April 18, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| I think in general, the government is not good at what it does. | ||
| You know, it's either incompetent or ineffective or inefficient or it's kind of villainous. | ||
| You know, one of the reasons you would ask, well, how did I become a libertarian? | ||
| And part of it is after I graduated college and before I got in the lucrative teen mag business, I wrote for a bunch of newspapers in New Jersey. | ||
| I was a reporter and I would always have to go to planning board meetings. | ||
| And like, you know, if you want to turn people into libertarians, like just Busload school kids, you know, bus school kids to planning board meetings where people, you know, just the people in charge just rail against anybody who had the temerity to, like, improve their land, you know, or their house without getting the right permits. | ||
| And half of the cases I saw, like, people didn't even know, like, oh, I needed to go to the city council to put up a fence or, like, to, you know, make my house better. | ||
| It's like, screw you. | ||
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unidentified
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[MUSIC] | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the editor at large of Reason Magazine and | ||
| host of the Reason interview, Nick Gillespie. | ||
| Finally, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me, Dave. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| So this is very bizarre for me to admit, but we played a clip of real time with Bill Maher last week with Heidi Heitkamp accusing Gina Carano of basically being a Nazi and a white supremacist. | ||
| And you were sitting next to Heidi Heitkamp when she said this. | ||
| And I played the clip. | ||
| And then I said, oh, there's my buddy Nick Gillespie from Reason Magazine, I think I said former guest of the Rubin Report, and then we realized after that we've never done this somehow, and I feel bad. | ||
| I usually don't apologize at the beginning of a show, but I feel bad that you've never been here before. | ||
| I, in many contexts, I perform after, I apologize after performance failures, so please don't apologize. | ||
| I'm happy to be here. | ||
| I know I've gotten to interview you twice, once for Reason and once at Students for Liberty, LibertyCon. | ||
| So it's nice to be on the other side of the mic. | ||
| All right, one way or another, here we are. | ||
| It's overdue, but we got a lot to get to. | ||
| But let's start with that clip because I wanna spend a lot of time obviously talking about libertarianism and if there's any differences between libertarianism and classical liberalism and what should libertarians do now and all that good stuff. | ||
| But since the clip was what got us here today, let's start with that. | ||
| So I'm gonna throw to it right now. | ||
| Who was the woman in the Mandalorian? | ||
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What did she do? | |
| She like something? | ||
| She was a Nazi. | ||
| Oh, that's different, right. | ||
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unidentified
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I'm thinking of somebody else. | |
| Well, she's not a Nazi. | ||
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unidentified
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She's a white Nazi. | |
| She's involved in white supremacy. | ||
| She's called other people Nazis. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| She's the Nazi. | ||
| Okay, everyone's a Nazi now. | ||
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unidentified
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She does hang with white supremacists. | |
| It's like a Mel Brooks movie. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I suppose I'm now subject to defamation. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, it depends on what your definition of white supremacist is. | ||
| The goalposts there changed a lot. | ||
| You used to be a guy in a Klan hood. | ||
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But I think we have to be really careful. | |
| There's two things that Republicans think they're going to get Biden on. | ||
| Cancel culture and this whole Dr. Seuss stuff that's going on where they're reading Green Eggs and Ham, proving that some of these senators can actually read. | ||
| And immigration. | ||
| And so we can't ignore the fact that we got Donald Trump was in part because of political correctness. | ||
| Okay, so there's obviously a bunch to unpack there. | ||
| And it sort of seems to me by your sort of quick reaction, it's like when you're doing this on live TV, sometimes people say something so over the top, you kind of don't know how to react. | ||
| Can you just lay out what was going through your mind during that? | ||
| You know, there were a lot of moments where, you know, I was kind of looking to my left and I was like, this is a former, you know, U.S. | ||
| Senator and I didn't understand where she was coming from. | ||
| That was certainly part of it. | ||
| And, you know, the whole, you know, I grew up in the 70s and 80s and Hogan's Heroes and Mel Brooks movies were still, you know, everywhere. | ||
| And they always were making fun of Nazis. | ||
| I never thought I would live in America. | ||
| My father in World War II fought the Nazis. | ||
| I mean, he was in Europe fighting as an infantryman. | ||
| I never thought that people would be seriously lobbying charges of Nazism just as a way of shutting down all sorts of conversation. | ||
| What I liked in that clip, or what I liked in the reaction there is that Bill Maher | ||
| has really stepped up as a massive defender of free speech. | ||
| And I disagree with him about a lot of things, I'm sure you do too. | ||
| But fundamentally what you want in a, what you want in anybody in media, certainly, | ||
| and anybody in any kind of intellectual endeavor to be pushing for free speech. | ||
| And I was glad to see him push back in a way that was refreshing because, | ||
| and you could see how I think Heidi in a way is a proxy for a lot of people broadly on the left. | ||
| I mean, she's actually a centrist Democrat, but where they say, well, somebody's a Nazi, and then it's like, no, they're not a Nazi. | ||
| They accuse somebody else of being like the Nazis. | ||
| Then, you know, then it's like, well, they hang out with the alt-right, then they do this, then they do that. | ||
| And there's almost like a series of decision trees where it's like, OK, not a Nazi, but then this, not this, but then that. | ||
| And so, you know, it's a nice encapsulation, I think, of a thought process that is unfortunately rampant in public discourse right now. | ||
| Yeah, and you could sort of see the way she was laughing and smiling over what she was saying that she didn't even believe it or even know what she was saying in a way. | ||
| I think that second part is probably more to the point. | ||
| And I have to say, you know, I enjoy talking with her. | ||
| You know, in some ways, if there were more Democrats like her still in the Senate, I don't think we would be seeing the same level of spending, etc. | ||
| Having said that, I mean, it's a little bit promiscuous to, you know, call somebody a Nazi and then not even know who they are or what they were talking about, and then, you know, just kind of trail off into, well, you know, maybe they're not Nazis, but they hang out with people who hang out with people who hang out with Nazis, who aren't really Nazis. | ||
| You know, enough already. | ||
| Yeah, it is enough already. | ||
| Real quick on Bill Maher, because I think you said something interesting there. | ||
| He is what I would say is maybe one of the last 10 public intellectuals or comedians, whatever you want to call him, that is offering what I would say is a liberal, a true liberal defense of free speech that obviously you guys like us are completely aligned with. | ||
| But my frustration with him at this point is I want him to just say at this point he's a libertarian, basically. | ||
| Just say it, Bill. | ||
| You want a smoke pot? | ||
| You want to live your life. | ||
| You're a bachelor at 60, whatever, with millions of dollars and go to the Playboy Mansion or whatever is left with it. | ||
| Is there even a Playboy Mansion left anymore? | ||
| Playboy Mansion and COVID. | ||
| Somebody bought it and I don't know what's going on there. | ||
| But to me, it's like Bill is this odd thing where he'll bring on Adam Schiff and say, you know, all my friends are leaving and California is not business friendly, but then he'll still support Democrats. | ||
| And I'm struggling with that. | ||
| Help me, Nick. | ||
| So, you know, back in the 90s, the first time I interviewed Bill Maher for a reason has been around since 1968. | ||
| I joined in 1993. | ||
| I interviewed Bill at some point in the mid 90s, and he was calling himself a libertarian. | ||
| Then he was not particularly ideological. | ||
| You know, he's not a card carrying member. | ||
| I don't think of anything other than maybe PETA, to be quite honest. | ||
| What he meant by that was that he was in favor of free speech. | ||
| He was against censorship, which is a huge thing. | ||
| I mean, people forget in the 90s, Janet Reno and Bill Clinton, along with all, you know, major Republicans like Bob Dole, if anybody remembers him, they were all talking about censoring cable TV for having too much sex and violence. | ||
| And, you know, when we're talking about like basic, basic cable, And he pushed back on that. | ||
| He was very big in favor of free speech, in favor of kind of open sexuality, which was kind of forward back then, avant. | ||
| And then he, I think, with Bush and then Obama and then certainly Trump, he started rolling more with Democrats in terms of economic policy. | ||
| And so, you know, I actually think, and I'm happy to talk about this more, I think there is a kind of You know, I consider myself a libertarian without adjectives. | ||
| I believe in what Reason calls free minds and free markets. | ||
| You know, I want choice in everything, you know, from abortion to schools to food to, you know, marriage, whatever. | ||
| And, you know, but there are people on the right who are more conservative and are libertarian in spirit or in many policies, people on the left. | ||
| And I think Bill Maher is pretty good there on the left side of things. | ||
| And his really important function now is, you know, he is one of the few people in a kind of, you know, major, what's now legacy media. | ||
| It's funny to think that HBO is actually kind of old school. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| You know, but he was sticking up for freedom of speech and freedom of expression. | ||
| And, you know, at one point in that show, he was saying, like, can't we hold two thoughts at the same time that, you know, for instance, that we were talking about Asian violence against Asians in America. | ||
| And he was like, yeah, there could be some of that coming out of COVID. | ||
| But it's also that the Atlanta shooting was not that. | ||
| And I like to hear that kind of stuff, whether it's from the right or the left, like people who are just saying, let's have a conversation that is not simply talking points or slurs like Heidi Heitkamp was tossing around. | ||
| So it sounds to me like you'd kind of love him to say he was a libertarian in a way, because it would be great for libertarianism, but on another hand, he serves a sort of function as a remaining liberal, let's say. | ||
| I think so, yeah. | ||
| And, you know, I, again, like, right-left libertarians, like, sometimes you hear conservatarians and left libertarians and, you know, whatever. | ||
| I'm less interested in that and the slogans or the labels, and I'm more interested in, like, when you see people actually having conversations. | ||
| And one of the great virtues of his show, I think, real time and before that politically incorrect when it was on ABC and before that on Comedy Central, was that it was a staging ground for people who disagree with each other getting to air their, you know, to have a conversation or even an argument for more than 30 seconds at a time. | ||
| One of the things that I think you've done and a host of other people is really take advantage of this space and time that YouTube and other platforms, you know, the Blaze actually is also a fascinating network to me because it's, you know, the one thing you can't say about the Blaze is that, oh, you know, they're, They're only talking in 15-second soundbites, you know, like CNN, MSNBC, or Fox even. | ||
| You know, like these are long shows that are taking advantage of the time and space we have. | ||
| So more power to Bill Maher for that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
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unidentified
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All right. | |
| So let's move off Bill Maher for a moment. | ||
| I'm going to keep working. | ||
| I'm going to keep nudging him on my show. | ||
| That's, that's my plan is just to keep nudging him. | ||
| Cause it's like the Democrats, when they come to cancel him, I said this to him once when they, at an after party at real time, I said, you know, when they come to get you one day, it's going to be the left, not the right. | ||
| Yeah, I think he knows that because I, and I think it was during the show, like a portion of that aired there because of COVID, there were, you know, fewer guests than no after party or anything like that. | ||
| But he was saying, you know, that like when he goes places like people are often afraid to speak up even in, in private gatherings, because if you don't know everybody, I mean, it's, it's kind of like everybody's in the mafia and they're always figuring there's a couple of, you know, federal agents who are recording everything. | ||
| So you don't say anything if you don't know everybody. | ||
| What a, what a, you know, fucked up world to be living in. | ||
| Like where we have, you know, sometime, you know, since the early 60s, we kicked free of all the dumbest restraints on free speech. | ||
| You know, government censorship. | ||
| You couldn't publish, you couldn't legally publish Lady Chatterley's Lover, James Joyce's Ulysses, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. | ||
| uh... allen ginsberg's how old before about nineteen sixty without worrying | ||
| about being dragged into court we got rid of all of that and then we created | ||
| the internet which is like an infinite you know hard drive where you can just | ||
| load up everything you want and we're arguing now about like you know | ||
| policing each other's speech in such a picky and horrible ways it's uh... you | ||
| know it's it's tragic There's basically a protection racket and nobody knows who's in it. | ||
| So everyone is sort of hostage at some level. | ||
| All right, so let's just back up for a second. | ||
| Because I do sort of consider you, because of what you do with Reason and you've been doing this for a couple of decades now, forever basically. | ||
| Although I am noticing you're wearing a suede jacket today instead of your trademark leather jacket. | ||
| Yeah, I think of suede and leather as the same thing, really. | ||
| But this is a jacket that my girlfriend got me for Christmas, and I like it a lot, and I've been out in L.A. | ||
| for a while. | ||
| I'm usually in New York or D.C., and it's kind of a cowboy jacket, so what the hell? | ||
| People know that is Nick Gillespie walking down the street. | ||
| But where did this all start with you, this idea of freedom and liberty? | ||
| Five-year-old Nick wanting to play fairly with his friends and make even exchanges. | ||
| I did go to a Catholic school, so like you learn pretty quickly that, you know, people want to impose limits on everything and then you kind of like, you get tired of those limits somewhat. | ||
| But a lot of it, I think, is just kind of dispositional. | ||
| I think some people are born wanting to be able just to do what they want as long as they're not | ||
| hurting other people, which I think is a kind of basic impulse that defines libertarianism | ||
| or libertarian ideas. | ||
| I don't even like to use it as a noun anymore. | ||
| I don't like to say I am a libertarian or there is a thing called libertarianism. | ||
| I think it's more directional. | ||
| I think it's temperamental. | ||
| I think it's, you know, do you think that people should be given more choice, more autonomy, | ||
| more freedom in any given situation as the default? | ||
| Sometimes we override that. | ||
| But in general, it's like, you know, yeah, let's have more freedom. | ||
| And I'm happy that my life I was born in 63, you know, most of my life. | ||
| In most big ways, we have been getting more and more free, and I think that's great economically, culturally, individually, lifestyle-wise and stuff. | ||
| But a big part of it was actually my brother who's older than me. | ||
| I was born in Brooklyn, but grew up in New Jersey. | ||
| My brother went to college at Rutgers, as I did, and he discovered Reason Magazine in the bookstore and started sending it home to me, and I was like, oh, wow, that's really interesting stuff. | ||
| The way they do analysis of the outcomes of policies as opposed to simply the intentions. | ||
| And a lot of times things are that are done in the name of making people more free or more equal or better off end up having the opposite result and that really spoke to me. | ||
| And basically by the time I got to college I was calling myself libertarian and then I went to I worked for a while as a teen magazine editor or a music editor and a music magazine editor, and you meet a lot of people there who are very into free expression, particularly among teen stars. | ||
| You've never met people who want to have no restraints put on them whatsoever, as Corey Haim or Corey Feldman. | ||
| At least at that time. | ||
| I'm not sure if those magazines are so into free expression these days. | ||
| No, they are certainly not. | ||
| But in any case, I went back to grad school for English and cultural studies, literary and cultural studies, In the late 80s, and that was the time when what we were calling it was political correctness, kind of what has become wokeness, woke activism. | ||
| And I realized I needed an ideology because I wasn't a conservative aesthetically or personally or temperamentally and I certainly wasn't a progressive because these were people who really started, you know, this was the beginning of really clamping down on speech. | ||
| And of using identity politics or something like that to shut down conversation rather than open things up, which I thought, you know, that's why I wanted to, you know, go into academia. | ||
| And I took libertarian thought more seriously. | ||
| And then I got a job working at Reason. | ||
| It's interesting because you mentioned something about sort of how we're wired or temperament, and I do notice that one of the reasons I love going to libertarian talks and events and college things and YAF and all of those things and YAL and all those, there's a lot of Ys in there, but is that the general disposition of people, because the default is I don't want to control everyone, the disposition is quite pleasant. | ||
| I mean, there's very rarely, can you remember once going to a libertarian event? | ||
| I mean, yes, they got the convention with the naked guy, but where it's like a real fire and brimstone, like angry people. | ||
| And I think that that's an important piece of this, which may be just sort of how we're wired. | ||
| I think, well, two things. | ||
| One is, you know, libertarians believe in what sometimes gets called the right of exit. | ||
| And so like, if you, you know, you have a conference in Las Vegas or, you know, Washington DC or Antarctica, whatever, And then you start screaming and yelling at people that they're going to go to hell or that they're not allowed to do what you want, like, you know, people leave that room and they go out the hallway and start talking. | ||
| So, you know, it works pretty well. | ||
| I think for me, one of the questions is, I don't think it's simply, you know, you're either born this way or that way. | ||
| I like Lady Gaga's music and I like the idea when, you know, her concept of born that way, you know, makes sense for a lot of things, including, I think, broadly speaking, you know, sexual orientation, but I'm in the business of wanting to make more libertarians or make the case that a libertarian world is better. | ||
| It leads to better outcomes. | ||
| It's more fair. | ||
| It's more innovative. | ||
| It's more fun. | ||
| And you are not constantly spending 90% of your bandwidth on making sure that you're not saying something that is going to get you canceled or yelled at or put in prison. | ||
| To me, I'm glad to hear you talking about how libertarian events are kind of fun to go to and stuff like that. | ||
| I want to see us grow, uh, both as, you know, as, as a cultural force more than a political force. | ||
| Cause I, I agree with people like Andrew Breitbart that, you know, politics is a lagging indicator of culture. | ||
| And what worries me is that over the past, you know, certainly over the past decade or so, it feels like we are going backward things. | ||
| People are trying to throw it. | ||
| I, I, it's like people are throwing a weighted blanket over everything in American culture, you know, the economy, The culture itself, et cetera. | ||
| And that really, really worries me. | ||
| The weighted blanket is nice for the first few minutes, but three hours later when you can't get up and it's only three in the afternoon, it's a real problem. | ||
| Yeah, now it's like only old, scared, anxious people need weighted blankets. | ||
| And I'm glad that we have a free market that provides millions of different types of weighted blankets with whatever superhero you want embossed on it and everything. | ||
| But I don't want to live in a world where you're spending the first half of every day fighting to get out from under the covers. | ||
| So I wanna bring up a completely fictitious event because obviously this didn't happen, but let's just say one of us had a party a little bit after the election, and let's just say there were a bunch of political people at this party and we were sitting around a fire, and let's just say maybe there were a couple of joints being passed around, and let's just say some of the people voted for Trump and some of the people voted for Biden. | ||
| This, of course, is completely fictitious. | ||
| Neither one of us good, decent citizens, law-abiding, would ever do something like this. | ||
| And let's just say some of the Biden people were feeling good and the Trump people were kind of feeling upset. | ||
| And let's just say you, and again, this is completely fictitious, actually said to everybody, you know, maybe everyone needs to calm down because this is just the cyclical nature of politics. | ||
| And perhaps it was just the weed talking. | ||
| But do you really feel that way, that even now, as you see what I think, and if you take a different position, it's fine, an administration that's sort of out of control, and now we're gonna expand the courts and all of this stuff, do you still feel calm within that? | ||
| And that's a little bit of the previous question, just related to temperament, too. | ||
| No, no, I think it's great. | ||
| And the one thing I wanna point out is, you know, of course, in California, smoking weed is legal, which is something that it was, you know, Obviously was going to happen when I started at Reason in 1993 and there was the first medical marijuana vote, a ballot initiative in California in 96, which won overwhelmingly. | ||
| You know, you knew legal weed was going to come, but it's kind of amazing that it came, you know, and it's in a majority of people in America live in states where recreational weed is legal. | ||
| You know, the drug war is ending. | ||
| And it's kind of phenomenal. | ||
| So it's, you know, and that's like one of the libertarians don't have a lot of wins, | ||
| but this is something in the first issue of Reason in 1968, you know, talked about ending | ||
| the drug war before Richard Nixon had even escalated it in the very early 70s. | ||
| So, you know, it's it's kind of good to step back every once in a while and say, like, | ||
| you know what, like, there's a lot of terrible stuff going on. | ||
| But, you know, in many ways, things are pretty good. | ||
| To your larger point, I think what we specifically were talking about in a fictional universe... In that completely fictional universe. | ||
| Absolutely, you know, it takes place on the other side of Earth, you know, in negative Earth or something, counter Earth. | ||
| The food was delicious, though, at that fictitious event, wasn't it? | ||
| I seem to remember looking at that and thinking, wow, in a fictional universe, I wish I could eat that food in my actual place. | ||
| No, but, you know, it had more to do with things about free speech and where we were going, because I had written before the election, and this is something, I voted for Joe Jorgensen, I almost never vote, actually, I've only voted for a major party candidate once, In any election at any level, that was Walter Mondale in 1984. | ||
| I don't know what I was doing. | ||
| Did not go well. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| And, you know, and it's like, I think what I liked about him was that he said he was going to raise taxes to close the deficit. | ||
| I was like, OK, that's honest. | ||
| It's suicide, but it's honest. | ||
| But in any case, I had written before the election, here are 11 trillion reasons to be scared shitless about Joe Biden becoming president, because he had offered 11 trillion dollars in new spending uh... you know in his campaign platform and that's really | ||
| bad because donald trump it actually met on her honor under donald trump the | ||
| budget had already massively increased from when he took office | ||
| all bomber things ratcheted up from you know two thousand nine his first budget | ||
| year to him leaving bush you know had increased spending fifty percent we have | ||
| to stop spending so much money especially since we're not paying | ||
| for it so i i'm not a fan of of joe biden | ||
| I do think that we still live in a world of free speech. | ||
| I dislike very much the way the social media platforms, the Facebooks, Twitter, YouTubes of the world are clamping down on speech. | ||
| I think that's inarguable and we have to scream bloody murder and also build alternatives to that. | ||
| Let's talk about that in a second. | ||
| You're specifically, I think Joe Biden is delivering on exactly what he promised and that is a dark winter. | ||
| Uh, for America on every level. | ||
| Um, you know, he, and, and to this point, like I was just reading today, Kamala Harris has actually said, Oh, well, you know, Biden is so busy doing other things. | ||
| He's not even going to get around to, uh, legalizing or de-scheduling marijuana at the federal level, which is also something that was kind of promised, you know? | ||
| So it's like, yeah, he's going to be spending tons of money. | ||
| I mean, we, we are busting the budget in a way that is unimaginable. | ||
| We can't pay for it. | ||
| Bills come due. | ||
| Every dollar the government spends is one more, like it's a deeper finger in your pocket that is squeezing you in places you shouldn't be squeezed. | ||
| It all comes back to bite us. | ||
| And Joe Biden is out of control in that sense. | ||
| So do you think though, the inherent problem with this, when you talk about 11 trillion in spending or 2.2 in COVID relief or any of this, that the numbers are so bananas, they're so out of control and it makes sense to nobody. | ||
| We also know that the budgets come in in these papers that look like this and nobody reads them and all that stuff, but that it simply is just not sexy enough. | ||
| Like, you could sit here and explain perfectly why we can't keep doing this, and that eventually we're gonna have to go to war because we're in a mafia game, basically, where if you can't pay, which we obviously can't pay, well, then you better have a bigger gun than the other guy, and China might call in the debt one day, but it just isn't sexy enough. | ||
| I think that that's a real issue. | ||
| And again, I'm kind of like in the persuasion game. | ||
| Like, I know what I believe, so I don't feel a need to express myself with I can say I am the true Scotsman, I am the true libertarian and don't disagree with me otherwise you're not real or anything like that. | ||
| What I'm trying to do is persuade people to have a different view of the world, one in which individual freedom and voluntary association is at the center of everything rather than kind of top-down coercive controls of business, of culture, of life. | ||
| Um, and yeah, that's a real question. | ||
| And I think one of the things that I'm trying to talk about now more in all of this spending is that, you know, it's like, you know, when, when you're getting all of your money from one guy or from, you know, one source and it's in, you know, the capital district, I mean, we're in the hunger games here, you know, where everything is being funneled in from the, you know, the provinces to the capital. | ||
| And then they spit some of it back at you. | ||
| That comes with a huge amount of strings attached. | ||
| Um, and it gets complicated. | ||
| And, you know, and it's just freaking annoying, you know, and especially coming on the heels of the pandemic in California, in New York, the two states where I've spent most of the lockdown, you know, you have two madmen who were being hailed as, you know, the great saviors of humanity by the media, by people, you know, by politicians and their handlers and all of that kind of stuff. | ||
| Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo have been revealed to be terrible at what they do, and one of them is a truly awful human being, which was hiding in plain sight. | ||
| Wait, which one? | ||
| Which one? | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| I'll let your listeners decide. | ||
| I think I know which one you're talking about, but I'm honestly not sure. | ||
| We don't have to choose. | ||
| They can both be awful human beings as well as awful leaders. | ||
| But, you know, what we're witnessing now is a historic moment that I think builds on two decades of the government at all levels trying to get bigger. | ||
| Certainly the federal government, where it's spending more money, it's regulating more things. | ||
| You know, where we go from a place where, you know, we started the 21st century Not having to take our clothes off when we go to the airport. | ||
| And now we're not only doing that, we're talking about seriously discussing having to show medical papers in order to get on a freaking airplane. | ||
| This is serious stuff. | ||
| And this is the ground upon which I think we need to persuade people to say, you might want that $1,400 check. | ||
| You might want $3,600 to have a kid. | ||
| And by the way, I just want to say, It is so immoral to have the government trying to dictate, you know, how many times you fuck or how many kids you have by offering you more and more money. | ||
| And it's also unfair to people who don't want kids, you know? | ||
| But having said any of that, like, what we need to persuade people about or what I'm trying to do is, like, the more money you get from a place, the more they own you on some level. | ||
| And what I want is, you know, I'm not an anarchist. | ||
| I don't think there should be no government. | ||
| I think there should be a strictly limited government and a lot of what it should do, | ||
| apart from like general defense, is, you know, it should be helping people who are poor or | ||
| for whatever reason don't have the resources to fully, you know, kind of engage or participate | ||
| in society. | ||
| Give poor people a lot of money to go to education, to figure out how to live their lives and things like that. | ||
| But leave middle class and upper middle class and rich people, you know, we can pay our own way. | ||
| But, you know, we now have a government that is promising to be all things to all people. | ||
| And that, you know, that paycheck, you know, that paycheck from the government doesn't come free. | ||
| So. | ||
| So with all that being said, and you mentioned you voted for Joe Jorgensen, and I had her on the show, and we had a great conversation for an hour, and I don't know if you happened to see the clip, but she made a terrible mistake at the end because she- She flat out asked me if I was gonna vote for her. | ||
| And my feeling was I had to make an honest calculation that this was gonna be a close election and that everything that you just said about spending and a series of other things, I thought Biden was gonna usher in and wokeness and all of the stuff. | ||
| So my calculation was Trump is the last guy guarding the door. | ||
| So I had to tell her that and the clip went viral and all that stuff. | ||
| Do you think that was a fair estimation? | ||
| When you hear sort of libertarian-minded or classical liberal types make that move, did that seem sane to you, even though you didn't make the move? | ||
| Yeah, you know what? | ||
| I would never hold a vote against a person, or let me put it this way, like in an American context, I don't understand You know, I vote for the person who I think represents me and it's kind of like, you know, I'm choosing a Pokemon to represent me in a Pokemon battle or something like that. | ||
| And I just want to point out there at the Daily Mail, there is an incredible photo of Hunter Biden in a scene with two women sitting on his body and in the back. | ||
| is a stuffed Squirtle who is like a very basic Pokemon and I'm like wow that is like Squirtle | ||
| is wants to go back into his Pokeball and yeah but having said all of that I know I mean I | ||
| understand why people of a libertarian or classical liberal or conservative or even a liberal | ||
| have been voted for Trump because I do think Biden is bad news. | ||
| You know, what's fascinating, too, is as we're doing more and more analysis of the vote that, you know, Trump weirdly, you know, picked up more ethnic votes. | ||
| He picked up, you know, more black votes. | ||
| He picked up more Hispanic votes. | ||
| He picked up a lot of votes from women as well as men of color and things like that. | ||
| There's something, you know, interesting going on that we're not really talking about because everybody's either, you know, Trump and the election was stolen or Biden and like, let's not look at any, let's not look in the rear view mirror because where we're going, we are, you know, we're just spending money all the time. | ||
| We don't, we can't talk about anything else. | ||
| Um, so I think it's a rational, uh, you know, it was a rational position for me. | ||
| You know, I'm coming at it from a different angle and what I'm more interested about is the outcome, the kind of like, um, I was actually hoping, to be honest, that Trump would win and that he would be hemmed in by a Democratic Congress or a mixed Congress and that we would start getting towards some of the stuff that he had said as a candidate in 2016 that would have reduced the size, scope and spending of government, which I don't think he really did. | ||
| So, yeah, whatever. | ||
| Without getting too lost on Trump. | ||
| I mean, my feeling also with him was that he was almost as libertarian as we were ever gonna get, or at least anytime soon. | ||
| Meaning even though spending exploded for sure, he did cut taxes, we didn't get into new wars, he did do some criminal justice reform. | ||
| There was stuff there. | ||
| He was right on screen choice, which I think is really important. | ||
| He was so terrible for me on immigration, which is like immigration and drug policy and maybe school choice are the three things that I care about the most in terms of actual politics. | ||
| You know, so he was bad on immigration. | ||
| It was bad on free trade, I think. | ||
| And and it's interesting, of course, that Joe Biden is not touching any of the tariffs or any of the trade policy. | ||
| He's also talking about changing immigration stuff. | ||
| But, you know, as we see, Uh, Biden is merely, he's the latest president, which means that he's the latest president to put kids in cages on the border and all of that kind of stuff. | ||
| You know, the, the, the distance between Biden and Trump has been exaggerated by everybody because everybody has a reason to do that. | ||
| But, um, yeah, you know, Trump, I, one of the, one of the things though that I think Trump supporters, um, have to deal with too, is that like between November and January 6th, he, I mean, he had a breakdown and the way he acted, um, I think is the reason why the Democrats now control the Senate or have, you know, a basic, like a slimmest of working majorities there. | ||
| Um, I think he did a real disservice ultimately to the country. | ||
| I don't care about the Republican party. | ||
| I don't care about the Democratic party, but like he, he ushered in a weird moment, which ultimately threw the, uh, the Senate to the Democrats. | ||
| I will go on record though, Dave and say, and this goes back to that, you know, mythical, fictional conversation where I say, hey, you know, there are ebbs and flows of stuff. | ||
| The Democrats lost seats in the House, you know, even as they maintain the majority, they will lose control of the House of Representatives in the 2022 election. | ||
| I think the Republicans will also likely gain back control of the Senate, because even though Biden is, you know, he is the rich kid who comes, you know, who comes to a party and is giving everybody a bottle of Cristal or something like that. | ||
| People don't like him, and they know we are living on borrowed time. | ||
| Democrats are not popular. | ||
| Their agenda is not popular. | ||
| You know, the problem is the Republicans. | ||
| You know, what we have almost in every time, people, I think, they didn't vote for Trump, who got in totally fairly on the slimmest of majorities. | ||
| What a brilliant campaign he ran. | ||
| But they were voting against Hillary. | ||
| This time, they were voting against Trump. | ||
| You know, and I think in 2022, they're going to be voting against Biden and the Democrats. | ||
| And that's good news for the Republicans. | ||
| Let's get back to the idea portion and a little less in the Trump machine and the Biden thing and all that. | ||
| Do you find that there's any meaningful distinction between classical liberal and libertarian at this point? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| When I started at Reason, we were kind of like, some people were talking about, we need to take the word liberal back because in the 19th century and really starting in, I guess, 17th century, You know, liberal meant that you believed that people should have more, you know, freedom to decide what matters in their own life. | ||
| And it was, you know, it was a new kind of position that came in England and political philosophy after, you know, killing the king and beheading Charles the first. | ||
| And you had this brief flowering of liberal political philosophy, which, of course, in the immediate aftermath, and this is worth thinking about, you know, Oliver Cromwell led a successful civil war and revolution. | ||
| Kills a king. | ||
| You know, one of the first times that that had happened, certainly in British history, where people in the name of, like, of enfranchisement of everybody or many people chop off the king and replace him with a commonwealth, with a republic. | ||
| You know, within a couple of years, Cromwell was placing his son as the next leader. | ||
| You know, things went bad pretty quickly. | ||
| By the end of the 17th century, things were better. | ||
| You know, but people were saying, oh, we should reclaim liberal because it's our word first. | ||
| You know, and then we came up with libertarian. | ||
| Friedrich Hayek famously said libertarian is a bullshit term. | ||
| You know, it's not a good descriptor. | ||
| I don't know if there's a difference between classical liberal and libertarian. | ||
| It seems to me to come down to that a lot of people who are more kind of conservative in their personal lives and personal choices, but are libertarian, call themselves classical liberal. | ||
| It may be also that a number of libertarians, and this bothers me in a way that I get into trouble with libertarians, over the past quarter century, a lot of libertarians actually have drifted | ||
| into anarchism. | ||
| And they toggle back and forth between saying like, "I'm a libertarian because I don't believe in any government," | ||
| which is not libertarianism as I understand it. It's anarchism. | ||
| You know, and so I'm good with libertarian. | ||
| And I-- | ||
| I don't know, you know, that there is a strong functional difference between a classical liberal and a libertarian because I think we both believe in some, some government should be strictly limited, should be much smaller than what we do. | ||
| And everything government does in my view, and I think liberals agree with this generally, classical liberals, it should be done in a way to facilitate people being able to participate more fully in, in society. | ||
| And it's not about punishing people for being successful, for being rich, for being good looking, for being talented. | ||
| It's more about how do we raise up the people who need help? | ||
| That's the function of government along with keeping our borders safe. | ||
| By the way, for the record, I actually don't think there's a really meaningful distinction anymore. | ||
| The only reason I even asked the question is because for me, as someone that wrote a book defending classical liberalism, for me to keep going out there and saying I'm a liberal, Or for Bill Maher, even at this point, to keep saying I'm a liberal, it's become so confusing that I've always said from the beginning, I don't mind if someone calls me a libertarian. | ||
| I don't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And we're going through these phases. | ||
| You recall back in the 80s, in 1988, George H.W. | ||
| Bush Was able to, you know, get a rise of a crowd by, you know, calling Mike Dukakis the L word. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, and stuff like that. | ||
| And the idea liberal had become polluted and liberal has faded. | ||
| I mean, because people, Democrats either say I'm a Democrat or I'm a progressive. | ||
| And I think to the extent that, you know, Democrats, there's a lot of centrist people in the country. | ||
| I think, you know, 60 percent of people probably or certainly 40 percent of people are roughly in the middle and I think there's a lot of liberal classical liberal libertarian belief there you know they believe in leaving people alone and you know and and you know kind of fiscal responsibility fiscal conservatism social liberalism but the left and the Democratic Party to the extent it gets captured by progressives | ||
| It's gonna leave a lot more people looking towards the center and towards kind of liberal, you know, classical liberal libertarian positions. | ||
| I keep saying it, I think maybe it's nuts, but what you just described there of sort of the live and let live attitude, I think that it's probably, I honestly believe this, if people could really understand the issues clearly and not get lost in the show, I really believe that's probably like 80% of the country. | ||
| That may sound nuts, But I think it is. | ||
| I'm curious though, because you mentioned the ANCAP thing, and I'm sure you know Michael Malice, and I love having him on the show. | ||
| I think he's a great anarchist thinker. | ||
| I love intellectually that exercise of how far we can do that thing to end up in Mad Max. | ||
| What is the sort of line for you where it's like, no, no, that's too far? | ||
| You know, it's, for me, it's more like I believe in, and this is popular among kind of libertarians, I believe in transhumanism and life extension and longevity. | ||
| So I'm, you know, I'm hopeful that I'm going to live to be like 200 years old. | ||
| You know, I doubt it, but you know, a guy can hope, right? | ||
| They're working on it. | ||
| They're working on it. | ||
| Even if I live to be 200, I just don't have the time to like start arguing about everything about, okay, this is how we get the government out of this and this and this. | ||
| And like, I'm in favor of that direction. | ||
| I think in general, the government is not good at what it does. | ||
| You know, it's either incompetent or ineffective or inefficient. | ||
| Or it's kind of villainous. | ||
| You know, one of the reasons you would ask, well, how did I become a libertarian? | ||
| And part of it is after I graduated college and before I got in the lucrative teen mag business, I wrote for a bunch of newspapers in New Jersey. | ||
| I was a reporter and I would always have to go to planning board meetings. | ||
| And like, you know, if you want to turn people into libertarians, like just busload school kids, you know, bus school kids to planning board meetings where People, you know, just the people in charge just rail against anybody who had the temerity to, like, improve their land, you know, or their house without getting the right permits. | ||
| And half of the cases I saw, like, people didn't even know, like, oh, I needed to go to the city council to put up a fence or, like, to You know, make my house better? | ||
| It's like, screw you, but, um, you know, in any case, I just, I don't feel a need to have a philosophical discussion about everything. | ||
| I like the idea that in general, the government should be doing less and what it should be doing, it should be competent at. | ||
| It should be coming up with good solutions. | ||
| And that's why I like stuff like school choice where, you know, if you let, uh, you know, most school funding is done at the local and state level. | ||
| If you took all of the money that a state or a school district spends per student, and just gave it to the parents and said, "Okay, you can | ||
| use this wherever you want. | ||
| You can go to the public school or you can find a private school. | ||
| You can teach your kid at home." | ||
| Like to me, that's a win because it would allow people more freedom and more autonomy. | ||
| You know, to an ANCAP, I'm the problem because I'm not saying, you know, it's got to be like | ||
| rock and roll high school. | ||
| You got to blow up Vince Lombardi High at the end and it's got to be on fire. | ||
| Otherwise, you know, you're not a real libertarian. | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, OK, you know, I don't it's just like I've only got 200 years, man. | ||
| You know, I've only got 200 years. | ||
| Yeah, or you could be debating with Elizabeth Warren, who doesn't want school choice, but sends her kids to private school. | ||
| Now, well, this is, you know, one of the things that I hope the past year, and I don't, you know, and we're coming out of it, like, you know, everybody's getting vaccinated and, you know, and the rush to vaccination, by the way, this is a great libertarian win, you know, where it's like, You know, and this is something good that Donald Trump did. | ||
| He said, you know what, obviously the government isn't going to come up with these vaccines, so we're going to give, you know, what seems like a lot of money, you know, several billion dollars to, you know, companies to develop vaccines compared to the trillions of dollars that we have spent on COVID relief that is, you know, mostly going down the toilet somewhere. | ||
| You know, it's like, it's a real bargain, but like, That's a kind of libertarian solution where it's like, OK, we're going to incentivize people to do something that's for the public good. | ||
| You know, the rollouts have been kind of screwed up, partly because of people like Gavin Newsom or Andrew Cuomo, you know, but, you know, that's that's a good thing to do as we're coming out of the COVID lockdown. | ||
| I hope we don't lose the lessons, which is like, You don't want the government telling. | ||
| You don't want the government controlling every aspect of your life, even to the point of saying, you know what? | ||
| You are an essential worker. | ||
| You are in an essential business. | ||
| So, you know, you're a clothing store. | ||
| Screw you. | ||
| You're locked down for three months or six months. | ||
| You are a pharmacy. | ||
| So you get to open, you know, for these hours. | ||
| You're a liquor store. | ||
| You know, in New York City, at first, liquor stores were not considered essential. | ||
| that got changed really quickly. But you know, so like a liquor store, but then another type of | ||
| store as opposed to saying, you know what, if you're following these safety protocols, because | ||
| we're in a public health emergency, anybody who's following these general rules, they can do whatever | ||
| They can open their business how they want, et cetera. | ||
| Well, the height of hypocrisy would be that Target and the big box stores remained open, but if you were a small store that sells the same stuff as Target, you were closed. | ||
| You know, my main domicile, I live in Manhattan, in lower Manhattan, not far from a Kmart, and clothing stores all over the city were closed down because they didn't serve an essential function. | ||
| Kmart, because it sells some food and it has a pharmacy, was open. | ||
| So, you know, the last remaining Kmart, I mean, like, you know, you talk about Mad Max, Thunderdome, it's like the last place where you could shop for clothes in New York City for a number of months was freaking Kmart. | ||
| You know, and it's like, yeah, that's just not fair. | ||
| You know, it's just not fair. | ||
| And it didn't do anything to promote or preserve public health. | ||
| So where are you at with, well, I think I sense where you're at with the vaccine, but if you wanna go on that a little bit, but more so the vaccine passport, because this seems to be the next step in the liberty fight. | ||
| Yeah, I don't like, you know, I was relieved to see that the, you know, the Biden White House has said, you know, and this is only a few days ago, they said, you know what, we're not gonna be getting involved in a vaccine passport. | ||
| We don't see a role for the government to be administering them. | ||
| So I'm glad to hear that. | ||
| But is that, do you see that as like kind of a wink wink, like, yeah, cause you guys will all do it, all you big businesses and airlines and. | ||
| That's, you know, that's an interesting question, and I'll get to that in a second, because they did also say, we will issue guidelines. | ||
| You know, we're not going to enforce anything, but we're going to issue guidelines. | ||
| And then you start to say, like, OK, do these guidelines essentially become rules? | ||
| And this is, for me, a genuinely interesting question. | ||
| You have a couple of people like Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in Texas kind of saying either, you know, preemptively passing laws saying that no business can enforce, can say you need to be vaccinated to come in here. | ||
| I have to say, one of, again, coming out of COVID, like so much stuff has kind of gone, you know, you know, weird, where, you know, before COVID, you know, you would have businesses keeping people out, and then, you know, and conservatives would be cheering them, like, you know, don't, don't force gay cake, or cake bakers to, to, you know, bake gay wedding cakes, right? | ||
| And, you know, Um, and conservatives are like, yes, and now they're kind of cheering on like governor, government saying to businesses, no, you can't run your business the way you want because it's perceived as in the conservatives interest to block passports. | ||
| I think this will shake. | ||
| Well, I hope it will shake out where some businesses will want to say, you know, no shot, no shirt, no service. | ||
| Um, and I think broadly speaking, they should be allowed to do that. | ||
| I think other stores that wanna say, hey, you know what, you don't need a shot. | ||
| You don't need shirts and you don't need shoes, whatever. | ||
| I think it's a better world when we allow everybody to set their own rules and then live with the consequences of that. | ||
| So the passport issue, though, I do, again, it's, I don't like the idea of the, I don't like The idea of the government setting these really strict terms for, like, you walking around in public. | ||
| What does it mean that we'll have, like, a passport vaccine? | ||
| Is it the type of thing where police will be able to kind of stop you on the street and say, like, hey, have you been vaccinated or not? | ||
| And even if, you know, is it going to become kind of like the stop and frisk, you know, for coronavirus or something like that? | ||
| You know, if it becomes something like that, I think everyone will be against it. | ||
| I don't know, you know, and then you have these weird intermediary things like, well, what about airlines? | ||
| Because some airlines and some foreign airlines are already starting to develop. | ||
| Like, you gotta show that you've been vaccinated before you can get on the flight. | ||
| For a domestic flight? | ||
| You know, I don't think so. | ||
| The other thing is that a lot of this stuff is all, it's a way of smuggling in control of people's lives in the name of public safety and public health. | ||
| And that we need to stand athwart. | ||
| This is something that Michel Foucault, the left-wing French social theorist Thomas Sawes, you know, a hardcore libertarian critic of medicalization of all parts of American society, they would agree appeals to public health oftentimes don't have anything to do with public health. | ||
| It's about controlling people's behavior and making them live the way you want to. | ||
| So as you're watching this happen and the states do their own thing, Is it giving you some sense of satisfaction in a way? | ||
| Because it's like, oh, this is how the system was supposed to work. | ||
| As long as the feds don't do what they're saying they're not gonna do, | ||
| that letting Florida make its choices and guys like us that are from New York and New Jersey | ||
| and live in California, it's like, you gotta live with your choices, man. | ||
| Yeah, no, and to the extent that you have more options to sort. | ||
| So I'm a big believer, there's a guy named Albert Hirschman, | ||
| a political scientist in the early '70s, wrote a book called "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty." | ||
| And he said, there are basically three ways to register dissent from the status quo. | ||
| And one is loyalty, which where you just give up and you become a company man and you do what you're told and, you know, learn to love it. | ||
| That is not very appealing to most people. | ||
| There's a voice where you work within the system for reform and you scream bloody murder when you're pissed about something. | ||
| And that's whether you're a Facebook user or a resident of, you know, Arkansas or Alaska or Alabama. | ||
| And then there's exit, where you pull up stakes and you go out on the frontier, or you leave and you go someplace more to your liking, or, you know, kind of what you have done with your show, you know, and you exited the Young Turks, you went to new places, you know, and when YouTube gets too hot for you, you know, you form a partnership with the Blaze, you create locals, all of that kind of stuff. | ||
| You do exit, where you go to a place that's more hospitable, or you create your own kind of moon colony, you know, which is kind of great. | ||
| And so that's the dynamic that should be at work here as much as possible. | ||
| I do find it, you know, it's just that the hypocrisy or the bad faith arguments, I think, in a lot of people where Ron DeSantis, you know, he was the number one grandma killer because he was letting people do their own thing. | ||
| He killed a lot of grandmas. | ||
| That's what they wanted us to believe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then it, but it hurts to see him now being like, okay, you're a business in Florida. | ||
| You can't, You know, you can't decide how to run your business because I'm telling you, you cannot block somebody. | ||
| Like, yes, I'm with you if you don't want to bake a cake for somebody because you don't like how they fuck. | ||
| But like, God damn it, I'm going to put you in jail if you insist on a COVID vaccination. | ||
| Do you see that? | ||
| I wish they were just more systematic. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm with you on that, but to me, I can grant him a little extra leash there because to me, it's like an overcorrection because they've all gone so insane. | ||
| So then he's saying something that it's like a little over the top, but it's sort of, it's directionally right. | ||
| And I can kind of get over it. | ||
| I think this is one of the limits of sometimes when I think about, okay, what are libertarian ideas? | ||
| How do they affect society? | ||
| And it's that, You know, we're never going to live in an ANCAP society, a narco-capitalist society. | ||
| We're not going to live in a libertarian society. | ||
| But what we do is we kind of, you know, we add spice or we give a direction that people slowly kind of ooze over to. | ||
| And that's OK. | ||
| But I, you know, we're bad at being tribalistic. | ||
| And it is like, so I'm with people, I'm with politicians right up until the moment that they contravene a principle. | ||
| And this is why people like Ted Cruz is a good example in the U.S. | ||
| Senate where he came into office, you know, as a Tea Party darling, and he had a good rhetoric from a, generally speaking, limited government, libertarian-ish perspective. | ||
| But he just is constantly arguing in bad faith and flip-flopping, you know, because at every moment, like, if you're part of a tribe, if you're a Republican, it means at a certain point your principles stop and party affiliation takes over and, like, I can't really go there and I think it might mean, you know, this is why certainly the Libertarian Party, but I think more broadly Libertarians... | ||
| Well, you know, we are important and we're vital to a flourishing America, but we're never, you know, we're never gonna have a 60% plural or majority in anything. | ||
| Right, and by the way, that's why I like talking about ideas way more than politics, because yes, politics just kind of make you crazy, in case people don't know that. | ||
| And ideas, again, well, you know, but what worries me, and I know this is a concern of yours, is that, you know, so let's say, you know, Breitbart would say that politics is downstream from culture. | ||
| Politics as a lagging indicator. | ||
| You know, we've had, when it comes to things like free speech, we've had a Supreme Court that for the past 25 or 30 years, actually more like 50 years, has been really great on free speech. | ||
| And every time, including going back to the mid-90s, when the Clinton administration and Republicans in Congress wanted to regulate the internet like a broadcast network under the Communications Decency Act, the Supreme Court, in a nearly, it was like a 7 to 2 decision, Said, no, this is an illegal abridgment of the First Amendment of people's freedom to speak, etc. | ||
| We have a good Supreme Court. | ||
| We have a culture of free speech which has degraded so much over the past 25 years. | ||
| You know, the Supreme Court, there's a joke, you know, that the Supreme Court reads the newspaper. | ||
| It's like, we've been lucky to have the Supreme Court knock down a lot of restrictions on speech. | ||
| Now we're living in a real battleground where people are saying, you know, a speech is offensive, a speech is threatening, a speech Makes me feel unsafe. | ||
| We gotta get rid of it. | ||
| And they're turning the screws on all of the places where we can speak. | ||
| And how much longer? | ||
| Clarence Thomas recently, in a dissent in a recent case, was saying, you know what, maybe we should be regulating Facebook and other social media as a common carrier, as ABC and NBC News, where they can't moderate any content. | ||
| And I'm like, holy cow, this could be the beginning of a really bad period. | ||
| for not just the law of free speech, but the culture of free speech. | ||
| Okay, so that's exactly, you got me to exactly where I wanted to spend our last couple of minutes, which of course is the big tech thing, which I think for many libertarians has pushed their libertarian beliefs to the end of the line. | ||
| It's sort of a rubber meat road. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| So I'm with you and the Clarence Thomas thing is really interesting because I understand the inclination. | ||
| And then on the other hand, it's like, well, wait a minute. | ||
| Then if you start regulating them, don't you just kind of keep them around forever, | ||
| much like ABC and CBS and NBC and the rest of it? | ||
| So where are you on big tech at this point? | ||
| Because the main line that I hear every time you put out a libertarian idea on big tech, okay, build your own internet, and then they're gonna blow up your servers. | ||
| So help me out, Nick. | ||
| And you know, I'm working on a piece that'll come out down the road a little bit, but of like, you know, Parler did exactly what they were told. | ||
| You know, if you don't like it, and this is where liberals and progressives who were telling the cake baker, you gotta bake the damn cake. | ||
| And then they're saying to, you know, so they're saying, no, you can't leave that nobody, you know, you, you were forced to do this. | ||
| Then when it's, when it's a conservative saying, I want this, then they're like, well, build your own internet, you know, and parlor did all of that. | ||
| And at every step, you know, they were being cock blocked by anybody who could, you know, whether it was Amazon web services, uh, you know, payment, uh, payment programs, uh, you know, app stores. | ||
| Um, and yet they persisted and they're still out there. | ||
| And this, I think this will be unsatisfying to you. | ||
| I think we are in a place where, you know, we need to say, if you believe in private property rights and ownership and things like that, that Facebook does have a right to run its service the way that it wants to. | ||
| Uh, and this is going back to the Hirschman stuff of, you know, exit voice and loyalty. | ||
| I'm not being loyal. | ||
| I'm not loyal to Facebook. | ||
| I'm not loyal to almost anything, you know, other than principles. | ||
| So, like, I'm not going to go along with whatever Facebook wants. | ||
| I'm going to scream bloody murder on Facebook, on YouTube, in the Internet, you know, at Twitter, which did an abominable thing last, you know, last fall when they blocked the New York Post story about Hunter Biden and Joe Biden before the election. | ||
| It's like insane. | ||
| I was like apoplectic, you know, and they did kind of walk it back a little bit. | ||
| But it's a constant fight because every time you turn your back, they're trying to turn down a little bit more sphere of free speech. | ||
| Well, now we're seeing Hunter Biden bang this girl with Charmander sitting next to him, or who was it? | ||
| Not Charmander, Squirtle? | ||
| I would have, it was Squirtle. | ||
| I would have thought it was, he would have, I thought Charmander, you know, but now you would think he'd be a Charmander guy, but he's a Squirtle, which is just too much to think about. | ||
| It's too on the money, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but, but you know, you have to scream bloody murder and then you also have to be constantly building alternatives. | ||
| And you know, one of the things that I like is that just as Twitter is getting worse in terms of its | ||
| arbitrary, its ideological, its politically correct, suddenly Clubhouse appears as a | ||
| place where you can have free and That's what they said in the New York Times! | ||
| It's unfettered! | ||
| different types of discussions. | ||
| Then you see people starting to move in there saying, like, you know what, the problem with clubhouses, | ||
| nobody's recording and reporting on everything everybody's saying all the time. | ||
| It's unfettered, that's what they said in the New York Times. | ||
| Unfettered, you know, could you, I mean, like my grandparents all left Ireland and Italy | ||
| to get out of fetters, like nobody wants fetters, you know, for Christ's sake. | ||
| But, you know, and so clubhouse, you can already see the beginning of the end of clubhouse, | ||
| but there'll be something there after that. | ||
| And it's a push-pull where, you know, it's not a utopian or like super idealistic or inspirational outcome. | ||
| But I think between voice and exit and a constant pushing, that's where freedom is going to resolve. | ||
| And I'm a big fan of a concept that was popular in the 90s called temporary autonomous zones. | ||
| And these were places where You know, outside of, you know, the church, outside of the government, outside of school, you would find these little places where, for a little while, you could do or say or be whatever you wanted to be. | ||
| You know, and Burning Man was like a big example of that, especially before Burning Man. | ||
| It's not that it's corporate, but, you know, it becomes its own institution and it's more fettered. | ||
| But now there are a million other Burning Mans and whatnot, and I think This has to be like what we have to strive for is to say, you know what, in my life and in everything I do, I'm going to be tolerant. | ||
| I'm going to be pluralistic. | ||
| I'm going to engage people rather than try to shut them down and cancel them and screw them over. | ||
| And not only make sure that they're not doing well, but that anybody who associates with them gets put in the gulag, you know, figurative as may be. | ||
| We have to model that. | ||
| And then we have to constantly be building the escape hatch, you know, building the escape pod and having You know, the figurative equivalent of a Swiss bank account where we can go and have the conversations, the lives that we want. | ||
| And what's great about that is that, you know, for all of this, you know, ABC, NBC, CBS, they still exist and they still draw big numbers. | ||
| But everybody is kind of drawn to the frontier where things are a little bit newer, things are a little bit more free, things are a little bit more current. | ||
| And, you know, that's the dynamic that I think people need to understand. | ||
| And we need to make sure that that, you know, kind of, I think that in a lot of ways, that | ||
| for me is what American exceptionalism is, is this balance between being rooted in a | ||
| community and caring about people, and then also being ready to light out for the territory | ||
| when, you know, this, this thing here that we grew up in, whether it's New Jersey or | ||
| New York or wherever, you know, it gets a little bit too stuffed up. | ||
| It gets a little bit too repressive. | ||
| We're gonna light out for someplace else. | ||
| Nick, you just gave me like a three minute sort of Atlas shrugged ending sales job for Locals because that's exactly what I'm trying to do with Locals. | ||
| We're building the escape hatch while I'm yelling and yeah. | ||
| I know and you know it's funny because I know a bunch of people who are using it and they all say the same thing and where you guys at Locals are doing it right and I think This is also starting to happen in social media, where it's decentralized, so that it is, you know, like there is no one choke point, because this is also true, you know, when it comes to everything that depends on a credit card, you know, payment or something, there's a choke point. | ||
| Everything where there's a central server, there's a choke point, or one person ultimately, you know, there's the button, the on-off switch, and they can flip it one way or the other. | ||
| The future is much more dispersed and decentralized. | ||
| We need to be promoting that, not simply as like, okay, this'll do, but like, that's what we want. | ||
| You know, we, you know, and it's, it's always better, uh, you know, I'm a, I, this may seem far afield, but like intersectionality, which has become a buzzword in identity politics, you know, the way I see it or the way I interpret it, it's that all of us are made up of like partial identities and, and interests and things like that. | ||
| And no one of them defines us fully, but overlapping, they kind of give us a sense. | ||
| But they also make us more resilient. | ||
| They make us less fragile because, you know, we have a lot of different parts of our lives going on. | ||
| And that's, it's a kind of way of decentralizing, dispersing who we are. | ||
| It's like, you know, horcruxes. | ||
| It's like a horcrux in Harry Potter where, you know, you want to have parts of your soul all over the place so that you can't get wiped out of one, you know, because of one bad action or one big mistake. | ||
| We're one big attack. | ||
| That's what our society has to be like. | ||
| And I, in a lot of ways, I think we're groping towards that. | ||
| And that's actually, if I may, that's what drives me nuts about political correctness or tribal politics, whether it's right wing or left wing, where people want to take all of the complexities of all we do and all who we are and say, no, you know what? | ||
| You are this one thing, whether it's your, this religion, You're this gender, you're this orientation, you're this profession. | ||
| Like, no way, man. | ||
| You know, what was great about the 20th century, which was a miserable century, you know, like I said, my father fought in World War II. | ||
| There were mass exterminations, you know, the Russian gulag, all of that. | ||
| It ended in this furious, you know, kind of firework show of mass personalization, mass individualization. | ||
| And then that all, you know, kind of came crashing down and like, we've got to get out of the rubble of the global war | ||
| on terror. | ||
| We've got to get out of the garrison state of government getting so big. | ||
| I mean, you know, Biden is talking, you know, we've got the we have the rescue plan, which was 1.9 trillion, we've got $2.2 trillion in infrastructure, which people are saying, you know, childcare is infrastructure, you know, toothpaste is infrastructure. | ||
| And then he's got like another two and something trillion dollar plan just down the road, like, You know, we gotta leave that behind and start getting down to living our lives rather than waiting for checks that we can't afford. | ||
| Nick, you gave me two Atlas Shrugged endings there. | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| And I will admit that I've never read Atlas Shrugged. | ||
| I've never finished it. | ||
| I've watched the movies, which I enjoyed, and I know the basic plot. | ||
| And I kind of like the idea of Galt's Gulch, but I also worry that Galt's Gulch would be like the worst homeowner association. | ||
| And you know everybody's armed, right? | ||
| So it's like, okay. | ||
| I mean, I guess I believe like Robert Heinlein and William Burroughs both said that an armed society is a pleasant society, but I don't know if I would want to live in Galt's Gulch. | ||
| I think I would want to have a friend who has a condo or a timeshare there. | ||
| Listen, I cannot believe we did not do this in all these years. | ||
| So I really enjoyed this. | ||
| And let's just say, let's just say I was hypothetic. | ||
| Ooh, I've said too much. | ||
| Let's just say someone was hypothetically gonna have some sort of get together with a bunch of political dissidents and sit around a fire and smoke some weed. | ||
| in the next couple of days. | ||
| Would that be something that would hypothetically interest someone like you? | ||
| You know, that is, hypothetically, yes. | ||
| It's always, it's always fascinating. | ||
| And, you know, the only thing better than potential is, you know, is then potential energy is, you know, real energy, right? | ||
| So. | ||
| Nick, I will hypothetically see you on Friday night and we'll link to all your stuff down below. | ||
| And it was good seeing you, man. |
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