Blair: Well, good afternoon and good evening, everyone.
This is another episode of the Secular Foxhole podcast.
It's actually episode 70.
And today we're happy to have our friend
Robert Begley is returned.
Robert is a certified world class speaking
coach, Och, who helps executives, entrepreneurs and thought leaders deliver more
memorable messages.
He has appeared on national television and
spoken to an audience to audience acclaim across America, including Duke University
Freer Future Fest and the Libre Institute.
He also co hosted The Hero Show, a podcast
that celebrates heroism.
And Robert's here today to discuss a recent
lecture he gave on Alexander Hamilton.
The similarities between Alexander Hamilton
and Ein Rand, but it's also a deeper thought or subject.
Robert, how are you?
Robert: I am fabulous, Blair.
Thank you and Martin for having me on again.
This is one of my very favorite topics.
So let us jump in.
Blair: All right.
Martin: Dive in.
And I will start Martin here.
And then not to give out everything because we want the listener to listen to the whole show,
of course, and reflect.
But why Hamilton?
If you pick one of many and then, of course, the challenge to do a comparison with Rand.
Robert: Yes. Well, one of the many things that I'm Rand, influenced me by.
She has so much respect for America's founders.
And one statement she makes is that America's founders were something that's somewhat
unprecedented in history, where they are both thinkers and they're men of action.
And that always appealed to me because in philosophy, we call this mind and body
integration and thought and action should be together.
And the founders, during the Enlightenment era, there was such an upheaval of ideas
taking place, and this idea of liberty finally was coming to being for the first time in
history on the scale that had never existed.
And that always childhood.
From my own childhood as an American, that always appealed to me.
On a personal note, it was more the George Washington type of hero that stood head and
shoulders for me, his leadership style, but the thinker side.
Okay, like, who are the ones who wrote these documents and these lasting founding
documents? Declaration of Independence.
Martin: And even under a pen name, we will come back to that, right?
Robert: Yes. What was their stature? And so for me, for much of my adult life,
thomas Jefferson was the man.
Declaration of Independence was the document.
Life, Liberty, and pursuit of happiness to me, is still one of the most long lasting and
expressive phrases in the English language and probably in world language.
So Jefferson was a guy for you.
Martin: Even have a paperweight now I interrupt you, Blair.
Robert: Robert, I have a paperweight that I show in my presentation, which I bought in
Monticello and for the longest period of time.
And this love of Jefferson was something that
I felt I bonded with my mother over.
And Hamilton was the opposite in so many ways,
he was the opposite of Jefferson.
So I just had this aversion to who's this guy
who stands for kind of a strong government and some kind of central banking.
I don't want the bank to have anything to do with the government.
I just had this kind of eerie discomfort with Hamilton for much of my life.
But what happened over time, gentlemen, was that I lived in New York City my whole life,
and I'd go into Central Park and I'd see a statue of Hamilton.
I'd go to Columbia University.
Another statue of Hamilton museum of the City
of New York.
Hamilton is right outside that place.
And then up in what is Hamilton Heights, Harlem, his Grange, which had a fourth statue,
and not even George Washington has four singular statues in Manhattan I can't even
call New York City.
So I thought, I have to read about this guy.
I need to look at him, his personality, his character, his impact.
And it jumped out of me that, wow, I got this guy wrong.
And then the other thing that jumps out of me is the heroism of all of the Founders.
Nobody traveled a farther distance to become self made.
I mean, he's born in the Caribbean, in this dirt poor island where slavery is rampant and
no one wants to during the global wars that are happening at this point in the mid 17
hundreds, between France and Britain and the Dutch and the Spanish, the Caribbean was
incredibly important because of the sugar and molasses and different products coming out of
there.
And this is what Hamilton was born into, this
kind of background.
And he literally writes his way off the
island.
He describes a hurricane with such beauty when
he's aged like 1415 years old, and they send him to the mainland America to study.
And so it's the proverbial foreigner comes to America before it's even really America, and
then rises to the top of society by merit.
Okay, purely by merit.
Not because he knew people, but it was ability to come in and carve out his own destiny and
become what we call self made.
So that was, like, one of the major things
that shifted my thinking about Hamilton is that what kind of self made man he was that
always jumped out at me.
I tailor my life trying to be self made, and
I'm like, what this guy did when he's 15, I still haven't done yet.
So those were some of the things.
But if we want to transition to specific
topics so slavery and racism, this is something that he was completely different
from several of the Founders on constitutionalism.
He fought with the Founders with several Founders on business and finance,
industrialism and foreign policy.
Now, any criticism I give of the founders has
to be with this context.
They were all needed to create the United
States of America and united in the the first place where they were united was in opposition
to Britain.
The tyranny that Britain was imposing on the
13 colonies.
And everyone will always, in my mind and my
heart, will always have a special place.
But whereas I totally admired Jefferson early
on in my life, I came to see a lot of differences.
My evaluations of him has definitely gone down over the years, and it's for largely these
different topics constitutionalism slavery and racism, business, finance, industrialism and
foreign policy.
And here's where I look at Hamilton and I say,
iRant is in favor of all of these things in the 20th century.
I don't think anyone any thinker has been as strong and consistent an advocate of those
topics as I, Rand.
So I thought, let me do a compare and contrast
between Rand and of all of the founders I single out Hamilton.
Blair: Yeah, I have to say, I traveled a similar journey.
I was a big Jefferson fan for a long time.
And then I started reading about the others
and sort of soured on Jefferson some.
And then James Madison has taken the mantle
for me.
Okay.
But also seriously in the last year because there's so much about Hamilton out that I
started delving into him.
And then your speech came along to the local
group here and I had to see that.
So thank you for opening the door even further
on Hamilton.
Robert: Sure thing.
Well, if we could go to Hamilton and Madison
when Madison was young, he was very close to Hamilton in writing The Federalist Papers.
If we jump into where the two of them were most successful as a pair was when after the
Revolutionary War was over and America won, the question became, okay, now that we
defeated the British, what kind of country will we have?
And they had this agreement called the Articles of Confederation, which was this
loosely based concept that the states are still free and independent, which is what the
Declaration says 13 free and independent states.
But both Madison and Hamilton realized that, no, we need to connect the state.
We need to unite the states.
And by having a constitution that will make it
the law of the land, by having checks and balances, this will prevent there being one
part of government that dominates over other parts of governments and more importantly,
does not dominate the citizens lives.
James Madison was incredibly important at this
time while Jefferson was away in Europe, jefferson and John Adams, who was stellar
during the Declaration of Independence era, they were both away when the Constitution was
being written.
And this was largely Madison and Hamilton
working together because not only after the Constitution was written, it needed to be
ratified.
And between New York and Virginia, there was
opposition in both states.
Patrick Camry was largely against it, and he
was a much better he was a more towering figure than James Madison.
And in New York.
So that was Virginia.
And in New York, Clinton was the governor and he was very powerful, and he was against the
constitution.
So Hamilton came up with this idea of writing
these Federalist papers, which totaled 85 of them by the time it was done.
And the guys to know what the importance of writing these papers?
85 papers, which they did in about six months while both men were lawyers feeding their
families like running off law practices.
But they would knock out these papers and they
each specialized with different subjects, but written as Martin, alluded to not under their
name.
They used the name public.
Yes, publius.
And because they wanted the words to stand on
their own, they wanted the reader to be objective and not say, oh, this guy Hamilton
wrote that.
I can't stand him, and just dismiss it without
even reading.
But it's interesting.
Historians can tell one difference between the writing styles of Hamilton and Madison.
Madison would use the term wild, W-H-I-L-S-T which is more of a current British expression.
And Hamilton would use wild while and that was one of the ways that they figured out who was
the author, because there was discrepancy afterwards, because the promise was not to
publish, not to say not to identify the authors.
And so Madison, for me, I definitely agree with you on his import.
Certainly during the Constitutional Convention, he took the notes.
He was the major notetaker.
He summarized a lot of the material.
And to me, as a Hamiltonian, I say that was my favorite era in Madison's life.
Some of the differences in fact, I think in all of the other topics that I want to bring
up, there are differences there.
But if we bring in I'm Rand now, on
constitution, one of my absolute favorite quotations from Rand is about, if a drought
strikes them, animals perish.
But man builds irrigation canals, and if a
flood strikes them, animals perish.
Man builds dams.
If a carnivorous pack attacks them, animals perish.
Man writes the Constitution of the United States.
Wow, I get goosebumps just repeating that.
How precise is that?
If we go to current day, can we agree we're being attacked by a carnivorous pack,
particularly over these last few years, and the constitution is our only salvation in the
United States, and I think even Martin over in Europe and Sweden, they could use a taste of
this.
If they had a taste of the US.
Constitution in its original form, they'd be better off.
Blair: I agree.
But let me just question you on that quote
from Rand, wasn't it? She said, the Declaration, not the
constitution.
I could be wrong.
Robert: No, I'm sorry, you are wrong.
What Rand says about the Declaration, that's a
different thing.
She says men should kneel.
If ever men should kneel, it would be in the presence of the Declaration of Independence.
Yes, true.
Which she does call the greatest political
document ever written.
Okay, so let's do a contrast.
The declaration is the and I would agree with her in one sense, that of the importance of
this.
You needed this to get the country off the
ground.
The interesting thing is, at the time that it
was written, it was simply a declaration.
It wasn't a document for the ages because so
many of those ideas were baked into the culture.
And nobody john Adams thought it was average.
He didn't think it was this towering document.
We all properly think it is today, but that doesn't tell you tells you the purpose of
government, but it doesn't tell you this is the law of the land.
That is what the Constitution is.
And that's why America didn't really exist.
It was not yet united until the Constitution itself was ratified, because that is what lays
out the law of the land.
And the Federalist Papers, just coming back to
that, is all the checks and balances of describing what the different parts of
government would be and what their functions are.
But Rand admired both.
In fact, I'll say this, she actually had
problems with the Constitution properly.
Sure.
Yeah.
They wanted to get if we can move them now,
kind of backtrack to the slavery issue.
Hamilton was against slavery.
He started the New York Manumission Society, 1785, and he wanted to eradicate it.
Eventually was in New York.
But I think if we look at history, it was too
soon for slavery to be eradicated.
It was kind of an either or.
Either we start a brand new country, which has never been done of this type in human history,
and we deal with the issue of slavery as soon as we can, or we're at a stalemate over
slavery, and we're not going to have this Constitution because the Southern states, they
were not budging on that.
And this is where Hamilton agreed it's more
important to start the ball rolling.
And if I could give a plug for Brad Thompson,
brad's book on the revolutionary thinkers.
He makes his ball statement.
Before the two American documents, 1776 and 1787, slavery existed everywhere on the globe
throughout history.
Those documents did more to eradicate slavery
than anything else.
And so, again, I'm going back to although I'm
going to criticize certain founders for certain things.
Whoever got both of those documents, kudos to the sky.
Blair: Sure. Now, I think, again, as far as the issue of slavery, I think the founders
thought it was more important to establish the political concept of individual rights that
had never been heard of before.
So you have to get that started, and then you
deal with the slavery issue.
Unfortunately, it took, what, 70 more years or
60 more years for that to happen.
Robert: Hamilton predicted he saw this, he saw that issue.
Hamilton predicted that at some point there will be a civil war and it would be the
Northern industrial Hamiltonian north, free north that would defeat the south.
But he said it would come at a steep price, which we still in America are suffering that
price to this day in a lot of the issues that we have, sadly, mostly that revolve around
race and slavery.
But the thing is, we have to be realistic.
How can you expect some group of men to eradicate an age old institution that has been
around forever, and now they're going to start a brand new country and eradicate slave at the
same time? I think it's too much to ask for.
So, yes, I dare any other country to do what America did.
Right.
I'll just put it and sadly, if we go to
education, particularly the backwards indoctrination that happens in America, you
would think America invented slavery.
It didn't exist even before, right?
Blair: Yes.
Robert: Built on slavery.
Well, guess what?
Brazil imported ten times the amount of slaves than America, so they should be ten times
richer.
Right?
If we go with that logic, if America was built on slavery, but not so.
In fact, if you want that's a perfect segue to the next topic.
Next Hamiltonian topic, which is industrialism, because Brazil never had the
industrialism, and only Britain had industrialism on a scale.
They opened the door for America with this idea of industrialism.
And there's a place called Patterson, New Jersey, probably from where you are, Blair,
maybe 90 minutes drive.
It's about 15 miles west of New York City.
And Hamilton, there's this great 75 foot waterfall there.
Here's the reason why I love this man so much.
They're fighting the Revolutionary War.
America is on the run.
The Washington, Lafayette Hamilton.
They're camped out in this place.
The British have already taken over New York
City, and they're taking a break, and they see this waterfall.
And Hamilton points to it.
He says, after we win this war, we have to
harness that power.
Just what kind of vision is that if you're a
betting man, okay, and you say, what are the ODS of America?
First of all, winning this war, it's like 99 to one odds.
Then turning around and building, making an industrial center when most of the founders
are agrarians.
And these free farmers, and they don't like
industrialism, they don't like banking, which will be the next topic we'll cover.
And Hamilton is envisioning this.
He's like, we have to harness this power.
We have to exploit the Earth for all of its resources and build it to our comfort so we
could have this incredible standard of living.
And there's a beautiful plaque in Pasaic
Falls, and it says, alexander Hamilton envisioned this great potential power of these
scenic falls for industrial development.
And again, he differs from the other founders
on this because they were more thinking.
Most were southerners who had this agrarian
feudal lifestyle that they largely wanted to preserve.
And even the northerners, even like John Adams and the New Englanders, they were somewhat
mixed on industrialism.
They didn't envision the way Hamilton did.
And now, if we tie this into iront, who is a greater proponent of the Industrial Revolution
as a writer, as a thinker, than I'm read.
She just glorifies it in her novels and in her
nonfiction, Capitalism the Unknown Ideal.
And she has an article, The Anti Industrial
Revolution, where she shows the damages that come out of living in an anti industrial
society.
Blair: Yeah.
Martin: Yes.
Blair: Similarities are very striking.
I'll tell you what about now.
Let's go back and touch on the self made aspect of the young Hamilton.
It was very young, as you said, I guess he was self taught, but he wrote that letter that
other people just recognized and said, well, he's not going to learn anything here, we
should send him to the colonies.
Robert: Yes. Self taught.
Yeah. I would say when his mother died, so his
father left, his father abandoned him and his younger brother when he was ten years old.
And then a couple of years later, his mother, both him and his mother got sick.
They're puking up a storm.
He falls asleep and wakes up and she's lying
in bed dead next to him.
Yeah.
Then he moves in with his cousin.
The cousin commits suicide.
I mean, all this is in the Hamilton musical.
It's all covered in the opening song.
I credit Lin Manuel Miranda for synopsising the man's 1st 20 years in an excellent five
minute piece.
But when his mother dies, she leaves him these
books.
Alexander Pope livies the lives of Plutarch
and Hamilton's reading about these heroes.
And he just has this glorious vision.
And he wanted to be kind of like an Achilles, to lead this glorious but short life, to die
on the battlefield, to make a name for himself.
In doing this, he wished there was a war.
That was like his statement to his best
friend, I wish there was a war when he's like twelve years old.
And so the confluence of events with him coming to the United States and then he
studied.
So he wanted to go to what would be called
Princeton University.
He wanted to do a rapid, like, two year
course, cover everything briefly.
And Aaron Burr, his nemesis, was at school at
the time, and they said, no, you can't go that fast.
And James Madison, too.
So he got turned down from Princeton and went
to King's College, which is now known as Columbia University.
And Hamilton and John J. Were the ones who renamed it after America won the war.
They took out a lot of the regal names of streets and institutions.
But at King's College, he was excellent student, loved to write.
He was writing pamphlets when he's like 1516 years old, during the revolutionary era, and
long documents, going again back to writing them anonymously.
And at one point they found out, they're like, it's a collegiant, this guy is he's in
college? And when the war broke out, they closed King's
College.
And Hamilton was a captain of a unit.
He was drilling the militia and so, yeah, these are all self made elements.
Player this is like I'm thinking, again, I'm using myself as a contrast, and I'm like, Man,
I'm sorry, I want to shine this guy's shoes, but I'm not the self made type that he is.
And if we go, even if we think of Iranda, what she experienced in her youth with the Russian
Revolution, the upheaval there and that she survived that and then wrote her way, the both
of them kind of wrote their way out of this real, depressing, disgusting early years of
their lives misery.
And they just had this global this global
vision, this heroic vision of what life could be.
So I think that's about enough on the self made aspect that I can.
Blair: Okay, let's touch on his tenure as George Washington's aide.
Camp yeah, he was brilliant.
Strategist I believe I read.
Robert: Yes, he was in fact Hamilton.
So all he did, he butted heads with Washington
because he wanted to fight, not write.
That's kind of the way he wanted to be on the
battlefield.
And Washington is like, no, you are way too
important.
He could think the way Washington could think,
and he could write letters, dozens of letters every week asking for supplies.
And Hamilton came up with this idea because Washington fought for the British military and
they had this old world form of fighting where you line up on each side, both sides line up,
they count down, and then they shoot at each other and the soldiers die.
And all the generals are off limits because they're going to have tea parties during the
winter when you don't fight.
So it was like a completely different type of
battle.
And the French on the American continent, the
French and English had done this for 150 years, the final one being the French and
Indian War, 1760.
Like, I think 59 to 64 was that war.
And Washington fought during that war.
And Hamilton said, no, we need something
different.
Instead of taking them head on, we would get
slaughtered because they outman us.
They outgun us and they out think us.
So what we need to do is take advantage of the terrain.
We need to pick them off.
We need to have what is kind of today called
guerrilla warfare and fight long enough to bankrupt them, to bankrupt the British bank,
the bank of England, which is funding this war.
And then also where even the English would say, you know, why are we still fighting that
war across the Atlantic Ocean? We got our own problems over here.
And that's precisely what ended up happening.
So that was one of Hamilton's strategies that
he persuaded Washington about.
He wasn't the only one.
But that wasn't Washington's initial plan.
His initial plan was fighting a European war,
European style, and Hamilton persuaded him otherwise.
Blair: Okay, yes.
Now, I agree with Hamilton again about because
of the debt situation, a bank should be formed what can you say about that?
Robert: Yeah. So let's set the context here that America wins the war and they are
bankrupt.
And the 13 colonies, there are border
disputes.
There are currency disputes.
Some states will take the Continental, which was this printed worthless currency, and other
states would not.
And this is again where Hamilton realized we
need to unite these states and we need a central currency where everyone agrees.
And guess what? That currency needs to be backed by precious
metals, by gold and silver.
Even argued with Benjamin Franklin, who was a
printer and kind of wanted to print money to deal with this issue.
But also Jefferson and others were like, we have a new country.
We forget about the debt.
Let's just start all over.
The debt was so high to European nations and to people like Robert Morris, wealthy
businessman who had financed the war.
And Hamilton said, first of all, morally, we
need to pay off the debt, okay? There's a moral obligation and there's a
sanctity in contracts.
That's one thing.
And then secondly, financially, if we pay the debt, we will establish our credit with the
rest of the world.
And because we uphold individual rights and
freedom, we will leapfrog over these countries because we have these incredible resources
here in the colonies that if we go with my industrial system, we are going to surpass
these countries within a couple of decades.
A lot of people knew that.
They actually knew that.
Some Europeans feared that America would
leapfrog over them.
And Spain in particular, they were really
jealous of the rapid ascent.
So several of the founders just wanted to
forget the debt.
They were like, no, let's just wash our hands
and startle over.
So Hamilton had to persuade them that and he
comes up with this idea of the bank of the United States, which was a privately run bank,
but it was chartered to exist for 20 years for the purpose of paying off the debt, and then
it would dissolve after that.
Servicing the debt is the banking term.
And he fought.
He fought with Madison, he fought with
Jefferson.
And this is where it gets a little bit blurry,
particularly whether it's objectivists or libertarians.
They want a sharp line divided between state and economics, and there should not be one
inch of crossover.
But I've talked a lot with my good friend
Richard Salzman about this, and we think it's impossible.
I can't call it a good theory.
That doesn't work in practice.
I don't even think it's not possible.
Even in theory.
The two overlap.
It's called political economy.
And there is an overlap there.
And Hamilton's idea was we have this bank, we
service the debt, we get the country off the ground, and in 20 years it dissolves precisely
what ended up happening.
But before then, there are just two other
quick things here, Blair.
Before then, the first bank was called the
bank of Philadelphia, which robert Morris, the America's first wealthy banker and
businessman, who, as I said, funded the he largely funded the 90% of bullets that were
shot during the war came from the bank account of Robert Morris.
In a few senses, he was kind of like Hamilton's forefather in coming over from
Britain and becoming incredibly successful and wealthy.
So he had the same idea of having this bank and funding the debt and then dissolving.
And in fact, Washington went to morris was the superintendent during the war.
He was the Superintendent of finance.
And he got tarred and feathered, almost
literally.
In fact, Ben Franklin said, be prepared.
Every blood sucker is going to come and call you names that you wouldn't believe, which is
what happened to Morris.
So when George Washington approached him and
said, can you be the Secretary of treasury to run our finances?
Morris said, no, thank you.
But you have a guy on your own staff who could
do it.
That's Alexander Hamilton.
So another thing, Blair and Martin during the war, hamilton is lugging around these massive
volumes of economics books.
Okay?
Blair: Really?
Robert: Yeah. And he's reading them and he's corresponding with Morris.
And one of the things was this famous expression, a debt is a blessing, if not
excessive.
That's the main clause there.
And the idea of credit and debt was not really understood back then.
The idea of credit meant you lend money and you will get paid.
So you're making money kind of work for itself and your reputation is what allows, you know,
is what allows this credit to be something valuable.
But a lot of people were old fashioned and they didn't understand this concept, and they
just thought money and banks were swindlers and all they did was move other people's money
around.
We could see in the 220, 30 years we haven't
advanced that far because that's still kind of the perception of banks today.
But also Hamilton himself founded the bank of New York 1784, which got New York itself.
It was burned out after seven years of fighting during it was British occupied it and
it was kind of their headquarters.
And it was all burned out after the war.
So Hamilton started bank of New York, which got the city itself off the ground.
It was actually the first capital of the country as a result.
So he had a lot of experience, but he had to explain to the Madisons and the Jeffersons who
said, no, there's nothing in the Constitution that says you could charter a bank.
That's not the purpose of government here.
And what is the purpose of government?
That's a that's a broader you know, that's a broader category.
Is it something so if if we want to I want to go back to a term that what Hamilton calls
energetic government.
And this is why libertarians in particular
hate him and I think objectivists who don't like him buy into the libertarian argument,
which is.
That government.
It should only do a few things and nothing else.
And that part I agree with.
But when Hamilton says energetic, meaning,
yes, we need a police force, yes, we need a military, and we'll cover that.
He founded the Coast Guard and wanted a military at West Point.
That was his conception and objective laws.
He was a lawyer.
He wrote this in.
And he wanted sanctity of contract.
All of these things that I ran herself in her political philosophy.
Advocates follow up there.
Blair: No, I was just agreeing with you.
Martin: Go ahead.
Blair: Sorry.
Robert: Okay. Yeah. So just wrapping up with the bank.
So it does what Hamilton wanted it to do and then he dies.
He gets killed.
18 four in the duel with Aaron Burr.
And then 1812 rolls around and America and Britain are at war again and they have no
money to fund this war.
So Madison and Jefferson jefferson is the
president.
No, I'm sorry.
Jefferson handed it over to Madison at this time.
And they're like, even though Hamilton is dead, his idea of having a bank, we need a
bank.
So they founded the Second National Bank and
it financed the war.
And so precisely the reason that Hamilton
wanted it came to fruition to the arch opponents of his idea of having this bank.
And so I think that's a short case that could I would yield now to my friend Richard Salzman
on anything deeper on this idea.
But the thing to keep in mind, privately run,
gold backed so this idea that Hamilton's National Bank was a precursor to the today
central bank and Federal Reserve, that is as opposite as can be.
The two have nothing to do in common except they both have the word government in it.
I don't buy that case.
Martin: Robert, I have a commentary, you said about the Spanish.
He also discussed about how we should set up monetary regarding if it would be like
decimals or tens or whatever, or in these eight pieces, the Spanish.
So that was funny when he mentioned the Spanish were afraid of it.
And then also as interesting in coin collecting and so on and silverstacker, you
could say, have you seen coins that he have minted, in a way, or come up with this idea of
a mint?
Robert: It's interesting, Martin, that you bring that up.
Actually, that was Jefferson's.
Jefferson's.
So they both served.
Jefferson was Secretary of treasury.
And while Hamilton was Secretary no, I'm sorry, jefferson was Secretary of State while
Hamilton was Secretary of treasury.
And so it was actually Jefferson's job to mint
the coins.
And Hamilton wrote about it and praised
Jefferson for his ideas, his design of the coins.
There was definitely some overlap, but he wanted Americans on it.
Hamilton did not want royalty, which was on all coins, all currency before America.
Pretty much it was royalty, I think every country.
And if we look at denominations of American currency, hamilton was on more different
currencies.
I have a picture in my presentation showing
all the different kinds of currencies that he was on the face of.
And of course this reminds me if we go to Ein Rand herself, one of my absolute favorite
articles called The Money Making Personality.
And she says wealth is a product of human
intellect.
And again, this is Hamiltonian because he saw
industrialism comes from the mind, okay, it's taking natural resources that stood under the
natives bare feet forever.
And he's like, no, we need to utilize this by
thinking and by using our thought and labor and putting it to use.
So again, here's the parallel I see between Rand and Hamilton.
And if we look at Wall Street, wall street was born out of Hamilton's idea of having a stock
exchange and allowing traders to speculate on money and make your money work for you.
And of course, there's a famous picture of Iron Rand standing on Wall Street and you can
see the statue of George Washington in the background.
And Hamilton, who was effectively the founder of Wall Street, was died and is now buried on
Wall Street at Trinity Church.
So I think it's a bit of there's another
overlap there between the two of them.
So between Iron's money making personality and
Hamilton's total pro business, pro finance approach, there's overlap there that I can't
say there is with another founder in America's founding era.
Martin: Okay, Robert, I will do before I continue and then also wrap up about I mean,
this is so it's historical, but you really hear back of a history here what's going on in
the world today, especially foreign policy.
But I wanted to have a call to action here
middle and then also on a good note, so I would envision that Alexander Hamilton, if he
would see like Bitcoin and trade and forex trading and others and he could really support
that.
So I will say if you like this value and this
conversation so far, you could send digital telegram a boostogram and send Satushis, for
example, with a symbolic number like 1776 around I think one $2 in fiat currency at
today's date.
So really interesting to hear with Robert.
And yeah, we have his foreign policy and military academy left.
And then, of course, Blair, if you have something but I wanted to put that in because
it's so interesting with fascinating with the history and ideas in action and what he did in
a short time period because he didn't live for so long.
He was a so called like this gentleman to be in duel and ending that too soon.
So that's in a way sad.
But yeah.
So please continue.
And blair.
And okay.
Robert: Blair.
I'm sorry.
Blair: No, go ahead.
Robert: A couple of quick things that Martin said.
First of all, call to action, please support this program, Secular Foxholes.
It is awesome work that the two of you are doing.
I gather it cost maybe a bitcoin, I don't know, put some of my money where my mouth is
and have you get more resources and preferably more reach with the good work that you're
doing.
But we come back to this Bitcoin.
What hamilton thing? One thing I forgot to say was so when he's a
kid in the Caribbean, he works for this import export company, Beekman and Kruger.
In downtown New York, there's a famous street, Beekman, which I'd always whenever I go there
as a kid, I would like that word, but I didn't know this was the guy who had the import
export company.
And they would leave Hamilton for six months
at a time.
They would leave this 1314 year old kid for
six months at a time running while they go to the colonies.
He's running the business and he's cursing out older men who come in with cattle that are
like bone, they're like bony and they're ready to die.
And he's like, compounder what you've just done, this mistake you've just made, and he'd
fatten them up by giving them a lot of water and then trade them up, the value of them.
But one thing if we go to currency so in his head, he had to calculate the exchange rates
of Spanish ducats and Dutch.
I should know, Florence.
I think he had to make these calculations in his head.
So international currency, what you're talking about here, Martin, is this is what Hamilton
is doing, age 13, 1415.
And again, when it came time for United States
and Secretary of treasury, he wanted to unite all of those things.
Now, my last thing on Bitcoin is that I should know more about it by now, which I am
ignorant, more ignorant than I'd like to be.
But I guess my one question is in Hamilton's
idea of currency, it is backed by something.
And that's the part that I tend to be.
If you can explain this to me, I'm open to persuasion.
I mean, I see the value of it because people are using it and the value goes up and down.
But in Hamilton's mind, the currency must be backed by something tangible and objective.
That's where I can't say 100%.
I can't speak to that.
But then again, I'm not that knowledgeable.
Either way, we'll link you that in.
Martin: Show notes when we had the guest dave, Wexler, about explaining about Bitcoin.
Robert: Okay? Yeah, I know.
Dave yes.
Martin: So thanks again for that because we haven't been fought about that and we say we
are newbies also, but to get that AHA moment and then, of course, think about it and learn
from the history.
So, yeah, please continue.
And thanks for that note.
Robert: Sure.
Blair: Blair you have all right, well, thank you.
One thing I'll quickly say about Bitcoin is I think the most attractive aspect about Bitcoin
is it's a decentralized currency.
It's a peer to peer, one person to another
without government interference.
And I think I have the originators some of his
crucial documents that he published, but I haven't gotten to them.
I'm slowly reading through a compilation.
Robert: There.
Martin: You have a good connection, Blair, and you will continue because think if we would
read what they read wrote in these federalist papers and so on and get it the same thing as
Satushi when you see that document or get it explained for somebody who knows a bit more
and explain it for a layman and you get it.
That's the AHA moment.
Same thing when you're reading rant's work and as you have done here, Robert, I mean, it's
amazing to compare and contrast it and then do it in a nice presentation, including that
you're in train of thought and we are interrupting you whole time.
But of course, it's our show.
Robert: One topic, gentlemen, that there's dispute about it.
I totally agree with Blair.
If I could just add one other thing.
So there are two reasons for my caller mistake.
I have not gotten involved with bitcoin.
One was not backed by something concrete.
And two, I totally love the idea of decentralized.
Decentralization.
My fear is the government's going to find a
way to come in and shut this damn thing down because that's all they do, is destroy
everything they touch.
So I have stayed away while this value has
gone up and up and up and up.
That's my short history of bitcoin and what I
like about it and what I'm not sure about it and why I did.
Martin: And thanks again and for the green room.
You gave an offer there how to present it in a good way, to ask about how to support work,
but also to present it so you could say the fellow individual listener understands it.
And there you have your skills and expertise with leopard and others to do that.
So that got me thinking it has to explain in a good way.
Yeah.
So I really have been thinking of it myself
and Robert Blair was introducing me to, for example, services like Swan, Bitcoin and
others, that you could do it in in a safe way and and so it's a development.
So again, you have to get it and then grasp it and then apply it.
Blair: All right, Robert, we're approaching an hour and there's just a few more things you
say in your notes.
You have book comma myth about Alexander
Hamilton, question mark.
Robert: Oh, boy.
There's one book.
Yeah.
What is it, the myth?
Martin: It's my comment during the presentation.
You have these myths about Alexander Hamilton and you took out of your bookshelf book that
explained all these different myths.
Robert: Yeah. So one of the things about Hamilton was because he was an outsider and
here's again with Rand, here are so many parallels with Rand.
He was always the smartest guy in the room and he was brash and I'm Rand, check and check.
Okay.
As far as Rand goes, they were very
Domineering persuasive or aimed to be persuasive.
And this rubbed people the wrong way in many cases.
And because Hamilton's life was cut short, died age 47 in 18 four, and his enemies
outlived him by 20 to something 28, the two most prominent being John Adams and Thomas
Jefferson, who both died July 4, 1826.
And they had a chance to kind of rewrite the
history and say these things about Hamilton.
And I've seen the same thing with Iron Rand.
If someone says, Well, I was in a room with Iron and she said, A, B, and C, we have no way
to verify that.
A lot of this in the book about the myths of
Hamilton is the author goes through that, all of these things, and he debunks so many of
these myths about him.
And that's kind of one of the problems.
And that's where I appreciate the work that Ron Chernow did.
First of all, Hamilton's wife outlived him by 50 years.
And she saw his stature, his legacy being twisted by a lot of these opponents of his.
And again, rewriting history and making it all about only the Declaration and not about the
Constitution.
This definitely had an impact in his life of
what did he do? What did he not do?
Alexander Hamilton and The Persistence of Myth is the name of the book which, as I said, I
highly recommend.
I met the author, Stephen Knott, and chatted
with him about I wish this book came out on audio.
That's what I asked him.
Because I love audiobooks.
I read it.
Martin: You're reading my mind now, Robert.
And I like audiobooks also because the time
and you could do the same thing with podcasting.
But I understand the value of reading a hardcover book.
And I've written a blog post about that with Tim Sanders that talked about love cat and how
your library.
So when I saw your library, I could definitely
say, oh, Robert, he knows the thing to have a library.
But do you have any tip of that? The Federalist Paper like Audible and
audiobooks.
Robert: Yes, I have papers.
And Carrie Ann and I, the first thing we wrote
for the objective standard was a celebration of the Federalist Papers.
When I used to write regularly for the Objective Standards, it would always be kind
of like on this day in history.
And one was on the celebration.
October 1787, I think was The Federalist number one written by Hamilton.
But, yeah.
So I think between the two of them, their
legacies were diminished.
Their impact was diminished partially because
they had very strong characters that didn't mind clashing.
I ran with the conservatives in the 1940s, particularly some of whom could have been her
defenders, maybe Von Mises and Henry Haslett.
On the economic side, there were no
philosophers in her lifetime who were really prominent philosophers who were with her.
And Hamilton had the same thing, the same pattern, where he clashed with all the
Virginians except for George Washington, and he persuaded Washington over time to free his
slaves.
Okay, here's the impact of Hamilton where none
of the Virginians freed their slaves, they all died with their slaves intact.
And Washington, through the efforts of Hamilton, ended up doing that.
And so he clashed on industrialism, he clashed on banking.
He clashed we didn't even get to foreign policy.
He clashed on foreign policy.
They didn't even want there to be an army, a
standing army in his lifetime because they thought that would lead to war.
And Hamilton was like, no, we need not only an army, but we need a military academy to train
soldiers.
And guess what?
West Point, where we fought this battle and Benedict Arnold betrayed us, that's a good
spot.
And also we need a Coast Guard to protect our
shores.
This is tying in again to Iron Ram.
When we look at her famous speech to the graduates at West Point, there dovetails
perfectly with one of my favorite quotes that she says is that West Point has given America
a long line of heroes, known and unknown.
And one of those heroes is Alexander Hamilton.
She might not know, I don't think.
To my knowledge, her favorite founder asked in
the Q and A was Jefferson, and it was only because of the Declaration of Independence.
To my knowledge.
I don't know how much she knew about the other
founders, their personalities, and for much of Hamilton's life and career you asked about in
school.
When I was in school, I didn't know anything
about him.
He's on the $10 bill and he's on the verge of
getting kicked off the $10 bill because they wanted to put a woman on it about seven, eight
years ago.
But it was the musical that came in and kind
of gave this gave him a second life.
And unfortunately, he's not going to be taken
off currency now.
I think Andrew Jackson is in danger of being
booted off the currency at some point.
Those are a couple of other things that I
think are important in Hamilton, distinguishing him from the other founders.
And then a couple of centuries later, Ein Rand distinguished from other intellectuals in her
era, and their message is largely bastardized.
How often do you see an article on Iran where
they get everything wrong about her and it's usually on purpose?
Blair: Far too often.
Yeah.
Robert: And it's kind of the same thing with this persistence of myth with Hamilton as
well, where they say these things about him and his ideas that just are not grounded in
fact.
Martin: But thanks to you, Robert, and others, you could go to the source and do you want to
end on that? Because your presentation really made an
impact and how you could have really, in a positive way, stamp something into your head,
but voluntarily.
Robert: That was a perfect setup.
In baseball, Martin, we call that a hanging
curveball.
Blair: That's right.
Robert: Yes. So the stamps so Hamilton is on the stamp.
In 1957 was 200th anniversary.
So he's on the $3 stamp.
And in the 1980 $3 stamp.
Did I say $3?
I'm sorry.
$0.03.
Thank you.
Sure.
$3 stamps are coming probably, right?
Blair: Yeah. Really?
Robert: I still use proudly.
I still use stamps, I still write letters, I
still card.
I definitely advocate that older way of
communication.
But in the 1990s, I took part in a letter
writing campaign because my sister worked at Minkus Stamp department and she gave me a
magazine that had an article.
Here's something by you, that Lady Anne Rand
that you like.
Martin: Do you have that read meals?
Robert: Why? I like stamp collecting.
And I'm like, wow, what an awesome story.
Because she's looking for heroes.
And this was something I would bond with my mother over.
I said there should be a stamp about her.
And sure enough, and I think it was 1997, it
was passed 33 cent stamp.
So Hamilton's on the three cent and ran eleven
times.
Is it?
And this beautiful art deco.
Blair: Yes.
Robert: Beautiful type painting of her wrapping this up.
It brings up this idea.
They both made a stamp, they made a statement
with their lives, and they've inspired me to make different kinds of statements.
I don't know if my letter writing ended up having an impact, but I took some kind of
action.
And that's what I think.
If there are takeaways for your audience, don't be the passenger.
Don't be the passenger in your life.
What kind of stamp do you want to make in your
life? And I think the two of you with this program,
there's an opportunity this will outlast you.
What can we do that, first of all, that we can
enjoy during our lifetime? That's kind of the first thing.
But the second thing is what will outlast you.
And I'm always personally striving for that in
my own life.
I think for your listeners, I think that's a
good goal to aim for.
Blair: Outstanding.
Thank you so much, Robert.
Thank you.
Martin: Thank you very much, Robert.
Blair: All right, well, we've been talking with Robert Begley.
He is an entrepreneur himself, a speaking coach.
And Robert, thanks again.
We hope to have you back.
And thanks for manning the Foxhole with us.
Martin: Yes, that's good.
When you are in the Foxhole and if you have
internet connection or some other, how could listeners reach out to.
Robert: You and find my website? Robert@begley.com is my email website.
Robert Begley.
Begley.com.
You could google me.
I'm out there.
I'm in the process of kind of revamping all that material.
But I have tons of writing, tons of speaking out there, have upcoming presentations coming
up and coaching all the time.
My goal is I help presenters to wow their
audience.
Sadly, I think too many speakers do not know
the import and how to be very effective on stage.
And that's one of the things I aim to help and often do help presenters, whether it's on the
boardroom or on a national stage.
Blair: Very good.
Awesome.
All right, that's a wrap.
Martin: Yeah. Thanks.
Robert: Thank you.
Blair: All right, ladies and gentlemen, we are planning to air this on July 4, america's
247th birthday.
Happy birthday, America.
I speak for myself when I say I'm so grateful to our founders and I'll never apologize for
what they did for us.
But that's our plan for this episode with
Robert.
Robert, do you have anything to add?
Robert: Yes, I would go a step further.
Not only never apologize, I will always be
grateful for everything they did.
Every July 4, I hold a zoom based reading and
celebration of the Declaration, which flair you and I did this in Connecticut.
Blair: Oh, yes.
Robert: Or so ago.
And we also make it a point.
After we go around the room reading paragraph by paragraph, then we end the reading by
naming all of the signers.
Because there were so many names that we don't
know.
Yes.
Thank you.
Thomas Jefferson.
John Hancock.
Benjamin Frank Franklin.
But there are others, and they deserve that merit as well.
So celebrating American independence is a global thing.
Martin does it in his own way in Sweden.
And Iran called this the greatest document in
political history.
So let's celebrate it.
Martin: And thanks for that.
And as an American spirit, I really am
interested to be part of that also.
We could talk about that.
Robert and I have my proposal to have a new holiday, and that's December 16 for
celebrating the Boston Tea Party.
That we could talk for some other time.
And I thank the Industrial Revolution and entrepreneurs and others, and the Hero Show
that you have.
If everything goes according to plan, it will
be published on July 4 on Independence Day, when we are recording this on June 24.
So, again, you could have a hat tip and thank you.
Thank you, guys.
Yeah.
Blair: All right.
You're welcome, Robert.
Thanks.