← The Tom Woods Show
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- [00:02]
A
Get ready to take a flamethrower to the official narrative and learn what the elites don't want you to know.
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B
You're listening to the Tom Woods Show.
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A
Hey, everybody, Tom woods here. It's episode 2771 of the Tom Woods Show. We have the great Daryl Cooper with us. You know him as Martyr Maid on X and host of the Martyr Maid podcast. Also co hosts with Scott Horton once a week, the Provoked Podcast, which I had the pleasure and honor of sitting in for you on one of those episodes not too long ago. And I asked him. Now, by the way, a lot of you know that Daryl is rather a controversial figure. And to my mind, that's unjust characterization. There's no reason that Daryl should be considered controversial. He just reads and he comments on what he reads. And if these things that he says are, are not part of the official establishment version of events, well, like, who cares? Like, why is that forbidden? These people lie to you 24 hours a day. They're probably also lying to you about the history. Their narratives are all wrong about the present. They're probably all wrong about the past. But I said to Daryl, okay, so you're kind of a lightning rod. I want to know how you came to be Daryl Cooper in the sense that I just, I'd like to know what some of your influences have been. And then it turned out that was like giving Murray Rothbard the assignment, write a short 300 word history of economic thought that turned into two giant volumes. And Darrel said, I, there's just no way I could fit that into one Tom woods show episode. So we've narrowed it down to one particular area of Darrel's brain. So why don't you describe that, what we're about to venture into.
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So when I first started making the list after you asked it, I mean, I started going through the books that really, like, formed my way of looking at everything. You know, I started with Decline of the west, which I was unfortunate enough. I mean, fortunate in my, in my view. But, you know, I read that book when I was like 17 or 18 years old, and I was obsessed with it for like my entire 20s. It's still a great book. Spangler's a great, you know, he's, he's a great thinker. But, you know, when you read something like that, or like I was 16 years old and I was in a bookstore and the guy behind the counter recommended this book that was about this thick by a woman named Ayn Rand. Maybe you've heard of her, called Atlas Shrugged. And so I read that when I was 16. When you read something like that, when you're 16, like, you know, with no guidance, especially like at that age, you have a tendency to just be like, well, this is my ideology now. This book is my ideology. Right. It's only later you start to be able to kind of critique that and pick and choose. But so it started to just become this massive, massive list. And I said we should just dial it down a little bit maybe to focus on just the general question of, you know, I've been criticized in the past for comments that I've made about democracy. You know, I know on a libertarian channel, a channel with a lot of libertarians watching, being critical of democracy is not necessarily a controversial stance to take. You probably even got some anarchists out there who are, you know, who are watching. So they're going to think I'm kind of normie on this. But I don't come at it from like, I don't critique democracy from another ideological standpoint. In other words, I'm not a libertarian who's critiquing democracy because of the ways it doesn't match up to the kind of society that I, that I would like to live in. I look at it much more as a historical phenomenon and ask myself in these books that we're going to talk about, you know, ask myself whether a democratic form of government or any form of government is suitable for all times and places, all cultures, all historical, social, technological, geographic circumstances, economic circumstances, et cetera. And the books that I listed, and probably some others I'll bring up, I think offer a good summary of why I don't think that that is true.
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All right, well, I want you to start with one of these. Now, of course, I have an instant objection to this, but I'm going to let you talk and then we'll.
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B
No, you're going to dig my hole deeper before you jump on me.
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A
Well, it's more that I've never been an imperialist as a libertarian. That is to say, I don't feel like it's my role to go fly over to Saudi Arabia and start handing out pocket constitutions. Like there were people in the D.C. beltway crowd who after the war in Iraq literally went to Baghdad and thought the thing I need to be doing is handing out pocket US Constitutions in a context that is so culturally alien to when the Constitution was drafted and that has different groups in it that hate each other, that absolutely they view politics as either self defense to make sure that the other group isn't lording it over them or as their own kind of imperialism where they lord it over others. That is the only way they are thinking. Unless you're going to add in John C. Calhoun's concurrent majority and expressly codify that in the Constitution, that document is precisely worthless to those people.
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In my opinion, Calhoun is actually a great one to bring up just because, you know, go back in the immediate aftermath of the John Brown raid and go hand out pocket constitutions to Americans in the north and South.
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Yeah.
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It was not sufficient for the crisis that they faced.
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Yeah, you know, exactly. It has. It's not addressing the issue that that's going on there. So. So I'm totally with. Like, I wouldn't say Jeff Dice has pointed this out quite a bit. It's not for me to go to Paris and say you guys need to change your gun laws. You know, if you live in Paris and you think that would be best for them, go ahead and do that. But this would not occur to me. This would be, I think, a ridiculous use of. Of your time. Be somebody who is situated somewhere, has roots somewhere, and connect your ideas to those roots instead of bringing some alien way of thinking all over the world for which the ground has not been even remotely clear. So I can follow you up to that point, but let me. Let you talk.
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B
Okay. You know, my favorite kind of libertarian thinkers, I mean, really just follow the sort of. I mean, I don't think it's a Catholic principle like in the sense that the church invented it, but it, as far as I know regarding governance, has adopted it. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but of just subsidiarity, you know, where if a local town wants to ban dancing, like in Flashdance or whatever, and that's what the community wants, like within broad sort of tolerances. Right. There are going to be certain things that maybe a higher level of the state is going to keep certain boundaries on the level of control that a lower level of government can exercise over its citizens, but that as long as they can move to the next town, I really don't care if they want to be puritanical or whatever. Like I've read libertarians who think like that. I don't think it was. Maybe it was. Is David Friedman Milton's son, anyway?
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Yeah, yeah, he is. And I. I don't know if he took that view in his.
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Yeah, I can't remember. It was one of the essays in Malice's book, the Anarchist Handbook. I can't remember which anarchist it was. He was Having the essay though, and he was saying, like, if a committee of Dearborn, Michigan wants Sharia law eventually, like, fine, as long as people can leave if they don't like it and move to Ann Arbor, then, you know, who am I at the state level government or the federal level government to tell them no. And so, you know, that maybe is like kind of an extreme case. Like, I don't know if most people would be willing to take it that far. But the spirit of that, like I agree with wholeheartedly, at least in a, in a mature society and mature governmental system like we have. Right.
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A
And I am certain that that is Hans Hoppe's view, that of course he would like to take it a step further. But I think his view is one step on the road to the society he wants is one in which political power is so broken up that you have as many units as possible and as long as you have the right of exit, that kind of keeps them in some kind of check.
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B
Yeah, and I mean, you hit on a really important point. It's the point that, you know, there's that famous little tidbit from BBC reporter was interviewing Lee Kuan Yew back in the day and was sort of gently chastising him for Singapore not being a parliamentary democracy like the great free land of Britain. And you know, he was just very frank. He said, look, if I imported your system to Singapore, what you would get is Chinese people voting for Chinese, Muslims voting for Muslims, Indians voting for Indians, etc, and nothing would work. And they'd be at each other's throats and demagogues would arise, pushing racial grievance and religious grievance, and it just wouldn't work. It doesn't suit. It's not suited to my society. And of course, the BBC reporter kept in character and just really almost seemingly couldn't understand what he was saying. How could you say that? Because democracy, parliamentary democracy to us, you know, is not something that in probably all societies do this to some degree, like when they're active is the governance form is really like a kind of religion. You know, it's something that democracy is. It's a sacred precept. And so the idea that people in Baghdad might not want it or might not be suited for it. This is just a crazy thing, is like saying people aren't suited for salvation. And if you look at it that way, then it is going to be incomprehensible when Lee Kuan Yu starts giving you his excuses for not importing your system to his, to his city. But if you step back, you know, one level or two, and just kind of look at it as one of many historical phenomenon that in many societies, like comes and goes, it sort of exists on a spectrum and sometimes you have much more sort of a participatory system, and other times, you know, not. And ask yourself, like, why is that? Is it purely because, you know, you have this reflexive process where, you know, power and resources are consolidated over time in a free society, and where people are more or less free to act in accordance with their own interests with very little constraint, and so wealth, privileges, all these things consolidate until so much is in the hands of a tiny minority that there's some kind of an uprising from the bottom, and they place their power in the hands of a Caesar to exercise for. Is it just sort of this social thing, or is it that along with that also that, you know, all kinds of circumstances change, technological circumstances change, you know, even governmental forms. Like take Papua New guinea, for example. It's like Papua New guinea is just, it's my favorite place in the world because it doesn't matter what you're talking about. There's a tribe there that'll give you a perfect illustration of whatever it is you want to talk about or what point you want to make, or if you want an exception to a point somebody else is trying to make. Papua New Guinea's got your back. If you go to an island, it's a crazy island with these really, really steep mountain ranges where you can literally be in a hundred percent humidity, one hundred degree weather at the base. And up at the top of the mountain, it's just covered with snow year round, and you'll freeze to death if you go out. I mean, and the whole place is very divided up into all of these sort of. Even their ecosystems are extremely separated from one another. You go one valley to the next, and there are organisms that live in one that don't live in any of the others, right? And so even to this day, Papua New Guinea's got something like one sixth of all of the world's still existing languages. This is just this one island in Indonesia. And it's because the geography of that land just never lent itself to any kind of political consolidation that would have allowed the emergence of what we would call a state. I mean, you have literally people who have very, very little contact or even knowledge of people who are two or three valleys over, let alone the entire island, right? And so it just didn't lend itself to the emergence of a consolidated state over the years. But now today, you know, technology has changed, and you can actually talk to people in every valley on the island, and you can fly from one place to another. There's all kinds of other things that might make that more possible than it's ever been in the past, like to, you know, to actually administer and govern it the way that a state would. And so, you know, as these things change over time, governmental forms, like, necessarily change with them, and where we run into trouble. I think, you know, there are two kinds of revolutions, if you look at history or. Well, maybe there's a thousand, but there's two in my mind. And, well, the two flavors of revolution, let's say one is that as circumstances have changed, the needs of the people, the demands of the people, et cetera, in a given society change. The mores of that society, change. The institutions which are naturally conservative, as all institutions are, they eventually grow more and more out of touch with where the society itself is actually at on the ground. And then a revolution takes place to bring those institutions up to date with where the society's at. Now, those very often go, all right, you know, you saw this in Eastern Europe, for example, the fall of the Soviet Union in a lot of these, like, revolutions, total overthrows of. Yeah, I mean, shoot. East German Stasi members are still collecting pensions in Germany. Like, that's an unbelievable, peaceful, like, overthrow of a government. Right? Especially an authoritarian one like that. And so you have that, because that's what was going on. This is where the people were, and you're simply bringing the institutions up to date with where the people are. The other kind is like the Bolshevik Revolution or the French Revolution, where you have this vanguard that has run way out ahead of the people, and they think that what they need to do is update the people. They need to bring the people up to date with the moral revelation that is fueling their revolution, and that leads to terror every time. Right? And so as circumstances, the underlying circumstances that sort of define what people need and want and how they live together in communities and families, you know, as those things change, eventually, like, you reach a point where the tension becomes so great that it makes sense to radically alter the institutions in order to meet completely different needs of a society. Right? And, you know, there's a sort of. I don't know if people would really cop to putting it this way in their own minds, but what I see with a lot of people, and even some libertarian types that I know, I don't know if they define themselves that way, but, like, is that they have a Sort of Fukuyama, end of history kind of view of the thing is they'll say, okay, yeah, yes, different institutions and different governance forms are suited to different circumstances. But you're progressing through stages to freedom, to liberty, to like this place. Right. And that's the goal. And it should be the goal for the Saudis, the Iranians, the Chinese, the Americans, everybody. That should be the goal. That's just not something that I really sympathize with. I. I just, I always think that the people who live in a given society are better suited to define, you know, what they need out of a system of organization for themselves than. Than I am from the outside. You know, I'm very hesitant to universalize like any of these things. So. Yeah. Okay, so let me give you a good example, actually. Unless you have a.
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Go ahead.
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Yeah, so one of the books that I listed, this great book by this Yale professor named Amy Chua, it's called World on Fire. It's very easy read and it's got a very, very simple thesis that. I mean, it's such a simple thesis. And the truth of it, like when she presents all the examples is so obvious. It's really amazing to you that this isn't just the sort of consensus establishment, you know, ideology on these things is that what she says is if you look at the history of the 20th century, the post colonial period, right in, in the third world and in Asia, you know, you had just tremendous bloodshed, destruction of all kinds like that took place throughout the 20th century. It really defined the second half of the 20th century. And her thesis is that we did two things at the same time that should not have been done at the same time. The first thing we did was liberalize the economy of a given place of a former colony, and at the same time we democratized its system of government. And so she gives as an example, and Chua has a very good insight into this particular phenomenon because, you know, she is Chinese American, obviously, but she grew up in the Philippines or. No, I don't know if she grew up there. I think she used to visit there a lot. She had a lot of family in the Philippines. And she's not Filipino, she's Chinese. And if you know anything about what they call the overseas Chinese, you know, it's these Chinese minorities in the Philippines, in Indonesia, in these various countries in Southeast Asia that had Malaysia also.
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Malaysia also
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in Singapore, actually, which, you know, obviously used to be part of the same thing, but who at the time of the move from colonialism to, you know, Sovereignty to independence. The Chinese, you know, these were still largely agrarian societies for the most part. Most people were still, you know, in the Philippines, for example, were. Were still subsistence farmers for the most part. Whatever commerce existed, and I mean, like almost completely whatever import, export existed, any of that, it was run by the Chinese. The Chinese had come there to do that. Like, that's why they had colonized that spot and created their own little colony in the place to begin with. So they were a very advanced, very successful commercial minority, which in earlier times, you know, they were better off than a subsistence peasant, obviously, you know, where you had, say, a king or a dictator and you had a lot of peasants. And the Chinese, they were better off. And there was some resentment and there was some kind of thing that you would always get when a people that is foreign to the majority population has such a vastly, like, higher standard of living materially than the majority population. But the dictator or the king or whoever, depending on the country, would protect them because they did a lot of things for him that nobody else could do. Right. He provided a lot of services to the state or to the regime. And so they got protection from any kind of pogroms or anything like that. That. Well, we came in and we said, we're going to do two things. We're going to liberalize the economy. Which meant that the Chinese minority, which used to be, you know, better off, they would do some import export, blah, blah, blah. Well, now they own all the airlines, they own all the banks, they own all the telegraph and telephone lines. They are fabulously wealthy. And all of the other people who, you know, might want to start moving up into the commercial class or moving in to compete with the Chinese, they're just completely unprepared to do that. You know, the Chinese are so far ahead of them in terms of their connections overseas, their access to capital, their know how just all of that kind of thing that just extremely difficult, almost impossible for one of the locals to sort of move up into the class the Chinese occupy and start moving into that ownership class. And so you would go to a place like the Philippines, and the Chinese, like every Chinese family, Chua says that you would see over there, they just got a whole host of Filipino servants, male servants, female servants. They're Filipinos out, you know, taking care of the yard, they take care of their kids, they cook their meals, they clean their houses, all these kind of things. There is no such thing as a Filipino person in the Philippines with a Chinese servant. It doesn't exist, you know. And so when you have a dynamic like that where this tiny minority of the population is so obviously and sort of ostentatiously now, because, you know, the amount of wealth after liberalization became so great that that starts creating a ton of resentment. Like the level of resentment starts, you know, really, really increasing. And so then the second thing, as I said that we would do is we pushed governmental democratization. And so at the same time that liberalization is creating massive, massive wealth disparities that are creating extreme racial resentments against a tiny minority population in a country, we then give all the political power to that resentful majority. And you start to see, I mean, you, you know, in the, in the 1960s in Indonesia, for example, the massacres of the Chinese there are infamous, but it's happened. You've had various pogroms and massacres of overseas Chinese throughout the second half of the 20th century, very often abetted by, or at least, you know, looked the other way from, by the governmental authorities which were put in place by, you know, the majority people in the country. And they don't have the king or the dictator whatever to protect them anymore. And obviously the, a closer to home version of this, you know, the overseas Chinese are often called the Jews of Asia. And you do have like a similar dynamic that took place in a lot of European countries with the Jews. You know, you saw this in Russia, for example, in the Russian empire, as they started to liberalize, the Jews were just, you know, they, you want to get into the money lending business, you want to practice law, you want to be import export guy or whatever. Yeah, well, you, you're gonna be competing with a guy who has been doing this for 10 generations. You know, it's very, it was very, very difficult to do. That's why you started to see in, in Russia, for example, you know, there, it was kind of like this in the US Too. You know, everybody looks back on like quotas at universities of how many Jews could go to a given university. It's like this great evil. And I'm not defending it, you know, just as I don't defend the quotas with Asians formally or informally today. But I do recognize that they were trying to deal with an actual issue. Like the issue that they were trying to deal with was if we just take our hands completely off steering wheel, let whatever happens happen, this university is going to be 95% Jews. And the other people are going to get angry about that. You know, they're going to get upset about it and like, then we're going to have to Deal with that problem. And so you have like, for example, in the United States, I mean, you had like our version of that was, you know, when Harvard put their quota on Jewish admissions back in the 20s, people think, I think they maybe, maybe just assume that that meant that, you know, only 10 Jews are allowed in or something. The cap was like 30% of the student population. It was like, you can't go higher than that. And it would have been higher because, you know, they were just more advanced than your average kid coming in from the countryside applying for school. And so, you know, you get what you had in like City College in New York, for example, which was actually 85, 90% Jewish for decades. And you know, not that it's bad to have a Jewish university or an oversee, like a Chinese unit, whatever it is. It's just that the other people whose kids are not getting into that university are going to start to get upset and then that becomes a political problem you have to deal with. Right. And so these are like real issues that should force us to ask the question, you know, in this post colonial state, given its total lack of collective national identity, you know, just it's a tribal society basically still, or a clan based society maybe in most of the country. It's huge, huge disconnect between the urban and rural population. The fact that the overwhelming amount of national wealth is controlled by this ethnic minority that is one and a half percent of the population. Is democracy the best thing for this society right now? And I mean, it's very clear to me that in that case, absolutely not, that's not what you want to do. If the society works towards that under a. Well, like, for example, like we wouldn't have democracies today, in my opinion, or nation states for that matter, if we had not gone through the period of absolutist kingship in Europe. You know, it was that the era of the absolute kings that really consolidated a lot of these societies into recognizable units. It's why Machiavelli wrote the prince, right, he's looking at like Spain and he's looking at France and he's recognizing that they're forming up societies at a scale that has never been done at least since, you know, the Roman Empire fell and that, you know, the Italian city states, they might feel great now, but Venice and Florence, they're not going to be able to compete with the Spanish Empire and the French Empire. These things continue to grow. And so they needed a sovereign who was going to bring together the Italian peninsula into it and consolidate it into a Nation. And, you know, it's, well, I'll let you get in because I'll just change the subject again and keep going.
- [24:59]
A
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B
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that you need much more. Well, I. Okay, I'll actually, I'll put it this way. It depends on what you're trying to do. Right. If you look at Switzerland, for example, Switzerland is not trying to be a great power. You know, they have a system where power is delegated to the lowest possible level to an extreme degree that, you know, I find very admirable. Like, I think it's. I think it's great. Amazing what they've made work there. That would not work if they were trying to. If they were in a situation where they were constantly under threat by great powers, for example, and they really needed to beef up and defend themselves and. And really be able to compete, like, on that level. If your geopolitical circumstances and everything else, you're not your. Your sort of the ambitions of your people are that we really just want to be with our Families and our communities, and we just don't want to get taken over. And, you know, we just basically want to be here and have our society. Then, you know, you. You could maybe get away with a system that delegates things to the lowest possible level, and that would diffuse maybe some of those concerns. I don't think it's going to diffuse the political problem of having the 98.5% of impoverished Filipinos looking at the one and a half percent Chinese minority that owns everything in the country and not have that become, you know, a real problem. Like, you have to look at that and say, I mean, look, think of like an extreme example like IDI Amin, right, in Uganda, where he just threw all the Indians out of the country. And a first question when you hear that is, what were a bunch of Indians doing in Uganda? The British brought them there because it was a British colony. And the British would very often bring Indians into their colonies because they were, you know, often urban, literate people that could be good administrators. They would serve as, you know, a commercial minority that took care of a lot of these things in a colony that the local population, which was all agrarian or tribal, was not capable of. Well, you get up to, like, the 1970s when Idi Amin's there and Indians still run the economy in Uganda. And so his solution to that was he threw them all out, which not a great solution. It was very violent. And, you know, and obviously, like, I mean, he was a psychopath, but, like, you know, that's the solution. You have to confront the question of, though, what's the other solution? Is it that, you know, they got there first? And so this ethnic minority in this African country, tiny, tiny minority that was brought there by the colonizers we just drove out, that they're just going to own everything forever. And that's kind of. We just need to be happy that they're doing that, performing that service for us. Okay? I mean, if you do have a system where politicians are elected by popular acclaim, I mean, it's just absolutely inevitable that politicians are going to use that to demagogue and as a flashpoint, to rally people to their, you know, to their side and just really fan the flames of that resentment. It's just. It's inevitable. And so then, you know, you get to the next layer of that analysis, I guess, and you say, well, then, I guess the people leading the country, the people in charge of the government, shouldn't be elected. Well, then what are you talking about? You're talking about some form of dictatorship or monarchy or Something where you have a centralized system that's going to keep order before all else. You know, there are some societies like I would argue the United states in the 19th century, right? It was a country that was capable of self governance at a family, community and state level, local and state level. So that, you know, if the federal government had disappeared completely, there's certain problems that would have to be solved and maybe we would have gotten conquered by Napoleon, you know, or something. But in terms of just running the society, we were probably capable of doing it for the most part without a federal government. In other societies where, you know, you don't have any kind of local institutions that are maybe even not even named, you know, but informal, informal local institutions at a smaller scale level that can make the people really capable of self governance. Not just freedom, not just liberty, but you know, self governance because that's the, really the necessary precondition for a functional liberty to exist, then if you, if you don't have those things or if you have a situation where, as you pointed out, the resentments are so great and so historically entrenched that violence or oppression of one kind or another is very probable the minute you make everything subject to a vote. I mean, this is, you know, I'm the last guy in the world to defend Israel, as I think most people know by now. But you know, look, they're not wrong when they say that if they do a one state solution and they grant voting rights and citizenship to Gaza and the west bank, that their lives are going to, the, the lives of, of Jews in Israel are likely to radically change in ways that they are absolutely not going to like in ways that would probably do damage to the Jewish state in a way that would make it non viable, like that's probably what would happen. I mean, Israeli politicians have actually talked about this for a long time. They talk about a little less now, but for a long time they pointed out that the demographic trends pointed toward, even if they continued to exclude the Palestinians outside of Israel, that the birth rate differential was so great that the Palestinians were eventually going to start moving closer and closer to a majority. And if they get to that point, well then they're going to have to choose between being a Jewish state and being a democracy. And I think that, and I won't, you know, I won't comment on whether an ethno state like that is a good or bad thing. Personally, I'm pretty neutral on the idea. I think, you know, one form of organizing your society is as good as another. If people like it, and it works. But you know, I don't have any like hardened, like moral problem with, with the idea of a Jewish state or any, you know, ethnostate, if that's what people want and if they treat, you know, the minorities that are in their midst with dignity. But it's good at least that they confront that very real problem rather than simply deny it. Right. Which we are kind of, this is where we're kind of at now is we're in that place that Lee Kuan you described where this group votes for that group and this group votes for that group and you're continuing to politically Balkanize, but we're just sort of pretending that that's not happening or it's just that it's not really a problem that the system can't handle. And I have my doubts about that. I mean we're going to find out, I suppose.
- [33:08]
A
Well, this problem that you're describing exists along a continuum. I mean every society has it to some degree. They don't all have the 98.5% of the population is dominated economically by 1.5%. But unfortunately human nature is, I'm sorry to say it's pretty bad. I mean at this point I can't entertain enlightenment optimism about it anymore. It's pretty bad. There are so many people who believe outright falsehoods about people they dislike, people who have more than they have that it is easy to become a demagogue on anything. You know, I, I hear libertarians saying, when they hear progressives arguing about rich people or this or that, I hear naive libertarians trying to explain to them what you don't like is crony capitalism. It's not capitalism that you don't like, it's crony capitalism. And I want to say to them, no, it's capitalism that they don't like. These are not people who are making careful distinctions between, well, this man became wealthy by offering useful goods and services. We won't expropriate him. That thought never enters their minds, you know, so don't act as if they do think that way. So in other words, you can find grounds to drum up envy based campaigns even without the deeply entrenched ethnic divisions. So the ethnic divisions only add more fuel to the fire. But it seems like, like in the US as you say, and I was just mentioning in an earlier episode this week in the UK they've, they just, I just saw some data released on trial by jury and how likely was a non white juror to convict a white defendant? And then they did all the combinations. A non white juror to convict a non white offender and then a white juror. And it's a 3x difference between a non white and a white juror finding the white defendant guilty or not. And then the way they treat the non white, that's not Malaysia with the tiny Chinese minority, that's not the Philippines. But that's a very, very deep divide. So it looks now as if, if we follow this argument to its logical conclusion, democracy just leads to conflict, avoidable conflict everywhere. Because being a demagogue pays and there are so many juicy targets.
- [35:26]
B
Yeah, so you're right, no doubt. You know, ancient Athens had its demagogues, you know, obviously, uh, given the, given the etymology there. But. And that was obviously a homogenous society. And so that's definitely true and that's definitely possible. But when you have a society where, you know, the divisions are rooted in something that is more permanent like ethnicity or religion, some kind of thing that's going to be the same today as it is tomorrow, then the stakes are raised, I suppose, you know, instead of getting demagogue politicians like you start seeing the early rumblings of civil war, you know, so yeah, I guess, I mean you're certainly right that democracy, I mean it does look, these things are balanced, right? Like have you ever been to Singapore? Singapore is. Oh dude, it's amazing. I mean you go there and you could eat steak off of the main boulevard there and it just, it's so clean. You could, you know, have your 18 year old daughter make a cash delivery to somebody at 2:00am in the morning, holding it over her head, walking through the worst part of town and she'd be fine. It's amazing like that they run a city as efficiently as they do speeding tickets at least when I was there last time were like three or four thousand dollars a fine. Right. We all know about the case back in the 1990s where that diplomat's kid did some vandalism and he got caned. They beat him, you know, with a big cane. They hang drug dealers. And so I mean these are things that, you know, a lot of Americans would say, wow, it's a great place. And when you talk to the people there, they would not have it any other way. For them, the order and the cleanliness and the safety and all that is worth having the city run like a corporation. A lot of Americans would say, yeah, you know what, I kind of admire it, it's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to. That's not How I want my country to be run or my city to be run, be run. I'm willing to accept the fact that there's going to be, you know, a little bit more to deal with at the street level in order to not have a governmental system that's that unaccountable. Or I, I wouldn't call Singapore's unaccountable, but you know what I mean.
- [37:36]
A
Yeah.
- [37:36]
B
And so the mistake maybe comes in is when people say, yeah, so that's true and we need to maximize in the other direction, you know, until you're stepping over crackheads when you're trying to take your daughter to a bookstore or something, you know, although, you know, it's very interesting actually because that's happening and nobody could, you know, even remotely make the argument that that's due to a lack of state power in the United States. So that's probably a different issue there.
- [38:03]
A
Right, right, right, indeed. Well, but then how do you, of course you're going to be accused if you take a view like this, that look, this works for Singapore and this is what they want, so, you know, why don't we let them have it? How is that not quote unquote, relativism, that there's no universal moral standard here that these various political arrangements need to comply with, so it's just whatever the local people want. That would be characterized by some people as so called relativism.
- [38:29]
B
No. Yeah, so I don't think it's relativism. I think it is taking things that they believe are moral absolutes and replacing them with other ones. Being able to go to the polls every so often and cast your vote for this or that person to, you know, occupy the, the chair of a government position, that's not some moral precept to me. I mean, you know, the question here is do the people feel represented by their government? You know, there are many ways that that could be achieved. You know, so for example, I take like the idealistic version of like the Soviet system, right. And I don't mean Lenin, Soviet Union, I mean sort of in the. More in the German revolution after the First World War, they called them councils, not Soviets. So like the general theory, right? And the general theory is that you have like a factory here, a military unit there, a church here, whatever it is that no, none of the Soviets really like churches for different reasons, but like you could theoretically include them as well. All of these different column interest groups even really just, you know, something deeper than that, a more stubborn sort of identity and you know, they're going to elect people up to a level that is going to say, for example, run their factory. And then all of the factories in that industry are going to send delegates to a next level council that is going to elect people and you know, eventually, and they'll coordinate the industry, but then that industry is going to be represented in the central government. Right. And that the government is the collection of these elect, elected or however you want to do it. They don't, you know, wouldn't necessarily have to do it that way, I guess, but, you know, where people don't go to the polls at all, except maybe in their labor union or at their factory or something like that to send their delegate up to the next level. And that all of the people and all of the different groups, the churches, the different industries, all these things are represented at the governmental table, but nobody is actually elected. And when, when that government makes the decisions, those decisions are, are final and not subject to democratic rule. Now if, if that were to function properly, it doesn't, it hasn't, and I don't think it probably can. There's a reason they all went the way that they did. But if it functioned the way that they envisioned it, you know, you could say that that is a representative government, even though nobody votes for the people who are occupying government offices or something. So the question is whether people feel represented, whether people are oppressed, especially if they're oppressed by some unchosen identity marker, persistent unchosen identity marker like race or religion, something like that. Those are moral problems, you know, those are problems that, that we can agree are moral universals. And I think it's, you know, so the question then is if those things are the moral universals, then you really have to look at a system of government as not a sacred thing, but just a tool to achieve, you know, the things that are actually morally important.
- [41:33]
A
Naturally, a libertarian looks at this and thinks on some level we might in the abstract want to approach a society in which we are able to get along. And now I just said I've, I've lost faith in the Enlightenment, confidence in man. But hang on where we can get along on the basis of mutual recognition of, you know, the interests that we all have in common. And those interests that we have in common include having a peaceful, prosperous society with an extensive division of labor and with the protection of private property. And that we can come to recognize these things and see in each other not rivals, but people whose work and contributions can improve our own lives. And, and so ideally we'd like to Have a society in which coercion is as unnecessary as possible, except against the truly perverse who need to, you know, be imprisoned or something. But in general it would be best to have a society that had as little official coercion as possible. With the reasoning being, number one, that in principle it is immoral to use physical aggression against a peaceful person. And secondly, that as a matter of empirical fact, since the French Revolution in particular, the kinds of people who tend, not always, but who tend to wind up in power in the various regimes of the world are, shall we say, manifestly unworthy of that power, tend to be sick and deranged in some way. And no matter what promises they make to us, generally we'd be better off if we could. If it were possible to have a society that didn't need them at all, we should prefer that society rather than having one where every four years we have like a low intensity civil war trying to decide whose side is going to get the loot and the graft and whose side is going to vanquish the other side. If, if it were possible not to have to choose, if it were possible to have a pure market society, and that's the big if, maybe there it's not possible to have a society like that. Shouldn't this be the simple moral ideal that is held up everywhere?
- [43:42]
B
Yeah, maybe, but isn't it really, I mean, isn't the thing you're the danger you're describing not really government so much as it is centralized power in general? And are governments the only thing that can wield centralized power? I mean, because I don't think so. I mean, I think that in a market society it's entirely possible that like a cartel of, of, of commercial and industrial interests could just essentially become the state, even if they, you know, there's no actual state that is empowering them to do so? I mean, look, when you went back to I, a lot of Republicans get on my case because I, I always defend Teddy Roosevelt when they go after him for his, you know, anti monopoly stuff, antitrust busting stuff and everything. And I say, look, I'm not going to defend every policy of Teddy Roosevelt for sure, but take into account like the transformations that were taking place like leading up to his time in office and the problems that he was trying to deal with. I mean, he was looking at a situation where, you know, all of a sudden you had private business owners with more revenue than the federal government. And in fact, since they, you know, say oil companies, company like United Fruit or something, I don't think they were around during his time, but, you know, had interests in places that are often very far away in Indian country or, you know, overseas, in places that are where security is a problem. They very often controlled more soldiers than the US Federal government. And so he's looking at this and he's saying, wait, no, we're not, we're not going to have that. Like, we're not going to have it. So that Rockefeller has more revenue and more soldiers than the US Federal government. That can't happen. And now again, all of his policies. I wouldn't defend all of his policies, but that's a real problem that he was trying to deal with and one that had never existed really before in the history of man. You know, where you had these, these private actors that were so vast in scale that they were, I mean, shoot like Elon Musk. Actually, the thought experiment I like to use, right, is let's say that somebody invents a new kind of Bitcoin, that it solves all the problems that exist with the current thing, from types of transactions to security to just everything. It solves all the problems. It's the perfect one. Somebody invents it and, you know, this isn't something you can take to an IPO or whatever. And so he did what, you know, the Satoshi guy supposedly did. He just. Half of it he kept for himself, which is nothing at first. It's not worth anything. But it catches on, it goes global and he's worth $500 trillion now or whatever, $100 trillion. You would have to bring that guy in and sit him down and be like, look, you could say, we're not going to take all your money from you. We're not going to. But you have to understand that you're a political actor now and we're going to have to deal with you and you're going to have to deal with us like on that level. Because when you get to a certain level, yet again, that's an extreme, extreme case. But, you know, at a certain scale, private interests can become political actors, even if they're not functionally like part of the state. I mean, and so, you know, I think that centralized power of any kind is dangerous. And I think that when you have a state that's too weak, depending on the circumstances at a given time and place, other centralized actors, centralized centers of power, other centers of power that will not necessarily have any more interest in the rights or the desires of the people than a state would, will take their place. And that's not always true everywhere. Again, I don't think that is true in the United states in the 19th century. Although, you know, that's not true everywhere because you go, like, if you were to go out west, you know, you have a lot of these sort of old west stories that are based on this tyrannical rancher that runs a whole valley and sort of makes everybody, you know, because he's got a lot of shooters, a lot of gunmen that work for him. I mean, that, that kind of thing did exist out there as well. But, you know, I think that. And again, I, I don't want to infantilize libertarians. Most of my good friends and political allies are libertarians. And so, and like, I, I'm like, you said, like, can't remember if you said this before or after we started, but I look at libertarianism sometimes and I'm like, ugh, man, this is ridiculous. And then I start looking around at everything else and I'm like, yeah, but. And so I, that's where I'm at. And I totally get that. But I think there's a tendency, and again, not everybody, and this probably takes, even for the people it applies to, it goes too far, but is they have this sense that this, like, the issue of freedom is like a problem that can be solved in the same way that communists had the idea that scarcity was a problem that could be solved. It's like, this is. These things are conditions of human social life. You know, they're not problems that have a solution. They're things that you negotiate over time. And sometimes there's give and take. You go in one direction or another based on the circumstances. And there are times, I think, again, like, you know, a lot of these, not that they were libertarian societies, but when a lot of those post colonial societies democratized, where the oppression got way worse than it had ever been under the prevailing monarchy or the colonial authorities once they democratized. And, you know, that to me, is the real danger. Not that people don't get to vote. The problem is, you know, how people are actually living and do they feel secure in their daily lives and, and can they go about their, you know, their family life and community life?
- [49:07]
A
And because democracy is assumed to be the ideal system, it's almost like it's hard for them to explain what's going wrong because, well, what don't you have? Isn't it the end of history? You have the final political setup that we all agree is optimal. It's like we don't even have the vocabulary to explain what's going wrong here because it's.
- [49:26]
B
I mean, here's like, think about it like this. I remember this was years ago, too. I was listening to an old Radio Lab episode. This was probably like 2002, 10 or something, right? So things have developed infinitely further since then. And what they were talking about was there was somebody talking who. He was at a. It wasn't a meeting. It was like a conference or something given for companies that advertise with Facebook, right? And Facebook was explaining, like, their capabilities and they were going through, like, all of these things that they could do. And they. And one of the things that the presenter said, he's like, okay, so like, here's an example, real world example of an experiment we ran. We've all heard of, like AB testing, right? Does a red button or a blue button get more people to click on it? He's like, well, you know, in the past you had things like focus groups, right, where you would bring people in and say, the effectiveness of this advertisement is based on these 12 people that I pulled into a room at the mall to watch it and tell me, well, now we can run that same focus group, except there's 10 million people participating. And so when we tell you that if we make the button this much bigger and a slightly different shade of red, we get 3.2% more engagement on that button. We mean it and we know it. Like, it's. This is a. This is a mathematical fact. You're talking about a massive scale, the law of large numbers here. And the guy said, you know, the. The guy said, he raised his hand and he asked, like, how, you know, how do you know if you've ever been a part of one of these experiments? And the guy said, do you use Facebook? He said, yeah, you've been a part of 10,000 of these experiments. They're running all the time. Like, just. And we're collecting this data and getting more and more and more efficient at figuring out, like, what, you know, the things to do to maximize engagement are. And so if you take that same principle and you, like, look at the modern democratic, mass democratic system under the sort of conditions that exist with mass media and the Internet, and you say, if a private actor like Facebook can do that, can they get 3.2% more people to vote for this candidate or that candidate in a way that is completely above board in terms of the law and all, probably they probably could. I mean, there's a reason that the Democrats were, you know, so hot on getting all the social media companies on their side. In the 2020 election is they, they understood that. And so, you know, if people are as susceptible, at least in large numbers, again, you know, the individual in large groups are different conversations. But in large numbers, we can predictably say that people will behave, they'll tend to behave on average in a certain way that, you know, your ability to manipulate those processes in ways that again, are not necessarily even coercive. Nobody's being coerced by Facebook. And yet, like, if left totally unchecked, I mean, put it this way, like, it's plausible to me that if all of the social media companies, their CEOs and their boards all got together and they had a meeting and they weren't sort of, they were very open about it, we're going to ensure that this election goes the way that we want it to go, that, you know, they would have a very good chance of being able to do something like that. And we'd only be saved by the fact probably that Americans, and this is our saving grace that I'll always hang my hat on, is that, you know, this is hard to do with Americans because we have a natural distrust to these kind of things. And once we find out that you're doing it to us, we just, we tend not to like it. And so attempts to centralize like that generally have a Tower of Babel ending on some level, you know, and I think that's a virtue of our people. But I think that the, you know. Well, that not all people have the same virtues as Americans, for sure, you know, and. Well, like, I, I definitely agree with what you said, that if that were possible, the scenario you outlined, if it were possible to not need these people at all, that would be ideal, no doubt. I, I agree with that. But you know, especially in a society today, right, where we're so disorganized at the street level, the community level, even the family level, people don't live anywhere near their family members anymore. They don't know the names of their neighbor in, in most cities. And you say, like, if there was, like, if you lived in South LA and the government just disappeared, well, guess what, the Crips are your government now or the Bloods are your government, depending on which block you live on. You know, because you're just not organized enough to be able to deal with a dozen guys with guns who are all acting in a coordinated manner. You just don't have any, like, local level organization that can deal with something like that because you don't know the name of your neighbor. And so a society where people don't know their neighbor's names, they don't live anywhere near their families, they don't have, we don't have a sort of social structure anymore where you have churches, you have extended families and so forth that sort of act as social welfare buffers, you know, for people when they fall down. We're so individuated and disorganized that it's highly questionable whether we can do without things that a society that was much better organized at like the community level and the family level will be able to get away. You know, it's the example people often bring up today that if we had like a real deal Great Depression, like the old school Great Depression today, I think most people agree it would not go as smoothly as it went the first time around. And it wasn't all that smooth the first time around. Like there would be social chaos on an extraordinary level because there's no church that's going to leave a basket of food on your door this time because you haven't been to church in 25 years and you know, they don't know who you are and churches don't really do that anymore a lot of the time. And so like, and you're, you know, your kids live in Ohio and you live in California and you don't know your neighbor's name and so all of a sudden you can't put food on your table, literally, and you can't pay your rent. And that's happening at a mass scale. That's going to be a different kind of problem than one in which people you know, still lived in parish neighborhoods or you know, lived in rural communities where everybody knew everybody. Very different problem to deal with everybody.
- [55:36]
A
Tom woods here with a quick tip for small business owners. If your business isn't showing up online, your competitors are getting the leads and you're missing out. That's where persist SEO comes in. For over 15 years, they've been helping local businesses grow through SEO, paid ads and the latest in AI powered search optimization so you stay visible and competitive in the digital age. Whether you're in home services, legal or healthcare. Persist SEO delivers real results without locking you into long term contracts or overwhelming you with tech jargon. Visit Ineedseo Help or call 770-580-3736 to schedule your free consultation. That's Ineedseo Help. Easy to remember, powerful for your small business. Yeah, and of course centralization is going to happen more readily when all these other lesser associations, smaller associations, have dissolved because then it Fills the gap. Well, look, we, we have Chuck Schumer here with his new bill that he just passed and he's going to take care of X, Y and Z. But there's something sick and unhealthy about a society that needs, or thinks it needs, Chuck Schumer's bill instead of, you know, having children who take care of you, you know, or obvious human things.
- [56:55]
B
The answer to that from any right thinking libertarian or even conservative or really anybody, period, who takes an honest look at things is going to be, well, yeah, but you put in those bureaucratic replacements for those things that evaporated and all that does is make sure that whatever vestiges of those institutions used to be are still left, that they're wiped out and that they cannot be rebuilt. And so now you're eternally dependent on that. And so the only way we're ever going to get back to having people that are, you know, integrated into communities and families actually take care of each other and so forth anymore is we have to just take the hard, bitter pill and pull those supports out. And I'm sympathetic to that idea. I think that's true. I think we got to be very careful about how we would ever do anything like that, for sure. I mean, it's not something you would want to go cold turkey on, I think.
- [57:47]
A
Yeah, well, it's, you know, Ron Paul kept trying to say, look, this is probably going to have to happen someday, so why don't we start thinking about it like adults now rather than when a genuine crisis comes along but nobody wants to think about it? Like, it doesn't sound fun.
- [58:04]
B
Malice likes to talk about. I can't remember if he originated this or if he is just referring to somebody else, but he said, you know, you're a libertarian or not or an anarchist or not, based on here's a button. You push that button and all governments will go away. Would you push the button? And if you wouldn't, then you're not one of us. And he says he would. And it's like, dude, you're talking about billions of people being killed. I mean, you're talking about like a level of starvation and destruction and deprivation that is absolutely unimaginable. And maybe on the other end of that, something would emerge that, you know, is better than what we have now. But, man, that is kind of a Soviet way of thinking, you know, that whatever chaos sort of comes is worth it because we're going to come to this better place on the other side of it, theoretically. And, you know, the. Of Course, the problem is people respond to disorder by empowering centralized forces. Right. There's a reason that the French Revolution turned to Napoleon very quickly. There's a reason that all of the chaos that was taking place in the late Roman Republic led to Caesar and people were very pleased with that outcome. You know, and there's a reason that even in the Soviet Union that the chaos of the 1920s led to just total concentration, consolidation of power under Stalin, who in his context was sort of a conservative dictator, you know, within the Soviet system at the time, you know, in the way that Napoleon was a conservative dictator compared to, you know, the, the revolution, the Jacobins people are complex creatures, communities, families, all of these things are extremely complex. And when you try to map out and predict their behaviors, you know, you really do have to take account of a lot of things that aren't always readily apparent. So it's very hard. And I tend to think that disorder generally leads to worse outcomes. And disorder in general can, you know, look, you can create a society just like individuals on a psychological level can become so over socialized and overcoated that they just feel completely constrained. I mean, you could argue that like that today one of the problems that you kind of see. Right. I did this essay recently on my substack about the history of boxing and immigration and the industrial era in America and how these things sort of the interplay of these, these things. I used two movies to sort of bookend the conversation. The first one was Far and Away with Tom Cruise. I don't know if you remember, it's a Ron Howard film back in the early 90s.
- [60:32]
A
No.
- [60:32]
B
Well, he's a Irish immigrant back in the mid-1800s who comes over to the United States and he's like an underground bare knuckle boxer because he can't, you know, it's one of the ways that he makes ends meet when he can't get a job here in America. And then the other bookend of the essay was Fight Club, where, you know, you have these underground bare knuckle, no rules, chaotic boxing or fighting clubs. And they look very similar if you actually watch the films, and they are very similar. And in between that, you have the rise and sort of decline of this highly structured sport of boxing, you know, to the point where it got to the point where the heavyweight champion was the most famous athlete in the world, you know, and so there's this like the difference between the two bookends far and away, Tom Cruise in that movie, and then the guys in Fight Club at the end is that Tom Cruise is an Irish immigrant who's trying to fight his way into the American system. He wants to be sort of brought in and have the firmware of American civilization sort of uploaded into him. Whereas when you get to Fight Club, people feel like the people who were involved in that feel so completely overcoated and everything's so over determined in their lives that they just want to smash their way through the wall and get out by any means necessary. And so, you know, order can be pathological. An obsession with order can be pathological just as much as chaos can. There's no doubt about that. It's why I say that, you know, my main point here is not that one or another system is good or bad. It's that they're suited to different times in different circumstances.
- [62:06]
A
Well, I obviously could go on about private corporations versus the government and we'd be here for, for five years. I will say that during COVID Well, I mean, I, I watched private corporations do all kinds of incredibly destructive and idiotic things. And I wondered to myself how much of that is they're following the lead of the regime and how much of that is they're following what a frightened American public wants. And I don't exactly know what the answer to that is. But at the same time it was the, it was the US Government that was pushing a universal mandate system on all large companies. But there was plenty of blame to go around. But I definitely did feel. I'll be honest, and maybe some of my listeners think I'm being. I'm making too many concessions, but to heck with it, I want to be honest, I felt somewhat chastened by that, that I felt like I had been somewhat naive about, about the private sector, but the same.
- [62:56]
B
Very often when I have these discussions, like the, the sort of bottom line response like at the end of the, at the end of the discussion that I get is, yeah, but corporations cannot send armed men to your house to drag you away and throw you in a cage. And my answer to that is always, yeah, that's because the government won't let them.
- [63:15]
A
I think there's more to that. I think corporations don't. I think legitimacy matters when you're going to try to get away with some novel exercise of power. And I think governments have legitimacy in the eyes of the public because they've just been trained to think that way about governments. But I don't think the Acme Corporation has that kind of legitimacy. I think it'd be much harder for them to get away with it. Because they're not listening every day to Schoolhouse Rock singing them a song about how when the government passes a bill, this is for your benefit. And so, you know, like, they. They're not hearing that.
- [63:45]
B
But what means would the people have to resist them? You know, I think about, like, the labor unions in the late 19th century or the coal mine, you know, the problems with the coal mine communities that led up to the Harlan wars and the battle of Blair Mountain and all that stuff, you know, where you have, you know, the companies are literally employing sort of secret police forces that are spying on people. And anytime they're caught talking about organizing or anything like that, they. I mean, sometimes they kill them, but they definitely fired them and blacklisted them from the industry and, you know, were exercising a tremendous amount of control over their people's attempt to organize, to actually resist what they were doing or to assert their own demands. And very often, I mean, you know, there's a reason there was an anti Pinkerton law. I mean, you know, they didn't need the government to have the Pinkertons go in there and kill a bunch of labor leaders or to go hire Lepy Bualt or, you know, to go bust up a union or something like that. I mean, these things can happen without having an agency that oversees it. And again, it's really hard to say because we don't have any real, like, we don't have any counter examples. Like, we don't have any examples of a society where you have really big, large corporations in, like, Rwanda or somewhere where there's just. Well, that's a bad example because they have a very centralized, strong government now. But, you know, some place where there just isn't really much of a government yet, like Somalia, but there's gigantic media and industrial corporations and stuff. We don't really have a lot of examples of how that would play out. So.
- [65:18]
A
Well, I've. Again, I. So I have stuff that I've. I've done on. In fact, I'm trying to wonder where. What book did I write in about the labor union thing? Maybe it's 33 questions.
- [65:28]
C
I don't know.
- [65:28]
A
I got a book that talks a little bit about this labor union question about the major. So I do talk about Pinkerton, Haymarket. I got some of the major ones. But at this point, I can't keep track of my own books, Darrell. So we're just going to leave it there.
- [65:41]
B
You know, everybody who listens to the Marmade podcast knows I'm hugely sympathetic to the 19th century labor movement, the Haymarket Affair. Those guys did it. They deserved it. I've got a great book by a guy who's a, he's a professor who, he was a legal professor who just. Who wanted to write a book about the Haymarket Affair. He's a, he was like a left wing liberal professor who was writing it from the standpoint of like using it as a, as an example of legal process. And through the process of researching it, he goes super deep and he, they did it for sure and they deserve what they got.
- [66:19]
A
All right, well, that. Okay, we'll close on that. So people should. How often do you come out with
- [66:24]
B
the Martyr Maid podcast, the main history feed? You know, again, these are five, six, seven hour episodes. Sometimes they require a ton of research and preparation. So that's like every few months. I, I try to shoot for every three or four months. Sometimes it's five or more, sometimes, depending. But. And then on the sub stack, you know, I, I've been really focusing on the World War II podcast lately, so I've been slacking a little bit on keeping up with the substack. But I try to keep up a pace of one essay or podcast every week. And that's usually, you know, 10 to 15 page essay with an audio version you can, you can listen to. So like last year I wrote a series on the history of slavery that I think it's, it was 16 parts and it's, I think about 250 pages. And I was putting that out weekly like as I was going. And so that's a pace I really like to keep. It's definitely good for keeping my subscriber numbers up. But, you know, you always have, you have some people saying, stop wasting time on the sub stack. We want the history episode. And then you have people who unsubscribe from the substack because I'm busy focusing on the history episodes.
- [67:33]
A
You cannot please everybody. I will say though, that I am a paid subscriber to your substack and I am very pleased. You haven't heard a word of complaint from me. So. So go do that. Guys. I'm gonna have Martyr made links, including the substack@tomwoods.com2771 and then regarding my books, just buy all of them and one of them is going to have the labor union stuff. So just, just go out and buy them all. Treat yourself and you flip around, you'll find it. So, Darrell, thanks a lot.
- [67:59]
B
And by the way, just everybody, I'm much more coherent and systematic in my thinking in my essays in my podcast than I am when I'm doing interviews and my mind's all over the place because I'm on my third Celsius in the morning. So.
- [68:12]
A
Well, we're just talking about things the way we would on a telephone conversation. Just. Yeah, one topic leads to another, leads to another, leads to another. And if people learn something that that's great. I'm constantly amazed at how many podcasts I listen to that are just pointless banter and that I don't learn anything. And you, given the kinds of, you know, research that you're doing, you are the opposite of that. You have no fluff whatsoever. But I really, I want to have, frankly, somewhat high level conversations that people walk away and say, all right, well, I learned something. Right. I thought about something now for in a fresh way that maybe has unsettled me a bit and I'll have to think this over. That's kind of what I want. I don't necessarily want it to be, well, that issue is resolved.
- [68:54]
B
It doesn't have to be like that. Even if you spent the entire time saying, this dude is an idiot, he's so wrong because of X, Y and Z, I still helped sharpen your thinking on this.
- [69:03]
A
Yes, you did. That's right. That's right. And you are wrong about some things. So. Well, maybe we'll have to talk about those in a, in a future episode. But anyway, Daryl, thanks so much.
- [69:13]
B
Yep.
- [69:13]
A
And thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
- [69:17]
B
Make yourself and those you love less
- [69:19]
A
vulnerable to the regime, both mentally and physically.
- [69:22]
B
Get more forbidden information@tomsfreebooks.com and be sure
- [69:26]
A
to subscribe to the show wherever you listen.
- [69:29]
B
See you next next time.
- [69:39]
A
Like the sound of the Tom Wood show, my audio production is provided by Podsworth Media. Check them out@podsworth.com Enter code WOODS50 to get 50% off your first order. If your recording sounds rough, the Podsworth app can make it not only listenable, but but professional. Remember, when you use code WOODS50, you'll get half off your first order and you'll also be supporting this show.
- [70:04]
C
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