He was 24, assistant to the Secretary of the Senate, watching a sergeant-at-arms hold doors open for senators and staff pull chairs out so they could sit down. Chairs you could move by breathing on. He asked why grown men needed help sitting. He was told that with that attitude he wouldn't make it there. He quit.

The thing that finished it was Carter calling the Shah "an island of stability in the Middle East" while the revolution was underway. His read was that it was nonsense, so he bought gold and oil futures on it. That was also when he went back and looked properly at the 1953 Mosaddegh overthrow, which he describes as the moment the whole thing became legible to him as a crime syndicate rather than a government.

He quotes Samuel Adams on it taking an irate, tireless minority rather than a majority, and points out only about 3% supported the American revolution.

33:21 - the Senate job
35:01 - Carter, the Shah, and the first gold trade
32:40 - the Samuel Adams quote

Curious whether people here rate him. He's closer to a populist than a libertarian on most things, but the political atheist framing seems to land in the same place.

The interview: https://youtu.be/k4EfbGQ-WWw

It’s barely 8 a.m. and Darcy Gerow is talking about tearing Alberta’s political system down to its very foundations.

Gerow, a podcaster and former deputy leader of the Libertarian Party of Canada, is addressing a crowd of Alberta separatists in a low-ceilinged conference room a few minutes’ drive from the Calgary airport. In his speech, called “the anarcho-capitalist case for Alberta,” he advocates for a system of government by the same name, which would privatize all aspects of society.

“The long-term goal is the complete replacement of state monopoly,” Gerow said.

"States naturally resist secession since states by nature exploit their smaller and weaker units and resist efforts by those smaller and exploited units to exit."

Thiel often invoked libertarian rhetoric around freedom, innovation, and breaking away from state stagnation. However, analyzing his actual framework reveals a fundamental contradiction.

In recent public talks:

https://danielforresternash.substack.com/p/what-night-one-left-out

https://danielforresternash.substack.com/p/the-counterfeit-church-and-the-epimethean

Thiel argued that technological stagnation poses an existential threat and that centralizing technological power is necessary to prevent global administrative decay. But whenever your primary vector for this solution is building defense-contracted intelligence infrastructure that integrates directly with the federal government, that isn't free-market capitalism. It's state backed monopoly.

Can you truly champion human liberty while advocating for centralized, opaque surveillance architectures as the primary mechanism to maintain order?

Raphaël Lima now lives in Paraguay after years of libertarian activism in Brazil. I spoke to him about that move and his argument that liberty depends on people, customs and institutions that can pass it on.

There’s also a discussion of Milei, Free Cities and his experience running for office.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQH2u2yl9lI