The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Nick Gillespie on Libertarianism

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

Noam Dworman, Dan Naturman and Periel Aschenbrand are joined by Nick Gillespie, editor at large at Reason. He is also host of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast.

This is Live From The Table, the official podcast of the world-famous Comedy Cellar, coming at you on Sirius XM 99 Raw Comedy, and available as a podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Also, we're on YouTube, so you can get that multimedia experience. You get the visuals, you get the audio. This is Dan Natterman, Comedy Cellar regular-ish, along with Noam Dorman, owner of the Comedy Cellar. Why do you say ish?

Well, because I feel like I'm being phased out. That's the word on the street. For example, tomorrow night, no, Friday night, I only have one spot. But we can discuss that on a more comedy-related podcast. Okay. Periel joins us. Hello.

Periel is the show's producer, I guess you would call him. Ish. Producer-ish. Go ahead. There's been some controversy regarding that. Perry L is the show's producer, I guess you would call him. Producer. Go ahead. There's been some controversy regarding that. We have with us Nick Gillespie, who is a libertarian journalist. The word libertarian, like the word producer, has various shades of meaning. He's also host of the Reason podcast, and Noam was a recent guest on The Reason podcast

talking about free speech. What's your position at Reason Magazine now? I'm an editor-at-large. Editor-at-large. Does that have weekly responsibilities? Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm a full-time employee, so I'm still drawing a paycheck,

and I'm on two podcasts a week, and I write and gallivant. I host two events in New York every month, so I'm keeping busy. So before we get into the interview, I just want to say, I saw you interview Steven Pinker and Nate Silver. Yeah. And you were so expert at these interviews, so at ease, so funny, so in the moment. I don't know.

But I feel like I'm being sad. No, there's no buts. And I watch it and I say, I would have just been nervous. I would have hemmed and hawed and stumbled. And you're like, cool as a cucumber. How do you? I think it's because I no longer have feeling in any of my extremities. I've been doing this for a long time and I'm on various kinds of pharmaceutical drugs. So it's no, I appreciate that. You know, and it's one of the things that I try to do when I interview people is, you know, read their work so that I'm kind of conversant in what they're talking about, and that kind of makes it easier to have a conversation. Also, I thought you were better in front of the crowd.

I felt like you were a performer, like you got something from the crowd, like you were on. I really thought it was great. Thank you. My background was besides, I was actually Herr Zeller, the lead Nazi in my high school production of what do you call it? The Sound of Music. My father was shot by Nazis during World War II.

He was a soldier. Was that friendly fire? Yeah, we always asked him that. He would be like, I got shot by the Germans. And it's like, oh, yeah, in the back. There used to be that joke about, you know, Pat Buchanan's, Pat Buchanan, what was it? His father died in the Holocaust. In Auschwitz.

Really? Yeah, he fell off a guardrail. All right. And then I started out as a journalist. I worked in Manhattan after I graduated college in the mid-'80s for teen magazines and movie magazines and rock magazines. So, you know, Steven Pinker is a more important thinker than Ozzy Osbourne, but he is not as intimidating. Well, we've got to get past this, but I have Steven Pinker's book on writing.

You've probably seen it. I haven't read that one. It's like a strunk and white for the— I hate those kinds of books. —21st century. No, but it is amazing white for the 21st century. No, but it is amazing. For the 21st century, what happened?

What changed? It's just like the current version, I think, of what people would pick up. People who would have picked up Strunk and White, I think, would pick this book up. But every little tidbit is just so, I mean, I can't remember them, but I think Coleman Hughes is an acolyte of that book, if that's the right word. And I just, just that he came up with them. It's not just that he

knows this stuff, but that he can generate these examples for a book. I just find the guy remarkable. Yeah, no, I mean, he is, you know, intellectually is just like a phenomenal person to have out there in front of you blazing a trail, right? Yeah. And he threw Harvard under the bus. I mean, he did not care. No, no, but he's a serious intellectual, you know, who cares about his home institution. So more power to him. All right. So tell us, what does it mean in this day and age to call oneself a libertarian? Yeah. You know, I define libertarian as I'm a libertarian because I believe that individuals should be free to make more meaningful choices in their lives across every possible condition or access or spectrum or whatever you want to call that. Like, you know, that we're individuals first and foremost. We're born alone.

You know, we're probably with a group of people looking on, and we ultimately die alone. And we want to form communities. We want to form families. We want to form businesses, all of this kind of stuff. But ultimately, we're individuals. And the thing that makes us unique is that we can make choices among competing alternatives and that

as long as you are as long as you are not hurting people as long as you're not stealing from them and things like that we should be given the broadest uh you know range possible to make decisions about how we want to live our lives you know what we want to eat what we want to smoke where we want to live you know what we want to do and to we want to live, you know, what we want to do. And to me, that's an impulse. It's pre-political. It's, you know, it's ideological, I guess, but it's really, it's just a temperament. And I think societies are more interesting. I think they're more fair. I think they're more fun. I think they're, you know, richer and more prosperous when we allow everybody as much latitude as possible

to live how they choose to live. What distinguishes that from a conservative? Well, among other things, conservatives will say, you know, I want you to live with me. I want you, you know, you're a good member of my community. And then the minute you start praying to a different God, the minute you start saying i'm a i have a different sexual orientation or i go against the community norm conservatives particularly today's conservatives are like okay get the fuck out you're taking it that far sexual orientation no go ahead yeah some of us have a sexual orientation so so how come you would think there's 75% between the two sides that kind of lean in that direction. In a libertarian direction.

Live and let live. How come we don't have more successful libertarian politicians? Yeah, that's a... Or closer even to the ideal libertarian. Because a lot of them are whack jobs. Well, Lyndon LaRouche was like the main... No, no, Lyndon LaRouche was like the main. No, no, Lyndon LaRouche was never a libertarian. I don't know exactly why he got lumped in, but certainly not a libertarian.

But you're right that like people equate libertarian ideas with Lyndon LaRouche. And other than a kind of fun but obviously insane conspiracy theory about how like the Pope and Franklin Roosevelt and the Queen of England were all involved, you know, currently in the opium trade. Lyndon LaRouche doesn't really offer a lot to, you know, kind of pass the time of day. To your question, Noam, I mean, part of it is politics is, you know, and particularly the way we do it, politics is not about giving people more choices. Politics is about telling people, you know, what they can do and what they can't do. And we have two, you know, we have two rival gangs in America, Democrats and Republicans. We've always had what the two parties are and what they stand for changes over time but we always have two main parties in

america for a variety of reasons um and the way that they gain power and hold power is by limiting what people can do and and you know and they pay off their people that they like or that are funding them uh and they punish other people and what i would love to see that be replaced with is a politics where it's like, you know, you are you by default, you have permission to do what you want to do until it is shown that you're abrogating somebody else's equal rights in general. And if we if that was how politics was done, we would have, you know, we'd be in a different place. A lot of the libertarian positions, I think, are a little too distasteful for most Americans. Like, for example, you would legalize all drugs, I gather. Yeah, eventually, you know. But, I mean, this is what you think about.

It's like I wouldn't say we legalize all drugs because I want to take all drugs, although I've taken a lot of drugs and I'm sure you've taken a lot of drugs. But it's because the way that we do things now, we legalize some drugs and we ban others. We make everything more expensive. We create crime by banning certain substances. And so then that creates a black market and a black market. It doesn't matter if it's for weed or for butter or for beer, it has a logic of its own and it causes, almost always causes more problems than it solves. So that's why libertarians are in favor of drug legalization. It's not to do them, although that would be fine. Again, as long as you're in court. I want to ask you about that because I'm not sure

it's working out as I thought it would, but is there a quick list you can give me of the issues that the libertarians were way out in front of, like gay marriage, like legalizing marijuana, and then like 20 years, the two parties came around to it, and you guys like, yeah, we told you so. Free trade, something like that. Imm immigration, having relatively open borders rather than relatively closed. And again, none of this, I'm not a utopian and I'm not an anarchist. A lot of my friends who are libertarian, a lot of the people I work with at Reason are anarchists or, you know, of a libertarian flavor. I'm not an anarchist. I don't really care that much about foundational arguments of like arguing from first principles about this or that.

So for me, I'm more directional or agitival. Or what? Agitival. Agitival. What is that? I mean, I see. To agitate? No.

I see libertarian as an adjective rather than as a noun. Oh, agitival. Yeah. So, you know, it's like. Not a word. I didn't hear the kt. Libertarian, you know, it can be a noun or it can be an adjective. It's like I think people should be given more choices.

But so things like, you know, does America work better when it's easier for people to move here legally or it's harder for them to move here legally, I would argue. You know, it's better when more people are coming here. And that's something that libertarians generally hold firm to. Free trade, trading with countries, being anti-war. America, you know, certainly in the 21st century has had terrible foreign policy, you know, almost without, you know, in an unrelenting way, libertarians have always been on the forefront of being anti-war, which for me, it doesn't mean you don't have an army. It doesn't mean that there aren't times when you go to war, but it's not the first choice in any given thing. So those are some of them, along with things like

criminal justice reform, how many things should be illegal and how many people should be locked up, things like that. I think libertarians actually have a pretty good track record. When you get outside of the ideology, a lot of the policies we talk about, things like occupational licensing reform, which a lot of people are talking about. Now, why does it take more hours to become a barber than it does to become a cop or something like that. And it's like because we've created these systems where in order to become something, you have to go and jump through hoops and do a bunch of tests. That costs a lot of money, and they shrink the number of practitioners in a field so that the people who make it through those hoops or over those hoops end up making more money.

That's not a good idea. And Friedman was all about abolishing, I think, all government licensing. Milton Friedman. For the most part, yeah. Yeah, and it's also, you know, this is also think about it, because in many ways we live in this world. Like, let's say you get rid of, you know, state-mandated occupational licensing for barbers.

It doesn't mean you're just going to walk in off the street to somebody who you've never heard of or, you know, different private companies will come up with ways of certifying to say, you know what, this person actually cleans their utensils in between customers. They've passed these courses. Here are recommendations or references, things like that. There's all sorts of ways that you can have less draconian restrictions that kind of certify who people are and why they're worth going to. And also, if they harm you, what do you do about that? Yeah. And we're not good at trade-offs as humans. So you hear one horrible story about in any context of something that went wrong,

and you think you need a law for this and a law for that and then and you never get rid of a law you just keep stacking them on but getting back to why libertarians haven't yeah succeeded more politics i think that that point of view about getting rid of government licensing that's strong stuff i think for the average american it is as much as it makes sense when you when you articulate it i agree uh and also it goes against power i mean this is one of the things that i think libertarians oftentimes are like, well, you know, if we can just win the argument, then everything will change. But it's like, you know, go, you know, you know, try to abolish barber licenses in New York City. You know what? There's there are powerful interests who are like, we wouldn't want to do that.

Things are working well enough as it is. Who's complaining about haircuts? And, well, haircuts are going to cost money because, you know, these are professionals, et cetera. And, like, you can see how it takes more than just having a good argument or an interesting insight in order to affect actual change. Other things that are related to this that libertarians have been out in front of are things like zoning laws and planning laws uh you know which are often used there everything always gets passed in the name of the public interest or public safety uh and oftentimes that's just a mask for power the people who own stuff like the way things are and then they pass laws to kind of make it harder for that for other people to compete you gotta have zoning let's take two examples that i'm struggling if somebody wants to build a building

in the shape of a penis, you can't let them do that. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Before we get to zoning. Fuck up the whole skyline. Before we get to, says who? Before we get to, they all look like penises. Well, but with a head. No, but with a head, with a mushroom.

There's one in Brooklyn that looks, anyway. Weed. So, you know, live and let live. Of course I agree with that. I should let the record show that my father, I don't ever remember not having someone in my household not

smoking pot from the time I was born. My father always smoked pot, basically every day. And he used to grow it in the basement. So he should have gone to jail for that. Oh, absolutely. He should have gone to jail for that. And you never got into such a fight with him that you weren't like, I'm calling the cops? No.

But he gave you a nuclear option right there. But as now that it's legal, I'm not liking it. People are high everywhere. I worry about my kids now that these gummies are candied and um people take them we have people passing out online waiting for the comedy seller which never happened before because they they can't uh monitor it it's um detracts from the atmosphere it's it's not it hasn't been a positive thing well one thing to understand in new York City, in particular in New York State, is it took forever for weed to get legalized here, for recreational use. And that was partly because of power plays in the legislature.

Different people wanted to be like, no, I am going to be in charge of who gives out the licenses, because that becomes a very powerful thing to be able to say. I've got 10 licenses. Who am I going to give them to and who's going to suck up to me to do that? But the fact of the matter is, is like they haven't even really rolled out. They haven't done a very good job of clarifying the retail laws and kind of practices. And, you know, I was just reading somewhere that there's, you know, a few dozen legal pot shops in New York State, and there are thousands of illegal or gray market places.

It's everywhere, and it's going to be everywhere. But part of the problem is that when you have it in this weird place where it's kind of legal, but it's not, it's gray market, you get bad information. A lot of people don't know what they're taking. You don't have the free flow of information about, okay, what does it mean to take a gummy that is 5% THC? What does that translate into if you are used to rolling a joint and smoking it or vaping or something like that?

And there is going to be a transition phase where this stuff kind of gets figured out in the way every teenager goes through this with drinking or smoking cigarettes or smoking weed or doing other drugs. There's a learning curve. I do think in New York, one of the things in New York City, and I think it's a statewide law, you're allowed to smoke marijuana outdoors in public. Some states like Colorado didn't allow that. There are arguments about where, you know, should there be limitations and where you're allowed to smoke. That might curb some of it. It's kind of like public drunkenness laws, right? And as a libertarian in general, I'm against laws that allow police or the state or people in power to single out somebody and say, you know what, you're driving without a seatbelt on. I'm going to pull you over because that... I'm against the seatbelt law. I'm in favor. Well, you know, I'm in favor of using a seatbelt. And, you know, generally when seatbelt laws were passed, we were told that they would only be

secondary infractions. So you couldn't get pulled over for not driving. And then very quickly, it became a thing where you could get pulled over. And then who gets pulled over? And it's always groups that are disfavored by society. So this is a roundabout way of saying, you know, public drunkenness laws, like, they'll never be enforced fully or fairly, but there might be a role for that. And that's a way of, you know, you watch the watchers so that they're not singling out certain types of people. But there's an argument, I think, from a libertarian perspective to say, you know, if you are falling down in the street because you are shit-faced, and whether it's from booze or heroin or fentanyl or weed, you know, that's a problem, and you can be cited for that. But we need to work through this kind of stuff.

And the one thing that we do, I think, know is that in a world where pot was illegal and a million people a year were being arrested for simple possession, that's not a good world. This world might not be perfect. And we're still, last year, 250,000 people were still arrested for weed around the country, even though it's legal at the state level in many, many places. I don't think it's a better world to go back to saying, you know what, like your father could have been put in jail for growing a bunch of plants in the basement. No, I agree. what like your your father could have been put in jail for growing a bunch of plants in the basement no i agree i mean the idea of putting people in jail for any drug use actually is is ridiculous unless they're violent or really caught then causing the idea of putting drug dealers in jail um especially drug dealers who deal to children uh is more palatable to me but from time to time this is always a problem with being being an idol ideologue is that from time to time real life just doesn't work out like you wish no i i would yeah and then you become a heretic right and then your

friends you know they curse you i agree i mean that, you know, and this is one of the ways that I am very much of a libertarian ideologue, but I also recognize that sometimes everything goes the way you want it to, and then it just doesn't work out the way you think. And sometimes you have to recalibrate. I'm not convinced that weed legalization falls into that yet, but I agree there are a lot of social problems that then need to be discussed and kind of sussed through. One of the things, you know, if people are falling down because they don't know how to monitor their use, again, of whatever drug, that strikes me as a real problem. When I hear people walk down the street and they're like disgusted by the smell of marijuana in the air and that's

why it should be banned, I less you know i'm less uh kind of with that type of argument because that's the same type of argument you know my uh parents were irish and italian and like i you know if you go back and read stuff from the 20s people will be walking by a kitchen and smell garlic and they'll be like oh that's disgusting that should be banned because they hated italians right? Or something like that. So, you know, there's levels of argument, but I agree with you fully that, you know, you pass a law, you change things, and then you also have to have continuing discussions to see how things end up working. Although I don't like this.

I mean, again, I'm so used to the smell. Do you know that my father used to make tinfoil pipes and he used to have me sorting his seeds for him. When I was a kid, you can't even believe how I was raised. By the way, libertarians always in favor of child labor. Yeah, exactly. But when I smell weed, I get turned off if it's not in an appropriate – I don't get turned off at a party, but in an atmosphere where I kind of – where I want the vibe to be responsible and I don't, just don't like the sense that everybody's high.

Oh, I mean, if you walk into your dentist's office or something and you're spelling Wade or something, yeah. No, can I ask if your, if your objection to the seatbelt lies just because they tend to pull over minorities or is it just more? I said at the time, by the way, I've never driven even from from even i haven't driven 50 yards of my life without wearing a seat belt so i always knew it's just another excuse for the cops to pull black guys over it was it was very clear to me and i said what is it my business if you want to wear your seat belt or not especially when we allow people to ride motorcycles i just just couldn't process the whole. Well, I mean, on another level, it could be right that, you know, you have car insurance. And ideally, in a world you would have, you know, car insurance would be voluntary rather than required by the state. But your insurer might say, we're not going to give you insurance unless

you promise to wear a seatbelt, right? And then if you get in an accident and you need, like, massive facial reconstruction surgery because you weren't wearing a seatbelt, right? And then if you get in an accident and you need massive facial reconstruction surgery because you weren't wearing a seat belt, the insurer can say, well, you broke the contract. I do think there is a place, albeit a small one, for saving people from themselves. I don't think it would extend to a law banning motorcycle riding

because people get so much pleasure out of that. It's a lifestyle. The pleasure they get out of it overrides the notion of saving people from themselves. But the seatbelt is such a small inconvenience that I think on balance, it's a good thing to save people from themselves in that situation.

I don't know off the top of my head, and I wish I did, but Noam and I are about the same age, so we can remember a world before not just seatbelt laws which was started to be passed in the 80s but before it was common yeah like my parents never wore the seat belt it was a bloodbath yeah I know I was well I mean it is true like more people died in car crashes for and cars were shittier too yeah yeah car seats used to look like oh yeah we yeah. We didn't have car seats, but go ahead.

Go ahead. No, I mean, we would, like, lay in the back of the window, you know, et cetera. There'd be, like, a wooden bar. But here, you know, one of the things that is interesting when you put it into a cost-benefit analysis, you're saying, like, you know, it's a small inconvenience and it will save people. I'm curious if there are, you know, how many people don't wear seatbelts? Because it has now become a kind of go-to thing. My kids who are 30 and 23 will always put a seatbelt on in a way that

there was a period where people my age had to be convinced to wear a seatbelt. But it becomes common, less so because it's the law and more because it's an obviously smart thing to do. And then the law isn't going to actually prevent the people who aren't going to do it anyway. And so then you have to factor in, you know, if you're at 97% compliance, you know,

maybe that's good enough, especially if you don't want the law, because then the law means that cops are going to be like, I don't know. I thought he wasn't, he didn't have a seatbelt on. And then we got into a fight and I tased it. Right.

Okay. I know. I mean, if you put that into the balance and I tased him, right? Okay, I know Nick's good. I mean, if you put that into the balance, then sure. But I agree. But the principle is the same, is that at times, perhaps saving people from themselves is a worthy goal. Yeah, I get that.

I think Nick will agree with the following, and this is probably, I'm sure, quixotic, is that you just want to break the back of these people becoming legislators and saying, what can we do now? What's the next rule, the next law, the next imposition we can make on people? Ah, traffic cameras. I don't even – you're rubbing your hands in what is universally understood as an anti-Semitic symbol. I thought it was Mr. Burns-like – well, Mr. Burns is arguably an anti-Semitic trope.

We had reason. We had a new video. We do a lot of online documentaries there. And a guy that I work with did something about Washington, D.C., which already has, like, if not the most, among the very most expensive daycare costs in America. And people on the city council there passed the law saying that everybody who does daycare has to have a college degree, like a BA, and, you know, in education, et cetera. And it's like, okay, I don't think they were doing that because they're evil or they're motivated by the wrong things, but all they're doing is making something more

expensive. You know, so it's this type of thing thing like, what can we do to make society better, to make daycare better? And it's like, oh, well, let's make sure that everybody's schooled, educated in early childhood development. And ultimately, it's not going to improve the quality of care at all. And it is just going to jack up the price even more.

And so some of it is like people who are power mad and just want to control and boss people around. But part of it is that people, really out of the goodness of their heart, they think passing more laws and more mandates and more things like that will help. And most of the time, and this is something Milton Friedman would, you know, was always delighted to point out and other people, you know, a lot of the times the laws don't even achieve the effect that they were passed in order to do almost never yeah um all right so zoning while we're on these subjects so i'm of uh two minds my whole zoning has been the bane of my existence as a business owner for many years you weren't allowed to have dancing you weren't allowed to have more than two string instruments you can't

have more than 200 people even though your room is big enough to hold 400 people i think zoning laws in the city are ridiculous and and they've been chipped away at over the years um actually the the some of the zoning laws were were um overturned on constitutional grounds because they decided that dancing was a form of expression, so stuff like that. But where I live at home in Westchester, where we have nice one-acre lots, it would horrify me if three people across the street could combine their parcels and put an apartment building there. Yeah. You would want that to be my fate?

Yeah. Fuck you. It's interesting that you, like where you're a businessman, you're like zoning is bullshit. But then where you're a homeowner, you're like, no, no, we got to keep things out. Well, there was no good reason for the zoning of the businesses. There really wasn't. I don't know.

I mean, if it's that important, let you and the other rich barons in Westchester buy the property and then subdivide it and have a homeowners association. Do it privately and pay the cost on that as opposed to telling everybody else how to live. Because I grew up – I was born in Brooklyn, but I grew up about 50 miles from here. And my hometown of Middletown, New Jersey, it's been around since like 1664. So it's got these weird different sections, like, you know, really old horse farm type shit that it has, like, you

know, post World War Two tract homes, etc. And then, you know, in my part of the town, there was a thing where like our next door neighbor, and these were single family houses that had one car garages, so they weren't as good as the places that had two-car garages. But our neighbors wanted to put in a mother-in-law apartment because one of their parents was old and they were going to bring her and have her there. And they couldn't put in a second kitchen because that was against the zoning laws. And it's like, that's what most people are going to do. They're going to do kind of mild modifications. In general, zoning laws just add costs without really changing the way land gets used.

Because, like, you know, probably in your neighborhood in Westchester, nobody's going to be like, you know what would be great is to plop a giant apartment building down there that's going to piss off everybody around us. And, like, you know, and then the people can walk there. Yeah. And then they can walk a mile and a half to the supermarket or something like that.

I mean, like a lot of these problems take care of themselves. The old, you know, zoning law thing is always like, oh, well, you know, if you do that, you're going to have strip clubs next to schools and then there's going to be a rendering plant, you know, right in the middle of downtown. And it never works out that way

because the industrial uses need more space and that tends to be out, you know, out on the middle of downtown. And it never works out that way because the industrial uses need more space, and that tends to be out on the outskirts. And, like, you know, strip club operators don't want to be next to a school because it's bad for business on every possible level. A lot of these things that we think need order made by wise people actually kind of work out if people are free to figure out what's the best land. I'm open to that. I'm a big believer in trial and error in general.

And if you want to start the zoning in Perry Ells neighborhood, experimenting with taking down zoning in Perry Ells neighborhood, she's buying a house now. Let's see how it goes. What is it? Well, I mean, isn't there an externality involved where I have to suffer? We want a beautiful city. And my example was an extreme one.

A guy builds a building in the shape of a penis, but that ruins the city. It ruins the aesthetic of the city. Of New York City. Yeah, I mean, it's an extreme example, but I'm saying there's an externality there because now we want a beautiful skyline. So your taste and what counts as, you know,

when the World Trade Center... Well, the taste of the public that votes on – When the World Trade Center was built, everybody hated it. It took – it was into the late 80s before it was really accepted as part of the skyline of New York. Should people have been able – I mean, who gets to vote on what a building looks like? Well, they took those down. Yeah, that's right. They did.

They did. Well, okay. But the. Yeah, that's true. They did. They did. Well, okay. But the witness will answer the question. Is it okay to build a building in the shape of a big penis? Yeah, I think so. With two balls on each side. Are they healthy? I mean, maybe they're modeling good prostate and testicular checkups.

I don't know. I mean, how often would that happen? Well, it's an extreme example just to illustrate the point. I don't know. I mean, you know, how often would that happen? Well, it's an extreme example, just to illustrate the point that there is that. And then that's the vagina house. And then like, who knows what's coming next? What about historical landmarks? Is that does that fall into that? That's an interesting question. You know, in New York City, it's something I don't know, it's it might even be like half of the buildings in Manhattan. I used to know this, and I should know this.

Because Grand Central might have been razed, and after they got rid of the old Penn Station in the early 60s, they created the Landmarking Association. So many buildings in New York are now landmark. We did a documentary about the woman who owns the Strand Bookstore, which is a historically landmark building. She fought against it because all that meant was that she no longer is the property owner, and it's been in her family for generations. She has to go and talk in front of a bunch of idiots who have no idea of what it means to run a bookstore or a business and beg them to allow her to run her building the way it is.

The landmark rules are ridiculous. It's 27%. What is the – some buildings, I assume you would agree, should be preserved. Then the city should buy them. Okay. Or private nonprofits, places like Central Park. Okay. I mean, if there's another way to do it.

But it's also do it. You know, I agree. And, you know, here's the question. Like when you say, I want a beautiful city, your vision of what a beautiful city is and mine are very different. And if one of us gets to decide, like, our aesthetics wins, that's not good. Well, I mean, ideally, we vote for people that are going to represent our interests, including...

There's an important issue with landmarking, which is that once the city landmarks your property, it can drastically change the value of your property. And they, in the Supreme Court, in their wisdom, have decided that's not a taking. You know, the government's not allowed to take. But it clearly is a taking. That's one of the worst decisions ever made

because if I have a building or parcel land worth $5 million and tomorrow it's worth $2 million because the government did something. Nothing has changed other than the government says this is now a landmark. So, fine, but the government at least should pay you for the fact that it's going to do this, but it doesn't.

And the laws are so ridiculous. When we renovated our kitchen downstairs, and we never actually recovered from our renovation in the olive tree, we were held up by the landmarks committee, even though it's inside the place, and it's just a cosmetic thing. Now they, what we were talking about before, now you go before these people, and and you have to be solicitous of them and they feel that they have the authority. Well, what are you going to do in your building? And let me see the drawings. I'm not sure I like this. Joe, what do you think?

You think this is okay? You know, we're talking in Greenwich Village. You want to kill him. We're talking in Greenwich Village. And that always brings up the specter of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. And Jane Jacobs was, you know, the advocate who, you know, saved Greenwich Village and saved Soho from Robert Moses, the power broker who was, you know, going to build, you know, massive highways through Washington Square and all of that kind of stuff. But it's interesting, you know, Jane Jacobs stopped that, but then a lot of people who

are disciples of her are exactly like that. Like, no, what goes on in your kitchen, what the toilet fixtures might look like, they have to somehow answer to my aesthetics or my taste, and that's bad. I do, in your defense about New York, what's fascinating, and I think this is a challenge to a broadly libertarian point of view, is that New York is simultaneously one of the most, one of the freest cities in America. Like, you can come here and live kind of however you want. That's why millions of people come here from abroad and from within the U.S. and everything. And at the same time, it's massively overregulated. And like, in a way, the libertarian theory, you know, New York should be a ghost town and everybody should be living in Houston or a place that doesn't have traditional zoning or land use planning.

So it's an interesting question, and I don't want to make light of it, but the whole thing is you want to give people as much freedom as possible, I think, to build a building in the shape of a penis or a vagina or a penis and a vagina or whatever you want yeah but garage is a great idea no but a lot of this stuff is a racket i mean and you do know it from being in westchester or whatever you want to you know do electricity in your house or put in a pool and suddenly you have to file and pay like thousands of dollars for that's another i've been through all that too okay so let's let's um let's talk about other interesting libertarian issues um i saw a debate a couple days ago you you you were one of the sponsors of alan dershowitz and glenn greenwald and they were they were arguing about whether or not america should bomb iran um that's uh yeah because that's you know what we're all talking about.

That's what this election is going to do. Dershowitz is gung-ho. Yeah, I have to say, for me, the main takeaway of that debate is Alan Dershowitz is 85 years old, and I saw Bob Dylan perform on his last tour through here a couple months ago, and he's like 80-something, and he sat down most of the show. Dershowitz sat at the debate,

but at 85, that guy is fucking smart. I mean, he's sharp, and it's like, I don't know what he's doing, but I want to be that way when I'm 60. Grudges, grudges. I don't think he's doing anything. Yeah, cleans the plaque out of the brain. I don't think he's doing anything.

I think he's probably what they call a super-ager in the gerontology field. Somebody's just genetically gifted in that way, my guess would be. I'm sensing, and I don't know this. You tell me if I'm wrong. I'm sensing a little bit of a cleavage, a little bit of a split in the libertarian community. The Dave Smiths are going off in one kind of anti-western and it's still anti-war maybe even a little anti or israel uh oh no they're definitely anti israel uncomfortable

yeah i don't want to say anti-semitic and um and other libertarians that i know, like you and Matt, are actually pro-Israel and wouldn't call you pro-war, but ready to listen to arguments about what actually might need to be done in the real world. Is that actually going on? I think that's true. There's different flavors of libertarians, and some are just flat out non-interventionists, and they believe that the United States, to the extent that we have to have a government, we should have a military that only patrols basically the borders of the continental United States, maybe Alaska and Hawaii, but that's part of empire. You know, we shouldn't even have there, and we should bring all of the troops home.

We should have no military bases anywhere. We should have very few, if any, military alliances. Then there is the type that, you know, and in a way it's an understandable reaction to the reaction to 9-11, where we immediately, you know, we didn't just go into Afghanistan to try and find bin Laden and bring him to justice, but we ended up occupying and destroying that country for a couple decades and then giving it back to the people that we booted out with a lot of extra, you know, military equipment and stuff, you know, and we did a fucked up job in Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9-11, who are now, I think, moving into a bizarre phase where it's not just that we should be non-interventionists

or we should only have a defensive military, but that somehow people like Putin, you know, Putin was actually, it's a defensive war to invade Ukraine. And I don't understand that kind of thinking. Or that, you know, Hamas has, you know, what Hamas did is justifiable based on X, Y, and Z, like, you know, slaughtering a bunch of innocent babies and things like that, because, well, that's what Israel has been doing to them every day. I pull back from that. I'm still not a military interventionist, and I don't think that the U.S. should be

as involved in as many countries. I don't think, you know, we certainly shouldn't have invaded, we shouldn't have occupied Afghanistan, we shouldn't have invaded Iraq. But when it comes to something like, you know, the current war in Gaza, I think Israel is kind of fucking it up now. But I think, you know, they were attacked in a way that they have every right to respond to that. And I actually think that at the end of at the end of hostilities whenever those are declared it will come out that Israel was actually much more restrained and responsible and how it went after Hamas which I think is a legitimate goal Israel is a country that has a right to exist and you know

they are now doing that but the best thing that has happened in the Middle East you know in the past couple of decades really is the U.S. effectively pulling out and forcing all of the Gulf states to actually recognize they have commonalities and they don't need to be, you know, the U.S. does not have to be there and dictating everything. So one of the things that I, one of the rubs that I sense, first of all, you alluded to it. It's interesting that the people who are sympathetic to Putin here are not sympathetic to Israel. Putin had no choice but to invade Ukraine. I mean, we gave him no other choice. But Israel somehow, you know, Israel wasn't provoked. No, absolutely not.

It just doesn't hold but also as a libertarian i brought this up to dave smith i said if ukraine is fighting to be free why is not the the natural libertarian sympathy with the ukrainians rather than putin who wants to put them under the yoke a kgb you know uh apparatchik um i you, and none of this is to even get involved in kind of like understanding the internal histories of these places, nor is it saying that the United States should be giving tons of material or, you know, certainly not military, you know, troops and things like that. It strikes me as something is wrong when you do not understand why Ukraine is fighting Russia, which invaded it. I mean, it's I just don't understand that. And from a libertarian perspective, we should know, you know, one of the things that the U.S. can do and can have an influence on is, you know,

when international boundaries, you know, recognize international boundaries are, you know, you know, just trampled over, we might have a role to play to kind of calling bullshit on that and also trying to bring things to a quicker and more peaceful close. Now, this is not to say that America may not have been reckless in its policy. Yeah, it totally should have been better defensive driving. I'm not. But but the notion that people are sympathetic to Putinin yeah i don't understand that and let me say so so i thought it'd be interesting maybe i want to have glenn greenwald on one time to actually go through the history of interventions because as they were

arguing about it i really don't know where i stand i can start in the middle and then go back from it yes it it it was bad to occupy Afghanistan because it didn't work. But the spirit of occupying Afghanistan at the time was quite positive. We knew the oppression that was going on there. We thought we were wrong that if we brought democracy and freedom, that every heart yearned to be free, and if we showed them this, that this would catch on, and we would be doing something wonderful for them while at the same time serving our own security interests.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's, you're really talking more about Iraq in that sense. Afghanistan. Yeah, no, but I mean, because... Girls can go to school, get rid of the Taliban. They were doing horrible things. Right, but I mean, we weren Girls can go to school, get rid of the Taliban. They were doing horrible things. Right. But I mean, we weren't.

Do you remember when Karzai was first elected? We all had tears in our eyes. We weren't really fomenting democracy and we were playing off warlords against warlords. I mean, it was, you know, it was, it was, it was not a smart move to occupy Afghanistan. Ultimately, when, and you say like, well well because it didn't work and it's like it wasn't going to work because we didn't actually have a functioning understanding of social change and how that might work in Afghanistan but who knew at the time that it wasn't going to I think pretty much everybody who like knew the area and knew the region and knew the history of the region. And then in Iraq, it was, you know, we did something even different

where, like, apparently there was no backup plan when, okay, we're going to depose Saddam Hussein and then a thousand flowers will bloom. And that didn't happen. You know, that's deeply, deeply disturbing. You know, the pretext of going in there was wrong. And I don't think Bush going in there was wrong. And I don't think, I don't think Bush knew that it was wrong. It was just like, you know, lying about it in order to get in there to for, you know, for Halliburton or any of those kinds of conspiracy theories.

I think people went in for, you know, what they thought were legitimate reasons, but they were wrong. And then they did not have a theory of how to promote democracy in the country in a way that was actually had any chance of working and we ended up creating or extending a situation you know well past what it would have been otherwise yeah and then it and then and then all of a sudden it discredits becomes a sample size of one or two and it discredits future things but i mean um korea seems like it was a good thing to a good place to intervene. It you know, it's also interesting that when you put Korea in, you know, Korea is coming only a couple of years after the end of World War Two. And it was the United Nations, which, of course, is, you know, was also early on in its existence, the UN has so much to answer for in everything that it does,

including not intervening in genocide and then trying to prevent things and causing things to be more difficult. But the one thing that you can say about Korea is that there was a broad constituency for an action that was preserving South Korea, which you did not see in Vietnam, right? And you do not see in a lot of other places. And then- We do see in Ukraine. We see Ukrainians standing up for themselves. Well, and also Poland and also Germany. I mean, I'm of the mind that NATO should have been disbanded at the end of the Cold War because its very specific function had to do with

keeping the Soviet Union at bay, and it should have been reconstituted as something different. But like Europe, you know, the Russia-Ukraine conflict strikes me very much as something that is Europe should be taking the lead on, and in significant ways is. But it's hard to, if the U.S. is always there and is always, you know, we're the largest economy, we're the largest military by a factor of five or 10, you know, it's hard for regions to kind of work through their issues if the U.S. is always hovering around. So Greenwald, Dan was there too, so Greenwald was talking about, you know, Vietnam. Vietnam is like the ultimate mistake, right? But I was thinking, the bubble over my head was,

well, what if the United States' posture at the time had been basically to tell the Soviet Union, we don't intervene? What would they have done across the globe? I mean, would they have even thought twice about many other interventions? Well, I mean, when you're talking about Vietnam, ultimately, you know, what that was was a civil war for, you know, a post-French colony

and then one that was being, you know, kind of brooded around in the Cold War as an American colony. And it's like, it wasn't, you know, the country that invaded Vietnam after the Vietnamese Civil War ended was China. You know, and Vietnam and China have terrible relations because of that. So it wasn't about the Soviet Union versus America. And I think one of the problems...

No, but I mean specifically that if it's known to the world at that time in the Cold War, that America doesn't feel that intervention in foreign issues is the right thing to do. Well, we didn't. They give them open road. Yeah, but we didn't. Like what happened in Hungary in 1956 in the U.S.?

Well, I mean, the Soviet Union invaded, and we didn't do anything. Czechoslovakia in the 60s. So there were lots of places where the U.S. I mean, it's complicated. That's in their backyard. That's in their backyard. I don't know. What's in the backyard? Like, where is Vietnam? What's the backyard of Vietnam? China. Yeah. So why? I mean, if I'm not sure what you're saying

in terms of like in the Cold War, there were many moments. So you're questioning the whole doctrine of containment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, containment theory and even the person who kind of created the concept said that it was being misapplied. And it was always being – sometimes it would be observed, other times not. George Kenan? Yeah. And he was against Vietnam? He was critical of the way that containment became kind of – the way that it was implemented as part of American foreign policy. I think there's also, you know, and going back to Iran or the Middle East and

things like that, the United States, you know, we deposed a democratically elected leader in Iran in 1953. We helped. It was really a British- Dulles. I heard that somebody- Yeah, yeah. Dulles. Alan Dulles. Yeah. But, you know, that is, you know, the United States has a lot to answer for where we did a lot of, you know, backdoor kind of stuff, you know, our intentions were and how we thought about things because we ended up you know we we didn't end up making all that many allies if you are going into places that are you know you know we want everybody to have democracy unless you become anti-american and then we're going to invade you or we're going to depose you that's i guess where i come down is when you're dealing with a bad actor like hamas or the soviet union or whatever it is and you get and you make some decision and then

it doesn't turn out well people criticize it based on the assumption that there was if you'd only done this then we'd have this good outcome and i think the reality is usually there was never a good outcome there There were multiple bad outcomes. You don't know if that outcome would have been better or worse. You're channeling Dershowitz right now. I think he's right about that. So one thing I would just say, I don't necessarily disagree with you. And it is good. Like the way America ended up winning the Cold War was a combination of military power like that that Soviets knew we were formidable, but it was mostly economic and trade and cultural freedom. That's what ultimately won the Cold War. And I'm

not saying the military stuff wasn't important and the spy craft and everything, but there's a category error, I think, when you say Hamas or the Soviet Union in the sense, and this isn't to take away any, you know, evil from Hamas and what they have done to their own people, much less Israelis, but they are not a threat to the world order in the way the Soviet Union was. Vis-a-vis Israel. Yeah. But I'm saying that's where the US, when we're talking about projecting power onto the world stage, we need to be careful about getting involved in every dispute everywhere, which was what we were trending towards under, you know, at the beginning of the century, like where it's like, no, we're the indispensable nation. This is

people coming out of the Clinton administration was the U.S. is the indispensable nation. We have to be everywhere all the time, making sure the traffic signals are working right. And that is, you know, that's not, it didn't work for Rome, you know, back in the Roman Empire days, and it's not going to work for any country now. But Iran is a threat to the world order. And... Yeah, I think Iran will be... And Hamas, you know... Is an agent, or maybe not an agent, but it's clearly allied with Iran.

I am confident Israel and this is absolutely true. Like Israel has, you know, they're like the blob in the old Marvel X-Men comics. You punch him and he absorbs the energy and then pushes back. Israel is capable of taking care of itself. And I don't mean that we should cut them loose completely in any kind of awful way. I'm pretty confident that the Gulf states, including Israel, will be able to contain Iran in a big way.

And to the extent that it is a state sponsor of terror, that is something for the world community to really be on top of. But is Iran the same thing as Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany during World War II? Clearly not. And that doesn't mean that's the only time that you can act. regions are pretty good at taking care of themselves.

I don't know if you have anything to say about it. Iran is not, I don't know if they're not like Imperial Japan. I don't know what Japan's ambitions were. They occupied most of Asia. But Iran would happily control most of the Middle East. I don't know if people occupy in the same way.

But certainly they're not the Nazis. But if they were to get nuclear weapons, the combination of nuclear bombs or just enriched uranium and this uh jihadist belief which i don't think any of us can really wrap our heads around i i that's the one thing i like i hear sam harris talk about it he convinces me and then my mind resets i think they wouldn't possibly then i'll read an article about stuff they were saying to

each other that we're going to kill this. And I say, holy shit, they really believe this stuff. And if you can imagine that they really believe it, you can't let them have a nuclear bomb. You just can't, right? And the consequences to the world really could be catastrophic. And if it's just a bombing of some nuclear facilities to set the clock. Or a virus, a computer virus. Yeah, whatever it is.

You know, Israel does a pretty good job of handling. But they should set the clock back if they can. I think Dershowitz might be right about that, even if previous things have gone bad. Just like, you know, it depends where you want to start the story. If you start right around Korea, say, well, we didn't intervene then. And actually this Korea worked out okay.

You want to start it at Vietnam, now it looks like interventions are bad. Except the first Iraq war turned out okay. We saved Kuwait. Again, the same kind of thing. If we had let Saddam Hussein take Kuwait, we know he had other ambitions. We know he was next to Saudi Arabia. You know, he was also trying to, you know, he was fighting Iran.

I mean, one of the reasons why Iran was hemmed in was because Iraq is their major regional enemy, and they bled each other of, you know, a couple million people. That's about the first war I'm talking about. Yeah. The second one we... Greenwald made the point that if you set... You might set Iran back a few years, but then in a few years you'll have to do it again. All right. I guess Dershowitz's point was keep doing it

until one day maybe there is regime change. And I guess... Well, here, I mean, this is a question of, like, the U.S. as foreign policy. The idea of regime change is, you know, it has a bad history. Right. We oftentimes pick the wrong people to put into power or say, like, need to be taken out of power and things like that. I think a good question coming out of all of this is like, no, you know, least of all the people in Iran, apparently, you know, it's a very young country. And, you know, they don't like particularly living under theocracy. And what might we do, the US short of military intervention that would actually facilitate a regime change in Iran that

is coming from within the country, because regime change really, for the most part, only works when it is internally generated. But how many people in Iran want regime change as a percentage? I mean... Dershowitz floated that and Greenwald wouldn't have it, but I think the smart money is that they would like regime change. Yeah. Well, certainly not all of them.

No, not all of them. Significantly. It's like if you think the landmarking laws suck in New York, there's still people who support them, right? Yeah, you can't, there's only like, you know, you can't put the entire population under your thumb if they don't want to be under your thumb. I don't think.

I don't know. But, you know, and it's also, it is, you know, the U.S., you know, and again, it's, you know, can talk about this, and it doesn't change anything, but we made missteps when we supported the Shah of Iran the way that we did because it was a very barbaric authoritarian regime, which on a certain level also allowed Iran to be more modern. And we've all seen the images of, you know, women in around in the 60s and 70s, where they're wearing mini skirts and

things like that. It looks like any European or North American city. But, you know, the way that we supported that regime also made it possible for an Islamic theocracy to take over and to maintain power since 1979. And one of the ways to think about it is how do we actually facilitate positive change in the world? And part of it is through some military power, for sure. Some of it's diplomacy. A lot of it is economic. And by example. Yeah.

I mean, most of the change that we've been responsible, not most of it, we've been responsible for a tremendous amount of change in the world simply by example. People wanting to be like America. And it's got to warm every American's heart when Hong Kong is protesting that they wave American flags. It does mine. Yeah. Even Glenn Greenwald's heart might be. I emailed with him today.

I want to meet him. He's a good guy. It's interesting, and I just did a long interview with him myself after that debate that we had. And he does not talk in the terms of patriotism that I think everybody at this table is more comfortable with. And he lives in Brazil. He's an American citizen. But he also is a real critic of state power. And, you know, the American deep state, you know,

and he helped expose that in a profound way, both working through with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, but especially with Edward Snowden. That's really important to keep in mind, that we have a government that, you know, constantly mouths certain platitudes about democracy and individualism and freedom, and then is, you know, kind of surveilling us all the time. And then every time they get their hand caught in the cookie jar, you know, they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, we didn't mean to do that. We'll stop doing that.

And then it just gets worse and worse. So Greenwald is an interesting character. So you must know these stories way better than I do about Snowden. I'm aware of the FISA abuses. What terrible things were going on that have stopped now because of these leaks and these exposures in the last 15 years? It's a good question. And it's, I don't know, you know, but. But you're up on Snowden and. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've interviewed Edward Snowden, who I think is a real American patriot.

And I think it is, you know, he had a choice and like he blew up his life in order to, you know, expose certain government. What's the worst that he exposed? Well, I mean, that there was a ubiquitous surveillance program, that everybody in America, against the laws of our country, that themselves, the FISA stuff that came out of revelations in the 70s of what was going on in the Cold War, you know, under the Church Commission and whatnot, Church Committee,

you know, that the government has complete surveillance power of the American numbers. What else? It's everything. I mean, it's because they can pick up every communication and what FISA helped to do, or was the idea that, you know, things like the FBI and the CIA and the NSA can't really operate within the country against American citizens. But there's so much leakage in that, that there's just, you know, it's a ubiquitous surveillance program. And it may, you know, it's hard to say, okay, well, you know, what that meant is that they picked up a bunch of people and disappeared them and things like that. But it is an, you know, it's a complete abrogation of constitutional rights and of due process and things like that.

And most importantly, it's always done in the name of national security. But it's like the big breakthroughs and when they break up spy rings and attempts to terrorist plots, it's never through that kind of stuff where they're just vacuuming up huge amounts of data and communications, it's always through the older versions of spycraft, where they develop leads and contacts and networks, and they figure out what's going on, and then they lower the boom on people there. You know, so I think, you know, that's important. It's important to know what your government's doing to you. And that, by the way, that brings to mind, and I want to talk about drugs, psychedelics. Yeah. And by the way, that brings to mind, and I want to talk about drugs, psychedelics. That brings to mind another counterfactual, which it has to be in the consideration, which is that prior to 9-11, we had a series of ever-increasing terrorist attacks, ever escalating and culminating in 9-11. And then after that, we didn't have any more so in some way in some clumsy way the sum total of everything we did did stop this thing

in its tracks unless it's just coincidence we never had another attack so the question still has to be okay you don't like what were the i mean the the fact of the matter is that was you know and obviously the world trade center was that you know uh islamists not linked to al-qaeda tried to blow it up in the 90s and failed and that was lucky right i mean you know it it was the van that they parked. The blind sheik. Yeah, it was, you know, it was too close to a beam, etc. So, but, you know, there was not massive terrorism in America. I think, you know, go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say that on a certain level, you know, 9-11 is horrific and whatnot, but it's also, it is like a black swan event. That kind of thing happens very rarely in most parts of the world. And it happened very rarely, you know, it, you

know, if, if it was so possible, it would have been happening frequently in America. So I'm just saying that the, the idea that it, it didn't happen again. 9-11 happened once. A terrorist attack in America on that scale happened once. Right. There was a bombing. Was it in Kenya in the embassy? Yeah. Then there was the call.

Then there was the, I don't have the timeline exactly right. Then there was the attempt at the World Trade Center. Then there was 9-11. And then there's a Wikipedia article about it there were many thwarted attacks after that what I'm saying is that if after 9-11

we had not intervened had not responded in some significant ways it's hard to imagine that bin Laden wouldn't have would he have stopped? Yeah. He might have stopped bombing American targets if we had not,

because I don't know. Is there, we have to wait for another one, and then at some point, we can't live this way anymore. I mean, one of the things, would you agree with this? I mean, it's a really interesting and important question to ask, but it's also we were sold after 9-11 the idea that Islamism was an existential threat to the West and to America that was on the order of the Soviet Union,

the threat posed by an expansionist ideology that was taking over countries in different parts of the world. And it's clear that that was oversold because we were looking at Islamism as if it was the Soviet Union. And that it's just not up to that task. The writer V.S. Nepal wrote right after 9-11 that he didn't fear the terrorists behind 9-11 because they could fly planes into buildings, but they couldn't build planes or buildings. And that it doesn't make the crime less horrific, but the idea that we have to change everything

in our footing in order to protect ourselves from that was an overreaction. I guess. I mean, at the time, we were worried about anthrax. We were worried about chemical weapons. We were worried about dirty bombs. I mean, I was I was worried about all these things. I felt that. horrible things to Israel. And, you know, until October 7th, Israelis would be having exactly this argument. Oh, it was oversold. They really weren't so bad. The Iron Dome is enough. Right. And it's quite a big risk to chalk it off. I also think it's very different looking at Israel and its specific history and its geography,

you know, and... But we're way more vulnerable than Israel is in a certain way. In what way? Israel is a locked down state where everybody's searched, everybody's surveilled. Yeah, but I mean, what are terrorists going to do to destroy the United States? They can't destroy the United States. They can do horrible things in the United States. And listen can't destroy the United States they can they can do horrible things the United States and listen we're about the same age 9 11 was traumatic well beyond the number of people that died we were scared and people were buying safe rooms and survival kits

and um afraid to take the subway I had employees didn't want to come into work. I don't know how you could live that way. If you have a motivated worldwide network that can go into home Depot and buy materials to blow up this and blow up that and buy it and doesn't have to be the world trade center. We have a whole subway system here. You know, anybody just walk into the subway and blow anything up?

It's, I don't disagree with you. It's also harder than you think, right? Because otherwise it would be happening more. I never, I've never been able to figure that out. How hard could it be? I, you know, I don't know. I'm not a terrorist, but obviously it's harder than it thinks. So I only said it to say that I don't know don't know the answer, but it's just important to bring that up into the conversation and say, are you sure that if we hadn't done any of these things, we would have had the next 20-something years without any terrorism? We don't know. Well, you know what, though?

I will say this. I agree with what you're saying, and this is a question worth really discussing fully. I do know that going into Iraq and occupying it and fucking it up and occupying Afghanistan, that's not – I don't think that's what saved us from the next level of it. I think you're right about that. I think you're right about that. And that's what people are always trying to sell, like, okay, something bad has happened. Now we've got to do the maximum response and no questions asked because that's also you know it was really uncomfortable and you know i it's not like i'm

brave or anything but like in the wake of 9-11 and then especially the move into iraq like i you know like so many people if you question that because it was massively popular on both the right and the left, and everybody in Congress voted for the Patriot Act and voted for this and that. And it was like, really, people are like, what is wrong with you that you would not accept what the rulers of this country said we need to do in order to stay safe? And it turns out like a lot of that was just bullshit. By the way, what would you say is the mistake in Iraq? Is it that the world is destabilized? Is it the money we spent?

The American lives lost? Are the Iraqi people maybe better off despite all that? That's hard to say, but it's like the hundreds of thousands of people who were killed in Iraq because of America. That's a starting point. And sometimes that happens, right? Like hundreds of thousands of people died in World War II. The destabilization... Tens of millions. Yeah, I'm under counting there. The destabilization of the region because Saddam Hussein was not

going to be a long-termer. Like like what were the other ways? You know, you have the rise not just of Al-Qaeda but of ISIS because of the United States occupation. You have the rise of Iran as a kind of unmatched regional power because we took out the main enemy of them. Like, there are a lot of knock-on effects. And I think it, you know, it destabilized the region in a particularly powerful way, which it may come around, you effects. And I think it, you know, it destabilized the region in a particularly powerful way, which it may come around, you know, and I mean, I'm optimistic that, you know, over the next 20 years that the Middle East will actually become more stable than it has been in the previous 20 years. Because I think as America pulls out, and, you know, we had already seen this, and this

is something Donald Trump did that was good, brokering the Abraham Accords. But, you know we had already seen this and this is something donald trump did that was good brokering the abraham accords but you know back in the in the late 70s and 80s egypt and jordan made peace with israel because they're like okay we're they're here for the long haul so are we um you know you add in countries like uae and saudi arabia bahrain etc that recognize that you know they have more in common with Israel than they do with Iran. And so I think there can be something good can come out of all of this, but it doesn't necessarily legitimate things. Ironically, we toppled Iran, Iraq. Iran became dangerous.

Is that my phone? I don't have a ringer like that. Iran became dangerous. Is that my fault? I don't have a ringer like that. Iran became dangerous. Then the other Arab countries felt they should make peace with Israel. So it's a weird... I mean, that's also one of the vagaries of history, right? On some level, you never know which version of the multiverse

you're going to get right in the future. We have about 10 minutes. What's that? We have about 10 minutes. Psychedelics. You're into psychedelics. Sam Harris is into psychedelics. A lot of smart people are into psychedelics now.

Well, we had that guy, Pete Bogosian. Pete Bogosian. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he won't stop talking about it. Psychedelics scare the shit out of me. Yeah. Why? Because I'm afraid I'll fry my brain.

I've got to turn this. You know, my wife is really something. She knows I'm doing a podcast. She knows. She knows we're not doing a podcast. She knows he's talking about psychedelics, right? A podcast, maybe she thought was over. Why are psychedelics okay to do, and why would you recommend them?

First, I wouldn't recommend them, you know, because who am I to recommend something, right? No, no. But, you know, I think the appeal of psychedelics are that they, especially for older people, like in a way, you know, people always talk about kids doing psychedelics or younger people. But it's really a boomer phenomenon. I mean, like psychedelics. The dead, you know. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's like very much of a kind of 60s counterculture into other stuff.

For older people, what psychedelics do is they, you know, they enliven your brain. The whole idea is, you know, you get kind of tired and in a rut thinking as well as physically and whatnot. And what psychedelics do is, you know, you don't lose touch with reality or anything like that. It's, you know, I always think of it as like emptying your web browser cache. You know, if you've been online for a long time and everything's just kind of getting kludgy and slow, what psychedelics can do is kind of offer a reset. There's interesting therapeutic dimensions to them that are getting talked a lot about. And that's why things like psilocybin and magic mushrooms are, you know, being used in therapy as well as things that are adjacent like MDMA or ketamine. It's a way of kind of being able to confront your hangups in a way that is,

you know, where you feel more secure and comfortable actually engaging with issues that you have. So 100% of people have that reaction to it? No, not 100%. But, I mean, that's the therapeutic thing. The other thing is that it's fun. You know, it's like, you know, psychedelics can be in the right setting with the right people or by yourself or whatever. Like, it's, you know, they're very pleasant.

They're feeling. I don't drink anymore. I used to drink a lot. And, you know, that wasn't working for don't drink anymore. I used to drink a lot. Um, and, um, you know, that wasn't working. Are you tasting my words now? Yeah. Um, but what, what, you know, what they do is they kind of freshen things up. I mean, that's so tempting. Have you done DMT? Yeah. He said it's five minutes and you're totally stone cold. Yeah. Well, it, it's a little bit longer than that, I'd say, but it's, it's DMT is, you know, and there's varieties of DMT, but the one he's talking about, yeah, it's like a 15-minute trip to another dimension.

I mentioned on last week's podcast that I bought a projector that projects the northern lights onto my ceiling. I'm going to have to make do with that because I've heard psychedelics make you vomit. No, it depends. I mean, you know, some of them. Ayahuasca. Yeah, ayahuasca. Virgin is a metaphor. I'm a metaphobic.

Okay. And also, a lot of people have trouble with mushrooms because they also tend to have like a bad stomach effect. But not necessarily in something like LSD doesn't really, it's not associated with any kind of stomach issues. Or ketamine, which again, you can get into a lot of Jesuitical decisions about whether it's something actually psychedelic or not. But, I mean, have you ever looked at the projection of the Northern Lights while you've had a couple of drinks? Or I don't know if you smoke weed. I have sort of a one drink limit because I tend to get nauseous. Okay, wow. Regarding weed, no, I if you smoke weed. I have sort of a one-drink limit because I tend to get nauseous. Okay, wow.

Regarding weed, no, I'm not a weed smoker. Can you give us a starter? I did do one line of Coke once, and I went right to sleep. Oh, that's interesting. I don't know if it was. It might have been baby powder. I don't know. Also, nothing is for everybody.

Nothing works on everybody. A lot of people don't need to do psychedelics or drink or smoke weed or whatever. I want to live. I want to do it. What about like microdosing? Why don't you start with that? It's a different phenomenon. It really is.

And there's a legitimate question as to whether or not microdosing even works. Because like, you know, a lot of drugs have a threshold level. And like if you don't cross that threshold, your body doesn't really register. Maybe that's what happened with the cocaine. But I don't know. Have you ever taken a, you know, like an SSRI or do you take any other kind of, any psychoactive substance?

You drink? Yeah. And you drink coffee? Yeah. Yeah. So it's like, you know, think of, all drugs should be thought of as on a continuum. So, you know, and Andrew Weil, the-

Like my sexuality, yeah. Yes, exactly. But he wrote a book in the mid-80s called From Chocolate to Morphine. And, you know, what that did that was really fascinating is that he just said, like, psychoactive substances are all on the same kind of spectrum. And it's like you might take, like, you know, a typical tab of acid has 100 micrograms. You might try 50 micrograms, you know, and that might give you a bit of a buzz or something like that or a bump of ketamine, which, you know, if you take a small amount of something, it's very it oftentimes becomes a very different drug if you take a big dose of it. But, you know, it's like, do you do you ever want to feel more love and do you want to feel at one with things all the time yeah so this you could do that through breathing i mean there's

certain types of uh you know i'm sure sam harris has like a a multi-tiered i can picture sam harris wanting to feel more love he doesn't doesn't seem like type of guy. Yeah, but it's, you know, read about it. There's a great book by a guy I know called Listening to Ecstasy by Charlie Winninger, and that's about MDMA. And, you know, there's lots of interesting guidebooks out there just to get a sense of what kind of experiences you might enjoy. And, you know, the irony is that probably the most damaging of all of them is alcohol in terms of killing brain the actual brain damage you know yeah and i've been drinking you know for

years one thing that people a lot of people register um is that after taking uh you know either a significant dose of mushrooms or lsd they, they stopped drinking or they drink less for a certain period of time. And LSD was widely used as a alcohol abuse treatment in the fifties. And actually that was part of Timothy Leary was kind of working that line. I seem to be the only person that was scared out of drugs by all the film strips we saw in the 19th. But those of us who grew up in the 70s, Johnny thought he was cool.

You know what was funny? And I bought into all of it, so much so that I saw in high school this guy next to me in class like, Natterman, check this out. And he pulled out a bag of weed. And I debated whether to turn him in for his own good. I thankfully didn't do that. If I may just say,

because you mentioned like health class in the 70s, I went to a Catholic high school in Middletown, New Jersey called Modern Day, Mother of God, which went out of business, which is great. The market at work, right? You know that they went out of business a couple of years ago.

But we had shitty old health movies. And so like in the late 70s and early 80s they were showing us these health movies from the 60s where everybody were hippies like on after and it was like what who are these people they're like your parents or something and they would talk about lsd and they said like one dose can last for 14 hours and it's a dollar or two dollars a hit and everybody in school was like you're kidding me like there's a drug that's's a dollar or two dollars a hit and everybody in school was like you're kidding me like there's a drug that's only a buck or two and will last forever and they created a boomlet in psychedelics um and all of that you know the stuff that you're going to have uh you

know babies that are like thalidomide flashbacks they talk about that's all you'd stay that way forever was the threat it's uh it is psychedelics. You know, psychedelics are very powerful drugs. A lot of people who are into them call them medicine. You know, and it is true, like if you're prone to or you have a family history of like psychotic breaks and stuff like that, you really need to be careful about this stuff and thoughtful and intentional. But, you know, they are good, clean fun. When I was in high school, it's so funny what you're saying.

When I was in high school at my health teacher, Aloysius Jangle, that was his name. He, he would, he closed all the windows of shades. And then he put on a moody blues record, days of future past. And it's the song the right before ride my seesaw. It's like, it's actually like a audio acid trip. Right. And he plays it for us and he turns out all the lights. He starts flashing the lights to really entice us. How awesome.

And he says, don't ever do this. Wow. So was he dealing on the side? I don't know what the hell was going on with this guy, and it was awesome. It was really tempting. All right, we have to go, but two things. First of all, I just want to say, vis-a-vis Reason Magazine,

I meant to say the Volokh conspiracy, I don't know your relationship with this guy. He is a fucking genius in my estimation. That guy is so smart. Eugene Volokh. Yeah, yeah. The elder Volokh. Yeah, the Volokh conspiracy is a legal blog that's been around for, I think, two decades or so. But we host that at Reason.com because they used to be on their own. Then they

were on the Washington Post.com. And then the Washington Post started saying like, hey, we don't want you to post this or that. And so they poured it over to us. And it's a fantastic read. Absolutely. If there's any legal issue that's facing the nation, if you want to get the smartest, least partisan, highest batting average, I believe, opinion on what's good, that is by far. And they disagree. Like they oftentimes, you know, it's like, you know, a bunch of different contributors who will often argue with you. But that'll actually bring them to a consensus. You know, they'll very nicely debate, take each other's arguments into account.

And it's excellent and the final thing is the most charming thing about you now that i've gotten to know you is your nostalgia for 1970s am radio songs big wheel commercials on his twitter feed he he he he posted um uh billy don't be a hero the night chicago died probably seasons in the sun um the all these old commercials that we remember from when we were kids um the 70s is an underappreciated decade absolutely it gets written off as the me decade or it's like oh it's all inflation and uh well i hear a lot of people praising the 70s great good movies it's great did you see unfrosted. Classic rock. I did not like it. I was disappointed with it. Do you agree that the first 20 minutes or so really hit the 1970s heart?

I mean, he really. I mean, he's. Was that the 50s or the 70s? Well, the Pop-Tarts were created in the 60s, but it's like a very. Everybody grew up in the 70s eating Pop-Tarts. I mean, that was like a treat. But just the references, there were so many things that... Well, you know, the 70s, the other thing,

and Matt Welch and I, my recent colleague, a decade ago or a dozen years ago, we wrote a book called The Declaration of Independence. And part of it was kind of re-evaluating the 70s. And that was a time when, you know, people, like everybody started to act like they had a right to live their life the way they wanted to. And there's some negative sides to that. But it's also deeply empowering, especially if you don't come from an elite class or something like suddenly you could be lower middle class and be like, no, you know what?

I want to live my life the way I want to. And that's a pretty good message. I think the 70s has always been appreciated, at least musically. Nobody has ever doubted the greatness of the music. Well, it goes back and forth, right? Because then it's, oh, disco sucks. But you look back now, and it's like, disco was an incredibly liberating phenomenon.

And it won. Disco beats maintain, and gay liberation, feminist liberation, individualism in the 70s really took flight. And hip-hop started in the 70s really took flight. And hip-hop started in the 70s. Yeah. Rapper's Delight.

Was that the 70s? I think it was like 80. No, I wasn't. I was in high school. Maybe 79. Okay. Well, it could have been. Okay, we have to go.

Listen, you should come on more often. You're in the neighborhood. I am. And just shoot the shit about stuff with us. We'll talk about why I said that the night Chicago died is is better than the bands The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. You know that – Which version of Billy Don't Be a Hero is better, Paper Lace or – No, I like Bo Donaldson and the Paper Lace.

It's partly because of the outfits they're wearing, which look like David Bowie cast off spacesuits. It is better. I listened to both. I listened to both. They're better. Okay. Bye, everybody. Bye-bye.