WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.020 Joining us now is Dave Smith, husband, father, comedian and libertarian, host of Part of 00:00:05.020 --> 00:00:05.880 the Problem podcast. 00:00:06.640 --> 00:00:10.840 Dave, I want to have you on the program because I want him to sufficiently celebrate the pardon 00:00:10.840 --> 00:00:13.660 of Ross Ulbricht with somebody who understands the issue. 00:00:13.800 --> 00:00:15.720 I've been pushing for Ross very, very hard. 00:00:15.800 --> 00:00:18.760 In fact, it was my greatest failure of the first Trump administration. 00:00:19.380 --> 00:00:22.200 The last couple of weeks, I tried so hard to get him out of federal prison. 00:00:22.600 --> 00:00:26.620 Ross Ulbricht is a free man with a full and unconditional pardon. 00:00:29.260 --> 00:00:33.220 Who is Ross Albrecht, what was he convicted of, and what is the significance of this 00:00:33.220 --> 00:00:33.460 apartment? 00:00:34.600 --> 00:00:39.080 Sure, thanks for having me, Charlie. And I appreciate your work on this issue as well. 00:00:39.660 --> 00:00:46.440 A lot of people were really in President Trump's ear about this case. Ross Ulbrich was, he 00:00:46.440 --> 00:00:53.620 was essentially convicted of starting a website. Now, the feds would say that he was convicted 00:00:53.620 --> 00:00:58.780 of money laundering or drug dealing. But the logic of it would essentially be like if you 00:01:03.180 --> 00:01:07.140 But this wasn't just the government shutting down Craigslist. This was the government 00:01:08.260 --> 00:01:14.160 arresting Craig and giving him two life sentences plus 40 years when he had not committed a 00:01:14.160 --> 00:01:16.060 violent crime at all. 00:01:16.940 --> 00:01:19.320 And it was just so preposterous. 00:01:20.020 --> 00:01:23.020 I saw Michael Knowles was tweeting 00:01:23.020 --> 00:01:24.440 about this and I went back and 00:01:24.440 --> 00:01:25.340 forth with him a little bit. 00:01:25.420 --> 00:01:26.340 And by the way, I like Michael 00:01:26.340 --> 00:01:27.580 Knowles, I'm not knocking him. 00:01:27.880 --> 00:01:28.680 But he was kind of saying, 00:01:29.000 --> 00:01:30.220 I understand why libertarians 00:01:30.220 --> 00:01:31.160 are supporting this, but 00:01:31.160 --> 00:01:33.000 why do conservatives care about 00:01:33.000 --> 00:01:35.140 this guy who created like a website 00:01:35.140 --> 00:01:36.880 where drugs were being sold on it? 00:01:37.520 --> 00:01:39.260 And I think that it's interesting 00:01:39.260 --> 00:01:40.040 because I've been listening to 00:01:40.040 --> 00:01:41.440 a few minutes of your show as I 00:01:41.440 --> 00:01:42.060 was waiting here. 00:01:42.300 --> 00:01:43.660 And I think that you kind of laid 00:01:43.660 --> 00:01:44.780 it all out already. 00:01:45.840 --> 00:01:50.760 Look, first of all, conservatives, the highest priority should be conserving liberty. 00:01:51.600 --> 00:01:57.760 And aside from that, look, that your framing of 2020 was spot on, and this was a color 00:01:57.760 --> 00:01:59.440 coded revolution that we just lived. 00:01:59.620 --> 00:02:05.720 It had all the earmarks of a color coded revolution, I'll say, to borrow the Fed's terminology. 00:02:06.990 --> 00:02:09.670 Look, first of all, the judge in 00:02:09.670 --> 00:02:12.810 the case, she was a woke judge who 00:02:12.810 --> 00:02:15.370 said at one point that if a drug 00:02:15.370 --> 00:02:17.630 dealer in the Bronx had been caught, 00:02:17.770 --> 00:02:19.330 they'd have the book thrown at them. 00:02:19.790 --> 00:02:21.770 Therefore, we're going to make an 00:02:21.770 --> 00:02:23.110 example out of this kid. 00:02:23.270 --> 00:02:25.010 This totally backward, 00:02:26.590 --> 00:02:29.090 racist, woke logic that we should 00:02:29.090 --> 00:02:31.010 punish this kid for the color of 00:02:31.010 --> 00:02:31.590 his skin. 00:02:32.010 --> 00:02:37.510 And I've met his mother several times. She's been all over the place for the last decade. 00:02:37.990 --> 00:02:44.210 Just Lin Albrecht was tirelessly advocating for her son. The fact that Donald Trump just ended 00:02:44.210 --> 00:02:50.390 this poor woman's nightmare and just free to kid. Look man, I mean, I know I'm a hardcore libertarian 00:02:50.390 --> 00:02:54.190 and I know that there are some issues where conservatives and libertarians disagree. 00:02:54.590 --> 00:03:01.320 But I mean, the idea of giving somebody a double life sentence plus 40 years, I can't- 00:03:01.320 --> 00:03:06.480 We all agree that that should be reserved for violent criminals, murderers, people who 00:03:06.480 --> 00:03:08.540 abuse children, something like that. 00:03:08.720 --> 00:03:13.140 The idea that a guy committed a website, he did nearly 11 years in prison for it. 00:03:13.860 --> 00:03:18.920 Thank you, President Trump, and God bless him for free in this guy. 00:03:20.080 --> 00:03:24.520 Yeah, one more detail on this. And by the way, this is part of the coalition. So you're 00:03:24.520 --> 00:03:27.940 going to have libertarians as part of a coalition. You're going to have more aggressive people 00:03:27.940 --> 00:03:31.740 on foreign policy, which I'm not with them on this. You have to build a coalition and 00:03:31.740 --> 00:03:35.280 you have to have non-negotiational principles that when they're broken, they're out of it. 00:03:35.360 --> 00:03:38.000 They're off the team. Like John Bolton is never coming back on the team. That's just 00:03:38.000 --> 00:03:41.500 not going to happen. Liz Cheney's never come back on the team. But let me just emphasize 00:03:44.800 --> 00:03:48.980 was operating, it shouldn't it have been protected 00:03:49.544 --> 00:03:51.280 theoretically by section 230. 00:03:51.920 --> 00:03:55.300 For example, Mark Zuckerberg is not going to go to jail, 00:03:55.620 --> 00:04:00.060 nor should he if somebody uses WhatsApp to traffic drugs, 00:04:00.160 --> 00:04:02.120 which of course it's probably happening, right? 00:04:02.540 --> 00:04:04.820 Or if somebody uses Instagram or Facebook, 00:04:05.400 --> 00:04:07.420 to illegally smuggle guns. 00:04:07.840 --> 00:04:10.020 So why wasn't Ross Ulbricht afforded 00:04:10.020 --> 00:04:11.940 the same Section 230 protections 00:04:12.180 --> 00:04:17.080 that the biggest drug companies are given on a daily basis? 00:04:18.270 --> 00:04:23.890 Yeah, I mean, that's a great question and the answer to it is essentially that he started 00:04:23.890 --> 00:04:24.390 a market. 00:04:24.590 --> 00:04:29.490 He was a big Ron Paul supporter and this is why a lot of libertarians got behind him, 00:04:29.550 --> 00:04:30.850 kind of felt like he was one of us. 00:04:31.530 --> 00:04:35.470 But what he was trying to do was start a marketplace where you could trade in Bitcoin 00:04:36.030 --> 00:04:39.510 and it would be away from government surveillance or government control. 00:04:39.830 --> 00:04:42.370 And so this is why they went after him and made an example. 00:04:42.590 --> 00:04:45.930 I mean, look, first of all, you're absolutely right, he should have been protected by 230. 00:04:47.630 --> 00:04:51.930 who played ball with the previous regimes are nobody's thinking about going after Zuckerberg 00:04:51.930 --> 00:04:52.310 like this. 00:04:52.530 --> 00:04:55.470 I mean, I said this kind of tongue-in-cheek, but I was saying on Twitter the other day, 00:04:55.810 --> 00:05:00.070 I mean, like a whole lot of people launder money and buy prostitution and drugs with 00:05:00.070 --> 00:05:05.970 cash, but we're not locking up the Fed chairman over it, which by the way, that one I might 00:05:05.970 --> 00:05:10.690 support doing, but I might be convinced on this logic if that's what we were doing. 00:05:10.850 --> 00:05:13.790 But that's one of the things that I think conservatives should really pay attention 00:05:13.790 --> 00:05:14.270 to, right? 00:05:16.840 --> 00:05:23.700 for so many years now, where you have these laws or whatever on the books. 00:05:24.060 --> 00:05:28.040 But then, who do they go after versus who they don't go after? 00:05:28.160 --> 00:05:29.620 I mean, you see this all over the place, right? 00:05:30.100 --> 00:05:34.080 In California, in many of these blue cities, they're not going to go after the people doing 00:05:34.080 --> 00:05:34.960 carjackings. 00:05:35.100 --> 00:05:38.120 They're not going to go after the people stealing strong arm robbing stores. 00:05:39.280 --> 00:05:48.220 Let a property owner with a legal firearm try to defend themselves against one of these criminals and they will throw the entire book against that person. 00:05:48.560 --> 00:05:54.480 You know, a lot of this would be cleaned up if they just let the Second Amendment take care of this stuff and let citizens protect their own property. 00:05:54.760 --> 00:06:03.980 But so that's what you have here in this Ross Ulbricht case, a case where they targeted this guy in a way that they would never have gone after others for the exact same as you as you planned. 00:06:04.160 --> 00:06:08.360 Zuckerberg just admitted the other day when he did this turnaround, which I was happy to see that. 00:06:08.650 --> 00:06:11.890 Yeah, we got a real problem with child trafficking on this site. 00:06:12.150 --> 00:06:16.250 And we all probably want to take measures to make sure that child trafficking is eliminated. 00:06:16.330 --> 00:06:21.130 But no one even thinks Zuckerberg should go to prison for life over it because that's 00:06:21.130 --> 00:06:21.630 madness. 00:06:23.020 --> 00:06:29.600 Two life sentences and the other element here that you touched on Dave of why they went after Ross with such ferocity 00:06:29.600 --> 00:06:36.740 was because he was a pioneer of cryptocurrency and you got to give Trump credit in the libertarian world is 00:06:37.560 --> 00:06:43.460 That he really has decided to tell the Jamie diamonds to go pound sand. We are seeing an ascendant 00:06:43.460 --> 00:06:45.880 type of public policy 00:06:46.540 --> 00:06:50.680 portfolio where cryptocurrency is going to be allowed. There was a question, Dave, you remember 00:06:50.680 --> 00:06:54.500 this six or seven years ago, was Elizabeth Warren and the worst people in government, 00:06:54.660 --> 00:06:58.440 are they going to allow crypto to continue? Are they going to just say that it's illegal? 00:06:58.960 --> 00:07:03.640 Ross Ulbricht was one of the early pioneers of decentralized blockchain technology. 00:07:04.180 --> 00:07:08.140 I believe they wanted to put him on a show trial for that reason, saying that no, 00:07:08.400 --> 00:07:14.120 you must use the government authored currency or else. But now President Trump has 00:07:14.640 --> 00:07:18.880 fully embraced cryptocurrency. I think Roger Ver, by the way, who also deserves a pardon, 00:07:19.200 --> 00:07:24.800 is kind of equally in that category. I'm pushing for Roger as well, because they wanted to make 00:07:24.800 --> 00:07:30.860 examples of no, you must use our own monopoly on money. Can you comment on that? And also, 00:07:31.300 --> 00:07:35.900 President Trump has a crypto czar and wants to be the most pro-crypto president in history. 00:07:37.040 --> 00:07:43.800 Yeah, well, it's really remarkable to me to watch Donald Trump's evolution on a lot of 00:07:43.800 --> 00:07:44.260 these issues. 00:07:44.460 --> 00:07:46.520 And Donald Trump is- 00:07:46.990 --> 00:07:53.970 is not without his faults. And one of those obviously is, yes, of course. And one of Donald 00:07:53.970 --> 00:07:58.210 Trump's faults is that he has an ego for sure. I mean, I'm guilty of the same thing as well, 00:07:58.230 --> 00:08:01.790 and I haven't accomplished nearly as much as he has in life, so I'm not knocking him for it. 00:08:02.030 --> 00:08:08.010 But even Donald Trump admitted that his first go around, he just really didn't know much about DC. 00:08:13.880 --> 00:08:18.380 how vicious the swamp was, and how many brutal tactics they had, and- 00:08:18.570 --> 00:08:24.890 got burned quite a bit in his first term. And I do think that he's shown an eagerness to learn 00:08:24.890 --> 00:08:28.490 since then. And he's gotten, as you were just pointing out before I joined you, 00:08:28.550 --> 00:08:33.730 he's gotten a lot better people around him this time. And this is one of the areas where the 00:08:33.730 --> 00:08:39.070 idea of cryptocurrency, specifically Bitcoin, where he's really come around, I believe, 00:08:39.250 --> 00:08:43.830 on this issue. And I'm impressed with the fact that he's listening to smart people, 00:08:43.990 --> 00:08:47.750 which by the way, you remember eight years ago, this was one of the knocks on Donald. 00:08:47.850 --> 00:08:51.170 Trump that he doesn't listen to anybody and he thinks he has all the answers himself. 00:08:51.370 --> 00:08:58.730 But he's already kind of proven that not to be not true. And so I love David Sacks being 00:08:58.730 --> 00:09:03.890 in there and I think it's a very interesting dynamic. There's a lot of possibilities. Of 00:09:03.890 --> 00:09:08.110 course, as I'm sure you know, the swamp isn't defeated yet and I'm sure they will be coming 00:09:08.110 --> 00:09:09.450 back at Donald Trump. 00:09:11.530 --> 00:09:15.710 They're gonna try, look, a lot of the stuff they tried didn't work and they've tried just 00:09:15.710 --> 00:09:16.930 about everything so far. 00:09:17.090 --> 00:09:22.610 But right now, I mean, there's gonna be an attempt to remove all of the good people around 00:09:22.610 --> 00:09:23.250 Donald Trump. 00:09:23.330 --> 00:09:26.570 That's what they did last time when they got Flynn out and they got Bannon out and they 00:09:26.570 --> 00:09:28.990 got a lot of the outsiders out of power. 00:09:29.950 --> 00:09:35.190 But regardless, I think your point is spot on. This was it was always about protecting power 00:09:35.190 --> 00:09:41.190 and the most the lifeblood of big government power is the money supply. 00:09:41.510 --> 00:09:45.770 And they wanted to make an example out of anybody who would challenge that monopoly. 00:09:46.510 --> 00:09:50.410 Donald, I don't think that's gonna be happening under the next Donald Trump administration.