(((My Fellow Americans))) #108: Lou Sander

DISCLOSURE

FULL TRANSCRIPT TEXT

i’ll be buried in my grave before i become a slave that is [Music] but it seems like since that day yeah we have solely changed [Music] before i become [Music] is [Music] but it seems like since that day [Music] we have sorely changed [Music] [Applause] [Music] and oh live from beautiful myrtle beach south carolina you’re watching my fellow americans with your host spike cohen yes me i know it’s been three weeks but i’m still here it’s me keep clapping clap for the three-week miracle yes thank you how would we know that you were happy and ready for the miracle if you didn’t keep clapping welcome to my fellow americans i am literally spike cohen you missed me last week because my power went out as and that’s why i have the guests that i was supposed to have last week uh and you missed me the week before because i was at freedom fest and the no the week before i had it i had a guest so it’s been three weeks but i am back right here with you with me with you right now with you thank you so much this is a muddy waters media production as always check us out on facebook youtube instagram anchor twitter periscope itunes google play float switch twitch and switch everywhere check us out everywhere all podcasting platforms all social media platforms muddy muddywatersmedia.com anchor dot fm slash muddy waters every single place be sure to like us and follow us and subscribe to us and and and review us at the the five stars whatever the highest number of stars is and comment and share and do all the things that help the various algorithm my out there algorithms out there and of course if you’re watching us on youtube don’t just press subscribe hit the bell hit that bell i want your phone to explode with notifications every single time we go live every time we go live i don’t want you to miss out be sure to check us out uh folks next week or no this what two days in two days i’m going to be in florence kentucky where i will do among other things i will be throwing out the opening pitch to a professional baseball game so if you live anywhere near florence kentucky you’re going to want to see that because this is going to go one of two ways either i’m going to throw it to the catcher where they are able to catch it without having to move too much or i’m going to be ragged on for the entire rest of my natural life either one of those will be funny in their own special way i’m hoping for the first one because it’ll be more funny in how i act how obnoxiously victorious i act when i do it the other one will be funny but at my expense so i’m hoping that won’t happen but uh be sure to come out if you go to spitecoming.com you can see the uh there’s a link there on how to uh register for that and i’ll be doing stuff with the libertarian party of kentucky all that weekend but it starts off with me throwing a shutout for the florentials i’m calling it no one is going to score a run while i’m on that plate and hopefully the relief team can you keep that momentum going after i’m after i’m done pitching uh this episode of course is brought to you by the libertarian party waffle house caucus the fastest growing waffle related caucus i say that this isn’t just the fastest growing waffle related caucus anymore this is now the fastest growing caucus in the libertarian party and the second largest caucus not waffle relate just caucus period in the entire libertarian party like literally the second largest in the party that’s a real thing and you help to make that real and if you aren’t a member yet go to the facebook group libertarian party waffle house caucus to become a member today and if you want to become an official voting member which means literally nothing because we don’t we don’t actually vote on it we don’t do anything uh of any actual like political value but if you’d like to become a voting member whatever that means go to muddywatersmedia.comstore and buy some sweet merch and if you’ve got some libertarian party waffle housecock has 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but there’s an upside to you reading it jack casey the writer gets money every time you buy them so the royal green and in silver throne did these are books about jewelry that hate you or something like i don’t know what that is i i i don’t know what this is about there’s a third book coming any day now called crowned by gold and if you want to buy these books then that’s certainly your right as an american to do go to royal theroyalgreen.com and make possible cult leader jack casey wealthy today fierce luxury by ashley i actually feel bad for this woman because she has a serious business and i try not my best not to trash it high-end bags and accessories she has some of the finest products high-end bag and accessories consignment store based online they carry the hottest brands like louis vuitton chanel gucci and hermes hermes consigned with them for a 30 fee which is 20 less than most consignment stores that’s what she told me so i have no reason to disagree or not know if that’s 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terrible game and if you’re into hating hating being awake then be sure to get it on steam for the low low price of five dollars plus the cost of therapy for the rest of your life and possibly for your children because you’re going to traumatize them from having anything to do with this we also have another sponsor who we don’t have an ad for but thomas quiter is running for state senate in new york district 52 and when i say he wants me to make a joke about the fact that he’s in a wheelchair and that he’s running but i just i can’t do it i can’t do it tom i you can do it but i feel terrible to make that joke but man if you want to help someone who is basically using memes to run for office go to tom452tomfor52.com and you can be part of the meme magic and man has he really i worshiped i have a shirt of his and it’s him in a wheelchair going across the sky like e.t it’s this is that’s how he’s campaigning and god bless him for it uh i think it’s fantastic what he’s doing uh also chris reynolds attorney at law if these ads have made you want to sue someone uh then go to chrisreynoldslaw.com and if you live in florida he can help you sue people for uh real and perceived personal injuries i mean it would probably be best if they were real but he certainly will help you get as much money as any lawyer possibly can chrisreynoldslaw.com the intro and outro music to this and every single episode of my fellow americans comes from the amazing and talented mr joe davey that’s j-o-d-a-v-i check him out on facebook go to his soundcloud go to his bandcamp joedaveymusic.bandcamp.com buy his entire discography his newest album just dropped incredible stuff some of the best music you’ll ever hear it’s like 25 bucks go there right now well not right now go there after after the show’s over joe davimusic.pandcamp.com thank you joe davey i’d like to thank waterloo sparkling water for this delicious sparkling water that i’m drinking on this episode of my sparkling what is what i don’t even know what’s in this it’s not bad though and there’s no sugar and it doesn’t it’s not sweet waterloo you can buy it at target this episode is brought to you by target no it’s not but you can go and buy that today shout out to tehran turks’s mom and him as always folks my guest tonight is was my first guest and the reason i had him as my first guest is because i didn’t know what the hell i was doing and i knew intuitively that i needed to offset that by having a guest who did in fact know what the hell he was doing uh and so that’s why he and paul gordon and a couple of my other first guests were people that actually had experience in radio or on tv and could fill in the gap for me ending everything i said like i was asking a question because i was still very nervous about being in front of a camera and so uh so he was a great guest um he is uh the former host of the freedom fiends radio show he’s currently the absentee landlord of the lou sanders show he wrote this description uh his website is lousandershow.com and he’s also a promoter and past organizer of the midwest peace and liberty fest which you can go to mplfest we’ll be putting those um those links in the in the show notes randomly the show comments randomly throughout the night uh but he is an incredible guy if you like the things that i say and do you can largely thank or blame him for it because he is uh one of the main spike radicalizers uh it was people like matt kibby and and ron paul who brought me to i guess the more standard issue libertarianism and it was lou sander and paul gordon and a couple others who just completely pushed me over the edge into the insanity that i’m in now ladies and gentlemen my fellow americans please welcome to the show mr lou sander lu thanks so much for coming on man hey thanks for having me and uh you’re not the only one promoting things my appearance is sponsored by possum the other other white meat get some today get some today possum.gov um yeah it’s incredible man so this is wild because literally this was i mean i have a much more professional setup than i did but i was literally sitting in this corner the first time i did the show with you and i just remember being like beyond nervous and having to tell myself this doesn’t matter it’s literally you talking with a friend and maybe four people are gonna tune in to watch this thing why are you freaking out and i was freaking out and i literally just let you do most of the talking so hopefully i’m well i am less nervous now but uh i i really appreciate you coming on man you are quite the smooth talker these days i just listen you do that intro you’re an entirely different person from the last time that i was on or the first time because i’ve been on here this is my third appearance yeah but you are quite the talker i don’t i don’t know if you become the seasoned radio person or the seasoned politician or whatever but you sure got a pretty mouth there spike somewhere in between i’m in that weird space between podcast slash radio host and politician or both yeah maybe it’s both but so you uh you have a really before we get into all this stuff because we have a few different things to talk about but i always like to talk about people’s genesis story and usually i don’t do it if someone’s already had has already been on the show but that was like three years ago when i had like 12 people that would watch it so can we talk a little bit about what brought you to you know libertarianism what you’re about yeah and i can even give the cliff no theater version for it so in 2008 when we had the housing collapse i was just a typical normie walking around with my with my gray skin and my single line eyebrows and everything else and i was thinking myself yeah i was thinking myself wow maybe capitalism is unstable we just need the government to get in there and and and fix things and run the show because you know you give these people the freedom and they’re and they’re just going to set the world on fire you know because i know that’s the stuff that you learn in the in the government schools and uh indoctrination gulags where they download the the the nonsense in there and um i was also a neocon at the time unlike most neocons i was a veteran so i thought that the military was a wonderful way for the united states to impose our will around the world and yes i meant it as ominously as that just sounded yep and and with with as little thinking uh about that phrases you can put into it but anyway so i’m seeing what’s going on in 2008 and i wanted to i want to understand what was going on so i i had some curiosity and and granted i would i probably was looking to confirm my own biases but i nevertheless did have a genuine curiosity and what i found did not confirm my biases um so i started reading about investing and finance and economics and and there wasn’t anything really groundbreaking in there and then i remember i was watching uh glenn beck and tom woods was on there and he started talking about the forgotten depression of 1920 and 21 and i’m like what in the world is this stuff i’ve never heard of it now they didn’t talk about this in school and i think i think one of his articles is why you’ve never heard of this but anyway um so i i went to his website and i read that article i read it several times because i’m like oh my god this is just no this can’t be and i’m reading all the other articles on there and all these different things and it’s starting to explain stuff i’m like wait a minute this is contrary to what i’ve been told and if it wasn’t for fdr in the new deal you know we’d all be ruining the yeah yeah we we would all be speaking german and and let me tell you german’s not easy to learn uh quite frankly when you look at some of the words in german that’s the real reason americans aren’t speaking german right yeah that’s why germans an increasing number of germans aren’t speaking german because of how you have to speak german yeah that’s just getting already take but anyway and by the way i do speak german uh which is why i know life is too short to learn it but anyway right so i’m going through all the stuff and then i find the mises institute and i also uh was watching some of his videos after after i had consumed all the all the written media i was watching videos so that was my first time using youtube so youtube was still kind of kind of pretty new at the time and i’m going through all this stuff i’m just sucking up all this information like a sponge you know it it’s kind of like the the youtube rabbit hole where you see a song from high school on on the side and you say oh well let me click on that and and you keep seeing more songs you keep clicking and next thing you know it’s monday morning it’s time to go back to work right right so so i was going through all these different rabbit holes and reading all these different articles listening to to podcasts watching videos sometimes doing all three at the same time and just starts sucking all the stuff up in and the way that they explain things austrian economics doesn’t rely on a bunch of waving magic wands and and stealing underpants to create giant profits they they actually tell what’s in phase two of how you get from stealing underpants to turning profits right yeah so there’s actually something there where with a lot of the uh pro-government schemes they will say that the government declared that everybody will will be well fed and they were well fed and on the eighth day they rested and banned some stuff but so with that i just now here’s the thing i didn’t fall into that men’s status trap my men status phase lasted about five minutes something like that because the information that they provided is explaining how things work talking about incentives and this is going to lead into our main topic but talk about incentives and disincentives cooperation why people do the things they do also looking at the perverse incentives uh the the way that things go wrong and you know particularly through crohn’s rheism and all this other stuff uh as a perfect example and tom talked about this in one of his presentations he was talking about james j hill the creator founder of the great northern railroad so james j hill and i’ve done a little bit additional research on him he he was born dirt poor but everybody in the 1800s was dirt poor even the wealthy people were impoverished because right now nobody could nobody could jump on a plane and go to cancun for a weekend period so you know much less raiders talk to every talk to any single human being on earth from yeah there’s no comparison right yeah they didn’t have refrigerators they didn’t have automobiles a person’s mobility and there were a lot of people that would never go more than a few miles from their from their homestead in their lifetimes so all the things that we take for granted today didn’t even exist yet so and also i think he was missing an eye and his dad died when he was 10. so here we have this guy definitely not a silver spooner not somebody who’s born into privilege i really hate that word this is stupid but um he winds up buying this defunct railroad and turning it into the most successful railroad at the time and he didn’t take any government handouts there were no land grants and by land grants i mean the government said here you can have this land and yes we will send the military to clear those indians out for you right right so yeah and by clear them out i don’t mean you know dropping an eviction notice and asking them to leave and give them a discount coupon to u-haul i mean they cleared them out they went they went and killed them chased them off and i have a side note there so i was at uh freedom fest a couple weeks ago and were they had it at rapid city which is like 20 minutes from mount rushmore so i went to mount rushmore one of the nights uh with some other people and of course we’re all libertarians so we’re all pretty red killed about american history and we knew that you know where we were was the site of what used to be a very thriving sioux community and that the you know the uh the the sixth grandfather’s mountain that they’ve you know carved a portion of it to make mount rushmore and all this stuff and so or the the mount rushmore presidential memorial and all that stuff and so we’re already like you know kind of whatever so we’re they we got there that night and before they light up the uh the display of the president’s faces they play this video and the video kind of gives this very patriotic you know brief rundown daily uh reader’s digest version of the history of those four presidents and it is the most i mean we could spend an hour just talking about how whitewashed it was but the one that had even the normies there put out audible gasps was it said you know because it was talking about thomas jefferson and and you know i said that he once talked about a time when us we and the red men will be will be able to live together in respect and harmony or something like that it says now sadly it took many years for uh president jefferson’s dream of harmony with the natives to come to pass during much of the 1800s there was great disagreement between our people which resulted in a drastic decline in the native population and it was like and everyone and and it was like they really said that right like everyone knows what even the people that don’t know the specific history everyone knows you know it came to their land there was a lot of fighting natives got killed they just got destroyed massacred left and right like they know that right so it wasn’t like people didn’t know that and they said it in the most like if you had to come up with the most sanitized way to talk about a genocide of people right and and we gasped but then we heard everyone else gasp too it was like that’s how they choose to talk about it it’s the funniest thing anyway i’m sorry go ahead i just find that hilarious did they respond with that was it real disharmony no that shut up the the the park ranger there should have said well you know that wasn’t you know the real jefferson’s vision which i guess it wasn’t holy crap that was more jackson’s vision jackson was really good on banks but unfortunately he had the same policy for indians so yes yes so that’s accurate um james j hill he negotiated rights of ways with with the indian tribes out there rather than having the military go kill him and he also built up along his rail lines so he he had towns built up in there and of course there were lumber mills and all these different things so there’s industry around there and because he did not take any money from the the government the the subsidies he had to be more frugal with it with how he spent his money so because he was paying out his own pocket he built his rail line straight and he avoided the big hills he also avoided the swamps the wetlands and everything else because when you’re spending your own money you want to avoid doing you know really dumb stuff now with the subsidized railroads they were getting a premium for having to go through wetlands and swamps they were getting a premium for having to build on on hills and they got paid by the mile so they didn’t miss a swamp they didn’t miss a a hill and they twisted around looking like something at an amusement park like like like a kirk screw ride or something like that right and incidentally that’s part of why roads have as many curbs as they do because it’s subsidized by the mile and then the subsidized firms got extra money to repair them in the springtime after the winner but james j hill because he was spending his own money he built his rail lines to last and incidentally he was the first person to cross the rocky mountains and he also invented the switch back to do it and the what happened was he sent out a scout to find the absolute lowest point in the rocky mountains and to find a way to get up there without having this great expense and just all the all the stuff that that goes along with trying to trying to a mountain range with the train and he was successful in that and he was charging unbelievably low rates uh when the when the politically connected cronies were charging exorbitant race he was charging lower rates and profitable they were losing their butts out on this thing but they also had a lot of drinks attached you know if you go to a congressman to get funding in his district well he’s going to want you to set up a bunch of stops in the district and and hit all the different things so it’s when you get in bed with government you catch the diseases that it carries right and if you look at john d rockefeller and the the number of new inventions that came about because of because of uh uh the standard oil in their innovations now it was unbelievable and there’s like two or three hundred new products that were invented that didn’t exist before and the prices on on all these things dropped now it used to be that they used whale oil for lanterns and it was prohibitively expensive so how how are poor moderate you know people modest means supposed to illuminate their homes at night now and you got candles but candles aren’t that great but if you have an oil lamp and you’re using kerosene and it’s a fraction of what it used to be for buying whale oil and not to mention the whales were pretty happy about not being killed so that people could light up their houses so the rockefeller did more the green piece there’s a political yeah there’s a political cartoon uh from that time that i like to show uh that i like to i think i did it this earth day um and uh and it’s like a cartoon of like uh whales celebrating at a party and they’re all wearing like fancy suits and then elsa’s like hooray john rockefeller and you know hip-hip-hooray standard oil and it was you know because they’re not going to kill us anymore for our oil and um right it was just funny yeah it was just this funny thing that even back then they recognized that there was like an ecological and environmental benefit and wildlife conservation benefit to switching to fossil fuels from whales so i well the the people that are labeled as the robber barons were actually the benefactors of society and the real robber barons were the politicians that were that were robbing everybody to give their money away it’s it’s just absolutely ridiculous by learning something like that uh helped to help to lead me along the way learning that people can cooperate or or was it carl fisher built the lincoln highway going from san francisco to philadelphia and the the dixie highway going from miami beach up to indianapolis and maybe even eventually gone to canada no toll booths no tax dollars he went around to to businesses and corporations and solicited funding for it hell woodrow wilson even cut a check for five grand out of his own personal account because he thought that idea was good and this is the early 1900s so it’s not like it’s not like building roads was as easy as today right so yeah you didn’t have the you didn’t have the fancy equipment that we have today so i why why on earth do do we need somebody that can’t even get the the the mail delivered efficiently to make a big flat spot on the on the land so vehicles can drive on it to put asphalt to the ground yeah that’s weird for that yeah as a matter of fact uh lysander spooner and the great american mail company is a perfect example of out competing the post office they have they have a freaking monopoly and they still lose yeah i had so i had someone say to me well but that’s proof that the free market can’t um can’t innovate and i said why and he said well because the the the po the lysander spooner’s postal service failed i said it didn’t fail they shut it down like they didn’t allow them to compete how was that a failure that proves that the that you know that it they shut him down because he was doing better than them yeah well nope nobody was calling for reforms of of ups fedex the great american letter company or any of that other stuff they’re not in constant state or farm and here’s one for you the post office sucks so bad that people do online uh save the post office campaigns they do it on twitter they do it on on on facebook they do it via email they don’t write a word to their friends saying hey it’s really important that we save the post office slap a stamp on it and wait three days for it to get delivered on the other side of town if it doesn’t get lost i mean come on i never made that connection yeah i think about it i bet the post office even has a twitter why don’t they why don’t they send letters to all their customers to share the information wow so these are the kinds of things that brought you to libertarianism just realizing the the utter absurdity of the of the status argument uh and then and then go ahead in in in and government is basically just a self-looking ice cream cone it exists solely for its own aggrandizement right now and if you look at how many problems exist today you know things that they’re really serious like the housing and education these were all political platforms not too long ago the war on drugs was a political platform uh if you’ve ever listened to chris calton in the historical controversies podcast from uh mises institute it he hasn’t done any episodes a while he he took a break to work on finishing his phd or something like that i wish he’d go back because he’s very good uh he’s right up there with prop cj but um there was a senator that was looking for an issue to get on or senator congressman and the the they already had the war on poverty uh the war on communism with vietnam so he he decides that he’s gonna do tough on crime and all the stuff that a lot of the stuff that we see as part of the war on drugs right now came about from that era you know the civil asset forfeiture the no knock raids the militarization of of cops and turning turning everything from andy griffith into into uh the delta force going in and stomping down doors so when you when you look at that i mean there’s there’s a utilitarian argument against government and i’m i’m sorry but like the the many status out there that are like well we need a limited government why for what they make a lot of arguments as to why small government is better than big government and i’ll agree with them but they don’t make it but they don’t make an argument for why we must have a limited government to begin with now and it’s amazing how many times people will say and and there’s somebody on facebook i i do appreciate her but i kind of give her a lot of a lot of grief over it uh she’ll talk about how the how the post office can’t do this and and talk about how horrible government is and how destructive and and everything else and yet doesn’t draw the connection of you know well get rid of it because i they’re not nobody’s making any arguments for why it must exist roads will exist they’ve existed in the past outside of government matter of fact the vast majority of road building has been outside of government but you know that they’re like we need a limited government why they they can’t deliver the post-op the the the mail but they can handle the the police courts and military the three things are guaranteed to bring us back to the government that we have right now right exactly and that’s the thing is they’ll say something like well you know government is just so uh uh untrustworthy and so bloated and so prone to corruption that we should limit it to the core structures of our society the very things we need to function which will inevitably lead to it being involved in everything else like you said it is right it is that you know that that minor kissed argument again i have lots of miraculous friends and allies and everything else i’m willing to work with anyone on trying to break down what we have now but i love having these discussions where i’m like okay but why like okay great we agree that this government’s terrible we agree it needs to be way smaller where’s the laffer curve like where is this this change where suddenly lack of government becomes oh well then it’s going to be really bad why like what what is the thing you know and they’ll say that oh the warlords will take over okay yes we could return to the status quo that we have now of warlords taking over the worst thing they can think about is it would look like it does right now that’s the worst thing they can come up with literally that it would look like it would look like governments that have already existed they’ll say without government another stalin would pop up oh really stalin didn’t have a government seriously yeah what do you think the origin of government is spike uh so someone recently told me this it was the uh or it was it might have been you actually the ditch bosses of of babel of the of the mesopotamian that that that was the first what could be considered a government was when they were trying to figure out how to a lot the water that was coming out of irrigation that it was basically these for lack of a better word uh gang leaders who would kind of take over and be like all right you get this much water you get this much water and you all have to give me a certain amount of money for me to make sure you’re getting as much water as you want that was sort of the first structure of something resembling government is are you saying something different uh i don’t know if i would use a specific example but uh as far as like the concept of government um what the way that i believe that happened and there’s there is evidence to support this but uh the origins of government is wait for it here it comes drum roll war wars took over so ben stone on the on the bad quaker podcast was talking about this and i believe it’s called conquest siri so you have a bunch of of robbers going around and they’re looting and pillaging now this required the population be sedentary and staying in one place so it doesn’t work on hunter-gatherers and it also requires uh above-ground agriculture so if you’ve ever if you’re familiar with james c scott and the art of not being governed and i believe his book is called against the grain maybe it talks about how states have always used a grain type agriculture as a way to uh spread and and infest things because grains are very easy to tax they’re predictable on when they’re going to grow uh they’re easy to destroy if the if the victims aren’t uh conforming and allowing themselves to be victimized so it makes it really easy for a state to to get in there and and get their share of the loot so yeah i think murray rothbard even talked about this in maybe anatomy of the state um so you got a bunch of robbers that they go around and in order to keep from having a counter attack um they they basically kind of took over and said all right we’re going to give you protection from other war wards so you have to have us war wars otherwise the other warlords are going to get you which is really the the men’s status argument that war wars which would take over so there’s probably the origin and now the the thing that you remember is when when you’re dealing with people that are basically doing subsistence at farming well they got they do have surplus because having the grains and everything else but um you can’t have a bunch of people robbing just a few people that don’t have a whole lot that that’s a poor way to make a living so it’s it’s a smaller group that has to take on a bunch of smaller groups or take on one larger group and when you’re when you’re looking at the sheer numbers if you have if you have a fair number of people with martial skill in that group and they’re able to defend themselves and the story that ben told was i believe it was about jericho where the the state as we as we recognized it had existed for maybe about 2500 years something like that and then it got absolutely destroyed so the i guess the archaeological evidence it’s been so long since i was this podcast the archaeological evidence points towards towards uh uh all the things that we would associate with the state like the the type of buildings that they had the defenses the armory and and things like that and it sounds like um it sounds like the the people of jericho finally had enough of it they they fought back and they burned everything in place to include the loot that had been stolen so i mean it certainly makes sense that that would be the origin of government right and it is still it still works on the mafia model except it’s not as well addressed it’s also the human trafficking model so if you listen to some of the arguments of like well if it wasn’t for us you’d be completely vulnerable and out there and who knows what would happen to you that’s literally what pimps and and sex traffickers say to their victims and to their prostitutes is you know you won’t make it out there without me i’m the one keeping you safe you know we’re going to make this money together and i’m going to make sure that you’re taken care of and meanwhile they’re just literally using them making them go out there and we’re not making them but you know convincing them to go or in some cases making them the traffickers making them or coercing them or you know swindling them into going out there and uh you know doing what they need to do to get money and then taking all or most of the money for themselves and controlling their their victims but they’re literally using the same arguments if it wasn’t for me you know someone else would come in and be even worse to you and if it wasn’t for you you’d get trafficked and victimized so you got to stay with me and of course for those that say well that’s not enough they have to use whatever force and violence necessary to keep them in check while while you know you know hoodwinking the rest of them and it’s it’s literally the same thing it’s just on a mass scale yeah and pimps and traffickers are a result of the prohibition on prostitution in the section absolutely oh yeah now it’s like it’s like um they’re complaining about people crossing the border and going across people’s property and they’re saying look these people have no respect for private property they’re littering and they’re doing this set and they are thing blah blah blah and and when you think about why are they crossing in the middle of the desert why aren’t they taking the highway and you know driving through the through the little checkpoint and and all that other stuff or or just driving across the border because there’s not a checkpoint you know the whole the whole immigration policy should be called no coyote left behind nobody hires a coyote to get them across the border when they can buy a ticket on greyhound so this is a problem created by immigration policy so we actually have oh yeah no the all of these things are created by a bad policy and we’re going to actually talk about how that applies in to some extent to the homeless situation but we have a question for you from uh nellick trump uh she says legit question how would justice look like uh in an anarchist society a society meaning enforcement of legit crimes in an anarchist environment that’s the one issue that kind of keeps her as a menacist is how would you know dealing with you know rapists and murderers and kidnappers what would that look like in a society without a even minimal state so one of the things about a market based society what would she like it to look like and if she could type in like some things that she wants to see some results uh and then you can share with me that would be great so there’s been a lot of theorization about this um bob murphy wrote chaos there and it talked about defense and talked about justice i believe that in the bible the book of judges talks about how how this was how this stuff was done so there is a market for dispute resolution there’s a market for mediation arbitration because it exists right now and it exists in the private sector because trying to trying to go through the government courts is such a nightmare so government courts is actually no private arbitrator or mediator left behind so it’s very important that she mentioned the legit crimes about rape and all this our stuff so i believe in the bible it talked about not not just the judges but there would be areas where people would be banished so if you have people that have committed great serious offense offenses they would get banished off to um no man’s land whatever you want to call it and while they’re there banished um they would be safe but if they stepped out of their their fair game so they would be outside the protection of the law in in that regard but if you look at restorative justice so an eye for an eye doesn’t mean that you have to have an eye for an eye it means that no more than an eye for an eye so if if i were to rob you uh you know i i would have i would have to compensate you for what you lost obviously and because of the inconvenience i’d probably assessed an tax for it so when you start looking at at restorative justice making the victim whole how is somebody made whole by somebody being locked in a cage so what let’s say somebody let’s say somebody robs you and clarence darrow wrote an article about this early in the 20th century the the robbery victim may as well not even report it because he’s going to get robbed twice the the original offense and then he’s going to be robbed to pay for the incarceration of this person ah sorry about that coughing attack so what i i guess what do we really want out of this because when we look at the punishment culture um we have a highly we have a a very large prison population here in the u.s and there’s a there’s a lot of there’s a lot of bad stuff that that comes out of prison uh as far as what happens to the person who goes in i believe there’s a i can’t remember who said this but basically that if somebody goes to prison for harm or if somebody commits a crime against themselves which vice is basically a crime against yourself the punishment ought not to be worse than uh what you’ve done to yourself so when we look at the psychological impact that incarceration has on people even a short period of time incarceration is going to be extremely traumatic and the long-term mental health impact on that person is going to be bad is going to be very bleak so here you have a person that is not being productive meaning they’re not benefiting society in any way shape or form and some if somebody’s doing a menial job somewhere and somebody’s willing to pay them for it i view that as productive right so i they don’t they don’t have to be doing great things but they’re not being productive and as a matter of fact their productivity when they come out is going to be a lot worse than it would have been so what does society gain not the society was the victim of a robbery you know spike was the victim of a robbery or whoever it was and this collectivization and this idea that we are you know society has been victimized has created this environment where um people become the the worst form of parasite the stakeholder and i remember us watching and you as you said you know even if you apply that model what does this society gain from someone for example being put in a cage because they rob someone instead of saying hey listen you got to pay this person back you’ve got to you know get a productive job you got to you know go and do something with your life if there’s a mental health issue that led you to do this you need to get help and so forth as opposed to saying well okay we’re putting you in a cage for x number of months and not addressing any of the not addressing the victim that you harmed not addressing what may have led you to do that not addressing anything at all or telling you to do anything but actually sticking with a criminal record that’s gonna make you more likely to commit the crime but let’s say say for example a situation where you have you know and again i am going to extremes so that we can test these things a mass murderer a serial killer someone where you know there’s a vested interest in making sure that this person doesn’t harm others not just a thief or even someone who committed assault or or something like that but someone who is like an active danger to the lives of many people how how is something like that dealt with in an anarchist society and some some of the questions here when they’re saying well who even determines laws or or uh you know determines what the standards are and i think this is part of the thing is is in an anarchist society it doesn’t say that there’s no governance it says there’s not a state so everyone is voluntarily a part of that everyone is voluntarily a part of whatever funding needs to be involved it’s not just a vote for a system that you aren’t allowed to opt out of everyone is allowed to opt in or out and as a result everyone is is you know working together and building a consensus on what their standards are so that’s the key difference it’s not that i think you govern it well you just answered it so here’s one for you you got a you got a group of people that’s all together and we’re since we’re going to be talking about the fast let’s talk about the people that go to that fast there’s not a there’s not a list of rules written down on what’s going to happen there but there is a consensus in how people are going to behave there’s there’s no law out there that says you don’t walk into a room and criticize everybody’s mother and insult her and denigrate her but that we don’t see this happening all the time and most the time when it does happen it’s people doing it in jest so you don’t why don’t people go in and insult everybody else’s mother walking in the door why doesn’t that happen there’s no log against it so what we have is the there’s a lot of unspoken or maybe even agreed upon uh but it’s not official there’s the way that people interact is it’s it’s rather spontaneous and uh contrary to the hopsins i i believe that humans have a very strong interest in cooperation and getting along avoiding conflict and things like that if they if we didn’t then the the species would have died out a long time ago we never would have made it to seven billion people it would have died yep right right yeah because when they say you know hobbes uh the the nature man or man in a state of nature is constantly at war with himself and that government exists to keep that from happening well government is made of men and when you look at the number of wars that have happened by government now you could change hobbs thing around and you could you could actually prove him right that the the man in the state of nature’s constantly awarded himself and to illustrate this he created government to facilitate that non-stop war right right right so you can’t have it both ways right you know unless you’re interested that’s like these are the these are the questions you asked me if people can’t be trusted with freedom how can they be trusted with power if they can’t be trusted with power why can’t they be trusted with freedom if only some people can be trusted with power why are we trusting everyone else we don’t trust for their own freedom to decide who has that power like it just it’s it’s self-defeating it’s a self-defeating argument right if you elect politicians to to come up with the answers of things that you don’t understand now to deal with the things that are beyond your capabilities how are you to know which politicians are best suited to do that if you don’t have enough knowledge right right so here here is here’s the thing that came up and i i actually want to address this one steve south says so then criminals would be allowed to opt out of laws if someone goes into a voluntary society that has a set of standards and they decide to break those standards they get removed and the the way that they are well they get a few things they can either change their behavior depending on the severity of what they do they can either change their behavior restore whatever victims they had to that and and make amends and move forward or they can be removed from that society and since we’re now talking a series of private properties and not some commons that we all are are forced into association on that can now be easily done and obviously the the level of how far you know if we’re talking they commit murder well then they might not make it out of there or they might end up you know being put somewhere where they can’t hurt anyone else for at least quite some time if it’s something like they go around insulting people and that’s not acceptable in that community then they get a chance to to make good on it or they get told that they’re not allowed to be there anymore and again because it is a series of private properties that are voluntarily associated with each other the it is now you are now trespassing on one or more people’s private property by not by by not keeping with their standards so that’s that’s how there are going to be people that say i don’t agree with that great you can go not agree with that somewhere else where people are okay with that or on your own property well there let me add to that i so if there’s not a law saying that you can’t kill people there’s also not a law saying that somebody can’t kill you for killing their family yes all right so when when you look at um like polycentric law zir law in somaliland which goes back several thousand years and and even uh even like with the judges and i don’t know specifically that it’s in the bible i’m i’m not i’m not a i’m not a believer so when i talk about the bible i’m not i am not a theology uh expert by a stretch of imagination i referenced some stuff that i heard and remember but if if you look at what has happened uh because there is a need to uh keep order there’s a desire to keep or there’s a market demand for settling disputes um the judges and they were judges because they were people that were respected it was like the natural aristocracy that thomas jefferson talked about um or wrote about the there are people that because of their accomplishments their their virtue their wisdom they are well respected and they are trusted by people in the community so like if you and i if you and i are having a disagreement and we say you know what let’s let’s have matt decide on this you’re you’re one of your co-hosts you know because we both respect his judgment and everything else and we will agree to abide by whatever he says now that’s that’s what that is people the this whole human interaction thing is really not that complicated and right i think a lot of times the the belief systems too complicated but you know something else if if we don’t look at crime as like a a criminal thing we look as a civil thing as a uh a violation of an individual’s rights and they say you know hey you know i have a problem because you did this to me and and we need to settle this and you don’t bring all the public into it and collectivize it and everything else i remember i was watching bill o’reilly and his website got hacked and uh he was talking about this on a show and he says he says you know what the the the kid that hacked it was like some lefty kid that would did it because he hated o’reilly because o’reilly was a different flavor of statism and he says you know i met with the kid and i saw his situation and i saw that he would not be you know justice would not be served by putting this kid in jail and having you know the the the wife be on her own or the girlfriend whatever and the kid not having the dad around for however long he was going to be incarcerated he said look it’s my website so i decided what happened and that was like the perfect lesson on property rights and i really wish that he would go back and re-watch that episode but here i was you know burned that kid because he broke the law and so you can see how far i’ve come here you know i wasn’t the victim but i made myself the victim i co-signed o’reilly’s victimhood he broke your social contract he broke your social contract that you agreed to at some point when you were born or conceived or during gestation or whatever yeah i i signed it in the womb and then i came out and said here i am i need can somebody notarize this so i just just little concepts like that when when you put a little bit of thought into it and when you question because most people speak in in narratives or they speak in slogans and talking points not real ideas so when i hear somebody talk about get back to the constitution limited government i think myself now there’s somebody who has no thoughts or ideas whatsoever now he should go sit over there with the vote harder people and because i mean and there’s there’s no substance there it’s it’s all it’s all emotional in that regard they’re kind of like the workstars but one other thing that brought me over and i i have to create tom woods for this again um i remember listening to an up a lecture that he was doing and he talked about the war prayer by uh mark twain and for those of you out there that are listening google this sometime read it uh there was a a version on youtube that was narrated by peter coyote and this struck such a chord with me twain had written this around the spanish-american war time but he said they didn’t want to publish it till after he was dead because he knew the jingos and and and imperial would would just go crazy and and want to kill him if if it was read while he was still alive or published by still alive and it talks about um the people in the town they’re the the sons are getting ready to march off to war and they’re all gathered at the church and they’re doing the you know the the service before they take off and and go to uh defend their country by invading somebody else or whatever right and protecting our freedoms over there yeah yeah so the so the the priest is up there and he says you know dear lord protect our boys and bring them home safely and blah blah blah and this this tattered man goes up there he looks like a rag picker and he goes up to the pulpit and he takes a priest’s spot and says uh i have heard your prayer and i am here to confirm your wishes basically and it says it’s an example of what is seen and what is unseen um and he says when you ask for uh for me to when you ask for god to protect your sons you are you are asking god to kill their sons for your guys to shoot straight is for their bullets to uh make widows and orphans of their wives and children and all this all the stuff and and this is where i really saw the immorality of war and this struck such a chord with me and this this really hit me so hard and i could not unhear it and i remember um they’re talking about the surge in iraq and i’m like yeah get in there and oh wait uh crap i heard that and it it really brought me to see the horror of war for what it was uh organized murder uh murder on a mass scale with flags yes and and that was when i had to shed my neocon ways so uh i that in a nutshell and there’s other stuff in there but realistically tom woods was my red pill and for those who are wondering no i haven’t listened to glenn beck in a long time that’s funny yeah no i it’s fine because we both came from the neocon uh i guess faith or whatever you want to call it the new neocon belief system and yeah as far as the religious statism goes the neocons are kind of the wahhabis yeah well that you know they say that the the the moderate neocon uh you know bombsher village while the the or no the radical neocon bombs your village while the moderate neocon stands back and watches um the uh so let’s talk about a specific issue that i know i know is is near and dear to your heart and mine as well um and it’s something that i’ve actually been touching on a lot this year um it was something that i saw last year campaigning um i was struck by the number of people because last year during the campaign we almost all the events that we had to do were outdoors both because it was nice out and it was a good place to have lots of people show up but also because of the lockdowns and most large events and arenas and things like that were either closed or had limited occupancy so it was just easier to say all right we’re all going to meet at this park and uh you know make up make a day-long thing out of it and so what would happen is uh especially because these were free events a large number of um of homeless people and and people that were close to homelessness people that were living in their cars and things like that would come to my events and ask questions and you know in in their mind a lot of times these were people that were living in or near these parks and these other places that we would pick and so in their mind it’s like hey you want to come into my backyard i got some questions for you you know you’re saying you want to run for something and it was it was i’ve always recognized that government was making that problem worse and i always recognize that it was a much more um complex and nuanced problem than either the i guess the the people that say they’re compassionate for the homeless or the people that you know say we got to be tough on the homeless want to recognize that it is but it really struck me the number of them that were actually saying like well what is your what is the solution to this or what will help alleviate the problems that that we’re going through and so you know coming into this year because i often said listen i honestly don’t know what the best solution is for your area which is why i believe as a libertarian that your community should be empowered to decide that instead of it being decided at the at the state level much less the federal level clearly they’ve screwed it up so much that you’re here living in the in the you know in the woods so clearly that’s not where your solution is going to come from but this year i really wanted to to dive into that and say well okay even though i’m not going to know in every community what’s needed i definitely want to be further along the dunning-kruger scale here and actually know what it is i’m talking about so i visited a number of uh you know homeless camps and i’ve talked with a lot of people that formerly homeless and homeless people i’ve met i’ve gone to a lot of non-profits and charities and mutual aid societies that are helping to meet the needs of homeless people in various areas and you know it’s it’s opened my eyes a lot to the the multiple different issues that are going on and when you reached out and said that you have a uh you know you have some very strong thoughts about this i thought well who better to have on to talk about it so you know talk to me talk to us about i guess first of all your you know your your background in dealing with um uh uh you know homeless people to the extent that you can and um and then also you know kind of i guess your thoughts on what’s missing here what what is missing that’s causing this problem to keep getting worse yeah it is an extremely nuanced subject uh like most like most things are a lot of people are very uh they they take a glance at it it bothers them and the do something ism pops out and they start saying somebody needs to do something and well maybe maybe not uh in a lot of cases the doing something is actually worse than doing nothing as a matter of fact there’s something that uh like the old-time social workers will say there’s there’s a there’s a couple phrases that i’m going to use one is don’t just do something stand there and the other is you can never work harder than your client so my experience with the homeless population and homelessness comes from part of my background so going back many years i’ve been a hub operations supervisor at ups i’ve been a sales manager in the insurance and financial services industry and i am of course a veteran um but the the the education that made me the most qualified to speak on all this stuff is the fact that i have been homeless and that’s after having the the hub operation supervisor position and being a sales manager so people say well how oh my god how does somebody who has all that stuff going on become homeless and well it is complicated to say the least so my situation came about from mental health issues i did i dealt with ptsd anxiety depression no substance abuse fortunately my depression was so bad at one time that i didn’t even want to drink or do drugs that’s how depressed i was wow yeah so i i spent a couple years milling around before i even started really working on myself and we are going to talk about the mental health recovery aspects of this but basically i burned a lot of bridges with family and friends sometimes i set the water on fire out of my friends that i had before all this stuff happened there are only two that i still have any contact with the rest have they forgot that i existed they flushed me down the memory hole and i can’t say that i don’t disagree with them and i pushed some of them down the memory hole because uh some of them it was uh part of their toxicity that that led me to uh my conditions uh you know where i was at and everything and uh and there were some that i they were wonderful people but because they were in the same type of mindset and same type of environment that i when i came out the shelter and and was reestablishing myself i didn’t i didn’t resume contact because that would be kind of a trigger for me right so you know it’s like an aaa they talk about stay away from what places went faces well this this wasn’t alcohol related but it was the same idea but it ultimately culminated with not being able to hold down a job living in flea bag motels i i squatted in in some empty houses couch surfed and uh just really a lot of people were shaking their head at me and eventually when i had burned all the bridges and everything else my buddy’s wife dropped me off in front of the in front of a va hospital said go get your together because i that’s really all the all that they could do and it is really a tough situation so what i want to talk about is um the the six stages of recovery and you have that graphic and i’m gonna tell my stories i’m going along and i’m i’m gonna be a little bit brief on it because this is difficult to talk about at times so i don’t want to get too far into it and and have a hard time but anyway so i spent a couple years uh in the pre-contemplation stage so pre-contemplation is you’re you’re doing your thing you’re you’re you have no idea that there’s a problem or no inkling no desire to change none of that stuff is going on you’re just caught up in the madness so you’re just oblivious to everything else so with my situation i i wasn’t working regularly and making money and all sorts of well i want to go back to something else first let’s talk about what is homelessness so homelessness uh we think of it as you don’t have a place to call home you don’t have a permanent address you don’t have a roof over your head and that is correct i expand that out because this is nuanced it’s not you know just looking at it and seeing it at face value it’s an inability to put a roof over your head so you could take somebody that’s homeless and give them a section 8 voucher and put them in in an apartment but they still don’t have the ability to put a roof over their own head and put food on the table okay so we have to look at what is impeding the ability to put a roof over the head and food on the table a lot of times it’s going to be mental illness sometimes it’s going to be substance abuse there’s sometimes people are going to have an inability to maintain employment because of criminal records and just all sorts of different things uh crappy economy the number of people that i have met that were doing everything right and wound up homeless uh those people are kind of like unicorns yeah so and you do have like some of the working poor and a lot of what i’m going to talk about is going to be anecdotal but i think i think it happens enough to where it could be considered factual or legitimate now granted not everybody falls in the same category so it’s not cookie cutter but like a lot of the people that i know that have been working poor um they’re not particularly frugal i mean they’re not going out well sometimes they’re trying to go out and buy fancy cars they’re outside their budget but they’re they’re not living frugally they’re they’re spending money on things that they can’t really afford and you can justify it with i i need to i need to treat myself good once in a while so that it perks up my mental health and i get that right the question is to what degree and does it benefit you more to to perk up your uh your ego and self-esteem or does it benefit you to not spend that money and save it for later a lot of these folks have the high type high time preference and they have a tendency to spend money as fast as they get it now and and even even worse if you ask them where the money went they can’t really tell you so by this like i said it’s not everybody that that’s something that we see a lot of right and they often have no perspective of money management like that they grew up in a household that was as you put it you know they might they might be in housing so they aren’t homeless quote unquote but absent that housing they would be homeless and after however many generations of that they don’t really have a perspective of money management we see this all the time with people that go from you know poverty to you know extreme wealth and they often lose it very quickly because they have no idea how to manage money and and you know unless either they figure it out or someone helps them then they often end up you know being poor again because they just do a bunch of conspicuous consumption and and you know i finally have it type spending and uh and and end up with with nothing as a result it was all they spent it all on butter and nothing on actual like property and and you know things that would gain value and investments yeah like that yeah we see this with people that when the when these super duper mega billions lottery yes drawings you know that they go from moderate middle income uh or low income to multi-millionaires and within four years the vast majority of them are broke yeah i mean they’re broke they’re trying to get on public assistance in some cases and and you’ll see people that uh young people they’ll go out and and they’ll get uh a new job a big fancy job with a big giant paycheck and and they’re buying these expensive sports cars but they can’t afford to put gas in them right so i mean yeah it’s it’s a it’s a very poor understanding of money and finances and and how to use it um but also you got to look at as signals when you have inflation and you can’t you can’t earn interest putting it in the bank uh that lets you know that you know hey this is a time to spend you know so keynesianism does have that that uh impact where it gives you bad signals but so my thing is and i i really started learning about economics in in the last place that i was living so i was selling cars selling used cars at this uh guaranteed finance a lot so i was dealing with a lot of people like me coming in and uh yeah it was very interesting i i learned a lot living out there but uh i started learning about economics because i started learning about trade-offs opportunity costs you know just figuring out how i was going to how i was going to spend my money and at the time my average my average grocery budget for a week was 20 to 30 bucks and there’s one time where i spent like 60 bucks because i just gotten a paycheck and i was living high on the hog and all i had was this this fleabag motel room with uh with a little mini fridge and a microwave in there yeah right it was it was bad when i first got to that place i i thought i’d hit rock bottom at the at the motel before that and and then also staying in the in the empty house once uh once a family that lived there got evicted and uh and i got there and i was just my my sensibilities were offended by it and the really bad part was when i got used to it and after being there for like three weeks or something like that i i i wasn’t so bothered by it anymore i wasn’t so offended by it but i said that i was going home one night after work and when i when i refer to that place as home it’s like holy cow what a mess you know i just normalized this crappiness so right one somebody asked me it says who in their right mind would want to be homeless exactly i wasn’t in my right mind i was dealing with mental health issues and everything else but also i was dealing with some stinking thinking i was greatly in denial as to how bad things were and i’d had a lot of people that had tried to help me and everything else and and when you’re in that pre-contemplative stage you are very resistant you deny that there’s a problem um i i viewed myself as i was going to be everything was going to be okay i was i was so close to making it and my ship coming in whatever phrase you want to use and why can’t these people see that i’m so close to getting it and meanwhile they’re just watching me swirl down the drain and that’s what i was doing but in that time you were convinced that you were just you know moments or days away from getting out of this and meanwhile anyone objectively looking at it would be like this is only going to get worse right right so i think the i think you and i have discussed that when uh when uh i visited you a couple of years ago uh there’s uh there’s a discussion that i’ve had that i’ve done several times it’s called how and why does stuff happen and i use the example of the of the underpants gnomes and everything else and it’s you look at what are your goals what what is the end result that that you’re looking for out of this and how are your methods going to get you there so if you would have asked me how my methods were going to get me out of that i was i would have been emphatic about how many underpants i was going to steal and and how good i was going to be after i had that big old pile of underpants right right because that’s where i was so when you’re dealing with somebody that’s in that state of mind the the denial that there’s a problem the being oblivious that there’s a problem uh you can’t tell them there’s a problem so you have a history of substance abuse and recovery uh these anybody that’s dealt with any sort of recovery of their own or somebody that’s really close to them be it mental health quitting smoking quitting drugs and alcohol something like that you may not know these phrases or the as these six steps by the words or um you know that it’s an actual thing but i’m i’m sure that you all are are quite familiar with what’s going on here so you have somebody that’s doing drugs and they haven’t hit their bottom yet and you tried to talk to them about their problem what is the response spike oh oh every uh my response was you know look at how well i’m doing with that because i i also had the i guess benefit of i was financially successful and so i’d say everything’s fine look at all this money i’m making and you know look at everything’s going great and people are like you are always doing drugs i’m like yeah but look look at how everything’s going it’s going fine now if i hadn’t been making money and then i would also say i’m getting it under control like it’s under control it’s not going to get any worse and so on and so forth if i hadn’t had the leaning on the i’m making all this money thing i’d be saying i’m getting under control i’m working on it i’m working on it i don’t have a problem and uh and something along those lines yeah and and when people are caught up in their madness uh they are very good at uh rationalizing it and explaining it away uh it is kind of like when uh it’s kind of like when you vote for when you support a politician they get elected and then they do the opposite of what they promised and they’re able to explain why that happened and no they know they didn’t do that but if they did do that they had a damn good reason for doing it but they didn’t do it so it doesn’t matter there’s really a lot yeah and there’s there’s really a lot of uh nonsensical thinking that goes with it so when we’re dealing with people that are on the streets as far as homelessness goes um what what is your goal for helping them and this is where we’re going to be interactive not just me telling my story if if people want to uh want to type in in spike if you can read those comments off you know what are the things that that you would like to see happen but you have to keep in mind that if they’re not ready for change then they’re not going to be responsive to it uh yeah if if everyone uh that’s watching if you want to put in the comments what what would be your goals you know uh and you can define that however you want to what would be your goals and the things you and we’ll read those off that the goals that you would want to see in ending or alleviating the conditions of homelessness i i can tell you mine basically go into three main uh i guess three main areas one is getting rid of any working on getting rid of or reforming basically getting rid of uh anything that is happening at the government level local state or federal identifying those things that are exacerbating these conditions making them worse creating these conditions and getting rid of them acknowledging them and acknowledging that it’s actually making it worse that the as you put it you know uh do something ism the the you know we gotta we gotta do something is often making it worse and fixing that because that’s that’s an externality that’s an external thing that you know even if you go through these these stages of change and everything else you’re now fighting a more uphill battle than you should be because of external factors that you have no control over so identifying those and and getting rid of those uh another one is dealing with the immediate acute needs of people that are in a bad situation with homelessness like making sure that a homeless person doesn’t uh doesn’t starve or making sure that a homeless person doesn’t commit suicide and when i say making sure trying to have people go out and and help people that are in that situation so that their immediate acute needs that are a matter of survival are handled in the meantime that we’re trying to figure out what we do and then that third one is kind of the it’s actually kind of number two in the underpants gnomes thing as you keep bringing up that that third one is like identifying the now that okay we’ve we’ve dealt with immediate cause immediate concern so the person’s not gonna die we or or you know or is less likely to die or suffer you know permanently permanent injury or something like that we we we’re working on getting rid of bad policy that’s making these things worse now let’s look at what’s actually causing this to happen and obviously understanding that every person’s situation is different but generally speaking what are the telltale signs of this and what if anything can we be doing to help people and what if anything can we be saying to folks to or or what conditions are needed for that person to decide its time and then how can we help them along without you know enabling them so those are kind of the three main three main areas i’m glad that you just said help them without enabling them so here’s where i’m probably going to reign on a few people’s parades so let’s talk about incentives and signals disincentives perverse and sounds and things like this um so we know that people respond to signals and incentives we can evidence this by people leave leave an industry to go work in new industry so the new industry uh let’s let’s let’s look at uh the the web-based industry so a lot of people end up going into computer programming and and all this other stuff and they left industries that were dying out or were tapering down so we know that there was a lot of money to be made in the computer industry and all the web-based stuff so that drew people there we know that when one city is having a is is having a slow economy people go to another city or another state that is booming that has a bunch of new jobs going on and because there’s a demand they’re paying more peop paying people more to go to those places we’ve seen the migration both geographically and professionally so many times i i think we could call that settled science so here’s the thing if you have people living in a homeless encampment and you want to make them uh you want to make sure that they that they don’t go hungry that they don’t starve to death that they don’t freeze and all this other stuff what impact is going out there and dropping off meals every day bringing them clothing blankets things like that going to have on them uh deciding that they want to go in and not be homeless anymore because when you make that lifestyle sustainable through that help the urgency to change meaning the hitting bottom gets prolonged and the longer they stay in that situation the more difficult it is to get out of it i remember tom woods talking about charles murray i can’t remember what his what his specialty is but he talked about incentive programs and the the the question they posed to his students and i’ve done this with interns like psych psychology and social work interns i i would say come up with an incentive program let’s say to quit smoking come up with an incentive program that will get people to quit smoking it has to be good enough to get them to quit smoking but not so great to induce people to start smoking and they look at me like huh and i’m i’m a former smoker i’m a little bit old for five and a half years now i haven’t even had a cheater puff so if you would have offered me 20 bucks to quit smoking 10 years ago i would have laughed at you if you would have offered me 20 bucks to quit smoking on the morning morning of december 11th of 2015 i would have taken it because that was my quit day if you offered it to me the day before i probably would have taken it um two months before probably not because i wasn’t i wasn’t really thinking about quitting at the time so 20 bucks is not a heck of an inducement to get me to change bad behavior unless of course i was already planning on changing it okay so how much would it take to get me to quit smoking or how much would quit get take to get you to quit doing what you’re doing whatever your advice is or was so 2000 okay you have my attention 20 000 sign me up bro so how many people do you think would start smoking in order to collect the 20 000. get that 20 grand yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so to find the spot where it’s great enough to get somebody to stop doing something but not so great as to get other people to start doing it to get the same thing so the the people that say well we got to have rules they try to reform the idea which is why i don’t like reformers uh if something’s in constant state of reform means that they’ve gotten it wrong the entire time they’ve been doing it right so they come up with rules and they say all right well you have to smoke for at least 24 months and you have to smoke at least a pack a day and let’s say there’s some scanner or blood test that they can do to measure this so if somebody is only at 18 months or only at 12 months or 18 months whatever and they’re at three quarters of a pack a day um they have to kick it up to they have to smoke a full pack a day and they have to keep smoking for an extra 12 to to or six to 12 months in order to get that 20 000 right so the longer we smoke the harder it is to quit and particularly when you add the more in there and trust me i spoke for like 30 31 years so what we see here is we have this brilliant idea of we’re going to offer incentives to get people to engage in good behavior and sometimes it’s going to get people to continue bad behavior or start bad behavior because politicians have this thing of well i have to do something or i have to have a political platform so i’m going to solve this i’m going to solve this problem that doesn’t exist by creating a problem that can’t be solved does that make sense so here we have the here we have the unintended consequences or the blind stupidity or the hubris now which which really fuels most political actions uh hubris stupidity ego everything else there’s not a whole lot of uh of uh good ideas out there as a matter of fact uh somebody was saying you know anarchy means no rulers not no rules and and to play devil’s advocate i say well maybe it should mean no rules because when you look at rules what are they they are a restriction on the way that you’re allowed to do something and the more tightly restricted something is the the more you structure it the less opportunity you have for improvement because you get down to where you only have one option for a way to do something and if you if you try to change anything at all it is outside the rules does that make sense right right so in order for rules to be respected i’m gonna i’m gonna go after do a little bastiat here the the rules must first be respectable so i will say do we need rules well in a vague in general term or gen vague in general meaning like you said no we don’t we should have rules that focus on right instead of wrong smart instead of dumb and they should not create more problems than what they were supposed to solve and they and they do need to solve the original problem so when we look at the prohibition of alcohol we know from the statistics that it was supposed to kill cure all these ills of society meaning the the health stuff the cirrhosis of the liver and everything else uh reduce the domestic violence and all this our stuff but because of the perverse incentives of illicit markets it created the turf wars of the gangs so you had gangland rub outs you had the saint valentine’s day massacre i think the the single greatest year for police deaths was during the prohibition of alcohol because they had gangsters shooting it out with the cops you had more health alcohol-related health problems because when you prohibit alcohol and the the punishment for beer and whiskey are the same but you can make much more money off of a truckload of whiskey than you can off a truckload of beer you encourage people to smuggle beer i’m sorry smuggle whiskey so now you have stronger alcohol instead of the weaker alcohol because you can charge more for it and a lot of people complained about about uh cannabis because you can’t get dirt weed anymore all this stuff now is is you you smoke one you gotta turn down the radio to be able to read because that’s how strong it is so so we have these perverse incentives in there so what happens when you take food and clothing and tents and all this other stuff out to a homeless encampment does it prolong them from coming in and and this i’m not trying to say don’t do it and this is something that we don’t have the answer to this is an unknown i think it’s probably it’s probably a mix of things because i i will tell you i have heard other formerly homeless people that have said what you’re saying that you know going out and and providing food and providing housing or you know tents or providing tarps or providing care packages or whatever it’s more to you know enable homeless people and make the person giving feel better than to actually fix the problem and it actually prolongs it but then i’ve also heard other homeless people who said i was in a homeless camp with a bunch of other people who were addicts we all were convinced no one cared about us and it was worthless to even try and it was when people came out and provided us with food and tarps and and you know care products and you know it made us realize that life was even worth living and that there was anyone that even cared about us and it made us feel like there was a reason to to reach out for help and now that’s why i’m not so it probably the answer again going back to nuance it’s probably that it’s it takes all kinds and that there are different responses that people are going to have based on why they’re even out there in the first place well it’s also based upon where they are in the in their stages of change in their stages right right yeah so somebody in the pre-contemplation phase a lot of times they’re going to be completely hopeless believing that there’s no opportunity for change that this is their lot in their life it’s inevitable and nothing is ever going to make it better uh you know it it’s the mentality of surrender it’s the person who is beaten so right if somebody does come out there and you said that somebody came out and and gave them tarps and food and stuff like that and that inspired them that motivated them that took them to the contemplation phase to where they started believing that there’s a possibility of change uh not really sure about it lacking the confidence to move forward uh scared stuff lists you know the all that stuff because once again they’re not in their right mind i mean there is a trauma to being homeless uh it’s yeah and it’s it’s outside of our norm and in when they’re in this contemplation phase they start thinking you know maybe i can maybe there is a possibility so when you have people that go out there and they talk to these folks now keep in mind if they’re not interested they’re they’re gonna they’re not gonna listen they’re not gonna pay attention they’re gonna take your food and then they’re gonna run away and go do their thing okay um but it’s like trying to try and talk liberty to or talk free market economics to a democratic socialist so you you’re kind of wasting your time there uh so they’re not open to it but in the contemplation phase they are open to it and you can do something called motivational interviewing and motivational interviewing is kind of the socratic method of of uh recovery discussion now what what would you like to do you know what is your goal uh do you want to get out of here and go back to work you want to have your own place what are the things that you want to do that you used to do but you can’t do anymore because of your situation what are the things that you would like to try in the future now and it is it’s it’s setting up goals it’s it’s giving people hope and when people do have hope that is something um i know they say hope is not a strategy but it’s it’s the first step so when they’re in that contemplation phase they’re recognizing there’s an issue they think there’s a possibility they’re not real strong on it but then they start go moving into the preparation and determination phase so going i’m gonna go back on my story a little bit so by the time i got the to the last motel the the last flea bag on uh on the avenue and oh that was that was a rough area that that wasn’t in the hood so but it was like the the redneck version of the hood anyway i was in the stage and i was just like you know whatever although i still had my delusions that i that i was like one one slick move away from getting out of there right so right right then i started realizing because i i had i had some really tough times and that’s when i started the contemplation and i i felt a little bit better about my situation and i felt that it could be reversed but it wasn’t quite the delusional thinking of being one move away from from hitting the you know hitting the the winning ticket so to speak um but i was really really strongly thinking about and and then i i started to hit rock bottom so i was working at that car joint and i was doing great um my first month i was i think the number four or five in sales in the metro detroit region this is my first month i’m beating i’m beating people that been there for years doing this and i’m just knocking it out left and right but i wound up getting fired because i couldn’t get to work on time so i never made a second month and i i did pretty well in spite of where my mind was at the time i i i think that if i went back there now i’d be killing it i mean i’d have like a hundred percent close rate where and you also have to destroy you also have the structure to get there on time now yeah yeah well i it what turned out i had sleep apnea but i also had the mental health stuff going on too so right and that right and that there’s a lot going on there so um getting into the getting into the prep preparation determination i’d lost that job i was looking around for other jobs now here’s something else it was july i think it was it was pretty hot that that that month and i didn’t have transportation so going you know i i had the i telegraph avenue in that area to uh were my places for working so there’s fast food joints and there were some other car lots and everything else i would have had to walk to work every day and it would have been a lot further than it was at this place but you know what it wasn’t going through my mind okay so if i get a job of the car lot two miles down the road but i can’t get to this one on time how am i supposed to get to the other one i wasn’t thinking that so i kind of had the the the tunnel vision blinders on of you know okay i just gotta get into our job and and there’s a there’s a belief that if i get another job and get another place to live then all my problems are gonna go away and that’s not true because the problem was inside my head the problem was me so it wasn’t a gun to my head it was a gun in my head so to speak so you see where i’m going with that yeah right right right so eventually uh i ran out of money and i called my buddy up and i’d been couch surfing at his place and he put me out of there and and into that motel dropped me off over there said you know let me pull it together i called him and and uh he won’t let me come back and i said well can you find a homeless shelter for me and that was when i was that’s when i really started hitting my bottom so that was my determination that was when i said i can’t do this and his wife went online and uh because as a veteran she found uh she found a program for veterans and called out there and they said i’d have to go to the va and they could send me over and everything else and and i stayed there for she she picked me up on the morning that i moved out and took me over to the va and dropped me off and i went inside and i spoke with one of the social workers and uh well let me go back to the registration so i’d never been i’d never been into the va before because you know back then and it was it was really bad and that’s just not something that you did you know that was for people that didn’t have anything else you know it it’s kind of the pride thing of you know not going on the dole with the government and i had to realize that my way of doing things wasn’t working so that’s why i had to make a change and i remember going in there and i was talking to the guy in uh registration and um i was in a i was in a pretty bad place you know because i was i was admitting defeat and i i told him that i was there for homeless services that day because he asked if i needed a immediate appointment and i just started to break down because there there’s uh the the mindset of i should be independent i should be able to put a roof over my head and i have failed because i haven’t done the basic human survival thing i haven’t been able to provide food and shelter for myself and that is the ultimate feeling of failure and it really really hit me hard but that recognizing that i wasn’t able to do it on my own and they talk about this in a a n a to realize that you have to make a change and the change is beyond your own power and you’re gonna have to bring somebody else in so in in this case it was mental health treatment uh for them they talked about the higher power in uh in the aaa and n a right and yeah since i’m a non-believer that higher power thing doesn’t really work uh but but it was realized the same it is it is that that fulcrum or whatever that leads to that catalyst that leads to that change and in your case it was a it was actual like you know um um an actual like program rehabbing the to to fix the problem yeah so i i finished up with that and and i tell you what that guy was great uh it’s it’s it’s easy to talk about government employees and and they don’t care and they’re just taxis and stuff like that and in some cases it’s true uh there’s a lot of people in the va and and other agencies for that matter that they they have uh they have head marks on their desk from banging their head on the desk because of how how stupid stuff can get and how many impediments there are to actually doing the job and and providing care to people and everything else so it’s you know it it is it’s not all ticket punching drums there are a lot of people that sincerely care and i actually i actually met a um someone over the weekend and she uh she was part of one of the people at this concern veterans of america event that i was that i was um speaking at and she is um i forget where she is but she’s one of the people in the i forget what it’s called i think veterans crisis network it’s basically a va run um uh uh number that you can call 24 7 if you’re in crisis and um and she was talking about you know because i you know i’m going up to her and talking and obviously you know she works for the federal government right but you know i’m talking to her and all she talked about was how frustrated she was by you know the the bureaucracy and she said and you know she said the vast majority of people i work with they are having to do everything they can to keep their sanity because they try to take on as many people as they can take as many calls as they can do as much as they can to try to because they know the lives they’ve saved and and you know it’s what fuels them but at the same time you know they’re struggling themselves and it’s just they’re just trying to help as many people as they can and you know you can’t you can’t beat up someone who’s trying to help people you know even if their employer sucks you know that’s right their fault that their employer sucks right like they’re trying their best to help people and they see that as the the most viable uh path for them to be able to do so yeah the first social worker that i talked to uh she was an old-timer guy she was i think she was like 73 at the time and i don’t think she’s retired yet now i mean she’d been in the game forever and a day and very knowledgeable you could you could sit down and talk to her and she just had this wealth of knowledge and understanding and she she really knew what she was talking about and you if you could get her to uh kind of go into the subject she’ll talk about all the times that she had break rules to be able to help people and give them the the care that they needed and everything else so it’s it’s kind of crazy in that regard uh but like i said just just an absolute wealth of knowledge i learned so much from her out of like casual conversations so i’m doing my i’m doing my intake with her and she’s asking me all these questions and i’m thinking myself do i have to lie to get in here do i have to say that i’m a certain level of bleeped up or do i have to say no i’m not you know i don’t have this going on because that would exclude me uh because it was the wrong type of bleeped up and it right when you’re not when you’re not in your right mindset like that you know you’re thinking a lot of dumb stuff right right so um i wound up uh uh doing a couple days in-patient mostly in storage um because to send me over to the place that they were gonna send me was not a good idea uh i was a little bit too fragile at the time to go over there and that place is kind of uh yeah uh not the best place to put mildly and it is probably better than nothing but is definitely not my in my top ten list of places i would want to go under the worst of circumstances so anyway uh i wound up uh getting placed in in an actual va facility and i i thought that i liked the the idea of how it was set up and by the way i spent my 40th birthday in there so i i turned 40 a couple days after i arrived so anyway it’s a it was an inpatient homeless program uh focusing on mental health issues so it’s not like inpatient like psych ward i used to joke there’s minimum security so they one that you have a roof over your head you got some structure uh the smoke breaks were were at a certain time uh you couldn’t just take off and come and go as you please and things like that but unlike a lot of the irish altars you didn’t have to leave in the morning and then not come back until nighttime so so they had some they had some classes during the day they had some group therapy and i found that i i noticed that a lot of it was geared towards substance abuse and uh much less towards mental health and i didn’t have a substance abuse problem like i had said when i was at my worst i was too depressed to drink or do drugs so i didn’t feel incredible what’s that i said that’s incredible that is yeah that is pretty you’re in a very interesting place if you’re like i don’t even care enough to get high i just don’t right that’s wow yeah yeah well i was never really a drug user i smoked a little weed in high school i didn’t like it and all the other stuff scared the hell out of me but uh so i i found that that aspect didn’t work so much for me uh but they did have like some life skills classes and i felt that a lot of that was pretty basic um i know i still participated uh the big thing was i i decided you know because when they did the orientation uh to decide if if uh where i would decide if i’m a good if it’s a good fit for me they’re talking about all these rules and uh when i realized i was at the action phase and and this is where you you’ve gone past the the preparation of saying okay i gotta do something and coming up with an idea this is actually putting that idea into place so at this point i determined that as i mentioned before my way of doing it wasn’t working so dr phil would say how’s that working out for you numbnuts and i would say it isn’t so at this point i had surrendered to the idea that i was going to need help to do this and i swallowed my pride and i said okay you got these stupid rules about when i can smoke well fine i’ll deal with it um you got these rules about time that you go to bed and time that you get up and also stuff i’ll deal with it you want me to participate in classes no problem and i did and i feel that i was quite conscientious about the participation uh there’s a few times where i kind of phoned it in but i for the most part uh i didn’t go in there and screw things up right so i you were solid solidly in the in the action phase at this point yeah yeah so what i did was i i came up with the goal and my goal was i wanted to be self-sufficient again i wanted to be able to put a roof over my head i wanted to have a decent job i want to pay my own way i wanted to be able to enjoy the things that i hadn’t done in a long time i hadn’t been camping in a couple years i hadn’t traveled um there was a lot of stuff that i had not done that i had taken for granted a couple years before you know it was just a given that was going to happen know that is going to go on the annual camping trip and and all this sort of stuff so i really wanted to avoid like getting on a section 8 voucher uh i wanted to avoid getting up food stamps and all sort of stuff and there were a lot of people there so there’s a variety of people that were in there and some of them this was like their first time some of them this is like the second or third time some of them there’s a couple people that have been bouncing from program to program state to state for years and years and years so this was their lifestyle was living in a living and homeless programs so there’s not a cookie cutter but it was really amazing how many people had the idea of defeat and i looked at uh i looked at like the the the different welfare benefits of public assistance as some somebody that’s trying to stay off drugs would look at the dope man right so i really wanted to avoid that because i know that it can be a roach motel where you checking you don’t check out and i’ve seen plenty of people that did that um and there there were guys that they got on the on the housing vouchers and the food stamps and they got some little chump change disability and i see them a few years later and they’re still in the same spot right and i did not want that sort of a lifestyle so i determined that i want to have my own place i started thinking about where do i want to live what city do i want to live in do i want to have an apartment do i want to have a house you know how do i want it to be decorated and i started i was very goal oriented on this and thinking about what i want my future to look like and i want to i wanted to create that future so i had to be realistic about it but you know i i also had to have dreams so i wanted to have a car i want to have all this stuff so i had to look at what did i have to do to get there what methods did i have to use to attain these goals do i have to steal underpants or do i have to get a job and save money and all is our stuff now i spent just short of nine months in there and one of the problems was in this wasn’t just for me this for a lot of people you get comfortable in there so just like i got comfortable in the flea bag motels and stuff like that i also got comfortable in the in the in the program there um when you okay praise this there needs to be a motivation to improve uh but so i i guess if you uh if you put stipulations on people um they say okay uh in order to in order to stay here you have to do x x and x um and this is something i’ve seen with unemployment there’s a requirement to fill out x number of job applications per week to maintain your unemployment so the person that’s looking for a new job is going to blow past the minimum requirement because they’re looking for a job the person that wants to write it out is gonna phone it in on the job applications so they’re gonna they’re gonna pick the the five least likely places for to call them and they’re gonna put in the worst possible resume to ensure that they don’t get called but they can say that they have emotions to meet the metrics to stay on the program right right right they’re checking the boxes is what they’re doing so you can you can put requirements on people but that doesn’t guarantee the result so and i saw a lot of people that did this and i and i have to admit i did it i wasn’t working as diligently as i should have been granted i i wasn’t in a great mental health place but i also wasn’t working on that as diligently as i should have been but i did have the goals and everything else and as i move forward uh i wasn’t there very long and i i really started to snap out of it and particularly i inserted myself into the community that was there and i very quickly went from new guy to i don’t want to say in crowd because that makes it sound like like high school but uh uh i i got respect of the other people that were in there and they knew that i wasn’t just you know some doofus diddy bopper basically so they they saw that there was something there and i wound up getting into into like leadership positions um i was i was there maybe a month or so and um i became one of the uh residential assistants so that was kind of a leadership position um so so to speak um and i would like uh one of the things i would do is when when new people came in during the day i would uh i would do the uh the briefing when they got there and welcome them and and go through all their stuff and if they had any contraband or whatever uh get rid of it and and all this stuff um so yeah so i i was like one of the first people that they would see i wasn’t staff so i i think it was pretty smart that they did that it was it was probably less intimidating to the people when they arrived but i remember the the van ride over there from the hospital and the guy the guy says to me says so what brings you in here and i says oh mental health and you know all messed up got to pull it together and he says good that shows that that you’re that you’re looking at pulling yourself together you know because there’s a lot of times where you’re right where if you ask somebody hey what brought you here and they’ll say the van what do you think brought me here and you know that person’s not ready because they’re not they’ll blame it on someone else they’ll blame it on some other thing external thing that has nothing to do with them right right yeah and and that guy says to me says yeah nobody winds up here on the winning streak so anyway that that’s the action phase um working on it and pulling it together now once you’re in there for a while i already mentioned that it was very easy to get comfortable and a lot of people did that the the day that i moved out i got to tell you i had some anxiety like you wouldn’t believe oh i’d imagine yeah of course i was leaving i’d been there like three days short of nine months and i was uh in the morning time that’s when the anxiety started i didn’t leave until i closed the business and i i’d already uh got a job and i wanted working at the va over there and i wound up getting the the job and i had been working for a couple weeks i took that day off to move out and everything and uh in in one regard i was excited for it but i was really scared because after the nine months of being there uh not having to worry about paying bills buying food and all of our stuff and taking care of myself i had i was responsible for doing that and not to mention i wasn’t exactly paying bills for the couple years before that you know in in some cases i was like one step ahead of the bill collectors you know it’s you know it was really rough i had not been taking care of myself like an adult does for quite some time and now i have to now i am responsible for this and that really scared the hell out of me and i’ve always been a pretty strong-willed independent-minded person and here i am scared to death about this so in that regard uh you can see where people get domesticated so one of the things that that we’ve seen over the years is uh when people wind up on like the housing vouchers of section 8 and all that other stuff they get very comfortable they’re scared to go out and they’re also afraid to lose the voucher they’re afraid to lose the food stamps and i’ve seen people that were offered uh there was a position that the va offered it wasn’t a job it wasn’t a job as a placement uh transitional work and um the the person could make like 750 bucks a month tax-free because it’s uh it’s it’s a work program uh to get people prepared to go out and get real jobs and everything and he didn’t want to give up his 200 a month food stamps which he didn’t have to do anything for those were guaranteed but he had to put in the 20 hours a week to get that 750 a month wow and and and this happens now it’s not everybody but when somebody just became institutionalized so even by working he didn’t lose the food stamps but just the fact that he’d have to work for it was enough for him to well that uh having an income impacts food stamps okay okay so i mean if if if you go out and collect dollars worth of returnable bottles or recyclables um and you claim it they’re gonna they’re gonna deduct from your food stamp benefit okay so anyway um there’s there’s a level of security um even though you’re in poverty there’s a level of security that is provided and if you lack the confidence to be able to take care of yourself then you’re going to be stuck in poverty and this the solution isn’t to give them more money on food stamps because you still have somebody that’s homeless or they’re still somewhat they’re still unable to put a roof over their head and put food on their table so that’s why i always say that the housing voucher in the food stamps is not the solution it’s the perpetuation of the real problem right so i guess what we want to look at is when it comes to helping people out how can you help them without hurting them the mental health care is very important so it’s hard to it’s hard to hold down a job when you have mental health issues and if mental health is only available during work hours then how do you do both how do you choose and a lot of people will skip the mental health because they got to pay the rent right yep yep you know you spend nine months in the shelter and you got you got a blank spot in your resume how do you explain that away right by the way the the job that i took at the detroit va and i was down there for three and a half years was i was working in vocational rehabilitation uh so when i when i got hired in because of my previous experience in industry and also being homeless i got hired to do voc rehab for the homeless program there were five of us that were hired and all five of us had gone through the system and that is one thing that was very brilliant on their part uh was getting people that had been through the system that had an understanding that they could go out to the different shelters and talk to people and know what’s what so but anyway so how do we help people without hurting them how do we help them without enabling them and prolonging things and have we had any responses uh in the chat yeah so here we’re let me or is that or is everybody logged off already saying well this is going to be no no we still if we still got people hold on let me um let me go and see what we have here in the comments um that was a while back in the comments so uh here are a few of them um and a lot of these i’m kind of packaging them together help raise their the awareness of their situation to others destigmatization of mental health issues normalization of neurodiversity so people that are like autistic and things like that um coming up with a way to deal with the uh the the homeless camps rather than just you know closing them down and taking property from everyone that’s there um uh uh allowing people and businesses to give to the poor uh instead of forcing them to throw food away um that this is um this is actually an interesting thing so where i live in myrtle beach we have enough food and obviously you don’t want to just give so much food to everyone that you know they’re never going to work so it is that balance of how like you said how do you help them without hurting them or enabling them right but it’s wild that you have because of regulations it’s illegal for me to go and feed homeless people without getting this license as a licensed charity which is you know thousands of dollars to get and to maintain and having health inspectors check my food but you have restaurants that have already gone through the whole health inspection process they’ve already made food that the government has said is perfectly fit uh safe to buy and to eat and then once that restaurant closes that food magically becomes unsafe for anyone to eat and they can’t give it away they can’t uh give it to their they can’t even give it to their workers employees to take home they literally have to throw it away and it is regularly checked by uh health inspectors who will go into the dumpsters and pour bleach into the dumpsters just to make sure that no one you know eats it without dying you know for their for their health and their safety and so that that’s one of the the other things people said okay so uh going to the stigmatization that’s a very important thing um part of what i’ve done in my work like when i was down there um talking to somebody and and listening to their story how they got to where they are and a lot of times people are resistant to therapy so you kind of have to bring them along to the idea that that they want to get therapy that they want to make that change so that’s where the motivational interviewing comes in that i talked about earlier uh but if if we think about what therapy is it’s nothing more than consulting or talking to somebody who knows something so let’s say i have to do a brake job on my truck and i haven’t done a brake job in years but you you have the same type of truck you did a break job six months ago and i asked you hey spike uh what do i need to know to do a break job and you say well do this and the other thing blah blah blah or maybe you come over and you supervise me doing it so in that regard that’s not a whole lot more that’s not a whole lot different from therapy because what you’re doing is with therapy you have a problem that you don’t understand or that you can’t solve on your own you’re going to somebody else to do it and there’s there wouldn’t there shouldn’t be a stigma about uh dealing with the emotional issues any more than there should be a stigma with going to physical therapy after a automobile accident right right does that make sense but because we are humans and we we think weird stuff we do have that stigma that goes on and people become embarrassed by it and it it really perpetuates things it prolongs the the issues it makes them worse over time and it makes it more difficult to reverse these things now if people could nip stuff in the bud and that’d be that would be the ideal thing or better yet if they if they didn’t get broken in the first place and one of the things that that we know about a lot of mental health issues is um a fair portion of it is trauma based like borderline personality disorder is completely trauma based and i don’t know how much experience you have with dealing with borderlines but uh it’s it’s very interesting right well and it started as a coping mechanism right like it became a way to cope and now it’s just turned into a full-blown a full-blown problem with borderline and the disassociating and that kind of stuff uh i’d i don’t know that i would call it a coping mechanism uh maybe in a weird abstract way possibly or maybe you’re saying in a way that i’m not that’s not ringing to me but okay it’s basically yeah somebody’s just really messed up and has a lot of stuff going on and the behaviors that come out of it um i’ve dealt with a couple people that were a little bit borderline i’ve dealt with people that were stark raving borderline and trust me the raving ones are it’s it’s exhausting yeah but so yeah so the go ahead no no i was gonna say so at this point we’ve been talking about the things needed to get into the action phase and and helping people along there you know where where is that transition into maintenance like when when does that what are the the uh the attributes of going from action to maintenance so the the action phase is the the doing and once once you have started to once you have entered recovery now there’s a difference between being in recovery and with the example of drug and alcohol just have a little bit of clean time so recovery is a state of mind recovery is i am going to leave the stuff behind i’m going to move forward i’m not going to engage in these sorts of behaviors i’m going to change my way of thinking and it’s actually doing it so the maintenance is doing little self evaluations here and there so where the line is for between action and maintenance i guess i guess that’s very subjective it’s hard to say i would say that it’s at the point to where you are where you feel that you are more in control than less in control you know maybe at the 51 mark i i don’t know but the maintenance is uh doing your follow-up appointments with the mental health provider or catching a meeting talking to people self-evaluations you know thinking about where you are where you want to be and one of the things about about the self-evaluation is it’s very difficult for people to be honest about themselves a lot of people will gloss over failings or they will they will blow minor failings into super failings so it is very hard for people to be objective in that regard right they’re very good at at uh viewing other people objectively but not themselves so and that’s a common human human difficulty right so the maintenance is maintaining sobriety maintaining uh the mental health if somebody like let’s say uh let’s say they have bipolar disorder and they’re starting to feel manic they would be reaching out to a provider maybe medication checks or a variety of other interventions that can happen okay okay and then once they’re at a point of of maintenance there um then the final stage or i guess it’s not really final but oh well okay so the maintenance so the recurrence is because i’m doing this where you know we’re zoomed in for people that are looking at this on their phone um so i didn’t see what the next one was so recurrence is when something could happen that could pull you back to to square one or at least back down the to the stages of change so like basically a relapse for backup lack of a yeah so so what i have on my cheat sheet here is relapse and termination so relapse is a part of recovery um many people are going to slip now is it actually a slip or is it a full blown slide and there’s a difference between uh being in recovery and having three weeks clean because you weren’t able to get drugs or whatever or you were locked up in jail while you could get jail on drugs but maybe you’re in a rehab and you didn’t have easy access to drugs whatever right so i this this is something that can happen that there is a risk of it there’s a there’s a risk that i could have a cigarette uh next week it’s a very low risk uh i would say that is extremely unlikely but there is a risk of it that could happen no matter how my nude yeah no matter how my nude it is so um it is something that could happen but the termination would be like the ending of the active uh treatment so to speak so it i guess would be a continued uh maintenance so this is either the you can either go with the five stages of change or the six stages of change i think this recurrence is is just an addition to the to the five so yeah it it basically makes it into a cycle that if you don’t get the recurrent that if you don’t you know address the recurrences deal with them and get back into maintenance it can slide you all the way back to square one um yeah which is why you don’t deny them you just acknowledge them and um you know and then determine how to get back into me or work your way back into maintenance because it says you know here it says primary task is cope with consequences and determine what to do next so it’s you know figure out what you’ve done how what it’s going to lead to and then figure out how to get back to where you’re you know at your goal your your you know your achieved goals and maintaining them yeah now now something that goes along with maintenance um there’s a thing called wellness recovery action plan and years ago i went through this course um on the patient level and then at then on the facilitator instructor level so uh i wound up getting certified as a peer support specialist which is kind of like a uh sponsor of sorts it’s somebody who’s been through mental health issues or whatever it is and they help with navigating the system reinforce things that the therapists talk about and um yeah basically a sponsor of sorts except getting paid to do it uh but anyway um the wellness recovery action plan and this is for somebody who is in their recovery it’s a way to uh prevent relapses so example writing down what your triggers are uh what the uh what it looks like what you do when you’re starting to relapse um as example uh somebody with uh depression um hygiene goes out the window uh right the neatness of their household goes out the window and you if somebody usually keeps a pretty clean house and and then you see that there’s mail piled up for for a month straight and and they haven’t vacuumed and all this other stuff you you know that there’s probably something going on there so that’s a little exciting it also it’s also identifying people that you could go to for support and all these different things but yeah so i i think we’ve covered the the stages of change here um and i i think we’ve addressed the the homeless stuff and and we’re not going to come up with any real answers but the no of course the one thing that that i do want to stress is uh do not let your good intentions cause more harm right and you have to figure out what is the balance if you if you feed people in the in the camp are they going to stay out there longer right right if you give people a housing voucher um and especially over a long period of time are they going to become independent or are they going to become more dependent so what is your goal do you want these people to be able to take care of themselves and as as libertarians i think i think we want to see people be independent we don’t want to see people uh dependent upon drugs or government you know i both are highly addictive yep and also make sure that your make sure that your good intentions are actually good intentions i i will admit when i went to one of the homeless camps and i’m there and i’m feeling in a there was a moment where i was feeling great about the fact that i was there and talking with them and raising awareness and working with the local group that was helping them and you know coming up with ways that we can go to the uh you know local legislatures to talk about ending their their uh what they call clean sweet policies which is basically where the police come in take all their stuff and you know expect them to scatter like roaches when the reality is these are people you just stole all their stuff and put them in dumpsters now what now what are they supposed to do and so we’re talking about all these things and then at one point i thought make sure that you’re not doing this because it’s making you feel good and make sure you’re actually centered on the people who don’t get to leave here shower put on a jacket and go to the studio to get interviewed by kennedy like that that was you know it’s like i’m here until four and then i have to get back so i can go and get ready for a five o’clock because i was on um i was on uh mountain time uh you know make sure you’re you’re there in time for that like make sure that you are staying in the right mindset of why you’re even doing this to begin with make sure your good intentions don’t turn into wow this makes me feel like like internal virtue signaling of like wow look at what a great person i am make sure you’re actually there with an intention of helping this person because sometimes that’s going to actually feel like crap it’s not going to feel good sometimes it’ll feel great sometimes it’ll feel like garbage because you’re dealing with people that whose lives are you know are on the precipice of being ruined or in some cases have been ruined well the the people that are doing it solely for their own aggrandizement uh they’re not gonna feel guilty about it they’re they’re gonna get the warming fuzzies and they could say look how kind and compassionate and progressive i am i was talking to that filthy derelict over there and quite frankly there’s there’s a lot of that out there of course of course of course so um now when it comes to like different charitable stuff uh i i’m a supporter of charity um i give to the to the local food bank up here um i know that some of the people getting the stuff are not going to be what i would deem to be deserving of it but i know that by giving to the to the local food bank that there’s a possibility that’s going to happen um right i i donate stuff that uh like canned goods and things like that um old clothes that i can’t use that they’re they’re still serviceable old furniture things like that but i i think that when libertarians talk about how there would be all this private charity i do think that the charity does do the enabling and you have that perverse incentive and something i’ve seen is people would um they would focus their efforts on getting different charity type things instead of uh working out ourselves yeah yeah and it’s something something i saw around the different homeless programs is you would have people going in there to get them signed up for uh uh food stamps or different services different programs and things like that their their income was based upon the grants that they get from getting people signed up right so if a person is going to lose their housing voucher and their food stamps because they have a certain amount of income um the the people that are getting them on vouchers have a incentive to keep them out of the workforce right right because they have to keep their numbers up so you have a you have a lot of times where the different programs to so-called help these people out are working against each other right right right well like you said it’s a perverse incentive and it’s what happens the minute government goes oh this is great what they’re doing we’re going to give them money to help well what and we’re going to you know give them money to help sign them up for our our you know uh break your leg and and buy your crutches programs um this is and like you said what happens is now you have charities ostensibly private charities who are being incentivized with taxpayer money not to actually help people but to just put them on a program and they can convince themselves well i’m helping these folks because now they get you know the health care they need to get the food they need it’s a it’s a pretty understandably compelling argument that they’re making to themselves that they’re helping people but the reality is like you said they’re actually discouraging people from doing things like working and investing right in the things that are going and it’s not you know investing as in they’re going to become a millionaire but investing is in working putting aside 25 50 bucks at a time to have some kind of a nest egg that they’re building fixing their credit so that they can actually get you know a loan that they need to be able to get a car or you know or to be able to get uh you know their credit up so that they can get their own apartment and and try to claw their way up and yes we need to be working on dismantling anything from government that is making that harder like dismantling programs that you know make housing prices go up and make uh uh pricing for food and education and things go up in health care and all that make those things go up but at the same time we need not be incentivizing the very programs and policies that lead to the need for that crutch in the first place so i you know like you said we can we can talk about this uh kind of endlessly um and we are coming up on to the third hour and unlike in the past this program is usually 60 minutes long now um but let’s talk real quick eat it paul yeah no no this is a yeah this is a whole different thing now we usually uh go between uh so there are a couple more things i want to touch on okay so i i mentioned i mentioned that on the day that i moved out i was really scared stuffless uh later on that night i think it’s about one in the morning i had woken up and i looked over and i saw that i saw that there wasn’t a second bed in in my new apartment and i didn’t have a fat bald guy snoring his brains out and i’m like okay yeah i can get used to this and i i started to adjust pretty quickly but there was there was an awful lot of nervousness and i i always i always say the person leaves the shelter twice first time their butt leaves second time their mind leaves and you do have to get out of that shelter mentality um and it’s even worse for people coming out of jail so they get institutionalized in there and they’re used to the environment where they have to watch your back and and all this sort of stuff and you don’t just turn that off by flicking a switch that same thing with soldiers coming back from combat zones you know somebody somebody does a tour in iraq or afghanistan and they come back here they see a bag of garbage on the on the side of the road over there it’s it could be a bomb and they have the same problem over here because they can’t turn it off and say oh that’s just a bag of garbage or a kid with a cell phone is not just a kid with a cell phone it’s a spotter or a trigger or whatever or something yeah so it it takes quite a bit to readjust to reality i one things i saw uh homeless people was how they responded down the road um they would i people would either say i’m gonna do everything i can to never wind up in that situation again so they would put money off to the side they would have food you know they they were they basically became preppers it was kind of like the the people in the great depression after the great depression everybody had canned goods they did their own canning and and they always had food laying around for the most part uh so you’ll see people that’ll do that and and they will prepare for in case of hard times down the road and then you also have people who say well i i was homeless once i’ll be homeless again i’ll just let the system take care of me right right so it’s yeah so they people either plan to prevent it plan for if or when it does happen or they just you know surrender and i think at that point they’re defeated so but yeah i was i was down there for about three and a half years and uh i was i was kind of new to libertarianism at the time so i i searched myself as a well maybe i can go inside the system and use a system to fix a system and well now you know why i laugh at people to say that right right exactly exactly yeah that doesn’t really work so um so yeah i before before i let you go i do want to talk about midwest peace and liberty fest uh yeah tell us a little bit about it um it is where it is i’ll i’m gonna put the while you’re talking about it i’m gonna put the link to the website in the uh in the notes so people can check it out later um but tell us a little bit about it so this is the ninth annual midwest peace and liberty fest and this started off a number of years ago uh nine to be exact or would it be eight years technically uh anyway this started the first one was in 2013 and it started out with a group of people sitting in a cold or sitting in a michigan living room in the month of late february or march and it was cold and snowy and michigan outside and they said hey we should go camping this summer eventually it evolved into saying hey let’s let’s make a big event and you know go beyond the six or seven people that were in that living room and it wound up being a facebook event and um that was how i got connected with those folks because i somebody had shared it and here i was thinking i was the only anarchist on facebook or the the only the only one in michigan whatever and uh so i i wound up signing up to go and everything else and and i wound up uh connecting with some of the people on facebook and then connecting in real life and this has been my family ever since but uh this year is going to be out in gaines michigan it’s going to be on a private farm the fest is it’s uh both adult and family friendly so uh somehow or another people have managed to figure out how to how to behave themselves appropriately and uh around appropriate company and everything else without laws without laws without laws that’s incredible yeah somehow or another through spontaneous order uh standards and acceptable behavior magically appear well incredible granted there’s a bunch of stolen underpants in the bushes but yes yeah we only take this road and not a single road everyone has to walk right right right so we only steal enough underpants to make this happen but anyway go ahead the this this isn’t going to be quite as fancy as in previous years when it was out circle pines so like i said this is a private farm um as far as guest speakers there’s not going to be a lot of guest speakers there not a lot of big names but uh brett vanat from school sucks he’s a very popular favorite uh people love when he comes out there and they love brett and they love what he’s done over these years i’m a bit of a fan myself anyway he’s going to be doing a uh discomfort zone live on friday night and then the school sucks graduation on saturday uh shane radliff is going to be doing a presentation on posnia and that will be after the biscuits and gravy cook cut off so posny is a personal autonomous zone uh that he has created and he’s going to talk a little bit about that i thought it should be called uh pasa stand but whatever right if he’s gonna create his own autonomous zone i guess he should be able to name it uh i mean is pretty pretty a pretty good name i could pass this day or possibly are pretty good yeah so saturday morning biscuits and gravy cook-off uh after shane’s presentation there is going to be a special announcement that well i know what it is but uh i guess everybody’s just gonna have to go to the fest to find out what it’s gonna be so but anyway uh on friday there’s going to be the magical mystery tour hike which will be off-site at a local uh park and yes the magical mystery is exactly how it sounds uh there’s gonna be karaoke open mike comedy and the whiskey chicks will be there uh every night except for i think saturday because they’re already booked but the whiskey chicks they got this uh this little trailer with a bar in it and they they serve whiskey so you can get whiskey from chicks and then what else oh yeah the assault kitchen will be going yes so the assault kitchen is is cooking bacon in the way that god intended yes yes high capacity magazines uh i will have my famous smoke porchetta the verified harmful extremist content porchetta i think that’ll be a saturday night i’ll do rib eyes on friday not sure if i’ll do ribs or what else for the other nights but my young apprentice nick will be back so he’ll be doing breakfast in the morning at the second breakfast cafe omelets and hashbrowns and uh he might be doing some late night tacos or something i don’t know we got to figure it out the founders could have never envisioned there being late night high capacity tacos they could have never known they wouldn’t have possibly supported free food freedom of food well never if they had known that never live according to the limits of other people’s imagination now something else is new for this year uh there’s no cabins out there so joe was going to set up and i think he’s done a couple of them but he ran into supply chain shortages uh cabin tents so it’s basically a 10 by 10 easy up with a floor screens and walls there’s a self-inflating or self-maintaining air mattress in their queen size there’s a little plastic dresser table a light an outlet for charging devices and all their stuff and i think those are all sold out uh but this is a trial run for that so i guess that’s going to be his no-tell motel or whatever but uh yeah so that’s going on so i think this one’s going to be yeah it’s gonna be pretty good it’s gonna be even better next year yeah it sounds it’s gonna be good this year but better next year so for people that want to uh get a be a part of this uh it’s mplfest.org i put that in the uh round up your friends and family and get them registered today yes register your friends registration for your safety and your health mplfs.org um lou again thank you so much for many things for being on the show today for being on the show the other times you’ve been on for encourage me to being one of the people who encouraged me to do this for being one of the ones who turned me into an extremist harmful extremist radical that i am now uh i appreciate all those things i love you man i’m so happy to have you on i before i let you go i want to give you a chance to you have the final floor anything you feel like we haven’t had a chance to say that you haven’t had a chance to talk about anything that you want to plug this is your time lou sander the floor is yours uh well my website as as you mentioned before i am the absentee landlord of mplf or uh lousandershow.com hasn’t that hasn’t been seized by commies because there’s a lot of work that has to be done so i haven’t put out any any audio content in quite some time uh i’m really strongly thinking about getting back into that i’m in the preparation determination phase of that matter of fact i’m looking at putting together another radio show but anywho um i do have some satire articles on there so you can read things like colonial lives matter facebook bans every single user for hate speech uh ftc cancels election due to unverified advertising things like that so uh one of my upcoming articles when i finally get around to writing it will be cannabis declares victory in the war on government and uh probably re-education camps will be done remotely until covet is over well i want to do and if you can do one about the conservative response 10 years from now to the the uh you know mandatory lockdowns for climate change that they’re going to say not without a warrant that’s that’s the uh that’s that’s that needs to be talked about you know and and the fact that the um that the progressives will be happy that the the re-education camp counselors are you know a record high number of of trans people of color um this is uh it’s it go ahead well i i was looking into one so i discovered something i don’t know if it’s a conspiracy theory but there’s been some documents uh from the kgb and now the uh fsb that russian spetsnaz were going to invade america and they were going to disarm all the republicans by wearing american police uniforms and saying hey we’re going to own the libs we need your guns you know hey do you got my six bra yeah so yeah i know like it’s like that’s i like them i like the meme that where it’s someone handing a gun over to a police officer and it says okay but you promised to give me back give me this back in case i have to fight you if tyranny ever arises right the cops like of course sure thing it’s the funniest thing so hey man thank you again for being on i really greatly appreciate it uh uh lousandershow.com mplfest.org um and stick around i want to talk with you during the outro folks thanks again for tuning in to this episode of my fellow americans uh very very informative you got to to see one of my i guess mentors in the game firsthand so thank you for tuning in for that um tomorrow night is uh the writer’s block with my co-host matt wright he’s going to be interviewing byron cabbage who is helping put together this event in kentucky i’m going to be going to uh this weekend where we’re going to be training for activists and candidates for the lp kentucky uh across the across the state of kentucky in multiple events and it all kicks off on friday at 6 30 at the florence yall’s baseball game where i am going to either embarrass myself in front of the world or i’m going to actually get the ball to the catcher and he doesn’t have to move much to catch it which is what i hope happens and then i’m going to be so obnoxious i’m going to pose next to their trophies if they have any i i’m going to have them ice down my shoulder i’m going to want to do color commentary for the whole game with whoever their broadcaster is it’s i’m going to be really bad about it but anyway so check me out that uh and also at 9 30 on friday right here on muddy waters media check out uh cajun and eskimo from bayou to igloo and then on uh saturday and sunday i’m doing events all through uh the uh through kentucky if you go to spikecone.com or to lpky.org you can find out more information about the events that i’m doing uh and then on uh monday is the next episode uh right here on money waters media of the uh mr of the mr america the bearded truth with jason lyon that is on at i believe 8 p.m eastern um and then uh join us next tuesday uh for uh the next episode of my fellow american next episode of the muddy waters of freedom on tuesday where matt wright and i parse through the week’s events like the sweet little chipper little monkeys that we are and then uh 8 pm eastern uh muddy waters freedom and then right back here next week same spike place same spike time for another fantastic episode of my fellow americans with my next guest olga meshu washington what are we going to talk about you’re not going to believe it folks thanks again for tuning in so much i’m spike cohen and you are the power god bless guys [Music] yay [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] though [Music] indeed the life i’ve lived brings light to kindness all you need is a sign put a cease to the crimes put an ease to the minds like mine sometimes darkness is all i find you know what they say about an eye for a night in a time where the blinds are blind who am i to deny with crime that’s my sister mother father brother is [Music] tell me why [Music] [Music] oh will make [Music] you