Welcome to the Free Cities Podcast. My name is Timothy Allen and this is the official podcast
of the Free Cities Foundation.
Hello and welcome to this episode number 129 of the Free Cities podcast.
Well, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are in the world.
And this is your weekly reminder that countrywide power outages are a thing and they're something that's worth contemplating.
you may have seen and i mentioned it on last week's show that spain and portugal experienced
major power outages recently for me it was a couple of days ago i'm recording this in advance
i quote houses offices trains traffic lights and even madrid open tennis tournament were all hit
causing chaos for millions of people now you may wonder why this happened i did and the two answers
that most easily come to mind are incompetency and of course conspiracy but to be honest either
way it doesn't matter which one it was it matters that it happened and if you are the kind of person
that would like to insulate yourself from these kinds of problems in life then I would like to
introduce you to Veritas Village our most excellent sponsor for this episode. Now Veritas
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notes and click on the link in there back to today's show and it's a fascinating one ian underwood
My guest has been, well, a planetary scientist, an artificial intelligence researcher for NASA,
the director of the renowned Ask Dr. Maths service, the co-founder of Bardo Farm and
Shaolin Rifleworks, and a popular speaker at Liberty-related events.
he's also written 20 books on liberty related subjects i'll give you some of the names to give
you an idea of the way he thinks barefoot learning political conversation in three jokes the lie
behind licensing and the libertarian case for public schools now we had a very long and interesting
conversations a two-hour one and very i found it pretty hard to sum up what we spoke about so i'm
actually quite interested to hear what the AI made of this conversation. We did cover quite a
bit of ground. Okay, let's see. Timothy Allen engages in a thought-provoking discussion.
Blimey AI, you always say that. Just think up something new. Maybe I should instruct it too.
With Ian exploring the multifaceted relationship between individual rights, government authority,
and societal norms. The conversation begins with a dive into the nuances of gun ownership across
cultures, particularly contrasting American perspectives with European views on self-defense
and government power. Ian shares his insights on the philosophical underpinnings of governance,
emphasizing the importance of consent and individual rights. The dialogue evolves into
a broader examination of how technology reshapes our understanding of governance,
community interactions and the potential for new models of societal organisation. As they navigate
topics such as the role of education in shaping responsible citizens, the implications of social
credit systems and the evolving landscape of political discourse, the conversation challenges
listeners to reconsider the foundations of their beliefs about freedom, responsibility
and the purpose of government. Now that's actually pretty good for once. AI, well done.
It was quite a mind-blowing conversation for me actually because Ian introduced me to
a new model of governance that he has come up with himself. The AI didn't really pick up on it
too much there but listen out for the part where Ian lays out his new and phenomenally interesting
model of governance a sort of version of extreme personal responsibility that uses 21st century
technology to create what looks like an extremely equitable system for all. Ian's a really interesting
bloke I have to say and I love conversations like this. I was genuinely impressed with this idea
and as far as we know we discussed it it's actually a new idea if you don't think so I'd
love to hear from you because I've always thought there's no new ideas in the world these days but
I'd love to talk about it more with somebody else anyway I very much hope to make another trip
back to Ian and his wife's 300 acre off-grid homestead in New Hampshire and record another
interview sometime in the meantime many thanks Ian and enjoy this one folks it's a good one as
I said last week there will be no Bitcoin strategic reserve and NOSTA comments this week since I'm
recording this intro in advance again and we'll be away speaking in Morocco at the Plumia Connect
Summit so I'll be bringing back the comments next week along with some very new and obviously
stimulating conversations from my trip see you soon and always remember to enjoy these conversations
the way they are intended by myself you guessed it just sit back relax and enjoy my conversation with
ian underwood
that's pretty much it you don't need a permit for an air rifle but you do for a shotgun
and there's quite strict rules about it.
You have to keep it in a special type of cupboards,
a metal cupboard, and you're not allowed to keep the ammo there.
You have to keep that somewhere else.
And can they come and inspect anytime they want?
Probably.
I don't know because I only have an air rifle.
But they're, yeah, I mean, they're not.
It's very difficult to kill someone with an air rifle,
But you would never do anything other than shoot small animals, really.
I mean, and the American view on it, depending on who you're talking to, it's not necessarily about self-defense, right?
It's about defending yourself from your government.
I know.
Yeah, that is a common misconception amongst Europeans.
I've talked a lot about that on this podcast.
And that was a big lesson for me, actually.
Yeah.
Like we aren't forced in Europe to have the debate about a number of things that you do.
Guns is one of them.
Abortion.
Things like this.
We just don't have it forced on us.
So we don't have to choose a side.
But I do enjoy the process of deciding.
And with both of those, both guns and abortion, I can see the value of both arguments.
and my conclusion is with abortion or no my conclusion with the guns for example is
that yes protecting yourself from your government is phenomenal um
the and being able to defend yourself of course but if i was given a choice between a very
a culture with a huge amount of guns or a culture with no guns currently i'd still go for the no
guns one because there's almost no gun crime at all like and there's no accidental deaths by guns
etc etc but obviously yeah you would probably look back over us and go well look your government's
treating you like pieces of shit and if you had guns you wouldn't be so it's very hard to say
because yeah we're all we're living in different scenarios if i was living here i'm almost certain
i would own a load of guns and i would be the same as that but there's the option's not there
I mean, it's a different culture, certainly.
But also, you don't get the choice of a society with no guns because you can make them in your garage.
They're not complicated machinery.
You can spend thousands of dollars and get a very nice, precise one.
But something that will just shoot at this distance and protect you or hurt somebody, it's a tube.
It's a metal tube, you know?
Right.
What about the ammunition, though?
I reload my own ammunition.
And you can have black powder.
You can literally, if you want to, make black powder at home.
You can melt lead into balls.
You could use whatever technology they had in, say, 1830, you know, out in the western United States.
You could do all that yourself, you know, and you can make the parts on any kind of machinery.
If you've got a mill and you've got a lathe, you can make a gun.
So it's not, it's sort of like saying, let's have a society without arithmetic.
You can't because somebody is going to figure it out and then you can do it.
So that's sort of the discussion that you have a lot in America is people say, yes, we should have no guns.
And it's like, you can't have no guns.
You can, because people who want guns are always going to have them.
So the question is only whether everybody else can have them.
The people who won't do the damage, the people who won't harm anybody, you can take them away from them.
because if they're law-abiding, they'll let you and they'll say,
well, I guess I have to give up my guns.
But the people who really need to use guns as tools are always going to have them.
I think that was my conclusion is that the arms race in guns has started
and it can't be stopped.
So in the U.S., you can't backtrack.
So you have to look at where you are and then make a decision based on that.
And the decision has to be, if you want to be fair, if you want to be free,
is it's up to everyone to do what they want to do right yes but it's almost like we didn't sorry
about it it's almost like we didn't really we haven't gone down that route yet and as a result
nobody thinks about it no one thinks about guns even it's it's very rare to see a policeman with
a gun no no local policeman would would have a gun you have specialist gun units that okay that
operate in cities i thought that had changed when i was a kid i knew that you know the london
bobbies would just have a nightstick and that was it but i thought that changed and you now see
them on street corners in in cities yeah in the middle of westminster where the politicians are
and right and they're not handguns and i don't think they're whatever automatic i don't know
what they are yeah but um no it's it's it really doesn't exist the whole culture of it and right
I think most people would say that's good.
And because they would look at a place like America and say,
you've had,
you have a lot more deaths from due to guns than we do.
And you know that because there's mistake,
accidental deaths that if the gun wasn't there would happen.
And, but the truth is the answer is it doesn't matter because the arms race has begun and,
and it can't stop because if you try and stop it,
then you basically let only a certain number of people have guns
and they're either criminals or the government.
Right.
Because everyone else, if you're law abiding, is going to give it up.
Right. Yeah.
And so that's exactly the why.
I mean, people who are for gun ownership will try to bring that argument up
as much as they can, that this is not about hunting.
It's not about the guy who's trying to rob you.
It's about your government saying,
we're going to start putting people in jail for saying the wrong things or we're going to start
making people you know take this injection or that injection or get this medical procedure
or we're going to start saying you can't raise certain animals and at a certain point you just
say well you can try you know here's a question then because i i've had this question with a
number of people what is the actual reality of somebody you know um combating their government
with a weapon like in real in real life because i've when i think it through i think
it's going to be very difficult say say right you know the government says right you're not
allowed to have i don't know something in your garden here and it really pisses you off and
they come around to take it away and you and they're like no i'm gonna i'm gonna confront this
at that point it's you and it's them and they're more powerful than you right right so what what's
the reality of something like that actually happening like say they start creating femur
camps and they start putting dissident minds in camps and stuff like that okay so there there's i
have an anecdote and i have a historical thing from just not too recent not too far in the in
the past where uh the bureau of land management was trying to take kick ranchers off of land that
they'd been using for you know decades and some government agents showed up and said we're gonna
kick all your cattle off and kick you off and they brought 100 friends with ars and the government
backed down they're just like we can't win this this is uh what's the name of the guy i want to
say brody but um just look up bureau land management standoff and you'll find it um so that was an
example right yeah go into that a little bit so they the the federal government was it or the
federal government backed down from a bunch of guys with guns absolutely some of those guys ended
up going to jail but then getting i think the guy who led it got released on it because this trial
wasn't conducted properly. We know there's a guy here, I think his name's Jerry Loomis,
and he took a plea deal. And so when all the other guys got off, he was stuck in jail.
But the government just, they backed down because it's like, well, there's 20 of us,
and there's 100 of you, and what are we going to do?
And what about the law itself that elicited this? Did that get backtracked?
It was, it was, the whole thing was, it wasn't clear what the law was and what their rights were.
but they're like, we've been here. Our fathers were here. Our grandfathers were here. We've been
grazing this land. There's no reason for the federal government to own in the first place,
which was a different issue, but you can't just come and kick us off. So, that's one example.
There's a much older historical example, which is Athens, Tennessee, I believe, where there was
a lot of local corruption, and they were rigging elections, and a bunch of guys had just come back
from the war and they were all armed and they drove that government out of town. So it does
happen. The anecdote that I have is, so in America, when you buy more than one gun at a time,
there's a special form. The ATF requires the gun dealer to fill out and send to the chief of police,
the local chief of police. And we happened to be talking to our local chief of police about this
one day. And we said, so what do you do with those forms? He said, I shred them. And we're like,
why do you do that? He's like, I don't want to know what anybody has. Because if they ever give
me the order to go around and confiscate people's guns, I'm going to resign because I might get them
from the first house. And I could get lucky and get them from the second house. But by the time I
get to the third house, I'm toast. Right? So, part of it is, it's like a mutually assured destruction,
right? Nobody wins if you actually use nuclear weapons. But the thing is to have a credible
threat and so the purpose of having an armed citizenry is not it's to not have those fights
right it's to make those fights so costly for the government that they will always be looking for
some means other than direct force to try to push you around it's the the meme is true the european
mind cannot comprehend that it's really interesting because and i think if you if you go into it it
must have something to do with your literally your dna and your your your your amendments and
your bills that allow you know that your um just the historical nature of the american person you
know it is and we're there is a lot of europe envy in america where we look oh they're they're
so civilized and so wonderful and we should be more like them and then there's you know the other
part saying, no, no, no, we're different and we want to be different. So, one of the books that
I have is called Politics and Three Jokes. And there are three jokes that lead to three questions.
So, just as an experiment, I'd like to try this. So, my contention in the book is if you're going
to get into a serious political discussion with somebody where you're actually trying to solve
some problem, there are three questions that you should compare answers on. So, the first question
is what's the purpose of government so as a an englishman or a european what would you say it is
well i wouldn't say as an englishman necessarily necessarily the purpose of government well i i i
know the theories whether or not i really understand whether this is correct or not
i mean i would say it's the smallest thing it could be and probably it depends how big your
country is if but if your country is too large um then because i think government should be you know
local as local as possible but if you're talking about like a an overall government i would say
it's probably protecting the kind of perimeter of your place like and protecting the rights of
your property so your ownership of things however i would still want that to be done
on a smaller level than say in the US.
I think the federal government is like,
it's too big an area of land to be in charge of, I think.
Okay, but those are all mechanisms
and how big a government should be.
I'm just saying, let's say you didn't have a government
and you're suddenly thinking, hey, we need to have one.
Why?
Why do you have a government?
What job is it supposed to do?
And so I'll just give you the answer.
No, no, no, don't tell me.
I want to give you an answer.
So the point here is that there are lots of different answers.
There is no right answer.
But I want to think it through so I can hear, because I want to hear your response to what I say.
So we've got no, I mean, right at the moment, we don't have a government.
Let's face it.
Yeah, we're going to form a government.
Why are we going to do that?
But we're literally living as, we're anarchists right now, you and me.
There's no one telling us what to do.
We're sitting here.
We don really need one by the looks of it Not in your property and what you doing here and your neighbors and but if we go out far enough there may be a threat from the outside and if your
country's large enough if that threat's down you know 700 miles away it may not be of concern to
you but in the future it might so you might appreciate someone mind you they'll probably
sort it out down there won't they i don't know really so what so what are they doing for me right
yeah exactly i don't know so the funny thing is you ask people and there are a lot some people say
you know and you'll hear politicians say this the the job of the government is to protect people
to protect people's lives or to protect their property you'll hear taught in schools i've heard
kids tell me oh the purpose of government is to do things for people that they can't do for
themselves or the the purpose is to make things fair or to make things equitable or to keep people
happy or whatever. So, I'm just saying there are lots of answers and none of those are specifically
wrong. But say I agree with Thomas Jefferson that the point of government is to protect your rights
or I agree with Frederick Bastiat that government is nothing more than organized self-defense.
If I start from that answer and you start from an answer about we're here to protect people
or we're here to do something or you know redistribute wealth or whatever we're really
not going to agree on what counts as a valid solution right i think the way my thought process
works if i analyze it now is that i always start with myself what can i do and as it gets larger
and larger as an issue i ask myself can i do it with my neighbors the people i know as soon as it
gets to the point where i need to if i need to include people that have no knowledge of me that's
probably where the point that where the government might exist but um in all honesty i could live in
like where your guys live and i could live here and never have contact with the government my
whole life sure yes you know if i really wanted to so i really don't you know i mean you could but
there is a government and it is doing things for you that you don't really notice like here here's
one of the things that you would like to have in a civilized place. I should be able to drive away
from my house for the day or two days or a week and come back and all my shit will still be here.
That's what I want. And that's one of the things that government is in some sort of unorganized,
inchoate, not well understood way providing for me. Now, whether you call that protecting my
property or protecting my rights, that's a discussion that needs to be had. But the thing
is i am agreeing you know that that you have rights and i will not transgress your rights and
i have rights and you won't transgress mine and the government is just there that if one of us
steps out of line you have a way in an organized way to come in and do something about it so that
it is just one way but i'm saying it's just one answer but do you think that in that particular
instance is it better to have the government mean intermediate or the people that live around here
Like, wouldn't you rather deal with them direct?
Well, the people are the government in that case, right?
They are.
We agree that we have a mutual protection society.
So it looks more like NATO than like the English government or the American government where NATO just says, look, you're France, I'm Germany.
You be France.
I'll be Germany.
I'm not going to tell you what to do.
You're not going to tell me what to do.
But if somebody attacks you, I'll help.
And if somebody attacks me, you'll help.
So in that sense, Germany and France are protecting each other's sort of right to exist and to be who they are and to live the way they want.
They're not imposing any values on it.
They're just saying, you have certain rights as a country.
We have certain rights as a country.
If somebody from outside tries to disturb that, we will help each other.
And if your government is a government that just protects rights, that's about it.
It is a very small government.
And all it's doing is saying, if people attack each other, we will make it easy for the other people who would not like to be attacked to protect each other.
That's it.
So that is, again, that's one version.
The point is, if you think that government is about redistributing wealth or making things fair, then like any question that we think about medical care, gun control, education, we're just, we might as well not even talk, right?
So the second question then is from where does government get its legitimate power?
Well, where does it get its power?
Where does it get its power?
We allow them, we say, we will allow you to intermediate between us.
So when you say we, what do you mean we?
Well, me.
And you and me.
And if we disagree, then what?
Well, then you'll be fighting the government and I won't.
Or you'll be fighting the government and I won't, or we'll both be fighting the government
if we're talking about thousands of people, and the government will take action,
what gives it the power to take action?
Well, it's a kind of an agreed abstract force, like I say.
And if the more, and you know, I'm not a fan of democracy,
but in the sense that if enough people agree that this abstract force exists
and they can convince other people, then it kind of does.
So that's the exact issue then for, in some senses, if enough people agree, okay?
So some people will say the source of government power is majority rule.
If enough people vote, then it gets to do this.
Now, here's an interesting thing.
If that's actually true, if majority rule is the source of the power and not just a mechanism for exercising power, then there's no such thing as rights, right?
You cannot talk about the right to say no in a situation where enough people can do anything.
So, that leads you to a contradiction right away.
And so, people who think, oh, well, majority rule, blah, blah, blah, that's how we do things, and I have rights.
It's like that's an immovable object and an irresistible force in the same universe.
They can't exist.
So, you have to make that choice.
You have rights, or majority rule is a source of whatever.
So, again, I would go back to Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence where he just says, governments get their legitimate power from the consent of the governed.
And then people will say, oh, well, consent is majority rule.
And then you say, well, here's an interesting thing.
Go look at our federal constitution.
Sorry, you don't have one.
But we have a federal constitution.
It has an Article 5 which says, here's how to amend the constitution.
If it turns out that we've said the wrong thing or done the wrong thing, you need to do something, here are the steps that you go through.
And then it says at the end, except whatever you do, you cannot deprive any state of equal suffrage in the Senate, equal representation in the Senate without its consent.
So, 49 states say Hawaii only needs one senator.
You know what?
Hawaii can say, bite me.
That's consent.
That's not majority rule.
So, you can't make a serious argument that anybody who set up the system confused majority rule of consent.
They clearly knew the difference. So, again, if people think, well, you know, where you get
government from is majority rule or just whoever is the strongest or whoever's the smartest,
there's lots of ways to answer that. And you look around the world, right? In some countries,
we get our power from God. In some countries, well, we have a king who got his power from God.
In some countries, it's just whoever is the baddest dude is the guy, right?
Those are all answers, right?
But the American answer, as I think of it, is government operates from consent.
So, if I believe that government protects rights and operates from consent, and you think something else,
then our chances of deciding how should we have socialized medicine, or how should we run public schools,
or who should be able to have what kinds of guns where,
we're just not even having the same conversation, right?
And then the third question is, when is it okay to violate a principle?
Can you say there's absolute freedom of speech unless somebody's feelings are going to be hurt
or unless it might hurt us in a war effort or unless, unless, unless?
Or do you just say, look, you can say whatever the hell you want?
Well, I am that.
I don't think if I believe in freedom of speech therefore I believe you should be able to say
anything you want and you can I mean you can I can say anything I want right now right uh I believe
actually there are people in England right now who are in prison yeah but what I mean is but I still
can like I still can I could I could say anything I want right now I might have to deal with the
consequences obviously but um yeah the the but in reality I appreciate that I'll probably choose not
to say certain things just because it causes hassle that i don't need or that you know you know
that would be my response but yeah i i'm an absolutist in that but that's in your personal
life as opposed to a bunch of other people getting together and saying that you can't say this you
can't say this you can't say that or you must say this you must use these pronouns you must say this
oath every day whatever that so these are the three questions though right what what do we have
government for in the first place where does it get its power and if you stated something as a
principle when is it okay to ignore that and if you don't agree on those then you're going nowhere
right and i think this is one of the things that americans many americans would have very different
answers than many europeans and that's sort of like they can't get their head around this idea
they're like why would i want to fight my government my government's me and it's us all together and
oh that's it's i think that's it i think that you've just hit it there that we do see our we're
we we don't have the historical dna telling us that it's them and us we we think of the government
as being people that help us to yeah you know but here it's much more that you were outlaws in a way
you there was you had the freedom and then it was taken away by government rather than the other way
around weird you know yeah kind of i mean it's it's it's maybe less about i mean to me it may
have more to do with the fact that like there wasn't in america and then suddenly there was
and like feeling in england it's like try to think of a time before there was an england it's just
it's a weird concept you know or if you're in france or jordan it's like when when was there
never this but this thing this america it it didn't exist and then it was created on purpose
it was designed in a way that other countries were not they just grew organically and we were like
okay screw that stuff we're not going to do any of this where you know and here's our bill of rights
all the things that we hated that england did to us we're not going to do them to ourselves
and we're going to have this structure and here are the limits and and they wrote all this down
we don't follow it but that's the design right so i think that where gun control is concerned or
even things like, you know, socialized medicine or education. It's like, so I look at, and this is
a sort of a meme, I think that's the right word, but an idea I'm trying to plant in people's heads
all the time is, there are two, I think, primary tools that you use to resist a government that's
trying to do too much. The first one is arms, and the second one's education. And so, I look at arms
And the American idea is like, hands off.
We have a Second Amendment, and you are not allowed to tell us what guns we can have, where we can take them, what we can do with them.
I mean, we obviously can't commit crimes with them.
But beyond that, you just don't – you don't get to tell us what we can have any more than China could tell you what to have, right?
We might have to fight you someday, and you don't get to tell us.
So that, to me, I look at education exactly the same way.
It's like for all the reasons that the government should not be involved in guns, government should not be involved in education, right?
I've got a t-shirt over here that I just had made for a friend, which it's got a picture of Linus from the comics for Peanuts.
And he's talking to – he's in school and talking to somebody behind him and says, nobody will give you the education you need to overthrow them, which I think sums it up perfectly, right?
The government would never give you the guns that you would need to remove it from power.
The government is never going to give you the education that you would need to remove
it from power or to know that you should remove it from power.
So, to me, the idea that government should be involved in either of those things or in
religion, right?
It's just, there are just certain areas where there just should be no government involvement
and education to me is one of them.
So that drives my thinking about education in large part, right?
Sometimes I'm thinking about, okay, given that everybody's going to ignore that and we're going to have something anyways, here are better and worse ways to do it.
But to me, guns and education, I mean, guns and education.
I've got a good title for the podcast anyway.
That will get a few people watching.
Yeah.
Guns and education.
So, like, what do you think?
Go on.
What is your answer to those?
to those ones i like jeffersons i really if if i could just get rid of the government we have and
say i'm going to take one sentence from the declaration of independence that men form
governments to protect their rights and those governments derive their legitimate powers
from the consent of the people i would start with that and say if you take that sentence seriously
it doesn't matter whether you have a congress or a dictator or whether you have a direct democracy
or whatever, as long as you don't do anything that isn't directly protecting rights, and
as long as you don't take away people's consent, I don't give a crap how you do the mechanics
of it.
On the other hand, if we say, oh, we have this very nice constitutional republic, blah, blah,
blah.
But if the representatives in that republic don't acknowledge that there are any limits
to what they do, then that's not an improvement over anything.
It's not an improvement over a king.
It's not an improvement over a dictator.
the key idea is are there limits and what are those limits so that you know i'm just wondering
where the where the anarchists fit into this or or more to the point people have a real issue in
the a lot of circles are revolving with the social contract and in a way you're kind of describing
there is still a social contract are you saying that there's there's limits to how free you can be
like actually naturally you know so so again i think nato is an instructive thing you don't have
a country doesn't have to join nato right it could just say you know what screw you guys we're going
our own way on the other hand if suddenly they get invaded they can't go to nato and say hey
help us because you just told us you didn't need our help so in that sense and that's why like
Bastiat very clearly just said, properly done, government is nothing more than organized
self-defense.
I have the right to defend myself.
I will do a better job of defending myself if I can count on other people to help me.
And to make that happen, they have to count on me to help them.
And that is the extent of the social contract in that sense.
It's just mutual self-defense.
And beyond that, I don't get to tell you what to think.
I don't get to tell you what to say.
I don't get to tell you what to eat or drink or smoke or inject.
I don't get to tell you how you get sex.
I don't get to tell you anything except if you get attacked, I'll help.
If I get attacked, you'll help.
What makes me think, though, is that countries and governments are formed from individuals.
And the problem is that when individuals are allowed to be individuals, they kind of group together in sort of little teams, don't they?
And the government are the same.
The government's going to have a team, isn't it?
But I would actually, I wouldn't really accept that because I think people think of themselves in America.
I think this is true.
And this is one of the fundamental questions.
Does society exist for the benefit of individuals or do individuals exist for the benefit of society?
And if you go someplace like communist China and you look at their constitution, they are a constitutional republic too.
it actually says right there it's like we're mostly interested in the harmony of the whole
and their philosophy is sort of like you're like a cell on a body and if we got to get rid of you
because you're causing trouble well that's just too bad you have no rights in that sense right
you're you're not important the whole thing is important whereas in America you use things like
national security and, you know, defense to try to make people think of themselves that way. But
there's a great author named Richard Mitchell, who wrote a wonderful book called The Gift of Fire,
and one of the chapters in it is called The Land of We All. And the whole chapter is about the
trouble you get into when you misuse the word we. Like we say, hey, we went to the moon. It's like,
you know what? I didn't. I had nothing to do with that. Or we gave up slavery. It's like,
I never gave up slavery. I never even had the choice of giving up slavery, right? We did this,
we will stand with Israel, we will do, you know, we will fight the, we will stand with Ukraine,
we will, you know, eradicate whatever. That's just not a proper use of the word we unless
you literally think of yourself as some smaller part of a larger organism. But if you think of
yourself as an individual, then that's just an abuse of English.
What about we the people then?
It's a bad use of it. You can't have we the people decide to do something except if each
of us needs to supply consent, then there is no we the people. There are some groups
of people. And this is like my, I'm in the middle of writing something where it's like,
I want, but the idea of something like a foreign policy, the more I think about it seems very
strange to me, right? And if you go back to George Washington saying, look, we should just
have commerce with everybody and not get entangled. And one of the ways to do that is we constantly
think we, the people, America, have to have a tariff against Canada or against China, as opposed
to just saying, I'm a person, there's a person in France, there's a person in China, I would like to
engage in commerce, I should be able to do it. Or if I think that Israel needs to defeat
Hamas, I can go there, or I can send them money, or I can send them ammunition, or I can act as an
individual, right? And so, the theme of the thing I'm writing, and I'm going to have hats made up,
it's going to make America Americans again, right? Individuals who act as individuals and who can
deal with individuals, as opposed to making up this fiction, you know? And so, what Mitchell would
say is like you take a statement like, we, you know, we must support Ukraine. And it's like,
okay, so first of all, let's actually think about what we say, what we mean by we, what we mean is
some part of the American people, but we don't even mean that we actually mean
some subset of a group of people who have been elected to represent the American people. And
then you look at that, and they have been elected because they had certain views,
but they disagree with the people who elected them on other views.
And by the time you actually say what's going on,
you basically say this group of people who have authority
without any real source of legitimate power
are acting, using the resources of those other people
to screw those people over.
And when you look at it that way, it's like nobody wants to be part of that.
Whereas we stand with Ukraine, that can make your belly purr
and you feel good and you're like, yeah, I'm part of something important.
Whereas if everybody just had to act as an individual, I think you would have very different outcomes.
Isn't that collective, though, a function of the fact that government needs to pay for itself?
And really if you track it back hard enough they need a collective Well what are you paying for That the thing If all you paying for is mutual self that not terribly expensive Yeah I know I saying on the way it runs at the moment you know like it a self disaster We in that sense is a marketing technique
You say we, and then you feel either good or at the moment bad about it, right? And politics have
become more and more divisive here so that people are starting to say, not my president,
not my country doing this. I am not a part of that, which I think is actually a good thing,
because if I'm not a part of that, then what I am at. And you hope that they'll actually think
about that and say, oh, I'm an individual. And oh, well, they're individuals too. So what if we all
just interacted as individuals? Okay, that would be a very different thing. But you can't do that
as long as you people think the purpose of government is to redistribute wealth, or to
make people feel good or to prevent people from feeling bad or whatever however though individuals
sooner or later realize that um they're more powerful in groups sure groups end up becoming
you know i mean my i don't know what your theory on the evolution of government is in in general but
when i thought it through it's almost if you track it back far enough it's like
you know some say we we were hunter gatherers we didn't really need a government at that point
We became farmers.
And then we had assets that needed protecting, basically.
Right.
And we've got a choice at that point.
We either protect them or we pay someone to protect them.
So someone comes in, I'll protect them.
You go and do the work.
I'll protect the assets.
You pay me some of the assets.
We're all good.
And then that's when it starts at that point.
And it will always evolve.
And there is an organic growth that comes to that, right?
And so some people get thought of as protectors and then their children become the leaders of the protectors and it grows in all different kinds of ways.
But at a certain point, you also get enough consciousness as individuals and enough reasoning ability as individuals that you can evaluate things and maybe do things that are counterintuitive.
So evolution sort of always does the next thing that seems obvious.
and the point of reasoning, the point of learning to be a critical thinker, to use a term that you
like, is to say, maybe I don't have to do the obvious thing. Maybe I could do the non-obvious
thing. And that's science, right? That's technology. Those are the things where we say,
well, this will be the easy, obvious thing to do, but what if I just take that off the table
and put it over there and I think of what are the other things I might do? And then you can
Maybe find a way, if we're smart and lucky, you can find a way to head off what would be that normal splintering into tribes and incessant fighting.
And you say, maybe if we agree to a few simple rules, we'll all leave each other alone.
And the energy and effort and money and blood that we put into fighting, we could put into making things and growing things and writing things and creating art, right?
That sounds like a utopia to me, though.
Okay, but you're always aiming for something, right?
A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for, right?
You should always have something that you're going for, and in some sense, you can look
at the Declaration of Independence as that.
This is what we would like to have.
Will we be able to get it?
Well, here's the Constitution.
Yeah, we're apparently not going to get it yet, but maybe later we can, right?
So, I don't think the fact that you can't do something immediately argues against it.
It's hard.
You know?
But, okay, I say that the next evolutionary stage of what's going on in the American experiment is more of an individualization.
I mean, is that what it takes?
Probably on the grand scale as well, secession of states, making them smaller.
I mean, I think when I look at it, I see it as a function.
The problems are much, much of the problems are a function of the size of this place.
that you're trying to govern.
And also, I mean, you think,
especially when you think about it in terms of Europe,
Europe's a similar idea in many ways now
because the European Union
has got its own little power center here
and blah, blah, blah.
And it seems very absurd to me
when I think there's Romania over there
and there's the UK there when we were in the EU.
And it's like, should they really be governed
by the same border governors?
And I think of the US as the same.
I know you have more of a national identity, but, you know, people are very different here than the people I know in California, for example.
And actually, it's a long way away.
It's a really long way away.
It is.
I mean, my feeling about that is basically you are more willing to help the people that you actually know and like and trust.
Okay.
And so the farther you try to extend the reach, and I think this is maybe what you're getting at, I don't really care about a lot of people in California.
I certainly don't care about a lot of people in Africa or Belgium.
I know one family in Belgium that I care about, which sort of leads me to my next point, which is that up to a certain level in time, everything is geographically defined.
And that's largely because of the difficulty of travel and communication, right?
So you can't – you divide into states and you divide the states into counties and counties into cities because if you're going to make decisions, you can't all just pick up the phone and call.
Well, now you can, actually, okay?
And so, here's the thing.
So, you ever heard this phrase, ontology recapitulates phylogeny?
No.
I'd love to hear it explained that.
Ontology, what's that?
Recapitulates.
Ontology recapitulates phylogeny.
Even if I think of that, I still don't know what it means.
I love it because it's very dense and it packs a lot of things.
What does the third word even mean, though?
It is the – so, what it says is your evolutionary growth, the stages you went through to become a human are reenacted during your growth as an embryo.
So, at a certain point, you have gills, for example, when you're an embryo because somewhere in your evolutionary development, you had gills.
You have a tail that then goes away.
You have, so it's not true, but it's true enough, okay, that you can use it as a guiding principle, sort of as a way to, it's true enough that you can use it to think about.
So I have another phrase similar to that, which I like, which is topology obviates geography.
okay if i have people who can connect with anyone anywhere then the fact that they live next to each
other becomes less and less important to the point of not being important at all okay so here's an
example of this so like people in america will say well we have to have these elections we have to
have these states and we have to you know have the electoral college and we need to get people
into congress so we can get single-payer health european countries can do it so that's europe
envy again, right? Well, England does this. And so, how many people are there in England?
60-something million.
Right. There are more registered Democrats in America than there are in England. So,
if registered Democrats- People in England, you mean.
Then there are, sorry, yes, then there are people in England. So, if registered Democrats
wanted to have a single-payer health system, they could have it tomorrow. And all they'd
have to do is give up this whole idea that you have to do the same thing as the guy who
lives next to you, right? You just, you give your bank account information to the Democratic Party,
and you go to the doctor, and they send the bill to the Democratic Party, and you pay maybe $5,000
a year to help everybody, and George Clooney pays $78 million, right? Warren Buffett, all these guys,
they're paying more, but that's your idea, right? That the more you have, the more you should pay.
All you have to do is leave everybody else the hell out of it, and you can do that if you give
up the idea that the way to do things is through geographically based politics. You connect with
the people that you and you could do education that way, you could do healthcare that way,
you could do all the all the things where the government redistributes money, you could do it
that way, you do it directly, topologically in a network, rather than by fighting to bring people
along with you who absolutely hate what you're trying to do.
well arguably i mean that as a function of the internet that probably will transpire i mean
versions of that already do there are new borders being sort of like you know written across the
globe based on what's happening on the internet right i mean in our movement the free cities
movement it's a very much there's two two ideas behind the evolution of it one is it's bottom up
yeah and the other is it's top down that and the a lot of the times the bottom up stuff is uh online
manifesting in real life and i'm i'm an anecdotal evidence of that i mean currently almost everyone
i know on a day-to-day basis i know through the internet i don't know from my geographical reason
place at all but um and the technology is already there to implement that idea i would have thought
But I mean, let's think, why wouldn't it? I mean, obviously, the geographical government wouldn't like it to begin with, because it would put their nose out of shame.
It could. And yet, like the Democratic Party should be thrilled about this. They can get what they want, right?
At a certain point, you hope, and this is I'm trying to get people with these ideas.
Thank you for spreading this virus.
I'm trying to get people to get the idea that by letting go of something that no longer serves your purpose, you can get the thing you want, right?
And the image I have in my mind is you're like trying to swim across a pond and somebody has a, you know, you're wearing a backpack full of rocks.
If you just take the backpack off, you can swim.
You can go to where you want.
Do you know what, though?
The Democrats, well, the modern day Democrats might be worried that no one would pay it.
Well, and that would be interesting, wouldn't it?
And that would be a very, you know.
But no, but we have a similar joke in the free cities movement, which is the idea of free cities are that you have a myriad of competing cities, for example.
and the joke is that if you had a left-wing city everyone that would go there would be
looking for a free handout and there'd be no one to give the handouts so so like you know the eye
is a bit similar with this plan it's like maybe there wouldn't be a lot of democrats prepared to
stump up the money because you know i don't know it is but the point i'm just making is it was that
that the ideas evolve and the technology evolves right and so the technology actually in some sense
liberates you to try ideas that you couldn't have tried in 1600 or 1700 or 1900. Now we're free to
try those things. And so in that sense, that actually allows you to scale back government
in a system, in a sort of gradual way to say each of these functions, like any function where
government's taken money from some people and given it to other people, you can do that
with smaller groups than everyone. And they are still big groups. And that's the point of like,
the democratic party is bigger than the population of several countries
individual countries it's a really good idea actually it would
it would it would show what the it would it would be a free market
and it would actually show the truth of the human
experience yeah really it would be really interesting right and not hard to
implement at all you just this technology wouldn't be hard you just
have to completely change everyone's mind on a lot of stuff exactly and
Well, also, if you think about it, the physical monopoly, the mafia, let's call it what it is, they won't like this because they run the physical world based on geography, don't they?
Yes.
They'll basically lose a lot of money, presumably.
Or they'll just find new ways to do things.
I have a friend who jokes that the way that the government grows is they look at whatever the mob is doing.
Oh, we're running numbers?
Let's have the lottery.
We're doing this?
Oh, we're doing alcohol.
Let's sell alcohol in state stores, right?
And so you look for the thing that they're doing next.
And you go, oh, well, we could just co-opt that and make it a state function.
They'll own the platform that.
And they'll take a cut probably.
Sure.
But you hit it on the head, right?
You need to change the way people think about what government is, which is why I like those three questions.
If your conception of government is that it's not about redistributing wealth, then okay, let's just cut that part out.
And we'll do it some other way.
And the beauty of it is, it's like I said, the Democratic Party, if they were serious about this, could have single-payer health next month.
They could do it.
The technology is there.
This is not rocket science.
This is not curing a disease.
This is not like trying to figure out how do we get rid of malaria.
This is just, we know how to move money from some people to other people and then to businesses.
That's a known quantity.
The only thing that's missing is the idea that maybe we don't have to force that on people who don't want it.
Or fight to get other people.
Or fight to get it, yes.
To get people to believe in it, basically.
Yeah.
So, you know, so those are the…
I mean, yeah.
Did you invent that idea or is that…
As far as I know, I did, yeah.
And I wrote two pieces on it.
The second one is about, there's a second component of this, which is sort of the moralistic component, that you want to punish vices and sins, right?
And there, again, the technology has brought you along.
It used to be, well, we pass a law and everybody in this geographical area can't, you know, buy alcohol or pay for sex or whatever.
But it's like, well, or smoke pot.
But it's like, okay, what if you could, and I got this idea from, I read about, there's, I think Pennsylvania does this.
If you live in Pennsylvania, you can put yourself on a list and you say, I don't want to gamble.
And any casino that finds you in it can just throw you out and keep your money.
So they're punishing you without making gambling illegal, right?
It's sort of a distributed punishment system.
It's like, okay, if I think, if I'm very conservative and I think I shouldn't commit adultery and I shouldn't take drugs and I shouldn't do this and this and this,
I can put on a body camera and I can have people monitoring me 24-7.
and everybody else can do those things but i can't what about this though because there will be
instances where say we have that system here you'll be you'll be you'll you'll you know you'll
be accepting basically a different bunch of rules to your neighbor over there yes but what about when
your i your different rules start encroaching on them say it was you can smoke pot here but they
can't and the smell of smoke wafts into there so there are already things in place that the people
don't fight that much about which are externalities like i can't i can't open a factory
next to my neighbor i can't play noise at all days and that there those are already dealt with
but in most cases why should that prevent me from sitting in my house and watching a movie
with some friends we're all smoking pot and eating cheetos and laughing who gives a crap
So, you mean you would have, if everyone agreed on something, it would be universal.
And if they didn't, then it would be very specific.
So, yeah, okay.
I mean, I would just get rid of the first part and say everybody agrees to what they will be punished for.
And if you're not on that list, then you don't get punished for it.
But what about like criminal law and stuff?
So, criminal law, that has more to do with, so this gets into government by consent.
because people you say well i'd like to have government by consent people like what would
that look like and here's how it looks like to me everybody sits down and you make a list and the
looks like this i don't want anyone else to do x to me i don't want them to kill me i don't want
them to rape me assault me destroy my property steal my property uh pollute my land right and
the funny thing is you do this with groups and you run out of things after like 15 things. You're
just like, okay, that's about it. If nobody does those things to me, I'm pretty happy.
And so that is government by consent. You essentially are just saying,
I don't want anybody to do these to me. So if I do them to somebody else, I consent to be punished.
And that's it. And anything that doesn't fit on that framework, like I don't think those two
people should be able to trade money for sex. Well, screw you. That's not part of government
by consent. Your consent is not needed there, right? Or these people should have to give money
to this or not have to give money or educate these kids or do whatever. You've got all the things
that you're worried about, right? Well, what if somebody steals from me? What if somebody breaks
into my house? What if somebody assaults me? Those are all taken care of through a consent mechanism.
And what you're then doing is layering something on top of that to say, but some people want to be
punished for things that don't fit in that framework, great, they could hire people to do it.
The Republican Party could set up a thing where they have AI monitoring body cams,
and if they catch you in a hotel room with somebody who's not your wife, they punish you.
If they catch you snorting cocaine or injecting a drug or gambling or whatever,
they punish you, but they leave everybody else the hell alone.
It's like a digitization of the golden rule, basically, isn't it?
It is, yeah. And so that's one of the things when I think about libertarianism,
And one of my formulations of it is the Hillel version of the golden rule, right?
Which I like better than the standard one, which is do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Because that opens things like, well, I would like people to give me free dental care.
It's like, okay.
Hillel's version is what's hateful to you, don't do to anybody else.
Hateful is a contentious word though, isn't it?
And this is what I would say.
What you don't want people to do to you, don't do to them.
But it's a completely negative formulation.
It doesn't allow for anybody forcing anybody to do anything.
It's just these are things I don't want to do.
I don't want them done to me.
Therefore, I won't do them to other people.
It's really interesting.
So I like that model.
You write down everything that you don't want people to do to you,
and that forms the basis of governance.
Yeah.
And it's, yeah.
And anything else is like that's up to you.
Did you say you've written that and put it in a book?
I, those two things, those are in Granite Rock, and I can give you the, they will be in a book called The Proper Use of Political Parties, because you have these giant political parties that could do all this stuff and not drag anybody else along.
Instead of fighting over temporary control so we can steer the bus this way and then they steer it back the other way, you know, oh, now I'm in office.
I will repeal.
I mean, I don't know if you saw this.
Trump is signing things.
I'm repealing Joe Biden's repeal of my previous order.
And it's just like, this is such a…
Well, it's better than in a lot of countries.
They just kill the people that could.
Yeah.
And so, yes, it's all being done on paper and that's good.
But the idea is that, yeah, you have these political parties that are just trying to get these small majorities and eke this out so I can have two years of control and try to shove things through against people who hate it and are using every parliamentary and legal procedure to get in my way.
They're the bag of rocks on my back swimming across the pond.
What if I just let go of them?
Just boop.
That sinks to the bottom and I swim on.
now i see why you were going on about the individual though because what it takes for that
to become a reality is to completely switch your perspective on governance you absolutely do has to
reside totally in you yes but it but it's a really good idea because and i can't even imagine it in
real life but i just know it's a good idea it's like because um the technology is really simple you
I mean, to digitize that is a piece of piss, as we would say.
It's like, you know, here are 20 questions, probably,
or whatever you think that you might be.
And now an algorithm just pairs all those up together.
And every time you interact with someone,
the only problem is that you have to monitor it And then someone knows all that information which makes me feel a little bit unsettled so these are technical questions but i photography could sort actually cryptography could could actually sort that and it solves like the counterfeiting problem right
maybe maybe i get a badge and it just says i have not signed up for any vice or sin control well if
i really did but i temporarily want to do something bad i could put that badge on if it's just a badge
i mean anybody can have badges made i have badges that were made you know they they're the same
But the blockchain, right? Gosh, if only we had a technology that you couldn't fake. Oh, we have one. So again, the technology actually makes – I did a thing called the age of consent, which is not what you think.
But it has to do with through history, you always have to get somebody's consent to act, right?
And for a while, it's like you have to get the consent of the king.
And then you have to get consent of the legislature or in Canada, you have to get essentially the consent of your neighbors.
And at a certain point, you would like to move towards you just need your own consent.
And the technology at each age has enabled the change, right?
So when the king has the army, that's how it works.
But suddenly you get to America and the people have more guns than the king.
Now they can have a different kind of consent, right?
Do you know what?
That, your idea should become a computer game first.
It would be so easy to do that, like a Sims type game.
But it would be interesting because I would like to see it modeled.
I would like to see what would happen.
Because at the moment, I'm trying to grasp it in its entirety.
And that's quite difficult because who knows how humans will interact.
Like human action is a creep.
But I want to see what happens when people adopt that.
It's like extreme ownership of themselves.
It is.
Extreme responsibility for yourself too.
Yeah, it is.
But which is kind of anarchism, right?
I mean, really?
It is.
And the only thing that keeps it from being anarchism and that, again, is Jefferson's conception of government or Bastiat's conception of government is you recruit some people to help you with your anarchism.
I want to do what I want to do, but sometimes what I want to do requires me to go away for three days.
And when I come back, I want my shit to be here.
Right.
So I recruit, we recruit each other for what you might call it.
And so I guess I tend to call it minarchism.
like what's the smallest thing you need to to actually do the things that you do need
which is self-defense extended in your self-defense should exist in your absence for
some period of time in that in your model who um who implements the rules like say i am someone who
doesn't want to ever rob from someone and then someone robs from me or i rob from someone so
Right. What happens to me? Who does it?
So this is the same way that you have police forces now, except they do a lot less. So that is, in fact, you do create institutions to carry this out. Right. And if you look at, say, the Bill of Rights, I mean, you have things like, okay, I have a right not to be searched, but it's not an absolute right.
Because in order to protect my other rights, I say, look, if you've got enough evidence that I did something wrong and you can convince a judge to search and you know what you're looking for, you don't just get to search everywhere and take everything.
You know there's a specific thing, there's a murder weapon or something.
Then I consent to that.
I say, look, because if somebody steals from me or hurts me, I want you to have that power to find the evidence so that we can prosecute, so we don't have feuds. Great, so I consent to that. And that's what something like the Fourth Amendment actually is doing. It's placing a limit on your absolute right to privacy. It's like, well, in order to protect my right to privacy in a much bigger sphere, I will give it up in a much smaller sphere, right?
And so that's the same thing that would happen.
All these ideas have been sitting around.
What's missing is sort of the, there's always this idea, well, we need government to do all this stuff.
And I'm saying you don't.
You don't need government to enforce, to punish people for sins and vices that don't involve anybody else.
You don't need government to redistribute money.
And if you take those things away, what's left is very, very small.
The dystopian version of that as well is that you don't even often really need any of that. I mean, the social credit score system is exactly that.
exactly and you could i was just trying to go through my mind whether you could implement a
social credit system in this model without it becoming dystopian because really it would be
it would work it would actually work but you would still need some things to be adjudicated in real
life but because you would have something would have to say that that actually happened yes you
actually did steal from that person or you did you know yes but really the the the the you know
can't believe i'm advocating for social credit scores but i don't think i am i don't think i am
i'm just like thinking about how the technology could work right because it's a good idea it's a
really good idea it's like it's the kind of thing i imagine in a thousand years time when we're all
flying around in in anti-gravity technology that's probably how we might live actually yeah you know
I wouldn't be surprised if there are advanced alien civilizations living like that already.
Yeah, there could be.
And that would be sort of what it would mean to be advanced is they don't have to keep a chain around each other's neck all the time.
Yeah.
Well, it's a much more efficient way of working because you don't have to convince anyone of your ideas.
And you don't have.
And yeah, and it's location unspecific.
So it's.
Right.
If you and I want to pay each other's medical bills, I don't care where you are.
it just doesn't matter but like it would defund it would defund the the the there it would i mean
it's like a trojan horse to sort out what is the right way to live your life because really it would
show the true colors of of right of people except i would think of it as more like a
a trojan horse where it starts inside the city and you load in all the crap you don't want and
you shove it out the gates right you're not bringing anything in no the idea is the trojan
horse yeah no but i think you know the idea is the trojan horse it's like do you want a fairer
system yeah of course well you know and the democrats love fairness right okay right so you
do all the stuff you want to do and we do all the stuff we want to do cool and then suddenly you
realize no one's going to do that their stuff because actually it costs them a lot more yeah
And there are lots of people over there trying to get their stuff.
And then you have to admit to yourself like, yeah, this was a bad idea and I needed to steal from people to fund it.
Whereas if it was a good idea, people would be joining the Democratic Party in droves.
Oh, my God.
They'll pay for my medical care?
Sign me up.
I want to be a Democrat.
They'll pay for my kid's school and his football and his trombone lessons.
Sign me up.
And then you'll see.
And then you'll watch like the people going, oh, my God.
Wait, I paid how much?
this is too and then you see but it's now contained in sort of an experimental lab and you watch that
and maybe at the end of it you end up with something that's really cool and then other
people go well we'd like that too with some you know modifications and then you get sort of the
equivalent of federalism except it's topological federalism rather than geographical federalism
you don't it doesn't depend on where you live you know there are certain things that do depend on
where you live like pollution you know i mean that is actually a local thing so yes you you need to
where you live isn't completely irrelevant but more and more the things that people turn to
government to do it is irrelevant because mainly what they want is somebody else to pay for my shit
you know yes the solution to democracy isn't it maybe that maybe maybe maybe it is a next i mean
And democracy is, I know at the moment, it's untouchable, isn't it?
It's the thing you can't, it's the pinnacle of governance.
And if you say anything bad against democracy, you're a heretic.
But it's the word.
So, you know, and this is the thing, like one of my favorite, maybe my favorite saying ever comes from Confucius, who said the first step towards wisdom is to call things by the right names.
And what we call democracy is not democracy.
And what we want when we say we want democracy is not democracy.
We should say what we want and use the right words.
Well, what would you call democracy then?
Well, I don't even think you can start at that level because it's power from the people, but which people?
And is it power over other people or power over yourself?
Right. Nobody's even had this discussion.
They just say. So it's funny.
We have these bonus granddaughters.
right they're not our kids they're neil and emily's kids but we're basically their grandparents
it's it's great so we're bonus grandparents and they will do things like i gave a talk at you know
this club the quill which you may have been at and it was it was called fuck fairness right and i just
went through like what do we mean by fair and it turns out we don't mean anything by fair all fair
is is a trigger it's just if i say you're being unfair you're supposed to feel bad and that's all
it means. So, what's funny is one of the granddaughters heard this and she was probably
like five. And now every time since then that I use the word fair, she's like, fair isn't even a
word. It's great. You know, she got it. She was five years old and she got it. It's like, right,
that every, you come up with different models of fairness and they're all incompatible and there's
nothing that they all have in common. You only use the word fair when you want somebody to feel bad.
that is it that is the point of fair you know so i'm just trying to get there must be examples
like i i think i'm quite a fair father on my kids and for example i would say when when they're any
of my kids i've got three of them when it whenever they're arguing about something and they will
eventually come to me if they can't and i will say that the fair thing to do is to hear everyone's
argument so so it's okay but then when you go to make the decision how do you make a fair decision
well great you say whatever you want there's normally a right decision right i don't know
that that's the case there's a right decision for each of those kids yes but there's normally in
their case and then there's normally one decision for you there's normally one where when everyone
thinks about it it makes i don't know that that's the case i mean i think that that is that may
sometimes be the case, and those are the fond ones that you remember. But the ones where nobody's
happy, and maybe that's one definition of fairness. Nobody's happy. One definition of fairness is
everybody's happy. In terms of education, I have a book about this where people think fairness means
we spend the same amount on every kid. And other people would say, I would say,
fairness is when every kid learns the same thing. And those are just not even close,
right? And if you pursue one model, you basically tank the other one.
Well, aren't we just trying to distill our philosophy down to the building blocks of it?
And, you know, it becomes many times when I've done this, I end up with either collectivism or individualism.
That's one of the places I end up.
It's not definitely the right one.
There are other ways to sort of subdivide ideas, I think.
But that is definitely one of them.
And the problem is they're just these words like democracy, like rights.
nobody has any idea what it means that i have a right well i have a right to be left alone that's
like as brandyves would say that is the source of all other rights but i have a right to free wi-fi
i have a right to safe spaces i have a right to not ever hear anything that i disagree with and
it's just the word the word no longer means anything right and so i think fairness is like
that people have used fairness and they have used it as a way to beat each other over the head
I grab this word fairness and democracy is like that.
Oh, you need democracy.
It's like, what do we mean by that?
Exactly.
We have no idea.
What do you think the real way to use fairness is then?
I don't think there is one.
I think we're past that.
I would just use different words.
I would talk about equitable distribution of something rather than fair.
I would say even distribution or preferred distribution.
or i mean i would always say the first thing before you can say something's fair it's like
what's your goal what are you trying to accomplish right because it might be all you're trying to
accomplish is peace and quiet in which case fairness isn't even an issue right well it's
half and half is it two people but you've got three daughters and two parents i mean that's
a good example is often it's like they got more than me and i i wouldn't go straight to 50 50 i
I would start with ownership.
I would say, well, who's were they?
And who's put the most time and effort into maintaining those things?
Did they buy them with their own money?
But also, how is this going to affect what happens in the future?
How does it make up for what may have happened in the past?
So without the context of those things, what's fair in a relationship where we're going to meet one time and do something and we'll never see each other again is very different than we're going to see each other every day for the next 30 years.
It just, it's not a useful word.
That's all I'm saying is in almost any context,
there are so many ways to understand it that you can both be saying,
I'm being fair and you both mean that you're being fair,
but you're not having the same discussion.
I look forward to having some more discussions.
My kids are normally, they're happy and content kids.
And I think I've thought that part of that reason is because whenever we do
discuss things we we we want to find a consensus on anything like critically analyze something and
go well you know some people think this some people think that um you know here's the pros
and cons of this idea and that one and what do we think right and and consensus is a great word
yes consensus is a fine thing and we understand what we mean by consensus but it's not necessarily
the same thing as fairness. You're teaching them a process by which you can resolve disputes,
which takes into account the fact that different people want different things at different times
for different reasons, right? So, yeah, I'm like Confucius. I'm saying, great,
use the word consensus. My claim here, and it'd be funny for you to test it,
is you could go the rest of your life and never use the word fair and you wouldn't lose anything.
You could just, we could hypnotize you and say, you know what, from now on the word fair doesn't
almost the only time i ever use it is in the context of my kids and um i don't think i use
it to make them feel bad put it that way maybe i am but i'm missing something but i tend for me
fairness is a function of of um what we just said what was the word um consensus consensus so that
would be that they would be almost the same word in all the the examples that i use we can we have
there is a consensus that this is the right way to do things therefore that's fair because everyone
can said yeah okay that that makes sense you know like sure but then you look at extreme examples
the mob comes to you and says you're going to give us 10 of everything you make and you say okay we've
reached a consensus was it no i no but i might not be giving there might not be a convinced okay
and they'll say here's the thing if you don't agree we'll kill you yeah it still won't be a
consensus i'll be forced to do it it will but your reasons will not be about fairness you will still
go okay you're forcing me to do it and i'll do it because i value all these other things like
staying alive and raising my family and doing the job that i like but we we have a meeting of the
minds i'm not happy it's not fair fairness has nothing to do with it but it's a consensus right
And I have my own reasons and they have their own reasons and they have force that they can bring to bear and I don't.
Whereas if I have thousands of friends, then we could just shoot all them and then we're fine, right?
I thought a consensus was an agreement, though.
It is an agreement.
Am I agreeing, really, with the mob?
I'm under duress.
It's like signing a contract, right?
I mean, you have agreed on the terms of the contract, whether you like them or not.
Yeah, but did you?
Like, I could sign a contract without agreeing with it.
Like, I could.
And you could.
and you have achieved consensus with the other people involved in the contract,
but it's not fair and you don't approve of it and you don't like it,
consensus just means you agreed to stop talking.
That's what it means.
Okay?
So if I'm in a Quaker meeting, right, and they only do things by consensus,
if anybody's complaining, we're not done talking yet.
All consensus eventually means is we're done talking.
We're done talking.
I'm not happy.
Maybe that's where I am with my kids as well,
and they bring me problems.
It's like,
it's a function of staying quiet.
But no,
I enjoy,
I enjoy the critical thought process
and I love watching my kids
learn about it
because it's,
I don't think a lot of,
they don't teach it at school,
put it that way.
No,
because,
because why would they?
They will never give you the education
you need to overthrow them.
I would have thought
if I was a teacher,
I'd be teaching that.
In fact,
actually,
that's not strictly true.
My,
my daughter,
my youngest that go,
still go to what we would call
primary school
up to the age of 10 they have excellent teeth one particular teacher there who's brilliant i really
love him and he does teach them things like that he does point out the two sides of an argument and
he does or the three or the four or the five yes correct but it's mostly the two obvious ones you
know but um yeah right and so every once in a while yes you get great teachers who are fantastic
human beings and who are very thoughtful and whatever but as an institution that's not going
to be encouraged by the people who are running it from the top because it actually works against
them so and it's not even you know it sounds like that's a conspiracy theory but it doesn't require
a an actual conspiracy it just requires people sort of acting in their own best interests rather
than in the interest the stated interest of the institution do they make that connection though
You don't have to. That's the beauty of it. You're just acting in self-interest and the institution and the government, the funds it, have set up the incentives in the wrong direction. Right? So, if I'm, say, you've read Catch-22, right?
I haven't read it.
Oh, fantastic book.
There's this great part in there where you have these army officers, and they're basically trying to steal each other's officers because like, well, if I get another colonel, then I get two captains and four lieutenants, blah, blah, blah.
And they're not really interested in fighting the war.
They're interested in having the largest command, right?
The incentives go in the wrong way there.
It's just, and this is, Thomas Sowell will often say, look, people don't respond to goals.
You can set up goals, but people respond to incentives.
And if an incentive is, if I do more of this, I get more of something I want, then I'm going
to do that thing.
I have no interest if I am running a school system where I get paid for the kid being
there, I have no interest in getting him out faster.
If I could get this kid to learn everything he needs to know about age 12, that hurts
me because that's like five, six years of money that I don't get for him. So my incentive is to
string him along, right? And to teach classes where I don't really care if any of the kids are
getting it. Maybe there's three kids in the middle of the bell hook curve are getting and five of them
are bored and eight of them are just like, what the hell's going on? But that has nothing to do
with my incentive, which is to get paid for providing instruction, whether anybody learns
anything or not. So this is, you know, just paying attention to incentives is incredibly important.
Bad segue, but you've written 16 books.
and I wrote down a few of the titles because there's some love brilliant interesting unusual
titles um I'm just going to read one two three how many have I written down there six of them
okay tell me I think it looks like no five pick one and tell me what the hell it is because I
couldn't work out just from the title okay uh losing the religion of liberty political conversion
in three jokes have we done that conversation we talked about that one conversation yeah political
conversation in three jokes we talked about that one three boxes a cure for government overreach
okay right that's not the same thing as the first one is it three no they're not three boxes you
have so that talks about the cartridge box the jury box the ballot box barefoot learning what
shoes can teach us about schools that one sounds really interesting what barefoot learning what
shoes can teach us about schools okay so very briefly i was having a problem with my feet
and I was looking into, I was buying all different kinds of shoes and stuff and, you know, trying to fix this problem.
And I finally came across these people who talked about going barefoot, barefoot shoes, you know, the soles.
And I tried this and it cleared everything up.
Okay.
And so I started thinking about this.
It's like.
No, sorry.
You wear shoes, but they're the shape of your feet.
I wear shoes, but like these are a boxy toe.
So my toe isn't being pushed over and the soles are like nothing.
So this is protecting me from sharp objects, and that's about it.
Okay, and my boots are like that, the muck-lucks I have.
And so I try not to have anything under my feet except to protect me from getting cut.
So the idea is you start looking at this thing, and you find, so what these people were explaining is your foot is designed to work a certain way.
And by design, I mean designed by evolution, not teleologically.
But your foot is supposed to do a certain thing, and it turns out that the way people shape shoes prevents it from doing that.
And so you start adding things, arch supports, pronation, supination.
You do this, you do that.
Here's different materials.
We'll put air in them, whatever.
And none of those fix the problem, which is basically you've prevented your foot from being a foot.
And so I was reading this, and I was like, holy crap, this reminds me of something.
What is it?
And it occurred to me, schools.
Schools are like this.
Okay? In that to make your feet work properly, you need to let a foot be a foot and do what a foot is, which is something comes down, you actually, the arch compresses and then releases the energy in a certain way. And that's how it's supposed to work. And if you don't do that, no matter what else you do, your feet are going to have problems unless you're lucky.
so in schools it's like so you start and you go you start there with what's the function of a foot
the function of a foot is to absorb this energy of your body coming down and then re-release it
what's the function of a kid a child the function of a child is to imitate adults using who are
doing interesting and important things that's what kids do and everything about school prevents them
from doing it okay you are not with interesting people who are doing anything that matters
right and so they do not get to be kids so that was what you can learn about schools from shoes
and so it's just you do all these things you put all this technology and you put all these
pedagogical things in and it's just like adding all this stuff to shoes but if you don't address
the problem it doesn't work but you have to be in consensus that the the point of a child is to
mimic adults though you would yes if you don't believe that then this book will not be useful
i've never thought of it like that if you if you would have said what's the point of a child i'd
just say to well to grow up to be a productive member of the point okay so the point is a bad
word right that's like michael faraday saying what's the point of a newborn baby it's to grow
But what does a child do?
What, in the most raw, basic, fundamental terms, children are imitation machines?
Apprentices.
They're apprentices.
Apprentices, right.
And I mean, I was just so weirded out because, like I said, we never had kids.
We have these grandkids.
And suddenly, like, you're sweeping the floor.
Like, can I help you sweep the floor?
And you're like, you know, 10 years from now, you're going to be like, get lost.
But they're just, you're doing something.
You're doing it because it needs to be done.
It's not a fake thing that you're doing to waste time.
And it's like, can I help?
Can I do this?
Oh, can I pour the flour into the bread?
Can I help you, you know, clean this thing?
Can I help you move this stuff?
Oh, you're moving leaves from here to there?
Let me help, right?
This is what they're doing.
They watch you do it.
They do it.
And this is how they learn.
You talk, they talk.
You read, they're like, well, reading is kind of interesting.
I want to do that.
And they learn to do the things that you do.
they imitate adults who are doing useful and important stuff and if kids do that then they
work properly as kids and if they don't then they don't right and so you can add all this other
stuff but as long as you don't address that central issue if you are preventing them from
being kids then it doesn't matter too much what else you do so that's what that book's about what
What were the things that moving to more natural shoes, what did that solve?
My feet stopped hurting.
I was, I had, what's it?
I can't even remember the name of it now.
It's been so long.
But I had this thing, like I would get out of bed in the morning and I couldn't, huh?
Plantar fasciitis.
I couldn't walk for 15 minutes because everything was so tightened up.
And I would try, yeah, and I would try things to sleep in.
It would pull my, you know, be stretching this or stretching that.
I'd put things in my shoes.
I'd put things around my feet.
I would, you know.
And I was at the point where I was like, okay, I'm just going to get orthopedic shoes.
I'm looking.
It's like, those are going to be $500.
What are orthopedic shoes?
They actually, you send them a mold of your feet, and they make something that exactly fits your foot.
And is that counterintuitive then, really?
Well, it's intuitive to do it because you think, oh, then my foot will make perfect contact all the time.
And what's counterintuitive is that's not going to help because your shoe is still screwed up at the front and you're not able to release the energy from your big toe.
Right.
Your big toe is made in a certain configuration so that you get all this energy and you release it and you release it by using the front of your foot in a certain way.
And if you can't do that because your feet look like your shoes look like this instead of like that.
it's reminding me actually uh in my former life as a film director we made a film in um
russia about it was like six or seven years ago with the nenet people do you know who the nenets
are they're like a nomadic um they live in tp well they live in chums they're called okay it's
yamal peninsula that's it it's like one of the super cold it was minus in centigrade minus 45
when we were there and they they're nomadic but they actually i took i went out there with my
baffin minus 50 boots you know like and before you know like i had a zero suit all in one everything
you know and it was brutal my colleague got a crossbin um at one point but they used um still
use reindeer skins for almost everything including their boots right which i ended up trying because
the the you know the kind of baffin boots i mean they're these canadian boots they're supposed to
last and down to minus 50 but they don't your feet get bloody cold well what the ninets all they did
right was they had these kind of like thigh length big they were like socks basically and they were
made from um fur out reindeer fur reindeer skins on one side a bit of not much but a bit of like
hay inside as in dried grass and then on the inside the fur in so two layers okay and no socks
nothing so you walk around on the snow and it would feel like it would actually feel like you're
walking on the snow because yeah you know there was nothing to cushion your but they were way
well i ended up wearing them the whole of the trip in the end because they were so much warmer
and now i'm thinking about what you're saying it's like they probably also were better for me
because I was actually walking along the ground and my foot was doing.
Yes.
It was a weird sensation to begin with.
You ever walked on snow in bed?
It's like walking on snow in bed.
I haven't done that yet.
I'll go out and try it later.
Well, you need to find something that you can, you know,
you need to put something waterproof.
But also they're just warm because there's actually air in there.
The trouble with those boots is they put all that felt and stuff in there
but they don't leave any gaps for the air.
But they're also preventing your foot from moving.
they're like i'm gonna pack stuff under the foot and around the foot and here it's like and so first
of all all what that's doing is sending the shock instead of being absorbed by your arch is going to
your ankles and if you stiffen your ankles it goes to your knees and so you get knee problems and
ankle problems you know um but also it's preventing them from moving which means you're getting less
blood flow which means you know the muscles aren't exercising so yes it's actually so the ones you
use now they're just very thin sold and flat and that's it yeah yeah i mean it's it's a boot it's a
the yeah this thing is just literally it's just some deer skin it's i mean like moccasins yeah
it's got some sheepskin in but after like two weeks that's just mashed down into nothing and
the you know the the sole is so if i'm walking across rocks i feel the rocks yeah you know if
i'm if i'm walking on something i feel that thing which is actually at first it's it's a little weird
but you know about the grounding movement as well i've heard of it yeah you can imagine what it is
but yeah there are i was funny enough i don know why yesterday on i was on the internet and one of those popped up a guy had a volt meter and he was showing that when he stood on the ground with you know i don know whether it true or not but but but that a thing now grounding yeah sure yes maybe you doing that as well
i i could be i do have a soul in between me and the ground so is it made of is it it's rubber oh
okay so it's not leather so i'm not no i would try leather ones the the main thing is i walk on a
lot of rocks and in the woods a lot and so if i have leather it's going to rip and i'm gonna have
to replace it a lot how much land have you got here by the way uh we have down at the farm there
is around 200 acres and up here there's around 50 and do you spend a lot of time out in the woods
and stuff um not so much in the winter because i don't ski but in the summer i go out and cut wood
for us and our friends and so i'm out in the woods all the time i'm jealous i'd love i i would i once
when i was younger i bought when i used to live in london i when i first earned some money that
you know i bought uh 15 acres of woodland which unfortunately i sold because i used the money to
buy a house in the end but for a good five or six years i used to go there every weekend
and just camp on my own land and just do all kinds whatever just various forest skills or
whatever you know it's super um nourishing for a guy especially then interestingly my middle
daughter loves doing that stuff as well yeah she's got one with all the knives and stuff
she yeah she's always out in the garden or we've got land now so um making fires and doing stuff
she's picked that's cool yeah but yeah it's a nourishing way of life i you know i'm we just
don't have the land where i live like you've got a lot of land here yeah and it's one of the reasons
that you were asking Jody about, you know, moving to New Hampshire.
Part of it was because there's still land here.
You know, if I go to...
And is most of your 250 acres wooded?
It is.
We just have a little bit clear to live in the rest of the small woods.
So you eat this whole house with wood, I take it.
Yes, we do.
Yeah, that's what I do all summer is cut trees down and I stack them.
You can see our woodshed back there.
So we have about three years worth of wood.
Another hugely satisfying thing.
It is.
I do that as well.
We just felled six old trees.
Unfortunately, they're pines, so they don't burn really hot.
But I haven't even got through a third of them yet.
And we've got wood for days.
It's going to last us so long.
I don't even know how long it's going to last.
Well, I mean, we have a fire in the winter just constantly.
And so we go through about three cords, I would say.
Does it run all night then?
um it there will be coals in the morning and so we have to get it going again and we could get up
in the night and you know like set an alarm and get up at three o'clock and put it in but we're
just too lazy yeah we don't need to do so yeah you only have to put up with 10 or 15 minutes of
yeah we get up it's like 50 degrees in the house and so you make coffee and you make a fire and is
it really insulated in here no no no no no this this was originally a hunting cabin the part we're
sitting ending right here was a hunting cabin. It had terrible insulation. At one point, we made
this into an office, and it turns out there was insulation in here, which was keeping...
But really, no, this is not a house that we would build from scratch. So, in that sense,
it's very much like an education system, right? You could say, well, we can tinker with this,
and we could tinker with this, but really what you want to do is just start over and say,
what's the house we would want the house and we know what house we would want if we could do it
but it's just it's too much money and it's too much trouble so we're just put another layer of
in what we call kingspan you know that stuff that insulation yeah i mean i'm about to do that
i think to an outbuilding we've got at home which is just makes your rooms a little bit smaller on
the inside that's all it does yeah i mean and we could do it and we could do things with the windows
and we're probably going to put insulation under the floor
because this is up on pilings.
So there's, you know, like two feet under there.
So that gets cold.
You know, that floor down there is actually on cement.
So that gets cold.
But if it ain't broke, don't fix it sometimes.
Right.
Yeah, so we'll do what we can.
You know, I would love sometimes to just get a bunch of Amish people up here,
lift the house up and turn it 90 degrees because the sun's over there.
and so all the windows are over here you know um so yeah it's just the house is facing the wrong way
but it's you know it's it's like just the place we live is so wonderful have you ever thought about
taking your excess energy and turning into heat and any i know it's not a very efficient way to
things but it could if you because you've got excess energy right we do and it means we can
run like we have a heater now in one of the bathrooms and it's electric and we can do that
during the day and it wouldn't even run the batteries down that much i mean we're looking
more for things like to get a big chest freezer and run that we want to replace um our gas water
heater with electric because then that's free you know as long as we have the system um we haven't
thought too much about using it for heat somehow that just seems extravagant well yeah it is but
And if it's excess heat, presumably some days they switch off and they stop topping the batteries up, right?
Yeah, they do.
And yes, on a day like today, they were done by like 11 a.m.
So the rest of the day we could.
She gets Bitcoin miners up here.
Well, why not?
It's not that much electricity.
What we would probably do at some point is we'll get an electric car because we'll be able to charge it and top that off.
So we are always looking for, okay, what else could we do with electricity that we now do with propane?
Because propane is really our only connection to the world, the grid.
They have to come up here twice a year and fill up a couple of tanks.
But we're using less and less all the time.
You could even buy those.
We used to have propane at our last house.
But we used to buy or borrow.
We used to pay for these big canisters that were only this big.
Yeah.
But we only used it for cooking.
And we did have an on-demand heater, actually, that used to work.
But we didn't really get through much.
We used to get through two big ones of those a year.
Yeah, we have one of those.
They're just hard to move around.
But we have a heater in that room that we just run when it's really, really cold most of the time.
We ignore it.
We use propane for the water heater and for our stove and oven.
And that's it.
So it's not very much.
and we could probably go for two years
and not get a fill-up and still be okay.
But it is still sort of one more connection
where, oh, we're going to raise the price of propane by a factor of 10.
And then you're like...
If you get an electric car, that's a whole new world of pain.
Is it?
I think it is because...
Can you fix an electric car?
I can't.
I think I know people who could, though.
What happens in the batteries?
you know as far when you said well you know we're self-sufficient and the prices and the
wouldn't be surprised if you worked it out on paper and realized that um the the purchasing of
an electric car because buying a second-hand electric car is probably not a good idea because
it's the battery that's the thing so you you have to spend quite a lot of money and then who knows
you know it would have been cheaper just to use a diesel one or yeah i don't know what a lot of
people around who do is they have golf carts electric golf carts that's a good idea because
then when you know the batteries wear out it's easy to pop it out and get another one you fix it
um and if the whole thing craps out it was you know they're getting amused from golf courses for
you know a thousand bucks or something but where do you where do you go where would you go we would
go up and down our road we would go to the farm in a golf course or golf cart i would you know
drive out like if i need to take a bunch of chainsaws out someplace throw them in a golf
cart take them out on a on a path and leave them where i'm going to use them stuff like that i mean
people just use them to get around we had a couple at the farm down there and they mostly would use
them like oh i got to take a bag of grain over to the chickens you throw in the back of that and you
just go over so they're really nice and they're easy um and they're quiet and as long as they work
they're great and then they stop working and then nobody can figure out how to fix them yeah
Yeah, or we would use a quad bike still, I think.
But there are no easy.
Right.
So, yeah, and we have one of those, and we're having some problems with it.
But, you know, we'll get it fixed up.
And, yeah, so there are things you can do with it,
but it's just people keep telling us, like, yeah, if you had an electric car,
then you could charge it basically for free.
Or a hybrid, right, so that you can still run it on gas if you need to.
Yes.
And that would be a better choice.
I don't like all this electric stuff, I'll be honest.
because of it because it disempowers me as a as a fixer it really does yes and also it means that
i'm i'm yeah beholden to the battery companies really i have to buy a new battery and i know
tesla batteries don't have a long life like they're the main one i know about they don't have a
particularly long life cycle in a car and when they when you change them they're like a substantial
cost of the car it's not like you just go and get a new battery and pop it in it's like half the car
that is yeah that's the major component of the car that's the thing that makes it different from
other cars so yes whereas my yeah my i've got a toyota hilux that has a really simple engine in
it when you open the in 2015 when you look inside you'll recognize all the parts but they when you
drive them, if you've been driving new cars, you'll be like,
something wrong with this, because you have to put it into
gear for real Oh well I actually prefer that Me too I don mind that at all i mean it yeah we have a truck that somebody borrowing now it manual transmission i fine with that i like that
and i i think we talked about this when you first got here i just i have come to appreciate more and
more pieces of equipment where all the connections are visible and traceable and understandable
and as soon as you put a computer into something it's like that's that link is broken that could
be doing anything well yeah that's the point and it is doing anything yeah my car that i'm that you
kindly got me up that hill there in the first thing it does when you switch on is uh it says
google services is sending do you agree to this that and the other and i went through and i ticked
everything no no no no no no you know but almost certainly i mean there's sat nav in there there's
everything is i i am a product driving around and people are tracking me and yeah and i don't like
that and if you go you don't have to go back that far in history like my 2015 is a great truck i love
it and it's got it's got electric windows which is so it's it's got yeah it's got some mod cons
but beyond that it's just a good truck and it and i can last time it got fixed it cost me about
300 to change something whereas the one we had before that which was a whatever land rover
discovery or whatever that was always more than a thousand pounds whenever something went wrong
always and half the time it was the sensor that needed replacing because the light came on and
said there's you know like my like what bugs me most is when it tells you there's not enough air
in the tires yeah we get when did we ever have that and there's some special battery we need to
buy for the sensor in the tire but when did you ever need to know how much air in your tires you've
either got a puncture or you're just driving around in your car because you can tell not
hopefully yes you can tell if if you can hear that you've got a puncture other than that
the wheels are the wheels it doesn't have to be exactly full of air i know yeah no it's no there's
there's a lot of uh stuff like that where it's just but even beyond like the radio and google
it's just you know oh we're we're using a computer to you know uh manage the the mixture of air and
gas and if that decides to crap out then you can't do anything you know so just yeah every i i am
really getting to appreciate all the things where and i i'm not a car fixer i know many people who
are right and i i sort of envy these bonus grandkids because they're growing up on a farm
where people are fixing shit left and right all the time and they're gonna see it and that's the
the attitude they'll be in is if something breaks you fix it you know they will unfortunately though
do away with
petrol cars and diesel cars.
They're going to try.
Do you think that people might take up
arms in this country if they try and get rid of that?
You know,
I think that is
one of the things that it could be, but
one of the things that happened in COVID
was I really thought
religion, I thought churches
were going to be a line you couldn't cross
and people just caved.
And that was one of the most
depressing things I ever went through. It was just like, they're like, oh, sorry, you can't go to
church on Sunday. And I thought, man, I don't go to church myself. But I was like, man, that's not
a thing you just say okay to. And then they said okay to it. So I don't know. I don't know how
conditioned people are, how much they value now convenience over freedom or responsibility,
wherever. And it might just be they're like, okay, this is how it works, right? You just tell
us what to do and we'll do it i don't know but that that would be i mean americans do love their
cars i think that's right up there with guns um so it's going to be interesting right now my my
sense is that they announce this because they want to sound like it's a lofty goal but they
don't really have the intention of doing it they just push of actually getting rid of internal
combustion they just say well we'll push it back another five years because they'll always they're
never like okay next year we're doing this it's always like oh in 2050 we'll do it yeah but it's
um it's it depends because it relies on the environmental spiel doesn't it if that if that
people seem to be losing i've noticed just my anecdotal kind of eye has noticed that far less
people believe in that stuff now and and and it's kind of cracking and that's why i'm saying i don't
think they'll ever get around to doing it. And then, you know, you get places that, oh, we'll
buy a fleet of, you know, school buses that are all electric and oh, they won't run in the winter
because we forgot. Batteries don't work that well in the cold. You know, so I think people see the
stories and people have been told, oh, New York City is going to be underwater by, you know,
2018. No, wait, we meant 2020. No, no, we meant 2024. Next year, next year it'll be underwater.
And people are just like at a certain point, it's just fatigue.
You're just like, okay, I'm not really going to listen to that anymore.
So I think that's one of the ways that any movement like that can overplay their hand
and just keep saying, and that's the thing you see with Trump.
Trump's a Nazi, Trump's a Nazi.
And at a certain point, people just, yeah, okay.
You just keep saying that.
But they can normally keep finding a new thing, can't they?
Possibly.
And they might.
Yes, although, again, I think there's a – I hope that people just get fatigued and just say, you know what, let's move on to something more substantive, right?
Oh, the end of the world's coming.
No, the end of the world's – no, now it's coming, right?
So, you saw around the end of the century, all these people, oh, you know, God is coming back and we're all going to die or something, blah, blah.
And it's like the world will end in the Mayan calendar.
And it's like after a while, it's just like, okay, another one of those.
That kind of fatigue.
Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've heard this.
you know tell tell me when the when the you know the meteorite is you know going to hit next week
and then and then i'll worry about it might be wood fires that's something they talk about where
i live can you believe that i mean and the worst thing about trying to ban wood fires is that you
can see smoke coming out of people's chimneys so and from a long way away where i live yeah and it
would be a real thing that because everyone i know uses wood yeah not not to necessarily heat their
whole house but for fun really yeah it's you know we use it often to heat a lot of our house
but we sit around the fire every night you know whereas but yeah i don't know if if they if they
banned it in towns already right and that's the thing so the people in town are just like okay
whatever but seriously there's a lot of people out who need internal combustion engines and they need
cars and they need you know to run their stoves using fossil fuels and they need this stuff and
when you suddenly come and say yeah you can't do that anymore well they can't they well it's like
you guys will just give in because you have no guns how do they know what you're doing up here
anyway does anyone ever come up you know no people people don't very much um and there's an
interesting thing in new hampshire which is one of the things i love most about it so the the towns
every town will revalue property every once in a while because they need to know how much
you have to pay them to run schools and stuff so but and so they send people to come up and like
we'll measure your house and come in and and you know see how many bedrooms you have and whatever
and you're free to just say get the fuck out of here yeah and they'll turn around and leave
yeah you don't have to let them on yeah they're they're supposed to do it but you know you just
go away
I bet most people don't realize that as well
yeah a lot of people don't but the people doing it
have probably had enough shotguns pointed at them
that they're like okay
have a nice
day
well
Ian we've been talking for nearly two hours
mate and I've already been
speaking to your wife for an hour
I'm still reading from
your idea of
what's the book called that that's in then
which the
The extreme self-governance.
It isn't a book yet.
So I will send you the, I can show you the grant.
Does it have a name?
Does that governance model have a name?
It doesn't yet.
So if you'd like to come up with one, you could.
So, yeah.
I like challenges like that.
I can't.
It's, I don't know.
It's the kind of thing that, like I say,
I either want it to be a science fiction book or a computer game.
that i can model because i want to see it i want to i want to see it play out yeah you know like in
kind of sims where everyone says what they can don't do and don't like right from the beginning
and then an algorithm then acts acts as the law and and because it would you know i'd rather see
it modeled before it got rolled out if you see what i mean you know yeah no no i and i you know
I'd be happy to consult on anything that anybody wants to do with it.
I'm not the guy to write either of those things.
Other than that, I think it's something for the far future, unfortunately.
Yes, but what I'm trying to do, so there's Milton Friedman, who I'm sure you know about.
He said something that motivates me.
It keeps me going sometimes when you just think, God, everything sucks.
He said, only in a crisis will you have real change.
And when a crisis occurs, what happens next depends on the ideas that are lying around.
when, as he put it, and I love this phrase,
when the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.
So that's what I'm doing.
I'm trying to get people to think about things like community centers
instead of schools and thinking about using political parties
instead of a whole government to get what they want or whatever.
So if I can stick that idea in your head and you'll go away
and a week from now a month from now you be thinking about us and go could we make this work Then I succeeded Well the place that you try these things out believe it or not are in free cities
And in, like, the special economic zones
are the same for economics.
Yeah.
You try out a new model in a small area.
But, yeah, I mean...
I mean, what's funny is it's still the free cities,
and I don't know that much about them,
but it is still a like, it's somewhat geographic.
We're all going to get together here.
Yes, but you could, as a microcosm,
you could say within the confines of this city.
Sure, but you could also then say
we will have several cities in a network
and they don't have to do, right?
They can cooperate with the other cities
and you see what can work in a network
and what has to be in a locality.
And that's a way to experiment with that
Because nobody knows the answer to that question yet.
But more and more, I think more and more you will find things like we don't have to actually be in the same place to do this.
I know, but the beautiful thing about what you're describing is that it's a function of technology.
Yes.
Which is great because you can't look to the past to see where it's been manifested before.
Yeah.
It doesn't.
And so it has never been tried.
It can't have been tried.
There's no way you could have that system unless it exists in a kind of personal, interpersonal way, which it kind of does, I suppose.
When you meet someone, you know, like in the street you've never met before in a random place, you've got things that you won't do to them and they've got things that, you know, like, but you know what I mean.
Yeah, it's just this very small, you know, least common denominator of what we've agreed not to do to each other, which mostly means don't hurt each other and don't take our stuff, which, you know, then becomes libertarianism that, oh, that's what we were saying.
And it's like, yeah, okay, but you don't need the name.
You just need the idea of consent.
Before we go then, do you think libertarianism is a, is a, is kind of like, and don't take this the wrong way, but is a very elevated form of, of, of living a very hard, you know, do you know what I mean? Like, is it when you go through the evolution of, of life and of ways to interact with your fellow men, is this kind of like at the pinnacle of what you could understand about, about life?
Oh, I don't think it's the pinnacle at all. I think it is. I think it's the distinction I see between that and other political movements is they're at least trying to base everything on first principles, which I'm a big fan of, right?
I mean, you look at the Republican Party, what do they stand for?
Who the hell knows?
Nobody knows.
What do the Democrats stand for?
What do the various parties in Europe stand for?
Nobody.
We want this bag of stuff, and we don't like that bag of stuff.
And like right now, somebody who's a Republican here, if they say, I'm a Republican or I'm
a Democrat, it tells you nothing about what they actually think about almost anything.
Statistically, you can say, yeah, if they're Democrat, they're probably pro-abortion, but
Republicans are too.
or they're probably anti-gun except some of them are pro-gun.
So it's just there's no set of principles there except we want to win elections.
Libertarians have the luxury of knowing they're not going to win any elections.
So they can be very principled, right?
Until they start winning.
Right.
When they start winning, then it'll suddenly be,
oh, now the extra principle that comes in is we must continue to win.
And that changes everything.
That changes the nature of the venture.
It changes the nature of the institution.
It changes everything when your concern becomes winning, right?
So in that sense, you can say, I would say they have a more principled stance, but they
can afford to, right?
Because they're never going to be called upon, or not never, they will not anytime soon be
called upon to actually solve problems and have to deal with all the people who want to kill them
as a result of their solutions which democrats and republicans have you know centuries of
experience with so but but elevated i think is you know what i mean is it it's more i put it this way
i think um yeah but i wouldn't necessarily i don't know what to i i don't call i wouldn't say
I'm a libertarian because I don't really know what that means necessarily.
It might mean something different to you.
But the principles of non-aggression, the principles of, you know, the golden rule,
all these kind of things, they seem to be the kind of ideas that you end up at,
if you know what I mean.
I do know what you mean.
And I think, though, that you end up at them when you have a certain set of experiences.
Like, in fact, I'll give you a copy.
You can have that.
And I'll give you a copy.
One of the books you mentioned, Losing the Religion of Liberty,
it's actually about this. It is about sort of becoming a religious, in a sense, libertarian,
this is the right answer, and how I sort of got away from that. And now I just look at,
okay, this is one possible way to run things. There are lots of possible ways to run things,
depending on what your goals are, you know. So again, it can come down to something as simple
as if you decide as a matter of choice, not as a matter of a principle in the world,
not as like a law of gravity or anything.
If you decide as a choice that individuals are more important than society,
then yes, libertarian is going to seem, that's going to seem very obvious to you.
But if you believe that humans are, you know, you take more of a Gaian thing,
humans are this sort of bigger, not even a species,
but there's some magic organism that's doing this stuff
and you're just one little part of this organism.
Then if you have to go, you have to go, right?
Then you just get a completely different view of things.
so you know and so yeah we have to get rid of the dissenters if your goal is some kind of harmony
then okay that's fine if your goal is no the dissenters are the important ones then it's not
fine in the free cities movement that is solved by competing places small competing places who
have their own ideology or okay they're basically contractual in in in i mean you don't have to be
but the model that i like the most is we build a city it has a wall yeah and if you want to join
the city you can opt into the city whenever you want there is a contract an actual contract not a
social contract an actual contract that says what you can and can't do and if you choose to that's
good if you don't you go to that door yeah yeah well no you go to the other one that does do what
you want right and you know but i i kind of in a way i like your idea of of um of having it
having having that aspect of it exist in the digital realm in because that's a more 21st
century i mean free the ideas of free cities have existed kind of without the mind you we're using
the contract that's the kind of innovation i suppose but the innovation with yours is you
You don't have to change a huge amount.
I mean, you do.
But about the actual physical realm, you don't have to change a lot.
All the things that I'm advocating, the technology exists.
We know how to do it.
We do it for other things.
We have insurance companies.
We all pay money in, and then they pay money out.
There's nothing new here.
It's just letting go of this idea.
Well, everybody has to get insurance from my company.
It's like, no, they don't.
They can go without insurance.
They can get a different company.
You know what? Another expression that we use a lot is governance as a service.
No, but what you're describing, it should be.
Governance is a service that should be provided and you should be able to choose between your governance.
So if you're not getting a good service, you should be able to get a better service.
I know democracy apparently solves that problem, but it doesn't.
No, it doesn't.
We've just kind of like discussed.
No, it doesn't.
I like the word service because like to be serviced, like you get serviced like a bull services a cow.
You know, that's how I think of government service.
Yeah, I'm going to service you real good.
No, it's not.
It's the treatment, you know, like, yeah.
I meant to tell you earlier when you were talking to Jody, you were talking about state mottos.
And actually, you know, if you're not in America, you don't see these things.
But ours changed during COVID.
It is no longer live for your diet.
It is now public health trumps everything.
And also the New York change there.
from the Empire State to in loco parentis.
That's actually their motto now.
I'll take your word for it.
Let's end on some good misinformation.
That's what I like.
Ian, thanks indeed.
I wish we could do this again.
You know, you like to do it in person, but otherwise, I mean, I can do this forever.
It's a prerequisite of what I do.
and you probably understand why.
I do.
It wouldn't be the same online
and it wouldn't be the same having to drive down your drive
and all this stuff.
No, no, no, that's all fun.
No, but this is, I get something out of this as well.
Sure.
And not only just this conversation,
but in the fact that I've come to this amazing place
and I've seen, you know, when I go, I'll remember
there's two people living just there.
Well, if I'm ever in the UK, I'll let you know ahead of time.
Yeah, come to our farm.
I'd love to see that.
You'd be welcome to.
but thanks very much for your time thank you love this conversation thanks thank you