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Kibbe on Liberty
Ep 328 | When ‘Fringe’ Ideas Trump the Expert Class | Guest: Matt Kibbe
00:34:03
When ‘Fringe’ Ideas Trump the Expert Class
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- [00:00]
Matt Kibbe
Foreign welcome to Kibby at Liberty. Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. This week I'm going to go solo because I just slogged my way through The Douglas Murray vs. Dave Smith supposedly debate on Joe Rogan. I only made it a half an hour through. I shouldn't say I made it all the way through. I'll probably get to the rest of it. And we're not going to rehash the Douglas Murray Dave Smith debate one more time. But I don't know about you, if you've seen this, forgive me if I repeat it, but if you haven't seen it, I'll explain what the first half hour was. It was Douglas Murray scolding Joe Rogan and Dave Smith for having certain types of people, he couldn't name their names, he couldn't remember exactly who they were. He hadn't been bothered to actually work his way through their work, the people he's criticizing, but just dismiss them as unauthoritative people that didn't know what they were talking about, people on the fringe. And he kept using the word fringe. And it was fascinating to me because part of it was probably Douglas Murray's discomfort with the fact that a podcaster like Joe Rogan and Dave Smith for that matter, is in many ways multitudes more influential in the public discourse, in the conversation, in the where people get their ideas and how they're thinking about things and the subjects that we're discussing. So it felt to me like here's this self described intellectual who is frustrated that the intellectual debate is, is now more democratized and blatant appeals to authority no longer hold sway. But the first half hour of this was Douglas Murray just saying again and again and again that we need to police who is allowed to drive the conversation. He kept insisting he wasn't trying to censor people or prohibit certain people from expressing their opinions. But it was a weird form of credentialism, like this person is not qualified and they certainly don't know what they're talking about without ever really addressing the question of what that argument was and what was disqualifying about the arguments that these people that he could barely name and hadn't really studied their work, they were just wrong and it was completely off putting and it sent me down this rabbit hole because I, I think there's an interesting paradigm shift going on. And I talk about this quite a bit between the old top down authorities, the self ordained experts, the people with all the letters behind their name, the PhDs and the endowed chairs and all that stuff versus people that just have the audacity to pick up a book and read it and consume it and express their opinion about it, and then pick up other books and then go on podcasts, podcasts, and engage with people like Joe Rogan and Dave Smith in an open ended conversation trying to figure out what's going on in the world, how the world works, and whether or not ideas are good or questionable. And this, frankly, has nothing to do with what you think about Joe Rogan or what you think about Dave Smith. I happen to think that Dave Smith and Joe Rogan are, are well read, pretty intellectually curious and whip smart. And that, to me, I think, is the model that makes podcasters worth watching now. But there's another key piece to that. The magic in Rogan's success in a lot of ways is about intellectual humility and being willing to ask questions that you don't know the answer to, being willing to challenge people just with questions like, what do you mean by that? And it's so fundamentally different than the kind of media that I grew up on that were debates, not conversations. And the problem with a debate is in a debate your job is to score points. It's not to make points, it's not to engage your opponent, the person you're having the conversation with, in any way. It's to destroy the enemy so that you can, at the end of the debate, you can say, I crushed that guy. That's not intellectually interesting to me. And you can see in Douglas Murray's tactics, like, did he really not know the names of the people that he was criticizing? He probably did know their names, but for debate purposes, he didn't want to give them the credibility of actually saying their names out loud. Had he really not seen any of their work? Well, maybe that's true. Maybe, maybe he's guilty of his own accusations by not actually having done any homework on these ideas that he found so unsettling. But ultimately, debates don't really produce any common understanding, any at least agreement about what the disagreement is all about. And I think the power of Rogan and Dave Smith and a thousand other podcasters who are doing quite well, at least the good ones, is the fact that they respect their audience enough to not pretend that they know everything about everything. And this is an important paradigm shift. The one thing, amongst all the other things that keeps me white pilled about the future. And it's because I think for all of the censorship that I've talked about for years, the censorship industrial complex, particularly in the context of COVID But we learned while exposing the COVID cover up, that this censorship apparatus, the collusion between the government and big media platforms and university experts, that this was trying to censor everything that we thought out of desperation. And they're desperate because of this same dynamic, the same attitude, the same pretense that Douglas Murray was suggesting. And I should say I know very little about his work. I didn't really know much about him at all when I watched that. I've since learned that he's a neocon. And clearly that was probably the real argument that was supposed to have been had, but wasn't really in that first half hour that he didn't like the non interventionist inclinations of Dave Smith and a number of the guests that Joe Rogan has had on who are willing to criticize the military industrial complex and never ending wars. But that's not the point here. The point here is that there's this clash of paradigms between this radically decentralized world where people have the ability and the right, and I'm going to argue in a bit, the responsibility to figure out what's going on for themselves versus the people that want to dictate the terms of that conversation. They want to tell you what's true and false. They want to ensure that the official narrative about the next war, about where Covid came from, about just about everything. They want to dictate what you think is true. And they also want to prohibit you from certain questions, certain other ideas, certain other paradigms that they dismiss as fringe. And this word triggers me, fringe. Whenever the machine wants you to not think about an alternative narrative, they throw that word around. And we're going to get more into this as well. But we just had this beautiful celebration for my friend and now NIH director. Is this in? Screen? Okay. The fringe epidemiologist, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who has both a PhD in economics and epidemiology from Stanford University. You'll recall from the many conversations that we've had on this show that the phrase fringe epidemiologist actually comes from his predecessor at the nih, Francis Collins. And this was a way for Francis Collins in cahoots, in collusion with the censorship industrial complex, the government agencies that didn't want you to know that Covid came from a laboratory, the universities that were on the payroll and probably doing gain of function research. The head of the NIH wanted to make sure that this very credible source of an alternative opinion, not only on the source of COVID but more importantly how government lockdowns would be catastrophic for people. They wanted to make sure that you didn't even consider that opinion. So they called it fringe. And we've talked about this a lot. But this word fringe triggers me going all the way back and I'm thinking about some of the ideas that we talk about this show, specifically the Austrian economics ideas that animate a lot of Dave Smith's thinking, certainly animate a lot of my thinking, and in a lot of ways is a burgeoning source of an alternative way to think about economics, to think about how the world works and to think about humans can cooperate successfully in win win trades without anyone in authority telling them what they can or cannot do. And I just got back from Knoxville, Tennessee where this Free the People team just did this really cool series of video shoots with my friend Glenn Jacobs. You've seen him on show numerous towns times. He is the mayor of Knox County, Tennessee. He also happens to be this towering monster of a man who was a rock star wrestler in the WWE Kane. So we, we shot this video. Spoiler alert. I'm going to tease a little bit about this video series that's coming out quite soon. We actually shot in the wrestling ring where Kane had trained for years in preparation to be this just amazing athlete and performer inside the ring. And my introduction to the Jay Bhattacharya episode last week actually was shot in that ring. So you get a little peek on what we're doing. But the idea was not to talk to Cain about wrestling, but the idea was to talk to a professional wrestler about the principles and the ideas that turned him on to Austrian economics. And that seems like a contradiction. I don't think Douglas Murray is going to approve of talking to a wrestler about economics, but I think it's an essential thing to do because the one thing that we all have to do is arm ourselves with an intellectual tradition that allows us to better interpret the world. It allows us to interpret public policy. It teaches us what we can and cannot expect from government. And it's a way to think about the world that allows you to soar through the endless data and the arguments and the non sequiturs that professional debaters throw back at you and all of that. Thank you for joining me today on.
- [12:59]
Unknown
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.
- [13:29]
Matt Kibbe
When I was a kid studying economics, I was told that the Austrians were fringe. I've heard this my entire life. Because the professional economics profession, professional economics profession, that's sort of redundant. But the experts, they didn't like the fact that there was this alternate tradition that in many ways undermined their most important project. And their most important project was to reduce human action into a series of numbers and equations and treat people not as thinking, acting individuals, but as moves on a chessboard, as pawns, as cogs in a wheel, as simply numbers and some sort of macroeconomic aggregate fantasy. And the Austrians spent a lot of their time trying to dismantle the pretense of the macroeconomic way of thinking with the simple point that people act, aggregates don't act. And that has pretty profound implications when it comes to economics. But because they didn't ape the physical sciences, because they didn't use mathematics, because they didn't reduce human action to a series of quadratic equations and pretend that there was this thing called general equilibrium where everyone had perfect knowledge and there was no time and there was no choice and there was no ignorance, none of that makes sense if you actually are studying what people actually do in their real lives, which is an endless quest to figure out what to do next in a world of radical uncertainty. Now why does this matter to the economics profession? It, it matters because if you can reduce people to an equation, you can manipulate the outcomes of the math, you can train people or nudge them, as the kinder, gentler planners like to put it, you can nudge them in a certain direction and you can reorganize macroeconomic outcomes. And this of course, was the basis of Keynesian economics, but more fundamentally, it was the basis of any flavor of top down authoritarian. We're going to use force to make people do better things based on our particular belief and what those better things are. And the Austrians said, you can't do it, you can't do it because people are individualistic acting creatures. They act in their own self interest, they create plans, they have personal knowledge of time and place that can't be replaced with an equation or a plan. And they will find workarounds to your central plans and create unintended consequences, both positive and negative. And that critique was the thing that Hayek tried to explain when he was debating John Maynard Keynes. Keynes famously won that debate in large part because what Keynes was proposing, macroeconomic manipulation of the economy, was politically expedient. It was precisely what the politicians wanted to do because Keynes said that during a recession the government should spend more money. You can imagine politicians saying, you know what, hold my beer, I'm going to spend a lot of money. Now Keynes, to his credit, wanted them to spend less money during good times. And that part never really worked out. I feel like perhaps we've been living through that for quite some time. So I was talking to Glenn for this series and speculating out loud, like I this conversation was open ended in a very purposeful way. But the question came up, why is it that Austrian economics is so much more popular? Meaning accessible, meaning available to regular people, Meaning that God forbid, even a comedian can read books like Human Action and explain some of those principles on a podcast like Joe Rogan. Why is it so different? There is no grassroots movement for Keynesian economics because all of those equations, and by the way, those equations and the principles of Keynesianism got more esoteric every single generation. So if you pick up a professional journal today trying to understand the macroeconomics of, of stimulus spending, it won't make any sense to you, nor should it, because it's pure gibberish. So you don't see like there is no Ron Paul of Keynesian economics, there is no Keynes of Keynesian economics, and there has to be a reason for that. And I think it goes back to those core principles of what the Austrians were talking about, because they're talking about people acting and they're not using equations because equations are not appropriate for analyzing human action. They're using language, which is in fact how people communicate, how people choose, how people engage with each other, how people trade and how they exchange. It's fascinating to think about this and this is a project that Logan Albright's in studio with me right now and myself were working on a project called Austrian Economics and Popular Culture, which is going to be part of a series edited by my friend Peter Bettke, who is in fact an Austrian economist and a credentialed authority that I would stand up to the best of them.
- [20:08]
Unknown
If you've made it this far into the show, it means I must be doing something right. Kibion Liberty is just one of the amazing products we created Free 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.
- [20:45]
Matt Kibbe
We're trying to suss out, like, you know, who were these people that got to the point where someone like Cain or more recently, Renato Moicano. By the way, his nickname is Money Moicano, and I have suggested on Twitter recently that he should rename his name sound Money Moicano because he won this fight a while ago and immediately told people to start reading Ludwig von Mises and has continued to educate his audience on the tenets of the Austrian School of Economics, which I think is amazing. I don't think Douglas Murray is going to be happy about this because surely monimoikano is not qualified to do this. But there is this tradition that goes back, and I'm not going to get into the details here, because I think you want to wait until we actually finish this project. But it goes all the way back to Friedrich Hayek and his decision to publish the Road to Serfdom. Hayek, in many ways, is the most challenging Austrian to read, in part because of his native German writing. And, you know, it's fairly dense writing. But he. But he wrote a popular book that exceeded the expectations of the publisher time and time again. They had to keep going back to the printer to make more and more copies. He wrote the Road to Serfdom during World War II. And his point, which you've heard on this show a thousand times, is there is no fundamental difference between socialism and fascism. Both are appeals to government authority. Both presume that you can centrally plan an economy to various degrees, and both assume that the individual is subservient to the state at the time. He's trying to debunk this debate that for some reason, as the socialists claimed at the time, that fascism was sort of the last cry of late stage capitalism, a reaction to the glories that would be achieved once we transformed to true communism. And Hayek was warning people that that's not how it's going to work out. It's going to all boil down to pain and suffering and violence from the state. And that book became wildly popular, and it turned on an entire new generation. You had Ben Roge and Leonard Reed at the foundation for Economic Education that published the Freeman, which, again, were very short articles that were designed specifically to turn on regular folks to these really profound ideas. You had Henry Hazlett, who was. I'm sure the experts would not approve of this, but Henry Hazlett, a wildly successful journalist, did not finish college, but single handedly managed to introduce an American audience to people like Ludwig von Mises. Ludwig von Mises, because of Henry Hazlitt, was publishing in the Wall Street Journal and really turning on a broad lay audience to the ideas of the Austrian school. And of course Ayn Rand is where I learned about Ludwig von Mises. Henry Hazlitt introduced Ayn Rand to Ludwig von Mises, which is why she, in her nonfiction work that I eventually picked up, suggests that if you want to understand economics, you have to read the writings of Ludwig von Mises. I wouldn't have found him otherwise. Fast forward to my professor, Hans Senholz, who was a longtime professor at Grove City College. He was a professor for Peter Bettke, who I mentioned he was my professor. But amongst many other influences, including the Road to Serfdom, Hans Senholz is the guy that turned on Ron Paul to the ideas of the Austrian School. Ongoing conversations between Hans Sennholz and Ron Paul and of course Murray Rothbard is very much part of that mix as well. And fast forward to today. Tom Woods, Dave Smith, who I've mentioned a thousand times in this show, Javier Millet, who actually has pit bulls named after Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises. There's some, I'm sure the experts don't approve of that and of course, Mani Moicano. And I think the reason I bring all this up and I've probably given you guys some reading assignments by mentioning some of these guys, if you haven't been turned on to them already, is I want to pull this quote from John Maynard Keynes in the General Theory of Unemployment, this iconic work that he did that frankly ruined everything when it came to macroeconomics and is more than anything else responsible for the fact that our government today seems to be very comfortable spending trillions of dollars every year that we don't have, building up the debt, monetizing that through expanding the money supply and, and generally just destroying the money in your wallet. But this quote is worthy of consideration. And he says in the General Theory, the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Mad men in authority who hear voices in the air are distilling their frenzy. From some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Now, that last sentence I would quibble with, because I think what has happened in practice is that the vested interest that he speaks of this entire ecosystem in Washington, D.C. that feeds off the power of government, they have embraced exactly the ideas from exactly the wrong scribblers like John Maynard Keynes to intellectually justify their financially ruinous and enslaving ideas. But what Keynes is saying is that if we want to protect ourselves from bad intellectual ideas, we better know who those guys are. We better know who the good guys are, who the bad guys are. We better have the intellectual curiosity to sort of sort through what that is. And up until this generation where podcasters are allowed to have intellectual conversations, even though they don't have the right credentials, and maybe they're just asking questions as Douglas Murray kept scolding them for. We have a responsibility to understand the ideas that make the world work or the ideas that are driving America into a fiscal dumpster fire. We got to understand where they're coming from. And I don't think it ever makes sense, and it certainly doesn't make sense now to wait for the experts to figure it out for us. Those experts are precisely the people that John Maynard Keynes is warning you against. We have to figure it out for ourselves, and we have to push back against this counter revolution of ideas that says that we shouldn't do our own research. Remember that during COVID Don't do your own research. Rely on the experts. The science is settled. Well, we shouldn't watch Joe Rogan because Joe Rogan platforms the wrong types of intellectuals. Don't believe that. Pick up some books for yourself and be willing to have conversations. Because this Austrian tradition that I love so much, maybe you're not interested in that, but there's some aspects to it that can help guide you along your way. Specifically, a little bit of intellectual humility. The whole point of the science of economics is not that everything is settled, but that we're trying to figure out as best we can how humans will respond to exogenous events and the next crisis and the radical uncertainty, and how almost magically, it's not magic, it's human action, but how magically people, when left to their own devices, can sort things out, solve problems, and move forward. If we can understand that process, or at least have respect for the process of letting people to be free to figure stuff out, we can be armed with an alternative narrative to the experts that tell us basically to sit down and shut up. Two final thoughts, and I've talked about this Many times, the two points that I get from economics that allow me to think about the world when I'm confronted with a new idea, a new public policy, a new set of challenges, a new narrative that says we need to give power to the governments to solve global warming, fill in the blank. There's always going to be a crisis. There's two basic principles that I get from Austrian economics that help me sort through that, and they're just questions. I'm just asking questions. The first is, do we know enough? Do we know enough in a situation that is radically uncertain? And I asked this about the pandemic in March of 2020. If this is a novel virus, do we know enough to actually centrally plan our way around this? Because the answer is always no. Nobody has all the knowledge. The knowledge is the process of the market itself. The knowledge comes from people acting and reacting, their personal knowledge of time and place and sharing that knowledge with other people. Through that comes prices and other consequences of the market process. This was the fundamental point that Hayek used to criticize socialist planners. And the second question, which is not unique to Hayek, it goes all the way back to the classical liberals in the Scottish Enlightenment and even before that. The second question is, even if they did know the right thing to do, can you trust them with that much power? And that's the entire theme of the Road to Serfdom. It's certainly the entire theme of most of public choice economics. And if you can't say yes to both of those things, you have to start thinking about the unintended consequences of and the collateral damage done by giving government more power. And don't let the experts tell you that you don't have that responsibility. They want you to think that it's okay just to listen to them. That's precisely the wrong thing to do. All right, enough. Thank you and I will see you again next week.
- [33:24]
Unknown
Thanks for watching.
- [33:25]
Matt Kibbe
If you liked the conversation, make sure.
- [33:27]
Unknown
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