October 24, 2025 • 41 mins
The United States is in an interesting place economically thanks to years of the Federal Reserve and government spending. But now, President Trump has ushered in a new era of economics. So where does the country go from here? Jesse Kelly and Jeffrey A. Tucker discuss at length.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
We're doing something different tonight. You know, you obviously know
Jeffrey Tucker comes on the show so often, and every
single time Jeffrey Talker gets done on the show, have
a talk with the producers and we always say we
should have gone longer, We needed to get him for longer.
And so we're going to keep him the whole hour
this time, and we're just going to pick his brain
(00:29):
a bit. So joining me now, somebody you know quite well,
Jeffrey A. Tucker, president of the Brownstone Institute, and he
wrote a wonderful book called Spirits of America. I'm going
to fill yourself up with patriotism, remind you where you
came from. I would highly recommend it. Read it to
your kids. By the way, Jeffrey, you and I we
connected back during the COVID insanity. And I know what,
(00:52):
Maybe I'm supposed to move on, but I haven't moved on.
I still I can't understand totally how the Land of
the Free succumb.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
The way it did. Can you help me understand what happened?
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Well, I'm just glad you're asking the question, because everybody
else seems to pretend like nothing happened, and that nobody
should be shocked by this. Yeah, you know, I'm dealing
with crazy reporters all the time now, demanding to know
you know, how it is that Brownstone institutes become so
supposedly so influential. And I always say the same thing
(01:29):
that you can't shut churches all over the world, force
everybody's stay home orders, destroy millions of small businesses, imposed
travel restricts between states, and do it all over the
world at the same time, and then follow that up
by the forced injection of an experimental technology that had
(01:51):
not been ever tested for safety and effectiveness, claiming that
this is going to end the pandemic, when every virologist
the world knew that that wasn't true. You can't do
all this stuff and not expect some blowbacks, some some
uh uh, some questions to be asked about how this
came to be, and and and and and that has
(02:15):
spread a great deal of incredulity towards public health, and
not just public health, but doctors and the retail outlets
at the pharmaceutical companies that participated for that matter, of
the churches that shut their doors on Christmas and easterns,
the schools that refused to educate the kids for a
year and a half. Uh. You know, the bureaucrats who
(02:35):
divided us between essential and and unessential, the digital companies
that participated in a in a grim, gruesome, uh censorship
campaign to the point that they even took the president
off social media when he started saying things that were
too true. All of this happened to us, and of course,
(02:57):
I mean, what did you think was gonna happen? People
were going to be upset about it. And it's not
enough just to say, oh, don't worry about it. That
was then, this is now. Everybody, just get over it. Now.
It's primarily affected an entire generation and we're going to
be living with the consequences for the rest of our
lives and that of our children too. Nothing will ever
be the same after this. And it's just naive and
(03:19):
absurd for these media outlets to pretend as if you know,
Brownstone Institute alone somehow generated the public of the public anger.
I mean, it's it's absurd. If anything, we're trying to
ask the questions that are going to get us the
answers we need so that we can get over it.
You know, we can't just pretend like none of this happened.
(03:43):
It was like the equivalent of World War One, I
think for this generation. And you know, you just can't
you can't just wish that that never happened. It did happen,
and we're going to get answers and hopefully some justice,
and there's going to be tremendous consequences on the loss
of trust and all these institutions, from big tech to universities,
(04:06):
to churches, to government to doctors, everybody's been affected by it.
So it's the most profoundly devastating thing that's ever happened
to our country. I would say at least it compares
with World War One and World War Two. And the
questions are not going away.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Jeffrey, you mentioned the loss of trust in institutions, and
I'm someone who firmly believes all nations are built on
their institutions, that you really have to have good ones.
If you have goodwines, you have a good country. If
you have bad ones, you have a bad country. And
now we don't trust our institutions now, as you just
pointed out.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
But isn't that, in a.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Way a good thing that we finally found out just
how sick, demented and evil. So many of our institutions are. Yeah,
I want them to be good, but if I can't
have good ones, I at least have to know they're bad.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Yeah. No, I agree with that we shouldn't recall from
the truth. We have to know what the truth is.
But the truth is very profoundly disturbing. What we saw
unfold before us was a conspirators, no question, but then
collaborators who did so mostly as far as I can tell,
on grounds of careerism. People didn't want to speak out
(05:19):
because I knew that speaking out was going to be
injurious to their remunerative flow and ability to pay over
extended mortgages, car loans, and cell phone bills, and that
alone was enough to control an entire population. I mean,
I don't think we want to live this way, you know.
I think we placed too much of the burden on
(05:41):
the handful of courageous truth tellers like yourself who happened
to have been in a position to be independent enough
to do it. Or we're willing to take tremendous personal
risks to their career, and most of the people who
spoke out, especially in the early period, face terrible consequences
(06:02):
for their decisions, and you know, it's nice that. Okay,
now some of these people have jobs in the Trump
administration or whatever, but it hardly makes up for, you know,
having created a conditions under which people had to forego
all financial security, all sacrifice, professional relationships, forend circles, you know, everything,
(06:27):
to stand up to do the right thing, the kind
of thing should not be necessary. I also agree with
you it is better to know the truth. On the
other hand, nobody really wants to live in a world
without trust in anything, and that's sort of where we
are right now. We are in society without trust, and
(06:48):
the evidence of it is all around us. Our comments
have been are being taken away from us.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
You know.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
I recently ordered a train to get to go to
Manhattan and got off of the Monhn's train station. The
first thing you noticed at Moehan trainstation is like, while
it's pretty, there's no place to sit down, you know,
I mean, there's literally they've constructed it without benches, and
the reason is that they don't want people loitering. Well,
(07:19):
is that really the kind of world we want to
live in? Where you can't have a place to sit
down anywhere? And that's all of Manhattan. Now you can't.
There's hardly any place to sit down. And this contrast
with all the old train stations, like you look at
the New Haven train station in Connecticut. It's nothing but benches.
They made it as comfortable as possible for everybody to
(07:40):
be there, and it almost looks like a church with lined
up pews everywhere. You know. That's the difference in one
hundred years. The old train stations had nothing but places
to sit where everybody can be comfortable. New train stations
you dare not even create so much as one bench
because it'll be taken over by a homeless person. That's
a substantial difference in the kind of world that we
(08:00):
live in now. And then you leave the train station
and you encounter something like a post apocalyptic situation for
five square blocks in all directions. I've never really wanted
to wear a mask during COVID, but I want to
wear a mask now when I visit Manhattan because there's
three competing smells. There's urine, pot and trash okay so,
(08:25):
and at any anyone waft, you're not sure which of
the three is going to be dominant, you know, but
one of those three is going to overtake you and
mute the other other two, and then it's gonna flip.
One block later. I was wearing a suit and tie,
and I felt like a visitor from another planet, or
(08:48):
from the Gilded Age or something like. Nobody looked like me.
There wasn't a single person wearing a suit or a
tie anywhere. They're all just, you know, the dressed like vagabonds.
Fentanyl addicts everywhere, bombs, stepping over trash, construction that's never
going to be completed. It actually feels genuinely unsafe. This
(09:11):
is not civilization, I mean, but this is where we are,
and it's happened kind of quickly, but a little bit
too slowly, but we've accommodated ourselves to this. The same
thing is true in San Francisco. I was there recently.
I couldn't believe what a catastrophe was. You know, when
I was a kid, I used to visit. San Francisco
was gleaming. This is the greatest city in the world,
(09:33):
and now it's just nothing but a catastrophe, where where
anybody there feels free to take up to one thousand dollars,
to rob stores of up to one thousand dollars because
they're not going to get prosecuted for it, and human
fec is all over the sidewalks. I'm just it's indescribable.
I mean, that's sort of where we are as a country,
and it's not everywhere, but it's in a lot of places.
(09:55):
And the problem, as far as I can tell, it's spreading.
The covid re kicked all this off by demoralizing the
population and line just constantly, so it spread as sort
of nihilism towards public life, where people don't even believe
in truth. In fact, our top intellectuals now say this,
(10:15):
there's no such thing as truth. Who cares about truth?
Truth gets in the way of getting things done, So
NPR can be relied upon to lying to you every
single day. I talked to reporters of all these top
venues all the time, and they don't care about the truth.
They're concerned about everything but the truth. They're concerned about
(10:36):
keeping the establishment in power as long as possible and
stopping people like you and me who want to talk
about what's going on.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
And we have more for you next.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
I am a chip freak. I know that there are people.
There are pretzel people or people who like sweets. You
don't want to sit around and eat candy. Ever since
I was a kid, all I wanted were chips, And
now I'm forty four and I'm still addicted to chips.
It's very clear that I'm gonna eat chips to the
day I die. The problem is all these chips you
buy in the gas station will actually kill you, and
(11:09):
so I needed something else. I heard about massive chips
from a friend.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
I was told only.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Three ingredients, so there's so much better for you. So
immediately I thought they're gonna be disgusting. They're gonna be
grossed like all the other hell food. Massive chips are
my favorite chips. If everything was equal, I would still
eat massive chips.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
You don't feel all bloated and horrible.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
After you're done because it's just three ingredients, no cancer
causing filth. Go eat chips guilt free. May I recommend
Little Daba Hot Sauce on there. They have all kinds
of flavors. Go to Massive Chips dot com slash jessetv.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
You know I've never actually asked you on cameracks.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
We've always been more and more of a rush than
we are now what your background is? Everybody knows Jeffrey
Talker who watches I'm right, But people don't know your
background as well.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Give me the short and skinny on them.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Well, I grew up in a highly musical family, and
I thought from a very young age that I was
going to be that My highest aspiration was to be
a jazz trimonist. And then at the age of sixteen
or seventeen, I suddenly encouraged me I could do whatever
I wanted. I didn't have to be that, and so
(12:32):
I instead, you know, I spent a lot of time
playing in dance bands and jazz clubs and that kind
of thing to pay my way through school. But I
otherwise dropped it as a profession and took up economics
because economics is a discipline held out the possibility of
understanding the rise and fall of societies, and I wanted
to know what that story was. So I fell in
(12:52):
love with economics as a discipline, and that's what I studied.
And the main thing I learned from economics is that
for all the mysteries that are associated with the material world,
the one thing that seems to fix everything is letting
people be free in their actions and choices and secure
(13:13):
in their property. So that's the lesson I took from
all my studies there, and I thought, well, I would
like to I would like to go into an industry
and ideas industry that emphasizes these points freedom in your
action and choices, and security in your property. So that's
(13:34):
what I've done most of my career, and that took
me in a lot of different directions editorially and technologically,
and forth profit and nonprofit industries. My life took a
different direction with the COD with the COVID response, because
I had fifteen years part been writing about pandemics and
(13:57):
the government response to them. I wrote an article in
to five that said, listen, I know there's some people
out there who liked the idea of lockdowns and putting
government in charge of pandemics. If you ever attempt this,
you will discredit the government for forever. It won't work,
and it'll be a cultural, social, economic calamity. That's what
(14:18):
I wrote in two thousand and five. I never expected
they would ever attempt this, But then in January of
twenty twenty, I began to think this is getting more real.
In February I began to think it was even more real.
The day when I realized that it was all coming.
Was February twenty seventh, and that was the first day
(14:43):
when The New York Times ran a podcast where they
were trying to panic the population over the coming bug,
the virus. And this contradicted one hundred years of New
York Times reporting on pandemics, which is always about stake
calms your doctor if you get SID. This time they
were actively promoting panic, and I knew for sure that
(15:04):
there was a reason for that. And then you know,
within within two weeks, it was a done deal and
we were off trying the lockdown technique. The one piece
of it I never really anticipated was that the whole
purpose of lockdown was to prepare the population for the
deployment of a new shot technology, namely modified m RNA.
(15:27):
That is something I didn't really believe that they would
attempt something like that, because just on the face of it,
there's no way you can have a vaccine for fast
mutating pathogen like this with a zoonotic reservoir. It just
wasn't wasn't even plausible, wasn't even believable. And I knew
for sure it was going to make things worse, and
(15:50):
and that it wouldn't work ultimately, and that's what they tried.
And now even in that framework, uh, I didn't and
anticipate how dangerous the shots would be. That was the
part that really shocked me. And I wasn't even a
believer in it for a long time until the evidence
(16:11):
just overwhelmed me. But that put me in a position
of starting Brownstone as a kind of a voice for
resisting this kind of dictatorship by public health authorities and
investigating all the ways in which this unfolded. And it's
(16:31):
left Brownstone a little bit in a position of being
unique because not other answers to continue to ask these questions,
but at Brownstone we do. And it also has made us,
of course a target. That's, as you well know.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
Jeffrey, kind of a large question, like a thirty thousand
foot view question. But just hearing you talk about this,
I find it curious. We are suppose to live in
a constitutional republic, a representative republic, and we have all
these things that I shouldn't say nobody likes, but the
vast majority of people don't want. The vast majority of
(17:13):
people don't want New York without benches and smelling like pea.
The vast majority of people don't want their schools shut down.
The vast majority of people don't want homeless people everywhere,
criminals everywhere, border open ap okay, But we got all that,
so we live in a constitutional republic. The vast majority
of people don't want what we have in so many areas.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
How does that happen?
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Yeah, it has to do with the vast enterprise we
call the state, which is not just the government, but
it's all the tentacles of the state, which are reaching
into all of our industries and agriculture and pharmaceuticals, in banking,
our doctor's offices. Everything is impacted by these enormous networks
that have been aided by the agencies that are running everything,
(18:04):
and the agencies all represent industries. This system that we
inhabit today was built over a little more than one
hundred years. Really, it's finds its origin in the eighteen eighties,
but it really came of age about nineteen thirteen with
the income tax and the direct election of senators, and
then World War One, and ever since then we've lived
(18:25):
in this sort of managerial empire run by the expert classes,
on whom we never voted in the first place. We
found ourselves in this strange situation where we can't get
rid of them. The thing that makes the Trump administration
unique is that I think it's the first president we've
had in one hundred years that's absolutely determined to be
(18:46):
in charge, which is strans thing to say. But mostly
presidents are just acquiesced. And he's appointed a lot of
people who themselves want to be in charge. And the
agencies are not used to this. They've long been used
to just having marionettes come and go, yeah, you get
here's your nice parking place, here's your suitet office. But otherwise,
leave us alone and you'll be gone in a few years.
(19:08):
That's the way the agencies have always worked. This time
it's different. These guys really want to be in charge.
I'll tell you just earlier today, I was being asked
a question by a reporter. I know I shouldn't give
these interviews, and I'm going to try not to anymore,
but the question was, well, what's it like for you
(19:29):
and all your associates because there used to be the
dissidents just a year ago, but now you guys are
in charge of everything. And I said, you know, I'm
not even going to accept the premise of the question,
because I'm not sure that we are in charge of anything.
I know that some very important positions are now occupied
(19:52):
by people like you know, RFK and j Botachari, and
you could go down the list and there's dozens of them.
But are they are they really in charge? I'm you know, yeah,
in name, but they're battling immense beasts of such reach
and so well funded. And these guys are just all appointees,
(20:14):
you know, easily ignored by the systems that run by themselves,
by bureaucrats with all the institutional knowledge, and by industries
who know their way around very very well. They are
the masters at managing this world of power. Our people
are are just you know, just getting going. So I
don't really accept the idea that we're really in charge.
(20:36):
For that matter, Trump struggles every day. You know. It's
interesting his first term, he just naturally assumed that he
would be the CEO of the government and that what
he said would go. He found out otherwise very quickly
that you know, the executive agencies were in a plot
(20:57):
with industry and to deep state to drive him out
of office, to disable him, to humiliate him, to make
sure he never came back again as a way of
sending the message to anybody who thinks that democracy works,
that no democracy does not work. The voters will not
(21:19):
get their way, the establishment will rule forever. And to
their shock and amazement, he came back after four years,
despite assassination attempts and endless lawsuits trying to bankrupt him,
send him to jail. They've tried everything, and now he's
trying to make the second term really count. He's not
(21:39):
going as fast on many areas as I would wish,
but it's probably the first presidential administration in my lifetime
that's made any kind of difference at all. And a
lot of traces to the Russia Gate thing, but also
the COVID response traits looms very large in this administration.
That was entirely a deep state industrial scheme. Yeah, and
(22:05):
Trump wants to reverse that or at least disable the
institutions that made that happen or otherwise bamboozled them into
acquiescing to it or giving them no choice. Essentially. So
we're living an unprecedented times. We're really trying to figure
out right now whether whether this thing we call democracy,
(22:27):
whether this thing we call this constitutional republican which the
people rule whether it's real, whether it can be made
real again, or else. Are we just going to live
in a fictitious world where we pretend to have those
institutions while really the insiders run everything. The industry is
run everything. That's the great test of our time. And
I don't know how it's going to turn out, but
I admire at least the attempt to make the founder's
(22:52):
vision something meaningful in our lives.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Stay tuned, We have more coming up next. Let me
tell you about energy. Feeling good all the time, Feeling
good in the morning when you wake up, feeling energized,
ready to take on the day at work, not sitting.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
There staring at the clock. Get me another cup of
coffee when you get home. Don't you want to enjoy.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Your family, your time to yourself. You want to go shooting,
go for a walk, get your tea levels up. You
can't walk through your life being low tea and tired
and depressed all the time. That's no way to live.
We are drinking estrogen. It's in the birth control. We
can't get it out of the water, It's in the
we shower.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
In estrogen.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
We have lost half of our testosterone in the last
fifty years. That's societal extinction if we don't turn it around.
Chalk is trying to turn it around with natural herbal supplements.
Twenty percent increase in your tea levels in ninety days.
Just try it. You're three months away from feeling like
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Speaker 2 (24:11):
Jeffrey.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
We're gonna actually not really switch gears here because it's
really along the lines of what we've been talking about.
An area of particular area of your expertise that people
find very confusing is the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
What is it?
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Why did they have so much immense power? I mean
Trump can't even apparently fire someone from there with that.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
But who do they answer to tell us about the
Federal Reserve?
Speaker 3 (24:34):
Yeah, well, nobody really knows. That's what's funny about it.
We created this thing in nineteen thirteen. We call this
Federal Reserve, but it really was just a central bank.
I mean, it's a funny word, Federal reserve, federal menials,
just like a federal thing, Like we have a federal system,
so this is our federal thing. And then the reserve
(24:55):
part as if to say that, you know, there's all that.
It's just there in case we need it. You know,
this is while the gold is there are the people
who are going to make system run. Called the Federal
Reserve established branches all over the country to create the
appearance of decentralization. But it was never really figured out
(25:19):
whether you know who would run it. It was the
president in charge of it. Yes, it's an executive agency.
You know. It's called the Federal Reserve dot gov. So
it lives under the government and under the ORG chart
of the federal government. It reports to the president, meaning
that if the voters voter a new president and he
should have some authority over what it does. You know,
(25:44):
you think just by the ORG chart. But we don't
have an answer to that. In fact, this is going
to be adjudicated by the Supreme Court at some point.
And I don't know how the answer could be anything
other than the president's in charge of the Federal Reserve.
How could it be otherwise? It is an executive level agency.
You can't just say, oh, well, the Supreme Court is not.
I doubt the Supreme Court is going to say this.
(26:06):
The temptation to say, well, fetter Reserve is different. It's
an independent agency. Well, there's nothing in the constitution that
says anything about an independent agency. Is that that thing
does not exist. If you're actually reading the constitution, you
care about it, there's no such thing as an independent agency.
Every every agency of the government is responsible to the
(26:27):
people through their elected representatives. That's that's that's got to
be the case. Now. The other bigger question is whether
and to what extent the fit A Reserve has done
what it's supposed to do. And the answer on every
front is no. You know that one of the original charges.
You can't believe it. When they started the FED, they
said there was going to lower inflation.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
I mean.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
He I mean the dollar of nineteen thirteen is now
worth I think the last I checked about two cents. So,
I mean it's been a disaster, you know. And then
the first five years after the Fed's existed, the dollar
lost you know, thirty forty percent of its purchasing power.
(27:11):
I mean, it blew up immediately. There's been Instead of
taming business circles, it's created them through its ability to
print unlimited quantities of money. And the whole system's gotten
much worse since nineteen seventy four, when we went off
any tie of gold forever, and the institutent in a
news system where we're just going to have just pure
(27:36):
paper money, which in all of human history has always
led to, you know, tremendous calamity every single time the
system like this has ever been tried. Meanwhile, since that time,
we've seen the FED fundamentally changed the industrial structure of
the United States. It's used to be a country where
(27:58):
we made things, you know, through toil and creativity, things
that last. We lost one industry after another ever since
the dollar became the world reserve currency and the FED
could just export its inflation abroad that any trade theorist
(28:19):
of the nineteen thirties and forties would have predicted exactly
what would happened, which is that the industry and industrial
base of America would be gut it. And that's exactly
what happened. It happened slowly first and then all at once.
Here we lost pianos, that we lost watches, that we
lost textiles, and then lost steel, and then toys and
(28:40):
shipbuilding and tools and you name it. And we just
became a country that lives off leverage and silliness, thinking
that we could live off our credentials and degrees that
we pay exorbitant prices for. That's where we are now now.
(29:03):
So we developed an information economy and deconditioned an entire
generation into thinking they didn't have to work, so that work,
hard work, and toil are not even part of the
lives of people, you know, under the age of forty
really in general. And then the worst possible thing happened
(29:26):
during the COVID period, and that was mandates that everybody
stopped working and just live off the government. That's that
moment where vast loss of the population began to think,
this entire system is fake. I'm not working at all,
and yet I'm richer than I ever have been. Right.
That went on for like two years, three years. That's
(29:47):
a horrible lesson to impart to the population. Of course,
the consequence of that was thirty an additional thirty percent
loss and purchasing power. All the gains that people got
from the largest that was distributed to the population, where
the government was just like giving you thousands of dollars
(30:07):
in your bank account ever a month, which is a
weird time. It was all taken away in the form
of inflation, and but left a cultural message that it's
all nonsense, there's nothing that's real. And now we have
AI and we have influencer culture, and we have with
(30:28):
that fans thing only fans, and we have Crypto and
it's like the fictional world of you know, the casino
fantasy is dominating everything.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
We're not done yet, we have even more. I love chips.
I'm a chip freak. And now the Spaceball playoffs, it's
college football season. My chip intake increases exponentially right now.
But I'm forty four. I need to start being better
about what I eat. I know that.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
So what do you do? Though? Who wants healthy chips?
They're all gross?
Speaker 1 (31:09):
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eat without any guilt at all. No seed oil, filth,
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(31:31):
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Speaker 4 (31:41):
Get yourself a couple of bags.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
So I want to talk about Spirits of America because
it makes me feel better we're gonna talk about that book. Now,
tell me, tell me about your book, Tell me why
even write this book?
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Give it to me.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
Yeah, well, you know it's funny. I wrote two really
dark books in a row on the lockdowns. One was
called Liberty Lockdown and the second one was called Life
After Lockdown, and they're pretty pretty gritty, pretty grim, and
I kind of wanted to shake myself out of it
(32:24):
and realized that, look, if we're going to if we're
going to rebuild the country, we've got to remember who
we are, and one are those values that led to it.
So I discovered this writer named Eric Sloan who was
writing before the Bisentinial in the early nineteen seventies, and
he wrote a brilliant book called Spirits of seventy six,
(32:46):
but she divided between I think it was like ten
chapters where he identified these various traits of what it
really means to be an American brugality, hard work, patience,
respect for ones, neighbors, all these kinds of things that
I found myself so whipped up into excitement about the
(33:06):
romance of that which about what she was writing, that
I tried my hand at updating the book. The foundation
that published the book will not bring it back in
print because they find it too politically correct. I guess
you would say, like, it's not a message they wanted
to say. So you'll never be able to get this book.
Last time I saw the books were thousands of dollars online,
(33:28):
but now you can't even get them anymore. So I
decided to just update the book for myself and just
kind of related readers what he was saying. And then
I added a few additional chapters about other subjects like
forbearants and some other other matters that I discovered discussed
in the book. And it's not a big book. It's
(33:48):
about I think it's about one hundred pages maybe, but
I commissioned special drawings for pen and ink, you know.
So there's a there's a nostalgia, I would say to
the book, and I think everybody's feeling a little bit
nostalgic these days. So the book hit at exactly the
right time, like who are we, where do we come from?
(34:11):
What do we really believe as Americans? And what kind
of values do we need to have if we want
to recapture what it means to be free people in
a good society. So that's what that's what the book
is about. It really helped me to write it. And
I have to say, I'm I'm more proud of this
book than anything I've ever written. I feel really good
(34:31):
about it. I know this because I'm always rereading it
all the time. I pick it up and reread it,
you know, especially the lessons in there about time and patience.
There's some really important material in this in this book,
and I don't know it came about at the right time.
But meanwhile, and of course the reason for the book
(34:54):
is to celebrate the semi quincentennial. It's coming up next year, right,
But meanwhile, it turns out that in our media culture today,
it's you probably know this already, but it's even controversial
to say that America has a heritage, or that there
(35:15):
are spirits that animate this country, or that we have
habits and folk ways, uh that are that are worth
emulating from our ancestors. I mean, I just read an
article from the New York Times that appeared I think
this morning that denies all this, Oh America's never had
that we don't have a heritage, we don't have a history,
(35:36):
We're not a certain people. We don't know there's nothing,
you know, distinct about this country. It's always just been
NonStop chaos from the very beginning, and so it's it's
it's it's me nasty racist and nativists to to assert otherwise.
I thought, Wow, I wonder this journal I wonder what
(35:57):
this journalist to think about my book, because the thesis
that I'm arguing here is exactly the opposite. That this
country was forged through family relationships of particular people confronting
particular UH frontier conditions, and cultivated for ourselves certain value
(36:22):
systems that we need to recapture before we lose everything entirely.
That's the that's the thesis of the book.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
Can we we've all and we've all got about three
minutes up here, can we recapture it? I know we're
angry with what we have, but that doesn't mean we
can return to what we were?
Speaker 2 (36:41):
Is that possible?
Speaker 3 (36:44):
Of course? I wonder about this question every day. I'm
very concerned about what we're doing with AI and the
digitization in our lives. I just finished an article UH
calling out the fragility of these systems we've created without
any kind of redundancy. When the servers go down, we
won't be able to get we won't be able to
start our cars, we won't be able to get into
our homes. We won't be able to answer the door.
(37:08):
We won't be able to pay our bills, can't get money,
we won't be able to heed our homes. Like we've built.
All of these digital systems have been built on such
a fragile foundation. It worries me because outages are increasing
and they're always shockingness all the time. But they shouldn't.
We move way too quickly to abandon the analog world
(37:32):
and embrace the digital one. My concern is that it's
all going to at some point collapse in a way
that's going to be very ugly for us, and that
we need to get better at preparing, not just in
terms of rejecting digital technology when possible. I always choose
analog technology before embracing the digital. And like never scan
(37:58):
a QR code at a restaurant to order, just saying, like,
as a matter of princip will never do that demand
of physical menu. If they're not going to give you one,
then just ask them what they have to eat. Look,
let's just please balve this back a little bit, but
it's a much more important thing is figuring out, you know,
who we are as people and in a way of
(38:19):
making our own character and our own personalities more robust
to resist the insidious ways in which all the systems
around us are trying to make are trying to make
us dependent upon them by fostering as sort of a weird,
sort of persistent dissatisfaction with everything about our lives. So
(38:40):
we should stop resenting work and instead thrill that we
have the opportunity to work, not always get mad when
things break, but sta as a chance to show that
we can do something and still can control our lives
by fixing things ourselves, fostering community. I mean, one of
(39:01):
the things that Brownstone inst Is doing is we started
suparate clubs around the country so that we can so
that our communities that have been chattered by COVID can
reconstitute under a different value system, a love of freedom
than free speech, and a genuine community exchange. I think
these are some of the most valuable things we can
(39:23):
do where we assembly and friend networks and preparing for
the worst. My big concern right and the most immediate term,
is that we're going to face a second wave of
inflation after this first one, and then a third wave
after that, and if that happens, then the money will
you could die. You know what happens in a society
(39:45):
where the money dies. Terrible things happen. So we need
to prepare for the worst. And part of that preparation
is not just choosing an analog over digital whenever possible,
but it's also preparing our own sense of ourselves, our jobs,
our devotion to our communities and our families, and to
our faith. That is the cornerstone of that which will
(40:09):
get us through the crisis, but it also is the
basis of a rebuilding that's necessarily going to happen. Can
it happen? I believe I was talking to Steve Banner
early on when all this it was unfolding. Steve is
a very interesting guy, and he said to me, what
man has built, man can take apart again and rebuild.
(40:33):
There's no systems that are impervious to this. And I've
thought about that remark a lot, and I think it
has to be true. You know, we're being a cultutor
to believe that we don't have control, but we do
have control. Let's cling to the control we do have.
So that when the time comes, we're in a position
to rebuild this country on a foundation of constitutional government,
(40:57):
individual rights, and freedom. And that opportunity, I believe is
upon us right now to do it. And there's things
in everybody's lives that everyone can do to help achieve
this dream.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
I agree, Jeffrey. That was spectacular. We finally got to
have you for an hour. I appreciate you so much,
my friend, Come back soon, please. All right, final thoughts.
(41:35):
We've been wanting to do that for a very long time.
Tremendously interesting guy. And we have all these problems, all
these things we have to patch back together. But just
remember we can't. We just have to begin. Get to
know your neighbor. But the phone down, all right, We'll
do it again.
We're doing something different tonight. You know, you obviously know
Jeffrey Tucker comes on the show so often, and every
single time Jeffrey Talker gets done on the show, have
a talk with the producers and we always say we
should have gone longer, We needed to get him for longer.
And so we're going to keep him the whole hour
this time, and we're just going to pick his brain
(00:29):
a bit. So joining me now, somebody you know quite well,
Jeffrey A. Tucker, president of the Brownstone Institute, and he
wrote a wonderful book called Spirits of America. I'm going
to fill yourself up with patriotism, remind you where you
came from. I would highly recommend it. Read it to
your kids. By the way, Jeffrey, you and I we
connected back during the COVID insanity. And I know what,
(00:52):
Maybe I'm supposed to move on, but I haven't moved on.
I still I can't understand totally how the Land of
the Free succumb.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
The way it did. Can you help me understand what happened?
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Well, I'm just glad you're asking the question, because everybody
else seems to pretend like nothing happened, and that nobody
should be shocked by this. Yeah, you know, I'm dealing
with crazy reporters all the time now, demanding to know
you know, how it is that Brownstone institutes become so
supposedly so influential. And I always say the same thing
(01:29):
that you can't shut churches all over the world, force
everybody's stay home orders, destroy millions of small businesses, imposed
travel restricts between states, and do it all over the
world at the same time, and then follow that up
by the forced injection of an experimental technology that had
(01:51):
not been ever tested for safety and effectiveness, claiming that
this is going to end the pandemic, when every virologist
the world knew that that wasn't true. You can't do
all this stuff and not expect some blowbacks, some some
uh uh, some questions to be asked about how this
came to be, and and and and and that has
(02:15):
spread a great deal of incredulity towards public health, and
not just public health, but doctors and the retail outlets
at the pharmaceutical companies that participated for that matter, of
the churches that shut their doors on Christmas and easterns,
the schools that refused to educate the kids for a
year and a half. Uh. You know, the bureaucrats who
(02:35):
divided us between essential and and unessential, the digital companies
that participated in a in a grim, gruesome, uh censorship
campaign to the point that they even took the president
off social media when he started saying things that were
too true. All of this happened to us, and of course,
(02:57):
I mean, what did you think was gonna happen? People
were going to be upset about it. And it's not
enough just to say, oh, don't worry about it. That
was then, this is now. Everybody, just get over it. Now.
It's primarily affected an entire generation and we're going to
be living with the consequences for the rest of our
lives and that of our children too. Nothing will ever
be the same after this. And it's just naive and
(03:19):
absurd for these media outlets to pretend as if you know,
Brownstone Institute alone somehow generated the public of the public anger.
I mean, it's it's absurd. If anything, we're trying to
ask the questions that are going to get us the
answers we need so that we can get over it.
You know, we can't just pretend like none of this happened.
(03:43):
It was like the equivalent of World War One, I
think for this generation. And you know, you just can't
you can't just wish that that never happened. It did happen,
and we're going to get answers and hopefully some justice,
and there's going to be tremendous consequences on the loss
of trust and all these institutions, from big tech to universities,
(04:06):
to churches, to government to doctors, everybody's been affected by it.
So it's the most profoundly devastating thing that's ever happened
to our country. I would say at least it compares
with World War One and World War Two. And the
questions are not going away.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Jeffrey, you mentioned the loss of trust in institutions, and
I'm someone who firmly believes all nations are built on
their institutions, that you really have to have good ones.
If you have goodwines, you have a good country. If
you have bad ones, you have a bad country. And
now we don't trust our institutions now, as you just
pointed out.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
But isn't that, in a.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Way a good thing that we finally found out just
how sick, demented and evil. So many of our institutions are. Yeah,
I want them to be good, but if I can't
have good ones, I at least have to know they're bad.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Yeah. No, I agree with that we shouldn't recall from
the truth. We have to know what the truth is.
But the truth is very profoundly disturbing. What we saw
unfold before us was a conspirators, no question, but then
collaborators who did so mostly as far as I can tell,
on grounds of careerism. People didn't want to speak out
(05:19):
because I knew that speaking out was going to be
injurious to their remunerative flow and ability to pay over
extended mortgages, car loans, and cell phone bills, and that
alone was enough to control an entire population. I mean,
I don't think we want to live this way, you know.
I think we placed too much of the burden on
(05:41):
the handful of courageous truth tellers like yourself who happened
to have been in a position to be independent enough
to do it. Or we're willing to take tremendous personal
risks to their career, and most of the people who
spoke out, especially in the early period, face terrible consequences
(06:02):
for their decisions, and you know, it's nice that. Okay,
now some of these people have jobs in the Trump
administration or whatever, but it hardly makes up for, you know,
having created a conditions under which people had to forego
all financial security, all sacrifice, professional relationships, forend circles, you know, everything,
(06:27):
to stand up to do the right thing, the kind
of thing should not be necessary. I also agree with
you it is better to know the truth. On the
other hand, nobody really wants to live in a world
without trust in anything, and that's sort of where we
are right now. We are in society without trust, and
(06:48):
the evidence of it is all around us. Our comments
have been are being taken away from us.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
You know.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
I recently ordered a train to get to go to
Manhattan and got off of the Monhn's train station. The
first thing you noticed at Moehan trainstation is like, while
it's pretty, there's no place to sit down, you know,
I mean, there's literally they've constructed it without benches, and
the reason is that they don't want people loitering. Well,
(07:19):
is that really the kind of world we want to
live in? Where you can't have a place to sit
down anywhere? And that's all of Manhattan. Now you can't.
There's hardly any place to sit down. And this contrast
with all the old train stations, like you look at
the New Haven train station in Connecticut. It's nothing but benches.
They made it as comfortable as possible for everybody to
(07:40):
be there, and it almost looks like a church with lined
up pews everywhere. You know. That's the difference in one
hundred years. The old train stations had nothing but places
to sit where everybody can be comfortable. New train stations
you dare not even create so much as one bench
because it'll be taken over by a homeless person. That's
a substantial difference in the kind of world that we
(08:00):
live in now. And then you leave the train station
and you encounter something like a post apocalyptic situation for
five square blocks in all directions. I've never really wanted
to wear a mask during COVID, but I want to
wear a mask now when I visit Manhattan because there's
three competing smells. There's urine, pot and trash okay so,
(08:25):
and at any anyone waft, you're not sure which of
the three is going to be dominant, you know, but
one of those three is going to overtake you and
mute the other other two, and then it's gonna flip.
One block later. I was wearing a suit and tie,
and I felt like a visitor from another planet, or
(08:48):
from the Gilded Age or something like. Nobody looked like me.
There wasn't a single person wearing a suit or a
tie anywhere. They're all just, you know, the dressed like vagabonds.
Fentanyl addicts everywhere, bombs, stepping over trash, construction that's never
going to be completed. It actually feels genuinely unsafe. This
(09:11):
is not civilization, I mean, but this is where we are,
and it's happened kind of quickly, but a little bit
too slowly, but we've accommodated ourselves to this. The same
thing is true in San Francisco. I was there recently.
I couldn't believe what a catastrophe was. You know, when
I was a kid, I used to visit. San Francisco
was gleaming. This is the greatest city in the world,
(09:33):
and now it's just nothing but a catastrophe, where where
anybody there feels free to take up to one thousand dollars,
to rob stores of up to one thousand dollars because
they're not going to get prosecuted for it, and human
fec is all over the sidewalks. I'm just it's indescribable.
I mean, that's sort of where we are as a country,
and it's not everywhere, but it's in a lot of places.
(09:55):
And the problem, as far as I can tell, it's spreading.
The covid re kicked all this off by demoralizing the
population and line just constantly, so it spread as sort
of nihilism towards public life, where people don't even believe
in truth. In fact, our top intellectuals now say this,
(10:15):
there's no such thing as truth. Who cares about truth?
Truth gets in the way of getting things done, So
NPR can be relied upon to lying to you every
single day. I talked to reporters of all these top
venues all the time, and they don't care about the truth.
They're concerned about everything but the truth. They're concerned about
(10:36):
keeping the establishment in power as long as possible and
stopping people like you and me who want to talk
about what's going on.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
And we have more for you next.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
I am a chip freak. I know that there are people.
There are pretzel people or people who like sweets. You
don't want to sit around and eat candy. Ever since
I was a kid, all I wanted were chips, And
now I'm forty four and I'm still addicted to chips.
It's very clear that I'm gonna eat chips to the
day I die. The problem is all these chips you
buy in the gas station will actually kill you, and
(11:09):
so I needed something else. I heard about massive chips
from a friend.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
I was told only.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Three ingredients, so there's so much better for you. So
immediately I thought they're gonna be disgusting. They're gonna be
grossed like all the other hell food. Massive chips are
my favorite chips. If everything was equal, I would still
eat massive chips.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
You don't feel all bloated and horrible.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
After you're done because it's just three ingredients, no cancer
causing filth. Go eat chips guilt free. May I recommend
Little Daba Hot Sauce on there. They have all kinds
of flavors. Go to Massive Chips dot com slash jessetv.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
You know I've never actually asked you on cameracks.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
We've always been more and more of a rush than
we are now what your background is? Everybody knows Jeffrey
Talker who watches I'm right, But people don't know your
background as well.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Give me the short and skinny on them.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Well, I grew up in a highly musical family, and
I thought from a very young age that I was
going to be that My highest aspiration was to be
a jazz trimonist. And then at the age of sixteen
or seventeen, I suddenly encouraged me I could do whatever
I wanted. I didn't have to be that, and so
(12:32):
I instead, you know, I spent a lot of time
playing in dance bands and jazz clubs and that kind
of thing to pay my way through school. But I
otherwise dropped it as a profession and took up economics
because economics is a discipline held out the possibility of
understanding the rise and fall of societies, and I wanted
to know what that story was. So I fell in
(12:52):
love with economics as a discipline, and that's what I studied.
And the main thing I learned from economics is that
for all the mysteries that are associated with the material world,
the one thing that seems to fix everything is letting
people be free in their actions and choices and secure
(13:13):
in their property. So that's the lesson I took from
all my studies there, and I thought, well, I would
like to I would like to go into an industry
and ideas industry that emphasizes these points freedom in your
action and choices, and security in your property. So that's
(13:34):
what I've done most of my career, and that took
me in a lot of different directions editorially and technologically,
and forth profit and nonprofit industries. My life took a
different direction with the COD with the COVID response, because
I had fifteen years part been writing about pandemics and
(13:57):
the government response to them. I wrote an article in
to five that said, listen, I know there's some people
out there who liked the idea of lockdowns and putting
government in charge of pandemics. If you ever attempt this,
you will discredit the government for forever. It won't work,
and it'll be a cultural, social, economic calamity. That's what
(14:18):
I wrote in two thousand and five. I never expected
they would ever attempt this, But then in January of
twenty twenty, I began to think this is getting more real.
In February I began to think it was even more real.
The day when I realized that it was all coming.
Was February twenty seventh, and that was the first day
(14:43):
when The New York Times ran a podcast where they
were trying to panic the population over the coming bug,
the virus. And this contradicted one hundred years of New
York Times reporting on pandemics, which is always about stake
calms your doctor if you get SID. This time they
were actively promoting panic, and I knew for sure that
(15:04):
there was a reason for that. And then you know,
within within two weeks, it was a done deal and
we were off trying the lockdown technique. The one piece
of it I never really anticipated was that the whole
purpose of lockdown was to prepare the population for the
deployment of a new shot technology, namely modified m RNA.
(15:27):
That is something I didn't really believe that they would
attempt something like that, because just on the face of it,
there's no way you can have a vaccine for fast
mutating pathogen like this with a zoonotic reservoir. It just
wasn't wasn't even plausible, wasn't even believable. And I knew
for sure it was going to make things worse, and
(15:50):
and that it wouldn't work ultimately, and that's what they tried.
And now even in that framework, uh, I didn't and
anticipate how dangerous the shots would be. That was the
part that really shocked me. And I wasn't even a
believer in it for a long time until the evidence
(16:11):
just overwhelmed me. But that put me in a position
of starting Brownstone as a kind of a voice for
resisting this kind of dictatorship by public health authorities and
investigating all the ways in which this unfolded. And it's
(16:31):
left Brownstone a little bit in a position of being
unique because not other answers to continue to ask these questions,
but at Brownstone we do. And it also has made us,
of course a target. That's, as you well know.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
Jeffrey, kind of a large question, like a thirty thousand
foot view question. But just hearing you talk about this,
I find it curious. We are suppose to live in
a constitutional republic, a representative republic, and we have all
these things that I shouldn't say nobody likes, but the
vast majority of people don't want. The vast majority of
(17:13):
people don't want New York without benches and smelling like pea.
The vast majority of people don't want their schools shut down.
The vast majority of people don't want homeless people everywhere,
criminals everywhere, border open ap okay, But we got all that,
so we live in a constitutional republic. The vast majority
of people don't want what we have in so many areas.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
How does that happen?
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Yeah, it has to do with the vast enterprise we
call the state, which is not just the government, but
it's all the tentacles of the state, which are reaching
into all of our industries and agriculture and pharmaceuticals, in banking,
our doctor's offices. Everything is impacted by these enormous networks
that have been aided by the agencies that are running everything,
(18:04):
and the agencies all represent industries. This system that we
inhabit today was built over a little more than one
hundred years. Really, it's finds its origin in the eighteen eighties,
but it really came of age about nineteen thirteen with
the income tax and the direct election of senators, and
then World War One, and ever since then we've lived
(18:25):
in this sort of managerial empire run by the expert classes,
on whom we never voted in the first place. We
found ourselves in this strange situation where we can't get
rid of them. The thing that makes the Trump administration
unique is that I think it's the first president we've
had in one hundred years that's absolutely determined to be
(18:46):
in charge, which is strans thing to say. But mostly
presidents are just acquiesced. And he's appointed a lot of
people who themselves want to be in charge. And the
agencies are not used to this. They've long been used
to just having marionettes come and go, yeah, you get
here's your nice parking place, here's your suitet office. But otherwise,
leave us alone and you'll be gone in a few years.
(19:08):
That's the way the agencies have always worked. This time
it's different. These guys really want to be in charge.
I'll tell you just earlier today, I was being asked
a question by a reporter. I know I shouldn't give
these interviews, and I'm going to try not to anymore,
but the question was, well, what's it like for you
(19:29):
and all your associates because there used to be the
dissidents just a year ago, but now you guys are
in charge of everything. And I said, you know, I'm
not even going to accept the premise of the question,
because I'm not sure that we are in charge of anything.
I know that some very important positions are now occupied
(19:52):
by people like you know, RFK and j Botachari, and
you could go down the list and there's dozens of them.
But are they are they really in charge? I'm you know, yeah,
in name, but they're battling immense beasts of such reach
and so well funded. And these guys are just all appointees,
(20:14):
you know, easily ignored by the systems that run by themselves,
by bureaucrats with all the institutional knowledge, and by industries
who know their way around very very well. They are
the masters at managing this world of power. Our people
are are just you know, just getting going. So I
don't really accept the idea that we're really in charge.
(20:36):
For that matter, Trump struggles every day. You know. It's
interesting his first term, he just naturally assumed that he
would be the CEO of the government and that what
he said would go. He found out otherwise very quickly
that you know, the executive agencies were in a plot
(20:57):
with industry and to deep state to drive him out
of office, to disable him, to humiliate him, to make
sure he never came back again as a way of
sending the message to anybody who thinks that democracy works,
that no democracy does not work. The voters will not
(21:19):
get their way, the establishment will rule forever. And to
their shock and amazement, he came back after four years,
despite assassination attempts and endless lawsuits trying to bankrupt him,
send him to jail. They've tried everything, and now he's
trying to make the second term really count. He's not
(21:39):
going as fast on many areas as I would wish,
but it's probably the first presidential administration in my lifetime
that's made any kind of difference at all. And a
lot of traces to the Russia Gate thing, but also
the COVID response traits looms very large in this administration.
That was entirely a deep state industrial scheme. Yeah, and
(22:05):
Trump wants to reverse that or at least disable the
institutions that made that happen or otherwise bamboozled them into
acquiescing to it or giving them no choice. Essentially. So
we're living an unprecedented times. We're really trying to figure
out right now whether whether this thing we call democracy,
(22:27):
whether this thing we call this constitutional republican which the
people rule whether it's real, whether it can be made
real again, or else. Are we just going to live
in a fictitious world where we pretend to have those
institutions while really the insiders run everything. The industry is
run everything. That's the great test of our time. And
I don't know how it's going to turn out, but
I admire at least the attempt to make the founder's
(22:52):
vision something meaningful in our lives.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Stay tuned, We have more coming up next. Let me
tell you about energy. Feeling good all the time, Feeling
good in the morning when you wake up, feeling energized,
ready to take on the day at work, not sitting.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
There staring at the clock. Get me another cup of
coffee when you get home. Don't you want to enjoy.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Your family, your time to yourself. You want to go shooting,
go for a walk, get your tea levels up. You
can't walk through your life being low tea and tired
and depressed all the time. That's no way to live.
We are drinking estrogen. It's in the birth control. We
can't get it out of the water, It's in the
we shower.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
In estrogen.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
We have lost half of our testosterone in the last
fifty years. That's societal extinction if we don't turn it around.
Chalk is trying to turn it around with natural herbal supplements.
Twenty percent increase in your tea levels in ninety days.
Just try it. You're three months away from feeling like
a new person. Chalk dot Com, Slash, Jesse TV.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Jeffrey.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
We're gonna actually not really switch gears here because it's
really along the lines of what we've been talking about.
An area of particular area of your expertise that people
find very confusing is the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
What is it?
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Why did they have so much immense power? I mean
Trump can't even apparently fire someone from there with that.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
But who do they answer to tell us about the
Federal Reserve?
Speaker 3 (24:34):
Yeah, well, nobody really knows. That's what's funny about it.
We created this thing in nineteen thirteen. We call this
Federal Reserve, but it really was just a central bank.
I mean, it's a funny word, Federal reserve, federal menials,
just like a federal thing, Like we have a federal system,
so this is our federal thing. And then the reserve
(24:55):
part as if to say that, you know, there's all that.
It's just there in case we need it. You know,
this is while the gold is there are the people
who are going to make system run. Called the Federal
Reserve established branches all over the country to create the
appearance of decentralization. But it was never really figured out
(25:19):
whether you know who would run it. It was the
president in charge of it. Yes, it's an executive agency.
You know. It's called the Federal Reserve dot gov. So
it lives under the government and under the ORG chart
of the federal government. It reports to the president, meaning
that if the voters voter a new president and he
should have some authority over what it does. You know,
(25:44):
you think just by the ORG chart. But we don't
have an answer to that. In fact, this is going
to be adjudicated by the Supreme Court at some point.
And I don't know how the answer could be anything
other than the president's in charge of the Federal Reserve.
How could it be otherwise? It is an executive level agency.
You can't just say, oh, well, the Supreme Court is not.
I doubt the Supreme Court is going to say this.
(26:06):
The temptation to say, well, fetter Reserve is different. It's
an independent agency. Well, there's nothing in the constitution that
says anything about an independent agency. Is that that thing
does not exist. If you're actually reading the constitution, you
care about it, there's no such thing as an independent agency.
Every every agency of the government is responsible to the
(26:27):
people through their elected representatives. That's that's that's got to
be the case. Now. The other bigger question is whether
and to what extent the fit A Reserve has done
what it's supposed to do. And the answer on every
front is no. You know that one of the original charges.
You can't believe it. When they started the FED, they
said there was going to lower inflation.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
I mean.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
He I mean the dollar of nineteen thirteen is now
worth I think the last I checked about two cents. So,
I mean it's been a disaster, you know. And then
the first five years after the Fed's existed, the dollar
lost you know, thirty forty percent of its purchasing power.
(27:11):
I mean, it blew up immediately. There's been Instead of
taming business circles, it's created them through its ability to
print unlimited quantities of money. And the whole system's gotten
much worse since nineteen seventy four, when we went off
any tie of gold forever, and the institutent in a
news system where we're just going to have just pure
(27:36):
paper money, which in all of human history has always
led to, you know, tremendous calamity every single time the
system like this has ever been tried. Meanwhile, since that time,
we've seen the FED fundamentally changed the industrial structure of
the United States. It's used to be a country where
(27:58):
we made things, you know, through toil and creativity, things
that last. We lost one industry after another ever since
the dollar became the world reserve currency and the FED
could just export its inflation abroad that any trade theorist
(28:19):
of the nineteen thirties and forties would have predicted exactly
what would happened, which is that the industry and industrial
base of America would be gut it. And that's exactly
what happened. It happened slowly first and then all at once.
Here we lost pianos, that we lost watches, that we
lost textiles, and then lost steel, and then toys and
(28:40):
shipbuilding and tools and you name it. And we just
became a country that lives off leverage and silliness, thinking
that we could live off our credentials and degrees that
we pay exorbitant prices for. That's where we are now now.
(29:03):
So we developed an information economy and deconditioned an entire
generation into thinking they didn't have to work, so that work,
hard work, and toil are not even part of the
lives of people, you know, under the age of forty
really in general. And then the worst possible thing happened
(29:26):
during the COVID period, and that was mandates that everybody
stopped working and just live off the government. That's that
moment where vast loss of the population began to think,
this entire system is fake. I'm not working at all,
and yet I'm richer than I ever have been. Right.
That went on for like two years, three years. That's
(29:47):
a horrible lesson to impart to the population. Of course,
the consequence of that was thirty an additional thirty percent
loss and purchasing power. All the gains that people got
from the largest that was distributed to the population, where
the government was just like giving you thousands of dollars
(30:07):
in your bank account ever a month, which is a
weird time. It was all taken away in the form
of inflation, and but left a cultural message that it's
all nonsense, there's nothing that's real. And now we have
AI and we have influencer culture, and we have with
(30:28):
that fans thing only fans, and we have Crypto and
it's like the fictional world of you know, the casino
fantasy is dominating everything.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
We're not done yet, we have even more. I love chips.
I'm a chip freak. And now the Spaceball playoffs, it's
college football season. My chip intake increases exponentially right now.
But I'm forty four. I need to start being better
about what I eat. I know that.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
So what do you do? Though? Who wants healthy chips?
They're all gross?
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Right? Nope, Bandy Crisps is there. Bandy Crisps you can
eat without any guilt at all. No seed oil, filth,
no cancer costing stuff, just delicious natural chips, potatoes, salt,
tallow goodness, multiple flavors. It is your next potato chip.
(31:31):
You'll never need another one. These will be the only.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Potato chips you ever eat.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Go to Vandycrisps dot com, slash Jesse TV.
Speaker 4 (31:41):
Get yourself a couple of bags.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
So I want to talk about Spirits of America because
it makes me feel better we're gonna talk about that book. Now,
tell me, tell me about your book, Tell me why
even write this book?
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Give it to me.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
Yeah, well, you know it's funny. I wrote two really
dark books in a row on the lockdowns. One was
called Liberty Lockdown and the second one was called Life
After Lockdown, and they're pretty pretty gritty, pretty grim, and
I kind of wanted to shake myself out of it
(32:24):
and realized that, look, if we're going to if we're
going to rebuild the country, we've got to remember who
we are, and one are those values that led to it.
So I discovered this writer named Eric Sloan who was
writing before the Bisentinial in the early nineteen seventies, and
he wrote a brilliant book called Spirits of seventy six,
(32:46):
but she divided between I think it was like ten
chapters where he identified these various traits of what it
really means to be an American brugality, hard work, patience,
respect for ones, neighbors, all these kinds of things that
I found myself so whipped up into excitement about the
(33:06):
romance of that which about what she was writing, that
I tried my hand at updating the book. The foundation
that published the book will not bring it back in
print because they find it too politically correct. I guess
you would say, like, it's not a message they wanted
to say. So you'll never be able to get this book.
Last time I saw the books were thousands of dollars online,
(33:28):
but now you can't even get them anymore. So I
decided to just update the book for myself and just
kind of related readers what he was saying. And then
I added a few additional chapters about other subjects like
forbearants and some other other matters that I discovered discussed
in the book. And it's not a big book. It's
(33:48):
about I think it's about one hundred pages maybe, but
I commissioned special drawings for pen and ink, you know.
So there's a there's a nostalgia, I would say to
the book, and I think everybody's feeling a little bit
nostalgic these days. So the book hit at exactly the
right time, like who are we, where do we come from?
(34:11):
What do we really believe as Americans? And what kind
of values do we need to have if we want
to recapture what it means to be free people in
a good society. So that's what that's what the book
is about. It really helped me to write it. And
I have to say, I'm I'm more proud of this
book than anything I've ever written. I feel really good
(34:31):
about it. I know this because I'm always rereading it
all the time. I pick it up and reread it,
you know, especially the lessons in there about time and patience.
There's some really important material in this in this book,
and I don't know it came about at the right time.
But meanwhile, and of course the reason for the book
(34:54):
is to celebrate the semi quincentennial. It's coming up next year, right,
But meanwhile, it turns out that in our media culture today,
it's you probably know this already, but it's even controversial
to say that America has a heritage, or that there
(35:15):
are spirits that animate this country, or that we have
habits and folk ways, uh that are that are worth
emulating from our ancestors. I mean, I just read an
article from the New York Times that appeared I think
this morning that denies all this, Oh America's never had
that we don't have a heritage, we don't have a history,
(35:36):
We're not a certain people. We don't know there's nothing,
you know, distinct about this country. It's always just been
NonStop chaos from the very beginning, and so it's it's
it's it's me nasty racist and nativists to to assert otherwise.
I thought, Wow, I wonder this journal I wonder what
(35:57):
this journalist to think about my book, because the thesis
that I'm arguing here is exactly the opposite. That this
country was forged through family relationships of particular people confronting
particular UH frontier conditions, and cultivated for ourselves certain value
(36:22):
systems that we need to recapture before we lose everything entirely.
That's the that's the thesis of the book.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
Can we we've all and we've all got about three
minutes up here, can we recapture it? I know we're
angry with what we have, but that doesn't mean we
can return to what we were?
Speaker 2 (36:41):
Is that possible?
Speaker 3 (36:44):
Of course? I wonder about this question every day. I'm
very concerned about what we're doing with AI and the
digitization in our lives. I just finished an article UH
calling out the fragility of these systems we've created without
any kind of redundancy. When the servers go down, we
won't be able to get we won't be able to
start our cars, we won't be able to get into
our homes. We won't be able to answer the door.
(37:08):
We won't be able to pay our bills, can't get money,
we won't be able to heed our homes. Like we've built.
All of these digital systems have been built on such
a fragile foundation. It worries me because outages are increasing
and they're always shockingness all the time. But they shouldn't.
We move way too quickly to abandon the analog world
(37:32):
and embrace the digital one. My concern is that it's
all going to at some point collapse in a way
that's going to be very ugly for us, and that
we need to get better at preparing, not just in
terms of rejecting digital technology when possible. I always choose
analog technology before embracing the digital. And like never scan
(37:58):
a QR code at a restaurant to order, just saying, like,
as a matter of princip will never do that demand
of physical menu. If they're not going to give you one,
then just ask them what they have to eat. Look,
let's just please balve this back a little bit, but
it's a much more important thing is figuring out, you know,
who we are as people and in a way of
(38:19):
making our own character and our own personalities more robust
to resist the insidious ways in which all the systems
around us are trying to make are trying to make
us dependent upon them by fostering as sort of a weird,
sort of persistent dissatisfaction with everything about our lives. So
(38:40):
we should stop resenting work and instead thrill that we
have the opportunity to work, not always get mad when
things break, but sta as a chance to show that
we can do something and still can control our lives
by fixing things ourselves, fostering community. I mean, one of
(39:01):
the things that Brownstone inst Is doing is we started
suparate clubs around the country so that we can so
that our communities that have been chattered by COVID can
reconstitute under a different value system, a love of freedom
than free speech, and a genuine community exchange. I think
these are some of the most valuable things we can
(39:23):
do where we assembly and friend networks and preparing for
the worst. My big concern right and the most immediate term,
is that we're going to face a second wave of
inflation after this first one, and then a third wave
after that, and if that happens, then the money will
you could die. You know what happens in a society
(39:45):
where the money dies. Terrible things happen. So we need
to prepare for the worst. And part of that preparation
is not just choosing an analog over digital whenever possible,
but it's also preparing our own sense of ourselves, our jobs,
our devotion to our communities and our families, and to
our faith. That is the cornerstone of that which will
(40:09):
get us through the crisis, but it also is the
basis of a rebuilding that's necessarily going to happen. Can
it happen? I believe I was talking to Steve Banner
early on when all this it was unfolding. Steve is
a very interesting guy, and he said to me, what
man has built, man can take apart again and rebuild.
(40:33):
There's no systems that are impervious to this. And I've
thought about that remark a lot, and I think it
has to be true. You know, we're being a cultutor
to believe that we don't have control, but we do
have control. Let's cling to the control we do have.
So that when the time comes, we're in a position
to rebuild this country on a foundation of constitutional government,
(40:57):
individual rights, and freedom. And that opportunity, I believe is
upon us right now to do it. And there's things
in everybody's lives that everyone can do to help achieve
this dream.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
I agree, Jeffrey. That was spectacular. We finally got to
have you for an hour. I appreciate you so much,
my friend, Come back soon, please. All right, final thoughts.
(41:35):
We've been wanting to do that for a very long time.
Tremendously interesting guy. And we have all these problems, all
these things we have to patch back together. But just
remember we can't. We just have to begin. Get to
know your neighbor. But the phone down, all right, We'll
do it again.
Host
Jesse Kelly
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