The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Did Political Rhetoric Cause the Trump Assassination Attempt with Nick Gillespie

Episode Date: July 18, 2024

Nick Gillespie is an editor at large at Reason, the libertarian magazine of "free minds and free markets," and host of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.

The Comedy Cellar live from the table is brought to you by Sheath Underwear, the official underwear of comedy. Visit sheathunderwear.com slash cellar to get 20% off your first order. Every order supports the show. So don't forget, that's sheathunderwear.com slash cellar. Support the show and support your balls. All right. good evening. Welcome to Live from the Table. My name is Noam Dwarman, and Dan's not here,

so you have the treat to hear Perrielle give one of her... What's the opposite of lackluster? Lusterful. Lusterful introduction. Nicolespi is an editor-at-large at Reason, the libertarian magazine of, quote, free minds and free markets, and the host of The Reason interview with Nick Gillespie. He's a two-time finalist for Digital National Magazine Awards

for his work. Do you have any idea what that means? No, but it sounds impressive. It is kind of impressive. It's not really that impressive. I mean, it's kind of impressive. She doesn't know what free markets are. Shut up.

I call myself an award-losing journalist. I like this quote. First of all, be nice. Just because it's your birthday doesn't mean that you get to be extra obnoxious today. He's going to have a meltdown, right, if he hasn't already today? He might.

Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Nicholas B. is to libertarianism what Lou Reed is to rock and roll. Oh, that's very good. Dead. Dead. A legend. The quintessence of its outlaw spirit,

writes Robert Draper in the New York Times Magazine. That's very nice. So how's that for... Very good. So I just wanted to make a comment before we get into the show. So we're talking about Japanese restaurants. We had dinner at Nobu.

I don't know if you remember, we're about the same age. When Japanese restaurants first opened up, it was considered so exotic that like the odd couple will do a whole episode about going to a Japanese restaurant. And walking through like paper doors. Yes, and take off your shoes.

And eating raw fish. It was not that different from our notion of eating insects today. Like if imagine 20 years from now, everybody ate insects. It was the most common thing

in the world. Eating raw fish was crazy. And it was awesome for me. My parents who were the children of immigrants but grew up eating stuff like head cheese and tongue sandwiches, they would be like, raw fish, that's gross. And it's like, what the fuck are

you talking about? Like, half of what you eat is disgusting. Like, at least the fish is clean, right? You know? It was just, it was, and do you remember the first time you tried sushi? Yeah. Did you have, were you nervous about it? Yeah, a little bit. I did not know what to expect. You know, it is a little bit different. I grew up, I was born in Brooklyn, but I grew up near the ocean in New Jersey. So seafood was not as scary. And there's like a lot of stuff,

ceviche was yet to be discovered in my world. But, you know, like certain types of seafood or fish, you would eat pretty, pretty lean. So, or pretty rare. Ceviche is actually technically cooked. It's just cooked by like lemon or something. Yeah. Like citrus, the acid in citrus. I love ceviche. You ever had it, Peril? Yes, I have. No, but this is one of the, you know, one of the most amazing things in American culture in our lifetime. And I think, you know, I know your birthday was just how old are you? I'm 62 today.

OK, I'll be 61 in a couple of weeks. And among the many spectacular things that are better about America is like the food culture is so incredibly awesome, you know, like everywhere now. And it is unbelievable, you know, that like when I think about what I was eating in the 70s, you know, coming out of a crock pot, you know. TV dinners. Yeah. And, you know, and now it's like anything goes and it just keeps getting better and better. Yeah. All right.

So they tried to kill our president, and this put into the crosshairs one of the issues that's closest to your heart, which is free speech and what can be blamed on free speech, what policing should there be, What social norms should they be? Can we blame anybody who spoke freely for dominoes that ended with the assassination attempt of the president? I saw some of your tweets. I don't want to give them away. Just tell us what you give us the libertarian position on all this. Well, you know, the starting starting point and i kind of feel bad okay well i don't actually i this isn't throat clearing it's you know in a democracy in a functioning country um you know and not a failed country political violence has to be denounced every time that it

happens because it really is a threat to the system and man you think about what would have i mean like you've seen the reconstructions and everything, like how close this came to, you know, I mean, killing Trump. That's like so fucked up. It's been a long time since something like that kind of political shooting, they happen from time to time.

But, you know, at the presidential level, this is like terrifying. Reagan was the last one, I guess. Well, he was the one who got hit, yeah. It tried to kill Ford. Yeah, twice, like in a couple weeks. And we'll get to that because that's part of my, one of the reasons why I don't worry that much

about polarizing rhetoric or stuff like that. But political violence in a system that has regular elections and changes of power, you have to denounce it. And you have to denounce it now in the same way that I think you needed to denounce it in mostly peaceful protests against race-based or racially discriminatory policing practices, all that kind of stuff. You have to denounce it because it is, you know, it fucks up the system and it really, you know, it, it threatens it in a, in a powerful way. Having said that, what set me off on this was that, um, you know, Trump certainly brought in a,

you know, a bully boy rhetoric into American politics. He really amped things up. And of course, you know, if we're talking about just in the 21st century, how long did it take before George Bush, W. Bush was being called Bush Hitler and all of this kind of stuff, you know, but I mean, there was a movie that came out showing his assassination. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, conceptualizing it and this, you know, I, you, you made a, an interesting distinction as you were talking between kind of like, you know, lawizing it. And this, you know, you made an interesting distinction as you were talking between kind of like, you know, law and social norms. And we'll get to that in a second.

But what set me off was that J.D. Vance, and this was a couple days before he was named vice presidential candidate, he put out a tweet saying, you know, that Joe Biden calling Donald Trump, you know, a fascist threat to democracy and like that, you know, this, you know, a fascist threat to democracy and like that, you know, this, you know, it would be an extinction. You know, he was saying that Joe Biden is saying it would be an extinction level event if Donald Trump got reelected.

And he said, and I think this is a direct quote, that rhetoric led directly to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. And I think that is so unbelievably false. And it is so mendacious coming from a politician who, you know, who doesn't say, you know, we we need I'm going to reduce my rhetoric. I'm going to take it down from 11 and put it at eight. You know, it's like, no, that this other guy who also happens to be the person who's running against my guy. And he probably already knew he was going to be vice president. Yeah, probably. But it doesn't matter.

And it's like I flip out as a free speech libertarian, especially when politicians start to say, you know what, certain types of rhetoric is out of bounds without first acknowledging that they have a role to play in all of this. And that they, you know, I hate to invoke Michael Jackson because of social norms, but they can start with the man in the mirror. And certainly, you know, somebody like J.D. Vance, who won't shut the fuck up about wanting desperately, you know, just waiting to start doing large-scale deportations of up to 20 million illegal immigrants

that he says are living in the country. You know, it's like, I don't know, like, go fuck yourself. And the reason for that, though, is that there's a difference between polarized rhetoric, polarizing rhetoric and over the top rhetoric, and what why people point guns at politicians and shoot them. And I guarantee you, we don't know much about the killer. I guarantee you he's going to be closer to Squeaky Fromm or even, you know, Squeaky Fromm was the Manson family girl who shot at Gerald Ford, you know, or John Hinckley Jr. Like, you know, these are nut jobs. They are not acting out of any kind of political ideology. Jared Lochner, who is the guy who shot Gabby Giffords, the Arizona Congresswoman, and he

killed a bunch of people, gave her brain damage and whatnot. The minute that that happened, MSNBC was like, this guy's a Fox News watcher, he's a right-wing nut job. And they blamed it on a bunch of ads that Sarah Palin's political action committee had done, where she said, like, you know, let's target these douchebags in various states and put out posters with crosshairs on the elections. And it turned out, of course, that the guy, you know, he was like a Keith Olbermann superfan, and he was insane. Like, he wasn't shooting her out of any kind of political ideology that could in any way, shape or form be traced to what was going on in the culture.

So I think that's really important. I don't know how I feel about it, because, first of all, I've always felt there is some relationship between the real world and how the insane people react. I would, I should have looked up. I meant to the details of the guy who shot Rabin in Israel. Right. I believe he was unstable in some way. Yeah.

But that may have been more politically motivated and like, certainly the guy, the guy who shot Amr Sadat knew exactly what he was doing. And it was, it was a political murder because he was pissed that Sadat had made peace with Israel. Right. So we don't know. Look, listen, you know I'm on your side.

No, no. Yeah. And I mean, just to play to that, like somebody like Sirhan Sirhan, who shot Robert F. Kennedy, explicitly said, you know, I shot him because he supported Israel in the 67 war. And that doesn't mean he's not insane, and it certainly doesn't mean it's justified, but it's like that's the exception, though, I think. And, you know, then you get to this question of, like,

how many politicians have been shot at over, you know, the past 20 years? And it's very, it's in, like, single digits or low double digits. And how do you attribute that to the climate? Well, this is, so you, you made the distinction, which is in my mind. And I think the tough, the Trump situation, at least on paper is a tough case. My gut tells me it's probably somehow just a nut job. But in my entire life, we've seen tremendously over-the-top political rhetoric that we all knew was figurative. Biden famously said, he's going to put you all back in chains. Now, if that were true, to be taken literally, then if somebody killed Romney, that would be political violence.

He's going to put us back in chains. We're going to kill the guy. With Trump, it's the first time where the rhetoric was not figurative. Serious people were telling us this could be the last election. Yeah. I know serious people who believe that. Oh yeah. And they still do. Yeah. So at that point, if, if people are supposed to believe these wise people will tell them this is the last election, then this is baby Hitler in some way. And then,

so is it political violence or is it not political violence? I guess we'll have to find out. I suspect it's not. Yeah. But I, and, and just to be honest, as I analyze it,

so no, Yeah. But I and just to be honest, as I analyze this, you know, I cannot say that the rhetoric against Trump is just another form of the rhetoric I've always heard. It is to me different. It's saying you elect this guy, the country is over. And I don't mean it figuratively, as I've always meant it. I mean, the country is over. Yeah, I'm thinking back to when Barack Hussein Obama was, you know, running for president and became president. Cue the Arabic music. No, and I knew a lot of people who would say with a straight face who like a year earlier before anybody knew who Obama was, you know, they seemed like rational people and they would say, you know what? The problem with him is that he's the first person running for president who is actually dedicated to the destruction of everything that, you know, that America stands for. And it was just democratically, though, he was going to nobody ever thought he was going to get the military and have a coup. You know, there are people in the 80s were talking about, I knew a bunch of evangelical Christians who were talking about people like Ronald Reagan creating FEMA, you know, concentration camps and stuff like that.

This stuff goes back in a lot of different ways. Trump, that, you know, it might be that like he won't leave office, which of course he did, but like he can't get in unless he wins the election. So I don't know, you know, I mean, I don't, I agree with you like on a, in a way of social norms, like there's one of the things that's been being pointed to a lot is there was a New Republic cover story where it's like a famous portrait of Hitler, but it's Trump. And it's like, oh, wow, that's so bold. And it's like, that is not only mentally

retarded as political rhetoric, it's morally retarded. Because it's like, how, you know, if I mean, I don't believe that you really believe that. And then what a what a, you know, what a just kind of denigration of what Hitler actually stood for. If you think Trump is in any way, shape or form playing in the same league. So I think it's figured it, you know, and I, you know, and I also I condemn that kind of rhetoric, I think, because like that isn't what I traffic in.

I don't say, you know, this I don't know if I've ever said, you know, this last thing, this is the thing that will pull the threat apart. You know, if we you know, and I hate so many things about the contemporary government. I hate the Federal Reserve. I hate the minimum wage. I hate, you know, drug prohibition. But like I'm never I don't think I ever say, you know, if this one thing happens, then it's game over. So let the shooting begin. Well, let me tell you why I don't think it's figurative. And, you know, some of this, you just have to do a gut check. All the stuff you're saying, I heard about Obama too.

But I never felt anybody really thought the country was in the balance. More just a terrible pivot in a direction was in the balance. But we've heard the, well, we saw that Trump pressure tested the law to try to stay in office after the 2020 election, January 6th and all that. And now we hear people saying, this time he'll appoint the people who will do what he wants to do. Including J.D. Vance, who was famously Mike Pence refused to go along. That's not figurative.

He almost got away with it this time. Next time he will get away with it. Yeah, but I mean, that's all in the service of getting a zombie president reelected, right? Yes. I mean, I think this is all in a political context of election. Well, shame on them if they don't really mean it. I mean, fuck them. Yeah, mean, I think this is all in a political context of election and well, shame on them if they don't really mean it. You know, I mean, fuck them all. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. It's ridiculous. But I also agree that, I mean, it's and I'm not just saying,

you know, it's it's all whataboutism. But there's a lot here of like, you know, for conservatives, do they really believe in rounding up, you know, 20, what they claim are 20 million illegal immigrants and kicking them out of the country? Because they say that again and again. And if you don't mean that, then stop saying it, because that's repulsive. And I could see that trigger. I mean, if we're going to say, you know, you take rhetoric, you know, if there are 20 million people in the country who are about to get rounded up and put in cages and dumped into the ocean or over the border of Mexico, like, I guess they'd start shooting or they'd start fighting back, right? And you would – they would have a claim to, right? Because it's like –

It definitely means to round up some number of them. Yeah. But I'm just saying, you know, like this is rhetoric. It's shameful. And it's one of the reasons why people hate politics. It's why independents are at a historically high level of percentage of the electorate, because who wants to be a Republican or a Democrat when you have to, in order to show you're part of the gang, you have to make these insane testaments about stuff that you clearly don't believe. So just to add to this, you know, you know, Michael Shermer. Yeah, the guy. I actually I had dinner with Michael Shermer

recently in Vegas. I met him in Arizona. Very smart guy. Right. A skeptic. I mean, he runs the skeptic. And he's a thoughtful guy. And I believe he's basically of the disposition that we are about free speech. Very much so. But he tweeted, there is a price to reckless speech that portrays public figures as threats to the American way of life.

It can be the spark that helps push an assassin to act. It is impossible to separate the violence of political assassinations in modern American history from the temperature of the time. Yes, I think it is. I think you can. And so, for instance, what I or do it the other way around, like when there are assassination attempts or successful assassinations, Is it because of the temperature? I don't know. You know, was Kennedy, what was going on in the country? And there had been the Cuban Missile Crisis and things like that. But when Lee Harvey Oswald popped JFK, one of the things, and if you go back and look at the contemporary commentary about all of that, there was a reason why Kennedy was going to Dallas and to Texas.

And it was because there was a climate of right wing hate and he was disliked and he was running for reelection and he wasn't doing that well. And everybody kept talking about the climate of right wing hate, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then it's like he was killed by a self-described Marxist Leninist who, you know, had been handing out pamphlets for fair play to Cuba, who had actually defected to the Soviet Union. It had nothing to do with a climate of right-wing hate. Well, I will make the following analogy to climate change. We know, the smart people among us know, that you cannot assume that any horrible hurricane is a result of climate change.

You can 100% believe in climate change, but we've always had hurricanes. We always have record-breaking hurricanes. You can't make any assumption. You can only make that assumption. Yes, but even in the best of times, the Secret Service still takes its job quite seriously because we don't assume the president is safe as long as the temperature isn't high. We assume that— Or even when everything is San Diego and it's 72 degrees. That's right. We always assume that there are always people out there who want to kill the president to get a chance. So you can only begin to feel confidence in these judgments through the frequency that they happen.

Right. 20 hurricanes and, you know, a whole spate of political violence, I think then. But you can't make any judgment on one guy who tried to kill the president. I also, and I've talked about this on the recent Roundtable, which is another podcast I'm on, that when I look back at the 70s, and I don't remember it because I was a kid then, but when you look at political violence in the 70s in the United States and in Europe and throughout the world, there was a lot more of it because, you know, the Cold War was, you know, at, you know, one of its high points. So you had both American, you know, kind of free world people and Soviet people kind of pushing buttons and kind of stoking stuff. But you had groups like the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the IRA. You had the ANC working in South Africa. There were a lot of international groups that were

yoking up sometimes for legitimate reasons i think you know you gotta say you know in south africa was political violence justified um you know yeah i mean like and then you can always say not against civilians etc because you know something like the ira in a way you know i understand an armed response to british occupation of ireland um but i don way, you know, I understand an armed response to British occupation of Ireland, but I don't under, you know, I don't condone blowing up babies and, you know, people in discotheques and stuff like that, or claiming, you know, on 9-11 that there are no non-combatants. Like, that's insanity and needs to be rejected out of hand. But in the 70s, there was the weather underground in the United States. There was the Symbionese Liberation Army.

There was a lot of bombings that were happening on a regular basis. There was a lot of violence. And there were large-scale rhetorics, and everybody thought Nixon was Hitler, or McGovern was a stalking horse for the Soviet Union or whatever. But the violence that was Hitler, you know, or McGovern was, you know, a stalking horse for the Soviet Union or whatever. But the violence that was there, I would be more worried if we were in a time like that and something like this happens or you start to see a spate of this. But I don't see that. And that makes it I don't feel good about any of this, but like I don't worry about this and I don't link it to contemporary rhetoric.

In your gut, do you feel that there's some relationship between the BLM riots, then January 6th, then, does it become normalized in a certain way? Would January 6th have happened outside the context of all the rioting that happened in B-Land? We don't know the answer. No, no, I think that's a great question, and I kind of don't think it would have. In the same way, I don't think the riots in response to George Floyd would have happened nationally if it hadn't been for COVID lockdown. So, like, you know, there's a lot of interlocking pieces.

And, you know, but and I think January 6th, I think January 6th was overblown. I mean, I think it was awful. And I think the people who broke the law should be penalized. I don't think that, you know, I don't think Trump was directing it. And I don't think it was an actual attempt to, you know, take over the government. I mean, that would be pathetic if it were like, you know, big, fat, you know, militia men who were like, we're going to take over the government, but we're going to leave our guns, you know, in Virginia, because otherwise we'd be breaking the law if we brought them into DC and things like that. I mean, and it's ugly and it's serious,

but it's not, you know, it isn't an insurrection. But if this stuff had continued, and if crime had continued, I mean, one of the most amazing things besides like, over the past 60 years, you know, just how much better food is in America. What's amazing is over the past couple of years, we've seen a rapid decline in crime, basically across the board everywhere in the country. And so I think the fever pitch that was growing because of the pandemic and because of George Floyd and BLM, which I think protests against policing,

always legitimate, protests against anything, protests even by people that I disagree with completely, as long as it's peaceful, that's always good. But I think the criminality that was kind of clinging to the edges of that, that's actually faded in a way that should make us feel a little bit safer about what's going to happen. You know, on January 6th,

sometimes I have like a way of seeing things that, I wouldn't say it's unique to me, but I don't hear other people saying it. I wonder what's the matter with me? No one else is saying this. I must be wrong. But my take on January 6th has always been, in addition to the fact you can't take over the United States government by taking over the building or even by disrupting a congressional, I mean, that's not just not how it's done. That what came out was that Trump had a cynical, bad faith, legal strategy that was going to test this election.

Yeah. In that speech that Giuliani gave, we said, we're going to have trial by fire. Yeah. He meant trial in the courtroom. Right. And then January 6th happened.

And then Trump had to concede the election on January 7th, meaning that January 6th was the one thing that upended the whole strategy that he had to take over the country, as it were. And he was desperate to find a way. You know, like there's the phone call with the Georgia Secretary of State, like, you know, you got to find me these votes, and all of that kind of desperate, you know, gambits and stuff like that. But, you know, the fact is, by the way, today I listened to that

whole phone call. Have you listened to it? I did when it happened, you know, when it first came out, I haven't revisited. I don't think there's any way they're going to convict him on that phone call. But anyway. Yeah, no, I mean, because he's, I mean, he's like, you know, it's kind of like, you know, an electoral booty call, like he's just begging for sex and it's not going to happen. And then he doesn't push it. Right. Like, what's he going to do? You know, I do think in a way I've never voted for Trump. I don't expect to. I'm not going to vote for Biden. And that doesn't make me pure. It just I wish I wish there was a major party candidate that i felt comfortable voting for

um but i do think in many ways it disqualifies trump like his actions as they've come to light like this is a man to the extent that you want to believe the argument that character matters and i'm not sure that it does um to be honest but like if does, he doesn't have it. And having said that, I, and I've said this consistently, like, I think Trump would have been a better, was a better president than Hillary would have been. I wish he had won in 2020. And I kind of, I expect him to win this time. And I think it will be a better outcome than, than Biden, but he really, you know, the Republican party should be ashamed of themselves as the Republican Party should be ashamed of themselves as the Democratic Party should be ashamed of themselves for running Biden. Like if these are the choices

you're given, you're giving us, you got real problems. The problem is that the notion of being disqualified, it sounds good, but in reality and in democracy with self-government, nobody's disqualified for anything. Ariel Sharon was, did all this stuff with Sabra Shatila and all those people. He didn't kill them, but you know, blood was on his hands. He should have been disqualified. He became prime minister of Israel and a good one. And, um, we put all, we personalized the, the presidency and we hang all these, uh,

accusations on them and their, and we attack all these, uh, accusations on them and they're, and we attack their character and they've done things which are over the line should. But then of course, people whose lot, people whose lives are actually affected by the policies that these people represent and they can be diametrically opposed. They say, listen, yeah, I guess he should be disqualified, but you want me to lose my factory because he should be diametrically opposed, they say, listen, yeah, I guess he should be disqualified, but you want me to lose my factory because he should be disqualified? No, I'm going to take

the guy who's disqualified. Yeah, I agree. I mean, and you know, you don't, you want me to outlaw abortion because your guy, you know, like doesn't work that way. Yeah. Or I, you know, I mean, or like, yeah, you want me to outlaw abortion and that means I got to vote for somebody like I, you know, and I don't know if he can sue me or not, like, but like, you know, if there is a presidential candidate, and I guess, you know, you throw in Robert F. Kennedy Jr., there's probably more than one in this race, but who has paid for a lot of abortions, we're assuming it's Donald Trump, but he was the guy who was going to, you know, get Roe versus Wade overturned. So like, I understand why Christians or people where that's their one issue, they're going to vote for Trump, even if he goes out on

Fifth Avenue and murders a bunch of people. I mean, if there's anything that I really think somebody should be disqualified for, it may be just my own personal lack of tolerance for this. There was an article in Reason Magazine about it one time, was Kamala Harris and the shenanigans that she was guilty of to try to keep knowingly keep innocent people in prison. Right. There's nothing Donald Trump has ever been accused of. Yeah. Which cuts me like that.

That's like Fidel Castro level shit. Yeah. And nobody's saying she's disqualified because as long as we don't, as long as we pretend it didn't happen, we don't have to deal with that. Right. So fuck them. They're all full of hypocrites well this but you know for me this is and you know again the assassination attempt is like super important and you you

mentioned like the secret serving and service and passing are we going to talk about that because unbelievable a real failure of them and and the local police to like do their basic job right you know i mean this you know and And we shouldn't forget that. And a lot of the school shootings, like the one in Florida and everything like that and the one in Texas, what really the biggest story might be the way that law enforcement does not do its,

it doesn't execute its task. Now, is there a, go ahead, you have a point you want to finish? Yeah, yeah, I was just going to say that the real outcome of a lot of this, and it's not just this moment, and it's not just this election, and it's not just post-presidential debate

where, you know, Biden, like the people who are Biden supporters are shitting their pants because they realize like they are, you know, whatever they're doing, they're diluting themselves. You know, it can lead to a nihilism in America where you say like one, you know, morality doesn't matter. One choice is the same as the other.

And, you know, and this we've been in it for, you know, 50 years. We've been moving from relatively high trust to relatively low trust. And you don't want to live in a low trust society. And it's not inevitable. And it's mostly centered around politics because politicians have again and again been shown to be, you know, not just personally hypocritical, but like to be liars and cheaters and refusing to own any of their mistakes when it comes to policy you know when it comes to covid when it comes to you know economic uh policy after the financial crisis and what created the financial crisis you know it's like we need this is where we need to have a discussion and i don't want to say so you can't call anybody hitler or

stalin or anything like that but what we need to have is a real, is a political rhetoric that accounts for the reason why people have historically low levels of trust and confidence in government is because of the way government is acting. It's not any of us. We're just trying to get on with our lives. It's the people in office, the policies they pursue, and their refusal to acknowledge when they're guilty of failure. The irony of that, and actually brings me to my next point, is that the public likes when somebody says they were wrong and takes responsibility. These politicians avoid mea culpa as if it's bad for them politically. It's good, in my opinion.

Sometimes. I mean, this was the, know in a in a way and i think trump perfected this more than anybody but bill clinton in the 90s as his personal scandals and a couple you know political ones were we're starting to pile up the washington consensus at the time and i was kind of new at reason so i remembered we covered this extensively as did everybody but everybody was saying like he's got to. Like he's got to get in front of the scandal and confess and admit he was wrong and take his lumps. And then at various points, people were like, he's got to resign. He's got to resign. And Nixon resigned, right. You know, he's got to resign. And Clinton, you know, he was like, no, I really

don't. And, um, you know, he waited everybody out and it it was like people are, all right, you know, and then he just, you know, continued. And I think Trump is cut from that kind of, you know, he's cut from he's out of the same gene pool. He's not going to he's not going to apologize for anything. He's not going to admit that he's wrong and he's just going to keep going. And then he'll talk as if he was always this way. But he didn't have sex with Stormy Daniels. So what should he apologize for? Yeah.

Now, why would he? You know, she was always this way. But he didn't have sex with Stormy Daniels, so what should he have done? Yeah, yeah. Now, why would he? You know, she was horse-faced. Yeah, I mean, it's like, it's disturbing. And Biden, if I just may, you know, Biden was, you know, he was against the Vietnam War. You know, he was for the Vietnam War and against it. He was, you know, for Iraq and against,

like Biden's entire career. There's a very good piece by Martin Gurry at the Free Press. I think it came out today where he's just like, you know, Biden over his career, which is like the longest career. You know, certainly he is the Methuselah of contemporary American politics. And it's like it has been all over the place. Like he does not have you know, he is not a very stable genius. You've got to give it to him because he's, you know, he's the president of the United States. Um, and he's been in politics. He took office first in 1973. You know, it's like, he's fucking, he's part of the furniture, but he,

he just flips all the time. Imagine if Biden said, look, when we took over after COVID, um, everything was in disarray. had the best minds they told us that we could spend this we could have this program and it wouldn't cause inflation um uh larry summers actually warned that it might cause inflation and you know what in retrospect we probably did cause some of that inflation but we'll learn our lessons and we'll we'll be more careful uh with these things in the next administration. We're going to take it to heart. No, everything's fine.

You have just as much money as you've ever had. You shouldn't be complaining about prices. And in the presidential debate, the first thing he said, he misrepresented the statistics of unemployment and inflation when he took office. He, like, tripled each of them. And, yeah, you know, and again, actually, I was going to say,

I don't want to both sides it or what about it, but it's like each of these guys is terrible in their own way. I happen to think, and again, I say this, where I don't think people should have to stop calling Trump Hitler or worry and project their stupid fantasies that this is the end of everything good and decent. You know, that fruit will never ripen if Trump gets reelected.

Like, you know, everything will taste bad. You know, our cars will turn to sand. Whatever fantasy people want to have, I don't think that's going to happen. But I think Trump would be better because the mix of him getting elected and then I suspect that what will happen is people will balance things out because everybody understands now, like, nobody is projecting, oh, you know what, the Republicans are going to take over because they have such a great and refreshing and persuasive,

you know, comprehensive program to make America great again. It's like, no, like Trump will probably get elected. And it'll be like two years ago, like, you know, in the midterm elections, the Republicans should have massively taken major majorities in the House and the Senate. And they didn't because they fucked up and they, you know, they ran a bunch of idiots in easy races. Yet again, yes. You know, so getting back to the Secret Service, because this is, I had been resisting getting into it,

but I think I'm going to have to because things are kind of just bubbling up, and the story seems incredible, the debacle, the incompetence. However, let me just start to put it in context. In Israel, on October 7, 2023, Hammas got in there for seven hours killed 1200 people in a country which is hyper vigilant with the best military on planet earth so ridiculous things can happen yeah you know so in that context this seems like a relatively minor level of incompetence. And yet, when you see this head of Secret Service, this woman with no apparent qualifications, and you see this five-foot-two woman trying to hold up the president, and then you see the sum total of all

these other things that have caused us to lose trust in our institutions, one does wonder if this is just a degradation of our ability to do things properly because we're concerned with so many other factors. I don't, you know, I think it's a Secret Service failure, obviously, when anybody gets a shot and it's, you know, and there seems to be a lot of, you know, there were people there saying, hey, you know, there's a guy on that roof. Like, why don't you check that out? And there's, the AP reported like the day of or right after that local police, I guess,

had gone up and seen the guy on the roof. And then they were like, oh, but, you know, where's our guns? We got to go back to our guns. And that's when the guy started shooting and they got killed. Like, it's like, what, but, you know, where's our guns? We've got to go back to our guns. And that's when the guys started shooting, and they got killed. Like, it's like, what's going on? And I don't, you know, I am not yet in my structural engineer phase

of, like, the 9-11 analog of where I understand whether or not jet fuel can melt, you know, I-beams and stuff like that. But it seems, you know, we know that this was a failure of security, and, you know, the stuff that's coming out it seems like uh you know the secret service is you know fucked up i mean i saw the photo today it's just a roof right there and i read that um there's a slight slope to the roof and we didn't put somebody up there because the slope was dangerous yeah but then i saw the picture it's a little gentle slope yeah um how and then i but uh but you know i you know if if you're suggesting this is because of dei or because you know we we have to let trans athletes you know swim and you know in the ncaa or something like I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I doubt that.

And it's like I know that virtually every social service that the government is offering is getting crappier. And, I mean, like, you know, we're in New York, and I'm sure you saw that press conference where Eric Adams was like, hey, here's the new garbage cans, the rat-proof garbage cans. Yeah, I saw that. And it's kind of like, yeah, okay, this, you know, we're living in a bizarre world where, like,

things are actually pretty good, and they're better than they were, like, a couple years ago in terms of crime, you know, in New York and everywhere. Although we had two robbings at gunpoint on McDougal Street and then on, I think, on Thompson Street in the last two weeks. Okay, but I'm just saying, like, we clearly are living in a post-competency world in almost everything that we're talking about.

I don't know. I mean, I would like to... I mean, it's a predictable result of these policies. Everybody said it, that you see a woman there. She worked for Pepsi-Cola prior, is that right? I did, yeah said it, that you see a woman there. She worked for Pepsi Cola prior. Is that right? I did. Something like that. You know, and if you're not even hiring from like Coca-Cola,

if you're going with Pepsi. She worked for some company. Google it, Max, where she worked. And you see a woman in charge of the Secret Service. Of course, I have no problem with a woman in charge of the Secret Service, but I prefer it very much if I could see the woman in charge of the Secret Service. Oh, she must be a hell of a woman. Rather than saying, did they just look around, especially what comes from the Biden administration.

They had to hire a woman. And then when you look at her background, it's not like she came out of the CIA or some sort of military thing. Kimberly H. Sheetal. Yeah. She does this all the time. You'd think she would have had it all. Yeah, itetal. Yeah. One second. She does this all the time. You'd think she would have had it all. Yeah, it was Pepsi.

Pepsi. And what was her position at Pepsi? She was an executive. An executive at Pepsi. I wonder, did she handle Mountain Dew, at least? Like one of the spicier brands? I mean, on its face, you say, why did you hire an executive from Pepsi to be in charge of the Secret Service? But, you know, so just to go, you know. You say, why did you hire an executive from Pepsi to be in charge of the Secret Service?

But, you know, so just to go, you know, yeah. And I mean, I'm not like it's fucked up. Maybe you can Google who the previous ones were and what their resumes were for comparison. I remember like who ran FEMA under George W. Bush. It was like the heck of a job. Brownie guy who like had run the American Association of Arabian Horse Breeding or something. The guy who was put in charge, the doctor who was put in charge of MK Ultra, the mind control program that the Defense Department and the CIA did after in the 50s into the 60s, where, you know, they started dosing people with LSD without telling them to figure out. I just learned about that last week.

Yeah, no, and it's like, read Poisoner in Chief. The guy had no qualifications for that. The people who were in charge of torture in Afghanistan, they were like dentists or something. I mean, whenever you look into this stuff, it's just a wilderness of error, I think.

And yet in the 40s and 50s and 60s, there were a lot of competent people. But you're saying that like who? Like Robert McNamara, right? Who went from running General Motors to running the Vietnam War disastrously. Running General Motors is not the... No, but it was... Yeah, but I mean, this is that you think... Rex Tillerson was going from Exxon

to be Secretary of State she was the senior director in global security at Pepsi to be fair and she also what does global security mean at Pepsi I don't know but for more than 25 years including on Biden's security

detail while he was Vice President okay fair enough you guys are making her sound like she was running like a vending machine. Yeah, she emptied, she had a big route, you know, where she would go around an empty vending machine. In a statement announcing her appointment, Biden said he, quote, had complete trust in Shito, to whom in 2021... Well, she didn't show up on his detail. Look, and also, now conspiracy theories. I mean, we're running out of time soon.

You've seen the conspiracy theories that are going around. Staged was, yeah, trending on Twitter with it, like, you know, actually, it would have been great if staged was trending on Twitter, like, two minutes before the assassination attempt, but... I mean, serious people I know are open minded that this was a conspiracy that maybe Biden was in on it. I mean, yeah, that I well, I've seen mostly from a hardcore kind of right wing sources. And I think it's trolling,

you know, but saying that, you know, Biden had been kind of short sheeting the Secret Service deployment for Trump all along. And, you know, they won't give it to Bobby Kennedy Jr., you know, who comes from a family where it's like, if you're not flying the plane into the ocean yourself, you're getting killed where you know you say like smart people i know are people who are not clearly in the the booby hatch are starting to say no you you know come on you have to understand and like this i saw a lot of this with covid i saw a lot of this you know with all sorts of things in the 21st century. And it's like, it worries me when, you know,

people who seem to be kind of serious are so desperate to maintain their rapidly deteriorating world and framework that they're- The whole thing deserves me very much. Tucker Carlson is sitting a few chairs away from the president. Yeah. And we've talked about, I think, before, Tucker Carlson goes on his show and says that the American government

is keeping a secret about supernatural soldiers of Satan who kill people that appear to us as UFOs. You would think that would be the end of Tucker Carlson. Yeah. But it's not, and he has 20 other conspiracies. It's outrageous. Candace Owens says Macron's wife is a man, and Tucker goes on Joe Rogan

and says that Alex Jones is a supernatural prophet. And Joe Rogan won't go that far, but Joe Rogan says, well, yeah, he is, you know, he gets a lot of things right. There's something going on there. And then Joe Rogan says that the Jews killed JFK

because he was going to make AIPAC register as a foreign agent. Oh, really? Yeah, and all of this is just becoming too acceptable in polite company, as it were. Yeah. And I think it's fucking dangerous.

What do you think is driving that? I don't know. Yeah, because for me, it's harder. Well, here, let me try a meta theory on this. And this was easier to do like 15 years ago, but there was a wide appreciation for the idea that older institutions and kind of centralized institutions of power, both in the government but also in the private sector, like big corporations.

We understood that it was harder and harder for the Federal Reserve to really pump up or pump down the money supply or prices and whatnot, that it was hard for governments to really control people because we all have so much technology and kind of wealth and we can kind of figure out how to do whatever we want. Churches couldn't make people show up anymore. And I think that that's still true. And it's not all, it doesn't mean it's all clear sailing.

It means that like a lot of stuff that we could depend on and rely on gets disrupted or we haven't quite found out how to, you know, how to get to the next level where we don't worry about this kind of stuff. We're in a liminal space between the past and whatever the future is going to look like. And I think people in politics, this has become harder and harder. Like we, you know, we haven't in, you know, in the entire 21st century, we haven't had a stable governing majority of, you know, where the White House has, you know, the same party as the White House, Congress, you know, both has a Congress for a long time. It keeps changing every six years, typically every two years or something like that, because it's harder and harder to control things. And in those moments, people start to glom onto conspiracy theories to kind of give themselves psychological sucker to, you know, make it

through the day. Because think about it, like if you were, you know, if you're a Biden supporter, like, man, that's got to be hard. Because, you know, when we saw all of this for the past couple months, where it's like, oh, those are all cheap fakes, they're deep fakes. It's like, they're zeroing in on Biden, and it's unfair, blah, blah, blah. And then it's like, you just wait. And then that debate, and even the people who, I mean, even Jill Biden was probably like, you know, we got to we got to fucking get rid of this guy. And, you know, so they're flipping out. And I think a lot of people didn't, you know, didn't believe that Trump could win, didn't believe that Trump could come back, you know, et cetera. And like, so there the free flow of information. We did used to lean a lot on gatekeepers. But they were picked from the more responsible, smarter, more staid circles.

I don't agree. And they kind of told us what to believe. I don't agree with that. I mean, I think that they were picked from certain groups. I mean, Walter Cronkite wouldn't be out there saying Trump is Hitler, you know? No, he probably would be at this point. Yeah, maybe. know well no he probably would be at this yeah i may be and and you know was it a better world when walter cronk i got you know 50 of all tv viewers watching him he was a bullshit artist

and he was he was a mask for power i this is where i'm i'm not just libertarian um but i'm also very antinomian like i i don't like the establishment i don't like power because it always masks itself as correct or, you know, smarter. And like the fact is, it's not smarter. And I feel I'm very happy to have grown up, even if we are kind of like, you know, little fires everywhere are breaking out. It's like I would rather live in this world than a world where you, you know, you couldn't find out what was true or what was not true, and you had no options around that.

I was going to say- I agree with you. Two points that might make you feel a little bit better. And then I got to read the sponsor thing. Go ahead. I forgot. But one is that we worry about democracy, but compared to the year 2000, so many more people are participating in elections legally.

You know, there isn't a lot of voter fraud or anything like that. But the voter participation rates are way, way up across the board. So this is what democracy looks like. It wasn't the old thing where it's like, oh, you don't fucking bother. Like, you know, Georgia, you know, is a state that's been contested. Georgia has like unbelievably intense and high rates of voter participation, especially compared to New York. Because in New York, you kind of know like your vote doesn't matter because the fix is in anyway. And then like you're going to they're going to lose tons of vote.

There's there's Bernie votes from the 2016 primary that went missing that have never been counted. You know, so it's like this is, we're actually at a mega democratic moment now where more people are voting than ever. All right, democracy is, I mean, voting is the final step in that process of democracy. Right. And more voting on paper, I guess, is good. Yeah, it's more engagement.

But everything that goes on behind that and into that decision of who to vote for and choose the candidates and all that stuff, it's got to change. The fact that a total mentally ill conspiracy theorist is sitting two seats

from the President of the United States at a Republican convention, this is something different. It's not good. In 2028, maybe he's going to be sitting right next or even be the candidate. So the other thing I was going to say, so, okay, this is what democracy looks like. And it's, you know, it's kind of like it's ugly, right?

Or it's not pretty yet. The other thing is the solution to this, of course, is, you know, if we adopt a broadly libertarian view and say, you know, a government at all levels has less control over how you live your life, we can relax a little bit because then every election isn't quite, you know, the end or the beginning of, you know, the end of everything that is good and decent or the beginning of a new tyranny. It's like, you know what, if the government was half the size it was and focused on people who actually need help, you know what,

we'd have a better economy, we'd have fewer poor people, and we wouldn't be at each other's throats because we would be arguing over tastes and preference rather than, you know, the one law that we all have to live by. Nick, I don't know how much thought you've ever given to your underwear. Oh, all the time. You know, it's kind of like you had a telephone or a cell phone, and then the iPhone came out.

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Like if the underwear isn't soft enough, you get chafed. Is that right? Yes. Like if it rubs up again. I haven't had feeling below my neck for like 20 years, but I could say that. Well, I'm half black, you know, from the waist up. So anyway, that is I'm going to think about that.

About the sheath underwear. Yeah. All right. What, what else is on your, we're just wrapping it up. You're such an interesting guest. I can't believe it took all these years to strike up a good relationship with you like this, but what else is. Well, thank you for that. But yeah, this is like an incredible enjoyment. I don't know. I have a question.

Do you sense that the stigma of supporting Trump is melting away? Yes. This is a huge event because Trump's policies, as you already alluded to, I feel the same way. In general, they're closer to what most people prefer. Well, in an interview that I did of you for the Reason interview, you, at the end, insisted we were ready to pack up and go home. And he was like, wait, I have this Trump-like speech. Chiefs of paper. He had written when he was in wait i have this trump like speech oh yeah sheeps of paper he had written in you know when he was in second grade or something but um no i you know i think it's a couple of things and and also this you know i don't think it's going to last but trump being more conciliatory

because he can also like he senses that he's going to win. So he can be kind of a decent guy, at least for a while, assuming that holds up. It's like the guard in Schindler's List who tries to be nice for a while. Yeah, definitely. He goes right back to it. But, you know, he governed essentially as a kind of, you know, center-right Republican. It wasn't, he wasn't off the, you know, he wasn't totally off the reservation. I mean, I find his immigration stances and policies awful. I find his, his, his hatred of free trade really disturbing and problematic. You know, like I'm not a

Trump guy, but he wasn't, he wasn't like in a totally different universe from what we might have expected. And the economy before COVID, you know, and he was not good on COVID, actually. He's the one who called for the two weeks, you know, shutdown and all of that kind of crap. But he, you know, the economy was doing pretty well under him. So I think a lot of people who are not super ideological are like, okay, well, you know, between, you know, demented biden and trump you know what are we talking about here yeah i mean first of all i didn't mean to compare him to a nazi i just anyway i i that that wasn't the point because if he was a nazi then you would be right i don't want

to i don't want to get him killed yeah but um there's two correlation causation uh issues we don't know the answer. One is that the economy was better under Trump. I tend to think it had something to do with Trump. And two is that the world was more stable under Trump. Yeah. Which is insane. It's not crazy to think that that had something to do with Trump.

Well, you know, I think in the presidential debate, when he said, you know what, Putin wouldn't have invaded Ukraine, like you can't prove that. But it's like I think most people are like, yeah, that was probably right. Yeah, there's a good chance. Yeah, because Hamas not invading is less likely. Yeah. Although, you know, one of the things that you got to, you know, you or I think everybody should give to Trump is the Abraham Accords. You know, and of course, it's interesting that Ivanka and Jared Kushner, it's like they don't exist.

In this current iteration of Trump, they've gone missing. And Kushner was supposedly a big pusher of the Abraham Accords. But the Abraham Accords was the most significant kind of change in the Middle East in years, in decades for us, in a generally positive direction, and that was Trump. So he was not, by any stretch, a disaster or reckless. He forced NATO countries to cough up a little bit more money. I don't know.

And it's weird because this is where when, you know, one of the other things is like we look at Biden and we're like, oh, my God, this guy is just he's a mannequin. You know, he's he's he's going to be wheeled directly to the Walt Disney Hall of Presidents and just wired up for. No, it's weekends at Bernie. Yeah. Well, and but Trump is also very old. And then, like, is, is he going to be

calling all of the shots or not? Because somebody like JD Vance and, you know, the vice president doesn't really matter unless the president dies. But JD Vance is, you know, very pro-Israel apparently, but he's super anti-Ukraine. And, you know, how is all of this stuff going to play out? And I'm not even saying one thing is better than the other. It's like it remains unsettled what Trump's second administration agenda would really look like or what he would be able to do. Do you have an opinion on Ukraine? I think it's very important for Ukrainians to not, you know, I think it's great that they have held off Russia as far as they

have. I think the United States should be helpful to them, but I am worried by the amount of aid that we give them short of having actual defense agreements with them. And I, you know, and this isn't to say like, you know, the people in Ukraine should pay for the 25 years where we dicked around and didn't actually update nato or create a better system for european self-defense against bad actors like putin um but i'm impressed by ukraine and i think the u.s there are many reasons why the u.s should want ukraine to retain its integrity let's say money was not an issue, you know, in some way. Yeah. Just the people dying and the risk of things escalating,

instability to the world, your president, what I think most people have come around to, we kind of thought maybe Ukraine might just pull this off. Right. And maybe they're going to, a coup will come up against putin and maybe he's on maybe he has pancreatic cancer maybe yeah yeah i don't think anybody's really thinking that way anymore right so i mean i think what is going to happen and i i you know and this is also something where because we don't have any faith in our institutions like the u.s to the extent that

it's involved it should be working to end the conflict and i think that is also like i i don't think that putin is trying to take over europe he may well be trying to pencil back in the the contours of the soviet union and i don't i think he's awful and evil and rotten i do not think he's awful and evil and rotten. I do not think he poses a threat to the American way of life in a way that many people do. And I think we should be more thoughtful with our treasure, and especially with our troops, which really aren't there. So maybe J.D. Vance's actual... Oh, yeah, no, I'm not saying I disagree with him on that.

I disagree with the way he talks about it, because I find it disturbing to me when people, you know, don't stand up for, you know, were brutally occupied, you know, by either foreign or native born tyrants. And it's like, I'm a libertarian. I believe that everybody should have a right to self-determination. So like, I want Ukraine to survive. And I think I think Putin is an awful, even human being. And on the other issues that you mentioned, so immigration, I feel like it almost doesn't matter what one thinks that we will need the immigrants and therefore business and influential people will impose themselves on government to allow the

immigrants. If they were, if they were to close off the borders today, very soon, we'd be screaming for immigrants. But we've kind of been doing that. And I was just looking at this, like when you look at, well, and this, by the way, is part of where Trump in the debate, and actually before the debate, he was on All In, it's like a Silicon Valley podcast. I didn't see it, but I saw that he was on there. Yeah. And he was talking about, you know, he basically agreed with the idea that anybody who gets an associate's degree, a BA or an advanced degree,

should get a, you know, a green card staple to their diploma, like if you're a foreigner. And that's actually a pretty good idea. I think it doesn't go far enough, but, like, if he starts talking about immigration like that, and, you know, we do need to secure... By the way way he's always talked about it like that i gotta send you a get up there was a podcast in 2015 with him and steve bannon yeah about immigration where trump was disagreeing with bannon bannon had this that's one of the reasons why ann coulter turned on trump

because he didn't build the wall and he wasn't draconian enough uh you know actually sealing do you know her by the way i do yeah yeah she's a very nice person she's a wonderful person uh you know on a personal level when i was on the in the free press debate on immigration that was held in dallas a couple months ago and she's her policies are objectively racist now like she thinks certain people from certain countries because of the character of those people should not be allowed into the country. And I find that despicable. You know, like it's, you know, I just, I reject that completely. Having said that, I mean, if Trump acts more, you know, it, you know, everybody understands you need to secure the border because it's,

it's chaos and it causes more human misery. I mean, like, how fucked up is it that, you know, poor people from developing countries will pay 15 grand to get smuggled into here? Like, among, you know, any other things, like, why isn't the government collecting that if they're willing to do that? But the only way you're going to ease the border is by giving more people, like in the vast majority of people who want to come here legally a way to get here legally. And they'll queue up. Nobody wants to, you know, walk through a desert and get raped by coyotes and give all of your life savings and lose a child in order to get to America and get like a shitty single room occupancy room, you know, in New York for York for a couple of months or something like that. Like, you know, we, we need to fix immigration. But at any level of immigration and any policy that we're serious about, at some point

you reach a limit where you have to say, no, that's it. That's the last one. And then inevitably more people do get in and then either you deport them or you're not serious about the policy to begin with uh you know if we made it in this the libertarian party candidate who is uh i think is a nice guy and a good spokesman for a broadly libertarian point of view i am afraid you know even there's factions in the Libertarian Party that are denouncing him. So he's got a tough slot. But his immigration thing is we need a 21st century version of Ellis Island, which is basically if, you know, you come here, you get vetted. If you're not, if you don't have a communicable disease, if you're wearing nice underwear,

you know, and you don't have a criminal record, you can come here and live and work legally. You don't get welfare. You don't get handouts. And, you know, we'll figure that out pretty well. And I think that's generally a good policy. Unlimited? Yeah. Well, we'll see at first. I mean, there's this idea that, you know, all of the, you, say, 200 million people or whatever on the planet that want to migrate, all of them want to come to America and all of them want to come here, it's just not true. Let's open it up. We've been giving out a million or fewer green cards a year for a long time. We can absorb many more than that. I think one of the reasons why the Silicon Valley people are kind of giving money to Trump is because they understand, you know, they need high skilled workers and actually lots of industries and low skilled workers. And I think they've realized they can work with Trump on that. But we could we could scale up.

And then, you know, like if we're admitting, I don't know, legally 10 million people a year and it starts to become a problem, then we can say, okay, we're going to scale it back, but we're not even close to that. And then free trade, of course. I mean, I'm a businessman. I'm a huge believer in free trade, although...

You want those non-English speaking comedians to come here because they will work for less wages. I want to tariff on them. But I always wonder about this tariff issue. I saw an article recently. They say the tariffs cost the average American $650 a year. That's way less than they wanted to charge the average New Yorker for congestion pricing so

like for those new garbage bins yeah so the question is what what what do we get for that 650 dollars i'm not completely convinced that there aren't some benefits to that it's it's over my head but anyway but that's on one side on the the other side. By the way, Trump and Biden are, you know, in the debate, one of the things Trump was like, you know, like Joe Biden didn't repeal the tariffs I put into place. No, he believes in them. Yeah. So it's like, OK, this is getting a little bit weird. So the tariffs may be an impurity in the ideology. I'm not sure.

But Biden just put that all in the back burner when he came out for national rent control. Yeah. Yeah. That's I mean, it's a free trade issue also. Absolutely. And, you know, this is one of the reasons why I think when you get away from the kind of the bluster and the culture war aspects of things, which are important, but generally, you know, you know, they don't get solved by politics. You know, Biden in his time in office, everywhere there is a knob where you can turn it down to kind of make economic activity a little bit harder, he's doing that, you know, including stuff like, yeah, okay, let's have national rent control.

What could that possibly mean? And everybody knows that rent control is a terrible policy that hurts poor people the most. And it just creates, you know, scarcity in housing. It doesn't help. And that, you know, that's deeply worrying. But he does that with, you know, big companies and small companies. He wants more, you know, people have to go through more hoops in order to start businesses. It is true that, you know, in various ways, the economy has picked up from when he took office because we were coming, you know, we were coming out of COVID and things like that. But the people around him, and we assume the people around him are going to be more and more powerful. Most of them are very hostile to free enterprise. And

we, you know, and Trump is no saint saint on this but i think he's clearly less insane on free and oh there's no question of mine biden's been in the senate since what year in 1970 he took office in 73 so 73 and i don't even know if he ever worked a day in his life before that he was in law school i mean yeah yeah yeah trump spent a life in the marketplace. Yeah. And he's come around on, you know, kind of like he's more amenable to things like Bitcoin. And, you know, because Trump, one of his problems is he's like, oh, I'm just like a real estate guy. He doesn't like finance.

He doesn't like anything else. He's kind of coming around to that. He also said, you know, and this matters to me, he said he would pardon Ross Ulbricht. Oh, that matters to me too. The Silk Road, you know, and this matters to me, he said he would pardon Ross Ulbricht. Oh, that matters to me too, the Silk Road. That's an outrage. Yeah, no, it's terrifying and horrifying that that happened.

It's a whole other podcast. It also exposes a part of the judicial system, which is just outrageous that they can sentence you worse based on things they never have to prove in court. That's right. Which is just outrageous. Oh, and the sentencing, or the judge in her sentencing statement, and this became a contratompet reason, she spent most of the time lecturing Ross Ulbrich, not saying, okay, this is what you were actually

found guilty of, and this is why I'm sentencing you. It was the idea that who were you to think that you could create a place where people could peaceably trade illegal drugs and do something outside of the government's purview. It was very ideological. We had, speaking of political violence, on our site we had a couple of commenters who started making jokes about putting judges in wood chippers and what's the most efficient way to kill judges. And we ended up getting subpoenaed by the Southern District of New York, the federal court.

And it ended up becoming an interesting kind of discussion about free speech on the internet and things like that. But Russ Ulbricht is, you know, he's, you know, some of the times, you know, you think about, you know, who are the people who are like the unacknowledged creators of the future who get fucked over? And like he may well, I hope this doesn't happen, you know, but he may well die in jail by the time that everybody is buying drugs, you know, legal and illegal, and there's no distinction using Bitcoin online, and they're much better, and nobody overdoses from tainted drugs and things like that. And he may not be free. It's just, it's sickening.

I think there's a documentary about his case on YouTube. I think I'm remembering right. There's more than a few, probably. Alex Winter, you know, from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Maybe that's the one. Very good one a few, probably. Alex Winter, from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, did one very good one a few years ago. Everybody should watch it. It's really a blight on the American system, and I don't see how anybody can defend it. And also given the fact that he's been in jail for years now, I think more than a decade, or he just crossed like a decade. Um, whereas, you know,

people who have just done heinous crimes have gotten out. All the time. Yeah. All the time where they under people, people traumatize people for life just by smashing over the head with something in a robbery. And literally they don't go to jail. Right. Oh, you, you didn't die. So it's not, it's not a, anyway. Um, and yeah, just to, to finish up and then we got to go the, so my basic take on Trump is that any guy who's run businesses and, and his, his basic gut instincts.

Now many small minded people think, well, if it was good for the rich guy, it can't be good for the little guy. That's the little guy. That's not the case that they're in reality. although you might want to change the weights a little bit, when companies do well, they end up employing a lot of people and wealth is created. And he understands how regulation and everything that goes on that the government does by a thousand cuts kills innovation and and industry and economic prosperity and i mean we could talk ourselves into voting for the guy i wish he wasn't just such a erratic boorish dishonest i also to the extent and my colleague Matt Welch

wrote a good piece about how the pick of J.D. Vance, it doesn't really matter much in terms of electability and that, but it signifies that Trumpism is going to be the future of the Republican Party, and I wish that Trump, to the extent that he has changed the Republican Party, and he's pulled it away from any kind of explicit small government libertarian kind of free market, laissez-faire, let people alone kind of rhetoric because it's very culture war stuff.

That's bothersome to me, but I wish that Trump was more of the person that you're talking about where he's like, you know, the most important thing is to let people, you know, kind of get on with their lives and their businesses and a lot of other things get taken care of. The justices he appoints on the Supreme court are very much putting the country in that. They seem to be, yeah. Between, you know, a couple of rulings, uh, you know,

particularly like the Chevron defense stuff and kind of getting rid of the administrative state. I mean, it's fascinating that the case that ended Chevron deference, which, you know, is about where the government, you know, government agencies can't make up rules, you know, in order to fill in gaps that, you know, that case was based on a policy that Trump had put into place.

So he, you know, Steve Bannon had said, oh, you know, Trump is going to deconstruct the administrative state. And he didn't really. But this is, you know, we have two bad choices, but I don't think, you know, Trump is going to deconstruct the administrative state. And he didn't really. But this is, you know, we have two bad choices. But I don't think, you know, it's hard for me to see how Biden, even independent of the mental problems, which are pretty overwhelming. You know, I don't, you know, Biden has much more to answer for.

Yeah. All right, Nick, it's always a pleasure. Thank you. And, you know, when we suggested, I suggested, why don't you get Nick to come on? I'm thinking, I don't want to keep imposing on the guy to come on the show, but I actually get the feeling that you don't mind.

That I don't have anything else going on in my life. No, that you enjoy. I'm hanging upside down in a closet just waiting for the call, yeah. That you enjoy shooting the shit, and if it's in front of a microphone, why not? Yeah. So that's a great relationship. We're very happy to have that uh relationship with you with the show that means a lot to me good night everybody get your sheath

underwear bye thank you one final time to sheath underwear for sponsoring live from the table don't forget to visit sheathunderwear.com slash seller today to get 20 off your first order support the show and your balls with sheath underwear very very good thank you okay are we done yeah no at oh yeah yeah and then we're gonna do the um