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Kibbe on Liberty
Ep 320 | Trump Is Disrupting Everything, and Maybe That's Good | Guest: John Papola
01:24:48
Matt Kibbe sits down with John Papola, founder and CEO of Emergent Order Foundation, to discuss the potential good that can come out of shaking the establishment out of its comfort zone.
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- [00:00]
Matt Kibbe
Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. I'm talking to my friend John Popola. This is an awesome conversation. He's the head of Emergent Order, and we ended up talking about a lot of things, but the emerging counter revolution of loving America again and how that's impacting all of the disruption that's coming from President Trump, but more importantly, how being pro America is fundamentally a libertarian story. Check it out. Welcome to Kibby on Liberty. John, good to see you.
- [01:04]
John Popola
Matt. Thanks for having me.
- [01:06]
Matt Kibbe
It's cool to have you in my studio. You're here for the Students for Liberty conference that's going on the next couple days, and you're doing a presentation that I want to get into called Radical Discourse. I love the name of this, but I suspect that half of my audience knows exactly who you are and what you do, and the other half, the Blaze TV half, probably know less about you. So I think it'd be useful to talk a little bit about what you do and sort of how you got to this libertarian, classical, liberal. I don't even know what your ideological pronouns are, but we'll get into that, too. But you're with the Merchant Order and you. You tell stories and you produce videos.
- [01:50]
John Popola
That's right. My background was in traditional entertainment in New York City, so I worked at MTV and Nickelodeon and then Spike tv, which. Which today would be considered like a hate crime. Actually, no. You know, last year it would have been considered a hate crime. This year it'd be cool again. So maybe via Paramount can relaunch Spike now.
- [02:13]
Matt Kibbe
Full circle. Maybe they're saving mtv, too.
- [02:15]
John Popola
Yeah, yeah, we're in the. We're in the After Times now. Maybe. I can't imagine half your audience knows who I am, but if those who do, they probably more likely know that me and Russ Roberts created the Canes vs. Hayek rap battles, which was a project that I initiated with Russ while I was still working at Spike as a kind of bit of activism in response to two things. My rising fanaticism about Austrian economics coming out of Ron Paul's presidential run, and John Stossel's influence and others. But it was really Ron Paul that kind of brought me to the Austrian school. And then the financial crisis which followed right immediately after. So it was like, you've got this incredible Texas doctor, Ron Paul, and he's saying all these things that make sense, and he's being told he's terrible, and Rudy Giuliani saying, how dare you talk about blowback.
- [03:17]
Matt Kibbe
And all those clips never get old, by the way. They Never get old because. Because Ron Paul is basically Nostradamus.
- [03:24]
John Popola
And, you know, maybe in some respects he's a broken clock. That's right. Twice a day. But he happens to be broken on the truth most of the time.
- [03:30]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah. Yeah.
- [03:31]
John Popola
So. So that, that started me on this journey of leaving traditional entertainment, starting Emergent Order, and being a liberty minded media entrepreneur, I guess you could say. So we've done other rap battles since then, including the one that we'll talk more about, Battle of the Borders, that launched last November. And then a couple years back, I restarted Everything as a nonprofit emerging order foundation. I mean, Covid almost killed everything. Like we really. I mean, it was. We came into 202012 people and all these projects and all this energy, and by June we were five people and then four people and at the verge of total death.
- [04:16]
Matt Kibbe
It was like a Season of the Walking Dead, really.
- [04:19]
John Popola
Like, oh, man.
- [04:20]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah.
- [04:21]
John Popola
Those are the times where it's good to know. It's good to have your identity tied to things beyond work in times like that.
- [04:29]
Matt Kibbe
We had a slightly different experience. We have a small crew and one of the things I liked about lockdowns is that everybody was anxious about whether or not we could raise the money to stay open. So they worked really hard.
- [04:42]
John Popola
Very good. Yes.
- [04:43]
Matt Kibbe
And the combination of being obsessed about the authoritarian, anti human nature of lockdowns and that we were sort of like very hungry, very, very eager to survive. It became one of our most productive years. Still. Rather not do that year again.
- [05:01]
John Popola
No, yeah. Yeah. In a sense that happened to me too, in that I did take that moment to say, what do I really want to be doing? And what came out of that was this new organization, but also my show, dad Saves America, which is liberty oriented but also focused on how do we raise our kids to have a liberty mindset, have a freedom mindset, which to me means that you have individual agency and that you have a growth mindset. You believe your choices matter and that you can grow and change. And actually not just you, but the world can change. It can make room for your ideas and your stuff.
- [05:42]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, yeah. It's funny how radical that is, what you just said.
- [05:48]
John Popola
You're not a victim. The world's not a zero sum game.
- [05:52]
Matt Kibbe
You're not a victim. And taking risks and working hard, these can be insanely fulfilling things. And if you don't do those things, you're probably going to not be happy.
- [06:02]
John Popola
No.
- [06:04]
Matt Kibbe
I always thought that libertarianism in its best form could be. I don't like this word, but it could be A self help philosophy that basically says look in the mirror and take responsibility.
- [06:17]
John Popola
I think I don't know the connections here that well, but I do think Ayn Rand's, the Ayn Rand philosophy and Objectivism and did play a role in that initial sort of self help movement of the 70s and 80s. So that I think there's a lot to that. I mean, saying you can do it, you can, yeah, you can change the world, you can be a heroic force in the world.
- [06:45]
Matt Kibbe
I mean, I mean that's what I got from it. Like, like my, I had some fictional and non fictional role models when I was a kid. One of my fictional role models was Howard Roark and he taught me and even in college I had, there's this great passage from Rourke where he's berating Peter Keating, how can you not know what you want? And I put it up on my door because I didn't know what I wanted. And I'm like, I better figure this out. So there's that burden of responsibility and I'm an apologist for Rand and I don't think that the caricature has ever been fair that what I get from her is the responsibility of owning yourself. It's not about do whatever you want. It's not about conquering the world. It's about living a life with integrity. And that starts with the responsibility of, as Jordan Peterson might say, get out of bed and make it.
- [07:45]
John Popola
Yeah, I, I have, I, I, I think that Objectivism is the best atheist religion you can adopt. If you're not going to have, you know, if you're not going to have a religion, you know, because it, it is, there's so many paths to meaninglessness and hopelessness and disempowerment and nihilism and Rand cuts through all of that and get, and I, so I'm a big fan. I'm not, I'm kind of a big tent liberty guy. I don't, I don't, I don't like to play in the, you know, the squabbles among the, among the factions. I don't find that all that entertaining.
- [08:29]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, I sort of, yeah, like I describe myself as ecumenical and I mean that in the broadest sense possible because I, and I also jokingly, but not jokingly at all, describe myself as the intellectual bastard of Ayn Rand and Jerry Garcia because I love the hippie community based, almost anarchic nature of a Grateful Dead parking lot. But he in his own way was infused with that radical sense of individualism.
- [08:59]
John Popola
Oh yeah, and they were technical Perfectionists too, which was also another neat thing about them.
- [09:05]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah. So emergent order. And you guys obviously survived.
- [09:11]
John Popola
We did.
- [09:12]
Matt Kibbe
You're here to talk about it.
- [09:13]
John Popola
For now, survival is success, right? In entrepreneurship. That's my motto. Live to fight another day.
- [09:20]
Matt Kibbe
Speaking of working hard and taking risks, do you feel stronger having faced that challenge?
- [09:28]
John Popola
Oh, 100. Well, you know, it's funny, it's of a particular kind of lesson, frankly. So surviving because, you know, the lockdowns, the, like, I mean, you know, our revenue went down 80%. Like everything about what happened in 2020, coming out the other end and realizing, wow, I'm still here, like, I survived. That's a super powerful lesson. I feel like that's the lesson that. That's the best lesson of failure. I think within certain safe bounds. Right. Failure can destroy you and leave you damaged in a way where it's not like what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. It's like sometimes what doesn't kill you nearly kills you and you never recover. So I think that failure can be lionized beyond reason. But surviving really hard times does teach you that. That anxiety you feel about the future, you know, it's sort of. It's the offset for that. And that has definitely come through. Like, I don't. I don't worry too much about the future, or I do worry plenty, actually. But that worry gets offset by like, no, I'm sure it'll be. I'm sure I'll figure it. Whatever comes next, maybe this is the best of times. I should be grateful for things being good when they're not good again. I will get through it.
- [10:52]
Matt Kibbe
Do you suffer this? I have this, I guess I'll call it a psychosis where I force myself to do things that I'm not confident I can accomplish. And I like that stress. And I learned this at a young age because I was frustrated that I was afraid to do certain things. And I forced myself to do it and became competent at some of those things. But you go through this process of struggle and anxiety and fear that you can't achieve the goal. And then you achieve the goal and I immediately get bored with it.
- [11:29]
John Popola
Yes.
- [11:29]
Matt Kibbe
Like, oh, that was okay. So, like, I have like 48 hours of relishing the success of the project, and then I'm like, okay, what's next? Because I'm bored.
- [11:41]
John Popola
This is a deep point you're bringing up because I experience this all the time. In some ways, I'm a very even keeled guy. In others, I'm a bombastic Italian and still others. I go through, like, a largely hidden emotional boom and bust cycle of my own, especially with projects. I know this will resonate with you. You probably say it here. When the cameras are off, every project goes through the same sequence. This is gonna be great. Wow. This is harder than we thought. Oh, my God. It sucks. I think maybe I suck. Wait, okay. No, it's starting to be pretty good. It's maybe working, and then maybe you'll get back to hopefully. This was pretty awesome. It was different than we thought, but it's actually awesome. It worked out great every time. Every time.
- [12:35]
Matt Kibbe
You just described every project we do.
- [12:38]
John Popola
I think it's every creative endeavor. It's just.
- [12:40]
Matt Kibbe
And I always blame Logan at the sucky part. Like, Logan, Why? Yeah, I could tell.
- [12:48]
John Popola
Yeah, it's. It is. That is the nature of the creative beast. And it's also. I think it's also something that's weird about some of the bigger cycles of, like, why are we still fighting about communism when it's so clearly failed, catastrophically, murderously so. And I think it's like we are just as humans, so adaptable that we take for granted our wins and then forget them like that. It's like, oh, yeah, no, I didn't think I was. I didn't think I could do that. Oh, I did it. Eh. I'm bored. I'm bored. I don't. What else can I do now? I suck now. This is terrible.
- [13:30]
Matt Kibbe
It's the boom and the bust. It is.
- [13:32]
John Popola
There's a. There's. I actually think when I have to give. I think all of our intellectual adversaries have at least some kernels of truth or they wouldn't still be standing. And I think John Maynard Keynes sense that animal spirits are a real thing that make an. I think that is true. I don't think it's the primary cause, but I think it's a magnifying effect.
- [13:56]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah. And there's, you know, there's obscure wings of Austrian economics that I was really into as a graduate student, a guy named GLS Shackle, who was kind of a post Keynesian that a lot of us Austrians were very enamored of because he talked about, in a somewhat Keynesian way, radical uncertainty, like the unknown future in the most profound meaning of the term. And he talked about the collision of tradition and creation and entrepreneurship. There's a spark there that is not just, as Kersner might argue, just piecing together previously unseen opportunities. There's something that happens that's real creation, something that didn't exist before. And I always thought that that was really profound. So I. I would think maybe not so much Keynes, but some of the Keynesians, I think, appreciated the realness of the animal spirit half of humans.
- [15:02]
John Popola
It's funny because you even said it, in a sense, it's really weird, right? So you said something that your younger self was observing yourself and things you were afraid to do and pushing you to do them anyway. So that's real weird. Cause that means there's actually two of you. @ least there's a you that knows that you need to do this thing, forcing the other you. That's this inclination to not want to do it. And I don't think, I don't think we have any sense of what's going on there. But that is complex stuff inside every human.
- [15:43]
Matt Kibbe
There's a simple metaphor from another one of my childhood mentors, Neil Peart, the drummer from Rush. And he was also very influenced by Ayn Rand and Howard Roark. And my favorite album is called Hemispheres. And it's a metaphor for the two sides of the brain, the heart and the mind divided. And it's very much. And this bring it back to what you do and what we try to do. It took me a long time to realize that normal people are not like me. And I process the world through economics. Like if I'm going to have another beer, I do a simple economic calculus in my brain. And I realize that most people process most of the world through their emotions and their relationships and the world around them. And it's at our own detriment if we don't engage that half of ourselves.
- [16:38]
John Popola
It's. I think that this is where my own worldview has like enriched and gotten fuzzier. And part of it's also like becoming more engaged in my Catholicism, which is not. Which lives in a different realm than like libertarian theory. It's like we are a complex creature. And I would say this to the like, like a simpleton, Ayn Rand fan, like a young 18 year old who's at this Liberty Conference and maybe just is a Is a.
- [17:15]
Matt Kibbe
Has it all for you.
- [17:16]
John Popola
A is a. I'm stereotyping here, but. Well, if I'm an alien and I'm a materialist alien and I come to the planet and I observe this creature human and how they behave and why they do the things they do, and I'm a pure ration. I'm like a computer synthoid creature. I am not building a profile of this species as being purely rational in a kind of utility Maximizing opportunity cost, Calculating entity. I am seeing a mixed thing. You know, David Hume said something to the effect of, I'll paraphrase, because I don't think I can remember it perfectly, you know, that, you know, the reason is only ever a slave of the passions and that it ought to be a slave of the passions, which is an interesting. Like he goes from the is to the ought even. And I think we have to grapple with that. You can't say I'm looking at reality objectively and then treat people like we can potentially become rational calculators. We aren't. We're much more than that. We're more. We have plans, we have purposes, we respond to incentives. All of that is true, but our incentives are very complex.
- [18:34]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah. And the Jerry Garcia half of me is really a metaphor for the Friedrich Hayek and Adam Smith theory of Moral Sentiments half of me, and it's not. And again, as an apologist for Ayn Rand, her heroes care about other people.
- [18:52]
John Popola
Right.
- [18:53]
Matt Kibbe
They care about society, they care about creating a better world, and they're inspired by beauty.
- [18:59]
John Popola
I mean, Howard Roark, he had a notion of what it meant to do his job correctly, and it was. He would rather burn it all down than see it compromised.
- [19:10]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, yeah. So it's obviously infinitely complex and beautiful and then. But I think, tapping into the beauty of that, I want to get to the radical discourse. But one of the things that we libertarians struggle with, one is constantly making these rational economic arguments, and we use data and graphs and downward sloping demand curves and really turning on nobody, unless you're already into that stuff. We're also very good about raging against the machine. We know government sucks and we know communism kills, and we know that there's human collateral damage to allegedly well meaning government programs. But it's harder to tell the story about the beauty of what happens when people are left free to be their creative selves and cooperate and help their fellow humans. How do we do that? You're like, you're like, oh, gee, this is what I do. Help us.
- [20:15]
John Popola
You know, it's interesting. I appreciate that compliment. I don't think it's wholly deserved. I think that the thing I've probably done best has been to doll up economic arguments with playful genre. I think that's been the main thing I've been good at. That being said, I think the hero's journey is very fundamentally libertarian. There's two ways I think, about the challenges of storytelling and advancing the philosophy of freedom in a free society. One is that the Economic arguments, the reasons why trying to get the government to help this person feels lovely, but might ultimately not help them, but almost certainly immediately will also cause all these other problems that are the seen and the unseen and emergent order and the invisible hand of the market. Like that kind of thinking is actually, I think, pretty resistant to storytelling because it is not agentic, if you will. It is not actually the story of the hero making choices. It's a system story about like Thomas Sowell. And then what? And then what happens? And then what are the fallout effects? Like, maybe you can do a kind of multi perspective type of story like that. But most great stories have a central hero protagonist who is a flawed person who goes on an adventure and is transformed and transformed partly by the obstacles they encounter. So I think emergent order struggles with storytelling, but individual liberty as necessary to become the best version of yourself. And like no pain, no gain, and taking responsibility and exercising your freedom and seeing why other people don't know you as well as you know yourself. And so they don't really have the right or the knowledge to get in your way if you're not hurting anybody. That is super. That's at the heart of, I think every great story, every great story is going off on that adventure, encountering bad guys that want to stop you for their ends and the hero finding a way to defeat that. And I think that that story of liberty is embedded in I think every great story. I think that one of the reasons why woke Hollywood nonsense has wrecked the storytelling of the industry is because in the name of dei, they've put all these Mary sue characters in the protagonist seat who are already perfect and basically are there to scold everyone around them. It's like, well, that's not a story anymore. Like, that just sucks, right? So if they're already perfect, why did I show up? It's like, why not roll the credits after frame one? Because they're already. Captain Marvel's already the greatest superhero of all time and is basically super Superman. But no flaws because she's a woman or something. Like, that's not.
- [23:47]
Matt Kibbe
You showed up to be scolded. Yeah, yeah.
- [23:48]
John Popola
It's like, okay. Yeah, that's right. Oh, okay. Oh, Dr. Who. Like, now you're better because you've got long hair. All right. Yeah, it's like, I like, that's not fun. Like nobody wants. Nobody likes that. Yeah, so. And it's just not good storytelling like you can do. You can represent. I think you actually do a great job of this. You've. You've done some incredible films and documentaries telling stories from around the world, especially in South America, of heroic people with diverse backgrounds. But they're not perfect people, right? Yeah, they're real people. So I think that's what it, you know, that's what it looks like to do it. Right.
- [24:25]
Matt Kibbe
Thank you for joining me today on Kibbe on Liberty and for being part of our fiercely independent audience. Every week my organization, Free the People, partners with BlazeTV to bring you this show. My guests bring smart perspectives on everything from current events to timeless philosophical debates. If you like what you hear, go to freethepeople.org kol and support Kibbe on Liberty so we can continue to produce these honest conversations with interesting people. Now, let's get back to it. It's interesting to think about that. The realness makes it compelling because the audience can identify emotionally and personally. You know, except for me, I am perfect. So it's. I struggle. I struggle.
- [25:09]
John Popola
Yeah, well, we need some perfect beings, right?
- [25:12]
Matt Kibbe
We need. I forget what I was gonna say. Oh, so I was listening to your recent podcast with Kennedy.
- [25:20]
John Popola
Oh yeah.
- [25:21]
Matt Kibbe
Dad Saves America. Great. Obviously she's a lunatic, so. She's awesome. She's the best. But you guys were talking a little bit about this and I've been obsessed about this, this emerging anti authoritarian coalition that can be traced back to lockdowns and the censorship industrial complex and, and the medical mandates and all of this. You're seeing a number of people coming from the left and, and they're liberals, but they're, they're liberals that can't identify with the authoritarian woke insanity that has taken over the left. And a big part of that coalition with RFK Jr. And with Elon Musk and even with guys like Jay Bhattacharya. These are not partisan Republicans and these are not conservatives in the way that you would think about that. And that makes Trump 2.0, the coalition, very different than Trump 1.0 and far more compelling to me, more interesting. What's your take on that smash up of ideologies and tribes?
- [26:42]
John Popola
It's super exciting to me. I have a couple impulses that I'm aware of. So I grew up like conservative. You know, you can either embrace your parents worldview or reject it. I embraced it. My dad's always been a conservative Republican and so I was like a young Republican. And then actually it's like Ron Paul and John Stossel and you at Freedom Works and like, you know, I became radically libertarian in the aftermath of the financial crisis in which went into all this Economic stuff. And now it's probably partly age, but it was also the lockdowns. I haven't rejected really any tenants fundamentally of my libertarian principles, but I couch them in a different way. I don't think libertarianism and I'll get directly to your question, I know this seems like it's an offshoot. I don't think libertarianism is a total, totalizing worldview. I think it is a perspective on fundamentally like the legal regime in which we humans operate. It is a political philosophy. It is what should the role of government be if there even should be one at all and what should be our legal obligations to each other as instantiated in the law. I think, I think what an RFK coming into this right of center movement does that's interesting is says yeah, there's been a bunch of stuff that's business even leave aside even the crony government, fda, food pyramid stuff. There's been plenty of things that have been the process of voluntary free enterprise that are bad, that are unhealthy, that are, that we like, we like sugar. We like a lot of sugar. We'll eat way more sugar than is healthy or reasonable. It's a flaw of our nature the way we evolve with such limited calories.
- [29:03]
Matt Kibbe
At our fingertips and prosperity.
- [29:04]
John Popola
Right, right. So now we have I think this different set of constraints that I think this Trump coalition in different ways, imperfectly of course is speaking to. And the one that to me really sort of rocked my world was watching our kids. You know, I'm 47, you know, so my son's 19. That he's a gen zer his generation. The mental health collapse of their of Gen Z should be a wake up call to like late 90s classical liberal thought.
- [29:56]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah.
- [29:57]
John Popola
Because late 90s post fall of the Berlin Wall classical liberal thought is we are at the end of history. Democratic liberal capitalism has, has won the day as well it should have. And you know, the graph is up and to the right from here. It's Steven Pinker, right. It's everything's getting better. Look at the collapse of poverty around the world. Isn't that great? It's a very Panglossian story. It's not that it's not true. But here we are in the wealthiest country in the world and our little girls are cutting themselves at rates that we've never seen before and committing suicide or trying at rates we've never seen before. And if we don't, we gotta grapple with that. And that raises different kinds of questions. And I'm not saying the Government has an answer or that the Trump movement has an answer. But I think that's part of what has sort of scrambled our politics, is that we have a different set of problems at the level of our friends and family than we used to. You could even call it wealth diseases, although in some cases it's not wealth in the sense of like, there's plenty of Americans struggling mightily. Right, right, right. So I think that, that I know that's like a zigzaggy answer, but it just is kind of a window into my own feeling of concerns that fall outside of government bad shrink it. It's like, yes, and what should we do with our freedom that will be healthy and good and improve our lives?
- [31:32]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, there's elements of maha that. And this is what you're echoing. They're asking questions in a different way that I think forces us to that. I would argue that my sort of faith in free enterprise was wildly naive. And I would point to what RFK calls corporate capture to describe a lot of that. And I would push them even on questions of intellectual property and corporate structure itself, which is a government structure, because I think it creates perverse incentives. But we should be allowed to ask the question, are we over medicating our kids?
- [32:13]
John Popola
Yes.
- [32:13]
Matt Kibbe
Because, I mean, I think the answer is obvious. Are we over vaccinating infants? I suspect the answer is yes. And we're not allowed to say those things because, you know, we'll be accused of, of being anti science. But you got to look, this was my ultimate red pill during, during lockdowns. I had no idea just how intimately intertwined the pharmaceutical industry was with the health agencies that are allegedly overseeing that to the point where intellectual property is owned by the very same people in the very same agencies that are telling you whether or not a vaccine is safe. There. There. There are also probably the agencies that are telling you you have to take this product. That blows up the whole thing for me. And I'm now immediately skeptical of anything Big Pharma says. I'm still not sure that that is a creation of free market capitalism. I think it's something else.
- [33:16]
John Popola
Well, I'll give you another one. I don't like the idea of the government banning any kind of communications. In fact, I think that's just the path to hell. You know, London, England, you know, London Bridge has fallen down because they're arresting people from tweets. But it is interesting that the news media gets a non trivial amount of its revenue from advertisers in two sectors, in particular, military Industrial complex and pharmaceuticals. If the pharmaceutical industry stopped advertising on news networks, they would almost instantly probably have to fold. They'd be in the red, I think, instantly. And so we're supposed to pretend that being essentially reliant on the advertisements that none of us can comprehend. It's like every one of them looks exactly the same. It's a bunch of random United Colors of Benetton casting, walking through a field and rowing a canoe while we're told that we'll be vomiting blood. You know, in a long.
- [34:32]
Matt Kibbe
Ask your doctor if this is right for you.
- [34:34]
John Popola
You know, Zebulatron 2. Ask them these names that are impossible to remember with a long. And I know that even the list of the list of side effects is a regulatory requirement. Even so, it's pretty clear that at least some, if not most of the reason why the industry even buys those ridiculous ads. Because if you look at those ads, you're like, why would you even run this ad? This ad is much. Must be a net negative on the perception of your drug. Not the least of which because endings actually matter a lot. So the last thing you hear tends to be the message you're left with. So when you're left with may cause anal leakage at the end of your ad.
- [35:23]
Matt Kibbe
Oh, I'm in.
- [35:24]
John Popola
Yeah, like, no, that's probably. I don't want that. I don't want. I don't know about that. I don't want that. So they're not, they're not buying those ads for me and you viewing, watching TV or whoever, whatever. Like 14, 80 year olds still watch television. They're buying it to buy the complicity of the news media.
- [35:43]
Matt Kibbe
They're buying the narrative.
- [35:45]
John Popola
They're buying the narrative. They're buying like allegedly liberal MSNBC hosts being all in on their products being mandated on the public. So what do we as classical liberals have to say about that? Because we. I don't know that. Again, I'll just say like sort of late 90s classical liberalism has a lot to say. I don't think we and I, and I'm not saying we should ban them, but I'm saying like the roots below the surface there of how we end up in that place need to probably all be torn up.
- [36:18]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah. By the way, there's a third advertiser that dominates the market. It's actual government agencies. The, the ad spend for TV and social media from government agencies is insane. I don't know what the number is. And by the way, it's very much dovetails with the military industrial complex. And the pharmaceutical industrial complex.
- [36:40]
John Popola
Yeah, I can never unhear like this episode of Meet the Press is brought to you by Boeing and Pfizer. Next we'll have on Scott Gottlieb to talk about. Scott, you just came out of the FDA and went to Pfizer. Is that right now? I'm not going to bring that up. It's like the whole thing is just.
- [36:57]
Matt Kibbe
By the way, the market is correcting and I think the ham fisted nature of the censorship industrial complex exposed the fact that the old corporate media, legacy media, whatever you want to call that, that they're not doing the job of media and they're all dying. And you know, but for pharma funding and perhaps USAID funding, right. They would, they would all be dead, being replaced by, by the Rogan sphere. And I think that's awesome. And so there's, there's a, there's a reason why they tried to get Rogan canceled. There is a reason why they tried to stifle all of our organizations and all of our podcasts on all of these platforms. It was a business decision. We're going to die and these guys are going to take our place. The market is correcting, if it's allowed to.
- [37:53]
John Popola
Balaji Srinivasan pointed out years ago that the shift in media coverage towards Silicon Valley can be traced exactly to where the advertising revenue started to get sucked out of the news business, both from Craigslist and for. What are those ads called in the newspaper where you, you know, the wanted ads.
- [38:19]
Matt Kibbe
Oh, yeah, yeah. I don't even remember, but okay, okay, Boomer.
- [38:23]
John Popola
Yeah, that stuff on the paper that Craigslist got rid of. Yeah, yeah, but that.
- [38:29]
Matt Kibbe
The wanted. The wanted.
- [38:30]
John Popola
Yeah, the wanted ads. The. But that. It was all just economic. It was like Silicon Valley was great and they're in San Francisco, so they're progressive, so we like them. Oh, wait a second. No, they're all a bunch of libertarian demonic bros because they've moved our cheese.
- [38:47]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah.
- [38:48]
John Popola
And there's plenty of problems with Silicon Valley techno future utopian weirdo stuff. And we're all going to be sucked into the matrix of our large language models. I'm a little leery of some of that, but yeah, I don't trust, I don't trust. There's that occasional post you'll see on Twitter, like, you don't hate the media enough.
- [39:09]
Matt Kibbe
Right. I'm in that camp.
- [39:11]
John Popola
It's like, I'm not sure where the line is for hating it enough, but I'm probably not there yet.
- [39:16]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah. So this is a nice launching off point for radical discourse because you think about the difference. And I used to do this. I used to go on MSNBC and I used to go on Fox, and I would come out of every experience more pissed off and more stupid as a participant in the Yell Fest. You got three minutes. Make your point versus three hours on Rogan or two hours on dad Saves America where you're actually allowed to have a conversation with someone that you disagree with. So it's a radical transformation and you're trying to tap into this and you're even showing something at Students for Liberty. I want to hear about that.
- [40:03]
John Popola
Yeah. So as I said early in the conversation, my entry point into this world Was this Keynes vs. Hayek rap video and then its sequel. And at that time, my motivation was the dominant Keynesian clothes claim that, oh, we need to get out of this recession by big government spending and deficits and that stimulus. I thought that was all nonsense. I think Keynes is wrong. I think the only time Keynes is right, by and large, is when he's not being uniquely Keynesian, animal spirits notwithstanding. And, and yet when we, when me and Russ began to work together on, on this project, we realized way we, you know, my wife recommended we do music because she's like, this economic stuff is so boring. And we were listening Flight of the Concords and watching that show like, you.
- [40:53]
Matt Kibbe
Got to do it like fellow, fellow Deadhead, by the way. Yes, yes, shout out to Deadheads.
- [40:57]
John Popola
Yes. Lisa's a hardcore Deadhead. She's been like 70 plus dead shows. You know, she was like, I think that, that at least portions of that movie Almost Famous are kind of semi documentary of her young life. Yeah, only the good parts. And, and so we ended up making this musical sort of Hamilton style, before Hamilton Rap Battle, in which Keynes makes his strongest version of his argument that we could muster. And then it goes up against Hayek doing the same. And then the second one, they go more back and forth. And then I did a Mises vs. Marx with a I, E, R, with the same thing. Like, let's put the strongest arguments of Marx forward and, and have Mises, who I think is sort of the best match to Marx insofar as he's equally sort of stridently polemic. And so they're like a good fit for each other in that way. And then this past. And so that, that exercise of I think Marx is nonsense. I think it's murderous, horrible, you know, garbage philosophy. Although there's a couple things like alienation and stuff that I think are interesting. But if I can't make a strong Marxist argument, then how do I even know that I oppose Marx? Because do I even understand what Marx is saying?
- [42:15]
Matt Kibbe
This was Don Lavoie's point. He took the theory of socialism seriously in his critique, which was different at the time. It was easy just to make fun of it instead of taking it seriously.
- [42:27]
John Popola
Well, and I think one of the things that is interesting is, you know, at the heart of Marx is this strange. It's sort of this sort of Hegelian historical narrative that we will end up in a place where through market competition and capitalism we will achieve a post scarcity society. At which point the laws of capitalism don't really work anymore because capitalism does. Assume is race rests on property rights. Property rights are necessary for scarce goods. But when you have infinite, if you have no more scarcity, do you need property rights anymore? Like some of that, some parts of that might start to rear their head in the AI robot world that we might be heading into. So that's interesting. That's worth.
- [43:16]
Matt Kibbe
Hopefully, if that happens, hopefully the state withers away as he promises us.
- [43:20]
John Popola
Well, Right, right. So I mean, you know, maybe Marx will get the last laugh and we will all have anything we want at zero cost and we can be poets by day and farmers by day and poets by night or whatever.
- [43:33]
Matt Kibbe
Kind of sounds like hell, by the way.
- [43:34]
John Popola
Yeah.
- [43:35]
Matt Kibbe
Imagine a world where you don't, you don't have to get up in the morning. It's a dystopian nightmare.
- [43:41]
John Popola
It is. And I think it, I think we. Well, we'll see. You know, it's very easy to draw these lines again, like, oh, you know, we're heading towards a world where there'll be no one will have any jobs.
- [43:54]
Matt Kibbe
But if I do have a robot, I finally get to tell somebody what to do.
- [43:57]
John Popola
Yes, at least, at least your, at least your authoritarian impulses can be, can be applied to a non human. So that's a step in the right direction. So anyway, point is, I think you can both be a biased human with a perspective and be able to understand the other side and even make the strongest version of its argument. And that is what radical discourse is. So we took the YouTube channel that houses the Keynes versus Hayek videos. We rebranded it as radical discourse, a term that I think actually you'll find its origin is on the left, actually. And we launched the first of what will be ongoing though occasional new rap battles, the most recent one being Battle of the Borders, which we launched in November. We're going to be doing a debate and screening it here.
- [44:47]
Matt Kibbe
So it's actors, it's not actual intellectuals debating.
- [44:52]
John Popola
Yeah, so it is. We have. So the entire premise of it, like before is we dig into the work of the leading thinkers as we best can determine, and there's a judgment call there. In the case of Battle of the Borders, the two people duking it out are George Borjas, the Harvard economist who has been the most, you could say rigorous opponent of mass migration, especially of low skilled immigrants, which frankly, most of our ancestors were low skilled immigrants. Like my, my southern Italian great grandparents wouldn't have passed whatever merit based test would get concocted today.
- [45:36]
Matt Kibbe
And all my great grandparents had was grit. Yeah, that's all they had.
- [45:40]
John Popola
It's like, okay, so which desperately poor Irishman would pass the merit test? Probably zero.
- [45:47]
Matt Kibbe
It was a mistake letting the Irish shit. Including, including my wife.
- [45:53]
John Popola
You know, this is the American process. You come in, we hate you, we get married and we move on together.
- [46:01]
Matt Kibbe
Yep, exactly.
- [46:03]
John Popola
That's the deal. That's the compact. So on one side you have George Borjas, sort of with a little bit of support from our version of Stephen Miller, arguing for basically build the wall, send people home, keep people out, America first, Americans who are currently here first versus Bryan Kaplan, and with support from Africa, Alex Narasta. And it's set to a kind of silly environment where it's a basically wrestling match, WWE style at the border wall, and they duke it out. And the funny thing about the process was I came into the process of working on this together with the team, my producer Jesse, and we. This is the first one of these I haven't directed, although I did a lot of post production work very easily, stridently in the Bryan Caplan Open Borders camp. And it's not that I think Brian is wrong coming out of it, but I'm at least much more worried that Brian might be suffering from a certain kind of utopianism and that the immigration issue is more complex than the arguments Brian makes. And Brian's not alone because I think almost all economists are to the left of the public on immigration. And so I think it's an interesting challenge. It's an interesting challenge. I think the US also has different challenges when it comes to immigration than say Europe. I actually think Europe, the case for Europe being worried about immigration is much, much stronger than the case for the United States.
- [48:05]
Matt Kibbe
Right, right. But you know, it goes back to the, the heart versus the mind. And Brian makes a very rational, analytical, supported by data argument, but it's kind of A long run argument. It discounts all of the disruption that happens when you get mass immigration. And I've always hated the phrase open borders. I think, I don't know if it's purposeful, but it leans into a stereotype of people who are pro immigrant that I don't think is true. I don't want terrorists in my country. I don't want violent gangs in my country. And now that we have borders, it would be nice if we could work on building a system for good people, hard working people, including. I don't just want PhDs, I want people that want to work. Because all my immigrant friends are better Americans than most Americans, particularly if they've gone to college here in the last 10 years.
- [49:19]
John Popola
Well, it's funny, I did an op ed that went up on Sunday on FoxNews.com about immigration and, and the point I made, and it was somewhat of a promotion of the video and of the event this week was there's all these arguments about economics, cost of living, crime, culture. But the culture one I find most interesting because when our ancestors, or certainly when mine came to the, to America in the 1920s and 30s, they didn't teach their own kids Italian because they wanted to be American. Yeah, because they were entering into a culture that overwhelmingly loved America. And like Axios had a poll and this has been replicated in the Wall Street Journal and Gallup and others, only 18% if I'm remembering that number correctly, but it's close to that of 18 to 34 year olds polled last year said they were very proud to be American. That's down from 85% in 2013. Now what's happened since 2013 because you can find another stat that has collapsed and that is race. Percent perceived race relations. 68 to 72% of both white and black Americans in 2013 believed that race relations in America were good to very good. Now those numbers are in the 30s. So we have suffered through a woke reign of terror that literally hates the country, thinks we should give the land back, thinks we should be destroyed, thinks Western civilization is evil. Evil. And who would want to move? Who would move into that environment and assimilate into that? It's like you hate yourselves. Yeah, maybe I'll just keep speaking Spanish and I'll just live in an enclave with my, with my family. And I came here to have a better life and you hate the country. Like I just got here. So I think there's like, I think we need to, we can't hate ourselves and also want mass amounts of people to come to the country. Those two things are not congruent. And I think that that's a challenge that kind of is more complex than the arguments that get made.
- [51:55]
Matt Kibbe
If you've made it this far into the show, it means I must be doing something right. Key Beyond Liberty is just one of the amazing products we created for the people. We tell emotionally compelling stories and produce educational videos for the Liberty Curious. Our award winning documentaries personalize all things liberty. Independence, creativity, hard work, integrity and perseverance. After the show, check out our work@freethepeople.org and if you like what you see, donate to support what we do. That's freethepeople.org now back to the show. Yeah, this is not a simple question of economics. It's about this cultural rot that I do think the tide is turning. Yeah. And I think, and again, it goes back to this emerging anti authoritarian coalition that is as much cultural as economic. At this point it's just, it's mostly just a reactionary thing to everything that you're describing. So we got to try to fill in the blanks together on what that looks like. And I do think libertarians have a lot of compelling answers in the right way. I don't think economic efficiency is the first of those tenets. It may be the tenth of those tenets, but just the idea of, you know, we have a philosophy that allows for real diversity. We have a philosophy that allows for people of all different walks of life to find ways to cooperate and thrive together. That to me is like the gold in this new searching that so many people are looking at. They've decided that the insane authoritarian dividing us by race and sexual preference, that, that's disgusting. I don't like that. But what am I? That's an opportunity.
- [54:02]
John Popola
It is, I think. And at the end of the piece I write about this a little bit. But the thing that I think so interesting is what piece this, the Fox News piece. I'll send you a link to it if you want to include it. That'd be awesome. But basically I think that fundamentally the American creed is very libertarian. The Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the entire premise of America and the way America has developed into the wealthiest, most powerful nation on the planet in the history of the world is by and large saying, we believe as Americans that the individual is sovereign, that the individual is endowed by our creator with unalienable rights to life, liberty. It was originally property, right? But the pursuit of happiness by way of property, by way of ownership, by way of personal Responsibility by way of community, by way of our Bill of Rights, saying that anything not explicitly described as a power of government shall be left to the States and ultimately to the people. And so that is the democracy in America that Alexis de Tocqueville saw when he came from France and said, oh, you know, the noblemen of France just turn to the Parliament, turn to the aristocrats for answers. Americans just roll up their sleeves and do it. That is what it means to be an American. We are not a blood and soil nation. We never have been. Even if we were a white European nation with African American slaves. Right. I mean that's, that was our original mix, but very quick. I mean, we were, we were diverse in a lot of ways from the beginning. And that diversity only expanded. That diversity doesn't bring entirely strength. Some of that diversity brings strife. And that's part of the American challenge too. The strife between white and black as part of the American story. We can't pretend that wasn't there, but there's a lot of good to embrace. Some of it means that we'll always be like a messy place, I think. And there's countries like Japan that have a kind of cleanliness and orderliness that is admirable, but it also brings with it a suffocating conformity that's very antithetical to the American way of life. And so I, like, this is where I will start to part ways with some of the right wing populists like Tucker Carlson, who've shaded into kind of hating America a little bit. Like, why can't we be like Japan? They're so clean. Our cities are a dirty, scummy mess. It's like, well, our city should be cleaner, but I don't want to be Japan.
- [56:59]
Matt Kibbe
We could do, we could do, we could do clean and beautiful chaos at the same time.
- [57:04]
John Popola
Right. So I think, in a way, I think there, I think one thing I'd offer to my libertarian friends is don't hate America, embrace America. Like, it's almost like I'd rather that we call it Americanism than libertarianism. I know that's not perfect, but I think that is where I'm at. I kind of did this. I think that anarcho capitalist wing of our tent revels a little bit in down with the State to such an extent that kind of becomes just another utopian sect. And I'm pretty anarcho sympathetic still, but I don't know, read a history book. America's still pretty great.
- [57:53]
Matt Kibbe
Right? Right.
- [57:54]
John Popola
I want like make America even greater. I'M for that. I want that.
- [57:58]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah. And by the way, that's a radical, almost counter revolutionary position given where zoomers have been growing up. And I think again, just to go back to the. I think there's. I'm proud to be an American vibe in the maga Maha. Yes, my team gets mad, but I think there's something called mafa Make America free again. Because there was an explicitly libertarian piece of the Trump puzzle this time.
- [58:34]
John Popola
I mean, I, I voted for Trump and I vocally supported him. I don't think he's perfect. I think there's plenty of trouble. But I. The choice to me was crystal clear. It's just like appointed statist with the worst voting record in history who's just like always lying to the, to Trump. Who's. They all lie, you know. But I mean, it's one of the things that's so interesting about the time we're in right now is you have this sort of crazy chaos where you've got Trump and Elon both tweeting every move they make. And I think the criticism that this has got oligarchic elements is completely legitimate. He's the richest man in the world and a military contractor, so that's weird. But I would rather my military contractor billionaires be actively tweeting and exposing every move they make to what has been the billionaire military contractors doing it all behind closed doors while the head of the CIA lies to the public and then the guy that exposes it is called a traitor.
- [59:43]
Matt Kibbe
Right.
- [59:43]
John Popola
Like that was that. That is what, that is what we're up against. Like, we're not up against enlightened elite diplomats who are refined and who are smooth with their words and they're very, you know, Pete Buttigieg types. No, they're just, that's just a mask.
- [60:04]
Matt Kibbe
All that's fake.
- [60:05]
John Popola
That's all fake.
- [60:06]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, I don't.
- [60:07]
John Popola
I would rather have like the. And maybe this is just the South Philly in me, but I would rather have, you know, I would rather have them scream and go F yourself on Twitter. They're being all genteel while they murder people all around the world.
- [60:21]
Matt Kibbe
I sort of love the fact that a sitting president will drop the F bomb in a press conference. So I don't. Did you ever see the Dave Chappelle bit that he did for Saturday Night Live? And he didn't do the bit that they had screened him to do, but he did a bit about Trump where he makes the case for why his neighbors in Ohio were supporting Trump and this was the first time, not the second time. And he calls him an honest liar. And I think it's such a profound way to understand why people are attracted to Trump because he just says it in this context of this bit. He's talking about the debate with Hillary where Hillary is using the typical talking points. You're just going to give your billionaire friends tax cuts. And Trump says in response, I know the system. I use the system. And I know that you will never change the system because all your friends use it too. That is a level of honesty that most Americans have not heard from a politician in a long time.
- [61:27]
John Popola
I think one of the things that is part of the distinctly American culture is, and you really hear this when you travel abroad, is that we are a cowboy country. Like, in some respects, this sort of the crazy crudeness of Trump is very American. Yeah, he's like, he's what the Europeans have always thought we were, even when it was. Even when we had the genteel president. You know, do I wish he was even better on, on, on philosophy, like Ronald Reagan? 100%. But I think the we don't we? You know, you dance with the one, you, you came with it, right? To some extent. It's like we have the choices we have. And I think there's something, there's also something really interesting about where we are right now, which is. So he comes into office in 2016 and it can be reasonably hand waved as a bizarre fluke because Hillary was a particularly corrupt and despicable candidate and yet she won the popular vote by a decent margin. So it's like, okay, this was weird. And he was the TV guy and he's in half of the rap songs of the past 30 years. This doesn't say anything about what's happening in our culture or our politics, really. And then he's out of office and we go through this sort of COVID woke communist revolution in the society, and now he comes back having won every county by larger margins than before. Like, not one county shifted to the left of 2020, as I understand it, that puts him in a very different, like, it's an almost unprecedented position for an American president to be in, including to have been in office for four years, seen the way that all works, and then have four years in the wilderness plotting right. And then come back and you like, look at the velocity. I don't know, it's exciting. Even, even in the areas where I'm like, do I want the US to take over the Gaza Strip and turn it into a hotel? Is that what we're supposed to. I'm pretty sure that's a bad idea. And yet there is still like a silver lining in that level of disruptive rhetoric. There still kind of is. I'm not like, I'm not pearl clutching on anything on this front.
- [64:06]
Matt Kibbe
There's a. I mean, there's, there's a, there's a method to his bluster and lunacy sometimes that I definitely didn't appreciate in 2015 when I was running a Rand Paul super PAC against him. I thought he would be.
- [64:20]
John Popola
Yeah, I didn't vote for him in 2016.
- [64:22]
Matt Kibbe
I thought he would be a dangerous. Particularly on foreign policy. I thought he would be dangerous. And it turns out that the bluster in practice was more about restraint.
- [64:34]
John Popola
It's funny because there is. He's not especially ideological, but he does have a pretty consistent position, some of it good, some of it not great. When it comes to international relations, I think he's not great on trade. He views it like some zero sum game where it's America the corporation negotiating with Japan the corporation, or China the corporation. That's not how trade works. Although the way he's used the bully pulpit of threatening tariffs does seem to at least get other national leaders to move on things.
- [65:08]
Matt Kibbe
So if he'd use it to reduce tariffs, that would be ideal in my world. I think his Achilles heel is if he actually creates a trade war, he will destroy his presidency because people are still hurting about not just the cost of eggs, which, which is more complicated than other inflationary food, but they know how much stuff costs in their cart. And if that keeps going up, this is how presidents lose.
- [65:38]
John Popola
I think that the powder keg of our time right now is probably what's happened to housing.
- [65:50]
Matt Kibbe
We are not out back to 2008.
- [65:52]
John Popola
It is. We're not out of the the woods by any stretch in the fallout of what was done during COVID Yeah, during the COVID lockdowns and then the subsequent trillions in stimulus and money printing and all of it. And I think that, that it's been interesting. I think one of the reasons why macroeconomic debates have gotten somewhat sidelined is because I don't even know what to make of the macroeconomics. I mean, the simple Austrian economic story, which is that low interest rates produce unsustainable booms and then those run up against the real constraints of the real economy and come crashing down as prices rise. As prices and interest rates rise. That's the Mises Hayek story of the boom, boom and bust cycle. It doesn't that's at least an incomplete story because you look at what's happening and it's not like clear, are we in some super turbo bubble that's going to pop? What does that even mean? You know, we've. The only recession we've had technically is like the one right at the COVID lockdown moment.
- [67:11]
Matt Kibbe
Right.
- [67:12]
John Popola
Is that because it's all just a big inflationary debt bomb? I don't know. It's really hard to know what the heck's going on. Inflation's managed to come down, it's still high, it's still not good. And I think the stats are wrong. But I think that's one of the reasons why the economic story has gotten muddy is because it's literally just gotten muddy and hard to understand for everybody.
- [67:35]
Matt Kibbe
I love that Javier Milei is viewed as a role model and an ally for the new Trump administration. And I think that's obviously the, and here's an irony. The Peronis never thought that a guy like Milei would get in charge of a very muscular executive branch so he can just fuera the shit out of things.
- [68:01]
John Popola
It's amazing.
- [68:01]
Matt Kibbe
He's the greatest. Yeah. Similarly, Trump has inherited a much muscular executive branch and we could all complain about the lack of restraint and the concentration of power, but even in the creation of Doge, he took a Obamacare era agency and didn't he just renamed it. It's the same mission, like, let's make sure that our computer systems and data integrity is a thing. And Elon's like, okay, hold my beer. I'm going to go in and systematically root out corruption. I don't think a single government bureaucrat has ever met someone like these 22 year olds that we're all demonizing now because they actually understand how this stuff works and they, they actually potentially know how to fix it. So you have that, you have that sort of. It should be a teachable moment for the left. But I think their lesson will just be, we got to get it back.
- [68:59]
John Popola
I mean, there's no indication that at least the Democratic Party has even remotely come to grips with the world we're in. And it's not like they're dead because, right, you know, the Republicans have slim majorities and only hold, you know, a slim majority of governorships and all of that. So it's like the future of politics is pretty up for grabs at all times in the U.S. but if you watch those clips from that DNC where they're like, how many of you think that this election was about racism and misogyny. And every one of them raised their hands. And you go on Twitter and it's like every reasonable left of center person, the Matt Iglesias types are just like, oh, we're totally fucked. Like, yes, you are, you are. It's a complete. It's the headwaters are poison on the left. Academia is poisoned by Satan. It is awful and it is like an entire pipeline of trash. So there's like that. They have a lot, they have a lot to do to become a viable, functional, non demonic force. Force in our politics again. It can't be. I saw somebody on Twitter say, you know, it repweeted President Trump signing the executive order to not let men and women's sports, which I am. For not having men and women's sports.
- [70:34]
Matt Kibbe
Such a radical position.
- [70:35]
John Popola
I know, I know, it's crazy. It's crazy. But as a father and as someone that lives in planet Earth where there's only two sexes because that goes down to the level of plants, I'm not, you know, you can do what you want as an adult. That's great. I don't care. I have friends. It's fine. Don't mess with our kids. A guy on Twitter posted like, as a Democrat, he's like, you know, as someone of the left, how did our side give this man this victory? I'm like, who are you talking about? Like, who on your side was gonna be signing that? This was your people's idea. Go out into the wilderness, confront your demons. Come back when you got some ideas that aren't completely crazy.
- [71:21]
Matt Kibbe
I think part of it, and this another reason to be kind of white pilled, is I don't think the left understands this radically decentralized, democratized world that technology has brought to us now, going back 20, 30 years. And, and on the one side, you have the Democrats who were running a puppet regime, like Biden clearly wasn't running anything. He couldn't even do the fake press conferences. And then they airdropped, they, they oust him. It's a coup.
- [71:59]
John Popola
Yeah.
- [72:00]
Matt Kibbe
And they replace him with someone who can't string sentences together. So she's obviously a puppet. And they thought that whatever you call it, the deep state, the administrative state, whoever was signing those executive orders, whoever was determining the direction of foreign policy in the White House, we don't even know who they are. We can speculate, but it wasn't the president versus. So you have this sort of. It's almost like a progressive wet dream. Right. Like we finally have the experts in charge and we're going to ignore the people and, and bring in, bring in the smart guys and we're going to reorganize things. We're going to centrally plan everything, even, even global relations.
- [72:43]
John Popola
Right. It's the Pete Buttigieg types. It's the. No, no, no. I, I'm articulate and I was a consultant at McKinsey when I was 26. So I can design all of society.
- [72:53]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah. Versus this radical disruption. And we talked about this a little bit last time we talked. And it doesn't start with the Tea Party. It certainly starts before that. It doesn't even start with Ron Paul that turned you on. I always go back to Howard Dean, who had about 48 hours of notoriety as a disrupting candidate with than Democratic Party, but it was driven by technology. His campaign manager famously wrote a book saying the revolution will not be televised. And fast forward to Ron Paul. Ron Paul, who is doing this as a cultural platform. And he's dropping names like Mises and Hayek and kids are like, what's that? I'm going to Google that.
- [73:42]
John Popola
Yeah, myself and clown.
- [73:44]
Matt Kibbe
And you know, he does money bombs, you may remember this. He does these massive money bombs empowered by decentralized media. And he's on Meet the Press or something. Probably not Meet the Press because they would probably have blacklisted him. But someone asked him, what are you going to do with all that money? I have no idea. Because it was unimaginable that Ron Paul could raise millions of dollars to run a campaign. He was using it as a cultural platform. Platform. The Ron Paul movement bleeds into the Tea Party movement. Fundamentally decentralized. The establishment cannot understand how it is. A million and a half people showed up in the Mall in the 912 March on Washington in 2009 as the organizer. I had no idea how they all showed up, except I knew that everyone was using primitive social media platforms to organize buses all over the country, including Alaska. It was the power of decentralization. Then comes Bernie and then comes Trump. These are in maybe different ways, it's all like populist movements. It's bottom up, it's empowering people. And this is a long diatribe, but I'll wrap it up here. As libertarians who maybe have read Hayek or at least understand the power of, of decentralization and cooperation. This is an unstoppable thing. If we can tap into it in a way. And the ham fisted way with which the censorship industrial complex was telling Bob that he can't tell that joke about Joe Biden we're not going to allow for it. That's like the, the gasping breaths of, of something that's dying.
- [75:26]
John Popola
It's. I think that that's all true. And yet the one piece of the puzzle that does give me pause in a way that is new to me because I'm very much like a Matt Ridley type of optimist, generally speaking, is there was this notion, right, of security through obscurity. So that decentralized group of bandits who are all getting together and texting each other to go to the 912 event that you organized and make their voices heard and get things done. I do think AI is going to pose really radically new challenges for this because the show me the man, I'll show you the crime. You could hide in trillions of data points before and, and it doesn't look like we'll be that. That's true moving forward. You can ask a fairly fuzzy question of it.
- [76:28]
Matt Kibbe
This is something that I'm a huge fan of. John Perry Barlow, and he was one of the lyricists for the Grateful Dead, but he was also the guy that wrote the Declaration of Internet Independence. And he was like a futurist optimist about technology who over time got more cynical about the Internet. And he always said that like, there's two things. Radical democratization, the right to know, liberating in ways that we could never conceive of. Insanely dangerous technologies that authoritarians can use to oppress us. The clash is always there. It's still there.
- [77:08]
John Popola
I mean, the radio was the same thing, right? The radio was this one to many broadcast platforms platform that turned out to be really useful for the likes of Hitler. And you know, it's.
- [77:21]
Matt Kibbe
It's always both.
- [77:22]
John Popola
It's always both. So it's a good warning that there's, you know, it's always a messy fight in this world. There's never permanent victory. We're always one generation away from freedom, being under threat.
- [77:38]
Matt Kibbe
So.
- [77:38]
John Popola
So it's a reason to stay vigilant.
- [77:41]
Matt Kibbe
Which is why we fight. So, other projects, what else are you guys cooking up these days?
- [77:47]
John Popola
Well, in a very related sense, we are working on a documentary film about what's happening with high school debate. Because that is one of the institutions. It's this sort of quiet institution that is actually incredibly important in our society. It's something like a third of the Congress and half of the Supreme Court participated in debate clubs in high school and college. And like with everything else in the education sector, it appears to have been radically transformed by this sort of Postmodern critical social justice philosophy. And so when the most politically engaged young people are trained to think in narrow terms, that make it so that we already know what the truth is. And it's all just about tactics, which is what critical social justice is. Now we already know the truth. It has been delivered from on high. Not from the high that I think is the high, but from some other high. That's not the same thing as critical thinking or open discourse or radical discourse. So it's very of the same kind of concern as our radical discourse project. And that's going to be coming out, you know, probably towards the end of the year.
- [79:02]
Matt Kibbe
And, you know, it's its own religion that is just fundamentally corrupting of understanding anything.
- [79:13]
John Popola
You know, the thing that is so sad, really, is it's exciting to try to understand, understand something new. And why would you be afraid to confront an argument that. That challenges the way you think it is? And afraid is correct, because that is a posture of fear. Yeah, that is. That and fear. You know, it's the same thing with sort of the climate alarmism. The argument goes, well, sure, maybe we're exaggerating, but that's the way you move people to action. And the truth is. No, it's not. People don't take positive actions when they're in a posture of fear, when they feel like they're backed into a corner, just like animals don't. They lash out, they turn inward. They become the worst versions of themselves. So again, I think, like, if you want to look at a theme of everything we do right now, at emergent order and at dad Saves America and radical discourse, it's. It is ultimately agency and growth. You have the power to make choices for yourself and you as an individual and the world in general is capable of growth and expansion and improvement. It is not a zero sum game. You won't lose anything by understanding other people's point of view. And if you're afraid they'll change your mind, what does that tell you about your beliefs? Yeah, like, that's a weird position. You're kind of admitting defeat the second you do that. The censors are by default. Are. Are by default admitting they're wrong. If I am censoring you, I'm admitting that I'm wrong and I have something to hide and I'm a fraudster.
- [80:57]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah. By the way, final plug for Ayn Rand, and she's. Her work is so predictive of many of our current predicaments. And one that I just realized is the hero in Anthem the book that turned me on when I was 13 years old. He lives in this conformist society where you're not allowed to say the word I. And as time goes on, he realizes how fundamentally corrupt that is and he starts to think for himself and, and he eventually gets canceled and has to flee this authoritarian state where he meets a hot chick and they go someplace cool. But yeah, that's the mind rot of wokeism is you can't think for yourself, you can't question the narrative and ultimately you can't say the word I.
- [81:54]
John Popola
No, you're only we. Yeah, you're only part of a group. You're only in the service of the cause. It's, it's, it's. I'll never escape the self defeating irony that it, that it's a raised fist. That this, this entire movement broadly from communism to wokeism to antifa. All of them, that's their logo, right? A fist?
- [82:19]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah.
- [82:20]
John Popola
That's gross. You're obviously the bad guys. Your logo's a fist. What do fists do? They mostly punch. They mostly hurt people. Like, you know, how about a handshake? That's a deal. I like handshakes.
- [82:35]
Matt Kibbe
Conform to the machine.
- [82:37]
John Popola
No, I will smash you with my fist. I will throw my fist in the air, in the street. It's like, okay, if that's. That's your flag, I am, I'm flying the opposite flag. Flag. I'm not flying that flag. I don't want to smash other people.
- [82:50]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, okay, so you're on Twitter X. I'm sorry, sorry. Elon. Saint Elon. And tell us where we can see your stuff.
- [83:02]
John Popola
Well, the best place. You'll find the best version of me@YouTube.com dadsavesamerica you'll find the more spicy and not maybe the best version of me on, at John Paul on X. And then the rap battles can all be found on YouTube at Radical Discourse. And all that stuff's also on X as well. So you can find it kind of everywhere.
- [83:24]
Matt Kibbe
So the first one's on the immigration rap is up.
- [83:29]
John Popola
It's up. It's out there in the world. And we've got a new one on climate change that's in the works. It's going to go into production next month and fingers crossed, if all goes well, it will launch on Earth Day. So that's what we're planning.
- [83:46]
Matt Kibbe
That's a good deadline.
- [83:47]
John Popola
It's a good deadline. It's a total trolling. Yeah, but you know, Al Gore versus Alex Epstein and you know, Bjorn Lomborg.
- [83:55]
Matt Kibbe
Does tipper show up?
- [83:57]
John Popola
No, we're saving that for the censorship. Yeah, for the censorship Rap battle.
- [84:02]
Matt Kibbe
That's. That's the one I want to see. Okay. This was fun. Thank you, John.
- [84:06]
John Popola
Thanks, Matt. Thanks for having me.
- [84:08]
Matt Kibbe
Thanks for watching. If you liked the conversation, make sure to like the video, subscribe, and also ring the bell for notifications. And if you want to know more about Free the people, go to freethepeople.org.