I think bitcoin is if someone comes for you, they can't mess with you in the same way they can with cash. So I think it's very useful and I think it's hopeful for liborty moving forward. I think these city states are going to be powered by bitcoin, powered by just similar type of things that take, as you said, money out of the state's hands.
Multiple generations that have owned a castle or some part of land, but there's no income from that, so now they own this land. They own this castle where they can't even afford to keep it up.
What happened there huge blocks of land going on an ill liquid market for asset that no one wants, and it wiped out the estates, but there's no land to fund it because it's all been taxed away. And the problem with those taxes was it was the nominal value of the land, not the income it produced. So when they're not producing income and you have to sell the whole thing that the states just decayed.
It takes the assets out of the old owners.
Who kind of cared about it for the future and puts it in the hands of people who don't really care. They're going to put a solar farm on top of it. It's going to poison the agricultural land, and that's what we're saying now.
I think about sometimes, like, certainly we've sent the middle class over to China. We could bring those jobs back, but wouldn't that be a kin to putting people in the field to pick cotton and strawberries? Low paying jobs today? How much would you say it's just times change, technology has shifted that.
I think what you want, though, is you want more of those domestic jobs being produced, because not everyone can succeed in the knowledge economy. And I think to have a thriving internal market, you need jobs for people different ways up the ladder.
But you also don't want.
To stifle domestic innovation by letting people who have other interests take advantage of your market. You'd probably want to look at something about a new amendment for voting where only net taxpayers can vote. I mean, preferably we're not going to have the income tax, but if we are, all.
Right, Will Tanner, thanks so much for joining me today. Super happy to have you here. And it's been a little bit of trouble, but I'm glad we're here. We're going to do this show. You have been writing about history in a way that's super fascinating and most fascinating for me are the parallels that history has with sort of what the world seems to be going through right now. So I want to talk about that. The way that you're able to connect these dots is amazing. Start with
a big frame. I guess, what kind of big parallels do you see with some of the stuff you write about history in today?
Yeah, you know, there are a couple of things that it's all kind of interesting seeing the pattern repeat one big thing, and this kind of ties in with one of the points I use a lot is for whom does society exist? Is it for the productive? Is it for the best? Is it for the people who need
the most help? I think recently we've seen it beat for the people who need the most help, which has its advantages and disadvantages, but is a big change from twentieth century, eighteenth century, nineteenth century Western history.
And it's existed before, but it's rare.
And if you get into why, I think the pattern you really see in this thing that's relevant and happens a lot is egalitarianism, or this belief that there's no difference in human capability between people or between people groups, and that if any difference does present itself, it's the job of the government to come in and crush it
with whatever amount of force or regulation is necessary. So you see that in the French Revolution, you see that in England in the late nineteenth century, and you see that really in America starting in perhaps the sixties or seventies, but then really ramping up in the two thousands.
So I think we're in one of those patterns.
Where it's the battle of egalitarianism or hyper egalitarianism versus you know, human capability and technology gives us such ways to express ourselves and show differences in human capability. We're really seeing that struggle now, and I think it's a struggle we've seen before.
You referenced mostly sort of newer history, French Revolution and forward. So does that seem to be more a symptom of like a fluence, Like maybe when you've sort of gotten rid of the base needs that then those types of things become an issue. You know.
I think I just happened to reference more modern history because there's so many more sources that are far easier to read. Okay, if you want a more ancient example, and I think you're right that affluence makes this a bit deal where it presents itself more frequently. But if you want an older example, you can look at the egalitarianism under despotism of the pre Indo European European societies Katul Hayuk. I think as I pronounced it as one of the more famous ones, but everyone just lived in
these horrid, Favella like worlds. These cramped cities were disease. Disease was rife and spread it quickly, and the invaders that stamped a lot of that out were very hierarchical, and it was this long centuries long battle between the
two groups. Would this pastoralist society from the step which we've seen in history, repeat itself a lot when and the hierarchy that it carried with it when and the sky got it carried with it whin Or would these despotisms and other than the king at the top, the galitarian society completely beneath him, Is that what would win?
So we've seen the fight before.
But I think you're right that affluence both makes the cycles quicker and makes it a little bit easier to see.
Yeah, it seems like maybe once you're not so concerned about having enough food to live, for example, then you can start to worry about other people, right, and if they're equal as equal as you are, right, I want, I want to pull on some of these threads, but I want to go back maybe a little bit in time. So obviously you're super knowledgeable about this. You write about this,
and I'm curious. Why is it because you're just interested in curious or is it because you see like maybe there's lessons that we can learn and we could benefit from. I'm curious sort of how you guys started diving down these deep history rabbit holes and specifically why.
Yeah, it is very random.
When I was a teenager, I don't know if you've ever heard of Soldier Fortune magazine, but it was.
A folder fortune.
Yes, yes, yeah, it was kind of like a military magazine.
But the guy who founded it, I think his name's Robert Brown, wrote a memoir that I found in Bornes and Noble when I was just kind of plotting around looking for something to do, and read it and he mentioned Rhodesia in it, which is a country I'd never
heard of before. So I went and started reading about it and kept reading about it, and I noticed that there's this country that was, you know, relatively free and prosperous, and really the only difference between it and the countries that weren't destroyed during the decolonization push was that it
was relatively hierarchical and non egalitarian. The rights were respected for all, but it was a different society formation than we really see elsewhere in the West now, And so that got me interested, and I kind of kept reading out about it out of personal interest. But then I had started to notice that if you look at the problems America faces now, the things that really made life just awful in twenty.
Twenty and twenty twenty one for a lot of.
People, it was this refusal to recognize nature and you know, recognize that different people have different capabilities that should be cherished and strengthened to the best vability, but certainly have to be recognized.
I think.
So I started reading more about decolonization in Africa because of that, because it's one of these really stark examples of seeing this just collapse happen, and we know why, and we have all the day a lot because it's very modern and very recent result catalogued and them, and that's how I also got into the Old World because I noticed that why did the English Empire decline? Why
did it collapse? It was this magnificent empire that lifted people out of poverty and squalor for century and at one point covered I think a quarter of the world surface, and then at the point where its decline began, it was gone within a couple decades. So what happened there? And I noticed many of the same trends that happened in Southern Africa, particularly Rhodesia, happened in England as well.
And then at the same.
Time you saw these mass riots, just things on fire and politicians having this very odd way. I thought of talking about it and so kind of sense the commonalities and thought it might be helpful to get deeper into why these collapses happened in what ways they relate to the American experience.
Do you when you go back even further, I mean, it is the same things that you see repeating even back to the Roman Empire. And is it sort of like this two hundred and fifty year lifespan of an empire or democracy something like that?
Maybe I think in some ways it is the looting of the treasury phase of democracy or a decayed republic is certainly something that plays out very frequently, and we see that in America, we see it in Greece, we see it in Rome, and same with to Piffody call it democracy's tendency to choose Barabbas, which is from the story of Christ where Brabas was chosen by the crowd over Christ when pilot asked who the crowd wanted to free.
And you see that in Athens, for example, where they chose Alcibiades, just terrible expedition to Sicily that really ended Athens as this important city state because Sparta defeated it because of that. So you see democracy making patent decisions frequently and ending empires because of it, which is very.
Relevant to America.
I do think though, that the what we call the Enlightenment, in this kind of birth of liberalism as a political force, it did change things somewhat because if you look at you know, say the War of Spanish Succession in seventeen hundred, there's not this ideological bent to it about egalitarianism or about leveling. And similarly, if you get back to Rome, they had conflicts with the Germans and didn't see the barbarians on the step as their equals. But it wasn't
this ideological fight. It was just a fight, as you're talked about earlier, to fight for survival. Whereas in the post French Revolution, post mid seventeen hundred's world, there's this ideology of leveling that's attendant to a lot of conflict, and I think it's very hard to detach from it. And though that impulse has existed before, I think the dominance of it as an ideology and something to which just so many people in positions of power attached is something relatively near.
It makes this era different from ones that preceded it.
Yeah, you said that democracy ends a lot of times because of bad decisions? Is that? I think you had written a piece talking about was it maybe Socrates and how they had thought about a democracy? And I think you likened it to how could you vote for a captain of a ship if you know nothing about saling? Was that your writing? But you talk about democracy any
because of bad decisions? And so is that where you have sort of ruled by the mobs, but the uneducated mobs who are uneducated and don't understand the situations like so, for example, in this last presidential election states maybe one of the top issues was inflation. For example, most people have zero idea about inflation or what causes it. So then how do you vote for somebody to fix inflation if you don't even understand what the situation is that has caused it?
Right, one thing that comes up when you mentioned that. Now, I'll get to your foot in one second, and this just reminds me of it. If you say, well, you know, perhaps some there's some people who, because they've been pread to rule, they might do a better job at governing, at least on the edges, at least comparatively to the average.
And people say, well, there's reversion to the mean.
It's hard to do this over time because everyone just reverts the mean. And in some ways that's true. You revert to the mean of your ancestors. But do race horses revert to the mean of donkeys. No, If they do, it's very rare. And so I think that's something you run into with democracy as a system, is because there's no guidelines on who can vote.
And Athens at least had a system.
Where if you proposed a law, you did it with a news around your neck, because if the chain to their current laws were voted down and you proposed it, you'd be hanged because they didn't want this constant turmoil of law suggestion, which we of course don't have, And so republics can mind some of the old benefits of aristocracy with some of the other benefits of democracy, which
I think there's a great mix there. In America did it quite well for a period, but mass democracy has this problem where that you know, the worst will always outweigh the best if their votes are all equal, and that's something you really don't want. You want to have some limitation that it keeps the vote or keeps the ability to steward the wealth and prosperity in future of the nation in the hands of people who I think
have shown the ability to steward things personally. Rhodesia did that with property voting, as America and Britain did up until the eighteen thirties. I don't think it has to be hereditary, but it does certainly need to be limited to people who have shown personal a personal ability to have the qualities that you want of the qualities of people in charge.
I know that kind of jump around at the.
End of it and maybe it's more than that. It's even skin in the game. It's in centron systems, if you will. Right, So, like I used to live in a gated neighborhood. I didn't really like the rules they had, so I moved out of the gated neighborhood. But I
don't get a vote in that gate neighborhood anymore. Or if I went and rented a home in that neighborhood, I don't get a vote because I don't own the I'm just renting a home in that neighborhood, and so I have no incentive system or I'm not incentivized to keep that neighborhood up. So I wouldn't want to pay to increase the rates because I don't care what the streets look like. For example, I don't care if it brings home values down since I don't own a home
in that area. Because you're trying about some sort of a system like that would incentivize.
That right, and you know, as a skin in the game.
Example, A Rishi Sunac is the former Prime Minister of Britain who did a very bad job of it is probably the charitable way of putting it. He's now considering just coming to America and going back to being a banker here because he's done with politics in England. And I think if you're a leader who can destroy the country and then just leave and go back to having a normal career, someone else he never really had skin in the game. How his policies played out or her
policies played out didn't really matter. Is so could kind of whatever could happen, it didn't matter. There's no need to steward things. There's no need to plan ahead. Whereas you know, when it was the aristocracy or the gentry running things in eighteen thirty, if they did something that was so bad it costs a revolution, they were going to have to deal with that, and all their wealth was tied up in a given counties, so they'd be
done if something that happened. And so you see, I think much more reasonable decision making and much more planning for the long term. This ability to plant trees and the shade of which you'll never sit, but your grandchildren will. That's one of the hallmarks of Western civilization, and it's something that the high time preference of mass democracy really just erodes. So yes, I think you do need a way to have skin in the game for the long term.
That mass democracy as a system generally doesn't provide.
The high time preference of democracy specifically around sort of like a two year or four year cycle where I'm here for two years or four years, I see what I could do, so maybe I get voted in back again and maybe I don't.
Right, And you see this in other areas of life and some America too. A ceo pay is a great example. How many just horror stories have we heard of CEOs having their compensation based on very short term metrics something they get this huge golden parachute, but the company just is destroyed in the long run. That General Electric is one famous example. They're kind of The oil boom of the early two thousands is another with how that played out.
But you see that just on a grander scale. And democratic politics where people don't have to plan for the long term, so they don't they plan for the election cycle you mentioned, which is nevery deleterious.
I think dark country when.
You think about I think you'd written about sort of like when you look in through the long lens of history, it's typically sort of powerful men that drive drive that influence right. So whether that might have been old powerful men as in you know, fighting ability, for example, ability to conquer, they drove sort of that policy shift. Today you might argue that we still have powerful men driving things, but now it's more like soft power, right through politics
but even also through money. I'm curious how how you think about that powerful mean driving that narrative, and how that shifted over time and why that matters.
It certainly shifted. There's one I find it very funny anecdote about this. Around the first decade of the twentieth century, the Prime Minister in England was Floyd George, and he was creating a large number of peerages, which are the aristocratic titles for different merchants and bankers and people in England who wanted one and donated a lot to his party.
And the old Lord, one of the people who had arrived with William the conqueror in the Conquest about a thousand years before, approached him in the House of Lords and was berating him for this and more. George, you didn't know the man's background, said well, where did you get your title? What did your family do? And Thelloyd George said, where did you get your title. The lord looked at him and said, with the battle axe, sir, with the battle.
Axe, and left it there.
So it's kind of a funny story, but it does the authority this does right here. Yes, we still have it on the wall at oh I can show you the And you know, that's a different type of authority because, for one, that elite isn't just a rentier class as a purpose, and that's military leadership, which it did largely exercise around the end of the Boer War, perhaps when
that ended. There's a long history of suffering and fighting and bearing the brunt of the country's foreign adventures that had existed for a thousand years, and they continued to exercise.
So then when they're considering.
Policies that they have skin in the game regarding that both at home with land and taxes and then abroad with having to be the ones who are going to go fight in Sudan or wherever. And that's a different system.
Whereas that started to shift, as the story shows, towards this merchant class that certainly brought a great degree of prosperity to the country and certainly did America Mendling, Chaping, Morgan or Rockefeller but it's a different sort of person and the skin in the game because the instruments are so financialized and somewhat made up, or at least it's
not a real asset, it's an abstracted one. Their power and their wealth is somewhat different, where they have a different conception of the state of the country, the state of prosperity, and what their duties are, if any, to their fellow citizens. And I think that's really the big shift you see over time, and it happens again and again.
Is this old landed elite kind of rule.
Is it going to be the Rome of the patricians and the equities, or the Britain of the lords and gentry, or the America of the Virginia gentry that existed for a long time, or is it going to be a country of merchants and bankers that are very successful but certainly have different priorities and different priors that they bring to the table. And it's a shift you see repeatedly, and I think we saw it in the twentieth century.
So do you think it's a difference in the type of wealth that they have. So you mentioned sort of like Richie Suna, who just can move and can potentially just take his wealth with them, because you know, whatever it's in the markets, as opposed to the class of the old who really had it tied up in the land, so they got driven off the land, they had no more assets, and so today you have this sort of oligarchy,
if you will. But they sort of have this wealth that's like global wealth, and they could just kind of go wherever. And you think that's sort of like one of the main things that really changes the skin of the game, if you will. On that.
I think that's certainly part of it.
And I think kind of the other aspect of it is if you look at how wealth was measured in say eighteen hundred, and the novels of Jane Austin are great for this. It wasn't the capital value of whatever asset was, whether bonds or land or yeah anything. It was the income it produced, because that's what the person who held it could live off of. And then because they didn't have to worry about having an income, they could serve the state and were expected to do so,
whether it was in parliament or the military. America similarly with congress and military that died around the same time, the shift transitions, and now we never hear about someone's income, unless it's just some ridiculous situation. Instead we hear about the nominal value of their capital wealth, right, And I think what's implied by that is that it's going to be sold, because you know, if it's a I think Amazon doesn't pay dividend.
If you have Amazon stock, you.
Might have a huge nominal wealth, but you're going to have to sell it to get anything out of that.
And if you're selling it, that means it's not permanent.
Of course, I think the exception there are bare assets like bitcoin, because hopefully I don't want to sell those gold.
But you know, if it's a financial asset that's.
Not producing a yield or it's not producing income from it, you have to sell it. And as such, your time horizons are not infinite. They're not for you know, the seven generations down the line. It's instead a much shorter timeline. It's you know, what's going to happen in the next year or two, because I'm going to need to think about this. And I think that is something we see with our elite is you know, Nancy Pelosi will make a stock trade that everyone hears about or Dan Crenshaw
will do the same and everyone will hear about it. Yeah, and they never focus on the dividends of the companies they trade. They're just trading them based on political events. And I think we see that a lot. It's the sound short term ism that's inculcated by the way mel Leftlows measured and the global nature of it.
Although you have you know, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk being the richest man in the world because he didn't sell his stock, will trade his stock and he has just owned it. Although there are stories of Musk kind of being broke and having no money at all. Right,
I've seen resting stories of that. And then you have on the other side, you have you know, not so much in the US, in the US as well, but maybe over in England as well as like maybe multiple generations that have owned a castle or some part of land, but there's no income from that. So now they own this land, they own this castle, they can't even afford to keep it up. So is that just is that because the wealth has shipped away from that type of asset or what happened there.
That's a really interesting story. Is so that was one of the changes that happened. At the end of the nineteenth century. Two things kind of came to a head. One was the opening of the American Midwest. We don't really think about it in these terms, but if you look at what the prairie was in say eighteen seventy, it was this virgin territory with fourteen fifteen feet of incredibly fertile tops where you didn't need fertilizers, you could
just plow it and plant grain. And also railroads meant that you could take that grain anywhere steamships, railroads, it could go from Kansas to Britain and the relative link of an eye. So this entire half of a continent was opened up to grain growing. And I promised the skin in your question, it's agriculture history.
But all this grain was grown.
And the same thing was happening in the Ukrainian region of the Russian Empire to the lesser extent. And it's all this grain from this incredibly fertile soil, which meant the cost of production was near zero. Because of steam and rail, the cost of transportation was near zero. So anywhere that up to this point it had some degree of struggle or at least had to care about how
they grew things. Could now just import it. There's so much grain that they could just import where people could be fed and prices were low, which was good because it fed people.
The problem was.
Without tariffs, which were called corn laws and died out around the end of the eighteen forties, and England and kind of similarly elsewhere, although Prussia anyway.
England I think.
Is a great example because it got rid of its corn laws so its agricultural market was open. And in the eighteen seventies grain starts pouring into England, particularly the end of the saving the end of the seventies, and it sets up this agricultural depression because what the traditional tenant system was. There's a tenant farmer who rented up say three hundred acre farm from the lord who owned say three thousand acres, and the tenant would pay rent to the lord and then keep the rest of the
profits from the farm. That worked pretty well when grain was a reasonable price. When it became super cheap because of imports, the farms died. Both the farmers just had no ability to grow anything for profit anymore, and the lords who up to that point had been renting the land and then serving in the military or parliament. No longer had any rents to John, so they started having
to sell things, their time horizons became shorter. Impaired with that were death taxes, because up to this point, death taxes had been pretty much gone. They're really briefly revived under Napoleon, but because they were one of the most hated taxes of the medieval system, just caused Baron's Wars, caused all this trouble. The governments had got rid of them. They came back around the turn of the century. A Winston Churchill and Lord George were largely responsible for that
in Britain. In America just followed suit with Wilson, and death taxes meant that now when you died, you start to have to sell land. But land wasn't worth as much because of the depression, and so it's this huge blocks of land going on an i liquid market for asset that no one wants, and it wiped out the estates. It's kind of my point. So you have these grand country houses, High clear Chatsworth.
High Cleared was falling apart.
Before Doubt and Abbey, but there's no land to fund it because it's all been taxed away. And the problem with those taxes was it was the nominal value of the land, not the income it produced. So when they're not producing income and you have to sell the whole thing, that.
The states just decayed. So it takes the assets out of the old owners.
Who kind of cared about it for the future and puts it in the hand to people who don't really care. They're going to put a solar farm on top of it. It's going to poison the agricultural land. And right, that's what we're saying now. So they were just taxed away, and the depression and knocks them outs with the unintended consequences of these policies.
And that's what we see in the US today right where it's like, to your point, they're putting solar panels on the land, which makes it more valuable, but if you want to farm it, you can't make enough income to pay the taxes.
Right, you know, the American equivalent. One of the closest ones is if you look at the main street, tap the main street of these towns in the Midwest, it used to be these thriving industrial hubs. You know, whether it was producing lead pipe or wing nuts or shoes or whatever it was, all of that got outsourced because
of free trade and these different policies. So now where it used to be there's a relatively prosperous upper class that owned the factories, middle class that kind of did the administration of them, and working class that.
Worked in them.
All of that was just obliterated by these policies. So now what used to be these thriving little towns that led to human flourishing, which I think is a end goal of civilization within them, oll now there are just you know, some people do fentanyl there and otherwise there's stumble weeds going through.
It's really har realic.
How much of that is policy versus just technology. So if you think about technology going back right through history, it's always sort of changed the way that we work and communicate and organized, change the balance of power, all of those things. Right, So, like you have the industrial revolution that brought people into cities and factories. Then you had you know, Henry Ford created the assembly line, which
created this massive middle class. Everybody sort of equal on an assembly line almost, So then you created this mass management system to manage everybody, like a cog in a wheel. Then you created like a mass government structure to manage all of that. So you have this massive middle class because everybody was sort of equal put in their cog
on the wheel. But now we've sort of gone from the industrial age to the information age, right, and so now we certainly those those low pain industrial jobs have gone overseas to lower pain workers. But in the information age, it allows knowledge workers to excel faster because some people are just smarter. There's no a dude galitarian, right, And so I think about sometimes like, certainly we've sent the
middle class over to China. We could bring those jobs back, But wouldn't that be a kin to putting people in the field to pick cotton and strawberries. They're low paying jobs today, right? And if so, how much of it was I mean some of it was policy, for sure, But how much would you say it's just times changed? Technology has shifted that There are.
Two issues there.
One, you're definitely right that the current like knowledge economy of powers the people who are able to take advantage of that, which is good and I think a good thing generally because people are able to do these things they wouldn't been able to do before it costs next to nothing to start a business. Now, which is very good has empowered a lot of people.
So I think you're right on.
That there are just these changes. I think the other side, though, is that we still need steel. You know, we still need natural gas, we still need oil. In some places, these companies are able to thrive. You know, a Germany up until the kind of recent unpleasantness had a thriving industrial sector alongside its other thriving sectors. And I think what you get there, what you got and say nineteen hundred in America with McKinley, are policies meant to protect
the innovative companies that produce these things. So New Core is a steelmaker in America that is much more efficient than US steel. They use electric arc well, or they use electricity rather than coal essentially for their production of steel. From what I understand, it makes them very competitive with the Chinese market. Say so, whereas a US steel just got hammered by these Chinese imports, New Core has been
able to hold on and do reasonably well. I think what you want, though, is you want more of those domestic jobs being produced, because not everyone can succeed in the knowledge economy, and I think to have a thriving internal market, you need jobs for people different ways up the ladder. So you don't want these legacy companies just being zombie companies and holding on because of tariffs and
drawing in resources that they shouldn't be. But you also don't want to stifle domestic innovation by letting people who have other interests take advantage of your market. Like when China, for example, is subsidizing it's steel sectors so that the price can be much lower than whatever America without those subsidies can produce. I think that creates a problem. So
I think both sides of it are true. I think you want to protect domestic innovation without just turning things stagnant, which is a tough f Lind walk, But.
I think the important one, yeah, which gets to a bigger question. I want to ask you which willet to, which is sort of where do we go from here? But as I think through this, I think about some of these things, and I constantly kind of keep going back to sort of like the government just getting too big, and so a lot of these functions seem to be or some of these maybe unintended consequences seem to be
a consequence of just government just being too big. But then to the point that you're talking about of like, how do we think about policies that can protect the company these companies in these industries, and then that just again keeps the government sort of getting getting big. I want I want to come back to that though, because you write a lot about Rhodesia. As you said, that was sort of your spark that got you going to where you're at today.
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What do you see in in Rhodesia maybe sort of being like a microcosm of maybe where we're at today, and maybe what are some of the lessons that does. Is it just lessons that sort of show where we're going, like on a downward trajectory, or is there maybe some lessons of how we can turn things around?
Yeah, I think there's actually a great lesson in how things can function. And it's the opposite of Rubisia is Singapore. So as I talked about Rudizia earlier, the thing to keep in mind is that Leekwan need the opposite of all this, And now Singapore is one of the most thriving places in the world.
So would you also to throw like Dubai into that.
I think it's somewhat different in that its wealth was pumped out of the ground.
I think Dubai less than one percent of GDP comes from oil, really less than one percent of GDP. I was recently over there. I spoke at the Bigcoin conference there in December, the first time I went there, and I posted something on Twitter that got me crucified. I didn't know you couldn't say nice things about Dubai and being in La, it's a complete war zone. And I just said, hey, it's just interesting because I had all
these preconceived notions of Dubai. I had never been there, and so I had these preconceived notions, and when I got there, I have to say, it's the most magnificent city I've ever seen. I've never seen anything like it. It's the whole thing's brand new, twenty years old, the most technological advance, the biggest fountain, the tallest building, all
these things. But I just made a post and I said, it's interesting coming from La, which has the highest taxes in the nation, worst infrastructure of the nation, and not a single crane in the sky. You can tell a lot about a city by the development in Dubai has no taxes, the cleanest and best infrastructure I've ever seen in my life, and cranes everywhere. And then of course I got a million comments cruise, fine, Oh you should go live there. You want to live under a dictator.
You must want gay people to die, you know, Yeah, because everyone's their slaves, and yeah, because they stole all the oil.
So anyway, I had to.
Go look it up. Yeah, less than one percent comes from oil. They have no income taxes. They have corporate taxes of nine percent over if you make over a certain amount. But they sort of did a say Singapore day. It was just outcompete. But anyway, we'll table that. I started to take it down that rabbit hole.
But that's really interesting. Yeah it was.
And again it took me going there to like, like I said, challenge all the things. Like one thing I look at like a major problem that the Europe Europe has as well as America is like this immigration problem. But ninety percent of people in the UAE are all emigrants.
Yeah, well it's a different system.
There's a lot there.
There's a different system.
Of course. Let's get back to uh kind of the Rhodesia and the Singapore example.
Yeah, so you or the Dubai might be a great example of kind of sing more strategy then, because what I think about Singapore versus Rhodesia Zimbabwe, the big differences are pragmatic policies that are going to embrace human flourishing for the citizens of the country embraced or they just hated if they don't line up with ideology. At leak one you was non ideological. He just wanted Singapore to succeed.
And so you see the strange mix of like McKinley's style policies with non first world leadership and some priors that are very interesting where he's going to these conferences in Africa post colonal Africa, but then you know, really doing first world stuff at home. As his autobiography title third World the first kind of sum set up. So it's very pragmatic, works with the Chinese, works with the America, and it's this mix of stuff that whatever he needs
to do. And so Singpour is a huge success story because of that. He embraced this pragmatism. Rhodesia, on the other hand, under the Ian Smith government very much did that and worked with everyone to the Drew Creet could, But then Mugabe did not. He famously just destroyed the country by seizing the white farms and has that in Zimbabwe.
Yes, so Zimbabwe.
So Rhodesia became called Zimbabwe when Mudagia was elected in nineteen eighty in a very corrupt election.
So so Rhodesia was a colony of the.
UK kind of. It's an interesting story.
So Jamestown is you probably know, was a company colony that subscriptions were raised with the Virginia Company to make Jamestown.
Rodzia was somewhat similar.
Cecil Rhodes was this big promoter of the British Empire and he both wanted a railroad from the Cape to Cairo, so from South Africa to Egypt, and needed the middle of Africa to do that, and also just thought it was a good thing for the English Empire to expand because of the benefits for everyone involved, both for raising up the natives and for providing more resources and export markets for the home market. So he saw that there was this vast tract of territory north of South Africa
that was almost unpopulated. There had been some large wars amongst the Africans that meant the population was very low, and the population that was there was largely welcoming to
British settlement. Is the forget the name of the chief, but it was the Neballet tribe was in charge at the time, and there welcomed the British more or less so roads put together this company called the British South Africa company that using largely funding from England, and then men gathered in England and South Africa, and he was looking for men of higher.
Quality than you might expect. There were many pirate types.
It sent them into Rhodesia to settle the land, and he was really hoping was to settle it so that it was a stable conne where he could put a railroad through it, and that they'd find gold because at the time the rand mind in South Africa were just producing this huge flood of gold that helped the world economy coud bit and made the owner's fabulously wealthy. So rhodes wanted that tappen again in Rhodesia. He struck out
on the goal. There wasn't much there, but they did find the lands are fertile and it was very great for growing tobacco. So Rhodesia became this company owned essentially agricultural, unto a lesser remining settlement where these large estates were built up, because there's no history of agriculture there at least any real degree. So unlike Britain, where farms were constrained by say the three hundred acres in the all defenses of stone surrounding it and made really doing anything
on a mechanical scale difficult. In Rhodesia, there's no one there, so you could just use a tractor and go from horizon to horizon, back and forth, and you could really take advantage of the efficiency.
So it became this.
Hugely successful agricultural colony where their main export was tobacco and to a lesser free wheat and cattle. So under British South Africa Company it thrived until nineteen twenty one when it became self governing and the company was no longer in charge.
Okay, and then it continued on self governing and Til Moubobby came and turned it back into Zimbabwe in the eighties.
Yeah, so it remained part of the Commonwealth until nineteen sixty five. What happened then was so from nineteen twenty to nineteen sixty five it continued attracting settlement brought in. It had very strict immigration quality or controls, because they only wanted people who would integrate to the local environment to move there, so very strict and not a ton of people fled in, but enough to build it up as an economy.
The problem was.
That Britain after the mid fifties was very hostile to its empire.
It wanted to shed it.
It wanted mass democracy to rule in place of kind of European directed and led government. So first Kenya fell apart and a lot of the Empire started to decay. But then the Belgians who owned the Congo gave it
up to the Congolese. And what followed was a like a parade of horrors that are absolutely awful, particularly the Simba Rebellion, which was in like sixty two, sixty three, maybe sixty four, I can't quite remember, but in the early sixties it was just like all the Belgian nuns in the Congo were killed by these rebels, along with a lot of Conguise villagers.
There are just these.
Huge humanitarian catastrophes. And so the Rhodesians looked at the Congo and said, well, we don't want to do that. We don't want to turn into this just anarcic hellhole. We want a stable, responsible government. They call it responsible government. And the British said, well, no, you need mass democracy if you're going to remain part of the empire or
detach yourself from that. We want mass democracy, we want local rule, not white rule in Rhodesia, which was a problem because the African chiefs who inside Rdisia directed much of the black political power and general functioning administration. Agreed with Ian Smith, who was the Prime Minister of Rhodesia at the time, that really you need this responsible government system the Rhodesians had built up, which was a property voting one. As I hinted at earlier, it wasn't a
part idly in South Africa. There weren't these strict racial rules. There weren't really any racial rules except for schooling.
And for politics. For voting, it was simply that to vote in the national.
List, the A list, you needed to have the modern equivalent of about sixty thousand U s dollars of Rhodesian property. So whether I was a farm where there's a house doc and a rodishan company, whatever, you just needed that to be able to vote in national election.
They found that screened out.
The people who couldn't make good decisions, and we're pretty successful in doing it. And that's a system that they had as they rose to prominence and success. The British said that system was racist, demand to get rid of it, and so that sparked the Unilateral Decoration Independence in nineteen sixty five, where Rhodesia, using language drawn from the American Decoration Independence, broke away from the British Commonwealth and became
a fully independent country. But except for Portugal, South Africa and Israel, the rest of the world didn't didn't legitimize that, didn't recognize it as a country. So it led to this Bush War from nineteen sixty five to nineteen eighty or communist rebels that were backed by the Chinese and the Russians and also the Americans. The British attacked Rhodesia and tried to end it and bring in Mugabe, who was a dictator, and it eventually ended in his victory.
Yeah, and I mean then that's just continued across Africa, the decolonization, if you will. I've looked into pretty extensively, like what happened in South Africa, and I saw someone post just yesterday. I mean that seems like the whole African continent is sort of under some sort of war at this point.
Yeah, there's a.
Spat and I think the Congo right now between the South African military and I think Bulgarian military on one hand and the Rwandans on the other, and the Rwandans just one.
But it's terrible.
And if you look at what happened there, and the Congo is another good example, there were ways to end the chaos. Very early on in my core he might have heard of was a South African mercenary who at the request of the Congolese government ended the sembl rebellion and wanted to after the rebellion bring continued stability to the country. But the UN forced them out because it was a majority white militia or mercenary outfit, and they said, well,
that's racist and you have to leave. And so then the Congo got five decades of civil war with millions de millions of people dead because of that. And so it's very much the opposite of Singapore or instead of these pragmatic policies, you get this race communism essentially.
When I look at the Singapore example of the Dubai example, I mean again Singapore in Dubai seems to have set up a system that just sort of outcompeted in Dubai, I mean, their immigration is very strict, right, unless you're gonna be a productive member of society. You're not invited.
It's an invite on these society. But at the same time, they don't have all that industrialization to protect, right, they don't have steel companies to protect, so like Well, on one hand, that type of government seems to make sense, and it certainly has worked on a small scale, as we can point to at Singapore, maybe Hong Kong to
some extent Dubai, et cetera. That doesn't necessarily apply apples to apples over to the US, right, because the US needs to be almost more protectionist of their industries that they have. I think that's what you're sort of alluding to earlier.
Yeah, I think the policies you get from that sort of government are different and tailored to local circumstances.
You know.
One of leakwon U's famous innovations was he put air conditioning in every government office so that the bureaucrats would work in the afternoon instead of taking siestas, and it hugely boosted Singapore's governing capacity without having to bring on more people. You don't really need that in New York for London, and it's not the same thing. But I do think if you look at, say, what's the similarity
between Leekwon Yu and the President Kinley. It's this non ideological view of events and economics where they're going to take whatever step is necessary to protect the wealth of the nation and the stability of the nation, but do so because it will work condision's history of it working, not because some ideologic, ideological belief told them they had to do it.
It's I think that's the similarity.
When you talk about the colonies, as we just kind of talked about, it seems like everything in life that there's just trade offs. You know, Alex Gladstein, I'm sure you've come across his work plenty and he is, you know, one hundred percent and thinking that the colonies are the worst thing in the world. And from his viewpoint and the things that he talks about, the way that the French use the CFA to you know, debase the currency. I get it that those two like really bad things.
I can also see how there's also good things that happened, right, So they did bring civilization technology order to things that didn't have that before. So I think there's trade offs.
Maybe would you agree with that absolutely?
Yeah, So there's good things about colonization, but there's also bad things. It can be misused and abused, just like any other policy probably for that matter. So you know, to the point of removing the colonization is like entropy, and now it's just into chaos and evolving into you know, mass disorder, which is not good. So I guess what I'd like to maybe just pivot into and sort of to wrap this up is, you know, now you're well
versed in history. You've seen the differences of what happened with the French Revolution versus the American Revolution, all the way back to Roman Empire and even Socrates the way they think about this and the colonization. You know, you've mentioned a couple of times, you know, sort of how democracy fails and the reasons for that. Obviously, America was
founded as a republic, not a democracy. I'm curious what you think to be sort of this way forward, maybe first just for the United States, and then maybe how that fits into the world and then maybe I'm sure, since you're so well read, you're probably also from with the sovereign individual thesis and which way forward and do you think maybe it goes in that direction?
Yeah, there's a lot there.
Okay, just break it down yeah.
So the first thing in America, you have to stop the entropy, and I think that's often like the biggest hurdle because it has this vibe, for lack of a better.
Word, of paternalism.
You have to stop people from doing X or stop people from ten y. So if you don't want you know, some woman lit on fire in the subway, as happened in New York recently, you don't want these like random attacks in the street. You don't want crime that calls for a stronger stance against things. You don't necessarily need
a bigger government. You don't necessarily need cameras on every street corner that didn't have them in eighteen ninety, but you do need to have a just we're not going to deal with this approach to things.
Which I think is actual punishment. Yes, yeah, actual punishment. Whether it's not like here in California, where you can steal up to one thousand dollars without a being crime.
Yeah, in Singapore, they'll cane you where they tie you the ladder and hit you with a stick, and that works pretty well in terms of stopping this petty crime, whatever it is. Based on the country, you just have to find something where people aren't going to commit these crimes.
The entropy's going to stop, and you know that.
I think we know how to do, we just don't want to. But it's this tough one crime approach, whether you're putting in people in jail like Bukla or hitting them with rods like in Singapore something. The step after that is, I think you need to get rid of the short termism. At these short time horizons have just proven devastating to society, particularly industrial ones, where you have to take these long term steps to preserve and build the wealth of the nation. So how do you do that.
That's really a situation that situation thing. I think for companies, for example, because we talked about that earlier, you'd want to use probably the SEC guidance to encourage companies to think about the health of the company both during and after the CEO's tenure for pay and pushing it out rather than just the short termism. But you know, that's kind of up to companies and stuff. I think the bigger thing politically is finding ways to put limits on
mass democracy that work with our culture. Ever since Jackson, we've been somewhat of a universal suffrage nation. That's worked okay in some regards, so it definitely probably works okay for the House of Representatives. I do think the Senate is supposed to be different, So either removing the amendment about the Senate being a popular vote rather than state vote, or finding some way to do a new update a
new amendment about that I think would be helpful. I think also you'd probably want to look at something about a new amendment for voting where only net taxpayers could vote. I mean, preferably we're not going to have the income tax, but if we are, you don't want the people who can loot the treasury doing so. You want to have the people who are contributing something on net to both the governments.
Again as a game, yeah, skin in the game exactly. I've also thought that's like the easiest requirement. If you don't pay tax, you just shouldn't vote. Like just back to my homeowner example, if I don't live in the neighborhood anymore, if I don't own the home in the neighborhood, I probably shouldn't vote either.
Right, And you could kind of go down the rabbit hole of specificity with that, But I think broadly the mindset should be. How are we going to limit democracy somewhat so that we can bring about long term thinking With whatever you work, I think the net taxpayer thing is probably the lowest hanging for you, just because you know, everyone who's a productive citizen degreews with that more or less.
Some don't, but most do. So there's that.
Hey, I've talked about those people before, and this is the much tougher question. But inculcating virtue in people, both just those who kind of exist and definitely those who lead, is an important thing either. The Founding fathers after the Bible, the most common ancient work on their.
Shelf was Plutarch's Lives.
And Plutarch was a writer and early Empire Rome who discussed the lie. He called it the Lives of the Noble Romans and Grecians, and it was the great men of Greece and the great men of Rome, and discussing their character traits, both moral failings and moral virtues, and of course their stands some reality of someone different in Rome than ours. But he discussed them, and if you still go back and read them, very useful. And that's
a small example. But no school teaches Plutarch now, even though our founding fathers when they wrote our constitution and built our government, they're doing it with Plutarch in mind.
And that is because you can't legislate morality right right.
But you can't teach it.
I think so, I you know, our education system is flawed in many ways. I do think you voluntarily want to teach people to have the right morals. And everyone has a different opinion on the right morals. But I think, you know, generally this idea of stewardship and the duty and sacrifice are good things for people to think of, because.
Do you think do you think that's also like that that at that point I heard Jordan Peterson talk about that, So like build a country is built on Judeo Christian principles, have that self sacrifice built in, which is why somebody may get out at five and five am or three am in a in a in a hurricane to go fix a power line, where in another country maybe they
wouldn't do that. But also, like you know, early in America too, people went to church and people gave it the church, and the church took care of the needy. And today without that, it seems like a lot of people expect the state to take care of the need.
Right well, and you know that's another opportunity for a form that I think would be helpful. So you have the virtue angle, but then you just have the practicality of it. As talking with someone yesterday about you know, Trump is trying to slash if it's Wick or one of the other foodstamp programs.
But he says, it's just abused. We need to get rid of it.
There're different opinions on that, but I think it's very true that it's abused. People have known about this for ages. The ways you're able to get around it and use it to put money in your pocket. So you know, what separates that from a food bank is that the food bank is generally run by a church or some other organization that cares about the community. It's all local, where it's local people drawing from it and contributing to it. So there's these ties that bind you know, people in
the community, and so it's limited. They're not just going to keep giving you pasta to sell to buy cigarettes with. They're going to, you know, expect you to feature family with it. And what that does is it gets rid of this concept of just philanthropy is this broad exercise where once you contribute the money, you don't have to worry about it, whether it's tax dollars or whether it's giving a billion dollars to some African country for mosquito nets.
They're just skins for fishing and over fish. Instead, it's more no less oblieged. It's this older system that you have a duty to those around you. You should be attached to the people in your community into what you can for them, and so you know, whether it's church or whether it's something secular and just built around making at work. As a Christian, I'd say the church is more useful for this.
But the problem is the secular people don't. Most secular people don't have that self sacrifice, right right.
Yeah, Yeah, there's a host of problems.
Yeah, but I think drawing things.
In locally, kind of what we were talking about earlier with what changes you need to make, I do think localism will be helpful because every community's needs are different and also the opportunities there are different. So taking things away from the federal government's ability to dictate them and putting in them, putting them in the hands of local people of prominence I think would be hugely helpful, both
on the charity and self sacrifice angle. But then also I'm making America prosperous again.
Yeah, yeah, So I want to ask you the question of which way forward. But based off of all of that, it sounds like you still have a lot of help for the future.
I do. I think a lot of people blackfill.
They just have this sense of doom, which you're even somewhere like Spain or France that might be closer to reality.
I think of a debt everything, they're gonna have a lot of trouble.
But I think in America we still just because our society became so prosperous and effective and really good at things, we have this vast store of capital that we're able to draw down and build on. And we've been in the draw down stage for a while. That's why things are getting worse. That's why, as you mentioned, the roads are just awful everywhere, and you can't go to the mall because you'll get shot. But it can also be
built upon. We have all these things where you know, we had an effective society, We have all the remnants of it. We just need to rebuild it in a different way that works better than the last one did. But I think in America we should certainly have hope that a lot of these things can be improved and fixed, and once we fix them and kind of move forward, I think there's a good reason for hope.
So then moving forward, we'll finish it up with this like I throughout the sovereign individual thesis.
And so for those that don't know, I mean, it's.
A book written and you should certainly read that book. I like it sort of my worldview, but it sort of paints this picture back to kind of going into this information age of us being able to sort of move more globally, if you will, because we're in cyberspace, not being tied down as much to one local area, like we kind of talked about like the old lords of the past that had their land in the local area.
But it also talked.
About a structure of small sort of entrepreneurial driven skin in the game localities or small governments, if you will, maybe not unlike what the United States was meant to be at some point in its founding. What do you think the way forward is?
I think one kind of issue with framing of just that esis generally is we've tried the atomized individual thing, and it works out very poorly for a lot of people.
There are some people who thrive in.
That circumstance, but you also get a lot of depths of despair and people like having a community to which they're attached. And now that doesn't mean you need a big government, that doesn't mean you need all the trappings we have now.
But I do think that at least for most.
People, some degree of community is a useful exercise and something that they want. So then I think the question becomes, how do you build community in a way that you're both self sovereign and the community is sovereign. And I don't know if you're familiar with it, but Blagie, I won't try pronouncing his last names.
Trinavastin wrote that book.
That never state.
Yeah, And I do think the concept of city states of the future Singapore and Dubai. Of course your city states is a very useful one because those are bigger city states. But the community that can be built and the sovereignty that can be built by building a new prosperous place, I think is something that we're going to see more of. Prospera is trying to figure it out off the coast of Honduras, I think, and there's c
stetting some other things. I think that free cities type thing is something that really helped Europe get its way out of the Middle Ages and is something that would help us now with kind of our present dark age. So I don't think it's individual atomization, but I do think the breaking up of some of these old calcified states and forms is going to be both going to happen and going to be useful as it happens.
Yeah, I mean, not the individual to the person thesis, but just like as I said, sort of like you know, the US is fifty independent states as opposed to everything being federal, right where like now three hundred and thirty million people live under one regime where it's supposed to
be sort of like one state. And then even to the point where the states have gotten way bigger and probably should have been cut up at some point even as well, right so, and then maybe going back to like a county structure, ye, just if you will.
Right, well, yeah, and that's the one thing people forget. It's clear though if you read works of the time, that the county was the unit people depended on. Gone with the Wind is that famous book about Civil war Georgia, But in it they rarely talk about the state. They never talk about either of the national governments. It's the county. You know, what are people in the county doing to mobilize? What's county leadership looking like? Who are the men of
note in the county? And that condense things locally where it's a useful thing to care about because you know about the problem children. You know, you know about the people have not It's more useful and more manageable as a human And you know, the information age has expanded the ability to be useful somewhat, but I still think there are only so many things you can keep track of even with computers.
Do you think that bitcoin can sort of help to shape I would say, but maybe even force that a little bit, right where like if if it does, you know what, what I think is sort of maybe separating money in state and which would then sort of limit the states never ending ability to grow. Then it sort of sets constraints on what they're able to do.
Yeah, I think it's hopeful.
I think the problem with relying on it completely is that Prussia existed during the gold standard era, as did the Czars Russia, and I know those are different than that. There are the gold standards different from bitcoin, but tyranny can still exist in a hard money world.
I think, what's the.
Most useful or most hopeful thing about bitcoin, as you as you're talking about with your neighbor, but the ability to move, vote with your feet and say I'm done with this, I'm not putting up with anymore, because it's the perfect bearer hasset where you can just leave.
Yeah, but the thing was like Pressia and just I mean just wars and tyranny with the gold standard is like to the point that you made earlier about the lords of old, like I could just get up and leave with all my wealth, so then I was certainly under that thumb of tyranny as well as if you came and took me over, you also took all my wealth, so that made the return, as the sovereignividuals say, right,
the return on violence is very high. Right, But if you can't come and take me over and take my wealth, or if I could just leave and take my wealth with me, then it makes the return on vines very low.
Right. I think there's something there. I think you're right.
I think you know the barons, for example, if you read about the Plantagenet kings in England, so kind of up to the fourteen hundreds, all these barrens wars where the king would try and take something and they'd say, well, we're not doing this, We're going to fight. I think kind of how gold and silver enabled that at the time, because if you pay mercenaries with gold or silver and you know them or as people that rely on you, there's not really anything an outside force can do about that.
They can try and stop you, but that's different from saying, as happens with credit cards or cash, now you can't do that. We're going to stop you before you get I think bitcoin is kind of helpful like you're talking about, and that even if someone comes for you, they can't mess with you in the same way they can with cash. So I think it's very useful and I think it's
hopeful for liberty moving forward. I think the ways we'll see a play out are probably gonna be unexpected, at least from what I'm thinking about.
But I think these city states are.
Going to be powered by bitcoin, powered by just similar type of things that take, as you said, money out of the state's hands.
Yeah.
All right, Well we covered a lot of ground that's super fascinating. I love history, not near as much as you do, but hopefully everybody thought this was as interesting as I did. I'm certainly going to link to a bunch of your writing down below in the show notes down below, so people can get caught up and read your stuff, anything that you want to point their attention to specifically.
Yeah, if you go to either my Twitter or my substack, which will probably be linked up, just the top articles that are on there where I've written about this stuff the most. So if anything interested you, it's probably on there too. You can just find more about it contact me through Twitter, all right, thanks so much. Well, yeah, thanks for having me on