719: Living Free in an Unfree World - A Libertarian's Guide

Brian Nichols  0:35  
Alright, libertarians, how do we cope with being a libertarian in a world that is overtly against us? Well, at least that's what it seems like. Let's talk about that. Instead of focusing on winning arguments, we're teaching the basic fundamentals of sales and marketing and how we can use them to win in the world of politics, teaching you how to meet people where they're at on the issues they care about. Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. Wow, hey there, folks, right here on The Brian Nichols Show thing going on, of course, another fun filled episode. I am always your humble host joining us live from our BNCT Studios here in lovely Eastern Indiana, folks, the recession is right around the corner, I was just on the phone here with a customer. They said my customers are starting to feel the pinch. I don't know what to do. Well, if you're in a situation just like that, well, here's what you need to do. Go email me, Brian at Brian Nichols. consulting.com. Because we're gonna go ahead, sit down, walk through your sales strategies, your messaging, and we're going to help you be prepared to face this recession head on because if you're not, I promise your competitors will again, email me Brian at Brian Nichols. consulting.com. So let's kick things off. Today we have a returning guest, a guest I am so so excited to have back here on the show. It's been a little bit since he was on the program. And today we're going to talk specifically about being a libertarian in what seems to be a not really friendly to libertarian world. Joining us once again on the program from the great free that people met Kenny, welcome back to The Brian Nichols Show.

Matt Kibbe  2:06  
Hey, Brian, great, great to see you.

Brian Nichols  2:08  
Great to have you back on that. It's been a little bit since we've connected you were saying before we hit the record button. You and Terry have been flying over God's green earth. You've written Lisbon and you're out in Serbia, what's been going on in the world of Matt Kibby there.

Matt Kibbe  2:21  
So we were trotting out this new terrain, I talk give these talks together now and it's, you know, half couples squabbling, working out their issues on stage but, but we'd like the the the boy girl dynamic and we tried it out a new talk called BE THE LIVING which is a riff on Iran's first big novel, we the living. And it's kind of my version of a positive, upbeat, Liberty based version of Jordan Peterson because we just went through these three years of miserable tyranny, people telling you, government's telling you, you can't even leave your house and what you can can't do to your body and whether or not you're essential, or non essential and, and one of the results of that was was a lot of broken people a lot of depression, alcoholism, you know, the numbers, it's horrific. And I've been really pissed off about that stuff. But the flip side of that, and and I've been doing it to myself, so I thought I might share it with other people is is basically our version of how do you live a free life in an unfree world? And how do you not let the bastards get you down? How do you continue to achieve and strive and succeed and fail and find joy in life, even when the government and the faceless bureaucrats don't want you to? So that was, that was kind of the gist of our message. And we're, we're building it into something I don't know where it's gonna go, that these were test pilots.

Brian Nichols  3:50  
Gotcha. And, Matt, you you've obviously been on the show before. But for the audience here, who maybe did not catch your older episodes, you are the head of free the people when you guys focus on telling stories, specifically in the world of our liberty senses and bring a lot of solutions to the table. And I love what you guys are doing. But I realized in terms of having you on the show, we've never really gotten to know the matt Kibby story, you're kind of world view and also your your path through this greater libertarian movement, liberty movement. So I thought today, it'd be a great chance to get to know you more as a person but also kind of your your world and in politics and get a bit more of your perspective. So I guess to start things off, talk to us about what was it that was the moment you realize that you were not necessarily with this Red Team Blue team, but more so somewhere in the middle and focusing specifically on the world of liberty?

Matt Kibbe  4:41  
Yeah, I've in some ways, a typical story in other ways a freakishly strange story because I was reading the liner notes on a rush album, an album called 2112 When I was about 13 years old, and and if you know this album if you don't know this album, you need to but if you If you know this album, you know that it's dedicated to the genius of iron Rand and I had no idea who that guy was. But the album and the music and particularly the lyrics, which is about this dystopian world where we're, the priests in a temple are dictating every aspect of your life, what you can read and watch, you can listen to music, everything, and, and I really connected with that, but her name stuck with me. And I found an old beat up copy of Anthem at a garage sale, again, probably when I was 13. And I devoured it like people do. And I went on this quest to find all of her stuff, which I eventually did. And in her one of her nonfiction books, she says, If you want to understand economics, read Ludwig von Mises. So I was strangely reading Mises in high school. And my dad got transferred to a small town called Grove City, Pennsylvania. I didn't want to go to college, I wanted to be a woodworker, dads really want their sons to go to college, he won that debate. So I'm like, Fine, I'll go there. And it was Grove City College. And Grove City College just happened to have one of the students of Ludwig von Mises chairing the economics department, a professor named Hudson holds. So eventually, I stumbled into that. The The reason I like to tell that story is that it wasn't, it wasn't a white paper. It wasn't an economics lecture. It wasn't a book like human action that turned me on to these ideas. It was music, and then a really compelling short story. So that's that's very much influenced my life. Over the years, I started off wanting to be an academic, I was a graduate student at George Mason University. But once I wrote my first Wall Street Journal Op Ed, I realized that 800 words, one, it's pretty hard to boil your ideas down to 800 words. And two, you could reach a much broader audience. So fast forward to what we do today, we produce videos because that's how people particularly young people consume information. And, and we think a powerful story can turn on a whole new generation to these to these values. And eventually, like there's there's breadcrumbs there, eventually, they might start to read the novels that turned me on and maybe maybe they they even read the Austrian economists that I love so much, but but I think for most people, it's going to be an emotionally compelling story. And something that connects with them viscerally. Instead of beating people over the head with these these intellectual arguments and data and graphs and all this thing. All these things that libertarians, I think, make a mistake by fixating on.

Brian Nichols  7:49  
The rush to Ayan ran rabbit hole, I guess, is real. Nuts. Folks ever thought that, Your Honor on a podcast. But I guess that kind of goes to Matt, it speaks to what works right when we're reaching out to folks. And we've talked about this many a time, both you on my show me on your show. And that is the idea of storytelling of using what we know in the world of sales and marketing works in business and bringing it to the world of politics. And the same thing is true there trying to put yourself in your customers shoes, meet them where they're at on the issues they care about, and not trying to force feed your ideas, your beliefs down their throat, but rather trying to understand where are they what's their problems? And how can we best help fix it? Which goes to my next question. And that is, and I kind of have an idea of where your head's at. But I want to hear even a little bit more in detail. Right now. We're in 2023, as we're recording today, and there's a lot of things in our world that definitely are not going in a pro Liberty direction. So what would you say are some of the main issues we as libertarians, or just folks in the greater liberty movement should be spending our time focusing on?

Matt Kibbe  8:54  
So I think, I mean, I mentioned earlier how angry I was, and I'm sure we've talked about this on the last time we were together, the the human destruction and collateral damage caused by by lock downs and a very practical level, not not just a philosophical level where we're government decided who was essential and non essential, which is, is morally repugnant, but just on a practical level people at the at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, people at the margins of society were destroyed by that. And I could go on and on for like, five hours about about how angry that makes me. But I think the the opportunity is to help people come up with a with a set of practical tools that they can use to lift themselves out of that, you know, maybe there maybe there maybe they've been really damaged by by all of this particularly yet a lot of young people who were screwed out of their high school and college education so struggling with that, and I think there's there's kind of a self helpy kind of perspective that lives gives you that that responsibility when you look in the mirror, that if you want to fix your life, you got to do it before yourself, nobody else gives a damn, if you don't care about yourself, no one's going to care about you for you, you're not going to get that dignity, as AOC likes to suggest from a government program, or a handout or anything else, it's the struggle to accomplish something and achieve something. And, and that's not like, that's not like a conservative thing, or a liberal thing. That's just a people thing. That's what makes people tick. And I think we should make that a beautiful thing work shouldn't be a dirty word work should be this beautiful thing that that you, you struggle and you you accomplish something and you feel good about it. So I think that that whole, that whole genre of helping people fix themselves even in an unfree world, we need to we need to balance these things. Because you and I, we fight for freedom all the time. And we see all of these horrible things happening. The economy is being destroyed by government policies. And we could go on and on about the horrible things, but but people still have to live their lives. And we need to find that balance.

Brian Nichols  11:12  
So you touched on it a little bit. There's a lot of criticisms we hear. And it's a lot of misconceptions, I would say. So part of what we talk about in the sales world is not necessarily overcoming objections, but rather addressing concerns. So what would you say are some of the top misconceptions or concerns that folks outside of liberty movement bring to the table when we say, well, here's this brand new idea you maybe had never heard about called libertarianism or this new idea, just not hurting people not taking their stuff. Great book, by the way, what are some of those misconceptions that you hear? And and what are some of the best ways we can address them?

Matt Kibbe  11:48  
I think that the biggest caricature of libertarians and and certainly iron Rand gets this and maybe she stepped into leaned into it a little bit, is that libertarianism is all about caring about yourself. And I don't think that's true. But I also think that if you don't care about yourself, you're not going to be any damn used to anybody else. I think the basis of community is individuals. And the basis of mutual respect is again, respecting yourself enough to to work with somebody else and accomplish something so much bigger than yourself. So I, I tend to lean on the community side of things and the beautiful things that we could do together through voluntary cooperation. Because I think we have the Rage Against the Machine. Am I being detained thing? Now? I think we got that one. But we haven't yet convinced people, that that these these free individuals that are responsible, and striving to succeed for themselves, this is the build these are the building blocks that build for a better society for for everybody.

Brian Nichols  12:55  
After the past three years, right, we just saw and you touched on it, just the the overreach, the tyranny, the being labeled essential versus non essential, which I still can't believe happened. It seems that as much as we fight, and we tell stories, and we try to bring more people on board that despite all that there's still so many folks out there, Matt, who they're just they're willing to do what they're told, and I guess as a libertarian, that's so concerning, but also so frustrating for me, because we do preach the ideas of self reliance of as you mentioned, trying to better yourself. But I guess for those people out there, who they do look to be told what to do. Do you think that they're a lost cause? Or do you think that there's an opportunity for us to speak to them, we just haven't figured out the right, the right cadence, whatever it may be, to enter into their world?

Matt Kibbe  13:54  
Aye. Aye. Aye. I believe that there's a little bit of libertarian in everybody. And I know that and I'm, by the way, I'm gonna debate Jeremy Kaufman on this point, at pork Fest this summer. And I think we're people are quite complicated. So there's a there's our rational side, there's our libertarian, let me live my own life. Let me think for myself, but then there's all of our fears and insecurities and emotions. And that's one big package. And so you could look at everybody, everybody's a little bit different on what what they emphasize. Maybe it is emotions that drive most people instead of instead of reason or economic logic. I think that's obviously true. But there's nothing wrong with that. That's just what how feelings. That's how humans tick. Right? So I think again, like if we're engaged in people on the debates about lockdowns, we need to not just argue that that the government has no more right to tell me what to do. We need to point out the point practical reasons why why prohibiting people from working is bad for their everything for their health, starting with their health, you can't actually lock down economies and, and expect people to have health care. And we, we can now see the collateral damage. It's very difficult to make those arguments when people are afraid. Yep. So I think part of part of what we need to do is point out the very nefarious motives of some of the government actors in this case and some of the mad science that they were engaged in. It's it really is. I think this entire episode can be explained by the first season of Stranger Things, you have this clandestine government agency, trying to stop a real or created enemy, the Soviet Union and in the process, they unleash hell on earth. I think that is literally what happened to us during COVID. And I just had, I'm thinking about this because I had Senator Rand Paul, on my podcast this morning. It hasn't been released yet. But we're talking about this this recent couple days ago, Fauci did this long interview in the New York Times. And what a What an arrogant fatally conceited guy that is. I don't I don't think he's set out to kill millions of people. But I think that's what he did. And I think we should hold them accountable.

Brian Nichols  16:29  
And let me ask you, Matt, to that Fauci questions specifically, because as easy as it is for us to see that and the implications of what he did. There are still so many people who they don't think we should question him at all that he was an expert, he was given the data and the information he had at the time. And Matt, he was just trying to do what he thought was best to help protect people. But the science changes, man, what what can we do to those who say what can we do? What can we though rather say to those folks to help, at least maybe help them see the light? Or are they a lost? Cause?

Matt Kibbe  17:07  
I don't think they're a lost cause. I think I think we in this this is complex, even for me personally, I think we be we need to be open and empathetic to people who are willing to say, You know what, I was wrong. And you know, a lot of friendships have been damaged. At the personal level. I've I personally have lost friends, even though I really tried not. It's hard for me to not engage people because they see what I do for a living so they know where I'm coming from. But But I think, you know, it's hard for anyone. It's hard for anyone to say, Wow, I really got that wrong, particularly when the consequences of getting it wrong, have a human cost to it. But But I think honest people who were wrong, I think we should embrace them and say, I appreciate your honesty. I'm not always right either. And, and what we have to agree on, is not that we screwed that one up, but let's never ever, ever do this again. And that's the only reason I'm still harping on it. Obviously, the damage is done. But if you look at the again, this Fauci article, he's both admitting his mistakes. But it's really a humble brag, because all of his mistakes were the fact that we didn't comply enough. And the solution is going to be to lock down earlier to fund more and more of this, this pandemic industrial complex, and to take all of these trial balloons that we did in 2020 2021 2022, and really ramp it up. And that that is it's unspeakably evil and we need to stop it.

Brian Nichols  18:49  
Matt, this episode's been a lot of doom and gloom. But I think we can paint a pretty picture here at the end of the episode, but maybe you can give us a chance to see some, I don't know a white pills and light at the end of the tunnel. What's something you've seen in the past three years that gives you hope that we maybe have some hope of getting liberty or the sense of No, we can't let this happen again, going forward to the future.

Matt Kibbe  19:12  
I actually think in a strange way. This This, again, this is very much tied to pit den pandemic but but this censorship industrial complex coming from Homeland Security and the government security state, where they were literally sorting through a tweets to decide whether or not we're allowed to say something. I think that that is a wild and clumsy overreaction to the fact that there's a there's a revolution going on and and we talk a lot about Joe Rogan. But if you look at the other comedians who have been willing to speak truth to power and have been uncatchable in this whole thing you know, Dave Chappelle is an obvious example of that. But but so is Bill Maher, my old nemesis when I used to go on his show he's, he sounds More and more like like you and I would on a lot of this stuff because he thinks the the, the, the authoritarian left is going crazy. So I happen to believe that that free speech, and particularly comedians might just save the world. They can't stop us. It's like whack a mole, they keep trying to stop us. They keep trying to censor our speech, but you really can't stop people when they have that freedom. So I would be wildly optimistic about that. And in a strange way, the the wildly unAmerican, things that they were doing to try to try to stifle us tells me that we should just double down on that. And then

Brian Nichols  20:40  
I say some glimmer of hope to and how about this, we'll go towards our final thoughts here. One thing you touched on when you look at the force that they tried to implement to get us to vaccinate, right? I forget the number of folks who got their first dose of the vaccine and then the second dose, but you go to the boosters, and it drops off precipitously. And that tells me that at that point, there must have been enough people who said, Yeah, this isn't what they sold it to be. And actually now I'm starting to question a lot of this nonsense, that it gives me hope that there are people out there who are waking up. And you mentioned some comedians man as we go behind the paywall. I'm sure folks had their ears tingly because maybe a comedian can save the Libertarian Party in 2024. And one Dave Smith, I'm going to get your thoughts there. But again, folks, if you want to hear Matt's answer, you're going to have to go ahead and subscribe to our Patreon dollar 99 a month. We'll include that link in the show notes. But Matt, that's my final thoughts. What do you have for us on your end? I know you'd mentioned something beforehand about comedy being murderer talking more about that.

Matt Kibbe  21:40  
Yeah. So we this, pursuing this this line of reasoning that comedy might in fact, be the best way to open people's minds and to embrace free speech. Even uncomfortable speech. We've, we've partnered with my old friend, Lou Perez, the the libertarian comedian, although I shouldn't say that he's just a comedian. And, and he is producing a new series with us called comedy is murder. And the point is to say things that we're not allowed to say the point is to use all the words, even if some people say that words are violent. And I think that the only way to solve problems, the only way to bring people together, the only way to work through these very difficult times that we've been through is to have robust, open, honest conversation about it. And and Lou does it with and it's just brutally hysterical. And we've released the first in that episode, check it out, comedy is murder. It's funny as hell. And you might even learn something, but the point is to be funny.

Brian Nichols  22:46  
Well, folks, that's a nice preview, by the way, because next week, we're going to have Lou Perez here on the show, as well. So I'll be asking him a little bit more in detail. But with that being said, Matt, thank you so much for hopping on the show here on the main show. And uh, for the folks who are listening and they're saying this Matt, Katie guy, he sounds pretty darn interesting. I want to go ahead and learn more, where can they go ahead and follow you but also subscribe to your podcast?

Matt Kibbe  23:09  
Yeah, check out Kibby on liberty, you can either subscribe to blaze TV or you can watch it on free the people's YouTube channel with no paywall. Check out free the people.org and follow me particularly on Twitter, if you like my spicy but hopefully thoughtful takes on things.

Brian Nichols  23:27  
All right, folks. Well, if you've enjoyed today's episode, well do me a favor, go ahead and give it a share when you do tag yours truly at be Nichols liberty. And by the way, we are over on YouTube, we are on rumble We are also on sovereign. And by the way, I mentioned the Patreon where you can go ahead and find the entire episode, including the the amount, we're going to go ahead and record here as we wrap things up where I'm going to ask Matt, you know, hey 2024 Dave Smith, other libertarian, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, you want to hear his answer? Make sure you go ahead and become a supporting listener or you can get a sovereign exclusive World Air the episode in its entirety. Over on sovereign they are doing great work helping content creators like yours truly have a voice and make sure we are not going to be censored by the YouTube overlords, which I say very nicely right now, because of course, they have not yet gone ahead and mute our channel. But with that being said, Please go ahead, make sure you support us over on those different mediums. So we always have a means to go ahead and reach back out to you folks. But other than that, yes, this has been a very fun conversation. And folks, if you would do me a favor, please reach out to Matt net loves to hear from our audience here The Brian Nichols Show. So if you go ahead, subscribe to his awesome channel Kibby on liberty, just make sure you tell him the Brian Sencha but with that being said, thank you for joining us. Brian Nichols signing off. You're on The Brian Nichols Show for the one and only Matt Kenny. We'll see you next time.