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April 26, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:51
2677 How is War Profitable? - Stefan Molyneux and Jeffrey Tucker

Stefan Molyneux and Jeffrey Tucker talk about what has made war possible, who profits from war, the role public education plays in modern war, unintended consequences and feeling the pain from the drug of debt.

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Okay, so we had a nice discussion earlier, but I would like to know more about this little game theory that you're running tonight.
Can you tell me now?
Oh, just a tiny preview?
Yeah.
The question is, how is war possibly profitable?
I mean, this is a fundamental question that...
We know it's profitable for specific individuals, right?
Hook onto the government apparatus and so on.
It's profitable for Blackwater.
It's profitable for the military-industrial complex.
The question is, how is it possibly profitable as a whole to have a massive industry designed to destroy things?
Right.
And I think that the only fundamental answer...
I mean, there are two answers that you can come up with.
One is the basic pillaging.
You know, like you go steal someone's grain or their bread or something like that and, you know, whatever, their women.
But people don't really do that anymore.
I mean, war doesn't consist of that anymore.
I mean, it used to be, up until the 20th century, that was the main purpose of war, was to get people to work as your slaves, to get resources that you could steal for yourself.
But that's not really the model of war in the 20th century, is it?
Well, yeah, I mean, basically that works until somebody figures out better technology.
The guy who invents a steel sword suddenly is, you know, better off.
And how do you get a steel sword?
Well, you have to have capital, you have to have incentives, you have to have some kind of market for that stuff.
And steel, of course, was probably invented like technology, not for government, but for private individuals, and then government just took it over, right?
So the question, how is it possible that...
Blowing things up and the human disassembly plant known as war could possibly be profitable.
And, I mean, even in the short run.
I mean, there's no business plan called, I'm dynamiting stuff.
Right.
And what do you want to invest, right?
Right.
I really think that it's only through fiat currency.
Certainly total war can't possibly be profitable.
Well, it can't be a coincidence that we got total war.
And I only know this because, I mean, Mises writes about this.
I guess every war historian writes about this.
That wars before the 20th century were of a different character.
Yes, they were destructive, but there was...
Like 2009's?
Yeah.
In a corner somewhere, three miles away, they don't even know there's a war.
Yeah, Voltaire said this, that most Europeans were just free to ignore all wars between governments.
And governments.
Yeah.
In general, right?
Yeah.
I mean, so there's this weird thing where, you know, when we look back in history, all we see are the wars, but the general population saw very little of them.
No.
Well, that's right.
Or anything of their leaders at all.
I mean, it's a pathetic way that historians tell history, really.
History of leaders and wars and everything.
That's not the history of real people.
No, no.
And that's one of the things I was grateful for was that we did actually focus on real history of real people when I was doing my master's in particular.
There's quite an emphasis on that, which comes out of a lot of the socialist tradition.
It does.
Like, let's look at the lives of the workers rather than the king, right?
That's right.
The new left was just fantastic in its innovation and historical, yeah.
So, but the total war, I think it required two things.
And one is well understood, the other is not.
I think it required, I don't know that it's entirely an accident, Jeff, that total war occurred about a generation after governments took over education.
Huh.
Because as children, we bond with whoever raises us.
And when governments took over the education of children, I don't think it's a huge stretch to say that they became psychologically like parents for people.
And then when the parent demands sacrifice, the child is resistant.
It's not easy to resist.
It was public.
I mean, I'm thinking about this, not you said this, because I only know really well about the American experience, but there was no such thing really as an American civic religion until public school.
Public school is the thing that unified people, gave people a sort of national story.
I mean, you know, the whole thing about the Founding Fathers was largely a Gilded Age invention, you know.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And so we got this mythology about the great George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, whatever.
So we began to cobble together the civic religion and so then suddenly you have the flag and the liturgy surrounding the flag and now suddenly you have to a pledge.
And all this stuff comes about with public education.
There's your opportunity to teach and preach and impose the catechism of civic life on the nation as a whole.
And part of that is this war religion that if you sacrifice your life for the nation, that makes you holy and good and probably a saint.
Okay.
Yeah, and saying no to those who've educated you is not kind of how we're designed.
We're a tribal species, right?
Whoever raises us, we usually say yes to them, right?
We're compliant to whatever.
And so I think it would have been fairly incomprehensible for there to be a pledge of allegiance to a government.
And that's effective stuff, you know, every morning, every morning.
We would stand for the Canadian National Anthem.
We did a pledge to the Queen in boarding school.
It's what Hitler did.
Again, it's a stretch, but Hitler required all of the soldiers to make a pledge to obey the Nazi government.
Now, they don't do that stuff because they just think it's cool.
They do it because it really works when you make a commitment, when you But certainly a hundred years ago, it probably worked better.
Because I'm imagining people listening and going, yeah, right, I had to do that stuff in public school.
I never took any of it seriously.
I didn't respect my teachers.
I didn't respect everybody.
It's probably the case now that it's just not as effective as it used to be.
But a hundred years ago, there was an ethos of attachment to authority and to power and a prevailing idea that the state was the thing that organized us, you know?
Well, and of course, the state you had allegiance to 130 years ago was 120th the size of the state you have allegiance to now.
That's true.
Yeah.
So maybe there's a little more understandable why maybe people would go along with this.
I think there was a great confusion in the late 19th century about cause and effect, actually.
The more I look at it, the more I look at it.
Well, what I mean is that, look, in the last quarter of the 19th century, we saw the invention of, you know, we saw railroads, we saw steel, really.
And so, therefore, bridges and possibility of skyscrapers are like, Electricity?
Flight?
This is some cool stuff.
I mean, you could see that we were catapulting into a new age.
But it was a pre-paradigmatic state of history in the sense that exactly what was causing life to become more spectacular was a little blurry.
People understood that their entrepreneurs were kind of cool and that global markets were important, but also states were claiming very much credit for all these things.
As soon as the technology came along, the state would grab onto it and say, okay, now Railroads.
Let's regulate them.
Let's make them ours.
You know, let's use them for our purposes.
Flight?
You know, that was, you know, this was very much, I mean, the Wright brothers, you know, sought the patent out from the federal government.
Internal combustion is the same way.
And so there's a mixture in people's minds, like, what is causing what?
And so we get to the 20th century and the pre-paragigmatic stage where people didn't understand it precisely was the relationship between cause and effect.
Why were we getting more processing?
They still don't.
But suddenly there was...
They think there's a financial deregulation cause...
They do, they do.
But certainly by the time we get into the 20th century, there's a paradigm emerging, and it's the state, you know, that this is the way we have to organize society.
If we're ever going to make any more progress, we've got to do it through our public channels, through our leadership.
These are the people that are going to do it for.
And so therefore we got, you know, for example, central banking among, well, probably the worst single institution ever invented.
Yeah, I think it's vastly underappreciated, the degree to which the central banking enables so many other human evils.
This idea that you treat the unborn as collateral for debt, it's literally something out of, there's a great novel by Gogol called Dead Souls.
He goes around trying to buy the souls of serfs who've died, and it's a fantastic story, a 19th century Russian story.
It's this absurd, that we literally are auctioning off people who don't even exist yet.
For the sake of consumption.
And if there weren't a central bank, what would have happened to this debt?
It would have been just, it never would have gone anywhere in a market.
Like, nobody would have ever bought it, right?
It would have been subject to a default premium.
Well, yeah, okay.
Everybody, of course, as you know, went into World War I. Thinking it was going to be over by Christmas, right?
I think it was August or September that it started.
And that's because that's what happened.
Because you ran out of money.
That's it.
Wars had to end because you ran out of money.
Particularly with the deployment in the millions.
You simply ran out of money.
You're leading the war.
You're the politician.
You're the general.
You're looking at the balance sheet going, this isn't really going to work for us.
We've got to push, push, push, right?
What enabled the stagnation on the Western Front in particular to continue for over four years was the central banking.
And what that was was basically saying we will enslave people after the war to pay for the murder during the war.
So all the guys who make it home, their kids are going to get born and they're going to have to pay off this debt.
That's not possible.
I mean, you can't have intergenerational debt in a banking system.
It's not legally possible in the common law, but never supported.
I can't say, I'm going to buy a car and Jeff's grandchildren and you stiff them.
No, that's right.
It would never work.
It would never happen.
And so, literally, the human carnage, this stuckness that occurred, occurred as a result of selling the future.
As Mises said, you have to go to war with what you have now.
There is no magic way to create stuff.
And so, they bled the future.
And the degree to which all the economic instability between the Second World Wars was created as a result of the First World War and the mess of the economies.
And then you also have the institution of sort of unconditional surrender, right?
I mean, old-fashioned states couldn't afford to press for unconditional surrender.
No, they're always looking for a settled result under the presumption that peace is less costly than war.
But that changed entirely.
I mean, there's no proof of this, but I can't imagine.
I think there would have been just worldwide revolution.
If after 10 million people had died, they'd have basically come back and the lines had remained the same, people would have gone insane.
Like, in my family, four of my...
Great-grandfather died.
Four out of five children died in the First World War.
Now, if they'd gone back and the lines had pretty much stayed the same after four years, there would have been revolutions.
You had to push to unconditional surrender so that otherwise you'd face a revolution at home.
Like, what was all that for?
Yeah.
Right?
So you had to say, you know, we're going to push, we're going to win, we're going to win, and all that kind of stuff.
And these horrible unintended consequences.
I mean, the First World War is just one of these cauldrons you could spend your whole life studying.
Yeah, it really is.
And there was a blowback after the war.
Even so, people looked back and said, what the hell was all that about?
And there were hearings in Washington about, you know, and there were best-selling books about the people who profited from the war.
One of the best books that was called, I forget the name of it, but just treating the war machine as kind of this parasite on society.
There's a great deal of anti-war sentiment.
Paris 1919 is a great book to read about how awful the peace settlements were and how horrible and corrupt the negotiations were.
And there's this great argument which is made, which is the idea that America's involvement is one of the things that made it possible to push for unconditional surrender.
Otherwise, they were all exhausting themselves.
Like in Vietnam, the entire military structure was breaking down.
People were literally shooting themselves.
They were shooting their officers.
That's what happened in Vietnam with prolonged warfare.
In the Second World War, the average infantryman in the Pacific theater saw 10 days of combat a year.
Because it took forever to get them anywhere.
In Vietnam, you had helicopters and everything.
These guys were doing 280 days of combat a year.
In the First World War, it was like 365 days of combat a year because you're in these trenches where nobody can get anywhere.
And they were literally, psychology was breaking down.
This is where shell shock first showed up as a phenomenon.
And so America comes in, they could then push for this unconditional surrender.
But because America comes in and starts pushing eastward into Germany, Germany has to close down the Western Front, so they send Lenin off, armed and funded to Russia, causing the Russian Revolution, which then ends up with a Cold War, you know, with America for 50 years after the second war, 40 years after the second war. - Well, the Cold War comes about only after we had the Cold War comes about only after we had a wonderful mighty alliance with Stalin.
It's a great quote from Churchill when he said, you know, they said, but isn't Stalin a dictator?
And he said, well, I can't do a great Churchill, but it's like, if Hitler were to invade hell itself, I'm sure I could find something nice to say about the devil.
It was just geopolitics.
And it changed, right?
So we had a red scare in the 20s.
Suddenly there are great allies and, well, they provided the great model for our reforms of the New Deal, the American agricultural policy, and it was specifically modeled on the Soviet model.
And the worst thing, oh, the worst thing for me, I don't know if I'll get into this in speech tonight, but the worst thing for me is the degree to which the virus of collectivism and socialism transferred across the Atlantic as a result of what happened.
Amazing.
All of the intellectuals who had built the ideological, the Fabian socialists, all the intellectuals who built this superstructure, which enabled these fascistic and Nazi and communist totalitarian states to emerge, all fled the results of that during the war, came to America and to Canada, and set themselves up as university professors.
And then what happened was, all of the soldiers at the end of the war got a thousand bucks, which is $75,000 now, to go through their education.
And so it's like, thank you so much for fighting to die against socialism.
Now we're going to pay for you to be indoctrinated by socialist professors.
Extraordinary.
And for a result of that, you get the 60s, which was the collapse of the Western rationale.
I am almost certain that you're the first person I've ever heard make that observation.
That's absolutely brilliant.
I mean, the virus transferred and then transmitted itself to the Americans.
Thank you for, you know, dying by the millions to fight National Socialists, and now we're going to pay for you to go be indoctrinated by the same people who provided the foundation for...
So that we can have it right here.
Yeah, so we can have it right here.
And then a generation after the GI Bill, you get...
You get the war on poverty, you get the great society, you get the massive expansion.
Medical socialism.
Yeah, war on drugs.
The massive expansion comes right afterwards.
And this is how you lose wars.
Forget about killing all the people.
That's horrible enough.
But then when the same virus that caused the war to begin with gets, you pay to have it transferred to your own population.
I think I did a video recently where eight of the ten planks of the Communist Manifesto have been already implemented in America.
That's fun.
I grew up actually in these times of, I remember the tail end of the Cold War, and it was always set up, you know, as freedom versus collectivism, you know, communism versus capitalism.
And you look back at it and it's just so preposterous.
I mean, just that anybody could have imposed this narrative on a world that was far more complicated We were losing freedom here.
The more we fought tyranny abroad, the more we actually had it right here.
In Canada, I wasn't here in Canada.
I came in 77.
But there was a hockey game.
You followed hockey, right?
There was a Canadian versus Soviet hockey game in the 70s.
What year was that?
72, right?
Okay.
So 1972, and I wasn't here, but the stories were, everyone was glued to the, like, we have to win against the Russians, right?
And I remember hearing that story thinking, how decadent are we as a society that it hinges on a game?
You know, we can't beat the ideology, we can't win the war of ideas, but boy, if that puck lands in the net, you know, it's like, oh, that's so beautiful.
Yeah.
In so many ways, we're better off today than we were during those gassy years of the Cold War, which were just a tremendous distraction against the key issue, which is always human liberty versus the power elite.
That's always the real narrative of history.
That whole Cold War was just a deflecting of attention away from that.
But for me, there was a genuine fear of nuclear war.
Well, sure.
When they came up with these movies the day after, I don't know if you remember.
I do remember the day after, yeah.
I remember watching that and feeling just such a sense of impotent rage.
Yeah.
Like just terror, rage, fear.
It was a very real possibility.
There was this Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
They had this clock that was like three minutes to midnight, how close we are to a nuclear war.
There's a whole generation.
Yeah, I remember.
I think I was a part of one or two of those in the early days.
That was a very real fear.
I remember that.
I remember in 2000, I was living downtown, and I was in a hot tub after working out, and there was a woman who was sitting there, and we were chatting.
And, you know, she was saying, oh, yeah, you older guys, because, you know, you older guys, yeah, you had lots of fears.
I was like, well, what are you guys really worried about?
Like, Y2K. Like, really?
Y2K? We had nuclear shadows up against the wall, and you're worried about your alarm clock blinking too long or something, you know?
Our fears are less now than they were.
Although we still have the nuclear bombs.
I don't think people really, you know, think like...
But we had protesters who would go to downtown Toronto and they would actually draw shadows at themselves, right?
They were everywhere and this was a reminder of what could happen with these kinds of wars.
Yeah.
Although, you know, it's funny, because I talked to scientists and economists who actually lived in Russia at the time, and so, you know, they said that there was no way that Russia would have ever released these things.
They couldn't find anybody to push the buttons, actually.
You know what the launch codes were in America?
No.
What do you mean?
Eight zeros.
Oh, yeah?
Really?
Zeros.
Just zeros.
Oh, yeah?
So, in other words, if somebody had leaned on the key, you know, like, it was not...
I mean, the U.S. was the only country that's ever used nuclear weapons against innocents anyway, so against people anyway, so...
But in any case, back to the message that you have tonight.
Bitcoin sort of reveals what money can be and should have been all along.
Yeah, that you cannot run a war on Bitcoin.
Yeah.
One of the most foundational reasons why people should be interested in it.
I mean, to end the scourge of war is the greatest goal of humanity.
I mean, if we could live a life without fear.
Let's say we still have taxation and still have all of the mess of the welfare state, but if we have a technology that pushes the costs of war lust to the people who want it, then we have a way of not socializing The costs of evil while privatizing the profits of war.
I made this argument years ago about the war on drugs costs like $200 billion a year or whatever.
And of course there should be a vote.
If you're for it, great, we'll send you the bill.
How many hands go down?
So Cheech and Chong and everyone who watches their movies, their hands go down.
So then for everyone, let's say half the people's hands go down, then it becomes double the price for those people, which causes more hands to go down.
And eventually one guy is like, when he's faced with a $200 billion bill, he's like, I think I've found tolerance in my heart.
So if you can push the costs of those who want to control others onto them, they will find tolerance.
You know, when you can't reason with people, you can at least appeal to economic survival instincts, right?
So, right now, you have to support the war on drugs, and you have to fund the war on terror, whether you like it or not.
This is impossible in the Bitcoin architecture.
You'd have to make a business case for a war, and you can't conceivably do that.
Now, is this more of a polemical point, or just a theoretical point, or do you see the use of Bitcoin as actually making war less likely?
No, my argument is that if we only had Bitcoin, war would be impossible.
So the more Bitcoin we use, the less we depend entirely on national monies.
Well, it's the cure, whether people want to adopt it or not.
And my argument tonight is going to be, let's say Bitcoin cured cancer, or prevented cancer, or heart disease, or whatever would be the major killers, right?
War, heart disease, and cancer are the major killers, right?
Well, what would people be writing about?
Bitcoin cures cancer.
Bitcoin cures, like, oh my god, Bitcoin cures cancer.
And people wouldn't be saying, well, the blockchain might get too big to propagate.
You would just be like, oh my god, whatever we have to do to adopt this cancer, but this is a cure for war.
People should be focusing on that.
Getting swept up in the technical minutiae.
It's a cure for war.
I mean, this is what everybody wants, who's not, like, ghastly in the salt.
And there are other humanitarian aspects to this, too, and we barely can scratch the surface, but, I mean, the inclusion of the financially excluded around the world, and we're talking about billions of people, is a gigantic humanitarian project that will be accomplished through cryptocurrency.
Yes.
And I think people are only just now beginning to realize this.
There's so much human energy in the world that's not being used for productive purposes because people live in the wrong IP range or they just don't have a bank or a credit card or something like this.
Bitcoin can unleash that and allow the world to become truly cooperative in an economic way.
And there's been very little written about this subject, but it's gigantic.
Well, socialists, I mean, those who genuinely care about the poor should be all over Bitcoin as an enabler of the energies of the poor.
Because, I mean, there's two ways that people approach helping the poor, right?
The hand-in or the hand-out.
Bitcoin is clearly the hand-out, which is far more respectful of the poor than just keeping them on that...
Dolled out leash of political support for whoever's doing the doling.
But I think that the leftists are, I think, of lower quality than they used to be.
I think originally there was some idealization about the poor.
Yeah, there was at some point.
I think now it's not really that way.
They just seem to be sort of petty and resentful, and they've turned into those caricatures.
Yeah, just think you wash your clothes too much, you're taking too long showers.
Yeah, they're eggs, they're like, you know, finger-wagging patrons, you know, they're...
You know, they're not really inspiring figures.
I mean, like the Shavian socialists, the progressives at the turn of the 20th century, they genuinely felt that they had the cure to the ills, the disparities, and blah, blah, blah.
But they should be all over.
You know, people into foreign aid, people into helping the third world should be all over.
Yeah, if you're genuinely in favor of human progress, you should be able to look at Bitcoin as a model.
Something to adopt, something to celebrate, but just as a beginning.
You know, in my own case, I think it was February of 2013 that I discovered Bitcoin for the first time.
You were there way before I was.
But it changed everything about my outlook.
It made me realize just how much potential there is for progress in the world.
And it was that month, I think it was the month later, I first began to imagine Liberty.me as a piece of real estate.
I want to talk more about how that's going on.
It made me realize that, okay, we live in a digital age.
This is a new frontier for us.
The potential for humanity to migrate in a way and use these tools to improve life is not yet exploited entirely.
So I became just completely obsessed with the idea of creating this digital city.
Now we're about one year later.
We've got the financing.
I've been building since October.
And I just woke up this morning.
It was just so exciting, Stefan, because I saw for the first time the live chat feature.
Yeah, live instant messaging between members.
And it was just like breathing and living.
Because up to now, yeah, we've had the multi-site blogging platforms and discussion forums and, you know, the news stream.
And, you know, everything's amazing about the site.
But it still wasn't quite breathing yet.
You know what I mean?
And when the chat came alive, it was just like you could just hear the heartbeat, you know, through the screens.
For people who don't know, Liberty.me is basically a digital community for freedom.
Anybody who loves Liberty is welcome to be there.
And we put everything that's possible into it.
Many of the technologies we've been using have only been economically viable for Maybe 12 months, maybe 10 months even.
So that's how advanced it is.
And its uniqueness is that we put it all on one piece of real estate, both centralized and decentralized, both public and private.
So every idea that I've ever had in the digital world has been crammed into this one thing.
And it's starting to just be so elegant, so beautiful.
We actually open for the public in 10 days.
So we've got 250 beta members in.
Now we're rolling in another few hundred every day.
But anyway, in so many ways, I think Bitcoin inspired me to think about the possibility that this could actually be realized.
And I think we're just at the beginning, right?
I mean, Bitcoin is just the beginning of what's going to be possible for humanity in the future.
And this is so important for people who lose hope, is that you simply don't know what is coming.
You don't know what is coming.
I mean, when I was...
During my graduate degree, There was no internet to speak of.
You could get on with a modem and talk to some library databases.
There was sort of the infinite DOS that was going on back then.
It was really funkily unusable.
I first saw the GUI interface in the early 90s.
I was visiting my college roommate who was doing his PhD, and he showed me this thing, and I was just literally jumping up and down, like, oh, my God.
It was like the infinite library of clickability.
It was staggering.
Everything before that was proprietary.
You could go into a particular place, but it was just there.
Nobody could have guessed before the internet what was possible after the internet.
It came out of nowhere.
Like, boom.
Oh, suddenly everyone can talk to everyone for free.
In real time.
And podcasting, right?
Then when bandwidth costs went down and speed went up, podcasting was really impossible early on because bandwidth costs were too expensive.
Oh, I see, right.
I mean, you'd have to make it such low quality so that people could download it over a 2,400-board modem that it wouldn't be possible, right?
But the Internet came out of nowhere.
Bitcoin came out of nowhere.
We don't know what the next thing is that is going to just completely blow historical paradigms out of the water.
You can't lose hope because that is to say that everyone is going to fail.
That every opportunity, every possibility with the greatest communications and electronic technology the world has ever seen, nobody can come up with something.
Oh yeah, digital currency, encrypted, open source, truly democratic with DRO or dispute resolution built in.
Like, when I was first writing these articles, way back in 05, this was like a complete fantasy.
You know, that you would have currency with this dispute resolution.
Way back in 05.
Yeah.
Right, yeah.
And I had no, I don't have the technical chops to develop anything like that.
But then it's suddenly, it's there.
And we don't know tomorrow.
Some guy may be working on the next thing.
And I think it's really up to us to try to establish the cause and effect.
Like I was saying earlier, late 19th century, people were very confused.
Why was all this progress happening?
Is it because of private markets or is it because of, you know, public authority?
And even now, there's confusion.
But people need to get the message that the reason the app economy exists, the reason why your cell phone is an amazing knowledge generator, all human knowledge in my pocket.
The reason we have Bitcoin is because of the unleashing of human knowledge within the sphere of exchange and trade and freedom and creativity.
It has nothing to do with states.
The states have held us back.
For a very long time.
It's only now we're breaking free of them that we're starting to see human creativity just being put to the cause of human service and the ennoblement of the whole of humanity.
And we need to understand that cause and effect.
I mean, it's freedom that is the source of our flourishing.
Yeah.
Because I think I certainly do occasionally still struggle with how is it going to change.
I mean, it's so big.
The state is so big.
It's so monolithic.
The entrenchment, the dependent classes, the vote buying.
I mean, it's one out of three Americans now needs a license to practice their occupation.
Oh, listen.
Yeah.
Half of them are dependent on the state.
But then I remember that to lose hope is fundamentally an act of arrogance.
It's saying that we can't win And there's no possibility of it.
Saying there's no possibility in the realm of human creativity is an impossible thing to do.
It's right.
And what's cool about our times, I've just got back from Brazil.
There is no Brazilian who doesn't understand the source of the problem.
I mean, everybody in Brazil knows why...
Why their economy is not growing.
Why the political system is totally corrupt.
Why they're less prosperous than they need to be.
And the answer is that this state is just living as a parasite on the people.
And there's nobody in Brazil who doesn't get this.
The key problem that they're facing It's what to do about it.
But that, in a way, is progress.
Because if you understand the source of the problem, then you can put your mind to work on finding creative solutions to it.
But if you don't know the source of the problem, which, I mean, quite frankly, it wasn't true, you know, in many parts of the world, even 50 years ago, people did not understand, why are we getting poor?
You know, what's going on?
People do understand that now.
I don't care where you go in the world today.
And I've been traveling a lot, as you have been.
I mean, it's universal now.
In Australia, they understand what's the problem.
In Brazil, they understand what's the problem.
In America, probably less so, but, you know, we're getting there.
Well, but America is still propped up, right?
I mean, so much debt, so much fiat currency is being pumped through the system that, I mean, Asking America to give up status right now is like asking a gambler to leave a casino in the middle of a winning streak.
Reality is suspended.
He can't lose.
He's high.
Unfortunately, America and most of the West is still not able to listen to a moral argument to reason.
And whenever you have a bad habit, you either learn by reason or by bitter experience.
And I think this is why there is going to have to be some significant readjustment.
And then when people have sufficient pain, they will change their behavior.
But it's still, I mean, we're all making the case for it.
And there's lots of people who are listening, but there are lots more people who are, you know, doing the la-la-la, right?
You know, history will survive all this.
It's just numbers and so on, right?
Reality has to, you know, just smack you upside the head with a wet fish.
Well, I take comfort in the popularity of your podcast, actually, and your videos.
Especially that which you've achieved over the last, what, year?
Since mine came on board.
It's been amazing to watch.
You know, you're reaching ever more people than you ever have before.
And engaging them in a conversation, which is just as important as teaching.
To converse with them, you know, and to develop this conversation, which you believe in.
In fact, I remember your paper that you delivered in Texas.
Do you remember that conference?
I think it was one of the first times.
Yeah, and you made a startling claim that you think that for the first time in history, we have the possibility of developing a consistent ethic.
Within the framework of sort of a global anarchist community because we're not constantly making exceptions to make room for the state as almost every moral system prior to the current age sort of had to do in a way.
Do you remember making this argument?
That was really a mind-blowing paper.
Very impressive.
Well, I hope it's going to be the case.
I think it will be.
Human beings tend towards consistency.
Yeah.
My daughter is incredible to listen to this way, right?
So I'll say, oh, you know, when I was a kid, you know, we didn't really have any money.
And she's like, you didn't have no money.
Like, you had a couple of dollars, like, not no money.
And I'm like, you know you're absolutely correct.
So she's constantly, like, whenever I get any hyperbole, she's constantly, well, no, that can't be true that you had, you know, we were hungry a lot of the time.
But it's not that you had no food, right?
You just didn't have as much or as much as you wanted.
So she's constantly tending towards accuracy and consistency.
Uh-huh.
And consistency is the great power of the human mind.
Science is all consistency, right?
And so on.
Double-blind experiments in medicine are all about reproducibility and consistency.
And so when we don't have to ripple ethics around the opposite of what we define as virtue called the state, Boy, I mean, that to me is the greatest engine we're capable of.
And then we will finally have all the power of consistency and universality, which is the seed of our genius as a species, in the most central aspect of our species, which is ethics.
I mean, boy, unstoppable then.
Well, and two, it's wonderful that we're moving into a world where the nation state is no longer the thing that defines us like it once did, which is another feature of Bitcoin that's very interesting.
It is a global currency that exists apart from the nation state.
There's no American Bitcoin, Brazilian Bitcoin, Australian Bitcoin.
It's all the same thing.
And any two people anywhere in the world can use it.
This has not really happened before.
You think about the height of the gold standard of, I don't know, the early part of the 19th century or something like that.
When all world currencies were more or less convertible into gold, you still had national paper monies.
But Bitcoin is a universal currency.
And trade unites.
I think it was Bassett who said where trade stops.
Where trade stops crossing borders, armies will start.
And so trade unites.
If you were doing business with someone in Zimbabwe, your country is Bitcoin.
Your identity, your nationality, your link to them is with Bitcoin.
You have more in common than with the guy using paper currency next door.
And that, I think, is a real way of uniting this spiderweb of Bitcoin going out across the universe that is dissolving borders.
It crosses, who cares, right?
Amazing.
You've got to stop and show your papers, and you can't bring more than $8 across the border.
A million dollars can squirt through Bitcoin and even trace it.
I mean, it's the unity that is possible.
I think about all the scenes that have inspired me over the last several weeks, but truly being in Porto Alegre at this big financial symposium, educational thing, and having a Bitcoin ATM right there, and having people in a line turning in their government paper currency and holding up their cell phones to get their Bitcoin out.
I mean, that was really cool.
That is cool.
Happening all over the world.
We have one more to do before my speech.
Okay.
I don't want to tire you out.
Go check out this website.
I was showing it to Michael a little bit ago, and you were amazed.
It's looking good.
I know you're going to be crazy when you go public, but let's do a demo.
We'll record the screen.
We'll get...
Okay, let's do the whole thing.
I'll give you a complete tour.
I mean, a complete tour at this point takes maybe 10 or 15...
It's not a complete tour, but 10 or 15 minutes.
I want to show everyone...
Yeah, what it is.
I mean, we're doing, what, three million-plus show downloads.
Yeah, okay.
Let's get some people to...
Yeah, let's do it.
You know, we'll turn you into Kathleen Sebelius, right?
So this is very important.
We thought it could handle this many people, but...
You know, it's funny.
Just this morning was such an exciting thing for me.
I mean, just to see the heart beating on the site like that.
I mean, because, you know, we've worked so hard for so long, and you have such dreams, you know?
And then it's funny.
Like, the one final piece goes into place, and then...
You know, that's what it was like for me today.
It's the liveliest thing to see is the cross-chat, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, liberty.me, go check it out.
Okay, we'll do a full demo.
That sounds a lot of fun.
Okay, thank you.
Oh, thank you.
Okay, wonderful.
And I look forward to your speech tonight.
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