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Sept. 21, 2023 - Viva & Barnes
01:04:44
Live with Libertarian Spike Cohen! Viva Frei-Days!
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Time Text
Actually, today we have to start with me reading a message before we play the video.
It seems we have a Joel Harden, part two.
Jyoti Gondek, for those who don't know, Mayor, City of Calgary, personal account, she, her.
Pronouns in bio is as much of a predictive measurement as syringe in bio.
Ukrainian flag in bio.
What are the other ones now that we have?
Face mask in bio.
Okay, that is her bio.
That is...
I'm glad she told me that her pronouns were she, her, because I'd be confused otherwise.
Okay.
Jyoti says, this morning, this is in reference to the one million march across Canada on Wednesday.
This morning, so-called...
Save our children, end quote.
Protesters swarmed my vehicle.
The level of hate was chilling.
It did not shake my resolve to stand with the 2SLGBTQ+.
She's missing the IA.
That's a sin.
And their families.
Calgary is a place of love and inclusion.
I have Calgary jokes.
I won't make them.
Your hatred has no home here.
She was, what did she say?
Swarmed.
The level of hate was chilling.
It's like these idiots don't know that there are things called cameras and this thing called the internet and these things called fake hate crimes.
They don't last very long, you idiots.
This, at least as the best evidence to date, this is the video of Jyoti being swarmed.
The hatred.
The hatred.
Buckle up, people.
Wow.
Wow.
Can you believe it?
I'm literally shaking in my boots.
Look at this.
Thumbs down?
Did that guy give her the thumbs down?
The thumbs down is literally an alliteration for...
I was going to make a joke.
Oh, let her go, guys.
Let her go.
Let her go.
All right.
Light turns green.
By the way, she might be the one harboring some bigotry here.
I was sworn by...
There was a kid.
He wasn't white.
And I was so scared.
She might be the one harboring some bigotry and some hatred.
But they leave.
And she drives off in her...
I can't tell what kind of Mercedes that is.
I can just tell that it's a Mercedes.
You know, rich or poor, it's good to be in politics, people.
Maybe, maybe Giotti, what was her name again?
Is the one harboring some inner bigotry that she was scared by that crowd.
Oh boy, the level of hate was chilling.
Chilling.
Anyhow, that's it.
Okay, short intro today because we actually have a guest who I'm sure we're going to get into some Canadian politics, but he might be more or less interested in Canadian politics.
All right, people.
I don't know why I've fallen down the libertarian rabbit hole.
Libertarians are interesting people.
Everyone is an interesting person.
But I've fallen down the libertarian rabbit hole, had Dave Smith on last week, went on with Goldenberg.
Troy Goldenberg on his channel did an interview with him.
I think it aired yesterday.
And now we've got Spike Cohen.
I mean, we're going to talk libertarian stuff, but we're going to talk, you know, just broader stuff.
He was the libertarian candidate for vice president in 2020.
And it's very cool to actually, you know, having gone through the political experience at the federal level in Canada.
Admittedly, I have no doubt that Spike did not think he was ever going to be the vice president, but was running nonetheless and had an experience.
We're going to get into all of this.
Libertarian politics, libertarian policies, why libertarians tend to be quirky people, to say the least, and what that experience was like.
I think we're all libertarian.
I just think the ones that call themselves libertarian tend to be very eccentric people.
Now, let me just make sure that we're live on Rumble.
VivaBarnesLaw.locals.com We are.
There's already some good memes in there.
Alright, so we're going to do the standard thing.
We're going to end on YouTube sooner than later, go over to Rumble, and then come over to Locals for an after party afterwards.
Alright, Spike, you ready?
Bringing him in.
Sir.
Hey man, how are you doing?
Good and yourself?
I'm doing fantastic.
Now I'm going to back this up a little bit because even your backdrop is quirky.
You've got the earth and an eagle with a...
I don't know what you're talking...
This is actually where I live, so I don't...
I mean...
Sorry I have a nice house.
Whatever.
You've got a multi-story house.
There's going to be a lot of people who don't know who you are.
30,000 foot overview.
For those who have no idea, then we're going to get into it.
Yes, did not care what the zoning board said about maximum height.
I was just going up until I was satisfied.
Yeah, no, my name is Spike Cohen.
As Viva said, I was the 2020 Libertarian VP candidate.
Prior to that, I was, I guess, serial entrepreneur for the better part of 20 years.
Retired from that around 2017.
Decided I might get into politics.
Ended up going down the rabbit hole, as you called it, and ended up running for vice president.
And the rest is history, and I'm happy to be here, man.
Now, where are you from, born and raised?
So I was born in Baltimore, but I've lived in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina for 35 years, and I still live there now.
Born in Baltimore, you're 42?
41, yeah.
41. So do you have any memory of Baltimore, what it was like when you were a kid compared to what it is now?
Vaguely, I don't have a tremendous amount of memory about it because we moved here just before I turned five, so I have some vague memories.
But I will say definitely anytime I go back, especially into the core city of Baltimore, I'm glad that my parents fled there.
I'm very happy to have not grown up where I came from.
And what do or did your parents do?
My father is a retired Messianic Jewish rabbi.
And my, I guess, I don't know if you ever retire from that, but he's not active anymore.
And my mother owns a real estate company.
All right, dude.
I'm not sure that I knew that.
I think if I knew that your father was a Messianic rabbi, I would have had the same thoughts I'm having now.
What does that, is he a Lubavitch or Black Hatter?
Or what does a Messianic rabbi mean and do?
Okay, Messianic Jews are Jews that believe that Jesus was the Messiah.
So that's Messianic Judaism.
So Messianic Jews are the Jews for Jesus, and I'm not saying that in any derogatory way.
Jews for Jesus is a, like, I don't know if it's a sect or a branch of Messianic Judaism, but yeah, we weren't part of that, but that's what that is, yeah.
Interesting.
So now technically, that makes Jews who believe in Jesus as the Messiah, the question is going to be, first of all, how does that happen in a family?
Well, your last name is Cohen.
I don't know.
Are you from the Cohen line of Jews?
Yeah, we're Cohenim.
Yeah.
So you're Cohenim, who believe in Jesus as the Messiah.
How did that happen?
Like, who was the first member of your family to be the Jew that says, we're going to follow Jesus as the Messiah, as opposed to, I don't know what...
Jews follow as the Messiah.
Who do they think is the Messiah in Judaism?
They don't think he came yet.
They don't think there has been a Messiah yet.
It was my father.
He converted or had revelation or whatever it was and ended up going down that and we had services out of our home for the entire time I was growing up.
And then he kind of retired from that about 10, 15 years ago, something like that.
Yeah.
I'm also not very religious now, so I'm probably not the best person.
Someone in the chat says, wouldn't that just make them Christians?
Like, I don't know the distinction between religions anymore.
So there are actually some Messianic Jews who refer to themselves as first century Christians.
So they refer to themselves as sort of like the original, I guess, batch of Christians, starting with the apostles, were just Jews that believed that Christ was the Messiah.
And so...
There are some that refer to themselves as that.
It is, I guess you can say, it's a branch of Christianity.
Well, I mean, in a way, I say, in a way, Christianity is a branch of Judaism.
They originate from the same person, and I don't know, they have so many of the same principles.
They're both Abrahamic religions, yeah.
But now, what does that look like growing up when your dad is a Messianic Jew holding services at home?
Strict?
Not strict?
What does that look like as a father?
It might have been strict, but it didn't seem strict to me.
There were certain programs I wasn't allowed to watch and things like that.
Any kind of even moderately religious home has certain things like that, I think.
It was somewhat strict, but it wasn't like there were kids in town that I wasn't allowed to speak to or anything like that.
I guess there were certain...
Any prohibitions that came with it, that would probably be standard issue for any kind of even mildly religious household.
But in terms of like, oh, I couldn't talk to, you know, non-Messianic Jews or I couldn't talk to other types of Christians or anything like that.
There was never anything like that.
And how many siblings do you have or how many siblings do you have growing up?
I have a half-brother and a half-sister.
Okay.
All right.
Now, Spike.
Okay.
So you're 41 years old.
You're raised in Myrtle Beach.
Dad's a Messianic Jew.
Your mother did what again or does what?
She owns a real estate company.
All right.
And your upbringing is standard childhood, public school, private school?
A mix of public school and homeschooling.
And a combination of frustration with the quality of public schooling and a few times that I was a disciplinary problem.
And that homeschooling was an alternative to what they were proposing if I wasn't being homeschooled.
So, yeah.
So it was kind of a mix of two.
And I will say this.
I'm glad for the friendships that I had that I got from being in public schooling, but I would learn inside of a few months of homeschooling.
Every time I would go from homeschooling back to public schooling, I would wait the better part of a year or so for the class curriculum to catch up to what I had been learning the previous grade.
I'd be like two grades ahead of what everyone else was learning.
My classes usually took...
You know, like the day of school usually took the better part of maybe two, three hours.
So I always found homeschooling to be, and I'm still a very big advocate of homeschooling because I saw the stark difference.
When my parents were in a position to be able to homeschool me, the difference was it wasn't even comparable.
It was so much better.
And when you say you were getting into trouble in public school?
Yes.
It's interesting just in terms of understanding who grows up to be a libertarian, free-minded, like, you know, challenging authority.
The kind of kid that gets in trouble in school, yeah.
Challenging authority as a kid makes you a problem pain in the ass.
Oh, right off the bat.
Did you get kicked out of school?
Or threatened?
I got told that we had to come up with an alternative to my getting kicked out of school because of the consequences that come from that, right?
Like, there's things that go on your record and there can be disciplinary issues and things like that as opposed to just...
How about your kid goes and gets homeschooled now?
And that was pretty much how that was handled.
That was one of my experiences.
In one high school, they said, look, if you just choose to leave, we'll help you get into the next high school.
But if you don't, we won't.
Do you remember what you did that was the straw that broke the camel's back on that particular occasion?
Yeah, so I've never pled guilty or admitted to anything.
And South Carolina has no statute of limitations on any crime.
So what I'm going to say is everything I'm referring to is in Minecraft.
None of this action.
It was all in Minecraft.
You know what?
I'm not going to ask anymore.
All right, Spike.
So childhood, what do you study in university?
I didn't go to college.
So I started my first business when I was 16. My parents used to have...
I was a website design company.
So what I originally...
My parents used to...
During the summer, my parents would say, listen, we'll take care of your basic needs, but if you want spending money, go get a job.
This was highly illegal, but it was child labor laws I'm breaking, so I don't think they can arrest me for...
Violating my own child labor law.
So I would go and I would work doing stuff like bussing tables, washing dishes, nothing too intense.
And it was cool.
I got to make money.
I got to learn the value of networking.
The waitstaff that liked me would tip me out and stuff like that.
So it was like I learned a lot of things.
But one of the things I learned was I didn't want to work for someone else.
And I would be doing something like bussing tables, washing dishes, doing landscaping, something like that.
And I'd be doing it next to someone who was two or three times my age, making maybe a little bit more than I was making.
But I was making it under the table.
So after taxes, I was probably making the same thing they were.
And I thought, I don't want to do this for the rest of my life.
And so at 16, I started learning how, you know, I got a laptop, learned how to use the different software and started going out and peddling my wares.
And this is in 1999, so this is right when, give or take, right when the internet was kind of taken off but becoming mainstream for everybody.
I think I got my first email address in 96. Yeah, so this would have been early 99, right before, like a few months before my 17th birthday.
Put it this way, my first few customers, when I would go to them and I'd say, hey, would you like a website for your business?
Their first question would be, what is a website?
That's how early on it was.
Or they'd say, I've heard of a website, but why would I need that?
I'm not some big company.
I don't do any technology stuff.
I don't do any computer stuff.
I'm just a restaurant.
I'm just a real estate company.
I'm just an insurance company.
I'm just a landscaping company, whatever business they were in.
And so the first few that I made, I just made them for free just to build up a portfolio and to show the value of it.
Very early on, I saw that it was more important to make sure that it was ranking highly on the search engines than the actual website itself.
The website was basically just a digital brochure.
It was more important that if someone was searching for something that they could find that business over everyone else.
And that's when it kind of took off.
What was the search engine back then?
Was it Netscape?
Was there something called Netscape back in the 90s?
I don't remember what that was.
What were the search engines back then?
So it was, oh gosh, man.
Netcrawler was one of them.
Yeah, there was Netcrawler.
There was, I do think Netscape had their own.
It's crazy because starting in the early 2000s, basically when Google came in, nothing else mattered anymore.
You would still do stuff.
Yahoo kind of abandoned their algorithm very early on and stuff.
It just sort of became Google for the longest time.
But yeah, that was definitely one of them.
Netscape had, I don't remember if they had their own.
I know there was Webcrawler.
I remember the words Webcrawler, but I had, like most people, no interest in the internet, and Netscape was a browser, says the chat.
Yeah, Netscape was a browser.
So you don't go to university, and this web design business which picks up, and is it lucrative enough that you say, I'm not going to go to university, or was it never the plan to go to university?
And then the follow-up question is, did your parents freak out when you decide not to go to university?
No, because their whole thing was, listen, just be successful.
Be successful and be happy.
If it's running businesses, fine.
We don't have to cover your university.
In fact, I actually had a full-ride Duke scholarship because of my SAT performance in the seventh grade, but I never pulled it because I was like, I don't want to go to school.
I'd rather not spend anywhere from four to eight years.
Before I can actually go out in the real world and start making money.
I don't even want to wait until I'm 18 to start doing that.
I want to start making money now.
So by the time I'm in my 20s, I have my own home.
And I'm starting to develop into what can be a multi-million or maybe one day a multi-billion dollar business.
I didn't quite get there.
MS got me before that.
But all that to say, I wanted to make money and be independent.
So I know it's shocking to hear that I'm a libertarian.
But the idea of being in school for 48 years...
If I wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or something like that, obviously then you have to do it.
But when I was hearing what my friends were looking into getting into, I'm like, I don't want to do any of that stuff.
I don't want to go to a liberal arts college.
And getting into a trade school or something, if you want to be a plumber, you want to be a mechanic, those are all very necessary things.
That wasn't anything I wanted to do.
I wanted to find a business that I could do myself until I was in a position to scale it and make a lot of money from it.
So that's what I did.
I have a joke that the difference between a messianic Jewish father and a secular Jewish father is one says you're going to university, you're going to get an undergrad, you're going to go to law school, and you will be, you cannot live without a university degree or two.
Yes.
I'm tongue-in-cheek.
And hold on, because I know what I'm being made fun of.
Uncle PJ says, what's your favorite color?
Did your grandmother, did your grandfather like Rose?
Was your aunt in a book club?
Good questions.
You know, I'm not going to stand for this kind of gotcha journalism.
No, my favorite color is, depending on the day, either black or blue.
Black is not a color, sir.
Wow.
It is the absence of color.
All right, that was a joke.
What we're going to do, by the way, right now is come on over to Rumble.
I'm going to end this on YouTube, and then we're going to continue this.
This is what YouTube gets?
YouTube gets the intro, and now we're going to get into the politics.
YouTube gets nothing.
YouTube is the vessel to drive traffic.
All right.
Three, two, one.
Boom.
By the way, Spike, I do publish the entire thing to YouTube afterwards.
No, I just thought that was the funniest thing.
Like, yeah, tell me about your favorite.
All right.
Bye, YouTube.
No, I say like 15, 30 minutes just so people know where the battle is at because we're going to get into this substantive discussion.
Yes.
So you run that business.
The question is like when people say you run for VP at the age of...
I don't know what it was at the time, 38. You've made enough money.
Have you made enough money that you can pursue not philanthropic but non-money-making ventures by the time you're in your late 30s?
Yeah, so a bit of a backstory there.
My goal was to scale up to sometime in the late 2020s, early 2030s to what would hopefully at that point be maybe a billion-dollar business or at least like an eight- or nine-figure business.
And I was...
Working my way towards that.
And then one day in 2014, I woke up and the right side of my body was going numb.
And fast forward a couple weeks later, I get an MRI and they tell me, yeah, you probably have MS. And that kind of sent me multiple sclerosis.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which is a...
Autoimmune disease that attacks your brain and your spinal cord.
And it's a pretty frightening thing.
And to get knocked off of a pedestal like that, I was in kind of a tailspin for the better part of a year.
We finally did get a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.
But that wasn't actually the jarring.
I was actually a relief by then, because I'm like, all right, at least I know what I'm dealing with.
The jarring thing to me...
Finally, now I have my diagnosis so I can sit down with a neurologist and they can talk about my options for treatment.
And they said, hey, we got great news.
The treatments are incredible.
We are now at a point where we can slow down the progression of your MS basically to a halt to where it's no more discernible than the typical aging process.
That hit me like a ton of bricks because I had just been...
You know, I've been in this kind of weird, depressive, existential thing for several years.
And then this MS thing had me, you know, all I thought about was MS and how I was going to fight MS. And they, in just one sentence that was supposed to make me feel better, reminded me that we're all going to die and that we're all going to age in between dying and that we better start living our lives in the meantime.
And so I thought, you know, I'm already at a point.
Where I don't have to work to make ends meet.
I'll never have to do that again.
I'm not buying islands and yachts or whatever, but I'll never have to actually continue doing this just to be able to make ends meet.
I can stop now and be able to make ends meet for good.
What do I actually want to...
What matters is, what am I leaving behind?
What matters is, what kind of life do I lead while I'm here?
And then what kind of world do I leave behind?
Is it better because I was here?
Is it worse because I was here?
Does it even matter that I was here?
And so it just, it put me in a completely different mind state than I'd ever been in my life, which up until that point had always been income, income, income, money, money, money, profit, profit, profit.
I'd reached a point, thanks to that mindset, I'd reached a point where I didn't have to worry about that anymore.
And ever since, it's been about how can I make a positive impact in this world?
And so, you know, that got me initially into podcasting to talk about libertarian ideas.
That parlayed into the run for VP.
Since then, I started my organization, You Are the Power.
We find people who are being abused by their local governments, and we help them organize to get justice and respect that they deserve.
And that's what I do now.
So, yeah, I was able to get myself in that point where now I can focus on leaving behind an impact and a legacy and enjoying my life in the meantime.
When you wake up one morning and you feel a tingling and you say it's bizarre, what physically does that feel like?
So, you know, like if you...
Fall asleep on your arm in a weird way or something, and you wake up, and it might not even be able to move, or it's numb.
And then over the course of maybe, I don't know, 30 seconds to a minute, it starts to come back, and you can move.
This was that happening in reverse very slowly.
And so it started with that residual tingle you get once it finally wakes up, and it just kept getting worse and kept spreading.
And it stopped pretty much right at the sternum from here.
All the way down and from the sternum over this way.
And this is my right.
And so I googled it and it said, oh, you probably have an MS-type lesion in between your C3 and C4 vertebrae.
So I go to my doctor and tell them that.
They're like, you have no idea what it is.
And two weeks later, I get an MRI and they go, yeah, you were right.
You got an MS-type lesion in between your C3 and C4.
MS is a differential diagnosis.
They have to rule out like a thousand other things first.
It usually takes about one to three, maybe four years to actually get an official diagnosis.
So it was not uncommon that it took two years after that to get the official and the progression This was over the course of weeks, but the way it works is there's a relapse.
You get that...
That symptom, whatever the symptom is that's being caused by the neurological damage, and then once they get that relapse under control, you get at least some of that back, like the symptom recedes.
In my case, it receded down to where I occasionally now have a mildly sandpapery feeling in these fingers and down my hand a little bit, sometimes here.
And over time, I've now been in remission for six years.
And this has gotten better over time.
I have a few other places where I have some symptoms, but they're mostly just sensory stuff.
If you started feeling the way I did, you'd be freaked out, but I'm used to it, and it doesn't affect my day-to-day life in any real way.
And not to compare the two, there's no...
But I have carpal tunnel syndrome, so I wake up and my hands are...
My three fingers are always numb, but they regain...
You know they're numb.
It comes back in a few seconds.
Yeah.
But the nerve damage, did it or does it cause muscle atrophy in your inability to use it normally?
It can.
So it depends on how intense it is, how many of the lesions you have, and how you respond to it.
So the one thing I learned early on is, yeah, you get on a good treatment that helps keep the relapses at bay, and I am.
We got me on a good one.
Thankfully, sometimes it takes multiple tries of different drugs before someone finds the right one.
I'm the first one they put me on.
I've been in remission ever since, thank God.
But the other thing is...
If you've got something that's already affecting your nerve supply to the rest of your body, you need to offset that with exercise, with regular stretching and physical therapy, with a really good diet and supplementation routine.
Basically, you have to offset it by living even more healthy than you already should.
The blessing of MS is that...
I used to be 100 pounds overweight.
I ate like crap.
I didn't take care of myself.
I didn't keep good sleep schedules.
My mental health was garbage.
And I wasn't ever taking it seriously because I told myself I'd worry about that once I was a billionaire.
And we all know that's not how that works, right?
MS forced me to take my health seriously.
So not only is my MS now under control, but I'm the healthiest I've ever been in my adult life.
And so it's actually turned out, it probably saved me from having a heart attack in my...
In my, you know, late 40s or early 50s or something like that.
Any kids?
No.
Okay.
And now, okay, so now, I don't know what the time frame is now.
When did you get the diagnosis for MS?
So, my first symptom that I know of, I'd been feeling weird for a year or so before, but my first confirmed, like, flare was in 2014.
Uh, early, March of 2014, and then my diagnosis, my official diagnosis happened in December of 2016, so about two and a half years late.
Okay, and now, were you involved in politics, uh, politicking in your younger years?
No, no.
One time, one time, so put it this way, I've always been politically, uh...
And my closest friends and associates knew it, but I actually kind of kept that from being too public because, you know, I was more in the business world and I'm not trying to put out a political opinion that's going to have one of my biggest clients say, hey, I don't agree with that, you know, especially because I'm like an anarcho-capitalist libertarian.
I don't want to piss off like a conservative business owner friend or something like that.
And so I had these opinions and if people talk with me about it, I talk about it, but I wasn't really public about it.
And so then, you know, now...
That's how I obviously am.
That's the question.
Now, first of all, everybody, it's been the 30 minutes.
We now know...
I didn't get into your grandparents' ancestry, how long you've been in America for, but forget that.
We now know you as a human, Spike.
And now the question is, you get into politics.
Everybody seems to have their distinctive red pill moment or the moment that they said, well, shit, you either get interested in politics or politics is going to get interested in you regardless.
Do you remember when that moment was for you?
It was a series of moments, and it was really just my neoconservative beliefs being disabused by reality, one by one by one.
Let me take a little step back.
On 9-11, I was 19 years old.
I thought I knew everything because I had a successful business, and I didn't really have much of a political opinion other than I really hated taxes and regulations, and I wanted the government to stay out of my business, so I assumed I was some kind of conservative or something, but I wasn't really like...
I'm strongly opinionated.
If you asked me what I thought about guns, I'd say I don't think there should be any restrictions.
But I'd say the same thing about drugs and people's personal sexual choices and things like that.
That's none of my business.
In retrospect, I was a libertarian but didn't really realize that.
So 9-11 happens.
I'm horrified.
Is this going to happen again?
Everyone...
This was pre-social media.
There were no alternative news sources to speak of, really.
And so everyone I'm hearing on TV, every government official, every political pundit, every media figure saying the same thing.
This could happen over and over and over again, and it's happening because of these evil people that hate us because we're just so darn free.
And when I would hear the occasional Yahoo saying...
That's not true.
That's, you know, that we have a long history of interventionism in the Middle East that's led to this blowback.
And, you know, I mean, Al Qaeda literally put out their manifesto saying why they did this.
And it didn't mention girls in tight shorts or freedom or any of that.
It mentioned the history of interventionism in the Middle East, starting with Operation Ajax.
And, you know, I didn't want to hear that.
And there was a guy named Matt Kibbe.
Most people, their person was Ron Paul.
Ron Paul was definitely influential.
My guy was Matt Kibbe.
And he used to have this email list called FreedomWorks.
And I'd probably sign some pro-Second Amendment or anti-tax lead capture petition.
And now he had my lead and he would send emails out to us.
And from a small government perspective...
He would explain why we should not be supporting the so-called War on Terror or the Patriot Act or warrantless wiretapping or putting people that haven't been tried for crimes indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay or bombing American citizens overseas and all of these different things.
And I was always like, why does this guy hate America so much?
Why does he want the terrorists to win?
He and other libertarians made one prediction after the next that we weren't going to be greeted as liberators in Iraq.
It was going to turn out everything we were told was a lie.
Eventually we'd find out everything we were told in Afghanistan was a lie.
The blowback was a very real thing that will continue to happen.
We're already creating the next terrorist group to fight this terrorist group and it ended up being ISIS.
All of these things.
And with each year, each month as...
Each thing that they would say, I would watch it happening in real time.
I got angrier and angrier, and I realized I was angry because I was wrong.
Well, there's a great way to fix that.
Stop being wrong.
So I spent a lot of time thinking, you know, I got here in a real ad hoc way.
What is it I actually believe?
And, you know, I kind of went down all sorts of different rabbit holes of political literature and philosophy, and I settled on libertarianism.
First, a kind of, I guess, paleo-conservative, constitutionalist, minarchist libertarianism We're going to break down some of these terms in a bit because they're terms that get used a lot.
Anarcho-capitalism and neoconservative.
But before we even get there, Operation Ajax was overthrowing the Iranian regime at the time.
Yes.
Reinstalling the Shah.
Yeah.
So I guess the question is this.
Let's just do like a 30,000-foot overview.
Are you comfortable answering a few questions like the why and then the blowback afterwards?
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, yeah.
So what was the rationale?
I know it had something to do with oil in terms of auditing the oil, but what was the rationale for overthrowing the democratically elected government?
And when it resulted in the hostage taking 20-some-odd years later, what was the interplay or the motivation to do that in terms of retribution?
Right.
So the reason that the Shah, who had been deposed by a popular movement of the people, the rationale for reinstalling the Shah and getting rid of the democratically elected leadership was essentially that...
They didn't like what the people chose, and they were worried that this new regime was going to cozy up to the Soviets.
And the fact is, they wanted to have multipolar relationships, like most non-puppet leaders do, right?
You don't want to just have all of your eggs in one basket in the middle of a Cold War, especially when you border one of the countries, right?
You want to have good relations with both.
And so they saw the Shah as the devil they knew.
And so using the CIA, they did a coup and they overthrew the elected leadership, replaced it with the Shah.
The Shah came back more brutal than ever before because now he's there for revenge and retribution.
And that ultimately led to the Iranian revolutions that happened starting in the 1970s.
And it was the brutality of the Shah.
Of a U.S.-backed Shah that led to people embracing something like the Ayatollahs.
In the same way that it was the brutality of Batista that led to people embracing people like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
Like, if you look at any time there's this reactionary communist movement, or reactionary fascist movement for that matter, any of these reactionary violent revolutionary movements, they are reactions to a brutal action.
And the reaction very often ends up being worse than the action.
But what happens is they're reacting to brutality.
And because they've been conditioned that the only way to govern is through brutality, they react to it with more brutality.
So in doing this, the U.S. government, intelligence services and military industrial complex, laid the seeds, sowed the seeds for what ended up becoming the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis and the whole thing.
And this is like my ignorance is when we say historically CIA, U.S. government has partaken and instigated the overthrowing of democratically elected governments, you sort of take for granted that nobody knows about it at the time.
But presumably on the Iranian end, they know damn well who's interfering in their local politics.
And like you say, the Shah comes back in and in order to punish the people who ousted him in the first place, even more brutal.
And everyone in Iran knows that America and American intelligence had a hand in it.
Right.
Or at least everyone in a position of authority knows that.
It might not be common knowledge in Iran, but it is pretty quickly afterwards.
I mean, it's interesting because one of the narratives we use in the U.S. as to why we have to fight back against Iran is how much they hate Israel.
They call Israel the little Satan.
They call the US the big Satan.
Their biggest beef with Israel is not that they're Jewish.
It's that they are basically the beachhead of American neocon foreign policy in the Middle East.
So that's their biggest beef with Israel is their attachment and adjacence to US foreign policy.
It's basically an extension of US foreign policy.
In the same way that Russia's biggest beef...
Or the BRICS nation's biggest beef with the West and NATO is that those are an extension of U.S. neoconservative foreign policy.
So it's all of this anger is at the action, which is the imposition of U.S. foreign policy.
And I don't even like calling it U.S. foreign policy because that implies that it's like in our interest.
And it's not.
It's the U.S. military-industrial complex foreign policy.
It's the U.S. central banking petrodollar system foreign policy.
It's paid for and underwritten by us, and it's paid for in the form of debt that will be paid off in the names of people that haven't even been born yet that are American, but it's not for us in any real way.
When did you start taking an interest in the historical aspect of all of this?
My previous belief system was just being wrecked by reality in front of me.
I thought, I don't know.
It was kind of a humbling moment where I'm like, I don't really know how we got here.
I don't know.
When people mention Operation Ajax or Operation Northwoods or COINTELPRO or MKUltra, I don't know what these things are.
And I probably should, because the thing I thought was true, I'm watching it play out that it was all BS.
So clearly I need to know more.
And so that was really when I started getting into that.
And I'm not going to pretend to be the expert on all history, but I know enough to know we shouldn't be trusting the government.
What's amazing is I think there are six big ones and maybe three huge ones.
That even, like, the average layperson is unaware of.
Operation Northwoods, when I first heard about it, and I haven't done any deep dive, but deep enough, blew my mind.
Operation Paperclip, when I fully understood what that was, blew my mind.
That's the one when they were, like, smuggling Nazi doctors out of Germany.
Nazis!
Because everyone was fighting over the Nazi doctor's expertise and scientific acumen.
Russia wanted them.
England wanted them.
And so they had an operation called Operation Paperclip.
They put a paperclip in the book of the Nazi doctors as to who they wanted.
Northwoods, MKUltra, Ajax was the overthrow of the Shah.
Then you get into, like, Oklahoma, you get into Waco, you get into Ruby Ridge.
Oh, yeah.
There's only six that you need to know of in order to forever lose your faith in a government and understand that the only government anybody should have is as small as necessary to maintain critical infrastructure and not what we've ended up with in America, the biggest federal government in the world in history.
Hold on.
Where was I going with that?
So, one thing I'll add while you're remembering what you were going to say.
You might have said it, but if you didn't, this one's important too.
COINTELPRO, you have to know that everything you were told about opposition to U.S. foreign policy from like the 19...
I don't care what anyone says.
It's still going now.
They just buy another name, but it's the same strategy.
It's still going on now, and its victims are still suffering now.
Leonard Peltier, or Peltier, I'm not sure how you pronounce that, but he was part of the American Indian movement where they would peacefully settle on land that was supposed to be given back to the Native Americans in treaties, and when the feds would show up to stop them, they would get court injunctions saying, no, you were supposed to give it to them, give it back to them, and they were successfully...
Reclaiming land that was supposed to be given back to the natives.
And so the FBI twice had to frame him for murder before it finally stuck.
And in the, I believe, 1990s, he's now in prison for multiple life sentences for murder.
In the 1990s, a federal court ruled that he should not be in prison.
He never should have even been tried and that there's no real evidence that he killed anyone.
But he had to stay in prison.
He's still in prison now.
The court said he's innocent.
And he's still going to be in prison for the rest of his life.
That's what COINTELPRO is.
Well, here, and I'll bring this up, just for the Wikipedia summary, because it's amazing.
It's one that I often also think of, yada, yada.
COINTELPRO, it was abbreviation for Counterintelligence Program, series of covert and illegal projects actively conducted by the US FBI aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, disrupting domestic American political organizations.
We can stop there.
Sowing discord among...
Among political allies, in theory.
And you see what's going on nowadays with certain...
Not coordinated campaigns, but certain things that you say, hmm, if there were a modern iteration of COINTELPRO, this is what it would look like?
This is what it is, yeah.
They don't have to assassinate people anymore.
They can just destroy them in public opinion.
They can just demonetize them.
They can make them effectively dead.
They can make them want to kill themselves.
They can drive someone to the point where it doesn't matter that they're alive anymore, because if anything, it's better that they're alive and everyone hates them.
But it's the exact same thing.
It's a much more sophisticated version, but they are literally still going through.
Back then, the assassination was just basically drive-by shooting people and claiming that they started it.
Now it's gotten a little bit more sophisticated, but it's the same thing.
They're still destroying people that get in the way of U.S. government policy.
I'm just looking at the chat here.
Operation Bluebeam, Operation Crossbow, MKUltra, and then we forgot Operation Mockingbird, which I'm certain it's no longer an operation because they do it voluntarily.
They don't need CIA helping them do it.
It's just Project Markingbird now.
The extrajudicial assassinations.
Character assassinations.
We're living through it.
So you have this revelation and then you say, not just that I'm going to brand myself as a libertarian, but I'm going to get involved in the libertarian party itself.
Actually, before there.
Anarcho-capitalism and neocons.
Explain those.
I know neocon now is used as a slur for war whores in government, but I guess at once upon a time neoconservative wasn't necessarily a slur or an insult.
What does neoconservative mean and entail and anarcho-capitalism?
Well, what's funny is it still means the same thing.
It's just now that's seen as derogatory, whereas before it was seen as a positive, legitimate thing.
Now, neoconservative policy, it's very interesting because neoconservatism and neoliberalism, or at least modern neoliberalism in many ways, are just basically two wings of the same bird.
But neoconservatism, broadly speaking, and there's different definitions of it, but broadly speaking, neoconservatism is a sort of quasi-domestic, moderate, conservative...
Domestic policy coupled with a wildly expansionist, interventionist, world peace foreign policy that is really behind it a way to keep the US petrodollar propped up and the military-industrial complex propped up.
So it's really a supply feeding the demand of the cottage industry built around the industrial complex and the central bankers who want to be able to print out endless money and try to have it keep enough of its value for them to be able to still switch.
Because absent forcing basically every government bank on earth to keep U.S. Treasury notes, IOUs, as their foreign reserves, if they weren't able to do that...
The money would be completely worthless.
We'd be past Weimar Republic levels at this point, or we'd be pretty darn close to it anyway.
We'd be in Venezuela or Argentina territory right now.
The reason that we're able to claim that is because they can say, look, it's underwritten by all these other banks.
They're holding our reserves.
Clearly, it's worth something.
Well, they're doing it at the point of a gun.
Because it just so happens that every single government that has been invaded, destabilized, bombed, replaced with puppet leadership...
Or in any other way, greatly encroached upon by the US and its NATO and Western allies are the ones who were refusing to accept US IOUs in their foreign reserves.
And one of the first things that happens with the imposition of the new puppet regime is they go, yep, we've just decided to keep US Treasury notes in our foreign reserves for no particular reason.
And it's really just a way of underwriting.
And making sure that the swindle can continue.
Which are the three remaining countries that don't...
What's the term?
Not central banking.
The fiat currency?
Well, which of the three remaining countries that have been under a lot of political pressure who have not adopted this central banking system?
Well, you've got...
Oh, that haven't adopted central banking or haven't adopted the US dollar?
Let's start with central banking.
Unless that's not the right question, it might be displayed.
Yeah, because just about every country has its own central bank.
And they will either say we have our own currency or they'll say we're going to use one of the major, usually the U.S. dollar or one of the other major currencies as our currency.
But they're still usually they have some kind of they either have a central bank in place or they have an authority that basically, you know, says.
We're going to just use their money or peg our dollar to our currency in some way to their currency.
So like, for example, Barbados is one.
They have their Bajan or Barbadian dollar is pegged two to one to the US dollar.
Two Barbadian dollars is worth one US dollar.
So it's basically they're using the US dollar standard.
So every country has some form.
I guess you could call it central banking.
I don't know of one offhand that just says, we have no currency policy, we'll let the market decide it.
Iraq, Iran, all the countries we were told were in the axis of evil, those just happened to be the most prominent ones that weren't holding U.S. Federal Reserve notes or U.S. Treasury notes in their...
They're foreign reserves.
And even countries like China and Russia kept them.
They kept them as a way to hedge their bets.
But now what's happening is they're reducing, they're letting those mature and getting their money from them.
And they're switching away from U.S. dollar.
And they've long since stopped buying U.S. debt or federal national...
U.S. federal debt through treasury bonds and notes, and are now trying to switch away from that.
And it just so happens that now they're the worst people ever, and we've got to do something about it.
Okay.
First of all, that was the best definition of neoconservative that I've heard to date.
And before we get back into this...
And a short one, too.
And the definition of anarcho-capitalism, because I know Michael Malice uses it frequently, a number of, I don't want to say anarchists and libertarians use it, anarcho-capitalism.
Without going down a whole rabbit hole, the easiest way to say it in a nutshell, it is an anti-state school of thought that is based on the concept of property rights.
And so it derives itself from a concept of, some people call it self-ownership, some people call it individual autonomy.
It's largely a semantical difference, but it's basically saying you, for lack of a better word, own yourself or have autonomy over yourself.
If you have ownership of yourself, then that means that you own your body.
If you own your body, that means that you own your thoughts.
That means you own your actions, which means that you own the ability to contract your thoughts and actions to be able to create, to use as labor.
And then that means that you can then reap the contractually agreed upon labor benefits from that, the product of your labor, which is your property, and that that's where property rights is derived from.
And then building out from there, and it's all kind of founded on Austrian economic technology.
I'm trying to keep it as simple as possible.
If we essentially own ourselves, and if we have these property rights that are built in as an extension of that, then that means that any attempt to...
To infringe upon that or to aggress upon that is not only morally wrong, but it's unnatural.
It goes against the natural order of things.
And so in that way, it means that...
And libertarians agree on pretty much all of that.
Where the disagreement comes is the minarchist libertarian will say what you said.
Well, we still need some kind of a monopoly that is able to enforce those rights and to stop some greater, worse monopoly from imposing itself and to provide critical infrastructure and things like that.
The anarcho-capitalist says, well, no, that's the very thing that we're saying we don't want.
And even if they're saying they're doing it to protect it...
That's the very thing that we're avoiding.
And so anarcho-capitalism proposes voluntary contract-based governance that is based on private law that is agreed upon by the people in a given community.
So it's very decentralist in nature.
It is an anarchist school of thought.
Unlike most other anarchist school of thoughts, we don't reject all forms of hierarchy.
We reject imposed authoritarian forms of hierarchy and believe that hierarchy should come from merit.
Okay, interesting.
Actually, before I even forget to ask the question, would some not say that this description of anarcho-capitalism sort of ignores inherent greed in individuals that will, in any given system, will exploit it and therefore need some form of external coercive force to keep the greed in check and the criminality in check?
Or would the communities do that?
So the distillation of that is people can't be trusted, so we need to give some of them ultimate power.
So our argument would be...
And after this, I want to get into pragmatism because we can now talk about how likely is it that I can snap my fingers and make anarcho-capitalism happen versus trying to force this government to live within its constitutional mandated limitations and so forth.
But from an ideological or philosophical standpoint, I'm happy to talk about this.
Our argument would be that if people are inherently greedy and will inherently take...
What they have and try to build upon it.
Then the last thing you want to do is to allow them to centralize authority under the inherent threat of harm to those who don't comply with it.
That there is always going to be bad actors.
There are always going to be people that are going to try to abuse it, which is why it is crucial that we are always ever vigilant against those who would try to We are not pacifists.
We are very strong believers in the use of force in defense, in defensive force, not aggressive force.
And so we just see government as that same aggressive force, but under the excuse of, well, you need us, we're going to protect you from people that are going to do what we're doing.
And so that's sort of our argument there.
Well, it's an interesting argument, and it's a good point, is that the bad people will do bad things to gain and retain power.
And that's why, in theory, the idea of, you know, democratically or having a democratic principle be at the base of getting these people to power, in theory, the aggregate knowledge of the people voting would pick out the ones that are psychopaths and there for the power and not there for the good.
But then it is a game of cat and mouse in terms of, OK, well, even if you do that democratically, well, the bad people are going to find a way to use democracy to get the bad ones elected.
As we've seen, I think, in 2016 and 2020.
Exactly.
And part of what...
I guess part of an answer to what you're saying.
Every system, if taken to believe or taken to assume that we're proposing utopia, yes, it is ignoring the nature of human beings to be greedy and just the nature of entropy in general, the fact that nothing ever stays the same.
I don't propose anarcho-capitalism as some perfect ideal that I know that we're going to reach, and then once we reach it, that's going to be it.
Society saved forever, and humanity is now never going to have to worry about any bad thing ever again.
The reality is, we may never be able to reach anarcho-capitalism in any kind of real scale.
And if and when we do, it will be an ever vigilance to fight against authoritarian impulses that come from reactions to negative externalities or various tragedies of various commons and things like that.
That will happen.
And so I would never be so naive as to say, I know.
That once anarcho-capitalism happens, once I magically snap my fingers and everyone wakes up and goes, government is bad, and we completely get rid of it and replace it with private law societies scattered around the world, that it's going to remain that way forever.
That's silly.
Any system is going to deal with the fact that people are inherently going to try to abuse, people are inherently going to try to get the most for themselves.
I believe that anarcho-capitalism is the one that addresses that in the most realistic way by removing as much of the ability for people to impose themselves through presumed authority.
Whereas a communism or a socialism or even a neoconservatism goes, no, we'll just put the right people in charge.
Let me bring this one up.
This is one of the rumble rants which answered the question, gave me one of the countries.
Libya was the last gold-backed currency too.
First thing they did when they came, they saw he died, was switching to US currency.
And do I understand that there were, I thought there were two other countries that had yet to do that.
But either way, and those two other countries were the ones that were the object of very much pressure for government intervention.
Oh, yeah.
So you have this revelation, and then how does it work into running for vice president for the Libertarian Party of America?
Yeah, of America.
So originally, it's interesting, because I kind of went from, well, I'm not going to vote anything but Republican, because at least they're the closest thing to saying...
I'm not voting for anything.
This is all a joke.
Why would I vote for any of this?
And I'd look at the Libertarian Party and go, well, I don't really think that they can win, so what the hell is the point?
I like a lot of what many of them are saying, but I'm not sure that they have any potential there, so why would I do that?
And I realized when I started my show, my podcast, that I did for the better part of four years.
I started having some Libertarian Party figures on that I respected.
And I did so because I liked what they had to say, but I was really trying to beat them up a little on, why are you doing this?
Why are you spending all this time in a party where you never win any statewide or federal elections?
You might occasionally win a local election.
Why are you doing this?
And the answers that I got were various ways of saying, Well, first of all, we do get some local candidates elected, and they do incredible things in their cities and their counties and their sheriff departments, if they're sheriffs or, you know, the mayors.
They do good things happen as a result of it.
But also, we're the only voice on the electoral political front who's speaking our way of thinking about this.
If we cede that territory to, you know, everyone else, then...
The majority of people in this country who think that the only real political change can happen through candidates running for office aren't really hearing our ideas.
Like, they're hearing Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and then the occasional third-party person.
All of them are just saying different versions of authoritarianism.
More so, less so, whatever.
They're all just, no one is saying actual, or very rarely are people saying actual libertarianism.
And I thought, okay, well, that makes sense.
And so when I ran for the VP nomination, I was not all that well-known in the Libertarian Party.
I had some people that knew me, but I thought, I'm not going to win this, but I'm going to just go in and from my background as a small business owner.
I'm going to talk about some of the glaring errors that I'm seeing and how we're presenting our ideas to people and how we could do it better by demonstrating it.
Because I didn't get picked by my running mate.
I actually had to run for the nomination separately.
So I was actually campaigning for the libertarian nomination for vice president.
So I was literally going out on door-knocking tours and doing front-facing, outward-facing stuff and turning back and saying to the delegates, This is the kind of stuff we should be doing.
Like, this works.
This is how we can bring libertarianism to people and show them what it is we actually believe, not just talking about it on the internet.
And I apparently did a good job selling it because then they picked me as their VP candidate.
So first of all, everyone should understand and appreciate that answer.
I ran, Spike, for the federal party in Canada called the People's Party of Canada.
Yeah.
No real chance of taking the government.
And then people said, Viva, you're splitting the conservative vote so that the liberals are going to have a better chance of getting it.
And I said, first of all, you're never splitting a vote when you vote with the entirety of your conscience.
Exactly.
B, you never affect any change if you don't even have that voice, not pulling the conservatives more to the right, because I don't think PPC is a right-wing party.
You don't have them even...
Talking about the ideas to keep that party in check and to be exposed to new ideas.
And all you need, it hasn't yet happened in Canada, you just need one person at the state level, just one whose voice gets amplified by getting in.
And then, you know, there's a new discourse in town and there's a new expansion of ideas where it's not just why should they support the Ukraine, but maybe that they shouldn't support the Ukraine, as politically incorrect as that is.
And so people don't appreciate that.
But this is the question.
I looked up libertarian crazy person because I forgot his name.
And it came right up, by the way.
First result.
And I'm not saying this to make fun.
Yes, yes.
Vernon Supreme.
The question is, I'm sure he's a very nice person.
He looks like he has a good sense of humor.
The problem is...
People think that the Libertarian Party are a bunch of kooks and wackos.
And then you see things that seem to confirm that even if they have good ideas and they're doing it for attention to raise awareness, you have action that discredits even the good ideas that the party might have.
I mean, and I'm not trying to give the Libertarian Party a hard time.
I think it all works out the way it should in the end.
But what's up with Vernon Supreme?
I know he did not become the candidate for presidency, but there was like an internal battle in 2020.
What year was this?
2020?
Yeah, he ran for the nomination.
So a little bit of background there.
First of all, Vermin has left the party.
He left the party last year, I think, or the year before.
He left the party.
And in retrospect, and I'm not trashing Vermin.
Vermin is a friend of mine.
I actually was his tongue-in-cheek proposed running mate during the time that we were running for the nomination.
I'm sure if you did the deep dive search, you saw that as well.
So he's definitely a friend of mine.
Vermin, he has done this with the Republican Party.
He has run as a Republican.
He's run as a Democrat.
I think he's run as a Green Party.
That may not be.
He's run as an Independent.
Green wouldn't surprise me.
Okay, I'm joking.
He's run all of these things and run as an independent many times.
He's a perennial.
He's been running for president since like 1989 or something like, or 1988 or 92 or something like that.
Has not won yet.
And in 2020, he said, okay, I'll do it with the Libertarian Party, but this time I'm actually going to try to get their nomination.
There are...
Vermin certainly has some libertarian beliefs, but even Vermin himself would say he wasn't really part of the libertarian party.
He wasn't an anarcho-capitalist or a constitutionalist minarchist type.
So it was some of it was to to try to use the Libertarian Party's ballot access to get his message out there.
His message is, if you dive into it, all of the stuff he does, the boot on his head and the free ponies and the two, those are all allegories for how absurd the presumption of authority is.
And he'll say, and how...
How much more or less ridiculous is that than putting a star-shaped piece of metal on my chest and saying, and now you have to listen to me?
Or holding up a sheet of paper that I wrote and signed and saying, and this says you have to do what I say.
How much more or less ridiculous is that?
When he talks about giving out free ponies, the allegory is obvious.
The government offers you a bunch of stuff that you know you're never going to get, but if it sounds good enough, you might vote for them.
He tells everyone it's going to be mandatory that you have to brush your teeth.
Well, how much more or less...
Ridiculous is that than saying you have to wear a helmet or wear your seatbelt or stay in your house if there's a virus.
Let people make their own choices.
Yeah, it's a good idea to brush your teeth, but let people make that decision.
And if you try to impose it on them, it's going to end up looking as ugly as the lockdowns did, right?
So all of those, as crazy as they are, they are performance art to demonstrate the absurdity of government in and of itself.
And so the people who get that joke, get it and understand it.
The ones who don't think he's a raving psychopath.
And I get it.
Like, cause he, he plays it well.
He plays his, his, his role very well.
So the, um, I'm still reading the bio, but I've read it before, so I won't read it again.
So you go through the process and you are going to be the VP candidate.
Yeah.
This is an interesting process that, I don't know, I hope other people find it as interesting as I do, but too bad if they don't, I'm asking anyhow.
You know you're not going to win.
You're going to go around campaigning, spreading the ideas, having the discussion.
What's the budget for the VP run?
How much money do you raise?
How much money do you have to spend on this process?
I don't know how much was spent specifically on the VP side of the campaign, but we raised just north of $2 million, which was the second best the party's ever done.
And third best wasn't even close.
There's only been two times we've ever gotten anywhere over a million dollars.
Was that 2016 and 2020?
Or was it an anomaly?
No, 2016, Bill Weld, who was a former governor of Massachusetts, he called in every favor he had and raised something like $10 million.
He also then went on TV and basically endorsed Hillary Clinton in the closing weeks of the campaign.
But, you know, he did raise a bunch of money.
Anyway...
Very often when I was running for VP, people would say, just promise not to be like Bill Weld.
And I'll say, well, that's not a very high bar, but I'll jump it with great gusto.
But he did raise a lot of money.
So we certainly couldn't, you know, I would hear what the Biden and Trump campaigns were able to do when they would go to an event, they'd literally buy out an entire hotel or the first several floors of a hotel for all their staff and, you know, their people and everything.
And we certainly couldn't do like that.
But we were able to have a very robust, almost 50-state campaign.
And in fact, the few states we couldn't reach...
A couple of them were because of the quarantine policies they had in those states, like in New Mexico.
We weren't able to visit that until just a couple days before Election Day because I wasn't able to go there until then because if I had gone before that, they wouldn't have let us leave for two weeks.
Well, that's amazing.
So you travel across the country by bus?
Bus, plane, and van.
So it was a combination of things, yeah.
How amazing or terrifying is that?
I mean, I think that sounds like a, well, it is a dream of mine to do a road trip across the country, maybe not as a VP run, but as a family trip.
How amazing, how revelatory, how awesome an experience was that?
Visiting 35 states over the better part of four months, many of them multiple times.
And having to just be on from like 3 in the morning until about midnight usually because I was having to do interviews in multiple time zones.
I'm running down airport corridors on the phone with a print interview, giving them an interview, getting onto the plane to get to the next thing.
And in the midst of lockdowns and shutdowns and very often being the only people on the plane, especially in those first few months in like July and August.
Really weird, dystopian stuff.
But I would say, broadly speaking, it was easily the most challenging and one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.
One of the things that people often leave out because they don't know, I'd say that one of the biggest successes that I had, besides bringing people into the party and getting the message out there as best as we could during a really weird time to do it, was the hundreds...
Of elected officials, we helped to get elected at the local level.
Every event I had, we reached out to the local candidates, anything from a school board candidate up to governor and everything in between.
If you're running for anything, show up, have your stump speech.
We're going to encourage people to give to our campaign, but we're going to encourage them to give to yours and volunteer for yours as well.
And we helped get a lot of people elected.
I would say that was probably the thing that I'm the most proud of.
And so you go through, I'm trying to, I'm asking my community, I remember the Libertarian Party, or maybe it was like different states, Libertarian parties had some very counterintuitive positions when it came to COVID, but I don't remember them offhand.
And I, I'm trying to refresh my memory on that.
But election comes, election goes, how many votes did you end up getting?
Or the party, I should say.
We got about, I think it was 1.8% of the vote, which worked out to roughly that same number of million, like just psi of 2 million, something like that.
That's very good.
Are you going to do it again?
We came in third place.
I mean, you know, it was very far behind in third place, but we got third place.
Are you going to try to do it again?
Are you done for the political stuff with this?
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