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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:57:55

Freedomain Radio Debates The Venus Project/Zeitgeist Moving Forward (Peter Joseph)

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	Hello, this is Peter Joseph and you're listening to V-Radio.
	Good afternoon and welcome to V-Radio.
	Today my guest is Stefan.
	I don't want to mispronounce your last name.
	Go ahead and say it.
	Well, it's spelled Molyneux, but you actually pronounce it Master of Time, Space and Dimension.
	It's got a couple of silent letters in there, but you can just go with Molyneux.
	All right. Before we get started, I just wanted to give the typical announcements.
	Epic Fail Productions has made more video counters to this Stormclouds gathering guy.
	I'll give out a link to the latest one here in the chatroom at V Radio.
	Other than that, we're still working on some of the other documentaries and such that I've been talking to you about.
	If this is your first time listening, you can check out V Radio at my website, v-radio.org.
	There you'll find archives of lots more shows like this one, and a list of what I call my must-see TV list is a list of free documentaries to watch on the internet that I think everybody should check out.
	And thank you also to everybody who has been supporting V-Radio.
	You guys are the reason I continue to do this.
	Of course, I just had to develop a nasty cold the day before this interview, but I'm hoping that Stefan will be gentle with me.
	I think it makes you sound sexy.
	So I think that's fine with me.
	Sexier than me, I'm going to have to put on my raspy voice modulator to catch up.
	Okay. Well, I guess now let's just have you introduce yourself.
	Tell everybody your background.
	Sure. My name is Stefan Molyneux.
	I am a podcast host of Free Domain Radio, which is the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world with over 25 million downloads.
	I've been doing this full-time for a couple of years now.
	Prior to this, I was a software entrepreneur.
	I co-founded a company and sold it and worked in a variety of We're good to go.
	I was an actor and a playwright.
	I studied for a couple of years at the National Theatre School.
	And prior to that, I was sucking my thumb and attempting to eat my toes.
	And before that, I was a glimmer in my daddy's eye.
	I'm not sure how far back I should go.
	Does this sort of work?
	No, that'll be sufficient.
	Although the question... I generally ask my guests, at what point in your life would you say was the precipice, the moment in which you started to think outside the box, where you stopped just being a mainstream American Idol generation member?
	At what point in your life did you basically break out of the mold?
	Well, a friend of mine in high school was really into the band Rush.
	The drummer for the band Rush was really into the great goddess of smoky Russian reason named Ayn Rand.
	I read The Fountainhead, which led me more towards philosophy and to The Austrian Economist and all that kind of good stuff.
	I think I came through a pretty typical route.
	I have more of a focus on self-knowledge.
	A lot of philosophy in the modern world appears to be very outwardly focused and I sort of take Socrates' dictum very seriously that You have to know yourself before you can know anything.
	The knowledge of the world really begins with knowledge of the self so that you can understand any cognitive distortions you have.
	Once you break those down, knowing the world is actually quite easy and quite simple once you get rid of internal distortions.
	I've been through therapy.
	I'm married to a woman who practices psychology.
	And I am very much focused on the knowledge within that I think leads much more easily to the knowledge without, if that makes sense.
	So basically it would kind of be when you read The Fountainhead, do you think that kind of broke you out of just the typical mold?
	Absolutely. It was certainly the most remarkable and stunning book.
	I mean, I'm a voracious reader of the classics and I had already plowed through my Dostoevsky and my Dickens and all of that.
	And I found that stuff... Lyrically beautiful and psychologically insightful and wonderfully evocative, but it didn't have, I think, the muscularity of truly original moral thoughts.
	I thought Dostoevsky was just regurgitating medieval Christianity and Dickens was just regurgitating post-medieval sentimentality.
	When I came to Ayn Rand, I found it just an incandescent illumination of a moral passion I'd never seen before and never experienced before and that led me towards atheism and that led me towards a respect for voluntary participation in free market exchange of goods and services and all of those kinds of good stuff.
	Then when I was in school, of course, I studied many more of the classics.
	I went all the way through the pre-Socratics, through Socrates, Plato, St.
	Augustine, Aristotle and Nietzsche and all of those kinds of good guys.
	And I found that working with those philosophers within the framework of reason and evidence was a very powerful but sometimes startling experience.
	So that's my brief journey, if you can sum it up, if I can sum it up that way.
	Well, yeah, there's quite a lot of information in that, actually.
	I guess you probably get asked that question frequently.
	I've already told my listeners, but basically, ironically, what brought me out of the stupor, I think, was a moment in particular where a friend of mine linked me a YouTube video of Ron Paul debating with Rudy Giuliani, and he goes up to say, you know, they don't attack us because they're free.
	They attack us because we bomb their countries and sanction them.
	them.
	And, you know, and I just kind of sat there with my mouth open going, did he just say that?
	Wow, he told the truth.
	And, you know, I mean, I had always been, you know, really open minded and all that.
	I was never a like a joiner.
	I remained myself basically strictly independent for a long time.
	And that was the first time anybody had really, you know, maybe, you know, take a double take and get involved.
	And, That whole story weaves around in different directions, but needless to say that got me involved at least in believing that we needed to think of new thinking to fix the problems.
	You know, the 9-11 thing to me was a remarkable opportunity for the basic extension of human empathy.
	You know, what I said to people at the time was I said, you know how angry and how vengeful you felt when you saw those towers go down and how you wanted to just get anybody who had done that to you?
	Well, that's how the Arab world has felt for about 100 years.
	So it's not too shocking.
	All you have to do is put yourself in their turban and it's exactly the same feelings.
	In fact, they could almost be commended for their restraint relative to the provocations they've endured.
	Anyway, just say goodbye.
	No, of course. Well, I know that you had a lot of concerns.
	That was basically the main reason I wanted to bring you on was because a lot of people, I'm sure, from your listenership and my listenership have both listened to the exchanges between you and Peter Joseph.
	Obviously, we talked a little bit off the air, and the goal of this broadcast is to try to basically come to some agreements and understandings about different things that people feel about your school of thought and about my school of thought.
	I'm going to go ahead and let you, I guess, put me on the hot seat, so to speak.
	And what is the first concern that you'd like to address?
	Well, if you don't mind, I'd like to start by telling you what my understanding of the Venus Project is.
	I get a lot of people who write to me either on YouTube or in my inbox or on my message board who say, Steph, man, you just don't get it.
	You're stuck in the old way of thinking.
	You're too heavily invested in the monetary system.
	You don't get the Venus Project.
	And look, if I don't get the Venus Project, then I'm criticizing a shibboleth.
	And I don't want to do that.
	If I'm going to criticize something, I want to make sure that I understand it first.
	So I was wondering if I could just spend a minute or so telling you what I understand about the Venus Project, and then you can tell me where I've got it all asked backwards if I have.
	Absolutely, as long as you don't mind me pausing them as we go, because I'll never...
	No, no, listen. Absolutely.
	Just interrupt me. Wherever I go astray, you let me know.
	Okay, so I'm not going to focus on the criticisms of the existing system, which I scarcely can even call a system.
	The existing war of all against all in a highly predatory, semi-fascistic democracy...
	I'm not going to focus on those criticisms because we share them and let's try and figure out where we have points of disagreement.
	But the problem that the Venus Project is trying to solve is the unequal distribution of resources within the world.
	It is the overconsumption based upon the stimulus of the ever-cyclical and ever-increasing capitalist economy that That makes people unhappy and causes us to consume far more of the Earth's resources in a very unjust and unequal way relative to how they could be distributed.
	And also, it's a lack of utilization of two key new technologies that have emerged in the 20th century, computerization and robotics.
	And so the approach of the Venus Project is to say, look, Let's not deal with everything that we've inherited and just try and tinker with it.
	Let's pretend that we're starting with this new world.
	How is it that we're going to organize things?
	We have the information now available to us through sensor technology, through communications technology, through computerization technology.
	We have the information available to us now to rationally plan The human economy so that it serves the needs of everyone, not just the few.
	So you don't get a few mutants out there with a billion dollars to their name and millions or billions of people out there scratching out subsistence living on a dollar or two a day.
	That is clearly insane and absolutely unnecessary.
	We have an economy which is based upon fiat currency and debt and predation and roping people into working to pay interest on money that has been lent to other people, all of which is completely monstrous.
	If we have a rationally planned economy, we can get rid of about 75% of crap Sewage cleaning jobs.
	We can have people freed from serving people coffee and working on the line and so on.
	With the immense amount of wealth that can be created through robotics and computerization and a rational allocation of the Earth's resources, we can create a human renaissance the like of which has never been seen before.
	A world where people don't have to work unless they want to.
	A world where everybody has enough to eat and everybody has access to healthcare when needed and everybody has access to reasonable shelter.
	Where the constant stimulation of irrational demands through capitalistic advertising and marketing is diminished so people can actually be happy with a reasonable amount of wealth rather than forever being dissatisfied because they're not as rich as the richest guy in the world.
	And all of that requires radical changes in our thinking.
	We have to reexamine and abandon the concept of money itself.
	We have to abandon and reexamine the concept of this dog-eat-dog predatory market capitalism That pits a war of all against all, that benefits the few so often at the expense of the majority, that consumes the Earth's resources at such a rate that they're going to be stripped bare in less than a generation.
	So it really is a very, very important endgame that we're working towards because we don't have much time left given the consumption of the Earth's resources and the growing inequality in wealth within the world, which leads to crime and wars.
	The stakes couldn't be higher.
	The time couldn't be shorter.
	Action needs to be taken now.
	Is that a fair summation of where the project is coming from?
	Yeah, I'd say that was pretty good, yeah.
	Was there anything that I completely missed?
	And, you know, I have convinced myself, because that was a pretty good speech, but I'm on board!
	Boobie, let's go! Well, there are a couple of things that tend to get glossed over, and I think that part of the reason why is because, for us, it's kind of a foregone conclusion, but because it isn't spelled out in big, giant, neon sign letters, the Venus Project does, in fact, value the non-aggression principle.
	That's not stated well enough everywhere, and That leads us to a lot of people just kind of putting together their own versions of it, or maybe they see, uh-oh, he said the word share, he must be a communist, which means he must be a fascist and all that other jazz, when we don't believe in any of that.
	We basically believe in the force of ideas.
	I present this idea to you, I demonstrate what I can do with it scientifically, and if I can't demonstrate it scientifically, then it wouldn't be part of my jargon anyway.
	And sorry, just to reinforce that point, I did see a video with Jacques Fresco, which for those who I'm sure everybody is aware, I think is the originator of the Venus Project in the 70s, if I'm right.
	He was explicitly stating that The goal of the Venus Project is to create such wonderful communities that through the process of just being more attractive to everyone than the lives they have outside, that people will voluntarily want to join these communities, that force will never be used to compel people into these communities, that it really is a social experiment that is designed to lure people in through tangible benefits rather than force them in through any threat of violence.
	That's very true. Thank you for pointing that out, because now that they've heard it from you, they'll know I didn't make it up.
	But yes, it is about presenting a concept.
	And the example that I usually use, for example, is that if you have a better situation going on, you know, like, for example, we have an immigration issue in the United States.
	People who live in areas that are poverty stricken want to get to places where there's no poverty.
	So not only do we not have to go to their, you know, go to Mexico, for example, with guns and force people to come here, we can't even keep them out.
	And that's the goal essentially of trying to present that it's a it's a it's a concept itself.
	It's an idea. And if people don't want to go along with it, then not only – because that's another problem is that one of the core issues here is eventually abolishing the need for estate and abolishing the need for laws.
	And I know that concept kind of scares people initially, but when you have an understanding of behavioral sciences, it becomes more realistic.
	And something that you can understand a little better is that it's not to say that we're going to absolutely eliminate all abilities to protect ourselves if somebody goes crazy, but it's a point of that the current system's approach of, well, we'll just take people who behave aberrantly and lock them up in a room with other people who behave aberrantly for a certain amount of years and hope they learn their lesson is ridiculous.
	And so just to finish, to give you an example of the difference there, though, is that the prison systems in like Norway, for example, several small European countries have switched to this idea of prisons becoming a rehabilitation system rather than becoming a, you know, just a, let's lock people up in a room and hope they get better, which doesn't work.
	No, it absolutely doesn't.
	And I also wanted to mention just for people who seem to mistake me for somebody who is a fan of the existing system.
	Politically, I am an anarchist.
	I hate to sort of define myself by conclusions, but I accept that anarchism is the only valid application of the non-aggression principle.
	I have a bunch of free books available on my website at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
	The two – if people are interested in how I sort of see the future unfolding to a state, the society is called everyday anarchy, which is an argument that we all love and enjoy anarchy in the worlds that we live in right now.
	I mean no government tells us what we can do for a living.
	No government tells us who we have to marry.
	No government tells us where we have to go to school.
	We enjoy having a non-coercive environment in so much of our lives.
	So why not take that which we love so much in our personal lives and extend it to the political?
	That's sort of basic argument.
	And Practical Anarchy is another book.
	It aims to answer questions around the roads and national defense and health care and protection of children, which is the essential task of any society because if you protect the children and raise them peacefully, the society will become nonviolent in a way we can't even picture at the moment.
	So I just wanted to point out that I side with the Venus Project adherence and the Zeitgeist.
	I'm not sure what you all call yourself, Anarchist.
	Let's just say thinkers.
	I completely side with everybody who is ferociously against The insane predations of the existing system, it has not escaped my attention as it has not escaped the attention of many social thinkers that as state power has grown, inequality has grown.
	So the concentration of wealth in the hands of those at the top has vastly exploded since the 1940s and 1950s, since the government has assumed more and more power and control over the economy.
	So I am an eternal foe of the initiation of force in all of its forms and the state is by far the largest initiator of force in all societies which leads to distortions and predations and violence and dysfunction like a ripple going out through a pond except it turns into a tidal wave which tends to knock over societies.
	I completely agree.
	That the existing system needs to be scrapped in its entirety, that we have inherited a cancerous and mutated and leprous social system that needs to be re-examined from the ground up and reorganized according to rational and empirical principles.
	And so I think as far as that goes, I just want people to really get that I am not a shill for Halliburton.
	I'm not being paid to lull people into a sense of...
	Relaxation about the existing system.
	It is toppling.
	It is disastrous. It is murderous.
	It is abusive.
	It is violent. It is ugly.
	It is predatory. And it harms the most vulnerable in society the most and rewards those who least need protection.
	So I just really wanted to put that out there so people understand that we may have different solutions, and I think we do.
	But in terms of the diagnosis, we both get that the patient is sick and dying.
	Well, yes, and I think that's another one of the problems that I see that was happening between you and Peter was that Peter's arguing with the current system.
	He doesn't really – I mean, he does talk about the free market sometimes, but a lot of the differences here has to do with – we do agree that the current system is messed up.
	It's not a free market, even in that term.
	But what we're – we have concerns about where we think the free market would lead, but it's nowhere near as important as eliminating the state.
	Now, that being said, I mean I would point out to the things that we have in common.
	I actually wrote a paper once to help anarchists understand where we were coming from called anarcho-virtualism, which is to say that we could form – I'm just putting my helmet on here.
	Go on. You know the way the schools of anarchy work.
	For example, Charlie Veach from the Love Police is an anarcho-primitivist.
	You can always tell because they have a beard.
	You compared us to anarcho-communists.
	I will say that there are some things in common with anarcho-communism, but we also have some things in common with anarcho-syndicalism.
	And neither of those are actually exactly what we are.
	There's also cyberocracy, which is something else that people could look up on Wikipedia as an example of just essentially automating bureaucracy.
	Now, the only fundamental difference – this is why Anarchy is interesting because it has different schools of thought that kind of give a variation on the theme – The main problems we tend to have is that some people kind of believe in this concept of spontaneous order.
	And in the Venus Project principles, we don't believe that people will just choose to get along on their own.
	We believe that essentially the environment has to be engineered in such a way so as to essentially eliminate the need or the desire or the motive to behave negatively to other people.
	And that's to say that it needs to go beyond just an issue of ideology.
	I mean, everybody generally has an ideology that says, well, we should not be hurting each other.
	But it doesn't really work out that way if the environment is not created in such a way so that there's no reason for anybody to hurt anybody.
	Okay, sorry. And here's where I think, you know, my spider sense starts tingling, which is sort of the engineered, the environment created, and so on.
	This is where, to me, I have some significant problems.
	And maybe we can start to talk about those now to make sure that we...
	Okay, so the calculation problem is first defined by Ludwig von Mises, I guess, almost 100 years ago.
	And I'll just touch on it very, very briefly because, you know, people can look it up more if they want.
	It says that prices are essential for economic calculation.
	And there are three standards that he puts forward for efficient prices.
	The first is that you need to have private property.
	And you don't just need to have private property in terms of the stuff that you own, like your house and your car and all this sort of stuff.
	But most essentially, you need to have private property in what are called capital goods and And capital goods are not things that are consumed by the end consumer but are used to create consumer products or business-to-business products.
	So you and I want to buy a car.
	We don't want to buy a car factory.
	And so he says the first thing you need is you need private property in all goods and services.
	The second thing that you need is you need free voluntary trade And that means no force, no tariffs, no protectionism, no trade barriers, no subsidies, just complete free and easy trade in a non-coercive way between individuals.
	And the third thing that you need, and this is really the most essential thing that you need, is a politics-free currency.
	A currency that is stable, a currency that is objective, a currency that is free of political manipulation.
	At the time he was writing, this was typically the gold standard, which is one way that it could work, or I believe in competing currencies or whatever.
	The important thing is that those three things need to be present.
	And the reason that those things are so important is because price in all of its manifestations reflects supply and demand and subjective human preference and to some degree objective human preference.
	And so when you have six billion people in a free market, all bidding for and giving away and exchanging and donating and earning and willing to other people, when you have all of these people making economic decisions in a free market, and we all make tens or hundreds or more economic when you have all of these people making economic decisions in a free market, and we all make tens or hundreds or more economic decisions every single day, that when you get all
	today that when you get all of these people acting in a global free market or any large free market, you have an amazing and enormous amount of information available to you in terms of how goods and resources are going to be allocated.
	So when I was an entrepreneur, I've just sort of give one example.
	I was an entrepreneur in the software industry for about 15 years.
	Pretty early on in my career, I said, hey, I really want to upgrade our core software product.
	It was not a huge amount of money.
	It was going to take about half a million dollars and maybe four to six months of my time as a coder and other people's coding time and so on.
	Now, in order to make the case that we should do this, because there was so much we could spend half a million dollars on, right?
	We could blow it all on hookers and cocaine.
	That, of course, was one suggestion from the head of research.
	We could buy heated gold, solid gold toilet seats for all the executives.
	That was my first proposal, of course, as an evil capitalist.
	We could expand to new areas.
	We could build a Mandarin version of the product.
	We could put the money in the bank and live off the interest.
	We could hire more people. We could do more advertising.
	There was so much we could do with half a million dollars.
	What I needed to do was to go to the board and say, make a presentation and it took several weeks.
	I had to write a whole document saying, look, Here's how we're going to spend these resources.
	Not only is here's the return on investment we're going to get from these resources in the future, but here's how it's superior to every other option that we could conceivably have, except for the gold-plated toilet seats, which of course speak for themselves.
	And that process of going through and saying, here's what we should spend in terms of time and money to improve things, it's Would have been completely impossible without prices because I wouldn't have known what the engineers were being paid.
	I wouldn't have known what the office space.
	We actually went off-site to do it.
	I wouldn't have known the future price that we could charge for the software.
	So in the absence of price, rational – and this is not to say perfect.
	Entrepreneurs always make mistakes from time to time.
	But not only can you not figure out the costs of production, Therefore, whether it's worth investing in this versus every other thing, like a lump of steel, can be transformed into millions of different things.
	How do you know which is the right thing?
	Well, in the absence of price, calculations simply can't be made in terms of economic efficiency.
	If the calculation is impossible in the absence of price, then the addition of supercomputers doesn't make it possible.
	I'm certainly happy to hear how my understanding of the Venus Project is flawed or My application of this problem is flawed, but that's a fundamental issue that I see with a moneyless or priceless society.
	Well, okay. And we get that a lot, and I had to go through all of that in my head as well, being a former free market capitalist.
	The thing is that, well, first of all, when Mises wrote all of that stuff, it was like, what, 50 years ago?
	The state of technology was very different, and I know that you've already qualified that you don't feel supercomputers will solve the problem, but When you take into account that a great deal of what it is that we need to calculate, what kind of things that we're trying to consume, and how the consumer culture was – when you talk about spider sense tangling, you brought up advertising.
	I don't know that people are completely aware of just how bad advertising has gotten.
	It went from well beyond just the issue of, hey, I got a great product, and my product is better than other people.
	It's moved on to now they're doing brain scans of consumers.
	To figure out what colors to use, what sounds to use, what timing to use.
	You know, paying people like Edward Bernays to get into the brains of the masses to help convince them that they need all of this extra junk.
	So the reason this is all relevant is that a great deal of what, you know, because the concept is, as you brought up in your video with Peter, was, you know, desires are infinite.
	And I don't feel that we agree with that.
	A lot of desires are, in fact, almost sadly, I hate to say it, most desires are manufactured through those systems.
	And anybody who wants to learn about that, watch Consuming Kids, very terrifying documentary about how they start this process when you're an infant.
	Watch Psy War and watch The Century of Self in particular to learn about Edward Bernays' role, some of the other people's roles in convincing us that our act of consumption in of itself was an expression of our freedom.
	We have been socially engineered to believe that, you know, that that's the case and And this is how we end up with situations like, the example I usually use, because it's the one that's most personal to me, is Edward Bernays convincing women that not only was cigarettes cool, that they needed them to be independent, you know, that they were an expression of them throwing off the shackles of man and how they, you know, he staged incidents to create this false concept that women need cigarettes, you know.
	The reason more personally is my mother died of lung cancer two years ago.
	The concept that these people are willing to go that far into your brain, there are a lot of things that I realized.
	After I became aware of advertising, for example, my need to consume, my desires went way down.
	I look at stuff differently now.
	I live a very minimalist lifestyle.
	The funny thing is that To further point this out, because a lot of people would think that would make you miserable, I have shows archived actually from a lady named Tammy Strobel, and they've done studies to point out the fact that people who live a lower material lifestyle actually are generally far happier, far less stressed, and generally just lead healthier lives.
	You can find all of that stuff in my archives.
	In fact, I think it's the first archived show.
	It's why money and the stuff you buy that doesn't make you happy.
	Now, all of that said, I kind of tend to look at, for example, that if you're the manager of a store, you regulate what you need as far as stock, obviously.
	How many of this kind of widget do I need?
	Well, I sold 10 of them.
	I guess I better order more.
	I guess I don't really feel that the calculation problem is really as complex, especially with the advent of technology to rapidly track everything you sell.
	Inventory is actually completely automated and computerized now The next point that people usually bring up is, well, then what's to stop people from just coming in and grabbing 30 televisions?
	And I kind of point out to them that, as you pointed out in your own assessment, is that we need to radically change our thinking.
	And one of the major motivating factors behind not getting 30 televisions is people need to understand that the planet that we live on can't put up with that much longer.
	We can't keep filling landfills full of bullshit.
	It will destroy the planet.
	And That would be very fertile.
	I think that would be called fertilizer.
	So let's get more bullshit into the land, but let's get less junk.
	Okay, I agree. We just want to point that out.
	There's literal people who will write to you about this.
	I just wanted to know. It's full of nitpickers, and I happen to be one of them.
	I agree. I agree. But the point, though, being is that this is one of the aspects of the scare.
	Basically, people get scared.
	They think we're going to take their ability to trade away, or we're going to take their ability to consume away.
	The reality is we're not going to ban trade, ever.
	Was that ever considered? We want to make trade obsolete.
	We want to make it so that it isn't necessary.
	And more to the point, we want to make people aware of...
	It would be utopian, and I tell people this all the time, it would be utopian to think that we can continue to forever produce on a planet with finite resources.
	It would be utopian to consider that we could just go on polluting the planet and not eventually make it uninhabitable.
	And I know that you're aware of that, but a great deal of our consumer culture quite literally are not.
	They're just not aware of that, or more to the point, they're willfully ignorant of that.
	And I'm not a global warming person or any of that other crap.
	I don't need any of those questionable things.
	I know that continually dumping stuff into the...
	I mean, just take a look at our oceans.
	The state of our oceans is full.
	There's more plastic in several parts of our oceans than plankton.
	It's getting into the whole ecology there.
	And that's what I'm trying to get at, is that it's not forces and we're going to come down on you.
	It's that you cannot...
	First of all, we don't have the freedom to pollute the planet beyond the point at which it is uninhabitable.
	I mean, we could do it, but we would kill ourselves.
	Essentially, the coercion will come from our own suicide, our own ecological suicide.
	Secondly, we don't have the freedom to consume resources beyond what is available.
	If you've only got three pairs, you can't eat four.
	No matter how many political laws or concepts of private property you think you have, when the time comes, your private property or your right to bear arms are not going to save you from the ecological disaster, period.
	That's kind of where we're coming from.
	Once again, as far as how this works for the calculation problem, we feel – and I've seen it myself.
	After I strip myself of all the BS of advertising and all that, I really don't spend very much money anymore, and I'm happy.
	And ironically, without this huge residual income that so many people get into, I don't have a car payment, I don't have a house payment, I don't have any of that crap.
	I have become so much less stressed out overall, and therefore I think it's a happier way of life.
	We won't force you into it.
	If you don't want to do it, you don't have to, but we're pretty confident that we can demonstrate that.
	And I guess that's what I'm trying to say is that I believe Mises was moving from the direction that people will just kind of grab everything because there's a lot of social stratification elements with owning a lot of stuff or owning expensive stuff.
	And the other thing that I would point out about – because I don't want to go on too much longer.
	I want to give you a chance to answer.
	I'm sorry. We both talk a lot because we're both radio hosts and this is what happens.
	So, is that the price system, I understand what he thinks is the point.
	The only problem is, is that the price system in of itself becomes corrupted.
	You end up with inflated prices or artificially scarce prices.
	As a result, the price system is not relative to the resources we have left on the planet.
	It's relative to whatever will be the most profitable to the people and corporations.
	We don't feel that we can continue to do that forever.
	Well, I can't argue with much of that.
	I took a 75% pay cut to talk about philosophy rather than work in the software industry, and I've never been happier in my life living a minimalist life with a 12-year-old car and a cheap headset.
	So I completely agree with you that the pursuit of material goods...
	You know, sort of Maslow's hierarchy of needs beyond the bare minimum has a diminishing return scenario and I certainly try to argue with people who are into conspicuous consumption that there lies the way to both personal and global ruin.
	So I completely agree with you there.
	The calculation problem is not solved by lowering people's demands because it doesn't matter what level of people's demands are, you simply have no way of knowing how to efficiently use resources without price.
	And again, I don't want to sort of dwell on that.
	I just want to put the argument out And people can go and research it further for themselves.
	But I do believe that lowering consumption, particularly conspicuous consumption, is important.
	But let me give you a scenario that I think can achieve that in a very intelligent way without requiring central planning.
	I'll keep it brief.
	I absolutely promise. One of the things that is always underestimated, almost always underestimated, and I think the Venus Project suffers from this flaw, in terms of how human beings are shaped, right?
	So in Zeitgeist 3, moving forward, there was a very powerful and I think brilliantly done expose on the myth of human nature, which is to say that early childhood experiences of of either love or trauma and so on.
	They shape the brain in very fundamental ways and if we need to look at the question of human violence or people's propensity towards using aggression, whether it's verbal or physical, to get what they want, we don't look at human nature.
	We look at their early childhood experiences to see what happens from there and I think that's a really, really powerful and important argument to make.
	Now, what happens though, which is sort of problematic, Is that people tend to really underestimate the degree to which public school education, government-run education, which is way, way, way, way outside the free market, really contributes to the kind of dysfunction that occurs in people.
	Herding children into these brain-deadening indoctrination camps called public schools I'm always surprised.
	I think we're good to go.
	Because they're indoctrinated in an institution that is not responsive to the needs of the parents, that is not responsive to the long-term mental and educational efficacy of children, that was designed 150 years ago by Prussian lunatics to create a stable of brain-dead workers for their factories and for their armies.
	Let me interject just a little bit here.
	We certainly don't disagree about that at all, actually.
	Jacques, if you've watched Z3, he talks a little bit about his experiences in school.
	The rest of the story, actually, ironically, is his school principal did not look down on him for saying what he said.
	He allowed Jacques to go research things that he wanted to and to go study things that he wanted to and to allow him to explore and to learn what he wanted to and to help develop these critical thinking skills.
	My own mother did a lot of the same thing.
	I went to public school, but she went through the whole time making sure that I was aware.
	By the way, you know, and then she'd hand me like a college history book.
	This is the real history. This is what they're going to show you, you know.
	And I mean, I'm not saying the college ones are completely accurate either, but she pointed out that, you know, right now they're trying to indoctrinate you into a certain point of view, and it's not a valid point of view.
	Be ready, you know, be skeptical, do whatever you need to do to get out of this stupid system.
	So, but anyway, this is actually a really important point, and I'm glad you brought it up, because Education, based in critical and analytical thinking, if you've ever read Jock's book, is crucial to our approach.
	It's not optional. It's crucial.
	Every child should be raised to have critical and analytical thinking skills.
	In fact, we feel that that is the best protection against any form of fascist takeover.
	When people conjure up the various stories of, well, what if some evil scientist tries to take over or whatever, You know, he's going to be faced with basically a population that is extremely aware of what's going on, that probably already has their own technological knowledge themselves.
	That's another thing. There is no elite of scientists.
	Everybody could be a scientist in the world that we propose.
	And he's going to find himself with a bunch of people who are aware of techniques like propaganda, brainwashing, things of that nature, and it's not going to work.
	I mean, a lot of the, you know...
	So, I mean, I guess basically to point out is that, yes, we absolutely are in agreement.
	There's no difference there. These institutions are terrible, and I've thought about – if it weren't for the fact that I had a long talk with the kindergarten teacher of my daughter, I'd be homeschooling right now.
	But she seems to be of the same opinion that you and I are, which I found to be very refreshing.
	But in any case, yeah, we don't disagree about that.
	And just to point out, that is not a free market institution.
	It's the antithesis of a free market institution.
	That is a centrally planned institution that leads children, I think, basically into the hands of marketers without critical thinking and with depressed and anxious mindsets that are hungry for the instant hit of social approval and status symbols and gratification.
	It really... Schools can't teach values.
	Public schools can't teach values because the moment you teach any kind of rational, empirical, intelligent, scientific values, you've got every lunatic parent on the planet raining down on the school board in absolute offense and horror.
	Whereas if schools are privatized, then you could at least have some schools who would be teaching rational values according to the values of the parents.
	But schools are completely empty of any depth or philosophy or critical thinking or meaning or values.
	We agree. We absolutely agree.
	Yeah, but to me, that is a criticism of central planning.
	It is not a criticism of the free market.
	I just sort of really wanted to point that.
	Oh, okay. Well, no, and I'm not saying that it is.
	I understand completely that public schools are not free market by any means because they don't believe in public, well, anything.
	So that being said, I understand.
	The difference is that everything that you just said are the kinds of things that Jacques says are wrong with schools all the time.
	This is the thing we have to recognize, as was pointed out in Z3, especially when you're children.
	Everybody is going to get indoctrinated in some fashion.
	We don't like it.
	We would like to try to believe that, no, no, no, as long as I have free will, etc., etc., etc., and nobody should ever force you to do anything.
	That's not the issue. But you are the product of your environment.
	In fact, those schools That you're talking about and how they affect kids are a perfect example.
	I mean, I was very happy to hear you refer to human nature as a myth because we get that one constantly.
	You can't have a free society because it's human nature to dominate other people.
	It's like, no, it's not. You'd say up until the 18th century, it's human nature to own slaves.
	Well, we don't own slaves directly anymore.
	It's human nature to oppress women.
	Well, we don't do that the same way anymore.
	I mean, this human nature is an excuse to not think.
	It's a cop-out. Now, and to further my point, actually, in my own personal life, for example, my children never, ever watch advertising.
	Ever. I use a Netflix account, and I'm very selective about what they're allowed to watch.
	I have a computer set up to my TV, and not because I'm going to deprive them of choices, but because I don't want them exposed to the kind of BS that makes them think that their choices are Barbie or G.I. Joe.
	I don't want them brainwashed.
	None of that. We talk about that constantly.
	Our movement is really big on spreading awareness of that kind of stuff.
	The example of that, the fruit of that, is that my son and my daughter don't care what toys I get them.
	They're happy with anything I give them.
	Even in the stores, they don't say, Mommy, Daddy, I need to have this or I need to have that.
	They're never exposed to any of that.
	As a result, I have never had to fill up their room with garbage.
	I can give them whatever I want to.
	Don't get me wrong, I do spend some time making sure they're happy, but it's amazing how different my children behave just from not being exposed to advertising.
	They don't see McDonald's and scream that we have to go.
	If you go to McDonald's every now and then, they don't care.
	So yeah, I don't want to go too far on that tangent, but I hope you understand that we're on the same mind on that.
	Now, as far as that being about central planning, I think that's what I was trying to say is that, yes, we recognize that there is indoctrination in those versions of central planning.
	Our concept of quote-unquote central planning is to eliminate everything you're talking about as part of the self-defense mechanism of our system preventing any form of an oppressive state from ever taking hold.
	Okay, so let me get into the meat here because to be perfectly honest, I view the substitution of a computer for the market mechanism to be magical thinking, to be pretty disingenuous because it seems like an answer.
	I don't actually think that it is.
	Because computers don't do anything, right?
	They just sit there passively waiting for instructions.
	So somebody's going to have to code the algorithm that sends the goods out.
	Now, if nobody wants anything more than what is available, then whether you have the Venus Project system or a complete free market is immaterial.
	In fact, I would say the complete free market is if you can limit people's desires through rational argument, through appeals to happiness rather than stimulus, Then you don't need this central computer.
	You don't need a centralized overhead of management.
	You don't need the risk of that becoming totalitarian.
	You could just have a free market where people are limiting their own desires.
	So if your argument, and I think my argument is correct, that we can philosophically, through reason and evidence, limit people's desires for ridiculous consumption, then a free market system will handle that perfectly.
	If we can't, in other words, if people want more than is available to the general population, then I think the free market begins to price that higher and higher to the point where people die off because their desires will die off.
	Because parents, for instance, don't want their children to be buying all of this stuff.
	And so in a school system, I would send my kids in a free market school system, I would send my kids to a school if schools even existed in the way that they do now, which I doubt.
	But let's say they do. I would send my daughter to a school which taught her that stuff is not going to make you happy and what matters is human connection and love and a reasonable amount of material comfort and so on because parents don't want to spend all of this stuff, all of this money on this garbage that just accumulates and causes fights and frustrations and lasts for 10 seconds after which the kids just want to play in the box the toy came in.
	So I think that there will be a countervailing desire on the part of parents and on the part of educational institutions to limit people's desires.
	If they limit people's desires successfully, a free market system will perfectly handle that and accept that.
	So help me to understand how the central computer in a very practical way – and this comes from my business training and experience.
	You have to not use adjectives.
	You have to use proof, right?
	I can't just come up with a business plan that says – Give me half a million dollars and we'll all make lots of money and it will be really efficient and profitable because those are just advocates.
	Help me to understand how people, not computers, because computers will only do what people tell them, how a small group of people will allocate these resources to everybody else.
	Okay. Well, I guess we went into that a little bit and I talked about how it's easier.
	We've already been over that. It's much easier to calculate it when there's far less variables.
	I think one of the issues of the variables is what I was talking about when I brought up all the issues of how consumers are created.
	Those are the irrational, quote-unquote, variables.
	Let's say that people's desires are limited.
	I understand that. So how is it that resources are allocated?
	Well, the systems approach that was laid out in Z3 seems to be pretty steady.
	I mean, do you want me to go over it all over again?
	Well, look, first of all, all of that stuff came out of the free market and all of that stuff is involved with pricing, right?
	So, I mean, I am not by any means a massive brain-spanning expert on this, but my last job in the software industry before I did this full-time was dealing with a company that produced algorithms to help Companies organize their resource consumption, allocation, and purchases entirely based upon an analysis of price versus profit, the cost of production versus the profit that could be made by selling it to the consumer.
	And I can absolutely tell you without a shadow of a doubt that if price were not available, all of those calculations would be meaningless.
	So in the absence of price, in the I'm trying to get through that.
	That's why I asked you if you understood the concept of systems theory.
	Do you understand the concept that we presented as far as strategic access?
	I understand that there is going to be a number of goods that are available that people can check in and check out of a sort of library.
	Is that the idea? That's a similar concept, yes.
	They're already doing this today with things like car banks and such.
	You don't need to own a car.
	You need access to a car for generally maybe 30 minutes out of a given day, depending on where you're going.
	Sure. Just to remind you, though, that the calculation problem is not around consumption.
	It's around production. The question is how many cars do you produce, of what kind, and do you produce cars relative to the other million things that you could produce?
	Only the price mechanism. Again, just to point the fact that it exists within a price system, right?
	Those cars only exist because of the price system, at least according to Austrian economic theory, which I think is valid.
	So, saying, well, the capitalist system has produced all of this stuff which will then take over for a non-capitalist system, to me, is not correct.
	The computers that you talk about, I think in Zeitgeist, Peter mentions that these systems are already in place for retail distribution outlets, but these systems only exist because of the price system, because of the efficiency of the price system.
	So, my question is, you know, how does it work in the absence I don't really...
	Well, I guess it's kind of a matter of not reinventing the wheel.
	I'm not necessarily saying...
	The point is that you could use all of those same technologies to keep track of inventory and then decide what to produce accordingly.
	Companies already do this when they decide how much they're going to produce of a given item.
	Yes, but sorry, just to reiterate, but that's only because they have price.
	If you take price out of the equation, those systems don't work.
	I've spent quite a bit of time working within these systems from a software entrepreneur standpoint.
	If you take price out of the equation, you have no way of gauging or comparing the cost of production for producing any particular good or service, particularly when compared to all of the possible goods and services, and even more particularly, for trying to figure out what to build in the future, right? Because entrepreneurs say, okay, well, if I combine all of these resources, which cost, you know, $500, then I can sell an iPad three years from now for $550.
	Without cost of production, without cost of comparison, which are all reflected automatically and for free in the price system because you just look stuff up on eBay to figure out how much it costs.
	Without the price mechanism, not only can you not figure out what to produce in the present, even more importantly, you can't figure out what to produce in the future and assume that economic growth is not going to stop and innovation is not going to stop in the future.
	Well no, and I recognize what you're talking about.
	I would point out though that I don't necessarily agree that Mises' theory about the lack of our ability to tackle the price problem is empirical.
	I don't think that that's an absolute.
	I think that it can be overcome.
	And I understand.
	I mean, you're repeating and kind of driving the point home about it, but I don't agree with his assessment.
	And essentially, as we were already saying, you adapt these technologies.
	You pointed out that they existed in the free market.
	That doesn't mean that they can't also be utilized in what we're talking about.
	Well, I'm sorry. My argument is that they can't be utilized in what you're talking about.
	And saying that they can be is not rebutting the point, right?
	So if you say, well, these things can be taken over, which is very much against the economic argument, then you need to tell me how.
	Because, you know, that's like me, you know, saying...
	I put forward a business plan and they say, well, the service that you require doesn't exist and there's no possibility of it existing.
	I say, no, no, no, it will exist.
	Nobody would accept that.
	I view the Venus Project as the most astoundingly ambitious, which is not to say wrong or false or anything, but the most astoundingly ambitious entrepreneurial project the world has ever seen because you're talking about reorganizing the economy of six billion people in the entire planet.
	And so I can't be satisfied with answers like, no, no, no.
	It was developed in the free market and it completely relies on price.
	But once we get rid of the free market and we get rid of prices, it will still work fine.
	That's not an argument. That's just an assertion.
	What I need is some tangible proof of how it's going to work or at least an argument.
	No, and I understand.
	I basically have tried to do that for you.
	I don't know why you're not satisfied, but I can elaborate on it more.
	Yeah. One of the things that goes into all of this is that right now, as you pointed out, things are calculated and they're determined according to the price system.
	The price system has a lot of anomalies in it, not the least of which being profit.
	Obviously, the person producing an item needs to try to get something more out of it than they put into it, and none of those things need to be necessary anymore.
	What exactly would stop us from just calculating the resources involved Based on that and take the profit element out of it and just produce things essentially beyond wholesale, produce things exactly what they're needed for and then go from there.
	Okay, so you want to calculate both the existing costs and the opportunity costs of raw materials and services to create, say, a car.
	How are you going to calculate it?
	Well, that's what I was trying to say.
	I don't feel that the calculations involved are really all that different other than the fact that we're not calculating them with consumption in mind.
	We're calculating them with access in mind, which makes it easier.
	We're not calculating it based on what people want that is generally based on irrationality.
	And we're not calculating it based on any need for anybody to get a benefit out of it beyond the fact that now we have a car available for people to use.
	Well, you see, and Neil, this is where I get a little frustrated with the Venus Project.
	So this thing's been floating around for 40 years, right?
	And I think it's reasonable for people to say, you know, computers existed 40 years ago.
	I think it's reasonable for people to say, if you think you have an algorithm that replaces the personal economic decisions of 6 billion people, if you have an algorithm that can do that, tell us what it is.
	Because if you don't have one, then saying, well, we'll be able to calculate it, don't worry, cross your fingers, let's just ride off into the future to this place which has led to disaster in terms of central planning and no prices in the past, saying, we have a calculation, don't worry, to me is not sufficient to take the risk, if that makes sense. So if it's, you know, you've been talking about this calculation in the Venus Project for four decades, I think it's reasonable for people to ask, you know, let's open the kimono, let's look behind the green curtain and see what this algorithm is.
	If it's not there or not present or not figured out, that to me is a significant weakness if not a complete undoing of the system.
	So, you know, once again I ask you, rather than just saying, don't worry, we'll be able to calculate it, how does the calculation work?
	What are the algorithms? When you're asking for algorithms, are you asking me to throw mathematical equations at you or something?
	No. I mean, I explained the calculation problem without throwing mathematical equations at you.
	I think that there's been ample time and ample opportunity.
	I mean, the Venus Project didn't come around yesterday.
	There's been 40 years with the Venus people saying, we've got this way of replacing the market system.
	And look, I mean, you understand, historically, I'm not saying that it's exactly the same, but historically, when people get rid of private property, when people get rid of the market system, when people get rid of currency, Usually within two years, people are starving to death.
	This has been the historical example.
	And again, I'm not saying that anybody in the Venus Project wants people to starve to death.
	I have no doubt of the sincerely good motives of people on the Venus Project.
	However, the reality exists that in the past...
	When this has been tried, economically it has been a complete catastrophe and there's lots of reasons for that which we can go into if we really want to put your audience to sleep.
	But if you're going to say, let's go back and try this thing called no property and no prices and no money.
	If you're going to say, let's go back and try this again, I need more than the magic word called computers and calculations to believe that the problem has really been thought through.
	I need to have some understanding of how goods are going to be allocated I think we're good to go.
	First of all, I don't know.
	I feel that I've answered you, but if you're still unsatisfied with the answer, that's fine.
	I'm not a mathematician.
	That's not my area of expertise.
	But there are other people involved with this process.
	One of them right now is spamming the chat.
	He's an engineer. Bring him in.
	I would love to hear. Look, I say this out of passion for the solution.
	I say this not out of any sense...
	I mean, if there's an answer that's better than the price system, I'm all ears.
	I'm for optimization. I'm for efficiency.
	I'm for getting as many resources into as many people's hands as humanly possible.
	If there's a way to do it that I'm not aware of or that you don't have the details of, you know, bring him in.
	Let him school me.
	I would love to hear it. Okay, well, that's fine.
	I'm going to actually ask him to come on via Skype right now.
	So, Doug, jump on Skype.
	But, um... In any case, overall though, before we can get him on here so we don't have like a...
	Oh, he's got a call in via the phone number.
	Let me go ahead and put it in here.
	Hey, Doug, it's...
	Well, I'll just type it in the chat.
	347... 945...
	And then...
	7747.
	Anyway, I'll bring him on.
	Yeah, just as he's coming on, I mean, I hope that you're enjoying it.
	I certainly am, and I appreciate the common ground that we found, and I certainly do appreciate the opportunity to speak to people in the Venus Project.
	It is a wonderful thing to speak to people as critical of the existing disasters and as enthusiastic about creative solutions as possible, so I just really wanted to thank you for the opportunity.
	No, that's fine. Anyway, well, in the meantime, while I'm waiting, just because it's going to be hard to know which one he is, I'll go from there.
	But basically, probably this latest one.
	I'm going to pull him on. And it may be worth, I mean, if you do have people who want to call in, I'm certainly happy for us both to field whatever people have to say because this really should be a more collective discussion.
	Doug, did I just enable your mic?
	Is that you? I'm going to say that's a no.
	Unless he's yelping something to us.
	I don't speak chihuahua.
	Poodle, yes, because I'm British, but not chihuahua.
	Doug, not dog. Who let the dugs out?
	Doug, is that you?
	Nope, that's not dog.
	Can you hear me? Now I can hear you.
	What's up, Doug? Alright, testing one, two.
	Thank you. Very good. By the way, to the audience, this is Doug.
	He made the brief film called Awakening.
	He was a systems engineer for the Space Shuttle Program.
	I still am, for as long as the Space Shuttle still exists.
	All right, well, go ahead and share with us, Doug, while I continue this, because apparently my show says two minutes remaining, and I know that's wrong, but go ahead and talk with Stefan.
	You have two minutes to solve the entire planet's problems.
	Go! All right, good.
	I could probably do that. The central computer system is not a control system.
	It's a data collection facility designed to take into account all of the natural resources of the planet so that you basically know what you have to work with.
	As far as who controls the distribution of resources, That's a misnomer based on the current system.
	Right now, who controls the distribution of resources?
	The companies and influences that go out, seek the land, mine the resources, create a product, and then sell it at some particular price.
	How is that demand derived in the first place?
	Either it's done by a series of studies or whatnot that judge if people want a particular product, how that product will work, look, demographic surveys, things like that.
	The exact same process would occur in a resource-based economy without the monetary price tag.
	You still conduct surveys.
	People still make notes of what they want.
	They can do it interactively and directly via online communication systems.
	The entire planet is now connected to the web, per se, or at least to their own local hub, their closest production center, which would be the main city's.
	It's local production, local distribution, and a smaller geographic terrain.
	Whereas today, we make stuff on one side of the planet to send it to the other side of the planet, and boiling a whole bunch of energy in the process, and energy equals money and cost, then if you can wipe all of that out and make everything a lot more local, you would drastically reduce the price model to the point to where it becomes negligibly irrelevant.
	And that's exactly what the RBE does.
	It dwindles the price model down so far Because of abundance, because of on-demand creation.
	In other words, if I want a chair, there aren't 10,000 chairs made sitting in a warehouse.
	I punch in what I want, when I want it, and the on-site local area production facility creates that product for me based on the resources that are readily available.
	And because we aren't making too much of anything, and we're not making multiple demographic models of something for poor people, for middle-income people, for wealthy people, We're always just making the best levels of everything.
	You drastically reduce your resource waste and you incorporate all of your recycling principles into the system.
	You end up negating the entire need for a price system because people can get what they want when they want it.
	There's no price tag on that.
	Sorry, I just wanted to go back to what you were saying.
	Were you saying that corporations control resource allocations?
	Yeah, pretty much that and governments combined.
	I don't mean to put you on the spot.
	I'm just curious if you've had any experience creating products for consumers in a free market.
	Yes. As a matter of fact, I've written a book and that's a product that I created and it's an on-demand book basically.
	It's done through a self-publisher and people, if they want it, they select and they quote-unquote buy it at a particular price and then the company actually manufactures it right then and there.
	They don't make a whole bunch of them.
	They do on-demand printing and then they send it off to the person.
	Sorry to interrupt. I'm not saying that any of this makes your argument incorrect, but that's not the most sophisticated coordination of resources that's you writing and attempting to publish it.
	And the reason that I ask that is because it's not true, economically speaking, it's not true that corporations, and of course I don't like corporations any more than your average communist, not that I'm calling you a communist because corporations are bizarre, horrible creations of government legal systems, but Cooperations don't control the utilization of resources.
	It is the consumer who directs the utilization of resources through the price mechanism.
	So if Apple creates an iPad, they do so based upon...
	Anticipation of consumer demand and how much consumers are going to pay for the iPad versus how much it costs to create it.
	That's how they know whether they're satisfying demand in an efficient way or not.
	It is the consumers who direct, through the purchasing of various items, it is the consumers who direct corporations to pursue particular avenues of resource allocation and consumption.
	It's not the corporations that push products onto the consumers.
	I mean, if you just think of the failure of the Edsel and the failure of New Coke as too highly advertised, I think Coke spent $100 million trying to advertise New Coke and the product completely failed because people just didn't like it or the Edsel also had a huge advertising campaign that completely failed.
	It's not corporations that determine the allocation of resources.
	It is the consumers and the only way that corporations know or any entity knows Whether or not to produce a particular good or service is because what the price the consumer is willing to pay for is greater than the cost of the resources to produce it.
	And without the price system, there's no way to allocate these resources effectively.
	Okay. In a way, you almost slightly contradicted yourself from what you said earlier in the show when you said, who dictates how the resources are distributed with the central computer and the RBE? And then you turn around now and say, The people, the consumers are the ones who dictate how resources are allocated.
	In a free market. Sorry, in a free market.
	That's exactly what the resource-based economy would be.
	The resource-based economy is a free market, the operative word being free.
	Nothing costs anything because the people demand or dictate what they want at their local area level and then that is what is produced to satisfy their needs.
	But it's done on a person-to-person basis.
	So, sorry, are you saying that, sorry, I just want to make sure, I'm sorry to interrupt you, I just want to make sure you said something quite startling to me, which is that nothing costs anything.
	No, it costs natural resources.
	That's what is measured and allocated, not allocated, that's not the right word.
	That is what is accounted for, is the actual resources, the natural resources themselves.
	Okay, sorry, again, if you can just help me with this, I just want to make sure I understand this.
	But when you said nothing costs anything, what did you mean?
	In other words, you don't have to pay something to acquire a good or service in the resource-based economy because there's an abundance of it and it's managed to the point scientifically to where the waste levels are so drastically reduced that there is no need to add a dollar sign to it to give it a perceived value.
	It has inherent value.
	Okay, so in a resource-based economy, I can just say, I want a car, and a car will appear, and I don't pay for any of it.
	You wouldn't have to say, I want a car.
	You could just go check one out. There's going to be entire centers dedicated to giving people the opportunity to use cars if they need them.
	But you've got to factor in also, when you're thinking about that process, that 99% of the time, you're going to have access to amazing public transportation systems that are much more highly efficient.
	Oh, fantastic.
	Okay, so help me to understand this.
	In the absence of price, and again, I don't mean to keep harping on this, but this is the major part I can't understand, and I'm not trying to be difficult.
	I genuinely don't get it.
	When you use terms like efficient, those are terms that are very specifically economic terms, and they are to do with...
	Everything requiring fewer resources to produce than people are willing to pay for it in order to consume.
	In other words, the car costs you 16,000 universal space credits or something to produce and people find it worth 17,000 and therefore it's worth producing it because it's efficient.
	If it costs 16,000 universal space credits to produce and people are only willing to pay 10,000 for it, then it's not satisfying people's needs to the point where it's worth producing it.
	That is what is meant by economic efficiency.
	What is the definition for efficiency and how do you know whether it's been achieved in the resource-based economy?
	Efficiency is not economic.
	Efficiency is scientific.
	There is a percentage. There is an efficiency rating that you can calculate for pretty much anything, thermodynamically, electrically, materialistically, depending upon the material needs and material quantifications, potential strength and things like that.
	Of a particular object, there is an efficiency number that can be assigned to those.
	It's taught to every engineer that comes to the basic curriculum.
	And so that's, considering the RBE is the scientific method for social concern, anything and everything that is created is made to the utmost efficiency of the knowledge of the time that that product was created for the people.
	In other words, it's designed to last as long as possible to help as many people as possible.
	Of course, that depends on… Ah, okay, okay, good, good.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	So what you're saying is you're using the word efficiency in two different ways, at least to me.
	The one is efficiency in terms of low energy consumption and well-lubricated parts and it lasts a reasonable amount of time and that is engineering efficiency.
	But then you're talking about meeting people's needs or preferences, which is more around economic efficiency.
	And the second one, to me, is not the same as the first, if that makes any sense.
	So my question is not, how do you make things efficient?
	Say, you know you want to build a car.
	How do you make that efficient from an engineering standpoint?
	I have no problem. That's a technical issue, which I have no issue with, that anybody can solve it.
	My question is, Given the Earth's scarce resources, how are they to be allocated to satisfy people's preference and desires in the best and most efficient way in the absence of price and free trade?
	Allow me to interject a little bit here because I think that something that Doug pointed out is actually an excellent example and the reason why it is engineering is because you're engineering the situation so that people's needs are more easily satisfied even with a minimum amount of production necessary rather than just sort of waiting around for a politician to get around to installing effective public transportation.
	public transportation is designed immediately into any given city or dwelling, therefore eliminating the need for something, for example, like cars.
	We actually think that cars will be only used when people need to get out of the city for one reason or another.
	That's an example of scientific applications to create an efficiency that eliminates a need rather than just, you know, it's not, this is another thing that's really important and it's why I brought up a lot of that stuff earlier, is that we're not talking about just taking a capitalist situation and then turning it into an RBE.
	A lot of the situations that we're talking about, you know, will come from an infrastructure that is designed intelligently for the maximum efficiency of the use of resources and ensuring that everybody's needs are met.
	That's an example. Rather than saying, well, I need to come up with a scientific problem of how to give everybody a car, I come up with a scientific problem to minimize the need for people to need cars.
	Sorry, how do you know which is more efficient?
	So when it comes to people's mobility, you could have, just off the top of my head, I'm no engineer, but you could have scooters, you could have jetpacks, you could have teleportation, you could have cars, you could have public transports.
	Public transportation could be helicopters, it could be trucks, it could be trampolines.
	I mean, I don't know, right?
	There's so many options.
	Or what you could do is instead of investing in roads and buses, You could invest in more high-speed data communications so that people could work from home and wouldn't need to do these kinds of things.
	That's another good example. Through the price system and through supply and demand.
	My question is, given the infinite number of possibilities of how to solve human problems, how does a priceless, moneyless system figure out which one is the best?
	Well, let me reply, and then I know Doug wanted to say something, but I would point out that although there's so many different ways to get around, science can prove which way happens to be the most efficient, utilizes the most, basically, resources most efficiently, With the ecological concerns built into that because we don't plan to design anything that isn't absolutely ecologically safe in the first place and completely disassemblable so that it could be completely recycled.
	Okay, science can prove which is the most effective means to get around.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but see, that works perfectly well within the price system.
	So if you have the most efficient way to get around, then you will be able to offer that to the consumer in the cheapest way possible, and everybody will flock to it.
	So that problem is solved by the free market.
	So why do we need the computer?
	How does the free market help the third world nations that are starving and dying to death?
	Do they actually have a say?
	Sorry, I'd love to get to the third world, but let's just try and deal with this issue first.
	Yeah, I agree with him, Doug.
	Let's not go down that road just yet.
	The issue is that...
	Sorry, let me just rephrase it.
	If you have the most efficient solution, you can offer it at the lowest price.
	So to take an example, email is more efficient than mail for most things.
	So you want to send something.
	And so email is free and a letter costs 50 cents or whatever.
	And so if you come up with something that uses the least resources and is the most efficient, that will outbid everything else in the free market and will become the dominant solution, if not the only solution, until someone, some entrepreneur, and there's always some asshole entrepreneur who out thinks you.
	That's been my experience in the free market.
	There's always some whiz kid who comes along who blows away your existing system.
	And so if you have the most economically efficient, minimal use of resources, customer-friendly, whiz-bang solution, the free market will promote that through lower prices and that will become the dominant solution.
	I just don't see the need for the supercomputer because the free market perfectly reflects optimized solution in the form of price.
	Well, allow me to elaborate then on where I feel the free market actually causes problems along that line.
	We've already been over, for example, I mean, one of the problems with it is particularly if you're going to go all the way anarcho-capitalist.
	Neil, I have to get going.
	I'm at work. Thanks, man.
	In the anarcho-capitalist scenario, you end up in a situation where – because this is the point at which it's not efficient.
	Because in a market system, the person who's creating all of this stuff has the desire to benefit directly from it in a profit fashion.
	And those things can be inflated in all kinds of different ways.
	I'm sorry. How do profits get inflated?
	How do profits get inflated?
	In a free system. Well, in a free system.
	Well, I guess let me ask you this.
	Obviously, it's a market system.
	So my goal is to make money off of the things that I make.
	Is that correct? That is another indicator of efficiency.
	Where the most money can be made is exactly where the greatest efficiencies are available, right?
	So if I have a solution...
	To public transportation that is half the price of the existing solution, then I'm going to go in and I'm going to charge a lot of money for that.
	But the consumer is still going to be better off because I'm going to draw them.
	So let's say I come up with some teleportation device that gets people to and from work and normally they're paying 20 bucks to drive to work and back and I come up with something that gets them to work teleports them to work and I charge them 10 bucks.
	Well, they're going to do that. Even if I charge them 20 bucks, they're going to do that because they don't have to spend time driving in traffic.
	So wherever the greatest profit is, is exactly where the price system indicates the greatest improvement in efficiency is.
	Now, of course, as you know, wherever the greatest profits are in any industry, that inevitably, like honey flies, that draws entrepreneurs in to attempt to exploit The greater profits, and they always undercut each other to the point where the profit usually goes down to about 2% to 5%.
	Profit in any economic system that is free is usually a few percentage points if you're lucky, because if it's any higher, it draws more and more people in to undercut that.
	Okay, well, allow me to interject here to point out a couple of different flaws with that theory, the first of which is the formation of cartels.
	When a group of people decide that we would like our commodity to go for more, then they get together and they all charge more for it.
	We saw that with the oil companies in the quote-unquote gas shortage where the quote-unquote competition was like maybe one or two cents a gallon, if that.
	And they had all basically agreed, we're just going to raise this price.
	I'm sorry, when was this?
	I mean, it was more so in Michigan than in other places.
	You may not have encountered it, but overall, the oil companies were telling us that they had to raise prices that they were going under, yet at the same time, they were repeating record profits.
	I just want to make sure I understand where you're coming from.
	Do you think that the modern oil corporations are examples of the free market in action?
	Well, what would stop them from doing that in a free market?
	That's a fantastic question, and I'm really, really glad you brought it up.
	First of all, if a monopoly of resources is a problem, creating a central computer and having that manage the resources is creating a monopoly.
	So I don't think that solves it.
	Secondly, there is, to my knowledge, and I've read quite extensively on this- Hold on a second.
	Let me point on something.
	I apologize for interrupting, but the computer system having access to the resources being a monopoly is not the same thing because it's a monopoly of common ownership.
	Everybody owns it. It's not one person deciding, well, I have this thing that's critical to life.
	We'll say it's food, and I happen to have all of it, and if you don't do what I say, you don't get any of it because that's how the market system creates slavery.
	Sorry, the market system creates slavery?
	Well, yes. If you don't find a way to be useful to somebody else who has more than you do, you cannot survive.
	What? You don't understand that?
	How do you gain what you need to live in a market system?
	You either trade with somebody or you work for somebody, you subject yourself to labor, and that's how you get the money that's necessary to get the things that you need to live.
	Is that correct? Sorry, we just brought up a whole bunch of points.
	Let's deal with this one and go back to the monopoly one.
	In a free market economy, which is basically a non-initiation of force, If you want, I mean, to live, you need to consume, obviously.
	Everybody needs to consume, and most of what we need to consume is produced by other people.
	I think that's, I mean, neither you and I, no matter how minimalist we get, are going to go and live on twigs, berries, and toenails in the forest.
	I'm not young enough to hunt rabbits anymore, so that option has been denied me by the advancing...
	No, neither of us are anarcho-primitivists, but...
	Right, so... So whatever we need to live, because we want to live, we need to consume stuff, and most of what we need to consume is produced by others.
	And there's a couple of ways that you can get what you need to live.
	My daughter doesn't work.
	She's two. And so she gets what she needs because of the benevolence, kindness, love, and generosity of her parents, myself included.
	And so that's one way is you can get charity, right?
	People are very generous.
	Americans even now give hundreds of billions of dollars a year in charities and there's lots of people out there helping people all the time.
	So there's a lot of benevolence because I believe that people are generally pretty kind.
	At least that's been my experience of people as an adult.
	So there's charity.
	You can go and work for somebody else if you want to have less risk.
	You can start up your own business.
	Fortunately, it's pretty cheap these days to start up your own business.
	A number of my friends are involved.
	Let me add a statistic to that.
	One out of four businesses don't make it out of the first year.
	One out of four of those businesses don't make it past four years.
	In a system wherein anybody has a great deal of money to start with, it's really easy for them to undercut everybody out of business, which is what Walmart does.
	Mind you, I think that the Walmart thing gets over-inflated and that people push on it a little bit too much.
	But for example, like what they do in third world economies is they'll just come in and undercut and destroy everybody, all the local farmers, and that puts them in a position to...
	I'm sorry, are you saying that Walmart undercuts local farmers?
	No, not Walmart, but it's the same process.
	No, no, look, I have to just stop you there because that's just not accurate.
	The destruction of third world farming, which is a massive, massive concern, to talk to Doug's point about starving third world children, the destruction of third world farmers has nothing to do with the free market and everything to do with government compulsion.
	So, for instance, the government subsidizes farmers and pays them to overproduce and then pays them to destroy their crop, which is a massive waste of human resources that would be unthinkable in a free market.
	Secondly, there's a massive amount of dumping of Western products through food aid and through other kinds of just dumping where massive amounts of Western crops are dumped on the third world at incredibly low prices, which keeps a dependent population pretty hungry and renders them to be susceptible.
	It destroys local agriculture because you can't compete with free food.
	And I just want to bring these things up because I'm obviously very passionate about the world, but let's not confuse that with the free market.
	Now, let me ask you this then, okay, because I know that government invention is involved.
	Now, mind you, this is actually… Yeah.
	Yeah. Yeah. Even absent the state, I don't really understand how just a rich person could not just go into a situation, undercut everybody, take a loss essentially for the goal of gaining a monopoly, putting everybody else out of business.
	That's what Walmart does. Okay?
	Well, no, no, no. Look, I mean, Walmart doesn't put everyone else out of business.
	There's lots of people that compete with Walmart.
	Right. Well, in order to do that, though, they've had to adapt a lot of the same things that Walmart does, including, you know, that's why, for example, I've been trying to avoid sweatshop labor products as a consumer, doing my part as the consumer.
	I understand the consumer's responsibility.
	I wish more consumers did.
	That's another reason I don't feel that the consumer is enough of an arbiter because unless you're going to make all, I mean, that's why we went over that, Unless you're going to make all advertising illegal, inevitably the masses are going to get manipulated and buy money in one fashion or another.
	But that is an aside.
	Let's go back to – I want to make sure that we deal with this question of cartels and monopolies and so on.
	Sure. The only thing I wanted to point out about the monopolies was that, yeah, we're talking about a central system having a monopoly, but it's not a monopoly that its position is for the purpose of benefiting a few people.
	We have this, therefore it is held in common ownership, and everybody has access to it.
	Within reason, of course.
	Well, of course, there's still a computer algorithm that somebody needs to program.
	But let's leave that aside for the moment because it is a very common objection to a free market that a free market leads to cartels.
	And this has been my pretty extensive reading.
	I'm not going to say that this completely clinches the issue, but let me give you the case very briefly that I've read.
	The first thing is that it's very, very hard to gain a monopoly in a free market.
	In fact, no monopoly in the free market has ever been maintained and sustained without the Government, control, violence, tariffs, exclusionary properties or intervention of some kind.
	And the reason for that is if I start a company in whatever field and I do really well and I start to grow and I want to start buying up all the other companies in that field.
	Well, what happens is every company that I buy up becomes more and more expensive because everybody realizes that I'm looking for a monopoly.
	And so every company that I buy, the next company that I buy becomes that much more valuable until the last company It's really expensive because that now gives me a monopoly.
	Now the problem is that as I'm buying up these companies, I have to pay for it somehow.
	And the ways that I pay for it are either I raise the prices of my goods on my customers to pay for the expansion of my business in an attempt to gain a monopoly, which actually shifts the balance to the companies I'm competing with.
	So I'm trying to buy Company B I'm in competition with, but in order to raise the funds to buy Company B, I have to raise the prices of my products.
	Everybody stops buying from me and starts buying from Company B, which nullifies my attempt to take it over.
	Or what I can do is I can go into debt.
	But then I have to pay off that debt and the interest somehow.
	I do that either by raising the prices of my products or by lowering the profits that I pay out to my shareholders, which means that people sell my shares and go buy the shares of some other company that's not doing it, which crashes my share price and hobbles my business.
	And so there's no way, economically speaking, to gain a monopoly except one way, and that way is to use the government.
	And you use the government by raising the barrier to entry to new companies.
	You use the government to create artificial cartels and to raise regulations on other people to make it harder for people to compete with you.
	But there's no example in history that I've ever known of, and I've read about this stuff for more than 20 years, where a company has ever been able to successfully gain a monopoly in a free market Because every time you try to expand yourself, it costs you money to do it.
	And if that money is not directly profitable to you, like building a new factory if that's what's profitable, then you have to hit your customers for that or you have to hit your shareholders for that, which lowers the value of your company and stymies your capacity to gain that monopoly.
	So at least to my knowledge, theoretically it's impossible and to my knowledge, absent of government power and intervention, it has never been achieved in the free market as far as I know.
	Okay, well, this is another thing I kind of took an issue with.
	I'm not offended or anything, but it's just like, I remember you talking about your experience in the free market and wanted to talk to other people about the free market, but how can you have any experience in the free market, or how are any of these theories tested?
	Because I know you wanted to have tests for algorithms and all that, and all I ever hear from you guys is, well, we've never had a free market.
	Well, no, but there's degrees, right?
	So, for instance, I worked in the software field, and the software field is really a very liberal part of the free market.
	There's very little government intervention.
	You don't have to have a license by the government to be a computer programmer.
	You don't have to have a license that requires years of study to be an entrepreneur.
	It's the closest thing, I think, that we have to a free market.
	And Not coincidentally, it is the area which has the greatest levels and speed of improvement and so on.
	And so I agree with you, but there are still laboratories.
	So for instance, you can look at Hong Kong versus, I don't know, North Korea, right?
	These are both sort of Oriental nations or Asian nations.
	And in Hong Kong, it's very easy to start a business and taxes are very low and so on.
	It's more of a free market versus North Korea where there's almost no free market, no prices, very little money transactions, no stock market and so on.
	You have these labs where you can compare things to and those do, I think, provide a very significant degree of information.
	In the same way, you can look at the fact that China, the Chinese government, which is supposedly communist, owns less of the economy than the British government, which is supposedly capitalist.
	Economic theory or free market theory would predict that where you have less coercion in the economy, you have a greater amount of economic productivity and efficiency and growth if that's what people want.
	And lo and behold, you find that when China lifts restrictions on free trade and stabilizes the currency and lifts restrictions on taxation and so on, that you get a massive explosion in productivity and growth in China.
	And the same thing has happened in India since the experiments that came in after partition in 1949 under Nira, the socialist experiment, stagnated Indian incomes for a generation or two when they began to liberalize and they began to allow more free trade.
	Then, lo and behold, you've got 50,000 to 70,000 people a day, a day, coming out of poverty in India.
	And so I agree with you that there is no perfect free market, but that doesn't mean that there's not gradations that we can come up with some reasonable assumptions from.
	Well, no, and I guess what I would say to you is that that's essentially how we feel.
	Gradations that we can make reasonable assumptions from is actually kind of the direction that we're in.
	We also agree that it's not perfect.
	If you've ever watched Jacques Fresco, he makes it very clear.
	It's not a utopia. He just feels it's a lot better than what we're doing.
	Now, all that being said...
	The free market ideology is considered fringe in most economic groups as well.
	We're both coming from the same level of credibility overall.
	We are both new ideas.
	I don't want to say new because free market isn't new.
	It's not really getting, I feel, a fair shake.
	The criticisms of the free market concept come from the apparent lack of willingness to use any kind of scientific designations or thing along that line.
	That's why I said it's difficult to prove that your theory will work because The free market concept, as they point out in Wikipedia, a couple of other examples, they're basically basing everything on what they call logical deductions, things of that nature.
	It's basically just a fancy way of saying, well, we kind of guess what we think is going to happen.
	I guess that's what I was trying to come across to you from, is that...
	I don't feel...
	I still feel... And this is kind of where we're at.
	I've given you the things that convinced me.
	And it's okay if we agree to disagree at the end of the day about all of this.
	I feel that the points about...
	The consumption rates going down due to the lack of advertising, that the labor issue is dealt with through as much automation as reasonably possible, that the strategic access concept will lower the needs that we have for production.
	I feel that was enough to convince me that we can calculate it overall.
	I understand where you're coming from.
	I have problems with some of the concepts that, as you pointed out, there are some issues that the free market has.
	It's not just me who feels this way.
	There are a lot of other economists who feel that way about Austrian theory.
	And I don't let any of those people make up my mind for me.
	Don't get me wrong. But that all being said, just because I wanted to sum up what we've both said here, and I understand where you're coming from.
	I feel that you made a great argument, and I'm already getting more requests that people would like to hear this debate go further than we'll ever have time for in this particular episode.
	But there is somebody who's been wanting to be added to the call for a while, and I'm going to- Bring them on.
	I'd love to chat. All right.
	Still ringing. Hey Frank, welcome to V-Radio.
	Hey Neil, thanks for having me on.
	Well, you had some things you wanted to say, you did some research and all that, so go ahead.
	Yeah, I've looked into some of the things that Mises had to say on the issue, and it doesn't seem that he actually entirely disagrees with the possibility of calculation without monetary concern.
	So, I think it is possible, even by Mises' theories.
	So, do you mean when he's talking about a static system?
	I'm sorry. I'm not really an economist and I have not done that much research into it.
	I don't mean to interrupt you. Let me just give 30 seconds on this because this came up on my message board as well.
	So at some point, Mises says, look, if you have a perfectly static economic system, who cares about the calculation problem?
	In other words, if all we're going to do tomorrow is exactly the same thing that we did today and that's as efficient as it can be, there's no such thing as the calculation problem.
	The calculation problem emerges when you have changes.
	When something new is discovered, when email is invented, when a whole bunch of people, unfortunately, may get sick and have to take five days off work, which raises the price of labor briefly, when there's some change to the equilibrium, the prices need to reflect that so the system can adjust itself dynamically to continue to be as efficient as possible based on the price mechanism.
	That's one aspect. The second is that it certainly is true, and a lot of people wrote to me about this and said, well, what are you saying central planning never works?
	I mean, we've got the American Indians lived for 50,000 years without a market system.
	And I think that's true to some degree, but I mean, they still trade it in someone.
	But the reality is that that has nothing to do with the Venus Project.
	The Venus Project does not say, let's go back to living like a Stone Age tribe.
	The Venus Project says we're going to have a future with all kinds of wonderful things.
	And so there's no way that system is ever going to remain static.
	So the calculation problem is going to emerge within the Venus Project system no matter what.
	So I just wanted to point that out for people who may have heard about that.
	Okay. Now, whenever I read what I did about it and Mises' theory on that, what I took into account was a static state population.
	Whereas you don't have a constant growth paradigm and so you don't have to take into consideration all of this perpetual growth in profit, in population and in all of that.
	And so you don't really have to consider all of that.
	That stuff just flies out the window.
	But I still believe that it can still allow for growth and change in technology.
	And that technology can still advance and be considered, and this can be considered by virtue of the scientific method in my estimation of things.
	So I don't think that it's entirely dismissive of the process either.
	Well, no, sorry. Even if the population remains stable, if there's going to be any kind of change in this, look, the change can be as simple as a bad summer or a really cold winter is going to change the equilibrium of the system because a really cold winter, of course, in a free market system, that's going to raise the demand for heat which is going to cause more people to want to provide heat because the prices have gone up briefly and so on.
	So any change in the system requires calculation.
	There's no economic system outside of the most primitive kind of Stone Age tribe that is going to escape the problems of having to constantly recalibrate based upon new inventions, changing weather patterns, even changing demographics if that's an issue.
	It could be, let's just say, to take some silly example, let's just say 20 years from now, Esperanto becomes dominant because everybody realizes how inefficient it is for everyone to speak different languages.
	That's going to change the equilibrium of the system.
	So wherever there's going to be a change, as there always is, outside the most primitive societies, the calculation problem is going to come into play for a non-market economy.
	Well, okay, let's think about those primitive societies for just a moment.
	They have well-established and well-documented and practiced policies methods of sustaining their society.
	They have obviously proven that they are sustainable in so much as they have existed for thousands upon thousands of years in a rather static state.
	And let's ignore the fact that they are technologically retarded.
	And I don't mean that in a stupid way.
	Let's ignore the fact that they're Right.
	Right.
	But by virtue of the fact that they live within their environment and they are – they don't grow as far as for their population size except in so much as their environment will allow for.
	I'm sorry, I'm not sure what your point is.
	I mean, my point is that if you get rid of the free market and you get rid of money, you're going to end up like that.
	And I don't want to live like that.
	I mean, God, I mean, what a terrible thing.
	I mean, it's all fun and games until you get a toothache or appendicitis, right?
	So I don't think that's an ideal for us to try and go back to living a bare subsistence existence.
	Well, I'm not even trying to suggest that we go back to a bare subsistence existence.
	But when we think about that society versus what we have today with a free market and most particularly a monetary system, a system of exchange, those systems had systems of exchange.
	They could trade between tribes and between villages and still subsist and still survive and be sustainable.
	So even they were able to have certain amounts of exchange, but they existed as a gift society where if someone needed something, then people pitched in and they helped, you know.
	Here in America, we've had a few different societies.
	Those societies based on the Quakers and the Pennsylvania Dutch have existed for over 400 years.
	Right.
	Right.
	I would also point out that families are kind of centrally planned economies.
	I don't need to have a currency to trade with my mother to get food.
	Right.
	You know, that's – it just – the difference is that – and I think this is the part that is kind of an oversimplification of the issue of various historical examples of failed centrally planned economies is they all had – beyond just the issue.
	It's like trying to track all the people that died.
	How many of them died due to the failure of the centrally planned economy and how many of them died because Stalin is a freaking evil person and should have never been in charge of anything ever?
	That would be my concern.
	Well, and of course, my argument would be that any system where you're dependent upon the goodwill of the master, and I'm not saying that's necessarily the zeitgeist system, but you need to decentralize authority.
	There's no solution to the problem of human corruption other than the decentralization of authority and the elimination of a monopoly of authority, which is really, I think, the goal of getting rid of the state.
	If you look at something like Europe… It is a balance of powers that has resulted in peace for the last 60 or 70 years, when for the previous 2,000 years, Europe had been almost perpetually at war in one form or another, with the exception of the Industrial Revolution.
	And so the way that I view how to have a free and peaceful society is to decentralize authority as much as possible and to have competing interests in a peaceful environment and to make sure that people don't use violence.
	And the one thing that's true, I have to state, I'm not going to speak about any particular sympathy I have for corporations.
	I think corporations are fairly monstrous as a whole.
	But having an existing entity with a massive police force, imprisonment and armies, the power to tax its source at will, the power to pass laws and compel everyone, it's like Soren's Ring of Power in Lord of the Rings.
	It's too grave a temptation and you can't have that kind of entity existing.
	Decentralization and competition is the only way that I know of to bring about lasting peace in human society.
	I really try to avoid as much as possible any kind of central solution because I don't think anyone can tell what the future is going to look like.
	The last point I'll make just very briefly is I don't care if it works or not.
	As far as the free market goes, I don't care what the effects are because It's a moral argument to say the non-initiation of force and respect for property rights.
	The people who fought against slavery, they didn't say, well, if we get rid of slavery, things will be more economically efficient.
	That's not a very good argument because it is for some and it isn't for others.
	It was more economically efficient for people who would get jobs in place of slaves.
	It was less so for people who were running slaves and selling slaves.
	I don't care what the future looks like.
	I don't care what the distribution of wealth is.
	I think there's lots of reasons to believe it will be much better than it is today.
	But fundamentally, it is not an argument from a fact.
	It is a moral argument that we should not initiate force against each other, which I'm sure we all agree with.
	I believe that we should respect private and individual property rights because I think that's just a philosophically sound position that no other position can be held.
	And so to me, it's the moral argument.
	It's not, well, what's going to happen in a free market that fundamentally matters to me?
	The question is, what is the most moral way society should be organized?
	And I believe autonomy and self-organization is the only morally defensible, philosophically defensible approach.
	So again, I just wanted to put that out there because you get these arguments from a fact, well, what if this and what if that and To me, that's like saying, well, we can't end slavery until we know exactly how every slave is going to get a job.
	Well, slavery is wrong.
	We don't have slavery, and the state is immoral, and we don't have the state.
	And that's my argument, and I'm sure we're all on the same page as far as that goes.
	Well, yeah, and I think actually that's an important point that people tend to forget about is that there have been people in the past who, you know, they did seriously benefit.
	I mean, honestly, I equate a lot of the living conditions in, you know, in sweatshops to basically just be the new slavery.
	But In any case, I wanted to get into another important point here.
	Just a thought that I had in my head is reaching out to both sides of the aisle, wouldn't the situation be a lot better if the choices that were presented to people was if we were the left, because that's what people usually call the Venus Project, they call it leftist, and you guys were the right, and that everybody agreed that The one central concept that all agreed to was the lack of any kind of aggression principle.
	you know, wouldn't the world be a better place if you were the example of the right instead of neoconservatives or any of these other, you know, insane power hungry people that end up giving your group of people a bad name.
	And we were the left as opposed to any kind of coercive system that, you know, been brought up the Soviets or whatever, or both extremes, I'd say neoconservatives versus Soviets.
	That sounds pretty sound.
	No, and I think that would be a wonderful world to live in.
	And As I talked about in my initial response to Zeitgeist, I have no doubt that there will be a multitude of social experimentation going on in a free world.
	There is the free market of goods and services, but there is also the free market of communities.
	And I really think it would be absolutely – I would love – I would give my left nut, seriously, I would, to see in a free system how these two systems would develop within a free system.
	Obviously, I would never prevent anybody from wanting to work with the Venus Project model, and I would obviously expect the same rite of peace in return.
	But wouldn't it be absolutely fascinating, almost like a laboratory, which is exactly what would happen?
	Because in a free system, there will be people who want to do the central computer thing and want to pay nothing for their goods and want to have resources allocated that way.
	And there are people like myself who, until I get a really strong answer to the calculation problem, among others, I'm going to say I'm not going to roll the dice with that community.
	But I would be fascinated to see how it would develop, and I would be more than happy to be proven wrong.
	If goods could be available for free, if everybody could be fed through central planning or central resource allocation, I think that would be fantastic and I would just – I really would love to see what would happen.
	Well, allow me also to point out that what the real core fundamental is this, okay?
	We suggest using the scientific method, not superstition, not politics, at least put politics in the sense that the money system creates.
	We suggest using the scientific method to reach solutions.
	If for some reason, for example, we have a problem with calculation, then we will figure that out and then we'll move beyond it.
	The reason that that's not as dangerous as it is in politics is in politics, politicians are inclined to continue doing things that have already been proven wrong because they don't want to look bad.
	You know, all these people who voted for the Patriot Act, although it's obviously wrong, they can't come forward and say, I made a mistake or they end up in a lot of trouble.
	I still remember John Edwards during the Democratic debates, his speechwriters kept taking out the line where he admitted he was wrong about voting to go into Iraq.
	Okay, and that's why we suggest using the scientific method, logic and reason to design society, apply it directly that way, as opposed to...
	It's that we have to be able to prove through science, experimentation, things of that nature, what it is that works and what it is that doesn't.
	And if something is proven to be a faulty concept, then we dump it.
	That's actually what's really important here, is that we don't hold on to these things.
	There's no dogma other than what can be proven.
	And if you can't prove it, or more importantly, this is also the advantage of science, is that in science, if you prove something else, okay, for example, the Jacques always gives, you know, around the time the Wright brothers, a couple of bicycle mechanics were building an airplane, they were physicists that were saying that, you know, that people will never fly.
	So when it was proven that people could fly, they didn't throw the Wright brothers like the religious people would anyway.
	They didn't throw the Wright brothers and burn them to death for disproving the Bible like they did to the guy who proved that the earth wasn't flat.
	That became the new science.
	Well, now there's a new science.
	It's called flight.
	These are the applications that go into it, and that's the core issue, utilizing science for social concern.
	The applications of it, if you're right and we're wrong, then our approach will change to justify that.
	We'll adapt to that.
	That's the major issue here, I think, that is really critical that people understand.
	I know you've probably encountered people in the Zeitgeist movement that are dogmatic, but like I told you off the air, I was like, I'm not a dogmatic person.
	Somebody has to convince me, and if they can't convince me, I don't care if they're somebody that all my friends think is really great.
	The minute they stop making sense, I stop listening.
	Yeah, and I think to reinforce that point, you mentioned earlier the statistics that business is the rate of failure within business.
	And I mean, having been an entrepreneur myself, and I've been in that situation where you're sort of, literally, I remember at one point in our business, sorry to give you boring business stories, but at one point in our business, we were, my brother and I and our partner, we were sitting around the fax and And it was like, you know, if we don't get this order today from this company, we have to shut down next week because we simply – we've spent all ourselves into oblivion.
	We've gone into debt. And then like literally 4.30, you know, the facts came through.
	It was like, hallelujah.
	We did this sort of happy entrepreneur dance and so on.
	There is a lot of risk in entrepreneurial activities.
	If you think about it, entrepreneurs invest massive amounts of time and ego and energy into succeeding – Still, there's a lot of failure and I think failure is natural.
	I think it's really exacerbated by fiat currency and random legislation and changes and things and so on that are imposed by the state which makes rational economic calculation like trying to compose an opera while rolling down a barrel full of monkeys on a mudslide in a sandstorm with an avalanche.
	It becomes very difficult.
	But even optimally, I can imagine that at least half the new businesses would fail.
	In other words, people who really want to succeed, who've really invested in succeeding, who everything hangs on the line for them succeeding, they still fail.
	And my concern then, if you take that and centrally plan it, there's not that same mechanism for weeding out the failures because failure is the natural and it doesn't get solved by computer algorithms.
	And so what capitalism does or what the free market does is it weeds out failures relatively quickly and that to me is the ultimate laboratory and scientific experiment in a way that centralized planning doesn't.
	It tends to maintain those failures because there's not that same rational calculation that proves very quickly the losses that are occurring.
	That's actually a very, very critical point that I just remembered to bring up, is that when people ask about the difference between the way that communism has been acted in person and before, there were a lot of other politics that went into that.
	There were people who were in a position of authority, and that was more important to them than the success or failure of their systems.
	They were very dogmatic.
	I mean, an example would be Jacque Fresco's own experience with Marxism.
	He went to a Marxist meeting and he said, so what are you guys going to do about corruption in the event that this Right.
	Right. Right. Even at the end of the day, okay, and I think that, you know, being as how you're an atheist, okay, you've seen the power of irrational bullshit having power over people.
	It's how we end up with situations like, well, I'm a Christian and I happen to have been elected to Congress, so I'm going to vote to make it illegal for gay people to get married, even though there's no rational reason for that, and it really is none of my business what those people are doing.
	That's why I embrace this is because even if at the end of the day, okay, we find out that we can't make these calculations that you're concerned about, I feel that actually we can own up to that.
	We can go from there. What you're talking about, about getting rid of the inefficiencies through the free market, I think, can also obviously be accomplished through the scientific method.
	The difference is that the scientific method is repeatable instances of data.
	If you can't do that, it doesn't matter how charismatic you are.
	You can bullshit with the best of them.
	If I can go test what you just said and find out that it's wrong, and that's the governing factor, that's the quote-unquote authority...
	Then you're not going to be able to get away with it.
	You can't just be a Barack Obama and have all the girls thinking you're hot.
	God, Bill Clinton was an even better example.
	That guy was an idiot, but everybody thought he was great.
	You know, and the reality is that those are the kinds of irrational examples of how society has been governed, and I think that they lead us into a direction that's absolutely destructive.
	Now, mind you, you've made a step that most people that I've talked to about this don't, is in that you've said that you realize that we need to enforce this rationality, get rid of all of these extra bullshit things like propaganda and excessive use of advertising that We've already been over this.
	In a free market, because we can't regulate anything, I don't know how we would stop them from doing that.
	Now, does that kind of come back to the consumer being the arbiter?
	Do we want to just make sure that the consumers are aware?
	Because that's another concern I have is that I'm afraid that the consumer is not going to be able to do its job.
	We talked about this earlier.
	Propaganda works on people who can't think, and the reason people can't think is because the government runs the schools.
	Parents want their children to be critical thinkers.
	Parents want their children to not fall prey to every boob flash bullshit that shows up on the television.
	Unfortunately, governments don't want people to think because people who think are impossible to rule.
	To cripple the brain is the first.
	It's like the way you clip wings if you want your birds not to fly away.
	You clip the brain of children so that you can rule them with bullshit slogans like Barack Obama spouts with his evil golden tongue And so in a free market, people will be taught to think critically because that is advantageous to people, not to people in charge because there won't be any people in charge.
	And so the way that we get children to think critically is we get government out of education and so that people will be taught to think critically, which will make them much more competitive in terms of entrepreneurship.
	We teach children how to start businesses.
	We teach children how to efficiently allocate resources.
	We teach children The science behind the fact that goods does not equal happiness and money does not equal happiness, all of those things will be achieved, but not while our evil political overlords hold the brains of children hostage in exactly the same way that priests in the Middle Ages did.
	Well, I mean, we would – hold on a second, Frank.
	We would also have to watch, though, if we're going to allow corporations – I mean, let's – I mean, you don't like corporations, but I mean, how would you – do you think that everybody should be homeschooled?
	Because how do we avoid any kind of private company that's educating people?
	But you see, you're still thinking of this paradigm.
	Do I think should?
	No. I don't know how people should live.
	I don't know. I don't have the arrogance or the insanity to say I know how the future should work.
	I don't know who should have sex with whom, but I know that rape is wrong and people should not get raped.
	I don't know who should hook up with whom.
	That's for everyone else to decide.
	Once we get rid of force and we continue to respect property rights, how children get educated would be a fascinating thing to see.
	I don't know. I'm not a big fan.
	I'm certainly not going to send my daughter to public school.
	There are lots of other options that could be explored.
	I mean, education in the 19th century was pretty fantastic, yet a 94% literacy rate, far higher than what we have now.
	And the debates that occurred between Lincoln and his competitor were like a grade 11 and grade 12 level.
	Now, under George W. Bush, it was a sixth grade level.
	This is the amount of decay that we've had in our literacy under government education.
	And what flows out of that in terms of the damage to society as a whole is incalculable but endlessly destructive.
	Okay, well, there's another really important core issue that we talked a little bit about.
	Ironically, you're the one who brought it up when we were off the air, but I want to be sure that people get to hear you weigh in on this.
	And this has to do with, you told me that you felt it was very unfortunate that our organization was being labeled a cult.
	Oh, it's terrible. Just terrible.
	Yeah, it's a terrible label and a cowardly label to throw at people.
	And, you know, there are real cults in the world.
	I think the US Army is one of them.
	I think the Catholic Church is another one and I think there are many other very destructive cults in the world that segregate children, that indoctrinate children, that control what you wear, control what you eat, control what you think and say and do and control who you associate with and isolate people physically and mind rape and brain torture them and brainwash them.
	And these organizations are hideous and exploitive and destructive cults.
	Cult is such an ugly and dangerous word.
	I thoroughly, thoroughly, thoroughly invite people who have problems with a particular approach, whether it's your approach, my approach or any other approach.
	People really need to be intelligent about their use of cult.
	Don't just throw it around like an ad-hom bomb for anything that you disagree with because there are lots of people, millions of people around the world suffering from real cults and a real emotional and physical distress, the psychological scars of which can last a lifetime.
	Let's not compare that to an engineer talking about circular cities.
	Let's not bring that ugly smear tactic word into the discussion and cheapen the genuine suffering of people who are really enmeshed in these kinds of hideous control mechanisms.
	Yeah, we went through something very similar to that when people tried to attribute that Gerald Loeffner guy to us and Several people actually ironically have come forward and pointed out how intellectually dishonest that was.
	When you look at his beliefs, I guess he wanted to switch to the gold standard and then he said he wanted to have his own currencies.
	The guy was crazy, but those are not resource-based economy beliefs in the slightest.
	Even if they are.
	I mean, so what? I mean, so some crazy guy, you know, did he believe the earth was round?
	Does that make Galileo a cult leader?
	I mean, this is all just so ridiculous.
	You know, we need to engage people at an intellectual level.
	We need to look at the quality of the arguments.
	We need to look at the quality of the evidence.
	Just throwing the C-bomb around is childish and ridiculous and immature.
	And it shows a fear of thinking, and it shows a fear of rational examination, and unfortunately, what it really does is it reveals somebody who was subject to extreme verbal abuse as a child, and that's the only way they know how to interact.
	And I really invite people who've had that kind of history, you know, look into yourself, get help from a competent therapist, figure out What makes you so frightened?
	Figure out what makes you so verbally abusive.
	Find a way to undo that.
	Because people who are throwing those kinds of labels around are peaceful organizations that are voluntary and philosophically based.
	Look, I mean, the least danger they do is to those organizations.
	By far, the greater danger they do is the way that they conduct themselves and their personal relationships.
	You know, your organization will survive these labels.
	And unfortunately, though, these people's personal relationships will neither survive nor flourish if this is their approach to differences of opinion.
	Thank you very much for bringing that up.
	Now, Frank wanted to bring up another point, and we're down to like the last five minutes, so I hope that I can get you to come back on sometime so we can further talk about this.
	I think you and I know enough about these topics that we could go on for hours.
	Okay, look, I'm so sorry.
	I actually have to stop now.
	My wife just handed me a note that says she has to go.
	I absolutely apologize because I didn't commit to the two hours, but I will have to pull out now.
	Can I make this one point real quick, Stephan?
	Sure. I agree with a lot of what you've said.
	You have shown yourself to be a very rational person.
	I think there's a big paradigm lately going on with people spending so much time debunking each other and offering no other solution, no other alternative, no alternative information that offers a different perspective.
	So instead of creating an environment of cooperation and collaboration, we end up creating this environment of me against you or us against them.
	That's certainly what the elite would want, too.
	Right.
	So I hope that this radio show and this conversation will extend and that we can form a cooperation and collaboration between yourself and our organization.
	Not necessarily get you on board with us, but, you know, share opinions and ideas and concepts.
	I think I would certainly be open to that.
	And I certainly don't claim to be any kind of ultimate expert or authority officer.
	Will and will not work in the future.
	So I would certainly be happy to continue the discussion.
	Thank you everybody who's been listening and thank you so much to the host and thank you to the callers in.
	I found it very enjoyable, very stimulating, and I hope that it was useful to others as well.
	Can you tell them where to find your show, Steph?
	Yes! Freedomainradio.com or you can check out my YouTube channel at youtube.com forward slash freedomainradio.
	And now, my friends, I'm afraid I must absolutely pull the plug.
	Thank you so much for your time. Have yourself a wonderful week.

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