EP86: What is the Free State Project?

Building a community of peaceful, liberty-minded people can create change and build freedom at the local level. New Hampshire...Live Free or Die!

0:00 Ashe Oro: You're listening to the Liberty Entrepreneurs Podcast, episode 86, What is the Free State Project? Let's go.

0:19 Ashe Oro: Hey, so what's up, everyone? Welcome to the Liberty Entrepreneurs Podcast. I've got on the show today a very interesting guy who I've known for a couple years, and he's actually a client of Liberty Virtual Assistants. We got Rodger Paxton. He is on the board of the Free State Project in New Hampshire, which is the reason that I brought him on, but he's also the producer of PorcFest. If my libertarian audience knows what PorcFest is, this is one of the key guys that creates PorcFest for you, and he's the founder and host of The LAVA Flow Podcast, which is part of the Pax Libertas Productions Network. Rodger, welcome to Liberty Entrepreneurs.

0:58 Rodger Paxton: Thanks for having me, Ashe. It's great to connect.

1:00 Ashe Oro: Yeah. Rodger, let's just get started here. What is the Free State Project, and how did you hear about it?

1:07 Rodger Paxton: The Free State Project was started, oh, goodness, about 15 years ago, I guess, now as a ... It was a thesis that Jason Sorens was doing for one of his degrees and was basically an idea of bringing a bunch of libertarians, 20,000, to one small state so they could centralize their activism, their voting, whatever libertarians can do to make that state the freest state in the country, possibly, and exert the maximum effort that they could to make that happen.

1:38 Rodger Paxton: It started, like I said, about 15 years ago. They looked at 10 different states. New Hampshire won the vote, and so then people started moving here almost immediately 10 or 12 years ago, matter of fact, I know several people who have been here for 10 years. I first found out about it in 2010 I believe it was, at the National Libertarian Party Convention. They had a booth there, of all things, and my wife and I were talking to the folks, and I'm for Arkansas. I'm from the deep South.

2:08 Ashe Oro: Right.

2:08 Rodger Paxton: I'm from hot, humid. That's what I love, right? I thought, "There's no way I'm ever going to move to New Hampshire. It snows, and it's cold." I didn't think about it for years, and then after being the chairman of the Libertarian Party for a while and banging my head against that wall, I realized, I've got to do something different. Something has to change.

2:26 Ashe Oro: Yes.

2:27 Rodger Paxton: We started looking at it again. Three years ago, actually, next week will be our three-year anniversary we moved up here, and I've loved being here. It's been amazing journey.

2:36 Ashe Oro: I believe you're a Ron Paul as well, likewise. I remember him saying back in the 2008 election cycle this concept of vote with your feet. What does that mean, and how does the Free State Project tie into that?

2:50 Rodger Paxton: Well, libertarianism is a minority opinion, sadly, and in order to be able to affect libertarian change, we really have to vote with our feet and get these people in one central location. You're never going to have a libertarian government in Texas because they are just so outnumbered, the same with California, the same with most states in the country, you're never going to affect enough change to really have liberty in your lifetime, which is the tagline for the Free State Project.

3:16 Rodger Paxton: Getting 20,000 libertarians in New Hampshire, we can make a huge change. There are so many things going on in New Hampshire. I mean, New Hampshire has over 400 state representatives. That means that the state rep to constituent ratio is extremely low. I mean, I can actually call my state rep on the phone and have a conversation with this person. Tell me where else in the world you can do that?

3:38 Ashe Oro: Right.

3:39 Rodger Paxton: Almost nowhere.

3:40 Ashe Oro: Yeah.

3:41 Rodger Paxton: Being able to affect change like that is so important, and that's why we're trying to get so many here.

3:44 Ashe Oro: Yeah, and compare and contrast that with the federal government and your ability to actually affect change there?

3:52 Rodger Paxton: I have never actually been able to shake the hand of one of my representatives from the federal government ever. I've seen one or two from a distance, but that's the closest. Every once in a while, when I was active in politics, I would get a form letter back if I send an email to my representative. That's about the interaction you get. Of course, you know that it's making no difference. You know you're not making any real change.

4:15 Ashe Oro: Yeah.

4:15 Rodger Paxton: Here, you can actually influence representatives and make change.

4:19 Ashe Oro: Yeah.

4:19 Rodger Paxton: As a matter of fact, we have over two dozen Free State Project members sitting in the State House as representatives right now.

4:26 Ashe Oro: Oh, wow. Yeah, so you said about 200?

4:30 Rodger Paxton: About two dozen, well over two dozen.

4:31 Ashe Oro: Oh, two dozen. I was like, "Yes, 200." That would be awesome.

4:34 Rodger Paxton: I wish I could say 200. Basically, we'll be there in utopia if there were 200.

4:37 Ashe Oro: Yeah, right? How many libertarian type or like-minded ... I don't even like to call people libertarian anymore. It's like free-thinking people, people who want to be left alone, people who believe in property rights, people who understand that governance on the local level is much more effective than governance when you start scaling up the chain up to the federal level, or heaven forbid we ever get a one-world government of some sort like they're testing out in the EU right now with having the Brussels ... Oh, no, like bureaucrats meeting Brussels and try to represent What has been like for you as an entrepreneur to move to a place where you feel like you at least have some level of control over the governing body?

5:27 Rodger Paxton: I'm going to be honest. I never even considered entrepreneurship before I moved here. I thought I was always going to be corporate drone. I was a director of IT for healthcare companies, and I thought the best way to do that was to be a corporate drone and sit in a cube for 10 hours a day, and that was my life. We moved up here, like I said, three years ago, and being around all of the entrepreneurship here just lit a fire in me, like a fire live I've never seen.

5:53 Rodger Paxton: As a matter of fact, the week before PorcFest this year, I lost that corporate drone job, and because I've been working on entrepreneurship and making things happen, it didn't matter. We're still making things happen. We're still making that income. Now, I'm living more free than I've ever lived in my life because I have that entrepreneurship lifestyle where I can stay at home, be with my kids, stop in the middle of the day, and spend an hour watching Star Wars with my kids or whatever the case may be.

6:19 Rodger Paxton: My life has completely done a 180 and that's because of the entrepreneurship spirit in New Hampshire. There are so many libertarian businesses coming out of here. There's cryptocurrency businesses like LBRY. There are regular mom-and-pop shops like Route 11 Goods in Keene. There's media companies. There's so many different libertarian type entrepreneurship companies in New Hampshire that if you're a liberty entrepreneur, New Hampshire is the place to be.

6:46 Ashe Oro: Have you been able to actually affect regulation to make it easy for entrepreneurs because every regulation that the government puts on the books, in some way, shape, or form, restricts the freedom for an entrepreneur to create value to build their business?

7:00 Rodger Paxton: Absolutely, one of the big ones, probably the biggest last year, was New Hampshire, thanks to libertarians going and speaking to our representatives, representatives from LBRY that I mentioned, went and spoke at these hearings, Free Keene and in different places. They are completely hands off now in New Hampshire for cryptocurrency. There is no regulation for cryptocurrency in New Hampshire because of liberty entrepreneurs going and saying, "Hey, this is how we do business. You are going to cripple us if you put restrictions and regulations on cryptocurrency." New Hampshire, as far as I know, is the only state that is completely hands off for cryptocurrency.

7:37 Ashe Oro: Yeah. When you say there's no regulation, there's no government regulation. We still have all the free market baked in regulation.

7:45 Rodger Paxton: Absolutely. Yeah, and I mean strictly government. Obviously, some cryptocurrencies have more regulations than others, and the market will decide on that. I think that that is absolutely the best way to do it. I prefer to use deregulated cryptocurrencies. That's the way I do business.

8:01 Ashe Oro: Yeah. Let's follow that trail for a minute. Back in 2017, everyone was talking about ICOs, and a lot of people made a lot of money. A lot of people lost a lot of money. As soon as people start losing money, then they start screaming for Big Brother to come in and start regulating things. Let's just think of how does the marketplace regulate something like ICOs, new technology, somebody doesn't really know exactly what it is. Most likely, the people screaming for regulation are the ones that are left holding the bag because they just try to get rich. They didn't care about the tech. They didn't care about the community.

8:39 Rodger Paxton: Right.

8:40 Ashe Oro: The market regulates this activity. This is not value-add activity in the marketplace. Pure trying to get rich quick is not really benefiting. Yes, okay, it's price discovery of these tokens, so I can appreciate someone thinking that the price that they're buying is less so than the price than they can sell for. This is just simple price discovery, but markets regulate people who try to, let's say, gamble on price discovery by rewarding the people who were right and taking that value and capital away from the people who were wrong as the price reflects the true value. Do you think that these people would invest again in these ICOs? Well, no, probably not.

9:25 Rodger Paxton: Well, and you mentioned that they didn't care about the tech. They didn't care about the community, and that was the problem. That was the problem. They didn't investigate. They just heard, "Hey, this is a get-rich-quick scheme. I'm just going to jump in without looking at it at all and seeing what chance it has of success or failure." They learned their lesson really quickly. Most of those people, you're right, will probably never jump back into cryptocurrency, at least until it becomes more mainstream, but certainly, they won't be trying to throw a bunch of money at ICOs that may or not happen.

9:53 Rodger Paxton: Have we actually seen a truly successful ICO yet? I mean, not really. There's a lot of reason for that, but a lot of it is because, number one, we had a huge downturn in the cryptocurrency prices, which meant a lot less capital for companies to do things, but also, a lot of the ICO industry were fly-by-night companies who were literally just trying to scam people. Others of those were ideas that really had no reason being on a blockchain. That's the latest buzzword. Oh, I'm going to put it on my blockchain. Well, not everything needs to be on a blockchain.

10:25 Ashe Oro: Right.

10:26 Rodger Paxton: That's just the way it is. A lot of those companies, like a blockchain VPN, well, I'm sorry, I just don't understand the idea behind that. Why do you need to have a blockchain VPN? I have a VPN that works perfectly fine, and it's not a blockchain.

10:38 Ashe Oro: Yeah. No, I know. I think Ethereum is known as the blockchain that launched all these ICOs. I agree with you. Not very many ICOs were successful, and so a lot of people needed to lose a lot of money.

10:53 Rodger Paxton: Yeah.

10:53 Ashe Oro: I should mention that I think that EOS was probably the most successful project that I see on Ethereum, even though they eventually created their own blockchain and now have a successful working product out there, but that's neither here nor there. Rodger, let's talk about PorcFest because I know quite a few of my listeners will know what PorcFest is, but quite a few won't. What is PorcFest? What's the origin of PorcFest, and what does PorcFest stand for?

11:22 Rodger Paxton: PorcFest stands for the Porcupine Freedom Festival. This past summer, in June, we had our 15th annual PorcFest. A PorcFest is basically a week of living our values. We all go out into the woods of New Hampshire at Rodgers Campground, and we spend a week trading with each other voluntarily, spending time with each other, and just living a libertarian lifestyle. It's almost like an anarchist utopia. That's kind of what I like to liken it to, but that's what it is because you've got a bunch of libertarians an anarchist together.

11:54 Rodger Paxton: A lot of people say it's the libertarian version of Burning Man, but it's really man because a lot of Burning Man ... Burning Man is great. I've never actually been, but I've heard it's amazing, but it basically this communist undervalues. You can't buy anything with actual money and all of that, whereas PorcFest is literally like an anarchist utopia. You can buy almost anything you can imagine from food to any kind of cryptocurrency to camping supplies. I mean, you name it, you can buy it there, even some illicit substances, possibly, allegedly.

12:30 Ashe Oro: Only illicit in the government's terms.

12:32 Rodger Paxton: Right. Exactly.

12:33 Ashe Oro: Only illicit through one corporation, aka, the government's opinion, but anyways.

12:38 Rodger Paxton: Right. Absolutely, the biggest monopoly. Absolutely. You can do all of this voluntarily, but it's not just that, it's also ... We have speakers. It's almost like a huge conference. We had over 250 events at this past PorcFest, everything from seeing your favorite podcaster do a live show too, Ben Swann on the main stage giving a keynote speech. I mean, we had it all.

13:01 Ashe Oro: Yeah.

13:01 Rodger Paxton: The best thing about PorcFest is that it's great for everybody. If you're single and you want to meet singles, or if you are a family and you have your kids with you. I mean, my two kids are 10 and 12 now have been to every PorcFest the last three years. The first time they came, they said, "Man, this is better than Disney World." If I had only known that years before, I could've saved thousands of dollars.

13:23 Ashe Oro: I was actually about to ask you, like what do you feel about kids? People hear this idea of anarchist, and they think about scarf-wearing, Molotov-cocktail-throwing, car-flipping, is this what goes on here, or is ...

13:38 Rodger Paxton: No, what you're talking about is authoritarian anarchism. What we're talking about is actual anarchism where people want to interact with each other voluntarily without any use of force, especially use of force by the government. Will you see a lot of people carrying weapons? Absolutely. I carried my pistol all week. You'll see people AR-15, AK-47s, swords, the whole nine yards, but we've never had an issue because we all have this base of understanding that we are going to interact voluntarily. If I don't want to interact with you, I'll either leave PorcFest or I will go to another part of PorcFest.

14:10 Ashe Oro: Right.

14:11 Rodger Paxton: It's a 200-acre facility.

14:13 Ashe Oro: Right.

14:13 Rodger Paxton: Just go somewhere else.

14:14 Ashe Oro: Yeah. You mentioned that Burning Man is a bit on the communist side. I would say maybe the anarcho-communist, whereas PorcFest is on the capitalist, anarcho-capitalist. I, myself, agree with the anarcho-capitalist philosophy, but can you try to describe the similarities and differences between and Ancom and an Ancap?

14:40 Rodger Paxton: Well, so Ancoms say that they want the end of government, yet they call for government assistance and communal assistance all the time. As long as it's done voluntarily, I have no issue with it. If you want to have a communist commune where everybody comes and voluntarily lives in that commune and voluntarily pulls all of their resources, I'm great with that. The problem is that these Ancoms are not so much against the state as they against capitalism and corporatism.

15:10 Rodger Paxton: Oh, I'm against corporatism as well, but I'm certainly not against capitalist, whereas anarcho-capitalism believes that without capitalism, we would not be where we are today and that it also believes that capitalism is the voluntary solution. Now, the word capitalism has been muddied quite a bit over the last couple of decades to where it doesn't mean free market the way that it used to. I generally prefer the term free market over capitalism, but those two words can be interchangeable.

15:39 Ashe Oro: Right. Yeah, and what do you think drives anarcho-communist? What is their mindset? I know a lot of people are angry at the government, and understandably so. They currently are modern day slave drivers. I make money at my job, let's say. They steal X percentage of it before I ever see it. Basically, so I'm working for free for them. If that's not slavery, I don't know what the definition is, but what do you think is the mindset of someone, as in anarcho-communist, and should libertarians and free people and anarcho-capitalist try to pull these people in, or try to engage with these types of people, or is the mindset so incredibly different that their fruit is hanging too high on the tree?

16:36 Rodger Paxton: Well, I think that a lot of anarcho-communists believe that they want fairness, that they really do want fairness for everybody, equality for everybody. They just see equality as different. They want equality of outcomes, whereas we prefer equality of opportunity. I think that that's a big dividing factor, whether we should interact with them and try to pull them over, it really depends on the individual income. I mean, some of them are so vehement in their hatred of anything that creates a profit that I don't think that they can ever be swayed.

17:11 Rodger Paxton: A lot of the rank and file, sure, I mean, I had conversations with Ancoms. Being here in New Hampshire, we had our share as well. Ran into some at a comic book store one time, a couple of years ago, and they had all the Bernie gear on and everything and had a discussion with them about how the free market has progressed us to where we are today. I actually read an article earlier today about how infant mortality rate around the world, even in third-world countries, is dropping dramatically. That's not because of communism. That is because of the free market. I think when you start showing people these things, even anarcho-communists, even they can start to understand.

17:48 Ashe Oro: Well, I hope so. I would love to switch gears here Rodger and talk about Star Wars because I know that you love Star Wars and you make a lot of similarities between Star Wars and our current society. Where did you start to notice this difference and just walk us down your thought path around the similarities here?

18:15 Rodger Paxton: I actually used to do a podcast with a friend of mine, that's on hiatus right now, called Resist the Empire - A libertarian view of the Star Wars universe. It's still out there. You can still subscribe to it. Basically, me and some friends would sit around and watch Star Wars, and we realize that there are so many parallels to what's going on in our current universe. I mean, you've got everything from the religious zealots, say, the Jedi. You've got the government, the Empire. You've got smugglers, and these are the black marketeers. They're the drug sellers or whatever the case may be. There are so many parallels, and there's a lot of libertarian parallels as well.

18:50 Rodger Paxton: You have the Jedi who, at one point, believed in true peace and voluntarism, not so much later in the story, but at certain points in the story, they did. There's a lot of parallels there with real life. I think George Lucas really did a great job of making the show that, while very fantastical and very different than our world, also has so many different parallels with our world.

19:15 Ashe Oro: What is the force then? How does that translate into real life?

19:20 Rodger Paxton: That's a great question, and I'm not certain that anybody can answer that. To me, the force is more of a guiding premise. To me, the force will be similar to the non-aggression principle, while it's not fantastical and supernatural, it's a guiding principle, a guiding light that leads people to true voluntary interaction. I don't believe in the supernatural. I don't believe in mystical forces, but it's great to fantasize about it, I guess.

19:47 Ashe Oro: Yeah, but could the force also be seen as the desire to use aggressive force?

19:54 Rodger Paxton: Well, it depends. I mean, if you're a Sith or if you're a Jedi, I guess. If you're a Sith, then absolutely. You want to tap into that force to take advantage of others and to exert force and power over them, absolutely.

20:07 Ashe Oro: Yeah. Tell us about your podcast a bit, because I think Pax means peace, doesn't it?

20:13 Rodger Paxton: Yeah, so Pax, my last name Paxton, that's where I pulled the Pax from. Paxton actually means son of peace. Pax Libertas is Peace Liberty Productions. We now have seven podcasts on the show, everything from, like I mentioned, there was this Empire, we had Anarcho-Christian Podcast for Christian anarchists, and we have The Big L podcast, which is my latest one with Caryn Ann Harlos, where she digs into the minutia and what's going on the Libertarian Party, the national Libertarian Party. It's kind of an unofficial look into what's going on in that party.

20:48 Rodger Paxton: We've got The Ancap Barber Shop and the Essential Libertarianism. We've got a lot of different shows. My main show, the flagship show that I've been doing for, gosh, almost four years now is The LAVA Flow, and that stands for libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, voluntaryist, and agorist. It's basically where I take the news of the week, and I give you philosophy, voluntaryist philosophy, and then I break down some of the news items that the mainstream media are ignoring, or that even main libertarian podcasts are ignoring.

21:14 Rodger Paxton: I get into these more esoteric topics. Then I a third segment every episode, anything from statists are going to state, and I'll break down something that the state has said on TV or something, and yet another bad cop or I get into some story about where the cops are yet again abusing somebody else, so definitely check it at paxlibertas.com.

21:40 Ashe Oro: Yeah. How did you get involved with the whole libertarian scene, or how did you start thinking like a liberty entrepreneur?

21:49 Rodger Paxton: The first time I heard of libertarianism, I was 19 or 20. This is probably 95, 96. A friend of mine said, "Hey, you've got to check out this Ron Paul guy." I was like, "Oh, yeah, he's pretty cool. He's got some great ideas, but, oh, man, he wants to make drugs legal. He wants to not have borders. He wants to end the war." I mean, he's great on some things.

22:09 Ashe Oro: Right.

22:10 Rodger Paxton: Then I just forgot about it for a while. Then after George Bush, that's when I really was like, "Okay, something's got to give because if he's a conservative, I'm not a conservative," right?

22:19 Ashe Oro: Right. Right. Right.

22:20 Rodger Paxton: If George Bush believes in liberty, then I certainly ... There's a problem here.

22:24 Ashe Oro: Yeah.

22:24 Rodger Paxton: I started looking into what real liberty truly was. I started reading Ron Paul stuff. I started reading Ayn Rand. I picked up some Murray Rothbard, and here I am today.

22:36 Ashe Oro: How do you communicate the ideas of freedom and liberty to your children?

22:43 Rodger Paxton: We radically un-school our children. We don't do any standard schooling. We don't sit them at a desk all day. My kids have never stepped foot in a government indoctrination center.

22:54 Ashe Oro: Good for them.

22:54 Rodger Paxton: I'm so thankful for that, right? As far as I'm concerned, that is one of the most important things you can do for the future of liberty is to not indoctrinate your kids in our government indoctrination centers. Every day, we run into something that we can talk to our kids about liberty. As a matter of fact, we were playing ... My mother-in-law is in town this week and we were playing apples to apples, some kid's game. There was a picture of somebody hitting somebody else with a stick. My 10-year-old, my youngest, you have to explain what this picture is. He says, "This picture is the government abusing somebody else." It's always just little things like that where we can show that, hey, there are always better ways of doing things than using force.

23:39 Ashe Oro: Yes, so two questions here. What keeps you up at night, and where are you finding progress towards a peaceful society?

23:51 Rodger Paxton: What keeps me up at night, being a father, and a husband and, of course, recently losing my job, trying to keep everything together has been ... It's been a challenge. Now, we've been doing just fine, but it's a whole new realm for me. It's a whole new universe for me. It's been the most free that I've ever been in my life, but it's also been a bit stressful, and that gets better every day as more things come into line. Also, the unexpected, unexpected violence, or unexpected illness, or unexpected anything that might harm me and my family. That's what kind of keeps me up. What was the second question, I'm sorry?

24:28:00 Ashe Oro: Where are you seeing progress towards a peaceful society?

24:33:00 Rodger Paxton: New Hampshire, I mean, in 2017 alone, we had medical marijuana. We had constitutional carry pass. We had fireworks regulations dropped. We had 1,500 regulations, business regulations completely wiped away. I think I mentioned medical marijuana, the cryptocurrency. That was in 2017 alone. This is only happening in one state. That's New Hampshire. If you are interested in truly achieving that liberty in our lifetime, New Hampshire is the place to me, hands down.

25:07:00 Ashe Oro: Yeah. I mean, if you're able to find a community of like-minded, liberty-minded individuals, then it can create a lot of support. Someone like me who's a digital nomad, this is something I crave often. I crave being around people who don't ask me who would build the roads. I was just at a cryptocurrency in Vegas last week. The conference closed down, and it was the final party, and everybody is around the bar talking.

25:36:00 Ashe Oro: It still amazes me, Rodger, that our perspective still tends to be so left field for most people that they've never even thought about this stuff. I actually now have a personal rule that as soon as someone asks me who would build the roads, I'll politely excuse myself and leave the conversation. I hear what keeps you up at night. I'm just curious. I imagine that having a like-minded community of free people around you gives you some sort of safety net.

26:13:00 Rodger Paxton: Absolutely. Number one, moving from Arkansas where we had a couple of libertarian events a year to moving to a state where, literally, if you look at the Free State Project calendar, there is something going on every single night of the year where you can hang around with real libertarians.

26:30:00 Ashe Oro: Right.

26:30:00 Rodger Paxton: Find me another place in the world, find me another place in the universe that has that. There's not.

26:34:00 Ashe Oro: Right.

26:34:00 Rodger Paxton: I mean, New Hampshire is the only place. New Hampshire is small enough that you can literally get anywhere in the state in a couple of hours. It was very overwhelming to me as somebody who's very ... I don't usually spend a lot of time with people, especially in Arkansas, so it's very overwhelming for me because I have all of these things going on, and you have to pick and choose what you go do because, in other states, you don't have that choice. In New Hampshire, you do. You can pick and choose the libertarians you want to hang out with, instead of the same 10 libertarians you always have to hang out with.

27:06:00 Ashe Oro: Right.

27:07:00 Rodger Paxton: You mentioned the safety net, so when I first lost my job, of course, I mentioned it in some of our libertarian private groups, and everybody just wrapped their arms around us. They offered us anything that we could possibly need, even offered some financial assistance if we needed it. I was offered several different jobs as far as going back to the corporate universe, and it just was something I was not going to do. Actually, I picked up a couple of projects from that from libertarians in New Hampshire, and that's part of what's helping make all of this work, is those projects that I was able to pick up, yet, still have the freedom to work at home and spend time with my family.

27:45:00 Ashe Oro: Yeah, I know that you're reading books and doing voiceovers and stuff now. I follow you all the time on Facebook. I think that you have some of the wittiest comments and best liberty-themed memes in the entire social media space.

28:01:00 Rodger Paxton: Thank you.

28:02:00 Ashe Oro: If you don't know, Rodger, I highly recommend that you check him out. Check out his podcast. Follow him on social media. Rodger, how can people keep up with you, and how can they keep up with PorcFest and the Free State Project?

28:16:00 Rodger Paxton: Well, to keep up with me, you just go to paxlibertas.com or thelavaflow.com and get it all there. For the FSP, we actually, we have now ... We mentioned that 20,000 number. We've had over 24,000 people sign the pledge to eventually move to New Hampshire. Almost 4,400 people have already moved. We've got almost 5,000 libertarians in state right now. The way that you can go and sign the pledge is at fsp.org/sign. You can also get all the information at fsp.org for PorcFest, which is an event that you do not want to miss. If you've never been to PorcFest, you've got to come. You can get that at porcfest.com. It's P-O-R-C-fest dot com. I'm really hoping to get Ashe there next year so he can be speaking from that main stage for us.

29:04:00 Ashe Oro: Tell us, what does the Porc part of PorcFest mean?

29:08:00 Rodger Paxton: It's porcupine.

29:09:00 Ashe Oro: Okay. Why the porcupine? Is that the mascot?

29:12:00 Rodger Paxton: Yeah, so the mascot of libertarians is generally the porcupine because it's a defensive only animal. It doesn't attack anybody. It runs around. It does its own things. It lives its life, but if you try to attack it, it's going to bear its claws, so to speak, with those spikes.

29:28:00 Ashe Oro: It's going to mess you up.

29:29:00 Rodger Paxton: It's going to mess you up.

29:29:00 Ashe Oro: Right.

29:30:00 Rodger Paxton: That's kind of our mascot.

29:32:00 Ashe Oro: Yeah. I knew that. I wanted to make sure my audience knew that.

29:35:00 Rodger Paxton: Softball.

29:36:00 Ashe Oro: Yeah. We have the porcupine over here in the libertarian camp, and the honey badger in the crypto camp. I think those are two amazing animals. I don't know who's going to screw with either one of those.

29:49:00 Rodger Paxton: Absolutely.

29:50:00 Ashe Oro: Rodger, you are a liberty entrepreneur through and through. I really appreciate what you're trying to do out here. We're both this build freedom type of people. I definitely consider you part of my circle, even though we've never hung out in real life, Rodger-

30:05:00 Rodger Paxton: Not yet.

30:06:00 Ashe Oro: Not yet, we will. I have so much respect for you and what you're doing, and the energy and ideas that you put out in the world, I absolutely love it. If I can help you in any way, please contact me. You got all my details.

30:20:00 Rodger Paxton: Yeah. I want to mention that because starting listening to your show is a huge help when I wanted to become an entrepreneur here in New Hampshire and Liberty VAs. I mean, I literally could not do what I do without my VA, Mike. He is amazing. He's done a great job for me. He's actually taking next week off because he's going on vacation. I'm like, "Oh, my God, what am I going to do without this guy?" He's so great. I mean, your podcast and your company Liberty VAs has been a huge help. Everybody, please, if you need some very inexpensive help with just about anything you could imagine, definitely check out Liberty VAs.

30:53:00 Ashe Oro: Oh, I thank you for that plug there, Rodger. Until next time, everyone, you know what to do, keep building freedom. See you.