Episode 18: Alexander Hamilton, the American System, and How a Professional Poker Player Became a Libertarian
What did Alexander Hamilton actually believe about sound money and central banking — and how does a professional poker player end up embracing libertarian philosophy and the case for a free-market, voluntary society?
In this episode, Joe sits down with Adam Haman to trace both threads at once, moving from the poker table to the founding arguments over what kind of monetary system America was actually supposed to have.
Adam spent years as a professional poker player before politics ever entered the picture, and he opens the conversation there — the psychology of reading opponents, the discipline of thinking in probabilities rather than certainties, and the strategic pressure of making high-stakes decisions with incomplete information.
That world, Adam explains, became the unlikely on-ramp to his first political awakening: libertarianism. Joe and Adam draw the line from professional poker's demand for clear thinking under pressure to Adam's growing skepticism of the political and economic consensus around him.
From poker, the conversation moves naturally into markets. Adam argues that technical analysis is fundamentally the study of psychology rather than math — that price charts are really a record of collective human behavior, fear, and conviction, and reading them well requires the same skillset that wins at the poker table.
That framing sets up the heart of the episode: a deep look at the American System and the historical fight between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson over the monetary and economic foundation of the young republic.
Adam and Joe work through what Hamilton actually argued for — a system grounded in sound money backed by gold and silver, alongside a national bank designed to channel credit toward productive enterprise. That vision, they note, bears little resemblance to the fiat-driven, debt-financed system that carries Hamilton's name today.
The conversation traces how those original Hamiltonian principles were bent and distorted over successive decades of policy drift, and where globalist macroeconomic interests fit into that longer arc. The conversation closes on the biggest question of all: is a genuine transition to a voluntary society actually possible, and what would have to happen first?
Adam and Joe talk through the practical, ground-level version of that idea — the role of private markets, individual agency, and local commerce as the building blocks of a freer system — along with a philosophical detour into the nature of good and evil underneath political and economic structures.
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In this episode:
- Adam Haman's background as a professional poker player and what that world teaches about psychology, probability, and risk
- How poker was the on-ramp to Adam's first political awakening as a libertarian
- Why technical analysis is really the study of market psychology, not just math
- The origins of the American System and the real historical fight between Hamilton and Jefferson
- What Alexander Hamilton actually believed about sound money, gold and silver backing, and central banking
- How Hamiltonian monetary principles got distorted into the modern fiat system
- The influence of macroeconomic policy and globalist interests on that long drift
- Whether a transition to a genuinely voluntary, stateless society is actually possible
- The role of private markets, individual agency, and local commerce in that transition
- A philosophical detour on the nature of good and evil underneath political and economic systems
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About Adam Haman: Former professional poker player turned libertarian writer and commentator. Follow his work at hamannature.substack.com(opens in new tab) and on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@HamanNature(opens in new tab)
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