A Conversation with Libertarian Party Presidential Candidate Lars Mapstead

The tech entrepreneur, who did not win the party nomination, criticizes America's "duopoly" political system, and shares the realities of running for president.

Lars Mapstead, Libertarian Party candidate (Photo by Judah Freed)

Libertarian presidential candidate Lars Mapstead, a tech entrepreneur from California, survived until the fourth round of elimination voting at the 2024 Libertarian Party National Convention last May in Washington, DC. Representing a centrist minority in the party, Mapstead garnered around 15% of the vote in each round of convention voting,

The final winner was Chase Oliver, the “armed and gay” Libertarian from Georgia whose 80,000 votes in 2022 forced the runoff race between Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock, which shifted the Senate majority to Democrats. Oliver represents the Classical Liberal Caucus in the Libertarian Party,

Oliver’s running mate is the party’s VP pick, Michael ter Maat, a “paleolibertarian,” representing the party’s ascendant Mises Caucus, inspired by Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, who opposed all government intervention in the economy and favored isolationism in foreign affairs.

Campaigning to “Unrig the System,” Mapstead called for a Voters Bill of Rights to end two-party “duopoly” rule by the Democrats and Republicans. He also urged congressional term limits and a ban on congressional insider trading to “fight back against corporate money in politics.” A former drug abuser, he’d end the drug war, eliminate qualified immunity for police, enforce healthcare transparency, and give patients more control over their care.

Unlike Libertarians espousing the Objectivist views of Ayn Rand that “selfishness is a virtue,” Mapstead promotes a more respectful slogan gaining traction among centrist libertarians. Instead of “Don’t Tread on Me,” he advises, “Don’t Tread on Anyone.”       

At the Libertarian Party of Colorado (LPCO) state convention in Colorado Springs last March, Lars Mapstead sat down with me as a reporter for the progressive Colorado Times Recorder. Edited for length, here is our extensive conversation.

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JF: Thanks for taking time to talk with me today. May we start with your short bio?

Mapstead: I was raised by hippies, basically. I grew up really poor in Big Sur, California, on a pot farm [laughs] with no electricity and an outhouse. The building I grew up in later became a goat barn. And for a guy that grew up with no electricity, I found my career in 1994 in Silicon Valley, which isn’t too far from Big Sur.

I connected with computers and became a serial entrepreneur. I started a lot of different companies over a twenty-year span, all based around internet marketing. The biggest one was a company called Friend Finder Networks, the dating websites. My partner and I grew that company to 600 employees doing $350 million a year in sales from 35 million members. One in 10 Americans was a member at one time or another.  In 2007, we sold the company for $500 million. That was a really big payday for a kid that grew up with an outhouse and no electricity, right?

So, I’ve seen different levels of income inequality, different levels of wealth in my own personal life. And I’ve been married to my wife for 30 years. We have two daughters. I met her at work in the early days, before I got into the internet. We were working for a collection agency together.

JF: Given your background, what lead you to a libertarian philosophy?

Mapstead: All my life, I’ve not felt like I was a Democrat or a Republican. I voted for Ross Perot, and I voted for Ron Paul a couple times. Something resonated with me for those guys.  I voted for them primarily over the national debt and the Federal Reserve. I like economics and the idea of free markets. Those guys were talking about how the future of American citizens was being sold down the river. They said the youth of today are being sold out. At that time, I was the youth of today. So, this resonated with me.

I never really fit in. I’ve been voting in every election all my adult life, and I’ve never once had a person elected to Congress that I voted for. I’ve never once felt represented by anybody representing me in Congress.  

But I didn’t know I was a libertarian until I took the quiz in 2007 [The World’s Smallest Political Quiz].  I thought, this’ll be a hoot. Will it pick my type as a Democrat or a Republican? Well, I took the quiz, and I’m way at the top of the chart in this thing called “Libertarian.”

What the hell is that? I literally had to Google, “What is a libertarian?” I had no idea. And I’m reading down a list of things that Libertarians believe, and, wow, like 90 percent of this stuff is what I believe, so that resonates with me. I would say my whole life I’ve been a small “l” libertarian.

That’s when I started identifying as a libertarian. I registered as a Libertarian and began voting Libertarian. I didn’t know there was a formal Libertarian Party until the 2018 election. That’s when I got more active as a big “L” Libertarian.

The Choice to Run for President

JF:  What prompted your decision to run for president?

Mapstead: A lot of my friends had often told me, you have great ideas. You have good things to say that could fix America, that sort of thing. Well, I kind of brushed it off. They’re like, you should run for some kind of office and help society, help Americans. And I was like, I don’t know.

But when Covid hit. I just couldn’t sit by and watch as the government really became very authoritarian in a lot of ways. My personal belief was that people should be allowed to make their own informed decisions, come to their own thought process. The government’s job was to give nonbiased information to help citizens be informed, so they can make a decision between them and their doctor or what they want to do about this thing, the pandemic.

I live in Santa Cruz, California, which is as liberal as it can possibly get, right? There was an old couple, retired couple, sitting in their car and watching the sunset go down. The police kept coming and telling them they needed to go home. They couldn’t be out in their own car, with the windows rolled up, because somehow the Covid was gonna jump out and kill the people next to them, or something like that.

I went to a state park during Covid. I wanted to go for a hike, but at the gate was told the parking lot was full. And I thought, maybe a lot of people really want to be here because it’s the only place you can go outside. I finally pull into the parking lot and every other parking space is blocked off because they’re social distancing the cars.

I just lost it. I was like, I cannot have this going on anymore. I cannot succumb. This is ridiculous. You people are acting irresponsibly and irrationally. Come at this from a rational point of view. The government sold us so much fear. For me, it almost became like a reality TV show. I saw both Trump and Cuomo battling back and forth on TV, and they turned Covid into a political football.

JF: I think we saw what Naomi Klein wrote about in The Shock Doctrine. She tells how crises are used by authoritarians to push through policies that otherwise people would oppose.

Mapstead: She’s a good writer. And that was a big part of why I decided to run.

Another reason is that I have always felt we should have more choices and more voices on the ballot. Back in 2020, we had 1,500 people run for president. I guarantee you that any one of those 1,500 people were better than the two or three people we’ll end up forced to vote for on the ballot this coming November.

We should have more opportunities to hear other voices, so we can make a more informed decision about who we want serving us as our public servants in Washington.