Sal the Agorist | Agorism the Quantum Leap | Common S3nse - 2026

Moving on, we're going to have Samuel Edward Konkin and he's going to talk about agorism and the quantum leap. Please welcome to the stage Samuel Edward Konkin.

Yeah.

Thanks, man. Appreciate you. Thank you guys. Let me just get my notes here. I can't see you though.

You can see me. So, what I'd like to do is tell you guys a little bit a little bit about agorism. Oh, is this mine? The other one. Cool.

All right. So, what I want to do is talk to you about agorism. I am Samuel Edward Konkin. If you guys are on Twitter, you might follow me. I don't know, but um the idea here is that I believe agorism is the only consistent theory of the political economy.

And I've sort of come up with this metaphor that it's sort of like the quantum theory of the social sciences and that is because it is the only consistent theory of the social sciences. And I'll talk a little bit about crypto anarchism because I think that the crypto anarchists have provided us with the tools to actually put these ideas into practice. This is unimportant. Um agorism is essentially um the the definition that I am most most comfortable with is that it is a unique form of entrepreneurship in which we seek not just profits. We're okay with profits.

We think that's totally fine, but we also want an element of disruption in that in that entrepreneurial sphere. Um Every other libertarian strategy here is inconsistent, okay? And I'm not even going to talk about the other forms of political theories because if you're not if you haven't come to the realization that the politicians are evil, I I don't know what to tell you. This conversation is not for you. This is only for the people who realize that the pedophiles are bad people.

Um we have minarchists here, right? These are the the small government people. Um a government is still a government. It doesn't matter how big it is. It still has the power to coerce you and tell you what to do and to take your Um the anarcho-capitalists sort of are the next sort of uh advancement here.

At least they accept they understand that these people are bad people, but they lack any sort of coherent strategy to defeat them. And of course voting, you know, they want you to do that, you know, it's your your voting is consent. Um but in agorism, we refuse to compromise, and we say we're not going to play your political games. We refuse to even come to the table to negotiate with you people. You have no right to tell me what to do or to interfere in my life whatsoever.

So, what we do instead is we build the alternative economy or the counter-economy until the old one withers out, dries up, and dies. Um here's a little comparison that I've come up with here. Uh classical politics is sort of like Aristotelian natural philosophy. And I'm not a scientist, but um and the ancaps are sort of like classical physics. It's like the next sort of advancement.

All right, it was a little bit more of a consistent theory. Uh and agorism is sort of the new the new quantum mechanics or I don't know, string theory if you're a physicist. I don't really know. But uh here we have so the the crypto-anarchists have really given us the tools needed to put these ideas into practice and here are some good examples. Um obviously agorism we're going I'll talk more about Bitcoin soon when I I want to talk about Ross Ulbricht, too, cuz I think that case is sort of misunderstood.

But there are some great tools that you guys can use here to put these ideas into practice. You don't need permission from politicians to live free. We already have the tools to do so. In fact, while we're here we're we're filming a documentary about that very topic about tools that people can use to live free in an increasingly totalitarian world. I'm a firm believer that those tools already exist.

Yes, the government is still going to be oppressive. They're still going to try to take your money. They're still going to try to ruin your life and they will succeed in some cases, but we have the tools needed to at least mitigate some of that harm. Uh these are some more tools, some more uh stuff you can use here to um stay free. Again, some more here.

Um So Ross Ross's case is very interesting to me because Ross was a uh pronounced agorist, right? He was one of the first to say I am an agorist. Here's why I'm what I'm doing is agorism. Ross read the book uh Alongside Night, which was written by um uh two agorists uh J Neil Stevenson and um uh Samuel Edward Konkin. They were actually driving across the country together.

They came up with these ideas and they wrote a sci-fi book called Alongside Night. They made a terrible movie about it um with uh Kevin Sorbo. Did any of you guys Anybody saw Hercules? No? Anyway, it's a bad movie, but if you're need something to watch for an hour, it's a pretty good explainer of the agorist revolution.

But uh you know, what Ross did, I think what Ross did that was so um what the government didn't like, right? He It wasn't that he built a website. It wasn't that he had a marketplace where you could buy weed on. They don't really give a about that kind of stuff. What Ross did was that he proved that Bitcoin is not a novelty.

It's not just some token that, you know, you send a bunch to your friend and he sends you back to say, "Oh, look how cool that is, right?" He proved that the utility of Bitcoin is that we can have a we can have secure transactions between two people who are not face-to-face. Right? And what did the Austrian economists say? What did Menger say?

What did Mises say? They said that in order for a commodity to become money, it must have a a non-monetary utility. And what Ross did was he proved what that non-monetary utility was. Again, just creating a secure transaction between two people who are not face-to-face. So, if I'm in New York, you're in Amsterdam, I can send you money securely without the need of a third party like PayPal or Visa or Wells Fargo, and that's why he posed such a big threat to him.

That's why they gave him double life plus 40. You don't get double life plus 40 for selling drugs. Um you know, he got he got a worse sentence than some of the people at The Hague. And that's because he was the first person, the first not even just the first American, the first real person to go toe-to-toe with a banking cabal and just look them in the eye and say no. So, they don't, you know, they don't fear your vote.

They don't fear your political participation. They fear you opting out and creating alternatives to their system. Um these are just some ideas you can take um if you're interested uh in actually putting these ideas into practice. Obviously, read Sam Konkin. Um you know, it says study black and gray markets, but I'll be honest with you, most of us are probably already engaging in some of these transactions and not even knowing it.

If you engage in an untaxed transaction, uh that's a gray market. So, you're already halfway there. Uh and I I'd be I I would go so far as to say that we probably all break the law once or twice a day, right? You don't wear a seatbelt or you jaywalk or something like that. So, we're really not that far out.

Um you know, I tell people agorism is as simple as becoming your own bank. Buy yourself a 3D printer because um if they come for your guns, I mean, in America we have guns, so. If they come for the guns, I'm not going to fight them over. I'm not going to die for my guns. Go ahead, take them.

I'll be pissed. But, guess what? As soon as they're gone, I get my 3D printer up and running and I'll have a new a new arsenal before they get to my neighbor's house. So, we have to find We have to find solutions like that. And it's not just 3D printing.

Also, like a garden, right? Like you know, Per Bylund, who is a an economist at the University of Oklahoma, he has this paper that was published at lewrockwell.com in 2006. It's called The Strategy for Pushing Back. And he goes a little bit deeper into the agorist ideology.

And what he says is that you take um a local production facility that bypasses state regulations. And you take the fruits of that production and you trade it in a voluntary or peer-to-peer way. And that becomes a very powerful tool for disruption. So, a blockchain miner is a local production facility of currency. A 3D printer is a local production facility of guns.

Um a garden is a local production facility of food. And when you take your the stuff that you make at the garden and you that you grow and you take it to the farmer's market and you sell it for silver coins or crypto, that becomes a much more powerful tool for disruption. And I'm not saying you're going to de- defeat the government by growing potatoes, but uh it's a lot better than voting. It's much more efficient than voting in that regard. Uh some quick resources for you.

Um NLM, which was Sam Konkin's first book, sort of the founding text of agorism. Uh Agorist Primer is another one. I also wrote a book a while back called Anti-Politics, which is meant to be like a foundational reading um for people who are interested in agorism. It's a collection of essays about that topic and about civil disobedience, sort of the history, the anarchist history and theory of how we arrived at these ideas. It's It's sort of similar to this talk in sense that I present agorism as the culmination of previous thinkers.

We have the tech guys. Cake Wallet and and Monero work great. Edge Wallet and Zano work great. Um support your political prisoners. Uh Ian Freeman, please go to freeiannow.

org. Sign the petition. Help get a good man out of prison. Uh I think it's billandkeoni.org and um obviously, I think the Tornado Cash guys were here or they're going to be here.

So, we should Do if you have crypto, a lot of you guys do, donate some of it to these guys. They need it. Um yeah, and that's about it, I think. All right, guys. Thank you.

Thanks, bro.

Yes, thank you very much. Um are you willing to take any questions?

Yes, of course.

Are there any questions? Debate, someone wants to know a little bit more. Yes, please. Because I I would say he gave a very very interesting speech about agorism and um basically how you can go about it and, you know, little steps go a long way. That's what I'm going to say.

So, I think it's very important. Uh uh

All right. I'm I'm going to have mess with you here cuz it's too good of an opportunity. Who builds the roads?

Who builds the roads now?

I think there's another one over there, so

[laughter]

Who builds the roads? Nobody. We don't drive anymore in an anarchist society. There are no cars. We only You know, look, think about it like this.

People say that, but who builds the roads today? It's It's It's sounds like a stupid question, but it actually is one of those things that we have to answer, right? And right now the government doesn't build roads. Politicians do not know how to lay rock in a flat way. That's how incompetent these people are.

They have to hire third parties to do it for them and then they keep a cut for themselves.

Well done, sir. Well done. Touche.

Thank you. Yes. I thought I'd have to sit down for that one.

Uh do you have any other questions? Um and to add up to that, I would say it little baby steps go a long way. Oh, I think there's another question. Yeah. Here you go.

Hey, um Sal, could we see your slide again of the privacy coins that you were listing? I saw a bunch of them that I know in the beginning, but then the other ones at the end I didn't know. And which of those do you think are good investments? No one one earlier?

Privacy coins, okay, there you go. So, Zano, Zano is wonderful because you can I I like Zano because you can tokenize things on it. I know Ellie opened her speech today, opened the conference by saying, "We're not going to talk about tokenization." I actually think tokenization is super disruptive. Now, you're going to get me going here because so FINRA is a cartel of brokers.

That's all they are, just as the Federal Reserve is a cartel of bankers. And when we can sort of tokenize assets, um you know, if you have a string of coffee shops and you want to expand, you want to grow, um I know this is an aside, I'll get back to what you're saying, but you have to you would normally, you know, list shares on a publicly traded exchange, but now you can actually tokenize your coffee shop and trade those shares in a completely private and anonymous way. And that's why Zano is super super uh, Firo is going to have the a similar ability when they launch Spark assets. Pirate Chain very well may be the most anonymous currency on Earth. Um, Monero as well, Zcash, Dash, Firo.

Chia is an interesting one. Chia is a stable coin on the Chia network, which is it has, uh, a lot of privacy. I wouldn't say it's Monero-grade, but it it's certainly much more private than dollars. CashFusion is a wonderful tool for Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash is one of the it's one of the coins that has the best retail adoption.

And I think that if we can get some more privacy on Bitcoin Cash, um, that is going to be a game-changer. Or if we can get a privacy coin to have the the level of retail adoption that Bitcoin Cash has, I think that will be equally disruptive. Um, yeah, honestly, I'm I'm super excited about all all privacy coins and coins that function as peer-to-peer cash because those are the ones that actually have real-world utility.

Um, I would like to add something to that or ask basic question. Um, you have Litecoin as well who has a second layer basically, uh, for stealth addresses as well as stealth payments. What about that? What are your opinion on that?

Yeah, look, any any coin that's making attempt at peer-to-peer cash for privacy I can get behind. Um, to be honest with you, I I I don't really mess with Litecoin that much just because I have such a plethora of other coins that I'm I'm working with here. Um, I really like, uh, right now I like Zano, Firo, Bitcoin Cash, Pirate Chain, Dash is another good one because they've integrated so well with Zcash. These coins are actually usable. The idea is you you you want to minimize your use of fiat currencies and maximize your your exposure to non-inflationary assets, stuff that the government can't look in and say, "Hey, I saw you spending your money."

People say, "Hey, we don't need this stuff to buy coffee." That's true, but do you really want the pedophiles to know when you buy coffee? I don't. The less they know about me, the happier I'm going to be.

That is great. I think also to add to that, it's yeah, I think one thing that's very important for people to take away is using networks like for example tool or more privacy respecting options like for example brave or tour for example for two and also having like something that you would use to instead of giving your normal name. For example, if you're going to order if you're going to go to the movies, okay, why are you going to use your normal name and everything give them all that information? Technically, it would be better to have a second or pseudonym that you would use for that because when you do that

[snorts]

it's easier to know, okay, if my data get leaks, where does it come from? Why do I need to give all my information to see I don't know Frozen 2 or something. It's There are many things that that you can do to you know keep your privacy intact and

My real name is not Sal The Agorist.

I I [laughter]

[gasps]

I would say that I I knew that, but so so something like that goes a long way because again, if not you're going to end up when for example the last discussion, your information going to end up in the honeypot and then it's easier to do scams. And say for example, when they do scam you don't have to then prove yourself that you're not responsible for that. That's a whole can of worms that you don't want to get into at some point. So, I really do thank you for your time and your speech today and yeah, a warm round of applause for Sal The Agorist.