Honest Money LIVE — Episode 007

And we're live.

What's up, everybody?

Bobby Gray here for episode seven of Honest Money Live.

Thanks so much for tuning in on Remember, Remember, the fifth of November.

What is today?

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday?

I don't know what day it is for you guys.

I think it's Thursday for me.

Thank you so much, Daniel and Tom, for being here.

This is like my favorite thing.

I get to meet my heroes.

I get to hang out with them, pick their brains for ten minutes, sixty minutes, thirty minutes, whatever time they care to share with our community.

We're trying to reignite. the fire in the hearts of the people of america about the thing that i got so excited about from ron paul back in two thousand and seven honest money and so we've talked to people from science and medicine and crypto and now we finally have a pro one of the ogs the best of the best from economics specifically field of austrian economics one of my favorite things mr tom woods so tom thank you so much for joining us today it is absolutely great to have you here my pleasure thank you We're also joined by Daniel.

Daniel's here to help us get the right questions asked and make sure our guests know that they are at the right place to have the right discussion about the right kind of stuff.

So thanks for tuning in.

We don't have a script.

You and I met one time long, long, long ago.

I'm sure you don't remember.

I hope you don't remember.

And so we don't know much about each other.

So this is a great opportunity to introduce you to our audience that's tuned in that may not know too much about you.

And so do you want to start by giving us a few minute intro to the world of Tom Woods?

Well, Daniel, I feel a little funny doing that for myself.

How about, since we've known each other for a while, why don't you say a couple things about me?

Tom Woods revolutionized the world with a couple of his books a couple years ago.

This great history, the politically incorrect history of the United States was a blockbuster.

My son read it when he was very young.

What year did that come out, Tom?

Oh, jeez, two thousand four.

Yeah, he read it a couple years later than that, but that revolutionized things, you know what I mean?

You've been very important.

As a personal friend to me, you've been very important, but you've also, more importantly to me at least, been important to my family.

And you're the man responsible for at least a half of the Ron Paul homeschool curriculum.

You taught literally all three of my kids Western Civilization, and I'm eternally grateful for that.

But the thing about Tom, for those of you who haven't seen him, Tom is...

He's gifted as a great communicator.

When Tom starts speaking, it's so facile.

And once, actually, Tom, I tried to convince you to put out a public speaking course.

You said, I can't do it.

It's just how I speak.

It just comes natural.

So it's a God-given gift to communicate.

And you can communicate from, as Bobby said, Austrian economics, alternative American history, which we would call real American history, the history of Western civilization, and on and on and on.

And now entrepreneurship. which you're also terrific at.

So you really are a man for all seasons, Tom.

We're delighted to have you here.

Well, thank you.

And I guess the only thing we're neglecting here is we're forgetting to add the disability I operate under.

I accomplished all this despite having degrees from two elite institutions that I am increasingly embarrassed to mention by name.

So let's just talk about that.

It's a bit of a handicap, but you've been able to work through it quite successfully.

Right.

Well, thank you so much for being here.

I don't know how much of our format has been explained to you, but I get to make a sizable donation to the to the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. when we bring guests together to share their stories with our audience, the Ron Paul audience and your audience as well.

And so anything and everything or nothing is on the table.

You can take us any direction you want to go.

I'm actually very curious about this public speaking skill.

You know, most people are deathly afraid of getting up in front of an audience and delivering a speech at a funeral.

They'd rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.

And so is there anything that you can point to as being a contributing factor to your skill set as a speaker?

Well, Daniel, I will say I actually did start a public speaking program, but not like a here's how to do this.

Here's how to do that.

It's more come to my living room.

I'll take like half dozen of you.

Let me hear how you're doing it and I'll give you my feedback kind of thing.

And that has worked really well.

But for me, masterminds, right?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's like a kind of public speaking mastermind in a sense.

But I'll say that for me, it helped that I had some experience in community theater, being on stage as an actor.

Because then you actually come to relish being in front of the audience instead of being frightened.

You're working with them and playing off of them, of course.

And it's important to try to remind yourself that when you yourself are sitting in the audience for somebody's talk, you're not hoping that that person bombs.

No. that person.

You never sit in your seat saying, well, I hope this turns out to be a real embarrassment.

Remember, the people listening to you are just as charitable as you are.

They don't want you to go badly.

So basically the way I do it, I'll give a couple of tips that you can actually implement.

The key thing is how you start.

Because if you start the right way, you can get people to put their phones down and listen.

And a lot of people start with, and I've done this too, there's nothing wrong with it.

Hello, everybody.

Good afternoon.

I'm really pleased to be here.

It's a real pleasure to be at the so-and-so bubble.

Nothing wrong with that.

Absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But you're putting them to sleep right out of the gate.

You want to grab them.

Number one, don't start with a joke.

That's an advanced tactic.

Because first of all, you haven't earned their laughter yet.

They're not comfortable enough with you yet.

They don't really know who you are.

I was actually just going to say, the first time I saw G.

Edward Griffin speak, it was him starting off with a joke.

And it was spectacular.

But it is an advanced strategy.

Yeah, and because everybody knows and loves G.

Edward Griffin already.

Most of the time you're speaking to a group of strangers.

And if your joke bombs, then it makes you start to lose confidence and it makes everybody else feel uncomfortable.

So don't do it that way.

A better way to start would be...

For example, start with a story.

And don't even start with, thank you very much, I'm very glad.

Don't even start with that.

Jump right into the story.

And you can say, you know...

Alice Hildebrand was comfortably tucked into her bed at three Oh seven in the morning when a loud knock on the door, you know, and so you start like that, like, Whoa, okay.

No one else is going to start like that.

And then before you know it, she's it's, there's a SWAT team.

She's face down on her lawn, you know, and then from that anecdote, you then move into your general principle.

But if you start with a really arresting story, yeah, you will see those phones get put down.

I have to find out what's going on here.

So that's definitely one.

But another, I have three, I'll give you two.

Another one is one that there's a professor from MIT who is somewhat recently deceased, but he used to give a presentation on speaking every year.

And the last one he did is actually available on YouTube.

And he recommends starting with a promise.

You know, by the end of this talk, you know, sixty minutes from now or forty five minutes from now, you will be able to X.

You'll be able to spot every time someone's trying to Y or Z or you will understand what happened in the financial crisis better than ninety nine percent of professional economists.

Set the expectation, give them something to look forward to.

Yeah.

Cross your fingers.

And then it really becomes a matter of you tell them what you're going to tell them, you tell it to them, and then you tell them what you told them.

Right.

And that gets it into – they're not going to remember all the details.

You shouldn't try to include thirty-seven facts and figures.

They're not going to remember that.

What you really want to do is sear an image into their brains that makes them remember the theme.

And, you know, maybe three really, really crushing points.

But you shouldn't be talking so fast because you have to try to fit every single fact you've ever learned about it into the next sixty minutes.

People are going to stop following you because they can't absorb the information that fast.

Excellent tips.

My keys to success are neuro-linguistic programming techniques.

Are you an NLP fan or familiar with that field of thought?

So it's all about using all of your sensory modalities to communicate, giving something for the visual guys, giving something for people to pick up and hold on to and feel, communicating to people in the language that they understand, but being certain to encompass all of those different senses to engage them as people. on as many different levels as possible.

But enough about that.

Thank you very much for sharing your insight.

What I want to talk about today is money, my favorite thing, the root of all good, as I call it.

And, you know, we I've been working in this realm for now, eighteen years.

I got started in two thousand and eight.

I'm not sure exactly when the Liberty bug bit you, but I was lit on fire about dishonest money back in two thousand and eight.

I started the American Open Currency Standard.

The first time you and I met, you were speaking, I think maybe it was St.

Louis. um and i was out there with a table full of my silver barter coins and back then i was minting you know little collectible rounds that people could actually barter and i was building a network of small businesses across the country where you could actually go and just like you know the old days on the horse and buggy trade silver and gold and copper coins for services for goods for restaurants we had all kinds of stuff uh that uh that we traded back then So that was the first time that I had the privilege of hearing you speak and talk about really the importance of savings and thrift as the cornerstone of a healthy economy and how that's kind of the opposite of the Keynesian way of spending your way into prosperity.

Because that's the first place where you and I met and I was so hooked on it back then.

Could you take a couple of minutes and explain that basic principle to the audience that's tuning in here today?

Well, I know people think that quote unquote spending drives the economy.

And I understand the statistic they're looking at, but they're looking at the wrong one.

Because what really drives the economy is not consumer spending, but there's much more spending going on behind the scenes involved in business spending from one business to another.

Because if, if the entire economy were just, I give you some pieces of paper, you give me a shirt, you know, and then now you have some pieces of paper, you're going to go buy some milk and If that's all it is, then nothing ever gets created.

It can't just be we're passing goods around.

Where's the side of the economy where the shirt factory gets built?

How does that get factored in?

Because we hear a lot, we need to encourage consumption.

Maybe, but consumption generally takes care of itself.

I don't want to starve the parts of the economy that make the consumer goods possible.

And those parts of the economy are held together by our saving and investment.

So all the different stages of production, all the way from raw materials down to manufacturing, to transportation, even down to marketing, all the way down to the thing being in the retail store, those are all the divisions of the economy that everybody forgets about because all they think about is consumption.

Let's stimulate consumption.

But what has typically happened when, let's say, you have a recession is it's not that you haven't had enough consumption.

The consumer goods industries actually didn't fare all that badly in the Great Depression.

It was the business spending.

It was the capital goods sector that was particularly hard hit.

But we have this, I think, very...

I don't know, elementary kind of cartoonish view of the economy that it's just dollar bills changing hands as we all get consumer goods.

But if all of our spending just took place from me to somebody selling me a consumer good, where would wages come from?

There'd be nobody paying wages because everybody's spending the money immediately on consumer goods.

You know, so, so the, the, the, This problem of looking at the economy as just a bunch of consumers grabbing things can lead to a lot of extremely unwise government policy.

Okay.

How does then... inflation and a fiat currency system end up driving that in one direction or another?

Well, there are a couple of things that we can, for one thing, a fiat system is going to have more price inflation.

That's just, that's absolutely unavoidable because the fiat money can be created at will and there's no physical constraint on it.

Even if you ran out of paper, let's say, you couldn't print new bills for some reason, you can always scribble an extra zero on the existing bills.

Zimbabwe style.

What did you say?

Zimbabwe style.

Right.

So you could always do that.

So there is no physical constraint.

So you're going to have higher consumer prices.

So that's one thing.

And what that means is that under a fiat money system, there is an artificial incentive not to save.

Because if you know that prices are going to go up, you would be more inclined to try to spend more in the present before they go up.

Whereas right now, even if the Federal Reserve behaves itself, by which I mean, even if it stays confined to its publicly announced goal of two percent inflation a year, even if it does that.

In a generation, you've lost thirty percent of your purchasing power.

So does that make you want to save or does that make you want to go out and spend?

Whereas under a hard money system where the money at least holds its value and very often increases its value. you have an incentive indeed to save.

And it's true.

You could do well.

You don't even have to invest.

You could just save.

But if you'd like to earn even more, you can go out and invest.

So all these things are encouraged as opposed to discouraged.

That's the first thing.

Then secondly, the behavior of entrepreneurs, if they know that there are certain sectors of the economy that know they would never really let us go down.

We implicitly, like Fannie and Freddie, everybody knew that that line of credit with the Treasury was not going to be limited to the official number.

They knew it would be unlimited someday.

How does that make them act?

Does it make them more prudent or less prudent?

And then finally, I could say, and there's obviously a lot more we could say, but the other thing we could say is the business cycle, about what is making the economy move in a sine curve like this?

Why does it go up, then down, then up, then down?

That seems normal to us because we're used to it.

The same way that price is always going up just seems like a feature of nature.

There's nothing you can do about that.

But there's no real reason to expect the economy to go up and down in a sine curve because what happens in the economy when people do badly as stewards of resources?

They make losses and they go out of business.

And so the economy shifts those resources into the hands of more skilled people.

So over time, you would expect the economy to move gently upward because resources are being moved away from less competent people and into the hands of more competent people.

You wouldn't expect all of a sudden people who have been selected for their competence would all suddenly make terrible errors simultaneously.

And then suddenly they'd all be doing well again.

And then they'd all make terrible errors at the same time.

Like something's going on here.

Why are people the economy has chosen selected for their skills at forecasting consumer demand suddenly made gross errors simultaneously?

And the answer to that, so Murray Rothbard used to ask that question.

And he said, now the answer to that has got to be an answer that's economy-wide.

It can't be, well, there's a problem with oil or there's a problem with some sector. this is a problem we see across the whole economy.

So the answer has to be across the whole economy.

And what is across the whole economy other than money?

Money is one half of everything.

You know, the fed, but, but I, I guess that would fall into the money.

The fed falls under money.

You know, like we don't have a central shoe producer.

We have a central bank, you know, and, and their policy on money and on interest rates affects the entire economy.

And because of fiat money, they're able to engage in manipulation of interest rates that sends the economy on what looked like booms, but that are not actually healthy.

That the analogy might be like, if you thought you could get through the day by just drinking Monster, you know, over and over.

You probably could do pretty well for a while.

For a couple of weeks before that catches up, sure.

Sure.

And people would think, wow, this works.

You know, I got to try that.

This works.

But we all know what happens.

It actually doesn't work.

And likewise, that's what happens in these.

And it's worth noting that we would learn that lesson sooner or later.

I mean, here we are, one hundred and thirteen years deep in the Federal Reserve.

Dollars lost ninety five, ninety seven, ninety nine.

Part of the reason we don't power.

Part of the reason we don't learn it is that people can turn around and say, well, before we had the Federal Reserve, you're going to blame it for all the instability in the economy.

Well, we had instability before we had a Fed.

We had bank panics and such.

So how can you blame the Fed for that?

And the answer to that is, well, here's what I decided to do.

I basically found there are like – eight or ten objections that people who disagree with us generally have.

It's not more than that.

It's deflation's a bad thing.

It's the Fed has given us stability.

It's we've had fewer recessions since we had the Fed.

I can name them all.

You know them, yeah.

So I decided, well, I don't mind going around the country giving the same speech over and over again about this, but I could also just write a little book that answers them all.

So I did that, and I actually give it away for free.

So it's called Our Enemy, the Fed.

And it's at OurEnemyTheFed.com.

And it has all the answers to this so that when you're arguing with somebody, chances are most people you're arguing with don't know any of this.

They know two paragraphs worth of information.

And if the conversation goes beyond that, you win.

And I tell you, I got you taken care of.

OurEnemyTheFed.com.

You will never lose an argument on this. you've got the sections tabulated and you can just flip to that one right there very easily good perfect thank you for that um but but a hundred and thirteen years of doing the wrong thing and we're we're no better off we're no happier healthier you know financially um in in better shape than well they might say i mean obviously our standard of living is better than it was a hundred some odd years ago but then the question becomes is that because of the fed or is that despite the fed and then here you know you need a deeper level of understanding but that they'll try to say they'll always say that if anything you know if something happens then something else happens the first something caused the second something but that's not necessarily the case i mean the fact that um you know, we do live at a higher material standard of living now, and we have a really heavy welfare state now, does not mean the welfare state gave us the prosperity.

So we have to dig in and figure out what's really going on.

Is there any other place that you could be sympathetic to any of those eight or ten arguments?

I mean, if we're trying to develop rapport with the person that we're discussing this uh this topic with is is there anything that we can point to that the fed has done that has potentially or probably had a positive impact on our economy or growth yeah no i'm sorry i can't concede that i i cannot i cannot concede that but what i do try to do though when i'm like for instance a long time ago i was invited to speak at um the university of colorado at boulder and it turns out i was the only person on earth who did not know that the university of colorado at boulder is a far left university i just thought it was just like any other place which is most of them are far but this one particularly i didn't know that until i got there yeah i thought well this this changes things a little bit and this gets back to the public speaking thing about knowing your audience sure i thought all right i have a different kind of audience here so i can't assume they know certain things that they won't know um and And so there are things I'm going to cover that I wouldn't have covered otherwise.

And there are little cracks that I might not make because they're not going to understand them.

So I started thinking like that.

But I also thought, The goal of this talk is now different.

It is not to make them walk out saying the Fed needs to be abolished tomorrow and it's responsible for the instability and recessions in our economy and blah, blah, blah.

There's no talk that will, you know, that would be like standing in front of a group of physicians and telling them that vaccines are no good and expect them to walk out and be convinced.

I mean, there's no talk you could give that would have that result.

So I went in there and said, I'm not asking you for that.

So the beginning of my talk was I'm not asking you to walk out here agreeing with me.

I'm asking you to walk out of here saying the questions he asked are worth raising.

They're not crazy.

They're not unreasonable.

They are worth raising.

And it is weird.

That they haven't been raised.

It is weird that it took almost a hundred years for a single presidential debate to so much as mention the institution that creates the money.

I think we can agree there's something peculiar about that.

And they were willing to.

I got people writing to me afterward.

They wrote to me afterward and said, I'm shaken by what you said.

What should I read?

Now, nowadays, this was two thousand nine.

So much has changed in seventeen years.

The nastiness on college campuses is such that no one would ever give me the time of day anymore.

But in those days, even even they have a conversation with people back then.

I could have a conversation.

And all I had to say was the most reasonable thing in the world.

Just I just want you to hear this.

Hear me out and tell me if, you know, even if I'm wrong, don't the questions deserve to be asked?

And they couldn't dispute that.

But real quick, what is the answer to that question, either today or back in two thousand nine about what to read first?

I mean, where do you start?

Is it creature?

Is it well, you know, what's what's the easiest to digest thing that somebody could get their hands on to open up their mind a little bit to the possibility that they've they've had it all wrong for a while?

Yeah.

Well, couple things.

Now, this is going to seem really self-serving, and I apologize, but I mean, I happen to have written that very book.

I think I have.

And the thing is that I believe in when you're trying to get somebody to read something on a topic that, let's face it, is a little technical.

I want to start short, and then if they want more, they'll find Creature from Jekyll Island on their own.

Yes.

Which, by the way, is a great book that I wholeheartedly endorse.

It is a great book, and the economics in it are completely sound.

So I totally endorse it.

But I would start first with Our Enemy the Fed, which is just that short little e-book, and that's going to chip away at some of the objections that might be in the back of your mind.

Then another one would be probably What Has Government Done to Our Money by Rothbard, because, again, that is, again, a small little book.

And then beyond that, I would recommend a collection called The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle and Other Essays.

That is not a very sexy title, but I'm telling you.

I was going to say that is a little hard to digest just in the title.

I'm guessing it's a challenging read.

You could even find just the Rothbard essay in that.

And it was published as a standalone pamphlet called Economic Depressions, Their Cause and Cure.

In fact, that is such a convincing little essay that the man who is currently the academic vice president of the Mises Institute, when he was at Rutgers, came across that essay, and it completely changed the way he thinks.

I mean, the guy who semi-runs the Mises Institute today came to that position because of that little essay by Rothbard.

So I would go for that.

So this is a very interesting time to have you on as a guest.

I'm not sure if you heard, but there was a bit of a blue wave or tsunami.

I don't follow the news.

I don't know what you're talking about.

Some sort of thing that's happened in the last forty eight hours in our country.

And so I'm honored and really grateful to have you here for your first kind of impression on that.

And I bring it up because, you know, you said our enemy, the Fed.

And as we engage these things, we I try to encourage people to start to explore ideas.

We're not friends with this thing or aligned with this thing.

We don't hate anybody.

But when you talk about an enemy, the Fed, it's a strong word.

Can you take a second real quick and just talk about why you would put it like that enemy?

This is this is somebody that we need to fear, hate or destroy.

Is that right?

The impression that we want the first time person that's learning about this to have as their takeaway.

Well, I mean, that's a fair enough point.

But I think about when I came to hold the views that I held, I didn't come to them because somebody sat me down and gently explained things to me. you know, in Socratic fashion.

People jolted me into the positions that I have.

And let's remember that Albert J.

Nock wrote a book called Our Enemy, The State.

That's really where I kind of stole this title from.

Sure, of course.

But I think I can defend it.

I realize that that is very...

That's very charged with emotion.

I'm leaning towards a point here in a moment.

So I just want to get your take on it.

I'm not asking you to defend it.

I'm asking you to explain why people need to think about it in those terms.

When I read Murray Rothbard, and I read the articles he wrote for the public, he's extremely punchy and take no prisoners.

But then when I read what he would consider his work of scientific economics, which is man, economy, and state, it is so dispassionate. it is just telling you the facts, telling you the facts.

So he was capable of both.

I'm technically capable of both, but most of the time I want to take that sledgehammer and say, and the reason I say enemy is, is that it's not that absolutely nobody could possibly profit from the existence of the Fed.

It's that they're not profiting honestly.

And that the average person, the person who is the forgotten man, William Graham Sumner called the forgotten man, the man who the politicians remember only when they think to themselves, now, where do we get the money from again for our crazy schemes?

Oh, those people.

Then they remember the forgotten man.

That guy.

A few weeks ago, we talked about the outsiders and the disenfranchised.

You know, those guys, those guys aren't profiting from the Fed.

In fact, it's the opposite.

They're being stolen from.

Yes.

And when you try to think about it in gentle terms, it's hard to wake people up.

It's hard to get past the things that they've got going on in their life that prevent them from stopping for a moment and looking at who's been taking out of their pocket for the last decade or more.

I bring it up because, as you've probably seen from the title and heard, I've started Texacoin.

And I'm trying to think about a message for my friends in Texas.

This has been a state that's been deeply red for a very long time.

And now all of a sudden, we went so far to the other side in this latest election cycle.

And I'm trying to think about a message that I need to bring to our friends in Texas.

And to me, you know, it's all about money.

It's all about people not understanding who they're mad at or why.

Obviously, the Republican Party has let them down.

And so that's how they responded at the ballot box.

But this whole thing is always about money.

And I don't think people understand that.

I don't think people grasp really what effect the Fed has on their life.

And if they thought of the Fed as their enemy.

Then would they vote different?

Would they act different?

The trouble, you know, is it goes back to something I said before that it took us ninety five years to get a politician to say something about the Fed.

And so the general public still doesn't exactly know about it.

And the two parties don't really do anything about it.

So no matter which party I vote for, the racket goes on.

Well, that was the next question.

Do you see the fiscal policy changing, getting better or getting worse as we get the new Congress going next year?

Well, I can't imagine.

At this point, I feel like the fiscal policy is so hopeless that it's almost like it doesn't even matter, really.

And if you looked at the record, sometimes the Republicans outspend the Democrats.

You can't even predict.

Although we have a new batch of Democrats now because not only is the Democratic Socialists of America group becoming more influential, but we also have academically the growth of a – of an approach called modern monetary theory that makes it almost a virtue in some circumstances to spend like crazy.

So we might not be dealing with the biggest budget hawks in the world, let's say, Bobby.

I wonder if the left's disdain for Trump policies might discourage additional spending authorizations.

Maybe you would think so.

I remember back in the first Trump term joking around, you know, we, we, you know, we libertarians would joke around by saying, you know, you progressives who are worried about Trump, you're absolutely right.

You should cripple him.

You should shut down the IRS so that he can't collect taxes.

You should, we had this whole list of things, you know, like if you were really serious, you would do all of them, but they love these institutions, you know, like, like they love their dog.

So there is no way anything were going to happen.

And I've wondered about that.

I'm sure it's a juvenile type of question, but why doesn't somebody get in there and just shut down the IRS?

Doesn't it seem like such a simple way to make friends and influence people?

It's like show of hands, how many people here love the IRS?

Why don't we shut them down? know it's because there are because a minority of Americans pay income taxes and the other group knows that that's how their stuff gets funded.

There are constituencies that would scream and scream and scream like we had a ballot initiative here in Florida that's slightly for the time being slightly reduces property taxes and you should have seen the panic and the wild speculation of the the the the The scaremongering about what would happen.

I mean, it was just wild.

People were losing their minds.

So you would have to deal with that.

And the fact is there are a lot of people, progressive, wealthy, progressive people who would fight you.

And some of them, I don't know, I have a suspicion that some of them, people who are established wealthy, I have a feeling that in the back of their minds, they view the taxes that the upper middle class has to pay because they bear a heavy burden as a way of keeping those people down from ever getting up to where they are.

So there's some nastiness, I think, involved in it too.

Can you think of any one, if you had to pick one thing that contributed to the elections going the way they did for the Republican Party, what would you say would be the one contributing major factor?

Well, I'm sorry to be unoriginal, but the exit polls don't lie.

And I think certainly it was the war in Iran.

And part of the way we know that is that some people are actually admitting it.

Like Will Chamberlain, who's wrong about everything, has said, look, hey, that's what the data says.

It's stupendously unpopular.

Ted Cruz is saying the war is stupendously unpopular.

We need to wind it down.

What does that take?

And that's very significant because it's a general rule of thumb that for the most part, Americans don't really vote on foreign policy.

They vote on the pocketbook.

But in this case, the pocketbook and the foreign policy were so obviously linked that it was hard to separate those things in their minds.

And then we had this really interesting, and Daniel, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts, that interesting post on X the other day by J.D.

Vance, where he said, look, there are four things that we're basically being told by our people are why they were demoralized. and it was end the war, it was focus on cost of living and inflation, it was we need another, a different kind of relationship with Israel, and we need to put America first.

Now, you could say, well, he's just trying to you know, do damage control for his own political future.

Well, be that as it may, he could have done damage control in a lot of ways apart from saying those four things.

But don't you think they knew that before the election?

I mean, it's one thing for Monday morning quarterback to step up and be like, oh, it sure seems like people are unhappy about this stuff.

Didn't they know that six months ago?

Well, yes.

I mean, this is the part that makes me feel like this was all planned.

I think...

They kind of knew it was coming... and actively work towards what we saw this past Tuesday?

Well, I think the neocons thought of it as they get two for the price of one.

They wanted the Iran war and they wanted the Trump wing destroyed.

Well, this does both.

The Iran war destroys the Trump wing of conservatism.

And then we can go back to Mitt Romney and the old days of John McCain, the way they like it.

So I think there was that.

But I...

And I'm not saying that I think Vance is necessarily trustworthy or sincere.

I think he's at least somewhat sincere.

But the fact that he thought it was in his interest to say that, the fact that Ron DeSantis, whose foreign policy views seemed pretty conventional to me, thought that it was in his interest to say, well, this has been a big disaster and it's hurt people in the pocketbook and this and that, that means something – Something got through their skulls.

It doesn't matter if they believe it.

It matters that they think it's in their interest to say it.

Yeah, I mean, I think the white pill in this whole thing is this is the first time, certainly in my memory, that foreign policy adventurism has hit Americans, especially middle class Americans, in the pocket in a way they can see it and feel it.

The Iraq war was buried.

The costs were buried.

Nobody saw them immediately. the propaganda took over a lot of it the same with afghanistan we had to hit those guys who hit us nobody saw the cost all of the adventurism in the middle east in the mid-mid-two thousands the ridiculous arab spring the color color revolutions all of those costs were sort of cooked into it now all of a sudden we have a situation where americans are making a direct connection between foreign policy interventionism, between war and their cost of living.

And I think that is the, again, the one white pill out of this entire thing.

And I think that might change the calculus going into the future.

A light has finally gone off in the heads of the American people hey, this war stuff costs money and it's costing me money at home.

Maybe I need to rethink it.

Maybe I need to put my flag away for a while and start thinking about the people in D.C. and how much money they're making off the war.

So I think that gives us a little bit of something to be optimistic about.

Yeah, I agree.

The silver lining might be there.

Yeah, I agree with that, certainly.

The monetary institutions we have have – been able to give the illusion that all this stuff is basically free.

Like you don't have to make any sacrifices for it.

So yeah, you might be annoyed, you might be against it, but you know, it doesn't really matter to you all that much.

So, so that's a big deal.

And just, and just seeing this kind of talk from anybody about Israel, any of this stuff is really valuable because he's, you know, like it or not, he's the vice president.

And for him to say that, well, that's almost, that's one of the first things, I mean, major people from the executive branch to speak this way, that's very significant.

So I don't know what the future holds, but certainly anybody who wants to try for twenty twenty eight had to start there.

Yeah.

Well, it's good to see people making that connection between the foreign adventurism and interventionism and, you know, the pocketbook.

My question is, will it be enough to wake people up?

I mean, we saw what happened back in two thousand and eight with the mortgage meltdown.

That's when guys like me started paying attention to economics and the impact that it had on our lives.

So do you think what's happening now is going to wake people up in a meaningful way?

At this point, I think I'm reaching an age where I no longer expect the people to wake up.

I thought they would years ago.

There's no excuse for it by now.

It's a good point because if not then, then why now?

Right.

I mean, all the information they need is out there if they just look for it.

But the white pill on this is that I don't necessarily need them all to wake up.

I need a sliver who will then make our position the cool one that other people will kind of want to adopt.

Like, for example, a lot of young people adopted Trumpism, not because they sat down and read all the policy proposals and what does he want to do with agriculture?

It was that suddenly that seemed like the chic, somewhat edgy position to take.

Like, I'm not going to support Kamala.

You know, how boring an establishment is that?

I want to be a little bit on the edge here.

We just need enough people who are skilled at doing that.

And then a lot of other people will follow.

It's like the mask mandate.

You know, at first I worried we're going to be wearing these blankety blank masks the rest of our lives.

And then I thought, no, what's going to happen is. a small number of people will stop wearing them, which will, in effect, give permission to others to stop wearing them, and then instantly they'll be gone.

And they really were gone almost just like that.

Just like that.

As fast as they showed up.

That's right.

So here's a question for you.

What is your take on cryptocurrency?

Is that something that's crossed your path a lot?

Have you studied it, taken time to consider how it could – create a structure that would give us a better monetary system?

I am not an authority on it.

I know only about Bitcoin.

And even there, I would not describe myself as an advanced student, although I hold some Bitcoin.

I would say that for now, I think a lot of Bitcoiners would agree with me.

Bitcoin, if you're talking about widespread adoption to the point of having it be the basis of a monetary system, I think it's not ready for primetime.

No.

If something happens to my phone and that's where I have my Bitcoin and I forgot my code, my series of words, then sorry, lost your money.

Like that, sorry.

Your grandma can't run something that works like that.

When your grandma can easily use it, then we can talk.

Yeah, well, I bring it up In part because that's kind of my area of expertise, but because you talk about young people.

And it was amazing that young people got excited about Bitcoin and crypto.

And we saw that go to a new level when Trump then jumped on the Bitcoin crypto bandwagon.

And I think that that might have been part of the catalyst or the crossover to really energize younger people about this political entity.

And so, you know, I look at cryptocurrency as something that is intriguing to young people.

If we can get them to understand what honest money is, how, you know, the Fed and their fiat monetary system is kind of the bad guy, and this honest and open and transparent public ledger is potentially the better guy or even the good guy potentially.

I tried to win Ron Paul over to my way of thinking on that. gave it a shot.

I don't think I was ultimately successful, but I do think I was.

You make a great point here, and I'm only realizing it now that you're saying it, that the interest that younger people have in Bitcoin in particular means that they are also simultaneously, if they're really interested in it, They're also learning the objection, how to answer the objections to it.

And what is one of the objections to Bitcoin?

It's the same objection they have against gold.

There isn't enough of it.

It can't be inflated enough, which of course we view that as a virtue, but they say, but it'll be quote deflationary.

Okay.

So now we can supply them with all the arguments about, why this is a phantom that you don't have to worry about and that the same rascals who profit from inflating the money supply, yeah, they all are against this because it hurts them.

You can talk to them about real economics.

That, yeah, you're right.

You're right.

Bitcoin is good.

And we don't need a money that can be inflated.

Like, it... opens up that discussion provokes these discussions yes that's right and so that's the work that i do that's the opportunity that i see and the problem is that the bitcoin community the guys that actually cared about the monetary or currency side of crypto currency they checked out they checked out in twenty fifteen twenty sixteen twenty seventeen and now the new kind of uh cryptocurrency community is all about meme coins and digital collectibles and nfts and um you know it's more of a casino for the cryptocurrency community today and i'm trying to grab that community and drag them back this origin story of honest money you know i got into gold and silver because of ron paul i'm saying look i learned about the importance of you know good fiscal policy honest and accountable currency and gold and silver are obviously the way to go but they've got their own set of challenges as well Cryptocurrency seems to be this thing that has this crossover between both worlds, the accountability of hard money, but also the high-tech digital snazziness of what the young people are looking for.

Everything that matters to these people is going to exist on their phone.

And if we as experts in good economics can bring that community back to this conversation about honest money, I think we've got an opportunity to wake them up and teach them about the things that they never knew were the foundation of these principles in the first place.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That is an excellent point.

I agree with you. because they're listening.

They know something's wrong.

They know that the banks are messing everything up.

And I think that that's a big reason why they're not as interested in crypto as a currency as they were ten, fifteen years ago, because the banks are now the biggest owners and recipients of the benefits of cryptocurrency.

You can't get into crypto mining today without institutional sized budgets.

You can't show up and set up a rig in your home and start using your own computing power and electricity to participate, you've got to have a nuclear reactor on hand in order to do anything meaningful there.

So the banks showed up, they took over the party and brought it back to the same system that we're used to from before.

But young people, they're into digital assets.

Young people are into crypto.

And I want to win them over to this honest money way of thinking.

And I think that there is a wedge there that can be used to get more attention.

Yeah, no doubt about it.

No doubt about it.

Daniel, what haven't we covered?

What else is on the topic list?

Is there anything else?

Are we ready to wrap up our call and say thank you to our guest for joining us today?

Well, one quick final question.

We talked a little bit about the midterms, and we don't need to delve into that right now.

But here's a question I think a lot of people in America are asking, and I'll ask Tom Woods.

Tom Woods, you're Thomas Massey.

What do you do right now?

Oh, boy.

Well, I'm going to upset a few people by saying this, but I do not consider running on a third-party ticket.

I rule that out.

Good point.

I mean, how could we not know by now?

It is a hopeless, hopeless endeavor.

Robert F.

Kennedy Jr. couldn't do it.

He has the Kennedy last name, and he couldn't do it.

The obstacles in front of you are insurmountable.

So you say to me, but the Republican Party is hopeless.

Look...

I can't change the nature of reality here.

I wish I could give you a great alternative.

There isn't one, but I'm just telling you the third party option is not on the table.

But if he doesn't have to run for president, if he wants to run for president, if that's implicitly the question, then you run in the GOP.

And and you get in the debates and you say to everybody, look, you know, I know you've been told this, that and the other thing about me.

But here, let me tell you, this is what I've been saying.

And I warned everybody that we were going to get wiped out in twenty twenty six.

And everybody knows I'm right now.

And that's OK.

You know, you make your case directly.

You're like, look, I'm Thomas Massey.

You guys all know me.

Right.

I got this crazy, unbelievable.

What happened to Ron Paul in two thousand and eight with that exact same thing?

I mean, that's when I stopped paying attention to all this stuff because he was the guy that that had all the information that made all the sense.

And they just.

But he came up against the same issue that Massey would come up against, which is a lot of these Republican primaries are closed.

It's only for registered Republicans and a lot of the people he might appeal to. are not people who have been very excited to register Republican.

So he'd have to figure out how to navigate that.

But I would say that between the two choices, like I've heard that there's some move to take over the Libertarian Party again.

And I'm telling you, look.

Again.

The retardation level is much, much too great.

It can't be done.

It is or it could be done.

But in the sense that, yeah, the Iran war could be, quote unquote, one, if you absolutely demolished everything and used an insane amount of resource, it would be a Pyrrhic victory.

And this would be a Pyrrhic victory.

It is absolutely not worth anybody's time.

And I can't possibly urge people more strongly against this strategy, even though it is being promoted by people I have been friends with and I hope I can remain friends with.

But a lot hangs in the balance here.

And I have to let my sensitivity toward my friends go a little bit by the wayside to indicate my feelings about that unwise strategy.

One last stupid question for you before we go.

Texit coin is something I started based on the idea that Texas may be better off going it alone.

What is your two cents thought on that idea?

Not necessarily can they do it, but what would it mean for the future of Texas or the country?

Well, I think, unfortunately, probably the plausibility of that is no longer clear. i mean it's just no longer plausible i think the demographic transformation of texas means you won't get you that you'll be fought tooth and nail on that now maybe there was a chance before uh but i for what it's worth i mean i favor it i did write national divorce i have a book nationaldivorce.com i actually own i own nationaldivorce.com nationaldivorce.com But Bobby was not cheap.

It was not cheap.

That was one of my favorite quotes when I started this project.

And you're right.

I mean, two and a half years ago, it was it was a hot topic walking around Texas talking to people about, hey, do you think we should start looking for the exit?

And people said, yeah, I'm interested in that.

Let's go.

Now it's. like you said, going to be a whole different headwind sailing into with with the state flipping the way it has.

But I look at that potentially as an opportunity, not necessarily for something that could be a solution from a third party perspective on a national basis, but something that might work in Texas.

Well, I mean, I'm all in favor of it.

I can think of a million reasons to favor it.

And I know that it's not fashionable and it's not one of the officially allowed opinions that we're supposed to have.

But I don't think any of the officially allowed opinions are any good.

So I take the unofficial and unallowed ones.

I appreciate you being upfront and honest with our community about your opinion on that matter.

Thank you so much for that.

And thank you for being here today.

It's really a great pleasure to have you.

I've admired you for a very long time and wish we could talk more at some point in the future about The homeschool curriculum that you've put together, I mentioned that to Daniel a couple weeks ago.

I said, you know, we've got some really great tools and AI stuff that we've developed.

Is there a way that we can potentially contribute some education material to the things that the homeschool curriculum is working on?

And it's great to know that you're participating in that and helping push it along.

So maybe we'll connect on that at some point in the future.

All right, terrific.

Well, thank you, gentlemen, very much.

Great to be here.

Great to have you.

Enjoy the rest of your Thursday.

Remember, remember the fifth of November.

Here we go.