Interview Highlights

This is a condensed, lightly edited transcript of an audio interview. The full audio is available and highly recommended.

Adrian Bye: Today I’m here with Roger Ver, who is called Bitcoin Jesus. He is the owner of MemoryDealers, and he is actually in Japan right now. He has funded a lot of important Bitcoin startups and has been very active in the Bitcoin world. He is a controversial figure because he is certainly known for speaking his mind. Roger, thanks for joining us.

Roger Ver: My pleasure. Thank you, Adrian.

Adrian Bye: I think your story is an interesting one. Why don’t you start off by telling us a little bit about your background?

Roger Ver: I grew up in Silicon Valley and I’ve been around computers all my life. Towards the end of junior high or early in high school I started studying economics and found it just incredibly interesting and read pretty much every book I could get my hands on at the time. That’s part of why I became so excited when I found Bitcoin. I had a computer science background to understand the concepts of it from the technical side, and then I had the economics background to understand it from the economics side. Bitcoin is computer science and economics coming together.

Adrian Bye: You studied computer science?

Roger Ver: Actually, I started selling computer components when I was in college. I quickly discovered that I can make a lot more money selling computer parts than I would by finishing college and going to work for some company. So I quit school and started selling computer components full time. That’s how my company MemoryDealers.com was born. Silicon Valley was the right place to be doing that sort of thing and it worked out really well to this very day.

Adrian Bye: You had an interesting run-in with the government that I guess changed your perspective on things a bit.

Roger Ver: Yes. During the study of economics I realized that the more freedom a place has the higher standard of living everybody has and the more material wealth can be produced to support all those people. It became so incredibly clear that the lower the taxes are and the less government control over the economy the better everybody’s life will be. So I felt the rest of the world should know about this too. In the year 2000 I was inspired to run for California State Assembly. I ran as the Libertarian candidate and I was invited to debate the Republican and Democratic candidates at San Jose State University. In that debate, which was just a few years after the big incident in Waco, Texas, in which the government basically murdered a bunch of kids, I called the ATF a bunch of jack booted thugs and murderers. In the audience were some plain clothed ATF agents that really didn’t like the things that this twenty-year old kid was saying about them. They started looking into me to figure out what they could prosecute me for. And in a country like the United States, and just about any country around the world, there are so many rules and laws and regulations that they can prosecute anybody at any time for any reason. I wound up being the only person in the entire nation to be prosecuted for selling a product called the Pest Control Report 2000, basically a firecracker used by farmers to scare birds out of their corn fields. The company that I was purchasing them from had no permit, the company manufacturing them had no permit. Cabelas Sporting Goods Catalog, the number one sporting goods catalog in the entire United States was selling the exact same product at the same time with no permit. Dozens of other resellers were selling them on eBay. I was very clearly guilty of the laws written. I sold explosives without a permit. Even though the people I was buying them from had no permit, the manufacturer had no permit, nobody else had a permit, they only prosecuted me. The U.S. prosecution attorney told me that if I didn’t sign a plea agreement he would send me to jail for seven or eight years. If I signed a plea agreement I would do between eight months and fourteen months. Eight months to fourteen months sounds a lot better than seven or eight years, so I signed a plea agreement. I remember very clearly the morning I was sentenced the judge asked me, "Did anybody threaten or coerce you in any way to sign this plea agreement?" I told the judge, "Yes, absolutely." The judge’s eyes got really big, and he said, "What do you mean?" I said, "The U.S. attorney told me that if I didn’t sign the plea agreement he would send me to jail for seven or eight years, so I signed the plea agreement." The judge told me, "That’s not what we mean", and I told him very genuinely, "If that’s not what you mean by being threatened or coerced I must not understand what it means to be threatened or coerced." The judge wound up sentencing me to ten months in federal prison. I served my time in federal prison.

The way I got into trouble was by trying to make the world a better place. Free markets empower everybody. They help the poor and the rich. They help everybody all over the world and I wanted to help make the world a better place. And to thank me for my efforts I wound up being sent to federal prison and then I had three years of harassment from the U.S. probation department. The day my probation ended I left the United States and I knew I was never going to live there ever again. Earlier this year I actually renounced my U.S. citizenship. I want absolutely nothing to do with those people. All these Americans pay all these tax dollars and then the U.S. government uses all this money to buy guns and arms and tanks and airplanes and fancy drones and then they go around dropping bombs on people all over the world, starting wars all over the world and murdering people all over the world. As a result of the Iraqi government’s stupid policies the U.S. Government imposed sanctions on the country which caused more than half a million children, who have no say whatsoever, to literally be starved to death. I want absolutely nothing to do with anybody that would think that it’s okay to starve to death children because the government in the country that those kids happen to be living in did some things that the government of the United States don’t like. Part of what attracted me to Bitcoin so much is a lot of those bombs are being paid for by inflation. The U.S. government can print as much money as they want to buy these guns and bombs and tanks. When I discovered Bitcoin and realized that the supply of Bitcoin was limited and it can’t just be created out of thin air, I realized that if the entire world starts using Bitcoin, governments are going to lose most of their ability to fund their wars.

Adrian Bye: One of the things that governments give us, or at least we like to think, is some level of security. You are a pretty big Bitcoin holder. That means you have a high net worth and you have a lot of that net worth in Bitcoin. Your situation is different to the standard billionaire because you can essentially be held hostage and be put in a position where it is your money or your life. You already had some attacks. How do you handle that? Do you always travel with a security guard?

Roger Ver: I had a hacker that tried to extort twenty thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin from me earlier this year. Rather than paying the extortionist the extortion money I offered the same amount of money as a bounty leading to that person’s arrest and conviction. In regards to government issued security, I don’t think they provide any of that. If anything, they make the world a less safe place.

Adrian Bye: So what do you do if you travel in Russia sometime and you get picked up by some guys of the Russian mafia who chop off your little finger and say we’re gonna keep chopping until you hand over all your Bitcoin holdings?

Roger Ver: If I had access to the bitcoins and someone is right there chopping my fingers off they would probably receive the bitcoins. That’s going to be a real problem in the future with things like Bitcoin. It makes it easier for people to do that sort of thing. But I don’t travel with my bitcoins with me. They are offline, secure and it takes quite a bit of effort to get to them. So even if someone were to kidnap me at an airport or coffee shop they wouldn’t be able to get very much money at all. My general policy is if there is not a gun right there to my head, anytime anybody tries to extort anything from me I’m much more likely to put the same amount of money as a bounty on arresting and prosecuting that person. In fact, I’m actually in the process of setting up a website that’s going to help with that exact sort of thing. And it’ll even be able to influence police officers to do the right thing and actually do their jobs. So I’m pretty excited about that new project I’m working on. It will be out maybe within another week or so.

Adrian Bye: What we are seeing now is that those who are good at business have an exponential advantage over everybody else. I think that’s going to increase just because of the amount of leverage you can get from having a good idea is increasing. I suspect we are reaching an endpoint where capitalism may not continue to work, simply because it won’t be able to provide for the whole population, to provide value. What do you think about that?

Roger Ver: Let’s name some really wealthy people in the world, like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and people like that. These people made an absolute fortune of money, but because of Steve Jobs we all have iPhones that we can use, and that makes even poor people’s lives better. Bill Gates created a new operating system that people all over the world use on computers, and certainly that’s made people’s lives better. These computers and softwares are being used in facilitating commerce around the world. Even if you are not a computer user, things that you buy in daily life and the things that you consume somehow ship to where you are. It improves lives for everybody on the entire planet. The fact that Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or whoever has this huge amount of money doesn’t mean that you or I or some poor person in some country has less. The overall economic pie, and the amount of wealth that’s been created in the world is not a fixed amount. That pie is increasing every single day as people are producing new goods for people to use and consume and enjoy. The fact that some people come along and figure out how to allocate resources in a way that creates a lot of wealth for them, that’s a good thing. In the free market every time anybody buys anything from anybody they are doing it because they value what they’re receiving more than what they are giving up. So after the trade happens both people have more than what they had to begin with. It’s only in governments in which they force someone to pay against their will. The more government you have that means the more coercion, the more times people have to pay for things they don’t necessarily feel make them better off. I’m not interested in paying for wars or bombs to be dropped on people all over the world, and I think most people wouldn’t want to pay for those sorts of things. Yet governments are going around forcing people to do that.

Adrian Bye: There is a guy named Nick Szabo. What do you think of him and what do you know about him?

Roger Ver: A lot of people think he could potentially be the creator of Bitcoin. Other than that I don’t know much. But whoever the real Satoshi is I hope he gets whatever it is that he wants out of life. He deserves it and I think he’ll go down in history like Thomas Edison and Isaac Newton when people just realize how amazing this block chain technology that he invented really is.

Adrian Bye: I would say Edison would be small by comparison. I would put it more in the realm of Einstein. Einstein’s discoveries enabled a whole lot of more discoveries. Newton and Einstein enabled entire new ages with what they produced, and I think that Satoshi has given us that with Bitcoin.

Roger Ver: That’s a great point, I agree with you.

Adrian Bye: You invested in a lot of startups, Blockchain is one.

Roger Ver: Blockchain is probably the most famous one. I was kind of fortunate because I heard about Bitcoin early on and started making my investment in the Bitcoin space in 2011. Blockchain is the world’s most popular Bitcoin wallet, it’s the number one Bitcoin website in the world. We have a lot of new products and features that we’re going to launch very shortly that I think you’re going to like. There are also some great apps for iPhone and Android and right there in your browser. You can send and receive any amount of money from anyone on the planet basically for free. It’s impossible for anyone to freeze your account, to seize your bitcoins, to control it in any way, and even if the entire website goes offline, your bitcoins are still safe and you’ll still be able to access them. That’s a pretty powerful tool that’s available right there on Blockchain.com.

Adrian Bye: What do you think about Coinapult?

Roger Ver: Coinapult is doing all sorts of great things. Some people are worried about Bitcoin’s volatility. Coinapult is offering a service called LOCKS, where you can lock in the value of your bitcoins’ today value into US dollars, Euros, and I believe British Pounds. If you have a thousand Euros worth of bitcoins today, you can lock it in at that price and then a month later when you’re ready to spend them, regardless of what Bitcoin has done in the meantime, you’ll still have a thousand euros worth of bitcoins to spend. I think lots of people that are scared of the volatility will find that incredibly useful.

It’s really kind of telling and sad just how difficult it is to do business in the U.S. Because of all the stupid regulations, government people, and politicians, all these really smart people from America are leaving. The Coinapult team moved down to Panama because it’s easier to do business in Panama than it is in the U.S. People are leaving the U.S. in droves because it is more favorable to do business in other places than the U.S. The U.S. government is really doing a good job of killing the geese that lay the golden eggs. And the goose that lays the golden egg is a free market business environment in which people can start any sort of business without having to ask for permission. Those days have disappeared in the U.S. and the U.S. is getting worse and worse as regards to that. A hundred years ago America was the freest place in the world and it was the place everybody wanted to go and start a business. Because it was so free it became the wealthiest nation in the world. Now the politicians are ruining it for everybody by controlling everything and they destroyed that free market environment.

Adrian Bye: Is there anything that you’d like to talk about?

Roger Ver: Yes. For anybody who is listening and doesn’t know much about Bitcoin google it right now. Google Bitcoin and read all about it. It really is, without exaggerating, one of the most important inventions ever, in the history of mankind. It’s right up there on par with the importance of the inventions of the Internet or electricity or the transistor. Bitcoin is really going to change lives of everybody on the entire planet. So it’s worth your time to google it right now and get involved in. It’s not just about money, it’s an entire platform that’s going to allow all sorts of amazing additional things to be built on top of it. So spend some time and Google it and read all about it right now. It’s worth your time learning about it.

Interview Highlights

This is a condensed, lightly edited transcript of an audio interview. The full audio is available and highly recommended.

Adrian Bye: Today I’m here with Dr. Richard K. Bernstein. Dr. Bernstein was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1946. He is probably the only person in the world who can say that he saved his own life by figuring out what to eat. He’s been a pioneer in terms of diabetes and I don’t think I’m exaggerating by saying that Dr. Bernstein deserves to win a Nobel Prize for his work in diabetes. Unfortunately, it’s been completely ignored by the mainstream establishment. Dr. Bernstein figured out essentially a lot of what we call a Paleo diet, except Paleo has fruit. He figured it out in 1970 by testing his blood glucose. Dr. Bernstein, thanks for your work over the years and thanks for joining us.

Richard Bernstein: Glad to be with you, Adrian.

Adrian Bye: Do you want to tell us a little bit about your story?

Richard Bernstein: I was a type 1 diabetic diagnosed in 1946 and I was within less than ten years of dying of the consequences of this disease, including advanced kidney disease. Back in those days we had no way of knowing what our blood sugars were at any given time. So I would have frequent blackouts from low blood sugars. I would also have very high blood sugars. I wanted to be a physicist and was taking graduate courses in mathematics at Columbia. I didn’t know that I was hypothyroid in addition to being diabetic, and I used to sleep through my classes. I used to miss classes because I didn’t wake up in the morning. I had a B minus average in college. I couldn’t remember things; there is dementia associated with hypothyroidism. So I decided to switch from physics to engineering which required less intellectual ability. I started engineering school and in the first semester got terrible grades. Then one of my doctors got the idea that I was hypothyroid and had me tested. In those days the test was to put you in a box and measure your respiration rate. Mine was the lowest anyone ever saw. They put me on thyroid replacement and I woke up and got straight A’s and ended up in the Engineering Honor Society. If only I had known that when I was in college, I would have been a physicist.

Adrian Bye: Yeah, but you wouldn’t have done as much interesting work.

Richard Bernstein: Probably. I wouldn’t have ended up working as an engineer for a company that made medical equipment and wouldn’t have discovered blood sugar self-monitoring.

Adrian Bye: And you’d be dead.

Richard Bernstein: In those days, type 1 diabetes was given thirty years from the time of diagnosis. So by 1976 I probably would have been dead.

Adrian Bye: That’s forty years ago that you should have been dead.

Richard Bernstein: Yes. So it’s good that I ended up where I ended up.

Adrian Bye: That was just by virtue of the fact that you were working at a medical instruments company and you were a type 1 diabetic that you stumbled upon this theme basically?    

Richard Bernstein: There was an ad in a journal called Lab World. It was the trade journal for our company because we sold medical laboratory equipment. It was my job to develop this equipment; in fact, some of the equipment I developed fifty years ago is still being marketed. One of the products is called Sedi-Stain which is used to stain urine for examination under the microscope. Another one is called the Readacrit Microhematocrit Centrifuge, and that was sort of a breakthrough in the field of measuring the hematocrit, which is the percentage of red cells in the blood. I ended up at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine working in the Peripheral Vascular Disease Clinic. My chief was the world’s authority on the diabetic food, and when he retired from private practice, he gave me his centrifuge, which was the one that I had developed. I have a patent on the calibrated capillary tube that it uses, called the PRE-CAL Tube.

Adrian Bye: You figured out about testing your blood glucose. You started to stabilize it a bit but you didn’t realize how important stabilizing it was. Later you really got into it and figured out how to stabilize your blood sugar and it made a major impact on your life.

Richard Bernstein: Initially, I just wanted to avoid hyperglycemia. Knowing that I had advanced kidney disease and other problems, it was actually my father who thought that maybe getting exercise on a regular basis would stop or prevent the complications of diabetes. 

Adrian Bye: How did he come up with that?

Richard Bernstein: My doctor had a patient named Billy Talbert, a world famous tennis player. He was a type 1 diabetic. I ended up meeting him. He was once on display at a major department store and I went up there to see how he looked. He was almost blind, but he was in his fifties by then. So I thought my father’s suggestion was reasonable. But it wasn’t correct. Exercise is good for anyone but it’s not gonna prevent the complications of diabetes. I ordered a literature search at the local medical library. They passed it on to the Library of Congress. There was one thing that they came up with: Exercise did not prevent complications of diabetes. They did point out that it lowered serum triglyceride. We didn’t have HDL in those days, but we knew about triglyceride. They came up with the fact that in animals, if you normalized blood sugar, you prevented and even reversed the complications of diabetes. And one complication that was very obviously reversible was diabetic kidney disease.  

Adrian Bye: Which you had.

Richard Bernstein: Which I had. I therefore set about to being more aggressive at attempting to normalize my blood sugars. One thing that became rapidly apparent as I did little experiments on myself was that with a high carbohydrate diet that my physician recommended for diabetics, and is still being recommended for diabetics, there was no way I could control my blood sugars. I came up with what I called the laws of small numbers, which was if you had small amounts of carbohydrate you needed only small doses of insulin. In other words, if you behaved like you were a physiologic human pancreas making tiny amounts of insulin on an as-needed basis, you would be doing something much more physiologic, whereas the American Diabetes Association is still recommending mega doses of insulin to cover the mega doses of carbohydrates. I could not make that work, whereas when I dealt with tiny amounts of insulin and tiny amounts of carbohydrates I could keep my blood sugar essentially normal. Since I couldn’t get my discoveries published as a lay person I went to medical school at age 45 and have since published nine books and many articles.

Adrian Bye: But the American Diabetes Association is starting to come around to your view, are they not?

Richard Bernstein: Yes and no. In November of 2012 they did a mega analysis of literature. They looked at many studies that were made upon diets for diabetics and they came to the conclusion that the only diet that both helped blood sugar and cardiac risk factors – they have always been interesting cardiac risk factors like LDL and HDL and things like that – was a low carbohydrate diet. “But of course we cannot recommend that because we don’t know the long term effects.” Now, of course, the long term effects were known because for the bulk of human history dietary carbohydrates, certainly rapid acting dietary carbohydrates, were not available. And everyone knew that. But there was one fact that they neglected to mention. It was pointed out to me about six months ago by a very well-known researcher in the field of diabetes, who is type 1 diabetic himself. He said you totally missed the point that the bulk of the income of the American Diabetes Association is through the advertising in their journals. And if they were to advocate low carbohydrate diets the bulk of the products that they advertise would no longer be used, or would be used only sparsely. In other words, a low carbohydrate diet would be a very good substitute for many of the medications that the ADA is making money of through their advertising. They recently received a large sum to recommend Domino Sugar mixed with Stevia as a “sugar substitute” for diabetics.

Adrian Bye: In one of your transcripts it made me very sad to see you are talking in front of a group of doctors explaining this, and one of the doctors raises his hands and says, who’s gonna pay for this?

Richard Bernstein: That was the wisest question that was ever asked. It was actually a diabetes educator that asked the question. Who is going to sit down with diabetic patients and teach them how to do all the things I advocate in my books? Whoever pays for it, it’s a lot cheaper than paying for the long-term complications of the disease; the amputations, the kidney transplants, the work on diabetic eyes, etc. The effects of high blood sugar work across the board to affect every tissue of the body.

Adrian Bye: Right. That was actually one of the things I wanted to ask you. I did an interview with Dr. Thomas Seyfried, who is in Boston College. He’s been looking a lot into whether cancer is actually a metabolic condition caused by essentially high blood sugar. What are your thoughts on that?

Richard Bernstein: I have published a paper jointly with the immunology department of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. They presented it at an annual meeting of the Association of Allergy and Immunology, and their abstract got published amongst fifteen hundred other abstracts in the annual meeting journal. I had discovered when that was published, that about 19 percent of diabetics had an immunodeficiency disorder, called CVID, Common Variable Immune Deficiency. Initially, I was testing people who in an initial interview complained about chronic sinusitis. I switched over to testing every new patient and we ended up with twenty-five percent of them having this immune deficiency disorder. Now, if you were to do a literature search on CVID, you’ll find that it predisposes very strongly to malignancies; most commonly blood born malignancies like leukemia and lymphoma, but also to malignancies in general.

Adrian Bye: You scare me because I have sinusitis; my father died of pancreatic cancer and was pre diabetic. Is this treatable?

Richard Bernstein: Yes, it is. It’s treatable with intravenous gamma globulin, which replaces the missing globulins that protect you from cancers and infections. Now, it’s unfortunate that we had to publish in the annual meeting bulletin of a journal that is not read by diabetologists or internists. So it’s still a secret even though we published it. I’m constantly running into problems that people are experiencing because they have CVID. I’m trying to get this published in diabetic journals and I can’t get it published.

Adrian Bye: So you are a black sheep.

Richard Bernstein: Yes, I’m the enemy.

Adrian Bye: You are also called the Low Carb Taliban.

Richard Bernstein: Yes, that’s right. The people who are making money off of diabetes hate anybody who advocates normal blood sugars and who shows how normal blood sugars can be achieved. There are all kinds of things that I have discovered that I can’t get published because the authorities are not interested in them. And then there is the fact that I’m considered the enemy by the publishers associated with the American Diabetes Association, so they usually won’t accept anything I submit.  

Adrian Bye: Have you been publishing all of this? You are eighty now, aren’t you?

Richard Bernstein: Well, yeah, I’ll be eighty in June. I have these monthly free teleconferences where in addition to answering questions that listeners submit I try every month to have extra subjects that no one asks about that I think are important. That’s how I leak out these interesting tidbits that are very important and have been turned down by the medical establishment.

Adrian Bye: I wanna ask you a question on stress. I read this in your books, and I’ve tested this myself, that stress does not raise your blood glucose. But you say that it sometimes does and sometimes it doesn’t.  

Richard Bernstein: When I was thirteen years old no one could understand why I was getting over two hundred units of insulin a day, which is about twenty times what a kid my size makes. It was because I was on this high carbohydrate diet. I was living on almost only carbohydrates because they thought this would prevent heart disease. They still have that myth even though they are killing people right and left. They sent me to the Joslin Clinic, which was then run by Elliott P. Joselin, who was a lot more of a believer in normal blood sugars than the current people in Boston seem to be. I attended lectures which were given for adults, and I only remember one thing that he taught: “never run a block for a bus, run a mile.” His point was that you make counter-regulatory hormones, called stress hormones, that are gonna raise your blood sugar and you won’t get enough exercise to get the blood sugar down if you only run a block. Now, I have plenty of patients when they speak in public, let’s say they are teachers, performers or singers, their blood sugars go up. I even have kids if they have an important soccer game their blood sugars go up. So stress does raise blood sugar if you are a diabetic.

Adrian Bye: Is this for type 1 diabetic?

Richard Bernstein: It could be for any diabetic. But exercise will not necessarily raise blood sugar. In fact, it may lower blood sugar if it is very strenuous and concentrated. When I go to the gym I do such intensive exercise, some people call it the slow burn, that I have to check my blood sugar after every two exercises. I would usually drop every two exercises by ten milligrams per deciliter, and I have to drink liquid glucose every two exercises or I won’t be able to do a decent workout. So certain kinds of physical stress, that’s exercise, if concentrated, can lower blood sugar dramatically; and other kinds of exercise, like getting into a fight with your spouse, or public speaking or what not, can raise your blood sugar if you’re diabetic. You do have a father with a bad history and it might be wise to look at your hemoglobin A1C, which is a test of your average blood sugar of the last few months

Adrian Bye: 5.5

Richard Bernstein: Well, unfortunately, that’s elevated. That’s a blood sugar of about 120. And normal is around 83. So you are about fifty percent above normal.

Adrian Bye: Go on, say it, you want to diagnose me as diabetic on this call, don’t you?

Richard Bernstein: You see, I tend to be much more aggressive. I have a patient that is diabetic. He is sixteen years old. We just tested his mother and she is 5.6. So she’s got a higher A1C than he because he’s been treated. He has two siblings, and they are both around 5.3. Something has to be done for all of them. They should all be on low carbohydrate diets, they should all be exercising, and if their A1Cs don’t come down to to let’s say 4.2 to 4.6, they should have some mild oral agents that are benign. In fact one of the oral agents, Metformin, is actually now being used experimentally to fight cancer because they discovered by accident that it fights cancer.  

Adrian Bye: A1C is an average glucose level over a three months period. It may turn out to be the single most important data point to evaluate your health. So you wanna check your A1C and I would follow what our friend here, the Low Carb Taliban, says: You want to be between 4.2 and 4.6., and you can hear on this call I’m potentially getting diagnosed myself with prediabetes.

Dr. Bernstein, thank you for the interview, thank you for all of your work.

Dr. Bernstein: For more information you might read my 2011 book DIABETES Solution, which has a five star rating at <amazon.com> and listen to my free teleseminars at <askdrbernstein.net>

Interview Highlights

This is a condensed, lightly edited transcript of an audio interview. The full audio is available and highly recommended. The interviewee may post clarifications in the comments.

Adrian Bye: Today I’m here with Jeff Berwick who runs the Dollar Vigilante. Jeff’s originally from Canada, he is an outspoken Libertarian, and does a lot of business around the world. Jeff, thanks for joining us.

Jeff Berwick: Thank you, Adrian.

Adrian Bye: Jeff, tell us a little bit about your story. It sounds like you used to be quite a geek and now you are a Libertarian in Acapulco, Mexico, which is a path I think you didn’t expect to take.

Jeff Berwick: No, I didn’t. I started out my life in Canada; I grew up in a place called Edmonton, which I called ‘Deadmonton’. It’s literally minus forty degrees for about half the year and not a lot to do. I really got into computers when I was younger. I didn’t go to school a lot after I got a computer when I was twelve years old. I would just go for the tests in school so I was quite lucky that I avoided a lot of the daytime prison camps for children called public schools. At the same time, in the evening I wouldn’t be watching the TV programming. They’re called programming for a reason. The media is almost one and the same with the government nowadays, and in Canada they don’t even try to lie about it. They actually help the CBC, that’s the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

I was always into computers, so when the internet came out I thought I have to do something on the internet. I had been working at a bank and I was interested in the stock market, so I started a financial website. It’s still the top financial website in Canada, called Stockhouse.com. It was worth about 240 million dollars in 1999/2000 and then, after the Alan Greenspan tech bubble, Y2K bubble burst, it was worth almost nothing. I decided to sell it at that point, I was so confused and I was really stressed out. I had been working for that company for about eight years straight, seven days a week, eighteen hours a day. I decided to buy a sail boat, a catamaran. I didn’t know how to sail, but the day I bought it I just left and tried to sail around the world. I actually ended up sinking it in El Salvador one year to the day later. I was actually a pretty good sailor at that point, but it was just a bunch of bad luck and bad timing and bad decisions all at once. I just kept going for about four or five years traveling the world and trying to find out what’s going on in the financial markets and in politics with government. I didn’t have a great understanding in any of them so I would spend almost all day reading on the internet. I really got into Austrian economics, which really explained why my company was worth nothing, then worth 240 million dollars and then worth nothing again all within a span of a few years. It happened because of all the money printing, all the counterfeiting done by Alan Greenspan. That opened my eyes. I also got into Libertarianism and I realized that the biggest problem on earth today, the biggest problem for humanity and the biggest enemy of mankind, is the government and the central banks. I’ve been rallying against them since about 2009 when I started The Dollar Vigilante, where I talk about the coming dollar collapse which I expect in the next decade. I hate to make predictions of time, but it’s definitely going to happen, it’s just a matter of when. I also rally against the politicians, government and central banks and talk about all those issues.

Adrian Bye: It’s interesting you talk about problems with Alan Greenspan, because Alan Greenspan was one of the original – in Ayn Rand’s terminology – group members of The Collective, and a lot of his policies were built on what Ayn Rand promoted; essentially saying that the market regulates itself, just leave it alone. But you feel there was a lot of problems with what he did.

Jeff Berwick: Yeah, it was such a strange thing because he was good friends with Ayn Rand. He wrote a thing on gold before he was in the Federal Reserve; he said a lot of Libertarian things. And then, once he was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, it was like he just forgot all about it and started printing money. I found it very interesting how he’s been talking since he’s left the Fed. He went into the Fed, basically said a bunch of nothing and then just walked off. It was really bizarre that anyone would listen to him. And it’s interesting to see that he actually has said since he’s left the Federal Reserve that they should shut down the Federal Reserve. He’s talked about gold again. When he was working at the Federal Reserve I think he basically sold his soul to the devil, the Federal Reserve. I’m sort of following him and see what he is doing next because maybe he says some more stuff like ‘Shut down the Fed’, that would be really interesting. We just had Ben Bernanke leave the Fed, thank God. But of course it always just gets worse and we now have Janet Yellen. She’s a bigger money printer, so we are heading towards hyperinflation. I don’t think it’s even possible to stop what’s going to happen at this point, but the way these people are it’s going to happen even faster than I expect.

Adrian Bye: There is a lot of truth to what you say. I’m pretty convinced we’re heading for a crash, too. I’d be very surprised in fact if it doesn’t happen. I think you know ten years is a long time frame and it’s probably gonna be a lot quicker than ten years.

Jeff Berwick: Last year was quite interesting already with Cypress, with Boston turning into a police state overnight. I think this year is going to see major problems probably in the Euro zone, I think Italy and France are going to have some sort of major blow-ups soon. We are already starting to see it with a lot of banks over there starting to limit withdrawals and they are really cracking down on capital controls. We’ll see what happens in Japan this year. I was predicting the housing bubble probably three, four years earlier before it popped. I was predicting that 2009 financial crisis probably a couple of years before it happened, and I’m predicting the collapse of the dollar coming pretty soon.

Adrian Bye: The 2008 crisis almost came out of nowhere, right? It wasn’t expected. Everything was fine and then suddenly the crisis happened and it hit really hard.

Jeff Berwick: You never know what’s going to set off one sort of chain reaction or another. If you look at the Arab Spring as just one example, we are talking about revolutions all throughout the Middle East. That all started in Tunisia with one person who had a very small cart in a market. The local police, just like any police anywhere were just thieves and criminals, were just robbing him every day. He only made about two dollars a day and they were taking almost two dollars a day from him. He just couldn’t survive and he didn’t wanna live like that. He lit himself on fire in Tunisia. That one man lighting himself on fire set off an entire reaction that is still going on to this day. Of course that would have happened anyway, but it’s interesting to see what do set this sort of things off. You never know it’s going to happen.

The root of the problem is central banking. Central banking serves no useful purpose other than to enrich the elites and to impoverish almost everybody else. True capitalism, which is just free markets, doesn’t have central banks. Capitalism and free markets don’t have taxes, and that’s of course a big part of what the government does. We don’t need central banks. And that’s why I’m so excited about bitcoin because for the first time we have a currency come out in the digital age from the private market. It’s not controlled by anybody and that’s exactly what you want in a currency.

Adrian Bye: If you are suggesting that we don’t have central banks and no monitoring we essentially go back to the economy of the nineteen hundreds. We gonna have a lot more inequality. It’s gonna make it harder for society to work together if certain groups get too far behind. How do you respond to that?

Jeff Berwick: I think we would have a lot less inequality if we actually had free markets. The governments and the central banks have been demolishing the middle class and keeping tens or even hundreds of millions of people in the US in poverty for decades, ever since the war on poverty. Tens of millions of people have been in abject poverty, driven into it through all these systems like minimum wage laws, which actually make it so that there is much more unemployment; things like welfare, which is a very dangerous thing.

Adrian Bye: You see that most profoundly in the indigenous populations, the Inuits in Canada, the Aborigines in Australia, the Indians in the US. They have more problems with alcoholism because they get lots of handouts and never have to go and work really hard.

Jeff Berwick: I totally agree, it’s really sad. If you really want to destroy a person, give them welfare. If you want to eat and you have no food and no money then you better go out and figure out how to make some money or get some food. If it’s just given to you it drives just any sort of incentive out of a wanting to improve yourself. But if you give incentive, which is just what the free market is, where you have the opportunity to earn more if you work harder that really improves most peoples lives. It’s just a fact of life. All you’re doing with things like welfare is ruining people, and taking money as well with taxes from people who are productive and giving it to people who are not productive. If anything, you should do the opposite, because what we need is people that produce wealth. Government programs, central banks, taxes and regulations destroy wealth.

Adrian Bye: I agree with everything you’re saying on welfare and how it destroys people, but it seems to me that we still can’t leave everybody or a lot of people behind because if we do then society starts to collapse.

Jeff Berwick: People get really confused about wealth, equality and poor people and how we can help poor people. The best way to help poor people is to get the government’s boot off of their necks, get rid of all the government programs, like minimum wage, get rid of the central banks, that printing up tons of money. That money first goes to the financial leads and the government. They get the benefit of that new money, but by the time it gets to a person who doesn’t have a lot of money all the prices have already gone up. I can’t believe that people don’t see what’s going on. No one looks at the real root of the problem. It’s all this money printing …

Adrian Bye: … which is driving inflation. If we weren’t printing so much money we wouldn’t have so much inflation and prices would be more stable. And that would stop the mess that’s going on.

Jeff Berwick: And it would actually improve the lives. Inflation always benefits the powerful and the rich because they get the money first. Going back, if you want to help poor people, get rid of government, get rid of central banks. There would be so much wealth in the economy again because almost half of everyone’s money is just taken and mostly destroyed by the government and the bureaucrats and just wasted on all kinds of wealth-destroying things. If people had that money a lot of people almost would make twice as much money all of a sudden. That would create an economy that would just be unbelievable.

Adrian Bye: You’ve been working on some interesting projects. One of them is Galt’s Gulch down in Chile. Do you want to talk about that?

Jeff Berwick: Sure. The idea I had a few years ago was just like in Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged. The governments in the world are just getting so oppressive, the Western governments especially. They are taxing a lot, the regulations are actually making it almost impossible to be productive. In the book Atlas Shrugged a lot of the producers went on strike. They said; that’s enough, I’m not going to keep working like this when most of my money is taken from me and I’m constantly bombarded with regulations. They all went to a place called Galt’s Gulch. Now I’m telling people get out of the Western world. It’s definitely on a downwards slide and it’s going to continue to get worse until it finally collapses. The financial system will collapse, the monetary system will collapse, the government might collapse. Throughout history, so many governments have gone under, so many currencies have been hyperinflated to nothing, but before these governments totally collapse they usually try to steal as much as they can from their own citizens. You can see that happening in the US right now. I tell people to look at the rest of the world. There are parts in the world that are doing incredibly well. Parts of Asia have done very well, parts of Latin America have done incredibly well. Chile is one of them. I’m looking into trying to start up communities of like-minded people, expats who want to escape and go somewhere, some of these other countries which have so much more potential and are so much more free. There is one in Chile which is called Galt’s Gulch Chile that I was involved in, and looking at other places as well. I think it’s really growth industry, there’s a lot of people that really want to get pretty close to wanting to ‘shrug’, as they call it in Atlas Shrugged. It’s time to get out and try to find a new life and find a bit more freedom and possibly more prosperity by going to these other areas.

Adrian Bye: Jeff, thank you very much for doing the interview.

Interview Highlights

This is a condensed, lightly edited transcript of an audio interview. The full audio is available and highly recommended. The interviewee may post clarifications in the comments.

Adrian Bye: Today I’m here with Professor Thomas Seyfried who is a cancer researcher at Boston College in Boston. Professor Seyfried, thanks for joining us.

Thomas Seyfried: Thank you very much, Adrian, It’s a pleasure to be here.

Adrian Bye: Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what you did to become who you are?

Thomas Seyfried: We’ve been in this business for quite a while, but my main background is in genetics. I received a degree in genetics and lipid biochemistry from the University of Illinois. Then we proceeded to do considerable work on neurochemistry in the brain in animals with epilepsy and mapping genes in very complex epilepsies. We were also at the same time doing studies of brain tumors while I was at Yale University. Over the years we were doing basic fundamental research and then we started to do some drug studies on brain tumors. It became apparent to us that the therapeutic benefits of some of the drugs were linked to actual body weight loss. So the effects that we saw on certain drugs were linked more to how much body weight the animal lost when they were taking the drug. When we included body weight controls we basically found the same thing: the size of the tumors were reduced to approximately the same level. And then we began to look at the biochemistry of the tumors and found the body weight loss was associated with the restriction of blood vessels, which is an anti-angiogenic effect.

Adrian Bye: I gonna have to simplify this down a little bit. Dr Seyfried is a researcher who is focused on ketogenic diet with relation to cancer. You’re building on research from Otto Warburg and others, basically saying that you can essentially stop cancer by switching cancer patients to a ketogenic diet. So when you’re talking about loss of body weight, that’s essentially what you’re talking about. Does that sound correct?

Thomas Seyfried: The ketogenic diet was designed originally as a means of controlling very difficult refractory seizures in children. The mechanism by which this ketogenic diet blocks epilepsy is still a point of considerable discussion and research. This research started in the 1920s by Dr Wilder, when he was looking at fasting and showing how powerful fasting was in blocking seizures. But that’s only a temporary effect. Then they developed this ketogenic diet. What we did was to dovetail this ketogenic diet into the management of cancer, mainly because we found that these body weight losses were associated with reduced glucose and elevated ketones. And if you want to reduce glucose and elevate ketones, the ketogenic diet is the best way to do this. It became clear that we could have a significant impact on how tumors grow and look at also the multiple different mechanisms that the cancer industry is investigating through various drugs, immunotherapies and all these kind of things, and find out that the ketogenic diet does all this, but without toxicity. That now becomes very interesting, you manage the disease without toxicity.

Adrian Bye: Is this something you came up with or is this something from Otto Warburg? Or where did this come from?  

Thomas Seyfried: The ketogenic diet came from studies with epilepsy, but Warburg showed that it was the blood glucose that was driving tumors. His theory is that the reason why the tumors are so dependent on glucose for their growth and survival is because their mitochondria, the little energy producing organelle within the cell, are defective. The cells can’t respire effectively because the organelle responsible for respiration is abnormal, insufficient, or damaged. If this happens, the cell in order to survive must revert to a primitive form of energy, which is fermentation. And the primary fuel for fermentation is glucose. The ketogenic diet lowers the glucose and then has the body burn ketones. If the cancer cells have defective respiration because their mitochondria are defective, they can’t effectively burn the ketones. So we have a very nice, elegant system to target and kill tumor cells without toxicity, which is based on Otto Warburg’s theory. People can argue whether he was right or not, but his theory, the basic concept that respiration is abnormal with compensatory fermentation, which is referred to as the Warburg effect, still stands. And it is becoming more and more investigated now that people realize we’re not making major progress in the genomic analysis or in using genomic information to target diseases. It’s simply not effective. Now people are revisiting the Warburg theory and recognizing that he actually had this thing pegged a long time ago.

Adrian Bye: Are a lot of people researching this?

Thomas Seyfried: I wouldn’t say a lot, but it’s an emerging field. The studies of cancer energy metabolism are advancing significantly. New journals are starting and many people are now becoming more aware of it. Although I have to admit, mainstream academic cancer research is still focused on the gene theory of cancer and many therapies that are being developed are being linked to the idea that cancer is a genetic disease. So, if metabolism is considered it would be considered as an effect of some kind of gene mutation. And we’ve shown that that’s not the case.

There are alternatives to toxic radiation. But there is a reluctance to get clinical trials going to prove our case without having to first radiate the person. The standard of care requires radiation, but radiation itself is tremendously damaging and can also provoke the tumor. The trials that are being considered today for the most part are that we give the patient the standard of care, which is radiation and chemo. Then, when the tumor recurs and invariably it does, we will use this ketogenic diet. At that point people are open to the ketogenic diet because they no longer have anything that will work. The problem is now you’re asking this metabolic therapy to attempt to correct the incredible damage done by the original standard of care while at the same time curing the tumor. That is a tall order for any kind of therapy. Let’s be honest, most of the drugs that people are subjected to are extremely toxic and that’s one of the reasons why people fear the cancer, mainly because of the kinds of treatments their bodies have to be subjected to.    

Adrian Bye: My father refused most chemo. He took a little bit at the end. He was an orthopedic surgeon and he knew exactly what all of those things do. I think doctors know this but patients don’t.

Thomas Seyfried: That’s true. I certainly know of some physicians who are actually doing the ketogenic diet themselves to try to battle their own disease. And that’s another thing, too. When you say I’m using metabolic therapy and the ketogenic diet to battle my cancer, that’s a true statement. Many people say, he is battling his cancer, which is really not doing anything but sitting there and getting infused with some sort of toxic chemical or radiated. I don’t consider that battling your disease. But using metabolic therapy definitely is because a lot of it comes as a personal determination to do this. Once your body is in this new state where glucose is lower and ketones are elevated, these tumor cells now become vulnerable to so many other kinds of approaches. And some of these new therapies from the genome projects could potentially be very useful in finishing off surviving tumor cells in some of these patients. The problem now is they’re using some of these new therapies as a stand-alone or first line of attack. The tumor is so genetically heterogeneous this approach doesn’t work, except you might live another few months at an enormous cost. In our writings we say that these things could be effective as the final chapter in controlling your disease because now you have a much smaller tumor with a very few number of cells that may all express the same marker. Now these surviving tumor cells become very vulnerable to these personalized genetic therapies. But the personalized genetic therapies don’t work well as an up-front first line of attack on the majority of people that are treated. I think we need to re-evaluate how we treat the disease and the timing and how we apply this to the patients. This is lacking in the cancer field today.

Adrian Bye: Have the incidents of cancer increased over the last fifty years?

Thomas Seyfried: The number of new cases is certainly increasing every year, there is no question about it. I’ve even linked the percentage increase of new cases each year to the percentage of increase in cancer research funding. The percentage increase in funding parallels the percentage increase in new cancer cases. What is interesting though is the number of deaths per year, or deaths per day, hasn’t really changed much in more than twenty years. There are more people being diagnosed with cancer, there are more people being treated with cancer, and many of these treatments themselves will lead to secondary cancers later on in life and other adverse effects. In fact, there are new clinics opening up now just to deal with the millions of so-called cancer survivors who are now suffering from all kinds of maladies that they never had before they had cancer. Depression is very high in survivors; and there are also gastrointestinal issues, neurological issues, bone issues, cardiovascular disease. You don’t get out of this completely unscathed. And ten to twenty years after the treatments there are recurring cancers that could occur in the same tissue or in a different tissue.  

Adrian Bye: Do you not feel that it’s actually very possible that one of the fundamental causes of all this cancer may actually be the amount of carbs that we are eating?

Thomas Seyfried: This is another topic that I’ve written about in my book, cancer prevention. People can go on a sustained ketogenic diet day in and day out, and some people that I know are using a very Paleolithic diet. This Paleolithic diet is very healthy. These are good conscious choices for maximum health benefits. Or people who say, I can’t be doing this my whole life, for those kinds of people doing a periodic fast for three to four days a couple of times a year can be very healthy in rejuvenating mitochondrial function. As long as you can keep the mitochondria healthy, the probability of getting cancer is extremely low. If you are on a ketogenic diet the probability of getting cancer while on the diet is much lower than if you’re not on the diet. If you want to try to help yourself for a short period of time you can do a water-only therapeutic fast a couple of times a year. This will enhance the functionality of the mitochondria and significantly reduce the risk of cancer. So, people have these choices. There is not just one way to prevent cancer, there are many ways. Diet and exercise are critical.

Adrian Bye: But couldn’t we just suggest that given the fact that the ketogenic diet, which is essentially a high fat diet, is so successful in treating cancer, eating too much carbs is the cause of a lot of this cancer?

Thomas Seyfried: We have introduced a lot of high-fructose corn syrup, a lot of carbohydrate sugars in all of our foods. There is no question that this is having an impact. There are significant linkages between hemoglobin A1, which is a marker for elevated glucose, and the risk of certain kinds of cancers, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. Interestingly enough, Alzheimer’s disease is a very interesting point because apparently, if you have Alzheimer’s disease, the risk of cancer is much less. We grappled with this concept for quite some time. What is it about if you have Alzheimer’s disease your risk of cancer is much lower? What we found is that people who have Alzheimer’s are actually hypometabolic. They have fewer glucose transporters on their cells. And if glucose is driving your cancer and you can’t bring the glucose into the cell for whatever reason, you are not able to develop a cancer very effectively. Cancer is one kind of metabolic disorder and Alzheimer’s disease is another kind, but they seem to be potentially on the opposite poles. Again, can you treat Alzheimer’s disease with a ketogenic diet? The answer is yes. It works by stimulating mitochondria in some of these cells of the Alzheimer’s patients, whereas in cancer the tumor cells can’t use the ketones so they become metabolically marginalized. So we have to think of the different kinds of mechanisms by which these same therapies work against one disease versus another. We do know that the ketogenic diet can improve the cognitive behavior of certain people with Alzheimer’s disease. Clearly there is a link although it’s not widely accepted. I think people want drugs that will cure or delay Alzheimer’s. Unfortunately, many of the drugs for Alzheimer’s disease are toxic, like many of the drugs for cancer.

We came from a Paleolithic ancestry where these kinds of carbs were not in the system. Now we’ve infused all these carbohydrates into the foods to make almost everything with sugar. People have to realize that a balance is needed. I think the key thing is we are getting away from the key balance and that disturbance of the balance is in some way contributing to the higher risk of not only cancer but Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, you can go on. Putting the carbs into the foods has created a situation that is unhealthy. Now we have an industry that develops around producing drugs rather than going to the source and saying let’s re-evaluate the diets. No, we make a whole series of drugs that are going to individually treat all these different diseases, which potentially have a common origin with an imbalance in the amount of carbs in the food. All this information needs to come out. People need to be more aware of this information so that they can make their own decisions.

Adrian Bye: Very good. Is there anything else that you would like to tell us?  

Thomas Seyfried: We covered a lot of interesting areas. I think people can get an idea of what we’re doing here, our approach to this very difficult problem. I’ve written a number of papers; we’ve just had another major paper accepted for those who might be interested in learning more about the mechanisms involved in the approach that we’re taking. I’m hopeful for the future of cancer. I think this is a disease that can be managed effectively without toxicity and possibly at a much lower cost than is presently experienced. So I’m optimistic in that regard.

Adrian Bye: Awesome. Professor Seyfried, thank you very much for the interview.

Interview Highlights

This is a condensed, lightly edited transcript of an audio interview. The full audio is available and highly recommended. The interviewee may post clarifications in the comments.

Adrian Bye: Today I’m here with Bryan Ward-Perkins who is at Oxford. Bryan is a specialist in the topic of the Roman Empire and the reason why it fell and the archeology around it. Bryan, thanks for joining us.

Bryan Ward-Perkins: It’s a great pleasure.

Adrian Bye: Could you tell us a little bit about your background, who you are and how you got to where you are now?

Bryan Ward-Perkins: The most important thing is I was born in Rome, the center of the Roman Empire.

Adrian Bye: So you are actually Roman?

Bryan Ward-Perkins: Yes, a Roman by birth. My dad was a classical archeologist, a distinguished classical Roman archeologist who wrote a very good book on Roman architecture. I was exposed to things Roman from a very early age. I actually got into it at a slightly later period than my dad was interested in, namely the early Middle Ages and the transition from Rome to a later period. Academically, I studied history, but I always worked partly as an archeologist. So I’ve always been very interested in things as well as texts. I kind of combine a perspective that looks at material and textual evidence. Luckily I have a job in Oxford teaching in the history faculty, and the history faculty allows one to be very broad-minded in terms of what exactly one teaches.

Adrian Bye: In your book you talk about when you were a kid that you guys dug up so much Roman pottery that you just went and threw it away in the river.

Bryan Ward-Perkins: That was actually my dad’s work. I was brought up in a place called the British School of Rome, which is an academic institution with archeologists and artists there. He ran what’s called a field survey, which involved going out to the countryside, walking over ploughed fields and picking up bits of Roman pottery. And you found where there was a villa, or a peasant dwelling, there was always Roman pottery. You could pick it up, chart it on a map, and you could date the settlement from the types of pot used. But that produced tons and tons of pottery, and that obviously creates a storage problem. The reason it was dumped into a river was that if anybody finding it later in that river would think it could have come from anywhere and washed downstream. So it wouldn’t infuse the archeological record. Whereas if you put it in a field, people would suddenly get very excited and think that was a major Roman site where they’d found it.

Adrian Bye: I’ve been to Italy, but I haven’t been to Rome. I wasn’t familiar at all with the Roman Empire. Just recently I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York City that has a big exhibit on the Greek and Roman Empires. It made it a lot more real to see everything there. As a person who hasn’t been exposed to any of this you think that this is old stuff that doesn’t really have any relevance today.

Bryan Ward-Perkins: What is striking about the Roman world in particular, and to some extent the Greek world of the first three centuries A.D., is the scale of economic activity and the reach of economic activity. What’s so striking about the Roman world is that they are making very ordinary things. Pottery is a splendid index of that because it is a very ordinary type of object and never hugely expensive. To make money out of making pottery you have to make it in large quantities and to a very high quality, to a very standardized form and then diffusing it widely. Not just geographically. There were workshops in North Africa in the third and fourth century which were sending material all over the Mediterranean, some of which even reach Britain at that date. But they are also diffusing it socially, so not just people in lead nor just people in towns have it. It actually gets right out to the countryside, to quite low level rural settlements where people we would describe as peasants were actually using imported high quality Roman pottery.

Adrian Bye: So they got quite a system set up. One of the things that struck me from your book is that it felt quite right wing. That’s at least the message I got from it.

Bryan Ward-Perkins: That’s a fair comment. I’m certainly not right wing. I agree, it is about markets and the power of markets. But there is the sting in the tail in the book which is about the danger of over-dependence on such things. I certainly didn’t write it with a political agenda, I wrote it because I know about the material evidence, and a lot of people writing about this period just look at texts.

Adrian Bye: You wrote the book almost ten years ago. How are your views now on the influence of Christianity and the decline? I got the impression that there were a lot of influences that caused it to fall. And it didn’t seem necessarily that they had a sustainable economy. I got the impression a lot of the economy of the Romans was built around acquisition of enemy stuff.

Bryan Ward-Perkins: I don’t actually think the Roman economy did require constant expansion. There is absolutely no doubt at all that in its period of expansion it did extremely well. But by 300 A.D. it had stopped expanding for already 300 years. It had settled down to being an essentially rather effective internal market with a single coinage, no trade barriers, a peaceful Mediterranean with no reason to interrupt trade in the Mediterranean. And to go back to my political views, one thing that I hoped would come out of my book is an interest in ordinary produces and merchants, and people moving stuff being important just as much as the elites of society are important. I think the Roman economy was an effective, efficient machine. It was very specialized. It is an economy that’s based on all the domestic activity and on an elite level on slaves. And a huge slave trade.

Adrian Bye: We know in academia, and you are probably more familiar with this than I am, there are a number of topics that aren’t really supposed to be researched. Essentially in some areas and particularly about gender and race, we have decided as a society not to research these topics based on reason. I actually got quite interested in stoicism. In stoicism they talk about the logos, or nature, which is the concept of the world being based on reason. A really interesting thing I came across is that when Christianity came along they defined the logos as the Word of God. So prior to Christianity the logos, the final word was based on reason. When Christianity came along it was based on the Word of God. Now, our level of reason is much more advanced than it was two thousand years ago, but we still have areas in academia which are not based on reason, and for obvious reasons. I can give you a very uncomfortable topic, that’s race and IQ. That’s a topic we are not allowed to discuss, that’s essentially banned.

Bryan Ward-Perkins: I suppose I would have said that probably all societies in all periods have the unthought, often unsuspected boundaries, and also the unthought, totally unsuspected prejudices which they can’t really detect themselves. If one looks back at our own society just a hundred years ago, we probably believed that women were deeply inferior, weren’t really competent to have the vote. We’d also assume that the British had a god-given right to rule over inferior peoples. I do agree, there is an interesting contrast between the Greek and Roman world and the immediate post-Greek and Roman world with the rise of what we would think of as fundamentalist religious belief. Which to many of us is much less attractive than the Greek or Roman world. I myself find many of the early Christian writers, who at their worst are profoundly fundamentalist and deeply prejudiced against other religions, very unattractive.

Adrian Bye: Since the book has been published, have your thoughts and views on what you wrote changed?

Bryan Ward-Perkins: Not enormously. I think it’s hard to dispute the overall economic message, which is of dramatic change at the end of the Roman world. The thing I like to emphasize is one way of looking at the end of the Roman world is from the material perspective, which I personally think is extremely important. But you can look at the period as a period of dynamic, very interesting change, particularly religious change. Key obviously is the rise of Christianity. In 312, the emperor Constantine happens to be a Christian, by good luck or perhaps will of God, he conquers the whole Roman world, sets up a Christian dynasty. The Roman Empire becomes Christian, which is a massively important change. The whole future, intellectual shape of the western world is determined by that change. There is no denying it is important. And then, third century, out of Arabia, where nobody expected anything ever to come, suddenly emerges a new religion, and an army which conquers the whole Persian Empire, the east Roman Empire, and sets up Islam. So it’s a period with huge dynamic, vastly interesting changes. I was wanting to focus on a different story, which I would define was the end of a civilization, but in very material terms.

Adrian Bye: I want to come back to this thing of the logos. Stoicism is a philosophy built on reason. We know that the Romans weren’t always terribly nice people, and certainly didn’t treat, should we say the unworthy masses, particularly well. I get the feeling that Christianity was sort of a way to take control. When you move away from reason to faith, that becomes a way of disempowering the Romans that are running everything. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Bryan Ward-Perkins: In theory, a switch to Christian values would be a switch away from a lead, in the sense that everybody can have faith. You don’t need to be philosophically trained to have it. In theory at least, Christianity favors the downtrodden. In practice it didn’t quite work out that way, unfortunately. The downtrodden became the recipients of charity, but it was always charity which the elite was using in order to display its wealth. Charity wasn’t really focused on the poor, it was focused on the elites in that they give away money in order to get to have them. And equally, the most striking thing is Christianity didn’t mean people stopped killing each other. Turning the other cheek and loving thy enemy never really functioned. In fact, they looked back to the example of the Old Testament where the God of Israel positively encourages you to slaughter your enemies in the name of God. That was a dreadful discovery; the discovery that you could actually kill people as a religious activity.

Adrian Bye: I mentioned I’m a big fan of stoicism, it’s helped me a lot personally. A lot of stoicism material got destroyed. A friend said that the reason why we have that much material left from stoicism today is because the Arabs kept it.

Bryan Ward-Perkins: Oh, that’s certainly true. And incidentally I’m just thinking about what you were saying about the contrast of the world of the philosophers and the world of the Christians. You are right, there is a big shift. It’s an interesting shift, though, because the world of the philosophers is a world of a very small elite who have studied that stuff, can read Greek, and actually have leisure. None of these people work. They were all sitting there, thinking and feeling, and feeling good. But it only works at the very top levels of society. In no way does that permeate any further down. So if you wanted to look positively at the impact of Christianity, Christianity was a religion that involved a much wider section of society. In fact, elite paganism as well was an essentially elite religion. There were popular forms of it, people going to rural shrines and things like that, but it wasn’t really much involvement for a wider part of society.

Adrian Bye: You are talking about philosophy?

Bryan Ward-Perkins: Yeah, particularly philosophy, but even just the traditional civic paganism that you do in a town. It was very much about the reinforcing of the position of the elite in the town. Christianity was a religion that involved people. There is a big difference in pagan temples where you always got a very small space where the statue of the god was and where only ever a few people got access to, and Christian churches that were always designed to bring vast people into them. One might, or might not, find that attractive. In a way it’s about a shift to a more demotic fundamentalist stir-up-the-crowds type religion which I don’t find terribly attractive. But one has to accept for a fact that it did involve more people, whereas your stoic position is a very elite one.

Adrian Bye: One of the things that is interesting to me is that Paul, the Apostle, if he wasn’t involved in stoicism, he was certainly around it a lot. And it seems that he included a lot of stoicism in Christianity.

Bryan Ward-Perkins: That wouldn’t surprise me. There obviously is a powerful influence. Christianity wasn’t immune. I’m certain the Christians of the third and fourth century were highly educated people who’d imbued Greek or Roman culture and therefore inevitably took into the new Christian culture a lot of what they’d taken from the pre-Christian past. Nobody stopped reading the pre-Christian material. They might be hesitant about the religious message of it, but they went on reading it. It’s undeniable that up until the fourth, fifth century, people wrote things that are self-reflexive. Actually, Christians as well, because ‘Augustine’s Confessions’ is a remarkable book. It’s a very readable account of his own conversion and his move towards Christianity. It’s an intelligent, interesting self-analytical work. We immediately identify much more readily with the literature of the Greek and Roman world, and the thinking of the Greek and Roman world; largely because it’s got people actually thinking about where they are in the world and where they stand. And that just stops at the end of the Roman world.

Adrian Bye: So, moving on to 2013, are we going to fall like the Roman Empire did?

Bryan Ward-Perkins: I very much hope not. My book ends with a moral, which is to tell the modern world that there is a danger of terrible collapse. The Roman world was so sophisticated and so complex that it consisted of lots of people in distant complex economic relationships, which created the widespread prosperity of the Roman world. But precisely because it was so sophisticated, when it collapsed, the collapse was so total. Instead of having people who knew how to make pottery locally, they were buying it from hundreds of kilometers away. When those markets collapsed, they didn’t know how to do it anymore. They weren’t able to recreate local markets. Obviously what happened at the end of the Roman world is nothing to what would happen to our world were our economic complexity to collapse. 2008 did reveal some of the dangers. Fortunately, 2008 in comparison to the end of the Roman world is a mere tiny economic blip, but it did sort of reveal how the extreme complexity that we got ourselves into has its dangers, as well as its benefits. No, I don’t think we are necessarily headed for disaster, but what I do think is that we are walking along a tightrope of complex prosperity, which we need to look after carefully.

Adrian Bye: I think that’s a very good way of saying it. Bryan, thank you very much for doing the interview.

Bryan Ward-Perkins: Thank you, that’s a great pleasure.

Interview Highlights

This is a condensed, lightly edited transcript of an audio interview. The full audio is available and highly recommended. The interviewee may post clarifications in the comments.

Adrian Bye: Today I’m here with Jeffrey Tucker who is CEO of Liberty.me and in the process of launching a startup. He’s been associated with the Mises Institute and runs Laissez Faire Books. Jeffrey, thanks for joining us.

Jeffrey Tucker: It’s really fun to be here.

Adrian Bye: Jeffrey, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and where you come from?

Jeffrey Tucker: Originally, I’m from southwest Texas, where my family has been since about 1832. I’d studied music up to high school, and then into college, and fell in love with economics. It’s kind of another form of music. It’s a discipline that seeks to understand where wealth comes from, why society exists the way it does, whether civilization is rising or falling, whether it’s prosperous or not. I just fell in love with economic as a science, and the more I looked into it the more it seemed very clear to me how human liberty is the key to making the social model work. I’ve spent the rest of my adult life exploring this topic and finding ways to get the word out there about a topic that I think is underrepresented generally in academia and in media.

Adrian Bye: What brought you to Alabama?

Jeffrey Tucker: I came here initially to work for the Mises Institute where I spent a good many years building the website, which was an exciting thing. I remember the first time I discovered the power of the web. I thought, wow, I can take this physical think called a book or an essay on this piece of paper I have, scan it, put it on this little digital thing and it becomes universally acceptable, malleable, and practically immortal. That is a dramatic transformation from something being bound in the physical world. I just fell in love with the idea that I can do this. It was from 1996, 1997 that I thought we had a magic tool here. So I threw myself into the technology and building that world and the chance of putting thousands and thousands of texts online, along with lots of commentary. I built one of the earliest online academies, a specialized wiki page, online communities, and all these sorts of things. I’ve always been intrigued by the prospect of escaping the constraints of the physical world. And that’s what the digital world has allowed us to do.

Adrian Bye: I think that Ayn Rand has saved the world economy.

Since I left the Mises Institute, I founded or refounded Laissez Faire Books, a kind of subscription model, where you subscribe and can download unlimited numbers of books. Now it’s doing very well, so I’m adding to that a startup of my own, called Liberty.me, which is a complete social and publishing solution for this sort of liberty-minded space which is growing internationally. We really need our own little digital civilization. So I’m throwing everything I know at this.

Adrian Bye: I went to university and I was convinced to become a democrat, so I became a democrat for twenty years or so, and then earlier this year I realized that I’m actually a libertarian. I am curious as to what was your process in becoming a libertarian.

Jeffrey Tucker: There are usually little issues that attract people ideologically. Most of them have something to do with the longing for human liberty. I’m convinced that’s the reason why people become hardcore leftists, for example. They believe there is some sort of wicked war machine that needs to be unplugged, or that there is a corporate cartelist system that’s changing the social order in its favor. Or people become rightists because they are convinced the government is too big, is taking too much of our money, and is doing belligerent and nasty things to people. I think both sides are right. People are driven to these ideological corners because their senses have perceived injustice. The reason I became a libertarian anarchist is because I think that this worldview addressed all the injustices all around us and provides a really good understanding for the right way out. My own intellectual trajectory began probably in high school. I read some Ayn Rand, and she really had a way of summing up the drama of capitalism in a fabulous way and crystallizing the human liberty project in a way that very few others have managed to do.

Adrian Bye: I think that Ayn Rand has saved the world economy.

Jeffrey Tucker: She is a very special figure in the history of literature. I loved the way she personalized the project of liberty. Her characters are never victims of the state, they always stand up and say, look, I have human rights, I’m a creator and I can’t let anything stop me. That’s a beautiful attitude. I think libertarians could actually learn a lot from that rather than constantly going to the government and saying: please recognize my rights, please start acknowledging that I am a free person. I think in some ways Rand continues to be the great fuel behind the liberty-minded impulse. There is a time in people’s lives when they first encounter Rand and read something like Atlas Shrugged or Fountainhead. They put down the book and go, damned, I am going to be different. I’m not going to be a victim of anybody, I’m not going to be a put-upon, and I’m not going to be pushed around by any would-be despot. I am going to live a free, independent and happy life. And that’s an amazing thing to happen to a person. That’s a real new revelation that tends to stick with you for ever.

Adrian Bye: How long have you been a libertarian?

Jeffrey Tucker: I mentioned my early experience with Rand. It gave me a nice sense of motivation but not a clear ideological coherence. In college I became something like an archetype of a right wing conservative. Then I discovered that that paradigm is inconsistent and doesn’t explain the world around me. I lost all interest in politics as a method for managing the social order and embraced anarchism as a worldview. That was for me a great liberation. Once you give up this idea that the state really can make any real contribution to our lives, there is kind of an intellectual and mental freeing that takes place. You begin to see beautiful order, lovely things all around you that extend out of human action and human choice rather than being imposed from the top. To me, to be an anarchist is to have a really hopeful outlook on the prospect for humanity’s capability of organizing itself without being imposed upon by central elites, that are either appointed or elected. And that is an exciting thing to discover.

Adrian Bye: Which is what the internet gives us, too. A question about the libertarian community. What percentage of libertarians would you say are lean libertarian left versus libertarian right? There does seem to be that sort of distinction there. I’m wondering is there a 80/20 sort of split?

Jeffrey Tucker: Maybe it’s more like 70/30. It’s not as if the libertarian left opposes private property, for example. It’s just that they have their own kind of issues that they tend to focus on. The left doesn’t like the corporate employment structure, they think it’s mostly artificial. They would tend to be more sympathetic to labor over capitalism if there was a dispute between the two. They are probably more interested in issues of institutionalized racism and sexism, and things like that. I’m not sure there is some serious substance of disagreement between the libertarian left and right. I think it’s really a matter of styling and messaging. One of my best friends is Charles Johnson who is probably the most left of the left of the libertarian left. We meet every week in a little group we call ‘The Anarchist Meetup’. I argue with the right because I tend to be very pro-corporate. I love McDonalds, I think Walmart is heroic, I celebrate corporate capitalism and rich people, so I have all these impulses. He tends to think of Walmart as just a kind of privileged industrial cartel, and McDonalds as benefiting from massive food subsidies and just an extension of a patent protected corporate racket. We argue all the time, but both of us grant that there is truth to what each of us is saying.

Adrian Bye: Tell me about the Mises Institute. Can you explain a little bit what’s been going on there?

Jeffrey Tucker: The Mises Institute began in 1982, long before the internet. It was trying to address a dearth of information that was out there about this great economist that lived from 1881 to 1973, and taught in Austria, in Geneva and then in New York. I fell in love with the Mises Institute because it was dedicated to advancing science and liberty in the tradition of Mises. We were all about publishing in the scholarly and in the popular space in that tradition. I was good friends with Murray Rothbard, who was kind of an economic adviser until he died in 1995. I met him in 1985. He and I hung out a lot together, and he had a huge influence over me. It was a real privilege for me to work there. I finally felt like my job was done there and wanted to take on a new project in the commercial space.

Adrian Bye: Maybe we can talk a little bit about economics. It seems to me that there is almost like a left and right dispute in economics at some level, where the right says: let capitalism run its course, try not to interfere with it; it will go up and down, and it will be bumpy every so often, but it’ll be fine just so leave it alone. And we have the left, or the Keynesian economics, which is essentially saying: no we need the workers to go first and when the workers are okay, that will stimulate capitalism. Is that accurate, or can you explain that?

Jeffrey Tucker: I’d say the main dispute comes down to those who believe that the price system is sort of self-stabilizing and those who think it needs to be prodded this way and that in order to achieve something like an equilibrium or perfect competition. This plays itself out in many ways. In 2008, when the world seemed to be falling apart, basically you have the Austrians saying: that’s what you get when you use the Central Bank to stimulate an artificial boom. Everything gets distorted and out of control. And it’s going to fix itself, and the way to address it is to let liquidation happen even if that means that some investment banks have to go under. Any attempt to fix it is gonna cause more damage. The other point of view, or the general Keynesian point of view is: no, the system fell apart not because of an artificial boom, but because it’s inherently unstable. That is proof that we need government involved, aggregate demand, kicking the economy forward by creating trillions of dollars, subsidizing certain kinds of businesses that are under pressure, and basically hammering the economy so that we can experience prosperity again. So that’s the outlook. I don’t think it worked. They promised that we would be back to normal levels years ago, and it still isn’t. The banking system is really unstable and essentially broken. There are plenty of things wrong with the US economy. Our growth rates are absolutely pathetic. We’ve tried the Keynesian way, and it just hasn’t worked.

Adrian Bye: It kind of makes you wanna have been alive during times like the Wild West, when things were just getting started and they didn’t have all this government getting in the way of everything.

Jeffrey Tucker: That’s right. And that’s sort of what the internet is, and that is why most modern entrepreneurs are exploring this great new real estate called the cloud. It’s a space for freedom. It allows us to exercise our creativity, makes the world new again. The physical world has been mostly ruined by taxing it and regulating it. There is no product that isn’t highly regulated by the central government and taxed. And that made a real mess of the world. But in the internet we are seeing real creativity take place, and in amazing ways. We are seeing innovations that are potentially earth-shattering, and I would list bitcoin as an example of that. We have actually seen innovation in the monetary sphere as well, it’s remarkable.

Adrian Bye: We haven’t talked about your startup. If you can tell us a little bit about it. I know that it hasn’t launched yet.

Jeffrey Tucker: I always thought that whatever is great about the physical world could be reproduced and improved in the digital world. And one of the things that’s great in the libertarian world is hanging out with libertarians. Liberty on the Rocks, there are great conferences, there is FreedomFest. What if you could extend that 24/7, 365 days a year, to an online piece of real estate that provides complete free chat, social networking plus a publishing platform. And it’s all focused on praxis, not so much on theorizing but on ways to achieve liberty without having to ask for government to give it to you. So I wrapped all that up in a package, showed it to some investors who said, that sounds fantastic. Nothing like that exists, lets go for it. I’m hoping to create a happy world of play and surprise and joy and creativity for people who are really interested in freedom right now in our times.

Adrian Bye: Is there anything we haven’t talked about that you would like to cover?

Jeffrey Tucker: Let me just say this as a way of closing. The big problem I see in the libertarian world is there is just too much despair. And the reason for that is that people began to realize that the government is a terrible thing, it’s their enemy, it ruins everything it touches, and it’s just kind of depressing. And if that’s all you focus on, then you can lose interest. So I’m trying to redirect the attention of the liberty-minded community not away from the state, but toward the beauty of private enterprise and human action to remake the world and to a more hopeful outlook. And I encourage libertarians to do startup businesses and to find ways to make the world a better place using the liberties they have to create more for themselves. I think that’s a better way to approach human liberty and it prevents burnout and keeps people involved and excited. And I think that’s a better path than politics, a more productive use of our time.

Adrian Bye: That’s a good thought. Okay. Jeffrey, thank you very much for doing the interview, that’s been great.

Jeffrey Tucker: It has been fun. Thank you so much for having me.

Interview Highlights

This is a condensed, lightly edited transcript of an audio interview. The full audio is available and highly recommended. The interviewee may post clarifications in the comments.

Adrian Bye: Today I’m here with Professor Carl Richard who is a history professor. He’s here to talk to us about the Fall of Rome and hopefully some of the dynamics on why those might happen. Thank you for joining us.

Carl Richard: Thank you for having me.

Adrian Bye: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and your background?

Carl Richard: I’m originally from Louisiana, which is where I teach now. This was my Alma Mater as an undergrad. I got my Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University. I always had an interest in the ancient world, Greece and Rome. I had the Greek and the French, but I didn’t have the Latin and the German. I was a very impatient young man, and I was going to have do all of this tremendous language work to even get started. So I decided to go into American history. My Ph.D. is actually in American and Intellectual History. I was interested in the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution, and so my mentor, Paul Conkin suggested, Why don’t you do the Influence of Greece and Rome on the Founding Fathers? Actually, that was my first book, The Founders and the Classics, was published by Harvard University Press in 1994. I became more and more interested in the ancients doing that work. Some of my books have been geared towards the influence of Greek and Rome in the western world, including the United States, and others have been more about the ancient world itself.

Adrian Bye: This past weekend I went to visit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s house. I would suggest that Thomas Jefferson might have been America’s first geek.

Carl Richard: He was an incredible man. He was a great scientist and inventor. He invented an odometer for his carriage that measured the mileage. He actually invented the rolled-out map. He invented a sort of a primitive copy-machine. He is often portrayed as this forward looking man which he certainly was. But he was also very well educated in history, especially in Greek and Roman history.

Adrian Bye: There was a book by Edward Gibbon published in 1776 on the Fall of Rome that was highly influential. Was Thomas Jefferson the main guy, or were there others that were also reading that and basing the Founding Documents on that book?

Carl Richard: Jefferson was exceptionally well educated, but actually most of the Founders were steeped in Greek and Roman history because that was their educational system. The so-called Grammar School, which I always thought referred to English Grammar, did refer to Latin Grammar. They studied Greek and Latin, but especially Latin for years and years and then went to college and studied usually for three more years. It really influenced the American Revolution because they saw themselves as recreating the ancient republics. They were almost all steeped into the classics. They were especially interested in the late Roman Republic because here they were establishing a new Roman Republic. They even used Roman architecture for the capitol; they used names like the senate for the upper branch. They were trying to recreate the Roman Republic and so they were very much concerned with what is it that killed the original Roman Republic. I would say they were more fascinated by the fall of the Roman Republic than they were by the fall of the Roman empire. Those two things were separated by five centuries. When they talked about the Fall of Rome they didn’t mean the empire, they meant the Republic.

Adrian Bye: I grew up as a reasonably well-educated person. I’d heard of the idea of the Fall of Rome. I went to Angkor Wat in Cambodia a year and a half ago, and I’m aware that there is Machu Picchu and all these other cities around the world, but had never given any thought whatsoever that there might be specific reasons why all these societies had actually failed.   

Carl Richard: I think in the Founders’ generation, back during the Enlightenment in the 18th century, they thought very much in terms of lessons of history. That societies repeated certain mistakes and that if we could learn from this prevent our own society from falling as a result. They tended to be sometimes a little naïve and trying to apply lessons from one time to another. But I think we’ve got the opposite extreme in academia today where we talk that all cultures are completely different and therefore you cannot learn any lessons. In fact, they hate this term of learning lessons because they think it’s naïve. But I think they go too far in that direction. There certainly is a common human nature and therefore there are common human problems and common responses to those problems. Because there is a common human nature we can learn from ancient societies and other societies. We do have to be careful because there are differences in historical context, but I think we can learn.

Adrian Bye: There is a book by Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies. His general thesis is that societies reach a level of complexity and the costs of continuing to the growth of this society outweighs the costs of continuing to run it. So at some point people scatter. You can do things to increase those costs on the system. For example, communism is a way to increase the costs of keeping the society and that will make it fail faster. Me being quite right-wing, I would put all left-wing movements into fairly expensive in terms of keeping the system running. Would you agree with that?

Carl Richard: I do. Government, to some extent, is parasitical. It can only exist in a society that is producing wealth, and the wealth does not come from the government. It comes from private enterprise. If you tax private enterprise too much you’re killing the goose that’s laying the golden egg. When I say tax, it’s not just taxes but regulations. I read somewhere that businesses in America are spending now twice as much money to comply with government regulations as they are spending in taxes. That’s a tax. Every time the government says you must do something and it costs you money to do it, that’s a tax. I think the private enterprises in America are taxed tremendously right now.

Adrian Bye: Can you talk a little bit more about the influence of Rome on the Founding Fathers? What kind of things really stuck out to them, and what kind of things did they embed in the Founding Documents of the United States?

Carl Richard: Maybe the most important thing structurally was this idea of mixed government. This went back to the ancient Greeks. But, as in so many other cases, the Romans were the ones who actually made it work and gave them a model. A mixed government was this theory that the best form of government would balance the power of the one, the few, and the many. The one being the king, the executive or the leader; the few being the rich, the well-born; and the many being the masses. Plato said if you give all the power to one person or group, they will abuse it. And so the one, the few and the many each have to have a veto basically. The Greeks talked about this, but they didn’t really come up with a great model that could be followed. The Romans did. The Roman Republic basically had a balance between one, actually the two consuls or executives; then they had the senate, which was the aristocratic body; and then they had the popular assemblies, where the masses could make their voice heard.

When the Founders got together in Philadelphia to construct the Constitution, they said we want a mixed government just as the Roman Republic had. So they created a king, the president. And then the senate. They even gave it the same name as the Roman aristocratic body. They were given these six year terms, they insulated them from mob pressure so that they could be this sort of aristocratic body. And then the House of Representatives, which was directly elected every two years. That was to be the organ through which the mass will would be heard. They created a system that was like the Roman system based on this classical theory of mixed government.

Adrian Bye: But the Roman system failed.

Carl Richard: Indeed, all systems eventually fail. And they knew that. They knew the Roman system failed and so they were almost obsessed with conducting what I would call an autopsy on the Roman Republic to find out what killed it. But they didn’t think mixed government killed it. They thought mixed government made it strong. It was other things, corruption and various other factors, that caused the Republic to fall.

Adrian Bye: What were the factors that they did think caused Rome to fall?

Carl Richard: Corruption, or what they would call moral decline. This is something that we’ve seen in every level. People were becoming more corrupt on all levels; farmers were losing their land, or voluntarily leaving their land in some cases, and moving to the cities where they were becoming sort of mobs. The government was trying to placate them with the dole, very much like the modern food stamp program. The masses were getting corrupt and so were the aristocrats. One of the things the Founders emphasized was the corruption at all levels in human society. The early Roman Republic that the Founders revered was based on various virtues, as the Founders called them. The early Romans were very religious, pious they would say, they were hard-working, just like early American settlers were. They were frugal, they saved their money; self-discipline. They had a lot of the same qualities. In the late Republic they lost these qualities. They had lost all the virtues that had made them so successful. The Founders were worried that the same thing would happen in America. And I would argue, in our own time a lot of that has happened.

Adrian Bye: One of the things from the Gibbon’s book is that the Romans became quite effeminate. Do you know why that was?  

Carl Richard: The term effeminate was used by the Romans and the Founders to mean the quality of luxury, because there was this classical idea that luxury was a feminine thing. Early Romans were these hard men, tough, working, and so on. Another thing that was called feminine was being dependent on someone else. A real man was someone who was independent. It’s interesting, the very word virtue which the Founders loved to use and spoke about a lot, that’s a Latin word. The word virtue actually comes from the first three letters vir, and vir in Latin is the word for man. So when they spoke of virtue they spoke of manly qualities. The Romans and the Founders were afraid of men losing their manly qualities that they believed were crucial in society.

Adrian Bye: In the US today there is a fear that things could go bad. I don’t hear much talk about comparing it to the Fall of Rome. We think that we have democracy and things will just continue to work. But we’re relying on the ideas of people two hundred plus years ago, and they are untested. We don’t know if they’re gonna work.

Carl Richard: I think it depends on what you mean by untested. I would say it was tested for two centuries and worked pretty well. It’s only recently that it’s declined. I certainly don’t think that we’re at the point where Rome was right before it fell. But I think we may be in a kind of the late imperial period unless we are able to correct our problems. Certainly, we’ve had our problems with debt for decades but it certainly has accelerated, a lot of these things have accelerated. The problem is as each year goes by, it becomes harder and harder to reverse course. For instance, the Roman government in the late years engaged in this extremely excessive spending. How did they pay for these things? There are two methods. One is taxation, and taxes got higher and higher. The other one was devaluing the coinage. They couldn’t do the third one, which is debt, because the banking system wasn’t big enough to support the Roman government. So they used the other two means. They devalued the currency so badly that by the end of the empire the so-called silver coin was only two percent silver and the Roman government would no longer accept their own money as taxes. You had to give goods to the taxman. We are not at that point yet, but certainly the Fed has created over two trillion dollars in money in the last few years. And of course we have high taxes, we also have high debt. So we’ve got all three. It’s not at the point they were at the very end, but it’s getting there.   

Greece and Rome were very religious societies, especially Rome, but their religion was very different from the Judeo-Christian religions. It was very exterior. You did your sacrifices, you did what you were supposed to do and hope that the Gods would be pleased with you and favor you. But it was not at all tied with belief. The very well-educated people were into stoicism and other philosophies. There was some commonality with Christianity which I think helped Christianity spread among the upper classes. For instance, in stoicism there is a belief in a kind of an afterlife. When you’re born your soul comes from the world soul, and when you die it goes back, which is a kind of afterlife. Gibbon blamed Christianity for the fall of the Roman Empire because early Christianity was very much inwardly focused. Great minds like St. Augustine, for instance, if he had not been a Christian, he probably would have been in government. So you have all these Christians sort of retreating from society, looking inwardly, looking toward the next life as opposed to this life. Gibbon believed that was one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman empire. Christianity took all these great minds out of Roman society, they become these sort of celibate priests, bishops living outside the system, and in Gibbon’s mind not really contributing to the system.

Adrian Bye: Thank you very much for doing the interview.

Carl Richard: Thank you.

Interview Highlights

This is a condensed, lightly edited transcript of an audio interview. The full audio is available and highly recommended. The interviewee may post clarifications in the comments.

Adrian Bye: Today we’re here with Warren Farrell who is a well-known author and is here to discuss some of his work over the years, particularly around the topic of feminism. Warren, thanks for joining us.

Warren Farrell: I’m looking forward to it, Adrian.

Adrian Bye: You are one of the pioneers of second-wave feminism. Tell us about that historically.

Warren Farrell: I guess that’s true. My history with feminism began in the late sixties. I was doing my doctorate in political science at New York University and the women’s movement surfaced. My former wife and I went to some of the rallies and she said: Warren, please stay out of this, there is a lot of men hating here. I said, yes, I see that, but I also see that they are really encouraging a reduction of stereotyped roles, and I think we really do need to move from rigid roles. Men and women have a lot more flexibility than society has allowed them to do. We went back and forth on that, and then one day she said to me, I see that when you are talking about these issues there is a fire in your belly that I don’t see as much of when you talk about political science or politics in general. If you want to go ahead and do that, if that’s where your passion is, go for it. And I did. Long story short, the people in the National Organization for Women in New York City, which is where we lived, were about to kick men out of NOW in New York City and it was becoming a big debate in NOW as to whether or not that should be done. The New York City NOW negotiated with national NOW that they would try to do something that would incorporate men and see if it worked. They asked me if I were to start men’s groups on the Thursday evenings on which they had women’s groups once a month. I did and those men’s groups went really well. Then they asked me if I’d run for the Board of Directors in the National Organization for Women in New York City, the New York City chapter. I did that and I served the next three years on the Board of NOW in New York City.

Adrian Bye: How were things back then? For example, my mother has talked about feminism as something very important that has enabled her to work and have a career. These things probably wouldn’t have happened without feminism, or so it seems. Is that the case? Were women’s roles really that rigid that they couldn’t do anything? We had Margaret Thatcher, we had Marie Curie, there have been a lot of women that have been successful.

Warren Farrell: Imagine a gentle young man in the fifties saying, “You know what I want to do when I grow up? I want to be a full-time dad.” It’s not that he couldn’t have become a full-time dad. He might have found a woman somewhere that would have accepted and married him as a full-time dad. But most boys would be discouraged by the resistance. Similarly, we have missed the opportunities for millions, probably billions of women with enormous talents who were frustrated by being confined into a narrow dimension of possibilities. If we believe in maximizing human potential, it is all in our self-interest to encourage men to discover the part of themselves that might want to be a full-time dad and to encourage women to be the part of themselves that might not be so strong and so powerful that they overcome all the odds and become the Madame Curies or the Margaret Thatchers. But we don’t wanna make it so difficult so that only one in ten thousand survives the process.

Adrian Bye: Are you aware of the anthropology research by Margaret Mead?

Warren Farrell: Sure.

Adrian Bye: I imagine her work was fairly influential on second-wave feminism, right?

Warren Farrell: It was. It was not actually very accurate, as it turns out.

Adrian Bye: That’s exactly what I wanted to ask you because this angry white guy Derek Freeman in ANU in Australia went and spent forty years researching it and found out that in fact what Margaret Mead built her career on was not right. And what this fundamentally was about was being able to modify culture in ways that superseded genetics. And Derek Freeman’s comment is, genetics drives culture, not the other way around.

Warren Farrell: Yes, Margaret Mead was partially wrong, and Freeman was partially wrong in my opinion because of what we now know from neuroplasticity and neuroscience. Neuroscience teaches us that genes run very deeply and powerfully, and neuroplasticity research teaches us that culture turns on or turns off genes. We all have enormous genetic potential in us that is turned on or turned off by what happens to us in our cultural experiences. When people used to ask me what is it, nature or nurture, my answer was, “yes”– it’s nature and it’s nurture. Nature influences nurture and nurture influences nature. We now know that this is much more accurate than I believed it was, or anybody believed it was back when I was saying that in the seventies.

Adrian Bye: It is a complex interaction between nature and nurture and the balance is finding which way it goes. It’s going to be different for different things. For some things it will be ninety percent nature and ten percent nurture, and for others it’ll be ten percent nurture and ninety percent nature.

Warren Farrell: Correct. Adrian, it’s extremely important to never let the “it’s nature” argument be used to discourage someone from developing her or his potential. Capitalism succeeds most when people are not trapped by self-fulfilling fears about the limits of their nature.  I don’t want to say to a son, unbecome what I sense you are wanting to be because that’s not natural for you. What’s natural for him will evolve when I give him permission and freedom to be what he wants to be, but I also have responsibility as a parent to educate my daughter and son as to the trade-offs within the framework of cultural confinements of the times (think Mad Men).

My role in the world is taking away the barriers that prevent boys and girls from being whatever they wish to be when they grow up. The feminist movement did an enormous amount of good. It started out liberal and then it evolved into bureaucracy that became concerned with political correctness as it has in the last twenty, thirty years. Human resources and women studies have only allowed the female perspectives, so we no longer have a dialogue between the genders (not that we ever did!). We have basically not a battle of the sexes but a war in which only one side has shown up. Women have been firing the shots and men have been putting their heads in the sand and hoping the bullets would miss. That is not a dialogue.

What I would like to see is not a women’s movement that is demonizing men and undervaluing the family, or a men’s movement that is demonizing women and undervaluing their potential. I’d like to see a gender transition movement in which both genders are helping each other, and all facets of society are helping each other move from the rigid roles of the past to more flexible roles in the future.

Adrian Bye: The understanding of genetics that we have today, a lot of it is missing because academia is left wing. Topics around race and gender are not allowed to be researched. I think we’re not getting the full story because they don’t want to disrupt the feminist revolution. I’m curious as to your thoughts on this.  

Warren Farrell: There is a lot of truth in what you’re saying. The left and the right need to learn from each other. What the left has done is a big mistake. In the universities they cut out dialogue. They’ve turned it into a monologue. They turned it into people who are taking the genetic perspective or the male perspective and they’ve turned them into devils. They demonize men and undervalue the family.

Adrian Bye: My firm believe is, exactly what you’re saying, in academia we have limited the right, the men’s voice is missing, that there in fact is a lot of weakness in the system because of this.

Warren Farrell: Absolutely. The very essence of what universities are supposed to be about is open dialogue. And the very essence of what a democracy is supposed to be about is open dialogue. The very essence of what nature is all about is we see that children are raised best when there is a significant amount of father and a significant amount of mother. It’s almost as if nature created this checks and balances between father and mother. The university has lost checks and balances in the gender dialogue. There is no gender dialogue. It’s women’s studies and gender studies that theoretically are open to both genders. The only discussions of men are within the framework of the conditions of the feminist movement. And so we have a gender monologue. And that’s extremely dangerous because it’s not only in the universities where it exists, it also exists in the divorce courts. Most judges and most people agree that children after a divorce are best raised by both parents. But when a mum objects to the father being involved it takes him a 100,000 to 150,000 or more in money to fight her resistance to this involvement. And that means that father involvement when a mother resists after divorce is confined to only the wealthy dads. And that’s a huge mistake that we’re making because particularly in poor areas children need their father.   

Adrian Bye: I’ll ask one of the controversial questions, not that there is many in gender issues. Since the rise of second-wave feminism we have a lot of school shootings. Do you see a correlation?

Warren Farrell: No, the things that I see as the biggest contributors to school shootings are first boys. Every school shooting or serial killings except for one since the 80s has involved boys, so people often talk about; Is it gun control? Is it mental health? Is it media, violence in the media? Is it feminism? But our daughters and our sons are both exposed to the same amount of feminist influences, our daughters more so. Our daughters and sons both either do or don’t have guns in their home. Our daughters and sons both have mental health issues, and yet it’s our sons that are doing the killing. So the real question that needs to be asked is, What is happening to our boys? Why is this the first time in US history and in the history of most industrialized nations that boys will have less education than their fathers? Why is it that boys’ IQs are fifteen points lower than they used to be? That is not just in the United States, but in Canada and most industrialized nations.

Adrian Bye: To come back to the question on shootings; you don’t feel that there is a relationship? You think that is something unrelated.  

Warren Farrell: The greatest relationship is the lack of attention to boys in the culture and what’s happening with boys. I don’t think there should be gun control, I think there should be gun elimination.

Adrian Bye: Something that is very interesting to me is what was it like to work with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and these people? One of the things that we get from feminism is that we must have empathy. I get the impression that these people were not particularly easy people to get along with.

Warren Farrell: Well, on a scale of one to ten, I would say Betty is somewhere between a zero and one in terms of negative, zero being the least easy to get along with. And Gloria was somewhere between a nine and a half and a ten. Gloria is an extraordinarily generous woman towards both women and men, even though her political views are far more rigid than Betty Friedan’s were. Betty was very condescending toward other women, less condescending but still some toward men. Unless someone was at her status level, or close to it, or could do her some good, she was an extremely condescending person. Most people knew that about her. On the other hand, Gloria was exactly the opposite of that. She was very acknowledging of people, brought them into conversations, made sure they weren’t interrupted. She was really a gem of a person.

Adrian Bye: We are just about out of time. Is there anything that you would like to bring up which we haven’t discussed?

Warren Farrell: Yes. When I thought about MeetInnovators, one of the questions I was thinking about addressing was, What is the most important innovation that we could have for the future? And if I were to answer that question I’d say it’s training boys and girls to communicate with each other at a very early age. That communication training should be part of our school system. We made a huge leap forward in communication skills with Active Listening. But what no one is doing anywhere in the world that I’m aware of is training people who are criticized to be able to escape our normal biological patterning of responding to criticism by becoming defensive. That is, historically and biologically, when we are criticized by another kinship network or tribe, we fear that that might mean that they will be the enemy. And therefore we get up our defenses. Or we would kill the enemy before the enemy would kill us. And therefore our inheritance is to be extraordinarily sensitive to any form of personal criticism, particularly from a loved one where we feel most vulnerable. So we tend to respond to that criticism by becoming defensive. While that was very useful for survival, it is very dysfunctional for love.

When we are criticized, what the person criticizing needs is to feel that we are there supporting what their feelings and their fears are and we are first able to listen to them. When a person criticizing us does feel listened to, they feel more loved by us. When they feel more loved by us, they feel more love for us. But our brains do not associate personal criticism by loved ones with an opportunity for love.

Part of the work that I do with men and women now is to realize real innovation for the future is not just about the substance of male and female issues, it is about getting men and women, parents and children, Israelis and Palestinians, everyone who disagrees to really hear each other and to not do what we usually do when attacked: distort the words of the attacker, and then sidestep the attack and counterattack. If we can bring that about in the next generation, that would be the mother of all innovations.

Adrian Bye: Excellent. Warren, thank you very much for doing the call.

Warren Farrell: You are very welcome, Adrian. It was a real pleasure talking with you.

Interview Highlights

This is a condensed, lightly edited transcript of an audio interview. The full audio is available and highly recommended. The interviewee may post clarifications in the comments.

Adrian Bye: Today I’m here with Hugh Howey. Hugh is doing some pretty amazing things in ebook publishing. He has published one of the top fiction books on Amazon Kindle and is really one of the very first people who is turning the dynamics of publishing upside down. I’m in absolute admiration and feel really honored for having you here. Hugh, thanks for joining us.

Hugh Howey: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Adrian.

Adrian Bye: You set up writing a book and you published it, called Wool. Wool turned into a thing that people liked and so you wrote a whole lot of installments and turned it into a full book. Is that right?

Hugh Howey: I had actually seven or eight other novels out when I wrote Wool. It was just a short story I didn’t think much about. I threw it online and within months it was outselling everything else I had written. I had all these reviewers asking me to continue the story. So I dropped what I was working on and concentrated on writing more of this. I’m just finishing up the third novel of this series. I’ve spent two years writing about this underground world.

Adrian Bye: You had actually written seven or eight books that didn’t take off, and then the short story did?

Hugh Howey: I think I had sold about five thousand accumulative copies of these other stories by the time Wool took off. I thought this was pretty amazing for someone publishing their own books. But nothing like what happened with Wool where I started selling that many copies in a couple of days rather than in lifetime sales.

Adrian Bye: I don’t know how much you can tell about dollar volume, but you got yourself up to $120,000 a month in fiction ebooks, right?

Hugh Howey: Yes. I had some months better than that, but that’s about an average for the last year.

Adrian Bye: What is fascinating to me is I understood that you had written this book Wool and it took off. You actually had been working on it for quite a while and then you found this story that people liked and you built on it.

Hugh Howey: It was kind of sudden. I’d been writing for three years when Wool took off. A lot of people are three years in with writing and they are still trying to find an agent. They don’t have anything published. You might spend three years writing your first novel and then you spend a year calling agents; maybe you land an agent and another year getting a publishing deal and another year before the book comes out. I was writing two or three novels a year, was just publishing them, getting them out there and went on to the next thing. When Wool took off it was without any promotion or any sort of marketing or release event. It was very organic, reader word of mouth. It definitely took me by surprise. I did not see it coming at all.

Adrian Bye: Did you do anything at all? Amazon has all these different programs with cross-selling and promoting and things like that. Did you just do nothing and priced it at a buck?

Hugh Howey: Yes, I priced it at 99 cents and I forgot about it. I wasn’t going to devote my energy into a short story for 99 cents. I didn’t even put a link to it on my website. I was thinking my novels were the things that would eventually do well and so I fully neglected this short story. And that is the thing that shot up the charts and everyone told everyone else to read. So the market kind of showed me what to write more of rather than me trying to write something and force the market to accept it.

Adrian Bye: Would it have been better in hindsight to make it free rather than charge for it so more people can get it?

Hugh Howey: Yes. I actually ran promotions where I would have the thing for free. I would give away tens of thousands of copies. When you’re getting started you are just desperate for anyone to take the time to read your work. Pricing them as inexpensively as possible and giving them away to me makes complete sense as someone just getting their start.

Adrian Bye: How do you know that it’s taking off? I guess you’re looking into your Amazon console to see your sales figures?

Hugh Howey: Yes. You can literally sit there and refresh your KDP dashboard and watch sales trickle in. I would check every week or so to see how my sales were and I noticed, oh my God, I sold like a hundred copies of this Wool story since the last time I checked. You wonder what the heck happened. Did the thing got mentioned somewhere? Why is this taking place? In one month I sold a thousand copies of the story. And I could sit there and refresh and watch the orders move through.

Adrian Bye: When you get a whole lot of traffic to a site or a lot of sales coming in you want to know where they are coming from. Were you able to reverse engineer and figure out what was going on? Where were people talking about you?

Hugh Howey: No I couldn’t. It was happening because one person would tell five other people they had to read this story, others two or three to check it out, and then they would repeat the process. I learned that from reading reviews, exchanging emails with readers and finding out how they heard about it. Later I could see a huge explosive increase in sales and pinned that on a specific media mention. Boing Boing did a review on their front page, Gizmodo put up the book trailer on their front page because the editor-in-chief there was a huge fan. And when that kind of thing would happen I would see a ten times or twenty times increase in sales. Having real time sales data like that would tell me these are the media events that moved books and these are the events that don’t really affect it at all.

Adrian Bye: Which were the ones that tended to affect and not affect?

Hugh Howey: The ones that affected it the most were the ones where you don’t normally see a book review. The Boing Boing and the Gizmodo mentions were huge because these are places where books aren’t mentioned but have a huge audience. So when someone says you should read this book they don’t tell you to read any other book. Just that book, and you get a huge rate of people going on to explore your work. When you get a review at a book review website it’s kind of drowned up by all the other book reviews on the website. Even getting major media like Wall Street Journal and some major television networks that covered the story, they didn’t move the needle nearly as much as a major website that had millions of viewers that were told about one book at a time.

Adrian Bye: Are you saying that traditional media was less effective, that going on Good Morning America is less effective than Gizmodo, for example?

Hugh Howey: If you got on Good Morning America that would be pretty effective. I think it’s the places that have communities built into them. I did a Reddit AMA that I get so much positive feedback from. I just spent the whole day answering questions that came in. And I still get emails from people who say they found out about the book through Reddit. A lot of redditers create sub-reddits to discuss the work and that seems to have a much longer-lasting effect than being part of a machinery that is constantly promoting books. I still value those machines. But working as a bookseller I saw that being even on the cover of the New York Times Book Review didn’t sell a lot of books. That’s pretty amazing because it used to be if you got into the New York Times Book Review that really nudged the needle. It just doesn’t seem to anymore.

Adrian Bye: What you are saying is that the power of balance is starting to shift from all of the traditional stuff to the online stuff in terms of PR.

Hugh Howey: That’s why the President does a Reddit AMA now. We’re trying to tap into where people spend their time. I see people spend so much more time browsing the web and just going to a handful of websites over and over again rather than sitting and watching news on the television or reading the paper. I think it’s important to do whatever you can. I don’t spend a lot of time reaching out to do networking, I just accept anything when people contact me and want to interview me, ask me a few questions or talk to me about anything, I just say yes all the time. I don’t shun one fashion of the media but I have been able to see which ones have worked well for me and it’s been the ones that I’d least expected.

Adrian Bye: What’s really fascinating about what you’re doing aside from how you started is how you then continued because the expectation is you’ve got your ebook selling and now what you need to do is go to New York City and sign a 7-figure deal and hand over all of your copyright and everything else. That is how it works. And you didn’t do that.  

Hugh Howey: I was able to quit my day job and pay my bills on my digital rights. They were more lucrative than what I’ve been offered for my print rights and my digital rights. I would explain the publishers I’m making in a couple of months what you are offering me for lifetime rights. I just don’t see how you’re going to sell that many extra copies of this work or have the long-term interest to justify selling this off. Let’s say twenty years from now I can make all these books that I own free and use that to generate more interest in a new series that I’m writing. I would never get a publisher to make my work free. What I saw really early on was how these books were going to be available forever, and I would much rather have control and ownership of them than a publisher. I have the ability to price my books as low as I want.  

Adrian Bye: Do you actually have conversations with the publishers where you had to say no, or you didn’t even talk to them on this topic?  

Hugh Howey: We turned down quite a few offers. My agent started shopping the book around. She was just interested in having these conversations to get publishers used to hearing that we need different sorts of contracts than the normal variety than these folks that are already bestsellers. Wool has been on the New York Times bestseller list a few times without a publisher’s support. We went through three rounds of offers and over a year period we probably had seven or eight offers from major publishers. They started in the six figure range and went up into the 7 figures. We just kept turning them down until Simon & Schuster came to us with this print-only deal which was one of the things that we were interested in. I keep the digital rights where I was earning so much and have them have the physical book rights and they can distribute to book stores.

Adrian Bye: What’s fascinating to me about you and why I reached out to you is you had to be an entrepreneur the way you handled this. You’ve hung onto all of the rights. That probably wasn’t a lot of effort to do, but you’re setting things up where if you end up with something like Fifty Shades of Grey on your hands, you are going to own the movie rights. You are in an incredible position.

Hugh Howey: I don’t know if I can have a Fifty Shades of Grey without Random House behind you printing that many books and getting them in the front displays in the bookstores. It will be interesting to see if we ever going to see an online equivalent where someone is selling tens of millions of copies of the same books series. It hasn’t happened yet. I did sign my film rights. I optioned them, so someone owns them for eighteen months. What’s really going to be interesting is if the film gets made. They’ve already written the screenplay and it’s in the hands of the film studio now. It’s never a done deal, but if they were to make a movie I’d be in a weird situation where I still own the book rights when the film is out. I don’t know if that has happened before, but it would get interesting very quickly.

Adrian Bye: I was astounded because I know what the press always talks about. Self-publishing is junk and you can’t make any real money publishing books.

Hugh Howey: What’s really heartening for me is the people who are making enough to supplement their income or quit their day job who you don’t even hear about. There’s a lot of people out there making thousands of dollars a month on their ebooks. They have enough readers who have heard of them and are reading all of their material. They are publishing enough material that they are making a solid living. That’s a new phenomena. The mid-list author in traditional publishing has a day job, they don’t earn enough to write on their own. It’s hard to make it as any sort of a writer, but what we are seeing with self-publishing is there are so many more people doing it and so many more people reading. There is more money in the pockets of authors, and I think that’s something to be celebrated.

Adrian Bye: Yes, absolutely. Your story is a success story from Amazon Kindle. What percentage of your sales are on other platforms and which ones actually matter to you?  

Hugh Howey: They all matter to me in that I have people email me that say when is your book going to be available on Kobo or Barnes & Noble, or iTunes. I don’t want to upset readers by not having my work available in various markets. They are all important from that perspective. From a percentage, I probably do 90 to 95% through Amazon. That’s my personal percentage. Industry wide it’s much lower, I think they have forty or fifty percent of the market, iTunes is fifteen to twenty percent.

Adrian Bye: Is there anything you want to tell us that we haven’t covered?

Hugh Howey: It’s such an interesting time to be writing and reading. I’ve been very lucky to have been doing this while the industry changed like it did.

Adrian Bye: Congratulations for making it happen. It’s amazing. So, thank you very much for the interview.

Hugh Howey: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Personal Info

Favourite Books:

• Benjamin Franklin – An American Life by Walter Isaacson
• Cryptonomicon; In the Beginning…was the Command Line; by Neal Stephenson
• Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Most Influenced By:Bob Noyce, Jerry Sanders

Twitter: http://twitter.com/NolanBushnell

Personal Blog: http://nolanbushnell.com/blog

Website: http://atari.com

Relevant Link: http://brainrush.com

Interview Highlights

This is a condensed, lightly edited transcript of an audio interview. The full audio is available and highly recommended. The interviewee may post clarifications in the comments.

Adrian Bye: Today I’m here with Nolan Bushnell who is one of the pioneers of the computer industry. He founded Atari and then went on to found Chuck E. Cheese. He also founded twenty other companies. It’s a real honor to have you here. So, Nolan, thanks for joining us.

Nolan Bushnell: Thank you.  

Adrian Bye: You want to tell us a little bit about your background, where you grew up and how things got started for you?

Nolan Bushnell: I was born and raised in Utah, about halfway between Salt Lake and Ogden. I graduated in electrical engineering, moved to California to the heart of Silicon Valley, and took a job with a company called Ampex, in high-density digital recording and video. It was one of the big movers and shakers in the Valley in the Sixties and Seventies.  

Adrian Bye: How long did you work at Ampex for?

Nolan Bushnell: Just two years.

Adrian Bye: What happened then?

Nolan Bushnell: Basically, I invented the core technology of the video game business, licensed that to a company called Nutting Associates. I went to work for them for a year and then decided to hang out my own shingle. My partner and I, I mean Ted Dabney, started Atari. And our first employee, Al Alcorn, as a training project invented Pong, and we were off to the races.

Adrian Bye: What drew you to California then? I remember as I was growing up seeing there were all these companies in California that were important, like Ampex, Atari, Commodore, and all the others. This was before we heard of Silicon Valley. You went out to California in the 60s. What drew you out there at that time?

Nolan Bushnell: There were two or three reasons. First of all, I thought that semiconductors were going to be important. And it was really where all the semiconductors were being created. Everybody was there, with the exception of Texas Instruments, and even they had a pretty good facility there. You had Intel, National Semiconductor, AMD. You could throw a rock from each of those to the other buildings. They were really the center of gravity of the Silicon research. I just thought that was going to be big, and I went down and interviewed there.

Adrian Bye: It was very clear back then that silicon would be very important.

Nolan Bushnell: Not to everybody. But I was an electrical engineer and I think a lot of people don’t realize the drastic change. Literally, when I started college we were learning about vacuum tubes and when I ended college we were learning about silicon. And semiconductors were such a superior technology to the vacuum tubes. Everything was better with silicon over vacuum tubes. You just didn’t want to build things with vacuum tubes anymore, and that had been the predominant technology basically during the previous century.

Adrian Bye: So you strike out on your own with your partner Ted. You didn’t create the game Pong, you made it first available on home consoles, right? It had been a game before?

Nolan Bushnell: Yes, we played it in college on big computers. Actually I think the very first ping pong game, I mean the very first one that anybody knows of, is by a guy named Willy Higginbotham who did a ping pong game in New York in 1958.

Adrian Bye: What happened next? I’d love to hear the beginning story of Atari.

Nolan Bushnell: We got the original prototype going. At the time we had a work-for-hire contract. When we started Atari our plan was to design games and license them to others. We didn’t perceive ourselves as having the capital or the expertise to go and manufacture ourselves. It seemed like a daunting task. And then we had this game and it was pretty fun. We thought hey, maybe our contractor will accept this instead of the driving game. We basically contracted to do a driving game for them. So we did that, went to them and they were unimpressed for reasons that were real but in the end turns out to be unimportant. Up till then any coin-operated game, video or otherwise, always had a single player mode. A lot of people were in Arcades and they would run around by themselves. To have only a two-player game was perceived to be a marketing flaw. They turned it down and I was disappointed. But the second unit, the company was Bally in Chicago. I climbed on an airplane to go to Chicago. The other game was put into a bar and tested. In fact it went in just before I left, and the first collections came in while I was in Chicago. This was kind of a famous story that’s been told and told. We got a service call that the game had broken, but the only thing that had happened was the coin box had totally filled up so it couldn’t take any more money. This was kind of a fault that we felt we were more than capable of remedying.   

Adrian Bye: What did you do then?

Nolan Bushnell: What you are talking about there was two or three years in. We basically funded the company by bootstrapping. We had no investor until we got a couple million VC money four years after that. Everybody thought that games were silly. How could they possibly be an important business?

Adrian Bye: I was then on the receiving end in Australia. Although I was using the Commodore 64 and not Atari so much, certainly some of my friends were. I’m in Tasmania, Australia, as a twelve year old. How were you getting your work over to my friends in Australia?

Nolan Bushnell: We were being quite successful in terms of selling Pong machines, and these were coin-operated. The coin-operated game business is worldwide just by its nature. But I hadn’t sold internationally. A guy came and said he wanted to represent me internationally. All we had to do was to give him a percentage. We did that and he basically blanketed the world with distributors for us. Probably a year later half of our revenue was derived from foreign markets.

Adrian Bye: How big were you in terms of sales at that point?

Nolan Bushnell: Probably 20 million.

Adrian Bye: So things grew. What happened then?

Nolan Bushnell: Allen Alcorn discovered this really new technology called n-channel for custom chips. And he felt that finally there was a way to put our technology into a consumer product. The price was right, the speed and the performance was right, and so we embarked on that.

Adrian Bye: Why bother doing that when you were already doing well with consoles as they were?

Nolan Bushnell: You know, there is this old thing that Andy Grove said: only the paranoid survive. I always felt that you always had to be aware of sources of potential competition. I felt that if there was a consumer game possible then somebody would do it. And from getting strength with that, they may be able to come back and attack us in the coin-op. I always felt strategically you had to take advantage of opportunities for growth.

Adrian Bye: You sold out and made 28 million dollars on it. Was this a deal you were forced to do? Would you have liked to keep going with Atari?

Nolan Bushnell: Yes and no. I wanted to take some money off the table and I was tired. I’d been fighting cash flow for six years because even though the company was growing we never had cash. A growing company consumes a certain amount of cash even though we were profitable every year. I think if I had just taken a two-week vacation I would have figured out a way to keep from having to sell.

Adrian Bye: And then a couple of years later the company was worth like 2 billion dollars.

Nolan Bushnell: Yes.

Adrian Bye: It seems like you are the genius that’s spotting the early stuff and then maybe letting it go before it gets too big.

Nolan Bushnell: I kind of am. I like the early phases better. Once a company starts to get big the CEO spends all their time with accountants and attorneys, and those guys are really boring.

Adrian Bye: You took 28 million dollars. That’s not a small sum. You were basically set for life back then.

Nolan Bushnell: That’s correct. Though I actually made more money personally on Chuck E. Cheese.

Adrian Bye: Oh really? So why don’t you tell us how that story happened?

Nolan Bushnell: Chuck E. Cheese was started inside Atari and was meant to allow the company to vertically integrate towards this market without really competing. The competition was for locations. I felt if we built our own locations that wouldn’t damage our reputation with our customers who were buying our coin-operated games by thousands.    
Adrian Bye: Were you still connected with Atari at that point or had you totally moved on?

Nolan Bushnell: I actually built the first one about six months prior to my sale to Warner. So it actually went with the sale. But Warner, upon taking over, said we don’t want this, why don’t you sell it off? I said, let me buy it, and they said okay. So I bought that outside of Atari and was growing it slowly while I was actually still working out my Atari contract.

Adrian Bye: So you had the idea for Chuck E. Cheese while you were at Atari, you built it out while you were doing Atari. You saw the next thing, so that was the direction that you went in. Then you sold Atari, you took Chuck E. Cheese back, and that was a complimentary thing that you went to build out as a separate venture.

Nolan Bushnell: Exactly right.

Adrian Bye: You had kids then. Your daughter was starting to grow up, was this what inspired it?  

Nolan Bushnell: Partially. But it was also just the realization that kids wanted to play our games but didn’t have a good venue to do so. Bars weren’t good for them. Believe it or not, this was before pizza parlors had video games in them.  

Adrian Bye: How did Chuck E. Cheese do? Did you scale that all from Northern California, from Silicon Valley?

Nolan Bushnell: Yes. Basically I opened up a shop down the street from Atari and started growing it and franchising. I took that public, did several capital raises to fund the growth, grew it to 250 stores. These were all big locations, doing one and a half to two million dollars a year. That was a pretty substantial company when I sold it.   

Adrian Bye: What did you do after you sold Chuck E. Cheese?

Nolan Bushnell: I started as a Venture Capitalist. I started this thing called Catalyst Technologies, which was the very first technical incubator. We incubated many of the twenty companies we talked about. I wrote the business plan, put people around. We did the first automobile navigation, we did the first online retail.

Adrian Bye: Did it affect your motivation, given that you had cashed out pretty well on two companies already? Or did you just want to keep starting stuff?  

Nolan Bushnell: I liked the idea of starting. I started doing some sailboat racing, and I always liked to travel a lot. My wife and I did a lot of charity work and things like that. I think I wasn’t quite as driven as when I was doing Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, but pretty driven.   

Adrian Bye: So you traveled a bit, you took some time out, started a bunch of different companies and maybe zoomed forward to what you are doing today. You are working on a company doing brain stuff and anti-aging?  

Nolan Bushnell: That’s correct. Basically, I think that I can use some interesting technology that I discovered and literally teach kids ten times faster in terms of certain subjects. And that’s quite interesting to me because I think that right now we have somewhat of a crisis in education. I think our kids are accustomed to a much higher level of interactivity and speed. The classroom is boring to kids today, it was boring when I was growing up. Boring academic institutions destroy enthusiasm which is maybe the worst amputation because I think almost everything in the educational realm comes from enthusiasm.  

Adrian Bye: That intensity when you can really engage in something and do something that really fascinates you.

Nolan Bushnell: Exactly. I could rant and rave about how screwed up school is, not only in how they teach but what they teach, how you fix things, the whole nine yards.

Adrian Bye: I just want to cover a little bit more on your current brain startup. Do you want to tell us how it works?  

Nolan Bushnell: It’s basically a business of creating learning engines, meaning that the brain science is encapsulated in how the information is presented. We are doing it much like Wikipedia where any teacher can put in a piece of curriculum, and they are called BrainRushes. They are ten to fifteen minutes in length for a kid to play, which turns out to be another optimum time frame for holding and generating attention. And with that we have a pretty robust system. What we want to do is crowdsource the curriculum, which means that everybody, every teacher can use it, put in the stuff and then publish it to everybody. And it’s free.

Adrian Bye: That’s a free thing that you’re going to distribute to schools?

Nolan Bushnell: Yes, just go to brainrush.com. Distribute to anybody who wants to learn. They are very simple games, but they actually have underneath the hood some really interesting brain science.

Adrian Bye: And this is from you having founded Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, so I guess this is an area that you know a little bit about?  

Nolan Bushnell: Yes, and it turns out that some of the principles of learning are the same principles that were required to make a good video game. You climb into some of the same neural pathways, you get some of the same endorphin responses. I actually think we can make education as addictive as video games.  

Adrian Bye: I feel like I can sit with you and talk for six hours. Thank you very much Nolan.

Nolan Bushnell: Thank you.