Charlie Robinson (00:01.354)
Welcome to Macroaggressions. I'm your host Charlie Robinson. If you're watching us on rumble band video vigilante TV now YouTube or You're listening wherever podcasts are served. Thanks a million. We appreciate your support We know that it's you know, there's a lot going on you have a million different options out there But thank you for checking out this show if you want to connect with me macroaggressions.io is the website You can go there and find out everything that's going on with the show with the podcast with activist post and natural blaze and all that good stuff

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Charlie Robinson (02:28.046)
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I will report back to you when I become a super soldier, but I'm confident in my, I think I'm on the right trajectory here. So go to chemicalfreebody.com forward slash macro and check it out for yourself. All right. It's my great pleasure to welcome back to the show my friend who I've met in real life. He's a real person, ladies and gentlemen, Anthony Samoroff. Good to see you again. My friend, how are you? You're not AI.

Antony Sammeroff (03:20.911)
I'm great, it's good to be back with the fin- I'm not AI. Although sometimes I get really frustrated when it asks me to prove that I'm a human. I'm like, Ca- Pot calling kettle. You're asking me to prove that I'm a human? I'm sure I'm not the first person to make this joke. Anyway, if anyone here is a human, it's me. And I know that because-

Charlie Robinson (03:36.398)
The irony.

What have been up to man? Good to see you again. How are you? You're always You're always you're always traveling all over the place every time I catch you you're you're on your way from one place to another So how are you? How have you been? How's work? How's business?

Antony Sammeroff (03:54.513)
Well, yeah, it's been really good. mean, I had a bit, I'm doing a little bit less traveling because my main job used to be being a counselor and coach for people in the freedom community, beyourselfandloveit.com. And I still do that a little bit, but a couple of years ago, I started getting repetitive strain injury in my wrist so bad. I was scared to pick up my phone and I was just trying to finish this book.

Big Pharma, I guess it quacks like a duck, which we talked about Big Pharma last time. And I was just trying to ignore it. And then when I went to one of these conferences that you and I meet at, I a body worker there and she was able to fix it. by the way, I've gone like, I've spent over, like I was basically a self help junkie. I've spent over six months on yoga retreats. I've been in fasting retreats. You name it, I've done it.

I've to physios, chiropractors, craniosacral therapists, time assuace, rolfing, osteopathy. Results were minimal. I was still getting worse, not better. So when I found someone that was actually able to help me, I was like, I need to learn this. So that's what I've been doing. And I have traveled a bit to go to conferences and Liberty events and do body work at those. And yeah, I took a little bit of a break from, I've still been counseling and coaching, but just a little bit.

and then, which means I'm less mobile, because my old job was like a mobile job. But yeah, it's just kind of got to this, it just kind of got to the point recently where I was willing to take on more counseling and therapy clients because I need a change after 13 years. Do you know what I mean? Now I'm kind of back into it and enjoying it again. And not that I hated it or anything like that, it's just nice to train in something new and experience.

I'm sort of starting to get similar results, yeah I've been getting similar results to people, people who've had serious problems with their shoulder, gone to a whole bunch of experts just like I did, amazing increase in range of motion, getting out of pain, elbows, wrists, hips, yeah it's just so interesting. So I've just been retreated a bit like from public life just to study and

Antony Sammeroff (06:20.155)
get this new business up and running and now I'm kind of coming back into it. So I'm going to be doing more shows and stuff, going to more events and stuff like that. yeah, it's been an interesting transition. My whole life has basically been forced by my healing journey. It sounds so cheesy and stuff like that, but I had all these, that's how I wrote the book on Big Pharma because I had all these like gut issues and stuff like that. And they never knew anything about that when I was a kid. So I...

Charlie Robinson (06:41.262)
Hmm.

Antony Sammeroff (06:48.647)
So the doctor, when the doctor said they had nothing to do for me, I found answers in naturopathy. found answers to, so that was a thing. And then obviously I had a stiff body. So I went out to India trying to fix it and did yoga and stuff like that and learned all about that. And that definitely learned me a bunch of valuable things, but it didn't fix it and you know, all the stuff. that's how I became a counselor as well. When I was in my twenties, was, know, I was,

suffering from bouts of depression and anxiety and I got became a self-help junkie and learned about that and started running workshops and things like that during my undergrad. So when I finished my undergraduate studies, I was like, what am going to do? So I went to study to become a therapist. Everything has just been kind of stuff that I've healed within myself and then decided to do. Who knows how I became an economics geek, but maybe it's because I had authoritarian parents. So that led me to become a libertarian. One authoritarian parent. I know.

That's not exactly true, but you know get the basic gist.

Charlie Robinson (07:54.937)
That's funny. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you're, mean, it's funny. You look back on my life's journey and if I had written a business plan for what I'm doing now, it would have been so obsolete. It would have been, I would have thrown it in the trash. Sometimes you have to just kind of take your hands off the wheel and let the universe kind of unfold a path in front of you. And that's hard. That's been hard for me to do because I...

I'm so used to wanting to be in control of something, not overly like a control freak, but you know, I want to know where we're going and I want to know how we're going to get there and I want to know how it's all going to work. And that is arrogant. And that is just not going to work. the universe will humble you of course, as we know, you don't need to, you're trying to be too bossy here. You're trying to drive the car too much. Sometimes you got to get in the back seat and see where things go. And that's how the best things turn out. I'm glad you're

Antony Sammeroff (08:33.84)
Yeah.

Antony Sammeroff (08:38.147)
Mmm. Yeah, man.

Antony Sammeroff (08:47.484)
Right.

Charlie Robinson (08:54.318)
I mean, I'm sorry that you went through, it needed to be healed, but it's interesting that it gave you this path for a life journey towards healing yourself. And then in doing that, you can heal others as well, right?

Antony Sammeroff (08:59.015)
Mm-hmm.

Antony Sammeroff (09:03.804)
Yeah.

Antony Sammeroff (09:08.827)
Yeah, and because I've got the background in psychotherapy, I was able to contribute to the course that my teacher created, know, counseling skills for practitioners and a module called trauma and the body, which I, you know, I want to develop into my next book. it's like trauma and the body, it's so fucking topical. So I'm able to bring like my whole life of journey into this. Like, you know, everything I did came into focus, you know, when I was in India, I became a

I qualified as a breathwear constructor because I thought, as well, I'm in India. You know, I was able to teach some of the stuff I learned in the course and get involved in my teacher's organization because I really admire them. And yeah, it has been a path with heart. It's definitely had a lot of ups and downs and there's, you know, nail biting moments and there's been a lot of suffering involved, but I like how I am, you know, I've been shaped by life into a person that I admire.

If you came here to have some control and predictability, you definitely incarnated in the wrong planet in the wrong time sphere. You should have been born in like 1945 or something like that. You know, there was a period of relative stability and predictability after that. But now that's all out the window. mean, all bets are off after Covid. I mean, you know, there's this expression in economics called regime uncertainty.

And the idea was that if you didn't know what the regulations were going to be changed to at any time, people would be reluctant to invest in businesses and build the economy because they don't know. know, one day you build a factory, next time you find out that the regulations forbid this or that. And if the government changes, then they're going to change the regulations again and things like that. So talk about regime uncertainty, but it's not just for businesses. It's for regular people like you and me. How the hell are you going to

How the hell can you plan for the future when you don't know what the hell is gonna happen? Just think of all the small business owners that lost everything that they built their whole life because a bunch of medical maniacs managed to convince people that shutting down the whole economy was how gonna make them less likely to die or get an ill health. That's bizarre and the mind boggles when you think about it.

Charlie Robinson (11:30.403)
Yeah, we went through COVID and they reimagined society and they reimagined economics, like fully. And the idea that, know, close the small and medium sized businesses, let the big ones stay open. Here's free money for COVID. Can't go to work, sit on your couch, Netflix and chill, get into that sort of rhythm for a couple of weeks. Next thing you know, you're kind of addicted to that, never want to go back to work.

Antony Sammeroff (11:37.319)
Mm-hmm.

Antony Sammeroff (11:58.449)
Mm-hmm.

Charlie Robinson (11:59.503)
There's so much change going on. mean, I think the only thing that is constant these days is that everything is changing. And I mistakenly thought, though that's not a, I wasn't coming from too weird of a place, but I mistakenly thought that Trump would be better. Well, Trump is probably better for business than the others. But I mistakenly thought that he was going to be, I know he's an insane person.

but I thought he was going to maybe have a sane voice when it came to business, because that's where he comes out of, right? He was going to change some regulations and straighten things out. And what I have noticed is that he makes decisions and then he makes another decision a couple of weeks later that counters the one that he made, and he makes announcements about both. And you can't really tell what he's doing. I thought this was going to be a great environment for businesses because Trump is there, Biden's out.

There's going to be a little bit of sanity, a little bit of certainty, and that you could then plan your company the next five years for what you're going to do. You know, we're going to build it, we're going to expand, we're going to do this. Trump gets in there and it feels even more disjointed and crazy and uncertain than it was with Biden. With the tariffs that come and go and they're subjective and maybe, yeah, we have tariffs on China, but we'll remove it for this product or that product or this guy or that company or what.

You just go, the whole thing is like totally chaotic and no better for a business environment. what do you, let's put your economist hat on for a second here. And like, what do you make of what we've seen over the last year with Trump in here?

Antony Sammeroff (13:36.305)
Mm-hmm.

Antony Sammeroff (13:47.505)
Well, I mean, I've always been skeptical about Trump. I feel like Trump performed the same function for the right as Obama performed for the left. Up until about 2008, there was a massive anti-war movement. There was Against the Patriot Act on the left. And basically, when we were kids, the left was like, fuck the war.

government get out of my business and fuck the rich capitalist bastards, okay? We might not have agreed with their analysis on capitalism, but it is true that a lot of people are very, very, very rich because they exploit people, they just happen to use the state to do it and they lobby the state to get lots of preferential regulations. The left used to be very good on those issues and obviously there's been a generational change where the only things

You know, the wars are not top of their mind, the surveillance state and the government interfering with your business is definitely not on their mind and they still want to fuck the rich capitalist bastards but their economic analysis is even worse than it was back then. So whatever they were good for, they become less good for and now they care about identity politics and regulating more and whatever and everything that was bad about them has got worse.

But when Obama came, he took the radical left that were kind of outside of the, that were against the war and stuff like that. Or just people who were disillusioned of the political system in general, because they thought both parties were the same and they brought them back into the fold. And then eight years later, Trump did the same thing. I know, libertarianism is not a well-known word in the Scotland, but when I became a libertarian, no one had heard of it. Between about 2012 and

2015 there was a massive increase in the membership of the Scottish Libertarian Party and then Trump gets along and then well people were turning up everyone gets sucked back or he's gonna do it and It's kind of like if the state's not gonna get you with the left wing will get you with the right wing Just like a boxer so it was a sorcery now Did I hope when Trump got back in a second time and he freed Ross Ulbricht and all that did I hope that I was wrong? Of course I did

Antony Sammeroff (16:09.251)
I still hope I'm wrong. I still hope that the Q people are right and you know, there's he's just playing the long game because he has to and he's doing what he can in the time that he has and I hear that he's done some good things in terms of making it easier to go after pedophile rings and so we say, I don't know what's happening with the Epstein files but as after the first few months it's been disappointment after disappointment. Since I wrote the book Big Pharma Guess It Quacks Like a Duck

I should comment on the fact that he just goes and makes a deal with Pfizer, who by the way are convicted felons and responsible for what was the biggest criminal fine in all of American history for fraud. So he's behaving like a mafia don going, all right, we're going to give you guys a monopoly on the drug market. Sets two bad precedents. One is it says that the government should choose who wins and loses in the

in the pharmaceutical industry and they've got a right to choose whether it's Eli Lilly or Moderna or who the hell knows. No, they're going to give it to Pfizer, right? Why should they decide? Secondly, it plays into the illusion that the only problem with drug prices and with drugs and with sorry, with healthcare in the USA is that drugs are too expensive. Or the problem is not that people are taking too many drugs.

It's not that they're taking drugs instead of changing their lifestyle. It's not that the symptom set the whole system is incentivized to get you as sick as possible for as long as possible without killing you so they can milk you like a cow for as long as they can. No, it's just that drugs are too expensive. And what we need to do is knock down drug prices so that people can get more of them cheaper. Yeah, that's going to fix it. So that's so I hope Trump's paying the long game. Obviously, he's responsible for Operation Warp Speed.

Obviously he brought in lockdowns. He didn't come out and say look if we close down the economy we're going to reduce production and everything in the shops is going to go up in a few years which as you know if you live in America even here Go out to the grocery shops and compare it to 2019 2020 I know I went to America in October of 2020 to stay with my girlfriend there. I lived there and Even then I was shocked at how much more expensive groceries are

Antony Sammeroff (18:27.777)
the USA than they were in Scotland, now it's like absolutely obscene. This is not a cost of living crisis as they like to call it in the UK, it's a cost of lockdown crisis and until everyone starts saying the reason why we've got inflation is because of lockdowns, you know, we're just not winning the fight, know, much in the same way as when they were bringing in cuts in 2008 and at least in the UK, austerity they called it

people stupidly didn't say well we're know we're fighting a war right now so if you can't you can't afford these things then you definitely can't afford the foreign wars so that's where we're up to in economics i hope i'm wrong i really really really really really would love to be wrong but as far as i can see the main effects of trump has been to bring a bunch of people who were disillusioned of the political system back into the system getting them spending their time and energy

even libertarian podcasters like Dave Smith spend hours and hours and hours shitloads of shows defending Trump against media lies. I'm not saying that the media wasn't lying, but what does that lead to? He's bringing the mainstream libertarian people back into the political process so people focus on politics instead of doing what they can to change the world, becoming successful, using their influence. Okay, so that's one of the things that Trump did. The other thing he did

is drive the left absolutely rabid. They were bad enough in 2007, right? But what happened to them under Trump is what led to Biden being able to be so left-wing. so has Trump been a net positive to the Liberty movement? You know, it doesn't look like it, but then we've got not got a counterfactual, you know, maybe if the commies had got in.

Maybe if, maybe, do you know what? Maybe if Hillary Clinton had got in, we'd be in war with China, we would have gone to war with China or something like that. You know, who the hell, maybe she would have let so many immigrants into the country that America would be like South Africa, where if you get killed in your house by a immigrant, or sorry, if you get killed in your house and you're white, if you kill the person who broke into your house, you're going to get prosecuted rather than the criminal. So yeah, maybe it would have been a lot worse.

Charlie Robinson (20:32.376)
For sure.

Charlie Robinson (20:55.138)
Yeah, it could have been a lot worse. I would have thought that the real estate guy would be good for real estate, but I think the whole economy, think we've got problems. He comes out of New York City. New York City with the election of Mondami, he's talking about rent controls, price fixing, which is crazy. Rent controls are not new.

Antony Sammeroff (21:06.215)
Mm-hmm.

Antony Sammeroff (21:14.033)
Mm-hmm.

Antony Sammeroff (21:17.883)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Charlie Robinson (21:21.826)
This has been going on. depends on where you live. Santa Monica, California has had rent controls for forever. And I know that in some parts of Manhattan, there's rent controls as well. is, this is going to be, this, this is a, it's always bad when the government gets involved and puts their, their, their thumb on the scale. But when you start talking about price controls, things like that, this is a real problem. Can we talk a little bit about like rent control, section eight housing?

Antony Sammeroff (21:21.872)
Right.

Antony Sammeroff (21:35.015)
Yeah, it's a disaster.

Antony Sammeroff (21:39.975)
Mm-hmm.

Charlie Robinson (21:51.267)
This is something that I saw firsthand. I saw the destructive nature of Section 8 housing with my own eyeballs in 2006. I was selling a new home community in North Las Vegas and the community that I was selling at was next door to another community that we had just finished building and selling out. And because of the timing of that,

Antony Sammeroff (21:51.269)
Yes.

Antony Sammeroff (21:56.988)
Right.

Charlie Robinson (22:17.698)
The people who were buying during that time in that other community that was right down the street were almost all investors. They were just buying everything they could get their hands on. With the understanding that once the house is built, this is new construction, they're going to take possession of it and they're gonna put a renter in there. And they're not only gonna put a renter in there, if you wanna live in North Las Vegas, you are going to be of a certain demographic, okay? And they're gonna stick a renter in there with section eight. And they did that they all had the same idea and they all did the same thing. And that neighborhood,

Antony Sammeroff (22:27.077)
Right, right.

Charlie Robinson (22:47.074)
that I had to drive by just to get to mine, same builder, same floor plans, same everything, just different timing. That neighborhood was inundated with crime, car break-ins, thefts, beatings, all kinds of stuff that never happened anywhere else. It just happened there. As soon as you put a group of people in there that get 70 % of the rent paid by the state,

Antony Sammeroff (22:59.815)
worth.

Charlie Robinson (23:11.522)
you lose control of the whole thing. So let's talk a little bit about section eight, UBI, rent control, all this stuff when the government gets involved, like what a catastrophe this is.

Antony Sammeroff (23:14.106)
Absolutely.

Antony Sammeroff (23:18.906)
Excellent.

Yeah, so a few years ago before I wrote the Pharma book, I wrote this book, Universal Basic Income for it and Against. outlines the arguments in favour of UBI and debunks them. But the main thrust of the book was to tell people, look, we don't need a UBI. If you implement libertarian policies, life will become so cheap. basically I said, don't solve a problem that was caused by government with more government.

Right? And one section of the book, I was the first libertarian to really say, look, we should be talking about this. Thankfully, which is that house prices are through the roof because of government. And luckily, no, I'm glad that since then, people a lot more famous than me have taken it on as their crusade as well. So.

But at the time I was like, why aren't libertarians talking about this? For most of the 20th century, buying a house would cost about three to four times median income. Now it's something like in America, now it's something like 11 times, right? But what I was screaming from the rooftops is, if a house cost a third of what it does now, if your rent cost a third of what it does now,

everyone would be rich, it would be cheaper to look after homeless people, it would be cheaper to look after people who are underemployed if the price of housing was lower than it was. Government is strangling housing supply. One of the things and one of the responses to that is, well we need rent controls because the rents are through the roof but this is downstream, why don't you look at what is causing the problem? Rent controls, the main

Antony Sammeroff (25:14.831)
Rent controls have so many negative consequences. One is people who want to move, old people who want to move to a smaller home can't do it because they lose their protected homes, which means a lot of those houses that are rent controlled are under occupied, right? This basic economics should be running a big red light here. Why is the cost of pricing so high? Don't respond to it with right rent. That's like saying,

Dude, you're fat, okay, what's the doctor gonna do? Put you on a Zempik. Why don't they sort out your diet first, and if you're still fat, then maybe we can look at a pharmaceutical option, right? But the problem isn't that you've got a Zempik deficiency, it's that you're eating four bags of Doritos a day, three sodas, and you never walk around the block, you fat fuck, right? So like, what I've always said is that...

as an economist, and we saw this with COVID, right? There was no cost benefit analysis. They didn't go, well, if we do lockdowns, this many more people might die. But on the other hand, more people might die of alcohol, they might die of suicide, they might not get around their friends. So we need to do a cost benefit analysis. There was none of that. But you need to look at what is causing the problem. In any industry, I can tell you, right,

If tomorrow they decided pogo sticks were worth 100, 10 times, three times what they were 40 years ago, tons of factories would open up and start making pogo sticks. So here's a big hint. If the price of housing is going through the roof, there is a supply problem, right? So when you look at, so obviously the one is restrictions on height, even in Manhattan.

The trick is they only let one big skyscraper be built every so often. So whatever building company gets the right to build that skyscraper, they're going to make F tons of money. And so they're in bed with the regulator. Regulators, even outside of the city, the zoning laws in many places in the country only allow people to build single family homes. You're not allowed to build apartment blocks. You're not allowed to build studio apartments.

Antony Sammeroff (27:36.679)
Not only that, but there'll be restrictions saying you need a huge amount of land for yards beside every house. Right? So people who want cheaper houses and say, look, why don't we just buy this pot of land that's got a house in, split it in half and build another house in the other lawn and sell it to two people? No, sorry, you're not allowed to do that. The government won't let you. And another problem is

They don't mix commercial and residential zoning together. So if you're in one of these areas, everyone needs to drive out to Walmart or something like that. They used to just have shops locally beside the houses that you could walk to. And that's where young people would meet each other. You know, you'd have a local theater or something like that. None of this exists anymore because of zoning laws. Government is strangling the building of houses. And by doing that, it's making everyone poor.

Charlie Robinson (28:28.44)
Yeah.

Antony Sammeroff (28:35.935)
I firmly believe most of what we see is not about them being rich. It's about all of us not being rich. Because if working class people achieve a middle class, sorry, we can come back to this point. It looks like you want to come in.

Charlie Robinson (28:54.478)
No, no, that no, I'm just kind of nodding in agreement. So keep going with it with it because yeah.

Antony Sammeroff (28:59.939)
Right, if middle class, sorry, if working class people, I don't like that term, but if people on low incomes achieved a middle class standard of living, they do exactly what middle class people do. They take their kids out of public schools and put them into better private schools, which means you wouldn't need the state to fund schools. Secondly, they'd be...

America's a funny one with healthcare, but basically they'd be able to provide their own healthcare, therefore they wouldn't think that the government's necessary to provide healthcare. 50 % of healthcare spending in the USA is state spending. Don't forget that, you guys spend as much on healthcare as we do, except for we get free at the point of entry healthcare for it. So then there wouldn't be poor people to go into the military.

then because people weren't poor, there'd be much less crime, so you wouldn't need as much policing. People becoming affluent in general is the death of the state. Everything the state does is justified on the grounds of, how will poor people get housing? How will poor people get healthcare? How will poor people get education? So if they can pay for those things themselves, you do not need the government.

And that's why I believe there's been a concerted effort to use policy to drive up the price of goods and services, including housing, print money like there's no tomorrow, shut down the production for a few years with COVID so that the price goes up in the shops. Don't let you import

goods cheaply from countries with developing economies so that everything's more expensive in the store because it's patriotic to buy American never mind that then you need to pay much more money for everything so you're poorer everything the state does makes people less wealthy so if it wasn't on purpose you'd think that sometime just accidentally maybe they'd do something that makes people richer not more poor

Charlie Robinson (31:12.94)
I'm reminded of working in Las Vegas real estate for a big builder. And there was a bidding process for this piece of land. was like 1900 acres. And in Nevada, the vacant land is controlled by the Bureau of Land Management. It's controlled at the federal level. In Arizona and places like that, it's controlled at the state level. So in Arizona, if you're a developer, you want to go build something, you petition the state. say, I want to buy that piece of land. They sell it to you or something like that.

in Nevada, if you say, want to buy that piece of land, they said, well, we're going to put it up for auction once a year for the BLM Bureau of Land Management auction. And then you can come bid on it. And so what was happening there was that they would get these consortiums of like builders. it wouldn't just be, it's so much that not one builder couldn't buy, you know, $450 million piece of land. So it's like one builder couldn't, couldn't do it. And I watched this because the piece of land was adjacent to where we were building when I was working for Dell web.

And I watched this and we were in on the bidding in a separate group. And I remember the president of our company said, no, it's too rich for my blood. And they fired her for passing on the land. They fired her for saying, no, I don't want to buy that land. And I was like, this is the smartest move she ever made. I can't believe they fired her for it. The other group.

wound up buying that land at $455 million. It didn't pencil out. And the guy who pulled the trigger on it wound up jumping off a building and killing himself in the aftermath of that. That was my experience with, she did much better than he did. Yeah, she also went on to become the CEO of another builder because she actually knew what she was doing. And I watched this. watched the state, I watched the local government,

Antony Sammeroff (32:48.165)
Yeah, she did better than he did.

Charlie Robinson (33:04.096)
state government, guess, in Nevada, which is insanely corrupt to begin with, just Nevada is insane. When you get government and real estate developers colluding together, boy, man, I saw nothing but problems with that. Now, again, this was Las Vegas, real estate, and I was there for 10 years. I worked for several new home builders and a couple of...

private developers and they all think the same way. Like what is your take on the role of the state and the developers in working together? I mean, it feels like massive collusion on my part, a completely rigged game just to top to bottom. And the reason why prices are so astronomically high, it's just they've rigged it. So what's your thoughts on that stuff?

Antony Sammeroff (33:46.523)
Yeah.

Antony Sammeroff (33:57.073)
Yeah, so at least I can speak for the UK. There's only a couple of companies that are allowed to build. And even then, it's very, very difficult for them. And they've got all these restrictions. They call these bits around the city's green belts. And they make it sound like this is very, it's green belt. It must be good land. It's not. It's trash. It's not very useful for agriculture. It's not very good for environment. But they won't let people build houses on them. And then.

I guess it's good for the couple of winners and at the end of the day most regularly, as the old saying goes, when buying and selling is regulated, the first people to be bought and sold are the regulators. And like in all industry, there's a collusion of interests. Now, one thing is usually there's more homeowners than people looking to buy a home. So the homeowners don't want their house prices to go down.

So there's a massive incentive for the government just by attorney of the majority to not allow house prices to go down. And that did happen to the government of John Major, which followed Margaret Thatcher in Scotland. When house prices went down during then, the Conservative Party became unelectable for a long time. So there is that element of people, but I would argue even if

see if you just rip the bandaid off and got rid of all the worst house regulations tomorrow and within the next year house prices went down by I think I think they could probably go down by 70 percent but let's or more but let's just say they have um ah I'm going to lose my house price that's not actually what would happen the banks would have to come to the homeowners and say look obviously there's been a man because

Everyone can't default on their house at the same time. The banks are not going to be able to sell them. So they're coming back to say, obviously there's a big fucking disaster has happened. It's completely unpredictable. Everything's gone down by 50%. So we're going to need to like renegotiate with you and maybe you'll pay something less than we agreed. Maybe a bit more than you'd like.

Antony Sammeroff (36:14.439)
But the thing is, in the long term, everyone's going to be better off. Yeah, it would be like a ridiculous adjustment and something that no one would like, you know, anyone who's owning a house. The main people who'd lose is the consortiums that own shitloads of flats, shitloads of apartments. What's happened in the UK is, especially Scotland, they keep on passing regulations to make it difficult for landlords.

And I believe, yeah, and you know, you can't throw your tenant out even if they've taken a dump in your living room, you can't do this. So I believe if I put my conspiracy theory hat on, is they're trying to make owning a second home to rent so onerous that regular people like you and me can't have that as a retirement plan. I'm just going to own.

you know, one or two extra properties other than the one I live in and that will, and the rent from those will pay my retirement plan. What they're going to do is they're going to make the regulations so onerous that people like my parents who owned a flat sell it off because it's too expensive and time consuming and scary to comply with the regulations. And that will mean only corporations that own a legal department and own several properties and can spread the cost among

over five, six, seven, eight, a hundred, a thousand properties, that's much cheaper to do than to manage one. So I think that's the agenda, to get regular people to sell their buy to rent, their buy to let, and just make sure that it's just consortiums as you put it. That's what it's going to be like if we keep on going down this road, if people don't wake up to the fact that their greed, I don't like...

I landlords are exploiting people. Yeah, it's good that we regulate against them. You know, that they're leveraging that butthurt nature of humanity. Yeah, I don't like those landlords. They're using that against you. They're making you poor. They're using that as a pretext to overregulate. And it's been disastrous for society because, especially in America, because you can't, here you can walk around, you can walk to the shops.

Antony Sammeroff (38:37.201)
That's not happening in America. That means people meet less. There's no commercial activity in a residential area. So it's really, really bad. And then you've got all these places where there's extreme laws on the minimum amount of parking. You need enough parking to deal with Black Friday every single day of the year under the law. that means tons. It's easy to regulate. It's easy to make sure there's enough parking.

all you do is institute peak times and the more busy the time the more expensive it is to park and then only people who need to park, park in peak time and everyone else comes to the shops when it's dead. You don't need the government to tell Walmart how many parking spaces they need it's a waste of land.

Charlie Robinson (39:28.462)
Yeah, there's so many things that could be changed, like low-hanging fruit that's just government decisions. Government decisions on zoning has always been, to me, just completely ramshackled, haphazard. They get together with... I had a buddy in Vegas, speaking of zoning, speaking of fraud, I had a buddy who was making a shitload of money in land.

buying, flipping, this is 2003, 2004, 2005 in Vegas. He finally got smart, smart meaning criminal, and realized that the best investment he could make was getting one of these city council ladies. So he started buttering up one of the city council, one of the planning commission ladies and started taking her to church with him. And he would do cocaine on Friday nights and go to church on Sundays. You know what I mean? One of these real hypocritical type of guys.

and take her to church and sweet talk her. Next thing you know, he kind of got her in his pocket and she would be in charge of zoning decisions for land, future land that he may or may not buy. So what he would do is he would find land that was undervalued due to poor zoning, undervalued zoning. was zoned, I don't know, zoned urban.

or zoned like rural and he wanted to zone it commercial. Change the zoning, triple the value on it. And he just got her to be the face who would change the zoning. And so he'd buy the land, give her money, she'd change the zoning, triple the value, and then he'd flip it to some dummy who was actually getting land that was now zoned, maybe even, to be honest, probably zoned more appropriately for what it should have been, but he was doing it in a criminal way, which, you know.

Antony Sammeroff (41:03.707)
Yeah, that's exactly it. Exactly. I'm so glad you said that.

Antony Sammeroff (41:21.723)
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, well...

Charlie Robinson (41:23.875)
That's that's that talk. So I was watching that. was going government shouldn't be involved in this. There shouldn't be a person. Yeah, it is a mafia. It's a fucking mafia.

Antony Sammeroff (41:29.553)
Yeah, it's a mafia.

Antony Sammeroff (41:35.013)
Yeah, because he's the beneficiary of the mafia. just means, so that just goes back to what I said, when buying it and selling is regulated, the first thing to be bought and sold is the regulator. Case in point. So there's a lot of those places, you know, there's places where there's two story buildings and all the bottom floors are shops and the top floors are completely unoccupied because...

that building is zoned as commercial so people can't turn the top floor into housing which is ridiculous. Small towns are drying up decaying, people are moving away from them but Trump's not come to the rescue and said do you know what it is it's the zoning laws in those small towns have made it impossible to adapt to contemporary conditions and those small towns just cannot compete with big box stores that have got

huge amounts of parking. So people are just not going there anymore. People just do not know how much of a psychological disaster government interfering in is. And its own laws are seen as relatively benign, but people just don't know how much more rich they would be if they didn't exist. Just like people don't know how much

richer they would be if we didn't have any tariffs and the whole world was free trade because we would get so many products and services cheaper even the ingredients of products that are manufactured in the USA would be cheaper if there's a tariff on China and you need to import steel for China to build something in the UK everyone who buys your product is now paying more money so

Unfortunately, people, while when you listen to economic reasoning, it's so compelling, it's so rational and logical. For some reason, people just have this crazy view that if you did away with zoning laws, people would just build ugly buildings everywhere and stuff like that. Well, maybe if you just do it in a tiny area and people are like moving in to get a quick buck by putting something up as cheaply as possible.

Antony Sammeroff (43:56.187)
But if they have to compete with everywhere else on the entire planet, why would people put up ugly buildings? Why wouldn't they put up buildings that people like? Because they're going to be competing with every other building that's allowed to go up now. So it's not that much more expensive to make a nice building, you might as well do it. And the way that they used to build, they built things to last. That's not necessarily the case anymore.

Charlie Robinson (44:26.967)
I, when, when I was working for this company, we were trying, we had this piece of land, $50 million, 10 acre piece of land directly in front of the Palms Hotel, right? Our 50 story building was going to go and block the Palms, the view that the Palms had. There was a, I, I seriously, at one point I was thinking to myself, the owner of our company, the guy who is trying to build the building never got built. I mean, I went all over the world.

lining up partnerships for it and it never wound up getting built. They couldn't get their money. Their money was coming from Lehman Brothers. They couldn't get their money in time. The whole thing was a catastrophe. But there was a point when we were doing this and the Palms was so furious that this building was going to go up that I honestly thought in a Vegas style massacre that they would murder the owner of our company.

the guy who was trying to build it. You know what I mean? That like, the city wasn't helped coming to the rescue to get this guy out of here. He was like a Florida guy who's come to Vegas. He wasn't paying off the right people. was making everybody mad. And I honestly thought for a minute there that they were gonna, that this guy was, I was gonna show up to work one day and the boss was gonna be like blown up in a car. I was thinking.

Antony Sammeroff (45:44.081)
Yeah, or they just bribe them to build it somewhere else. That's, you know, maybe a little bit less risky. That's right.

Charlie Robinson (45:51.824)
that yeah, and in the end, pressure, everything that kind of comes along with it. Yeah, I was of the opinion that like, if you have an idea for a project, you buy the land, you get the financing, you build it, and there you go.

But we were stuck, and I was at this project from the beginning. So I was there when they were dealing with zoning issues and cities. And it was like every week there was somebody from the city in our office having to have a meeting with the management about what we were doing and how we were doing this and the whole thing. And I'll tell you, the delays that were caused by that killed the project. We had two projects going. One project started construction, but it started late. If it had started when it was supposed to start, if it didn't get hung up on all the...

regulatory hell that makes everything take so long, the building would have been built in the proper time, it would have sold at the peak of the market, and the guy would have made a fortune. Instead, you have to factor in, you have to make a calculation if you're a builder, how long is this building gonna take to build, and then how much red tape time do I need in the before, during, and after process of this? We can't just get, mean, we would be, even if the money was the same.

Antony Sammeroff (47:03.121)
Yeah. Okay. Another- yeah.

Charlie Robinson (47:08.803)
We'd just be way more efficient if we didn't have to do all this stuff when the state gets involved.

Antony Sammeroff (47:10.225)
That's right.

Antony Sammeroff (47:15.239)
You've made a really good point there. The fact that it takes years to go through planning permission and build these things means that the companies that do that want to recoup their losses for that, which means everything's more expensive. You know, another point in this zoning law is people don't realize how much more expensive everything in the store is because of these laws. Do you know what I mean? If the price of renting a space to sell stuff is higher,

then more money is going to the owner of that place, which means that you need to charge more for every product in the store. People are just, especially America, right? Since the financial crisis of 2008, the American economy has doubled, but people's living standards haven't doubled because all of that extra money has been sucked up by the healthcare system, by the...

university system, college education, which just keeps on going up and up and up, by the increase in the cost of housing, by the increase in taxes, by the increase in the cost of government. while, now for someone like me, who when I was in school, if you were going on holiday to America, people are like, you're going to America. And we knew that

everything was going to be less expensive in America. So when you went there, some people did shopping and things like that in America to bring stuff back to the UK because they were going to get everything much cheaper. Well, maybe not much cheaper, but know, 20, 30 % cheaper. That's good. You were excited to go. People were like, now it's like America costs more than double a lot of places in the UK for accommodation, you know, for just groceries. Groceries are like double.

sometimes more than that. Even if you shop somewhere like Aldi, it's still pretty expensive. Even though your economy has doubled, the price of everything has doubled, but people's living standards haven't doubled. And they could have, if it hadn't been for so much state intervention into the economy. Things should be dirt cheap in America. And you know what? If you sort out your healthcare system and you sort out your higher education system,

Antony Sammeroff (49:40.199)
people and the housing issue, everyone will be rich in America easy. That's why they won't let you do it. Because it's the same with college. No one goes, oh well why don't we just open 10 more colleges in every state and then make them compete. And then the quality of the education will go down, sorry, the quality of the education will go up due to market competition and the cost of education will go down because of market competition. Then instead of asking the government to pay off your 100, 200 thousand dollars of student loans, you just go,

Who gives a shit? It's only $5,000 a year to go to university. I can pay that off. That's fine. And how much more expensive is everything in America? Because say someone like me, right, okay. I'm a therapist. I work online. I had someone come to me once for counseling that lived in New York. I'm almost embarrassed to say this because it makes it sound like I'm cheap. They told me after my first session with them,

That was worth more than all of the sessions I had with my therapist here in New York put together. His board certified in New York. And what I was charging was comparable to his copay. So not only was he paying what I charged for that session, his insurance company was paying almost the same amount on top of that. That motherfucker was getting paid twice as much as me to do a much less good job.

just apply that to every single profession in the US that requires board certification or a degree. That's why everything's so expensive in America, partly because of your higher education system. And as far as I know, I'm one of the only people, I've not heard anyone else point this out. I spoke to some of the candidates for the Libertarian Party about this stuff and they were very

grateful that I mentioned it because all the left talks about is poverty poverty poverty poverty poverty poverty. I mean I wish that libertarians would just talk about this stuff you know this these are real causes of poverty the government intervention into healthcare schooling housing etc you know that's that's why I wrote about in Universal Basic Income for and against

Antony Sammeroff (52:05.573)
I've obviously learned a lot about it since I wrote that book, but I stand by it. It was a really good book. So that's about, you know, it's...

Charlie Robinson (52:13.484)
It's tough. It's tough to have this conversation with the general public when the general public is economically illiterate. They don't know anything, you know, you have to start from the beginning. You have to start with the basic concepts of them. They say, I want this. Give me, give me, give me. And you're like, don't print more money and give me more money. It's like you don't understand economics like basic economics, supply, demand, inflation, money supply, money velocity, all this stuff. They just want, want, want.

Antony Sammeroff (52:22.577)
Right.

Antony Sammeroff (52:29.253)
Yeah.

Charlie Robinson (52:43.482)
But I think that if we understood the economic, if as a country, really as the world, if we understood how economics works and the things that you're talking about, all correct, very logical, very reasonable things, measurable things that you could do, it's almost like they don't want us to succeed, right? It's almost like they've rigged everything so that...

Antony Sammeroff (52:43.964)
Right.

Antony Sammeroff (52:56.187)
Yeah, absolutely.

Antony Sammeroff (53:05.553)
Yeah.

Charlie Robinson (53:10.0)
You're constantly, you can't get your foothold. can't get ahead, right?

Antony Sammeroff (53:16.121)
It's so difficult because the left and via the mainstream media has completely monopolized the conversation on poverty and what to deal with it. I know people at Libertarian Think Tanks in the UK who've written books on how to reduce poverty from a libertarian perspective that talk about how all of the charities, stuff like Oxfam, all they talk about is inequality and redistribution, right? Which is working downstream. That is a problem. That is not the problem.

That is a consequence of the problem. So for you and me, Charlie, and people at home, I'm open to ideas because that's why I wrote the Universal Basic Income book to give people an idea of how to tackle poverty in a libertarian way, to say, right, why don't you completely deregulate public transport so anyone can buy a minivan and act as a bus service, right?

That would be good for poor people. Actually, a lot of the time in the USA, you don't even pay for buses. If you don't have money, they just let you on. So I noticed that. It's just an example. what I'm, when I say I'm open to suggestions, what I mean is how do we talk about this? Because what I come against is people's skepticism. If someone says,

or house prices are too high, we need rent controls. And then you go, well, why don't you just build a lot more houses? Because obviously it's supply and demand. If you build shitloads of houses, then there'll be lots of houses and they'll be affordable. no, you can't do that because X, you can't do that because Y, but what about the environment? But what about this? Well, obviously it's better. It's better for the environment to build a skyscraper because just one water supply, just one electricity supply. You can have a store inside the skyscraper. People don't need to drive. Right, okay.

It doesn't really matter about that, it's just an example. You say, higher education's too high, we need the government to excuse student loan debt. Why don't you just build twice as many colleges? but the standard of education might not be that high and it needs to be regulated. Okay, well, compromise with me. Why don't we buy, build more colleges and we also like make sure that only fucking top tier qualified professors are allowed? Just work with me here.

Antony Sammeroff (55:32.227)
Why is it that people are so resistant to understanding that if something's expensive you need to free the market, supply will increase and the price will come down? I don't know why people are so against the idea of, goods are cheap in the shops, well why don't you open free trade for all South America so you can buy cheaper stuff from poor people? You're going to help those people in South America get rich instead of being poor.

and your groceries are going to be cheaper. no, we can't do that because why are people so opposed to the logic of freedom?

Charlie Robinson (56:12.559)
I think because it requires them to actually be present and actually have a thought and do something about it. It's easy to just, I don't think most people want their problems solved. I think they just want to complain about them. I think a lot of people out there who are complaining about all these things, they could educate themselves on it. They could figure out how to extricate themselves from a lot of the situations that they're in, but they won't.

Antony Sammeroff (56:17.776)
Isn't it?

Antony Sammeroff (56:26.896)
Okay.

Charlie Robinson (56:41.915)
Cause they're sitting around waiting for someone else to do it. They're waiting for the government to tell them, here's a handout. Here's this, here's more money. Here's more assistance. Here's Intergenerational dependency on welfare is a catastrophe. keeps you down on the reservation forever. And they can't see it because when you don't have anything, you just want stuff, right? And I understand that. But if you understood the mechanisms behind

Antony Sammeroff (56:49.447)
Whatever

Antony Sammeroff (56:56.443)
Right, absolutely.

Antony Sammeroff (57:06.417)
Right, exactly. Yeah, and.

Charlie Robinson (57:09.925)
Right? That would, if only you could understand the mechanism. My college, my university for the record, you want to know, take a wild guess how much my university, you don't even need to know where I went. Just how much is it this year? Take a guess.

Antony Sammeroff (57:12.623)
Yeah, I know.

Antony Sammeroff (57:23.576)
20 I don't know what it's like in the US 25 grand a year

Charlie Robinson (57:28.049)
$70,000 a year. $70,000 a year.

Antony Sammeroff (57:31.495)
crazy. But why does anyone go there? Why don't they just come to England where it's six, seven thousand pounds UK a year and get it for forty grand?

Charlie Robinson (57:40.369)
You could do that in California too, where I went to school. You could go to a public school. You could go to a state school that gives you in-state tuition and you can make it a lot cheaper. It's like, I don't know. There's, I don't know.

Antony Sammeroff (57:43.623)
Chris Good.

Antony Sammeroff (57:53.179)
I don't know why they don't do it. it's like that with American, it's like that with healthcare as well. Why don't you look, there needs to be an, right, it makes sense for insurance companies to just fly people out to Thailand, Mexico or Singapore or somewhere like that for lots of surgeries.

So the fact that they don't do that makes me think there's probably government regulations against it. Because why wouldn't they do that? It's like, OK, you can get that operation for 60 grand in the USA, or we can fly to Mexico, give you a holiday, get you treated at a top hospital for a quarter of that. Why wouldn't they do it? must be regulated against. And what I would say is, in defense of humanity, in defense of Americans and British people,

They were put through an 11 to 13 year mandatory education system where they didn't teach you anything practical, not even how to turn on a light bulb. Now, if they were still teaching people shop, if they taught people car maintenance, mechanic, how to do the basic electrics, how to do the plumbing in your own house, right? All of this stuff.

People would be so skillful that they would be more open to the free market because they'd go, well, you know, maybe my skills aren't worth $15 an hour, but I've learned tons of things in my life. I could probably get a job that I could learn something new that does get me 25 or 30 bucks an hour. But instead they just fill your head with information that you then forget.

and they don't teach you any skills so you don't come out and then they go the minimum wage needs to be $15 an hour wait a minute how come you fuckers had people for 11 to 13 years long enough to become a surgeon or a concert pianist and you didn't teach them one single skill that would get them $15 an hour you mean you wasted 13 years of their life like okay I'm

Antony Sammeroff (59:58.92)
I'm not surprised that people who are completely incompetent are not favourable to the free market. And I don't know why people are so resistant to thinking economically. It's obvious. Why is it that in many states in the USA you can't get a health insurance from a company that's not based on your state? Well, because then they'd have to compete with each other and insurance premiums would come down. It's so obvious that insurance would be cheaper if they

made it a free market health insurance and made them compete. No, no, no, no, we're not allowed to do that. And if you tell people, no, no, no, you mustn't deregulate insurance. You know, it's crazy what you guys, what we've got. I don't, but we just have to shout and rant at one another for now, because until a shift of consciousness comes and people are open to the kind of economic reasoning that we're saying, it's not going to change. However, one thing I will say is,

If things get really bad, people will just ignore all the regulations. You can't afford to pay me the $15 minimum wage. Okay, just fucking, just let's do it under the table. Just give me $10. Right? It's just people will just stop complying if it gets bad enough. I hope it doesn't have to, but that kind of gives me hope because it's mostly regulations why people are broke.

Charlie Robinson (01:01:21.595)
Well, I guess the good news is it's fixable. It's a fixable problem. I look at a lot of the issues that are happening to California. And as somebody who grew up in California and was always promised that we were gonna have the big one, the big earthquake that was gonna break off California into the ocean. we had plenty of earthquakes, but in the end, what destroyed California was democratic policies. It was government that destroyed it. wasn't...

It wasn't an earthquake. wasn't a comment. wasn't any of that stuff. It was bad decision-making by economically illiterate retards in positions of power who have never even come to a concept that maybe we should try things differently. Maybe we should look at this from, I mean, Austrian economics is what they think Hitler majored in. You know what I mean? Like they don't know what Austrian economics is. They don't understand how you can reimagine

Antony Sammeroff (01:02:08.92)
amazing.

Charlie Robinson (01:02:17.689)
society when you look at it from a libertarian or anarchist point of view. There's just, there's a lot of solutions out there, but I think really the problem is there are people, people don't, people in positions of power aren't looking for solutions. They like the system the way it is. They're in power because of the way the system is. To change it, that'd change everything.

Antony Sammeroff (01:02:24.977)
We've gone with the solutions.

Antony Sammeroff (01:02:33.255)
Yeah, and do you know what? They're in power because some people have, know, the people who are funding their campaigns are also the beneficiaries of the regulatory structure. you know, let's say if we did away with all farming subsidies, most Americans would be richer, all their American taxpayers would be richer. But the difference is they might be richer by a couple of hundred bucks a year.

Whereas the farmers, the farming consortiums, because it's mostly corporations like Monsanto who get all those subsidies, they've got hundreds of billions at stake. So they're going to lobby. They've got the money and the incentive to lobby to keep those farming subsidies, even though if you take into account all of the subsidies, they're making everyone less affluent.

And this is the problem with democracy, inherent in democracy, is the idea that a group of people can force other people to pay for stuff that benefits them. It's funny because Thomas Hobbes, the monarchist philosopher, believed that anarchy was the war of all against all. And maybe he was, he had half of it right because he was, he could see the

pitfalls of democracy is actually not anarchy that's the war of all against all, it's democracy because democracy means we, you and me vote and we get to loot the third podcaster, do you know what I mean? And that means that everyone's trying to extract as much as they can from the system as quickly as possible while paying in as little as possible and politicians cannot be real, they cannot be

long-termist. They can't say, right, this policy is going to hurt for five years, but see after that everyone's going to be better off because they're up for election in four years. So they're better off to lie. They can't say, sorry, we don't have enough money than that. They go, yeah, of course we've got money. This guy's a right-wing lunatic. He's saying, we don't have enough money because he hates the poor. He hates old people. He hates minorities. No, well, I'm now Mr. Popular. I'm going to get elected.

Antony Sammeroff (01:04:57.191)
But the guy says, look, this might look good in the short term, it might look good if we print lots of money and pay you to stay at home, but a few years from now, the price of everything's gonna be up in the store. no, cancel them. What are we gonna do? It's just the incentives that are, they're baked in to electoral politics, unfortunately.

Charlie Robinson (01:05:24.239)
Yeah, that's really what it comes down to is the incentive structure for a lot of this stuff. Why are we doing it the way we're doing it? In some cases, it's because there are people that you don't see that are making money because it's done this way. They retain their power, they retain their monopoly. You don't go in there and change all their zoning because it'll screw up their thing. They've got the money to pay the politicians to keep the zoning where it is and do all that stuff. It is a rigged game.

It is a rigged game and everybody needs to understand that. I'm not saying throw your hands up and say, you know, can't win. I'm just saying understand it's rigged. that these people don't want... Everything that you have suggested would make the world a better place. And yet you and I both know that it's tough to get those ideas through, right? Because they just make too much sense in a system that is incentivized to...

Antony Sammeroff (01:06:16.508)
Well,

Charlie Robinson (01:06:20.05)
to crush things.

Antony Sammeroff (01:06:21.393)
Right.

Well, there's a poverty industry and they profit from telling everyone that the only way to solve poverty is to take money from rich people and give it to poor people. They don't say, they don't explain to you why the 1 % became the 1%, which is by lobbying and controlling the political system. And those people would much rather you were focused on trying to raise taxes because they're very good at not paying taxes.

They just put things through as expenses in their corporation and the corporation doesn't tax. Corporation tax, that's another con. Corporations don't pay tax, consumers pay tax. If you tax corporations, then they need to pass that on to the consumer. Not only that, but look, if corporation tax is 45 % and I own a corporation, right, an iPad's $600. Well, actually, if I don't buy that iPad, I'm gonna have to pay 45%.

of that in tax anyway. So I might as well buy an iPad because to me it's only you know 55 % of the store price. That's why corporations spend ungodly amounts of money on stuff they don't need. When you go into the lobby there's a big golden fountain there and the banisters are made of gold. Why? Because they're getting it at 55 % off the list price because the corporation tax is at 45%. Now if you're an environmentalist and you hate wasteful spending

You must necessarily be against corporation tax because corporation tax encourages corporations to spend as much money as possible so that they don't get taxed on whatever's left over. But no, just like the, I hate those landlords profiting off tenants, people are the same. Yeah, tax those corporations. They're mobilizing your smallness of mind to...

Antony Sammeroff (01:08:21.327)
to get tacit consent for policies that make you less well off. It's so sad, Charlie. It's so sad when you think how rich we would have been if taxation had just, if government spending as a percentage of GDP had just stayed at the level it was when you or Ibert were born. know, it's so sad to think how much richer everyone would be. They wouldn't be clamouring for middle

minimum wage increases because the price of everything in the shops would be affordable. It's shocking, you know. Someone needs to just come in and just go, right, we need to start this again.

Charlie Robinson (01:09:01.136)
Yeah, everyone.

Charlie Robinson (01:09:06.338)
Reminds me of a, I think it was an interview I saw. Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, one of those guys, one of the Led Zeppelin guys, they're talking about why like in the 70s they're buying a Rolls Royce and driving it into a pool and everything like that. And they're like, why are you doing all that? And they're like, well, if we didn't spend the money, we were gonna get taxed on it. Like a fuckload. So we were buying shit.

Antony Sammeroff (01:09:28.081)
Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Charlie Robinson (01:09:29.402)
because the taxation was through the roof. So I'd buy a Rolls Royce and forget where I left it last night. know what I mean? Stuff like that. I mean, you wind up in these weird incentive structures where because of the tax format, you make purchases or acquisitions that you wouldn't normally make using logic and common sense, but you're doing it because the tax benefits are structured in a way that...

Antony Sammeroff (01:09:36.827)
Yeah.

Charlie Robinson (01:09:58.003)
that incentivize you to actually do things that are incompatible with what you would normally do. This was a big thing back like 20 years ago, especially where I was in Las Vegas in like 2005, 2006, the big Hummers were coming out. Everyone's like, everybody's got a Hummer, right? And they're driving that. And someone was like, why does everybody have a Hummer? And the reason people were buying Hummers wasn't because they loved them or they were great cars. Maybe they thought they were cool.

but they weighed a certain amount. Like they were over a hundred thousand pounds or something like that. I don't forget the exact number. And because it was over that, it qualified as a commercial vehicle and you could write off the price of it for businesses. So you'd see all of a sudden there was none of these cars and then all of a sudden they're everywhere. By the way, G wagons are like that too. If you see those Mercedes G wagons, you go, why would somebody have spent $180,000 on that fucking car? You go, because they're not, because it's a tax write off, right?

Antony Sammeroff (01:10:41.767)
That's true.

Antony Sammeroff (01:10:56.167)
Right, exactly.

Charlie Robinson (01:10:56.742)
there's an underlying tax incentive that people don't see that if they understood, it would make a little bit more sense in this crazy ass world that we live in.

Antony Sammeroff (01:11:08.581)
Yeah, so unfortunately until people realise that just because something is called a regulation doesn't mean that the government is regularising anything, usually these are passed to promote the industry that they're meant to regulate. And there's a lot of propaganda used to do it. I mean, if you look at workplace safety and the amount of deaths before...

when OSHA came along, they've got a graph that shows that workplace safety was deaths went down. But what they don't show is in the 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 years before OSHA was created, workplace safeties were going down at exactly the same rate. So they take credit for a trend that was actually happening because the free market, right? Because people were becoming more wealthy during that period, companies had more money to spend on work

workplace safety and they didn't really like their employees dying on the job because even in a complete it's bad publicity and also you need to train someone new. Another problem with the government regulated workplace safety is it's one size fits all. If I'm in a particular factory I can say right we really need this safety equipment because obviously that's at risk but some government bureaucrats going to make me spy a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't actually even make my

my staff any richer just because it's a one size fits all regulation and then you need to pay for the auditors and stuff like that. So that means again, my products are going to be more expensive. People think that they stopped sending children to school because the government regulated against it. Actually, sorry, to work. Actually, at least in Europe, was like 95 % of child labor had already been abolished before there was any regulations. Why?

because people were getting richer, the whole of society was getting richer during the industrial revolution, and people went, well, I don't need to send my kids to work anymore, I can send them to school. First, maybe two or three years of school, and as the 19th century progressed, less and less, more more more more years at school, less years at work, because people could afford it. This is true of almost anything that you see which is kind of sold as, the government came in and made this better.

Antony Sammeroff (01:13:33.795)
Usually what happened was there was already a trend where that thing was improving and the government came in because that was in a period of time where people were more affluent so they could tax them more. You know, when everyone was really, really broke, if you tax people at 10%, they'd be like, you're taking food out of my children's mouth. But come, you know, 1940 or whatever, or sorry, even, you know, after the First World War, people were much...

much much richer than they were 40-50 years ago you could start to tax them 15 % then 20 % then 25 % until you get to a situation now where you know half of what you earn goes in taxes. we really? Which means that those dollars are not taking place in the marketplace where the more you spend you're competing to bring down the price of goods and services and increase the

When private people buy stuff, they're looking for the best product at the cheapest price. That's not the case with government. That's why according to the meta analysis, whenever any government provides a service, it's usually twice as expensive. Here's an example. Sorry, I'm going on and on, but here's a great example, People here will always say, middle class people are doing

Charlie Robinson (01:14:50.547)
Thanks.

Antony Sammeroff (01:14:58.103)
so much better because private schools spend more money per student than public schools, right? The public schools today spend what private schools did a few years ago. The cost of putting a student through public school now is what private schools used to cost when you used to say that. So if you just free the market in education,

People will shop around for the best school at the best price and if you're poor and talented they'll want to take you on on the scholarship because you're going to make their school prestigious and they'll find ways to make it extremely cheap to educate poor children. Hey, we'll get the older children to educate the younger children and that will save them on some labour costs and it will improve the quality. I don't know what the market's going to do but I the market will come up with some stuff

So if you're that, if you really believe that it's just not, that we're not spending enough money on education, even though we have literally the best funded schools that have ever existed in all of the history, recorded history of mankind, we're spending more per student than ever, but it's still not enough money. Listen, I really don't know what to tell you. I really don't.

Charlie Robinson (01:16:15.623)
We're ready.

Antony Sammeroff (01:16:25.999)
It's bollocks. It's not that we're not spending enough money on healthcare. It's not that we're not spending enough money on education. It's who's doing the spending and what.

incentives they have. Consumers want the best product at the best price and will shop around for it. The government stands to gain from spending lots and lots of money on that product just as long as that money is going to one of their campaign contributors.

Charlie Robinson (01:16:56.935)
Man, whether we're talking about Big Pharma or UBI or whatever, it's always a treat to have you on, because you just break it down in a way with the libertarian philosophies flowing through you, the power of the libertarian emanating from your fingertips to break this down in a way that makes it so easy for people to understand. Where's the best place for people to buy your books and to maybe sign up for some of your workshops in the future?

Antony Sammeroff (01:17:26.087)
Okay cool yeah I mean my Anthony Samoroff is my name my books are on Amazon if you want to go to psychosocial.substack.com I sometimes write on there and there's Be Yourself and Love It podcast which is a good personal development podcast for libertarians and I'm throwing out too many things but guys you can listen back to it and select it's a buffet if you think that I would be a good counselor for you or you want to know more about the kind of body work

that I do, you can go to BeYourselfAndLoveIt.com. BeYourselfAndLoveIt.com. And there's just a form so you can fill out for a consultation. I love helping libertarians meet their goals, whether it's psychological challenges or you're at a point in your life where it's pretty good and you want to build something, then that's more coaching than counseling.

And yeah, I've spent my whole life trying to heal myself and they'll heal others and educate myself. So I'm just looking forward to connecting with more people and get back into the podcast sphere.

Charlie Robinson (01:18:41.853)
Good to see you again. I'll see you in Mexico if I don't see you before then. That's Anthony Samoroff, everybody. Yeah. Thanks for coming on.

Antony Sammeroff (01:18:45.083)
Thank you so much, I should have said.

Thank you so much for having me on your show. had a good rant. Yeah, it was good to get all that stuff out my chest. I've not gone all ranty for a while. Okay, cool. Cool.

Charlie Robinson (01:18:55.411)
I love your ramps.

good man. You come on here. You can rant whenever you need to. We love a good rant. That's Anthony Samoroff everybody. Go check out his books. They're available on Amazon. Sign up and for coaching with him as well. If you want to connect with me, I don't have coaching available. You can go to macroaggressions.io and find out what I'm doing with books and podcasts and all that good stuff. Thanks everybody. We'll talk to you again soon.

Antony Sammeroff (01:19:06.735)
Okay, cool.