Or I would get started. Tell everyone in the audience who was listening, either live or listening later to the recording of this who you are, what you believe. Tell us about your book and we'll get started.
My name is Keith Knight. I am managing editor at the Libertarian Institute. My belief is in advocating libertarianism, or the belief that human beings should cooperate peacefully, as opposed to some having the right to coerce others, whether that's in their private lives or whether they use the state as a surrogate to coerce others. So basically, nothing in life is something that we do by ourself.
Even if you are just reading this book, Domestic Imperialism yourself, you didn't build the computer which allowed you to order the book. You didn't generate your own electricity, which allowed that computer to work. You didn't put the ink on the paper, you didn't chop down the trees to make the paper. So we're constantly cooperating. The false divide progressives are always giving us is there's things we do together and then things we do alone.
Just by talking, you're using words that other people have spent thousands of years working on. So we're constantly engaged in actions that are affecting other people, and we're constantly cooperating. So the central question of my book is, should people achieve their ends through a cooperative mechanism, which means people have the right to freely disassociate with bad actors?
Or do some people, the state, have the right to coerce others under the guise of helping the working masses, helping minorities, helping women, or helping whatever demographic they claim to be? So that's who I am. That's where I work, Libertarian Institute, and that is a general overview of my belief system. OK, very good. So, so tell me I I immediately recognize by the way what you're saying. Perhaps it wasn't original to him, but it's best articulated by Leonard Reid's thesis I
pencil. So I I I believe you've you've read that and that's I think that's really a a very integrated way to see the world. It's a very rich way of seeing the world and I think that it really gives form to the idea of a social interaction as a means of both progress and maintenance, right. Progress of of humanity and maintenance of society, right. So I think that absolutely it's it's beautiful. So before I get into the book and it's contents, I want to know more about your personal
ideological journey. When was the moment the one moment? Well, first of all, let me ask this, when you were a progressive, what did an average day look like to you in terms of consuming information, in terms of, in terms of viewing certain events, certain ways in terms of
studying and reading? Were you a progressor that was in who was intent on understanding the the tradition which your thought came from and understanding concepts like classic quality and workers rights and things of that sort? Or were you simply ballast, as most people are in these cases, simply absorbing information like a sponge without ever actually analyzing it and interpreting it? There was a lot of analysis and a lot of historical references.
It's very common that people don't arrive at conclusions, you know, through a lot of logic and reason, just because the cost of doing so is so high. You have to read so many books, discuss so many things with so many people. So when you have historical narratives to lean on. For example, Franklin Roosevelt got us out of the Great Depression, LBJ gave us the Great Society, and Barack Obama got us over the hurdle of racism.
West America finally electing a black progressive into the White House. So I was constantly not looking at the ideological origins, like I hadn't read Woodrow Wilson's The New Freedom, but I was constantly looking for examples of history as to where this idea came from, which gives you a lot of grounding and much more confidence that you didn't just come up with something all on your own, you're actually part
of a historical process. So that was pretty important for me. As far as the day-to-day goes, I would watch MSNBC quite a bit. It seemed like there were two groups generally, those who cared about the poor and those who did not care about the poor at all, or not necessarily the poor, but those who are in vulnerable positions overall. So when this dichotomy was presented to me, I had just said, well, looks like the Democrats are basically the
party I should get behind. But the Democrats can be very establishment. And so, you know, some of these places that could be called the left end up being just old boys clubs and get bought off by corporations. So progressivism was sort of the silver lining of the Democratic Party that that that I supported. Interesting. So tell me about this then. What was that moment? OK, when did you begin seeing cracks in the armor? At what point did you begin
seeing cracks in the armor? Because what you described to me, you described to me. You're correct. I think that you're correct that most people don't know why with their political conclusions by means of a deep reason or research. It's unfortunate because this is not a necessary fact of human life. In fact, it's a aberration of previous generations, right?
If you think of the the literacy of the founding generation, that every household, at least according to most estimates, had at least one book in it, and that one book tended to be either some philosophy book or most commonly the Bible, then you would see that a lot of people at least had some anchoring to the transcendent, some anchoring something beyond their own experiences in their lives. Whereas today, in this I don't want to say this modern world is
rather this postmodern world. The subjective intuition is prided and emphasized over external searching for truth and meaning. And that has basically allowed people to become prisoners of their own epistemic errors. Which then of course translates into creating political errors. Because if a entire voting populace is led by errors of knowledge and they transfer those into their how they vote, how they think about politics, you'll ultimately get a system
that reflects that. But also you get a non engaged public by that as well because they can't see beyond themselves. So why? What's the need to engage? So no, I think that's very interesting. So tell me, when did you start seeing cracks in the armor, so to speak? So here is the first major crack and This is why I opened the book with it. I don't give my background story, but I give the example of what really changed my mind. There was a mass murder that took place on June 12th, 2016.
It's referred to as the Pulse nightclub massacre. And the terrorist Omar Mateen went into the nightclub, killed 49 people, injured 53 and actually called 911 to amplify his motives for doing this. So here is how Barack Obama summarized the event. And it's important to know Barack Obama was not seen as your average Democrat.
He was the progressive who was going to rein in the banks, you know, represent the workers, initiate that equal pay for women and all this other, you know, progressive platforms. Barack Obama said this was an attack on the LGBT community. Americans were targeted because we're a country that has learned to welcome everyone, no matter who you are or who you love.
And hatred towards people because of sexual orientation, regardless of where it comes from, is a betrayal of what's best in us. So I remember hearing that and being very curious as to what this terrorist would have said. Because much like a protest, the goal of terrorism is to amplify your motives as opposed to conceal them. So he gets his moment in the spotlight for committing this atrocity, this shortcut to fame. What does he say? We actually have the 911 transcript from Mateen's call.
Here's what he said. You have to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq. They are killing a lot of innocent people. What am I to do here when my people are getting killed over there? You get what I'm saying. You need to stop the US air strikes. They need to stop the US air strikes. You have to tell the US government to stop bombing. They are killing too many children. They are killing too many women.
OK, so when I first came across that, I said OK, It turns out that the sitting president can just explicitly lie about the motives of an attack and the press is not going to really call him out about this. This was so mind blowing for me that he mentions nothing about hatred of homosexuals, mentions nothing about hatred of Christians or Floridians. Even though the attack took place in Florida, it was against young people. He didn't say anything about the
young people. It was a result of blowback as a causal result of American foreign policy. I cite the Council on Foreign Relations. This year, 2016, the US government dropped a 24,000 bombs on Iraq and Syria, killing a large number of civilians. According to the Intercept, research they did indicates that nine out of every 10 people killed by these bombings were not the intended target. So this was really big for me. I said, you know, I was so wrong about this issue.
I had more or less assumed that the press and the president was telling the truth. So once I was so humbled at that, and President Bush also did the same thing many years earlier, I was so humbled at that. I said, you know, instead of walking into every conversation is the way things ought to be is I should just say what do I know? And on a scale of one to 10, how sure am I 'cause you? I mean, it's just impossible to know so much about so many wide issues.
I can say I'm a 10 on these issues, but on these I'm A2 or A3 and what's my justification? So once I saw the sitting president blatantly lying, this is not something I really thought could take place. But that's when I really started
to open my eyes. I would say that was the unique point in my progressive journey where I was at least open to saying I think I could be wrong about this whole approach of dividing people based on race, gender, nationality, income, and there's a much more true divide that we can have and the Bible says it. When the Bible says thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not steal.
These are genuine principles which can differentiate good people from bad, whereas progressives are constantly dividing people based arbitrarily. Yes, no, that's absolutely correct. This thing about machine, when that story actually happened, when it first came out, there was speculation about his own sexuality, which of course there was never anything inclusive found. His father said that he wasn't, you know, that way and things like that.
He didn't seem to have any, although people did. There are patrons of the club that claimed he had frequented it before. We of course, we don't know if that was true either, but it's very curious that he chose that particular location when he could have chosen the hundreds of other locations that may have even made more of a point. Perhaps even like a not not getting any more ideas or got. I'm just in like a post office, maybe something like that and
that's that. But regardless of the truth of the connection, it's the goal of the person who does proximity ethics, to consider though something is right or wrong on the basis of what it is close to as opposed to what it actually is in genuine principle to confuse these kind of things to make, to make their own agenda seem plausible. And I think that's what Barack Obama was doing, that's what the progressives were doing, that's what the media was doing.
And so it's very interesting that you noticed that though, because a lot of folks, including at that time I think the GOP, Paul Ryan, came out after that story and said we support the LGBT community. So if even the GOP was was captured by this mediocre thought form, how did you see through it? Did you just do more research? You'd fall into a like a rabbit hole. Did you listen to a podcast? Like, how did it happen? You know, it's not that I didn't care to see problems with the
GOP. I just kind of expected it from them. I did not expect it from the progressive who I thought had my back through thick and thin. I originally came across it when researching at the Mises Institute. Their website has a large collection of things just went down rabbit holes and eventually came across this story. Wow, interesting. Interesting. Well, and that's that's often
times that what happens, right? Often times you don't really see a progressive to what you call yourself libertarian or Ana capitalist or what exactly? OK, let's say libertarian as an umbrella term. You don't really see a progressive libertarian pipeline. But the inverse seems to be a concept in the media. Libertarian to all right pipeline, right. That's a very big concept amongst a lot of folks in the established media like the Washington Post.
What's your opinion? Do both of these pipelines exist? If so, which one is pushing forth more more people through it as opposed to the other? You know that I would have to give a little more thought to. I can say that I've met a large number of libertarians who came over after being progressives. Because when you're progressive, you already see the world through these divides. Sometimes it's boss and worker, sometimes it's black versus
white. Even immigrant verse citizen can be a big divide of Bernie Sanders got some heat when he said that. Well, something like open borders is just a Koch brothers policy and we shouldn't really encourage large amounts of immigration. That seems like a another false divide to me. So once I already had the divides down, I started slowly
chipping away at them. So this idea that I genuinely thought until an embarrassingly late age that America was basically the only place where slavery had ever been practiced, because not because a teacher at school necessarily said that, but it was just so heavily implied when they say the unique thing about America is the Declaration of Independence, but also slavery. So I had never really looked
into this. So when I came across the code of Urnamu, one of the oldest legal codes known to history, to see the word slave mentioned multiple times in ancient Mesopotamia, thousands of years before Christ was around, that really surprised me. So instead of having this, well, America's the bad guy, well, how many current living Americans
were slave owners? And does this mean that all people who you know are descendants of potential slave owners, that they, we should, you know, see them as potential enemies? So once I started chipping away at the really false divides, it just inevitably led me to all right, we have to have some method of differentiating the
good people from the bad. So people who choose to engage in things like fraudulent interactions, people who use coercion or threats thereof, that's a genuine person who we should say is evil, and we can justly vilify them. But so many things were just based on accidents of birth that I was ready for the divide. But the progressive divide just
kept chipping away all the time. The main one you see is the black versus white divide, where they're constantly using demographics to play off to play one off against the other. So when I was just used to saying that whites are generally the problem overall, well, the evidence lies in the fact that there's a disparity among the black population and those who are arrested or assaulted by police officers.
It took a long time for me to come across Thomas Olswork, who said, well, men are 50% of the population and they're 95% of those killed by police. What does that tell us? The police are sexist against men. Turns out that whites don't even have the highest incomes in this white supremacist society. You have Taiwanese Americans, Nigerian Americans, Vietnamese Americans. What stupid white supremacists are running the show here?
And it turns out black immigrants who have a different culture have higher incomes than native blacks. So the idea that I was just vilifying people based off country or skin color, it turns out I became the very thing that I thought I was against. Yeah, no, I think that it's
interesting. Both the progressives and the actual white supremacist, the actual white identitarians who use the argument about white supremacy in that direction, both of their points are equally disproven by empiricism. When you look at the achievement rates of Nigerian Americans, the white supremacist pro point is proven. And so is the black victimhood A narrative disproven at the same time. It took me a long time to
realize that. But it really goes to this idea that you have also mentioned the book closer to the end of it, when you're talking about National Socialism and Democrat Socialism, about these things having the same genus but just manifesting in different forms, right. Which I want to get to that in a little bit because I found that curious, and I've heard that before, But the way you've explained it was very precise, but I wanted to touch on
something else. So you another one of the reasons why you left Progressivism. According to your book, you have a chapter called Consent of the Governed and Game Errors. So the second part of that interests me quite a bit. And so you you begin in this chapter by saying that progressive victory, I quote progressive victory to legalize gay marriage in a predominantly
Christian country. This was justified from many different standpoints, among them being that they are adults, straight people, that kind of stuff. And then after you list all these points, you say that all it took for me to lead progressivism was for me to take this principle of free association between consenting adults and apply it consistently in the economic realm.
So are you saying that the progressive stance on gay marriage actually allows you to translate into a different context A justification against progressive thinking and economics? Yes, simply because instead of using the talking points at some point, you repeat it so often that you end up extracting the very principle. So for all the objections to gay marriage, it really just came down to these are consenting adults and marriage is just a contract. So, well, is it OK to, you know,
marry little kids? Well, now, you're not dealing in the realm of consenting adults. So if we say that people should really be empowered to, you know, live the lives that they want, interact with who they desire to, well, marriage is one thing that you do. Some people do it multiple times. But the economic realm is something you're constantly, constantly engaged in in every
moment of your life. Even when you choose to do you know nothing or just hang out, well, that's you actively disassociating from all of the other potential things you could be doing. So the progressive clearly see this when it comes to attempts to restrict voting rights. They'll say it is terrible if you need a license in order to vote. This hurts the most vulnerable
people in society. But they don't see that having, you know, requiring dozens of licenses and all of these training degrees in order to get your foot in the door at a job you really want. They don't see how that absolutely crushes people's dreams of, you know, achieving. Whatever career they'd like to be in. So they go for more entry level jobs and they have a less likelihood of getting on the job experience in something that
they want. Getting their foot in the door, developing a network in this area and it makes people far less successful than they otherwise would be. So this constant restricting of choice is something that the progressives are frequently advocating. Now there is something, the paradox of choice, where it turns out the more options you have, the less satisfied you will be. Because whatever you choose, there were 100 other things that could have been much better, and
it can get overwhelming. If there's two options on the menu, you'll most likely be happy with whatever you got. If there's 300 items on the menu, like The Cheesecake Factory, whatever you get, you're like, oh, I could have gotten something much better. So this is sometimes justified as see more choices isn't always better. So I can actually agree with that. The progressive will frequently say Bernie Sanders saying, well look at all these deodorant options and all these toothpaste
options. This is just terrible and redundant. The question is not should people have choices that are in high quantity or low quantity. The question is who's going to decide either? People decide for themselves, but when I say for themselves, they're looking at Yelp reviews, they're looking at brand names, they're talking to other people who have consumed the product. So they are the ultimate decision maker.
In the end, what I'm saying is not that that's a perfect system, but it's far superior to having surrogate decision makers in the form of politicians who do not give you the option to try new things to get your foot in the door without occupational licensing, to build buildings without a very high number of permits which make it so it's so costly to expand your
operations. This creates the very oligopolies that progressive say we have to watch out for cause Walmart and Amazon are constantly able to afford all this stuff, all of these, you know, regulation, compliance costs. But the average person is not. So they go into lower fields and end up staying there longer than they otherwise would. So this constant coercive restriction by the state of progressives was really a a major reason that I left progressivism.
And in order to really justify the move, you kind of have to build yourself mentally a golden bridge to retreat across. So it was hard to say no. I guess I've been wrong about everything for you know, the last, you know 2000 Facebook posts or something. So when I sort of had that gay marriage bridge to retreat across of yet, you know this thing we've constantly been saying and harping on of how important it is to give consenting adults the option to make big decisions in their lives.
Yeah, that's what I believe in just more realms than this one. So yes, that is the gay marriage to volunteerism pipeline that that that I had. Let's get a little bit nerdy in terms of the IT matter of consent. A lot of people don't realize, and you do because you've covered it in your book and I've watched you on other shows as well. But a lot of people don't realize just how gargantuan of a moral concept the idea of consent is, and just how radical it is in the history of the
world. More folks know how radical it is in the history of the world than know how gargantuan is. Because reflexively, a lot of people in Western society, reflexively, when they are confronted with immoral choice, consent will be the fundamental harm hallmark of their moral thinking. That'll be the reference point.
Sometimes harm will be too. And often times I always argue that when consent and harm are joined together in harmony, they are able to make for the best moral decision making. But sometimes just consent. And recently from the right, there's been an attack on this concept. They call it consent based morality from the the post
liberals. They call themselves people who are skeptical of America's classical liberal foundation to believe that the reason my society has so much decay and chaos today is because of the excesses of this sort of individualism. They call it atomization and they'll call it consent based morality, where nothing is sacred and everything is just a transactional set of two wills
merging together in space. How does Someone Like You, who uses first principles, who very clearly cares about a certain kind of morality, deal with those critiques in an effective way? Because on the one hand, it is absolutely true that to simply say consent should be the golden standard of all morality. That's not satisfying. It's not satisfying because the moral realm is not simply a matter of human choice. The moral realm is also a matter
of human persuasion. It's also a matter of belief, matter of values, a matter of social influences. It's a matter of a bunch of things. It's a matter of duties of obligations, so many different things and other ideas and motivations and laws that may
inform how 1 uses their choice. And so one of the reasons that I think, and this is one of Lucas's libertarianism, I think, is that libertarians, when it comes to social and cultural issues, all they can say is, well, I personally believe this in my own capacity, but you do what you want. OK, well, if we're thinking about these things on the political realm, thought that is the just answer.
But the political realm does not encompass everything else, or at least it shouldn't in all reality. It has a lot more influence than it should, but it shouldn't. So they're they're more thinking in terms of how politics should be run, is oftentimes completed with more thinking on the cultural and social level, which is concerning. So what do you think about all that I just said? So it's not that I'm advocating anyone do what they want, and I'm fine. The question is, who's going to
have the standards either? People are going to choose their own standards and associate with people who they have standards, who they appreciate based on how they talk, how they act, if they show up on time, if they're polite, if they're hard workers, if they're lazy. We can constantly have this regulating mechanism in society that's used by disassociating with people who don't meet our standards.
What the status position is, is that politicians should be able to coerce standards universally for basically everyone within a certain geographical area. So it's not that there's either standards or no standards, it's who gets to decide. This is Thomas Soule's thesis in his book Knowledge and Decisions that when you can both want, you know, good standards in food, housing, medicine, people you spend your time with, churches, you know the aesthetic pleasantness of, you know,
buildings and architecture. It's not that there shouldn't be standards or whatever someone chooses to do is totally fine. The question is who's going to have the standards? Either people are going to have their own standards or politicians are going to unilaterally decide. It's not that I have so much faith in people that they're always going to do the right thing and do the most efficient thing or do the most beautiful harmonious thing.
It's that I don't trust a subset of those people who are attracted to political power, having the right to coerce millions of total strangers in such a way where if they're wrong, they face very little to no backlash if they are wrong. So I disagree that it's about not having standards and saying, you know, so long as it doesn't affect me, I'm OK with it. I think that's absolutely terrible.
Every time you choose to go to a restaurant or not spend time with someone who was formerly a friend of yours, that is you engaging in having standards and setting rules for the society you live in. As far as the importance of consent, all I'm really saying here is that all else equal, consent is far preferable in the absence of extreme examples to
coercion. It's simply what differentiates rape from lovemaking, civilized from uncivilized behavior, theft from trade, kidnapping from spending time with other people, enslavement from work. So that's why I think consent is so important. So if we take that concept of it's not what should happen, but who should decide if we look at duties and obligations. Take military conscription, for example. It's not that I don't think people should fight for what they believe in and defend their
homeland against aggressors. I absolutely believe that. The question is, should politicians be able to coerce people against their will in fighting for such a thing? And who should fight in what amount, to what extent for, you know, for what end. If you know someone was going to take all of Florida, well, you'd have to weigh the costs and benefits of the Biden regime ruling Florida.
Or I guess it's, you know, realistic in the minds of some people that Vladimir Putin could take over Florida or some parts of America or, you know, use some methods of influence. So not everything terrible is worth, you know, totally dying for. So we could either have a method of conscripting people against their will, or you could let people decide for themselves what is worth fighting for, to
what extent. And since they actually have to bear the cost, they're the person in the body experiencing this world. They should be the ultimate decision maker. So I respectfully disagree that it's about, you know, not having standards and saying, well, whatever someone chooses to do, that's OK. People constantly have very high standards in the free market. That's why businesses go out of business because people choose
something else. That's why some big budget movies are total flops, because people don't want to associate with with those sorts of things. That's why Hollywood has been like, you know, I didn't even know the Oscars took place the other day, and I wasn't avoiding it. And the Oscars when I was a kid was like this huge thing. This is people voluntarily shifting their standards away
from terrible degeneracy. John Cena had some stunt on stage, and I'm actually glad that I missed the whole thing. So, So people can constantly have standard standards are vitally important. That's why they shouldn't be in the hands of politicians. Yeah, I know. So I I got by the way, I wasn't saying that you can't have standards when they're kind of morality. I was playing devil's advocate, and I'll keep doing that because I think this is very important. Not enough libertarians think
about morality. They just don't. They think about it in terms of being coerced or not being coerced. That's it. That's a limit. OK, So beyond the political context, let's put the political context to the side because this is how I personally face my morality. OK, I phrase it with two categories, what is permissible
and what is preferable. So there's an objective set of first principles in the first category that if I don't follow them, not only will society fall apart, but individuals would be in eminency with each other. Death will happen, disorder will happen, chaos will happen, and ultimately society as a whole will will be undermined. And ethics is simply the science of according right and wrong action as it relates to other people, IE ethics is a social practice.
Therefore, if society is gone, ethics can't really matter more so it's important to preserve society. So among these permissible principles is justice, which is simply refraining from violating someone's rights, honoring your oaths and your contracts as they're written out. Things of that sort, veracity being truthful, right? Those are the primary 2/2 of the sort of more than like. These create the permissible realm. But when it comes into the realm of preferability, you have
charity. You've got goodwill. I think that you need. I think that you. I think a society can. Societies can exist without people being nice to each other. It's better if they are, but they can still exist. If you respect people's rights, you can solve society. If people are mean, so good, so, so goodwill, charity, these kind of things.
We're not, by moral necessity, compelled to do them, but society is enhanced if we do. I'm more worried about the 2nd realm because let's go beyond the political realm, right? I think that's that's too much of the focus because the arguments of the people that do want to use the political realm to impose their their moral order upon all of us.
The post liberals the national these people is that when you divorce government from the from a sort of community ethos you get a society that's in chaos and they will often times use the society as a reference point to make their points to look at transgenderism for example and or the annihilation of womanhood as evidence of a laissez faire society run amok. Because how do you actually prevent prevent these things?
Is just people raising their voices and trying to stop them or is something that's going to be more assertive and more muscular. Whether it be other, this is other examples such can't turn into a meme, whether it be before Elon took over Twitter, big tech censoring people, the New York Post getting their their story censored about Hunter Biden's laptop. There are a lot of people making a joke out of the it's a private company phrase.
Because they're saying if there are companies that control the most amount of resources, so much so that competition is not effective in the public discourse, what uses it for it? Being a private, private company. And then there were others that were saying that? Is it really a private company if the government funds them and gives them special backdoor access?
You. I think that if we're going to comprehensively answer our foes, because by the way, I agree with you entirely, if we're going to answer our foes, we have to be comprehensive in how we view morality in society. It can't just be corrosion. Bad consent. Good. Correct. I believe it's necessary but not sufficient to value consent, or at least have it as the center focus of your ethical worldview.
So the claim that transgenderism and degeneracy are the result of a laissez faire society, we could say maybe the transgender issue. We could maybe measure it from 1980 to you know 2023 where it's gone from barely anyone talking about it to it being in a headline multiple times a day on
major news outlets. So according to that theory, since it's the result of too much laissez faire, we would have seen a drastic decrease in that 40 year span of government regulation and no hands on the economy. We would have seen major abolitions of large sectors of the government. The Department of Education had to have been abolished since, you know, it's a laissez faire society and government spending of course would have drastically decreased in that time according to that theory.
The problem is the exact opposite has happened and in response to that they've said well there's too much freedom. Of course, this is constantly the result of mostly college academics who get state funding. Constantly through programs with Sallie Mae, where the government's constantly getting people loans. They're doing such a bad job in K through 12 education that kids almost have to go to College in some cases in order to get a job in the future.
And once they funnel people into these colleges, they teach them all of these ridiculous ideas of egalitarianism, these ideas of, you know, constant white supremacies everywhere and things like transgenderism. So if the state really was the solution to something like this, we would see the state either growing and this degeneracy constantly shrinking, or we'd see the state shrinking and the, you know, transgenderism, advocacy growing in correlation. The problem is, well, we get the
exact opposite. More government involvement has led to less accountability in these areas where, I mean, I can't imagine actually voluntarily funding anyone who doesn't think there's a valuable difference for a society to have between men and women. I don't know. Men have what, 17 times the amount of testosterone women do. So of course we're going to have massive inequality in the results of these two demographics.
The idea that people could be, you know, transracial or transgender, I think is absolute lunacy and the state has not done much to prevent it. In fact, people like Joe Biden are constantly pushing it forward. Whereas according to this theory, you'd think that the government would be saying, hey, private sector, stop being so degenerate, here's you know the accurate way to live. We get trillions of dollars a year in taxes. We're going to spend it towards, you know, fighting degeneracy
and all this stuff. They're constantly amplifying it. Even Donald Trump had four years, two of which he had a Republican Congress and did not do much of. Of course, he should have abolished the Department of Education, taking all state funding of colleges down to 0 anyone who's promoting such a ridiculous nonsense. So that is my response to the claim That laissez faire leads to lowering of standards leads
to a total degeneracy. As far as whether or not private companies have the right to do what to do what they'd like, well, there's two ways to go about this. One way is to have a very consolidated structure where the state gets the final call and then they get to delegate licenses of who gets to say what things and what news is accurate and what news is inaccurate. Or you can say that there is no
solution, only trade-offs. And in this world view, you say that anyone who amasses large amounts of power is going to be corrupted with it, especially if there is coercive power. So yes, we did see Twitter blocking the story from the state who was the. So the state actually is the one, you know, blaming the Vladimir Putin. You had 50 intelligence officials come out and say this Hunter Biden laptop, according to you know Politico, is Russian
disinformation. They ran with the story for the second time after faking it in 2016. Russiagate 2 point O was again and then there was Russiagate 3 point O where Joe Biden on the debate stage said Vladimir Putin has put bounties on the heads of American soldiers in Afghanistan. So the government was behind all of these lies. And how did they get out?
Well, not necessarily because there was a government committee who then brought us the truth, but it was other competing private organizations like the Libertarian Institute, antiwar.com, Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore. Those were the people who actually got the truth out about Russia Gate. So yes, there are tons of amounts of fallibility in the voluntary sector, and the solution to that is more competition and less monopolies.
That is the ultimate what I call the unavoidable contradiction of progressivism is the claim that monopolies are bad. Also, the state should monopolize taxation. The state should monopolize the money supply. The state should monopolize guns. The state should monopolize the judicial system. All of the things that they're worried about being the result of a voluntary monopoly. That could hypothetically happen, even though alternatives are constantly coming up.
They actually advocate that as the solution to too much competition. So all of the problems you have with big companies in the voluntary sector apply many times over to the state sector. No, in the Valley. That's a very good response. I don't want to linger too much from this point. I could push, push, push, but I have sufficient for where we are right now.
I just think that it's very important for those of us who work from first principles, and I believe from what it sounds like, you have a natural law viewpoint of ethics as well, who work from that set of first principles as well to speak about morality in the most expansive way possible. Because coercion, a more preventive on coercion, is simply one domain of the broader moral universe.
There's several other domains that I I think aren't really touched by libertarians at great peril, and I I think people will often times say that libertarianism is not libertinism. Well, you're correct, in definition is not. But in practice, many libertarians do become libertine because they don't think about morality beyond the issue of coercion and state power. Well, we could also look at all the we could also look at all the degeneracy among the elite class.
There was the Franklin cover up with the Republicans in the 1980s where there was a pedophile ring. There was the Jeffrey Epstein pedophile ring that the 80s Democrats were recently operating and then covering up. So it's not like degeneracy is just some libertarian thing. No. No. It's not. It's not. It's a human thing, by the way, and I and I don't like it when people try to tie the degeneracy to a political philosophy. It's a human thing, right? And by the way, I'm not saying
this ananimous. I was, I was a Students for Liberty for all four years of my college. I was steeped and Nozick and Rothbard and all that stuff. So I'm not saying this out of animus. I'm just saying this because in my own journey towards constitutional conservatism, that's where I am now.
And being a much more conservative person in that respect, I found some things culturally libertarianism that I that didn't comport with me, but some of the values have sucked with me. Obviously, if you look at my political philosophy, you wouldn't be able to tell that I that I was any different. Mostly so.
But I simply like to still man because it's important for for those of us who do value human freedom, who do value the human being in its fullest capacity, to be able to stand strong on that beyond simply looking at a certain domain. So that's all I'm just trying to do some friendly pushing and nudging. But but yeah, so you mentioned something that's actually quite interesting in your book and this is closer towards the end, but I found it, I I, I found it
to be very insightful. It's in the title. It's in the thing titled The difference between Democratic Socialism and National Socialism is like no difference between it. And you say that that they are only different in rhetoric but not in terms of means to achieve their ends. So can you extend on that? So what I am doing here is I'm trying to extract a definition as to what these terms actually mean.
I'm referring to communism as the abolition of private property, as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels did. I'm referring to socialism as the institutionalized aggression against private property and capitalism as a social system of private property exchanges between consenting adults, mainly including the right to contract and whatnot. That is what I believe differentiates capitalists from
socialists, from communists. So when looking at democratic socialists and their blatant opposition to National Socialism, they're in a very glassy house throwing a lot of these stones at, you know, the terrible Nazis everywhere. Well, it's important to ask, what is it about National Socialism that they oppose so much? And usually it'll be something like too much hierarchy or judging people by race. As if the progressive is not
constantly. As if the average democratic socialist today is not constantly generalizing people by their race. They both believe that the state should monopolize key features within society, including the money supply, the judicial system, compulsory education,
etcetera. So when you look at it through this lens that the National Socialist wants to constantly coerce millions of strangers under the guise of helping the nation, and the Democratic Socialist constantly wants to coerce millions of strangers under the guise of helping the working masses, I think they are both absolutely fallacious. I and I do think that the average National Socialist says I want what's best for my country. This is the collective I'm a part of, and I want the state to
represent those values. I think they're both totally sincere, but they both advocate one group having a monopoly on violence to a very large extent. I'm not talking about the average person who just believes, you know, the state is some Hobbes unnecessary evil or or anything like that.
So because the democratic socialist has basically no principle to differentiate what the state can and cannot do, they're no different in principle than the National Socialist. One of the main things that I mentioned in the book is the Iron Law of Oligarchy. This is the idea that any system that starts out as very, very democratic in its origins will eventually develop into an oligarchy. So much though, so much so that it's an iron law within all organizations between all humans
in the human race. So you can ask, well now communism is more about equality, socialism is in the middle, and capitalism is about inequality. But it turns out if you look at Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Roosevelt, Truman, Genghis Khan, you look at Aristotle, who I know wasn't a, you know, political leader or anything.
But all of the major people throughout history in all these different countries at all these different times had a very, very disproportionate amount of power relative to the average person in the society they lived. So when the democratic socialist says, well, we're much more about equality and getting people involved, that is such a fool's errand that it's not even
to be taken seriously. The classic example is that of a labor union where, say, you have the bourgeoisie who make a lot of money, and then you have the workers who want to unionize to fight the bourgeoisie and sort of counterbalance the amount of power. Well, it turns out, and this is a classic example given by Mckells, who, you know, started the theory popularized by James Burnham. The response is well, not everyone wants to go to work and
then attend a Union meeting. Not everyone is going to have good ideas about what the Union should do. Not everyone's going to be courageous enough to speak up. Not everyone who speaks up is going to be equally persuasive. Not everyone who speaks up and is equally persuasive is as good looking as other people who might get more attention and
social status because of that. So what you end up is you end up having Jimmy Hoffa and a few friends running the union for 10s of thousands of people who have very little if any influence. So the entire democratic socialism justification of, well, we're about empowering the little guy just as much as anyone else. That is not possible to do in any society.
You know, once you get more than three or four people, even if you get four people who are related, I mean, look at the disparity between, you know, the Baldwin brothers. I use them as an example, one much more famous than the other. These people are directly related in many times. I grew up in the same household. Compare Barack Obama to his brother George Obama. Drastic inequality in the amount of power that they have. I also use Oprah Winfrey and her
siblings. She has much more institutional power and wealth than people who she's directly related to. So the entire claim that, well, the democratic socialists are different because they're about empowering, you know, the little people, it is the same exact thing where you end up having a few people coercively dominating everyone else. So because this Iron Law exists, the question is which sort of social arrangement should we recognize as legitimate?
One that gives us an elite class as the result of voluntary exchanges and voluntary contracts where we can disassociate with the elites if they get degenerate or corrupt or anything else, or one in which they have a monopoly on violence and there is no recognized right to disassociate from a bad elite. So elite is a constant, is a constant throughout all societies, and we have every reason to believe it'll always be here.
I just think libertarianism's a better approach than democratic socialism to the inevitability of elites that will exist. The original term I think was natural aristocracy, but that this is what that gets into and that's why I don't think there's a real difference between Democratic Socialism and National Socialism. No, yeah, I agree. I mean, wherever you have human beings of varied abilities and potentials, you will get varied outcomes. It's an absolutely, it's an axiom.
Although I do I I I think and just to still amend the democratic socialist perspective, even in a society where which is which in this world we're constructing is based entirely on voluntary interaction and everyone's free. Just like we shouldn't assume there will be an equal amount of skills and life outcomes amongst people, we also shouldn't assume there's going to be an equal amount of knowledge amongst
people either. And how people, how people use their consent and what principles and values guide that is almost as important that they have the ability to voluntarily associate. How do you fix that problem? Because Muslims are ballasts. Yes. So tell me if I'm evading this 'cause I want to get to the root of it, this, this knowledge asymmetry I mentioned in a section titled Government Failure. This knowledge asymmetry is constantly going to exist in any
society. So I just think it's preferable to have a society where you can look at Yelp reviews and choose to disassociate with bad actors. You can watch YouTube reviews. Every single product I've ever thought about. I go, I just heard about this. I wonder if there's anything on YouTube you have Youtubers reviewing this stuff so that that is one way to, you know, fight the inevitable knowledge asymmetry that will always exist in any society.
So the question is having does having a state, you know, absolve this from happening? I actually argue that it constantly amplifies it. What percentage of Americans are, you know, equally informed on what goes on in the education system? How many people have read how
many laws? When it comes to reading one law, the average person has not taken the time to read it and I don't blame them 'cause even if you read the 1st Amendment, you have 9 Ivy League trained Supreme Court justices who don't agree on the interpretation of that amendment. Let alone, you know, the Troubled Asset Relief package of 2008, which is 1000 pages, and as all the bailouts and everything, what percentage of people understand agricultural subsidies? There's constant knowledge
asymmetry among the citizenry. Compare it to government officials who have access to classified knowledge, huge knowledge asymmetry. A politician who's been in Washington for what Joe Biden's been in there like 40 something years. You think he has the the you think his knowledge is equal to the average Biden voter? Not even close. And that same applies for supporters of Ocasio, Cortez, and anyone else who says knowledge asymmetry is a justification for the state
coercing others. I think it amplifies the worst aspects that inevitably exist in every society. Yeah. No, I I I think that's right. That's right. And again, I don't want, I don't want to push too hard, but I, I, I think that it's often times when no, no, it's all right. Otherwise, when when libertarians talk about the importance of voluntary cooperation, we're all thinking in the moral terms of coercion being bad, the individual having some kind of moral value, human
interaction being good. I just wonder because voluntary association, the beauty of it is that it reflects human diversity and that leads people to different situations, right? We can voluntarily associate. You can come on Christian Watson's podcast at 10:00 at night EST and get grilled on philosophy. Or you can go join a cult in the northern, in northern northern Africa, or go join Jonestown and get taught by a prophet who's supposed to give you the keys to
heaven. It's a political system, ideally should be agnostic on which choice that you choose. We agree on that. But to sustain a culture of freedom beyond the political system, people in that culture, I'm not so sure, should be agnostic on that. Obviously I can't force you not to join. Join Jemstown. If you want to go join a cult and you're convinced at that point, OK, you have eternalizing world of you that has dominated your mind.
It will be dangerous for me to try to stop you, to do anything. And it will also be immoral, of course. But there should be extreme social stigma from doing that kind of stuff. And that stigma should be coordinated on a mass level. But I find that a lot of people who are into disassociation and going into their own silos, in some cases when they when they find who they don't like, they are, they don't like doing that kind of thing.
Well, if they want to believe that, let them go, OK, we can let them go. But we should make it uncomfortable in some way, shape and form for dangerous associations to take place in the society. Yeah, definitely. I try and hint at this in the book. Maybe it's a larger rant for a different treatise. But if you look at what the Jehovah's Witness does, I think we can learn a lot from the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witness who passionately make the case for what they believe in.
They use, you know, bashing people that not physically, but they use high amounts of disincentives in order to encourage certain behaviors and disassociate or discourage bad behaviors, provide disincentives. I think we can do the same exact thing. I don't agree with the Jehovah's Witness on their general world view, but simply that tactic of here are our standards. And even if I think you're going to burn in hell for all of eternity, I'm still going to give you the final say.
But I'm not going to stop bringing this up. I'm going to keep inviting you to church. I'm going to make my church gorgeous and give you every incentive to come and visit. I'm going to be the nicest person, you know, along with all my other friends.
So you're going to say, well, those Jehovah's Witnesses, that I just enjoy being around them, so you're going to want to spend time with us. So these methods of using heavy amounts of persuasion to encourage civilized behavior and disincentivize bad behavior, I think it's totally consistent with libertarianism. And you're absolutely right. It's something that we have overlooked for far too long.
It's difficult to, you know, get a fish to appreciate the water that it's always lived in. And when you've always lived in a sane culture, it doesn't occur to you of, yeah, people can do whatever they want, wait, you're smoking. How much pot. Wait. You're doing. What? To your genitals at the doctor? Getting them removed. OK, that I did not consider. Maybe I should roll back this, Do whatever you want kind of thing.
So yeah, it's definitely the the learning curve that we as a movement I think need to embrace. And I think the best way to create a culture like that is I think it's referred to as blind copying, where the population at large will see in certain individuals within the society who they are in awe of. And much like if I had been born in England, I would have developed a British accent.
They start incorporating aspects of, you know, this persons, you know, good traits into their everyday lives. So it's not that all Asians really sat down and thought about the costs and benefits of, you know, working hard and, you know, showing up on time and, you know, postponing consumption and all this stuff. They basically just started doing it because there are other people who are leaders within their community who did it, and they just copied them.
So I think it's on us to have people like Ron Paul and Dave Smith and Tom Woods and Scott Horton. These are the libertarian thinkers. Even someone like Robert Nozick, I think is very respectable to a large degree. I think if we put those people up as our heroes and they simply lead by example, I think that's the best way to build a culture which which we can be proud of. Because I got to say, it's definitely something I envy.
Seeing Tucker Carlson walk around Moscow, that subway state, forget the fact that he's totally wrong about the price of, you know, supermarket goods, the fact that there was no graffiti on that subway. Oh my gosh. And just comparing it to the last time I was at Penn Station, it's amazing to see what a really solid culture that has this, you know, sort of cultural continuity, cultural connection, this nationalist idea. That's something that I think is
totally beautiful. And I it definitely took me too long to appreciate the the value of that. So yeah, embracing standards and putting up people who we think are really good leaders, I think it's got to be the next move for us generally. Interesting. That's an interesting thought. Hopefully libertarians, hopefully they listen to you on that issue. So I want to go to the question portion of the interview now. Not my questions, but my audience questions.
So I'm giving an open invitation to anyone. If any of you have any questions for our guests, please let me
know. Put them in the chat, I'll put them up on the screen and we'll we'll just go from there because this has been a very interesting conversation and I appreciate you having it with me. You know, one thing that I do want to touch on though, and this is more of a general issue in politics, not necessarily relating to libertarianism, but it's the issue of status and the Society of status.
So if we think about how Old World Europe was organized, human value was conflated with your position, with social hierarchy and with titles and honorifics that you had. The New World kind of disputed that because the New World put emphasis on how much is are your hands going to touch the dirt
and mold it to make something. How much, how much self-reliance and personal responsibility you're going to have, how much perseverance in the face of this, these vast open Wilds Lewis and Clark style are you going to have. And that informed the sort of moral, individualistic, natural law based thinking of that entire finding generation
culture. But the Society of status still persists in our modern day culture in many different forms in terms of, and I was talking about this before you got on, in terms of celebrities, in terms of influencers in politics and all kind of things, where the value of one's voice and contribution to society is chalked up to how many followers they have. It's chalked up to how much praise they have. What did Emerson say? A man's name is found in the mass approbation of his friends,
that kind of status idea. I find that to be dangerous because it takes the emphasis off of the issues and it makes people who are supposed to be vessels. Instead, the entire issue themselves and causes this conflation between personality and ideas, which causes the ideas to be lost, the personalities to be elevated. And now we're living in a world of elevated personalities with no substance and superficiality. That's what celebrity culture is. I'm sorry I'm on a little bit of
a role, but still. So how in general, does anyone, any keen political observer deal with this? Because you mentioned, for example, Dave Smith, Scott Horton, all these people find people. But when people think of libertarianism in the contemporary context, they may think of those people. And if they have a problem with those people, they will automatically assume libertarianism has the same problem they have with those people.
That's dangerous. I don't like that very much, which is why I tune all that out. I don't. I don't watch anybody. I watch like I was mentioning. I watch like Glenn Beck, and that's about it. I don't watch anybody because I don't want my mind to be played with by status and personality when I'm really doing something that is putting me in the presence of ideas. Yeah, status can definitely have an impact on on how we see things.
I remember sitting next to a guy who was just drunk in a tank top and you know, we were just having a conversation. Next thing I know, he's got 600,000 Twitter followers on his Anonymous account. And it was in that moment where I realized, oh, I'm so much more of a sucker than I thought I was. I thought it really wouldn't matter. But it's it's difficult to not be persuaded or attracted to people who have such a status. So as far as what my analysis could be on something like that,
we simply just have to compete. And when there is a playing field of the high status, status is currently Joe Biden. And the only person Dumber than Joe Biden in America is his vice president. I mean, when these are the people who, you know, we're going up against. I think libertarians have a much better time now than in, say, the days of Reagan or John F Kennedy, as far as, you know, competing for people's attention or allegiances than they ever
did previously. It has been amazing to see the Thomas soul following that exists on random YouTube channels because you have a guy speaking clearly, always dressed nice and meeting you know, a lot of emotional arguments with a very large amount of empirical research. Same with people like Wilford Riley or Walter E Williams. You also have professors like Brian Kaplan doing the the same
thing. So it's definitely a ground that we need to compete on, and the best way to do it is to have alternatives like TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, so we can at least hopefully get our foot in the door. I don't know where, Elsa, you would want me to go with something like that, but I think you're definitely right. I remember Glenn Beck was one of the first people who analyzed the Affordable Care Act through the lens of whether or not people should be forced to purchase health insurance
against their will. And that really stood out to me. So. So taking that principle, that was another one that I was able to extract. And if I had heard it from a random person rather than a guy in a really nice studio who was dressed nice, who had a big following, I don't know if I would have taken it as
seriously. So it's definitely, it's definitely something that that that we have to consider And just just leading by example and Glenn Beck actually reading the books, Saul Alinsky was one of his big ones where he would actually go to these primary sources of you know, he makes the case that this person is influenced by this ideology and writing things on the chalkboard that really got you me at least
interested in education. Whereas I always thought education was, you know, Pluto's not a planet and Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. So relying on the status of other people, I think it's very valuable. Yeah, I think it's it's certainly so. I think that if you pick from high quality sources, you'll get high quality results 100%. I just find it.
I find it oppressive. I find I find in the Society of Status oppressive simply because it shuts the conversation out from newer voices and because it relegates legitimacy to personalities instead of ideas. I think if there's a workaround for that, I'm not sure I I most people don't think about this, this particular idea. So I don't blame you for, for, for, for, for for that. It's a very, I think about very odd things sometimes when it comes to these issues.
But I see it as impacting the quality of not only political representation you get in government status, but also the quality of commentators we have as well. I'm not going to call anyone's name out, but there are. If you look at both the left and the right, there is a deluge of people who don't really have thoughts that go beyond the status quo of their respective facts, whether they be libertarians, conservatives, progressives.
If you know what one group thinks, most people who are personalities for that group will just recite what that group thinks. There are the few within those factions that rise above that and go the extra mile, and that should be praised. But a lot of these people, their emphasis is on just being a good factionalist in a sense. And so that's a phenomenon that's not new. Our founders were dealing with this. They themselves were factionalist. In a sense. They it's it's interesting.
They anyone else in American history, they were the ones who were the most aware of the susceptibility of the republican system of government to lend towards factional party politics. And they were the ones many of them warned against that. And yet they were ensnared in that same system they warned against. So that should just go to show you the fallibility of the human being. Sorry.
Go on. So when it comes to whether or not a status society can be oppressive, I definitely think so, and especially in the political realm. So if you watch a lot of engineering videos on YouTube, the average person who is, you know, going to be making these engineer videos tends to really know what they're talking about. When I look for tech videos and you know, my side job, a lot of these people tend to be very educated.
If you look at the, you know, the high status people in the realm of physics, they really know what they're talking about, the high status people. When it comes to, you know, anything like microphones or cars or something like that, you
see a high degree of competency. But in the political realm, where there was so little incentive for the average person to get informed, all the brain is going to do is take a shortcut to which personalities they really like, because there's so many issues which are so complex.
Just to be, I mean informed on the Russia, Ukraine war from 2014, forget about how Putin starts it in the year 882 with Warwick, just to be informed on the events from the Maidan revolution in 2014 to what's happening today. So few people have the care because every second you spend doing that as a second less, you could be doing something else.
So in the political realm, we see it much more so because we're expecting people to be able to comment on immigration, minimum wage, the Second World War, Israel, Hamas, you know, the Democrats, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, all of these totally separate things. It's sort of like the fool's errand of expecting, you know, the five year old who says when I'm older, I'm going to be an astronaut and a dentist and I'm going to play in the NBA and I'm going to be in the NFL, it's
like that's just too much. So when these political commentators are commenting on a government that's just doing way too much, well, it's going to be impossible for them to accurately analyze almost every aspect of it. Maybe Ben Shapiro is the closest you can do as far as, you know, giving a real idea of someone who was able to show themselves, as you know, being able to be very informed on all these different issues. OK, you have a handful of people
in a population of 330 million. That's exactly what you would expect. When you have a huge government that's in all these realms of society, you can't get anyone to actually really understand these issues in depth. So the brain shortcut to who should I listen to Is going to use personality as the sorting mechanism of who they're going to listen to. So the bigger the state, the the more you're going to have people who are just attracted to personalities as opposed to actual issues.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's it's both a product of the, the mind as you mentioned, the custody mechanism, but it's also an unfortunate reality of our current era and I hope that it changes. Anyway, different story, different day. Last question, last question, what is the main take away from domestic imperialism? And by the way guys, before he answers, if you guys have any questions at all, this is the last call. I will put your question up on the screen and I will ask.
We'll take about two or three questions maybe because I respect my guest time and I want them to be able to of course be able to go if he needs to. But what is should be the main take away from your book domestic Imperialism? And how can people find it? What it were the links to find it or buy it or whatever? You can get it at libertarianinstitute.org. We give the PDF away totally free. We are a charity A501C3, so you
can get a free PDF there. Or you could buy it on Barnes and Noble or Amazon if you'd like. A hardcover or paperback or Kindle as well. The main take away is that so many of the injustices throughout history are pretty clear when looking in the rearview mirror and when you're not really bought into one side or the other. So in order to determine who is right and wrong in the present, we have to have some objective method of weighing good behavior versus bad behavior.
And this means not having double standards for people based on race, gender, ethnicity, or even intelligence when it comes to what rights they should have as a human being. So this generally means this take away is the biggest, you know, way that this issue was amplified of having double standards is the double standard that people have when it comes
to the state. People will clearly say that murder is wrong, yet justify mass murder campaigns that governments regularly involve themselves in. They say that, well, there's nothing really wrong with taxation. You're paying for a service, don't be so cheap. But if any other organization within society were to begin to issue taxes on your income, well, then you would see it as the theft that it actually is. Military conscription being a $20 word for forced labor and
slavery. That is the big take away that whenever you have double standards, that little hole in your philosophy is going to attract like a bat, signal the worst psychopaths in the society and the population at large is not going to have a very big incentive to combat those very few people. So domestic imperialism is just saying that for the same reason the people of Mexico would not have the right to coercively dominate the people of America.
The people of Washington, DC do not have the right to coercively control 330 million strangers. All right. And that is a very fine and very, dare I say, pro American message. And so I am happy that you wrote the book. I'm happy that you're willing to come on and take some some point at questions of course done in
good faith. But ones that hope that help flesh out, I think, the broader moral and political project of of what you're trying to achieve, which is going to be beneficial for generations to come, I believe so. Keith, thank you so much for coming. I have your, I linked your book in the chat. It's right there. Find it right there. And so I I hope that people go ahead and buy it, download it, share it and things and have more conversations with what we
had today. I think that it's going to be very, very important going forward that we center our mind when discussing fundamentals and then work our way from there. Do you have anything left for the audience or me that you like to say before we go? I want to thank you for your time and getting through the contents of the book and the thought you put into the questions. Christian Watson, It's been a pleasure.