The Problem With Jon Stewart - Libertarian Says What With Nick Gillespie

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

As the Trump administration pursues its federal downsizing project, we're joined by Nick Gillespie, Editor at Large of “Reason” magazine and Host of “The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie” podcast, to examine what's at stake. We explore where libertarian principles align with and diverge from Trump's approach, debate if government serves as essential check on free markets, and consider what role government should play in a society that values both liberty and the public good. PLUS+, find out what Donald Trump, Bob Dylan & George Constanza have in common! Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more:  > YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast > TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast  > X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod   > BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/theweeklyshowpodcast.com Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Lead Producer – Lauren Walker Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic  Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Researcher & Associate Producer – Gillian Spear Music by Hansdle Hsu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the weekly show podcast. My name is John Stewart. I come to you today, broken, but not bowed. For I had an owie on my finger. I'm going to show it now. You probably, I wrapped it up. I heard it on the show doing my classic brand of physical slapstick comedy that never works and always gets me hurt.

It's the second time on the Daily Show that I have broken a drinking vessel. The first one was glass. The second was ceramic. For those who thought I should have had a breakaway mug. Yeah. Now you tell me. Ceramic is one of my least favorite materials to have embedded in my skin. But I bled out.

It really, for a comedian, is humiliating. And I say that because the greats, the Buster Keaton, the Charlie Chaplin's. Buster Keaton would stand, you know, in front of a house with a little window cut out, it would fall on his head. He'd say, Harold Lloyd would hang off of a clock with no net. I nearly died being vociferous with a coffee mug. It does not speak well of the legends of my business.

But I don't imagine they ever had to have their set. that's childproofed. Can I tell you what's not smart to do when you have a cut, hold it below your heart for 20 minutes? Because it really does, it just makes your whole arm a straw and it just all just flows out and it makes it look way worse than when I picked it back up to look at it. Even I for a second was like, what the was I shot? I glued it that night and then it's pretty gnarly looking but it's all good so it goes as kurt vonnegut would say so it goes uh we have a ton to get to today we're taping on wednesday so god knows it will even still be uh in the in the alliances that we were in the day before uh but i'm excited to talk to today you know there's so much that's going on

and we talk about democrats and liberals and uh republicans and conservatives and doge and maga I wanted to get kind of the libertarian view, and I know that's not monolithic in any way, but I thought there's no better person to get that from than our guest today. So let's get to that right now. Ladies and gentlemen, we are very pleased in this moment to have with us. Nick Gillespie, editor at large of Reason Magazine, host of The Reason interview with Nick Gillespie, podcast. Nick the OG, in my mind of kind of grounded libertarian.

thought is in my mind, I think of Nick Gillespie, and I'm very pleased that you could be here and join us today. Well, thank you, John. It's a real treat. And it's always nice to be called grounded because normally I'm talked about as something less than grounded. So thank you. Is that really true?

Because, you know, it's so interesting to me, libertarian is, you know, you think of political movement sometimes and you have a tendency to group them as a monolith. and the libertarian movement is anything but a monolith. It has, you know, there's this sort of the side of it that's getting maybe the most attention in this day and age is maybe the kind of more edge lord side of it, that kind of young male. But when I call you the OG, you know, I feel like you were always grounding everything in Friedman and Hayek and, you know, all the things that you imagine libertarianism, foundation is built upon. Would that be correct? Yeah, I think so. And, you know, part of it is that I grew up as a

journalist or I, you know, I started working as a journalist. Then I went to grad school for literary studies. And then, you know, I had to come back. It was still in my blood. Somehow that the big payoff in being an English professor didn't materialize. So you didn't get your start in dank memes. That was not how you got your start with all this. Well, I actually did get my start working at teen magazines and music magazines. I've worked for a place called Teen Machine at some point. Teen Machine. But even in my Teen Mag days, I was always interested in starting with like some facts. You know, it's not like a card you lay down and then everything, the conversation stops. But, you know, starting, I've been a reason since 1993. The magazine started in 1968.

You know, I did a cover story about how everybody was talking about. And this was a big hill. Clinton thing, you know, that children were at risk like they had never been before, like, you know, worse than the little rascals. Those kids had a good compared to kids growing up in the fucking, like, late 1990s. And all I started with was like a list of, you know, how much better children are doing. Right. Let's start with one. No polio. Okay. Let's move on from there. Well, you know, I'm 61 years old. I was born in 1963. The average lead levels in kids, growing up in the 60s would have triggered massive medical interventions in the late 90s because, you know, lead, lead gasoline, lead paint, lead pencils, you know, let cereal, I'm sure.

Lettios, I believe, was called. It was delicious. Stayed crunchy. The one cereal that stayed crunchy in the bowl was lettios. And they filled you up for the whole day. Yeah. No, but so, I mean, this just gets back to the point of like, I think it's always important to when we start talking about stuff, especially today, because, you know, people are nuts is like, can we agree on some common facts, right? People are nuts would be a good title for the book. But Nick, so you just gave me in many ways the perfect segue kind of into our conversation, because I think I want to talk to you about Doge and how you're feeling about that, the Trump administration, all those things. But first, I think I've always been libertarian curious, if that would be the right. Every comedian is, right?

I think you would probably have to be. You have to be because you want to go where the jokes are and you want to be able to think a certain way and then express it. But here's what I always come up against, and you just brought it up. Years ago, there was a lot of lead in kid cereal. And through government regulation, the lead was removed. So how do you square that kind of essential tension? Yeah.

So, and this is where I guess I am grounded because I'm not an anarchist or an anarchist. or an anarcho-capitalist, which a lot of people say where, you know, no government is ever necessary or kind of the same thing that anything the government does is by force and theft and is illegitimate. And they also suck at everything they do. Why would we have them do anything, et cetera? You know, that's one strain of kind of libertarian thinking. I'm much more like Milton Friedman, again, you know, a proud New Jerseyan, everything good. Friedman? Where was he from? He's from, I think it was born in Newark and grew up in Robway.

You know, Robway's two most famous residents are Milton Friedman and Ruben Hurricane Carter. I was going to say, if you don't name somebody from the prison, you're just not working hard enough. But over the course of my career, you know, I've become much more of what I call a directional libertarian, which is that I'm not that I'm not that interested in like, okay, let's build a perfect philosophical foundation that, you know, makes perfect, mathematical and philosophical sense. It's like, are we heading in the direction of more individual freedom where people can live how they want to, where business owners can do what they want to, where things are looser and people are able to make more choices that matter in their lives. For me, the question isn't, you know, whether or not the government is funding something, it's are we going in the right direction or not. And so to bring that back to this question

of regulation of things like lead, you know, the single biggest thing to, you know, help air quality in the United States, arguably, was the environmental pollution, you know, kind of standards that were passed in the late 60s and early 70s under the Clean Air Act. By Nixon, who would have, who would be considered at this point, I think, like a gay leftist for Nader. Like he would, you know what I mean? We've so shifted in terms of the paradigm. Yeah.

And it, you know, what by banning, you know, and it took many years. D.D.T and all those other things, yeah. Well, no, let me, because I have a libertarian, I will pick a knit with you about DDT in just the second. But with leaded, getting rid of leaded gasoline, you know, and the atmosphere is a common. So it's not like you can't say, oh, you know, the lead you're admitting, you know, I'm going to sue you in court for that because it would take forever and it's never going to work or anything. But, you know, when there is a true commons. That you think the market won't address. Like there's too many externalities.

Right. And so if the market won't address it, the free market, that's a place where in your mind, you're able to come in. Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. And by saying, okay, we're taking leaded gasoline. I mean, you know, most people in America now, I think probably we're not, you know, grew up with leaded gasoline versus unleaded and, you know, and all of that kind of shit. And it's like by taking leaded gasoline out of the air, you know, that had a major positive effect on, you know, on the environment. Listen, Nick, you and I grew up at the same time in Jersey. I'm sure you did what I did, which is ride your bicycle behind mosquito trucks. Like, we didn't even get excited about the ice cream man coming. It was when a mosquito guy with a giant, he had a pickup truck with a giant fucking fire hose of who knows what. And we would ride our bikes behind it, be like, this smells interesting. Just let it wash over us. Yeah, no, it's like just breathe in, you know, because you're huffing anyway.

That's right. So even when you're saying like, okay, we're going to build a consensus and say we want to get leaded gasoline out of the air because it has these negative effects, you can do it smarter and dumber. And like the way the government did it. And this was Nixon's EPA said, okay, we're going to mandate catalytic converters, which is a particular type of technology that takes a lot of the lead out of emissions. I mean, as well as changing how we formulate gasoline. But, you know, it's like the government probably shouldn't be dictating technology or it could set a goal and say, you have to reduce pollution by so much, but then we're going to let you and we're going to let the market innovate to figure out what's the best way to do it. Are you for government then incentivizing those kinds of changes? Like, would that be, or is that considered an intervention that Sully's a free market? Yeah, well, it, I mean, it gets complicated pretty quickly.

Yeah, you know, obviously, right? Yeah. But it's, but it's where it might be that, you know, we want you to reduce your amount of pollution, however we define it. That's one thing. But then to say, oh, and by the way, we're going to give you a massive taxpayer subsidy and then give taxpayers credits to buy this one kind of technology. You know, it could be a solar panel. You know, I don't think build your own wind farms have taken off yet, but I'm sure they're coming. You know, like you probably, you want to make it as simple as possible. to say like, okay, we've come up with like, here are the basic rules. And then what free markets are really good at is figuring out innovative ways to do stuff for lower costs with better outcomes.

And that's not always perfect. And it's not always, you know, sometimes it needs a kick in the pants or sometimes you just need a top down regulation or restriction on something. But I think things generally work better, you know, when you let markets operate more freely to kind of figure out what people want to, because a lot of times we don't know what we want and then how to get there more quickly. With DDT, if I made- Oh, all right, yeah, pick the DDT knit and then I'll go back to the sort of more macro view and then we'll get into sort of what's happening today. Yeah, DDT is a really interesting example. I mean, the kind of planetary ban, almost complete planetary ban on DDT comes from Rachel Carson in Silent Spring. Silent Spring. And she was making a series of cases. And, you know,

the modern environmentalist movement, and a lot of comes out of that book and the movement that she helped inspire. You know, and it turns out that DDT is really good at killing mosquitoes. The best. Yeah, you know, and its banning was not necessarily a good thing because everything has costs and benefits. And it turns out in certain places, people are using lower levels of DDT in order to really powerfully eradicate mosquitoes.

And, you know, so like people, we are constantly held capped. by these old things like, you know, DDT was killing people, you know, as if like everything good didn't come out of an era where boys were riding spider bikes jumping ramps into vats of DDT. But, you know, it turns out that it gets much more complicated and we, you know, it's worth going back and thinking about this stuff. And you mentioned polio, I'm sure we'll talk about Robert Kennedy at a certain point. You know, Robert Kennedy, who's old enough to really remember polio is like, oh, you know, the polio vaccines have very. you know, killed more people than they saved. And it's like, you know, I want to see the stream of

iron lungs, you know, going up in front of health and human services. But it's really difficult right now, Nick, to make those choices and balances, especially now, because you bring up the point about DDT, and you're right. I mean, it was an incredibly effective killer of mosquitoes, which were causing malaria and all kinds of disease. But then it was found to have mutagenic properties and cancer properties. Well, at certain levels, right? Because this is, yeah, and then this is, you know, one of the things, I gave a talk last fall, you know, which was about what I call the agony of abundance. Like the biggest problem I think we have today, you know, in a kind of macro sense is we forget how to learn from the past. And boy, howdy. There was a poll last year and it's preach. Yeah. And it's like almost 60% of people last year said that life was better in America. in 1974. Because you were a kid. Yeah, let's go look at 1974.

And like the Pinto was the best-selling car in 1974. Which was invented to make the gremlin feel better about itself, as you know. Well, I was partial to the pacer because I just remember them having an ad where a guy delivered a six-foot sub in the back of the pacer. But then it was all glass. So by the time it got there, it would have flies and maggots on it. I had a gremlin. Yeah.

I was the idiot who worked his whole fucking high school career to buy an $800 off-brown gremlin just to find out it's front heavy and making a left meant you fish tailed into the neighbor's yard. But it was a nightmare. The pinto not only was explosive, literally and figuratively, well, not figuratively, just explosively, but it was a bad car. And like we have done so much better to make better cars, you know, but yet people are constantly being born back into the past thinking that it was a simple, you know, a simple decision. A simple time when cars were cars and segregation was allowed. Yeah. All right, going to take

quick break. Be right back. Hey, we're back. But let's talk about that central tension because I think here's where I probably have the hardest time embracing kind of the foundational philosophy, which would be kind of the way that Jeff Bezos is going with the Washington Post now. Personal liberty and free markets. And this is the part that's hardest for me, because in my formulation, right? Right. One of the greatest limitors of personal liberties oftentimes turns out to be free markets. Okay.

What's an example of that? All right. So the way I would look at it is this. The greatest inhibitor of personal liberty in my mind is not necessarily overreferral overzealous regulation or something along those lines, it's poverty. Right. It's struggle. It's the inability to get enough of the fruits of your labor to allow yourself the personal

freedom that you need. You know, survival and being on a tenuous razor's edge is for my calculation, the greatest inhibitor of personal liberty. free markets, the operating system that we're running, capitalism, whether it's free or not, is by its nature exploitative of labor. So their goal is to get you to work for them for the least amount of money they can pay you because they need to drive the biggest profits, right? Sure.

So because of that, it's hard for me to reconcile those two, dynamics feel at odds. I totally hear where you're coming from. And I, you know, libertarianism historically, you know, it's like a post-World War II phenomenon, really a post-1968 phenomenon, really as an organized movement. Really? Why 1968 do you think? Well, it was partly the people who founded the modern libertarian party, people who were working at places like reason. They felt left out of politics. You know, Republicans and Democrats, It's like, you know, when you're, especially if you're a young man in a draft year and your choice is Richard Nixon or Hubert Humphrey or George Wallace, you're like, okay, where's the exit, right? You know, it's not good, right? Would you draw it further back to like objectivism or would you say that?

Yeah, yeah. Okay. A huge, huge factor. And people like Ein Rand, I never personally went through an Ein Rand phase. But, you know, she was massive. You didn't smoke that much pot. See, I went through it. Oh, wow. You know, the objectivists I knew, you know, they didn't even get drunk. Oh, wow.

Much of smoking weed. So it's like, okay, I'm out. It was the only time I ever found it interesting. Because for me, you know, the 1950, I mean, post-war America is the first time when America became, you know, kind of a wealthy country and also like it was, you know, that's when individual liberty flourished. Like suddenly you had even among minorities who had it really shitty in the 50s. Like if you were black, you know, I mean, Brown versus Border.

of education only took place in 54. Schools didn't get fully desegregated until Nixon in the early 70s. I mean, you know, it's bad. But at every level, people were doing so much better. And there was so much more stuff to buy so many more choices to make on every level. It makes sense that libertarianism started to become more interesting and attractive. I was more into Jack Kerouac and the Beats, who were exploring individual liberty. Sure. The merry pranksters. And yeah, you know, So these are all like kind of, you know, parts of a broad movement. But in any case, I was going to say that I, you know, I'm a libertarian because I grew up lower middle class, not because it's often characterized as, you know, this is, you know, this is a philosophy for upper middle class people, highly educated people, men mostly and some women who are like Ein Rand or something like, you know, use cigarette holders or something. We're monocles.

Yeah, that's right. You know, my whole point, I agree with you in the questions you're asking. I think capitalism, broadly speaking, as an operating system, generates more possibilities for people. I agree, and this is why I'm not an anarchist, you know, when you talk about poor people. Not even poor people. I mean, like, working class or even regular middle class, which is how I grew up. Yeah, well, you know, part of the problem with political.

discourse in America, and I think it's always been this way, is that, you know, 90% of us say were middle class. And so you get middle class people, and this happened under, you know, it happened under George W. Bush. It happened under Trump, certainly under Biden, where, you know, suddenly households who are making $400,000 are being subsidized by the government. And you hear this, you know, I'm talking to you from Hell's Kitchen in New York, and you'll hear people in New York, say with a straight face, like, oh, you know, making $300,000 in New York just isn't really a lot. It's just not happening right now. Yeah, you know, it's like, you know, we're pinched.

And it's like then move or, you know, whatever. But what I was going to say is that the libertarian argument for helping people who need it and assistance in the market goes something like this. Or part of it is that, you know, if you're a kid and your parents for whatever reason aren't, you know, they're not well off. You don't have a lot of options. Giving kids access to education and to health care will allow them to grow so that they can fully participate in society, which is.

a good thing. Then we can say, okay, well, that's why we have Medicaid and why we have public schools. And then it might be the case that we say, well, you know what, let's maybe give the parents money so that they can pick the school their kid goes to. Like the government doesn't have to run the schools, et cetera, but there should be some aid and assistance in the interest of helping people fully participate in society. I think I can make a case that is consistent with libertarian beliefs and a belief in most. free markets and laissez-faire and certainly personal liberties, you know, that the state can exist to help people in terms of safety nets and in terms of helping to guarantee or at least

multiply opportunities. But having said that, you know, the reason why cars became cheaper and better and, you know, isn't because the government said, hey, you know what, we're going to give you, you know, a subsidized loan in order to buy that gremlin. You know, it actually cars in America got better and cheaper when you think about it in terms of the amount of work that people have to do to buy them when we opened up to competition. And throughout the, you know, through the mid-70s, car markets in America were basically, you know, it was very hard to get imports. And as a result, we got, you know, the cars that you and I grew up driving.

You know, the one good thing is, you know, I think about this all the time. And again, this is a question of progress that we should not celebrate uncritically, but take note of, I can remember people would have parties on the street if their car made it to 100,000 miles and the odometer went to zero. Sure. The rollover, baby. You had to get to them zeros. There were like two or three in your lifetime. Yeah. And now you don't even change the spark plugs on a new car until 100,000 miles. You know, and it is true that business owners want to, you know, they want you to work for as little as they have to pay you. But then if you're a good worker, you're going to be competing, you know, other companies are going to be like, you know what,

this guy is actually pretty good at what he's doing. I'm going to woo him away with a better wage. Yeah, I would, I think that's probably where you and I would disagree a little bit. Yeah, no. Well, I also think it's kind of, you know, you can push it too far. I was looking, in anticipation for this, I was looking at the percentage of households and whatnot that are on snap benefits. And things happen like, I think almost at, everybody in America, regardless of political persuasion or ideology or anything, would say, you know what, like, we don't want people to start. Yeah.

I would have questioned that at this point. There's a Republican congressman the other day who was like, kids should have to work for their lunch at school. And you're like, okay, that's interesting. Yeah. I agree. And by the way, SNAP benefits are controversial. Yeah. I mean, they really are within the government.

And the other side I would say to it is when governments do provide that, right? they attach all kinds of conditions to it that they don't attach to subsidies that are for corporations. I mean, you get billions for, you know, things and yet food stamps, you're not allowed to buy hot food. Yeah. No, it drives me nuts. And this is, again, from a libertarian point of view, I think you can say, okay, we're going to have certain social welfare, you know, safety net programs. Those are important. But then when you start getting to like, well, okay, you know, people who are making, you know, three times the population. poverty line or something, or still getting a benefit, maybe that's not a great use of taxpayer money because that money's coming from somewhere else. But also, you know, and you find this

in all sorts of giveaways under COVID and whatnot where people just, you know, okay, well, you know, why do seniors get prescription drug benefits, you know, regardless of how much money they make or why are they getting them anyway if they don't actually need them? So you're more of a, you would say means testing is the most important aspect of the safety net. It's two things. One is, I would say it would be better to give people like, you know, we know people are poor because they're below the poverty line. Like give them cash, you know, just give them cash and say, okay, here, we trust you not to buy, you know, not simply to buy letty of cereal for your kid. Right.

Instead of. Which, by the way, they don't. I mean, almost entirely those benefits are used to the. the positive and not. Absolutely. Yeah. The whole idea is like their game in the system for gambling money and cigarettes. Yeah. And it's like, well, they'll figure out how to do that anyway. But what, you know, to get to this point, because you mentioned Jeff Bezos, who just recently said, you know, he wants the opinion section of the Washington Post to focus on supporting personal liberties and free markets. And it's true. Like when when government gives a benefit and then says,

oh, but you know what, you have to get the 2% milk or the non-fat milk, because we don't trust you to make a good decision. That is so patronizing to my mind. It shouldn't be allowed. But you're not against the government subsidizing those that are left out of whatever economic prosperity comes from the capitalist system, which is, I think for a lot of people would be surprising. I've always said, you know, Rand Paul is kind of the avatar for all this in my mind,

only because having lobbied down there for Zedrogah Act for 9-11 and Pact Act for veterans and other things. Right. I always started to get the impression that, like, a libertarian was a Republican whose town hadn't been hit by a tornado yet. Right, right. Like, it was like, no money for Sandy relief. And then Kentucky gets hit by a tornado and they're like, come on.

Which made me feel like it wasn't a practical operating system for people to be talking about. You'll have fights over where the line gets drawn exactly, right? And things like that. But, you know, to me, and I like the way that you phrase it, it's, you know, it's like, who are the people who are left out? And particularly, people who are left out, you know, through no actions of their own. How do we give them a shot at participating in society? And this, I think, is going to surprise people. I think they view libertarianism in some ways as kind of a purest form of, a kind of selfishness, right, that you don't do. And I would say that's a more charitable view than I hear from the Republican Party, almost in its entirety. I think they view poverty and being left behind as vice, as somehow, it went in certain areas. I think if you were to look at, like, let's say the Midwest of the Rust Belt, right?

I think the view there is those poor people. globalization has hollowed out our manufacturing base and then you would say, well, what about Chicago and New York City and minority communities? And they would say, pull your pants up and get a fucking job. Yeah. It's almost an analog of what happened to our manufacturing base, yet viewed almost entirely differently and without any sympathy. Yeah. What you're describing is broadly, you know, a lot of Republicans think this way. I think a lot of conservatives. I think liberals go back and forth when you're talking about Chicago and it's like, oh, we got to help these people. But then if it's some, you know, fat Walmart march shopper in a small town in Indiana, it's like,

just buck it up, pal. No, no, no, you're right. It does. It goes across lines. People have their prejudices against different groups. And this is one of the things that is fascinating about Donald Trump, is that he is a master of playing all of this kind of stuff against itself. All right. Quick break and then back. All right. We are back. This is one of the things that is fascinating about Donald Trump is that he is a master of playing all of this kind of stuff against itself. Because, you know, when he's talking about tariffs and when he's talking about help,

you know, he just was praising the longshoremen for, you know, getting a good deal by resisting modernization of, you know, of containerized shipping. It's, you know, he knows how to play all of this. Do you think that's genuine? Because I find him to be incredibly dismissive of labor and workers and he views them. You know, I think in his unguarded moments like the podcast he did with Elon, where he was laughing with Elon about how badly they had cut, you know, the workers at Twitter. And where do you think they are in?

reality. Yeah. I, well, you know, Donald Trump, and this is probably the only time this sentence has been spoken in the English language, I think of Donald Trump like Bob Dylan. And by that, I mean that he... Hold on a minute. Are we recording this? Yeah. He has... We're certainly blowing in the wind, but what... A million different persona. And at any given point in time, Bob Dylan absolutely believes what he's singing, you know, and when he was... Wow. You know, anti-war, he believed that when he was, when he thought Rubin Carter was innocent. He believes it in the moment. Yeah.

And then when he thought that God was going to come and kill his friends and throw them into a lake of, you know, everlasting hellfire. It was only a couple of years, Nick. You know that was only a couple of years. He got out of that quick. But Trump believes what he's saying. So I don't think he's being calculated and saying, I'm screwing around with the longshoremen. It's a Kostanza thing. Yeah, that's right.

It's not a lie if you believe it. And in that moment, he believes it. Yeah. And but, you know, it does get into this larger question for the country. You know, surprisingly, I think my worldview would fix just about everything in the world. What? Why didn't we talk to you sooner, Nick? You know, it's, I've been waiting.

No, but, you know, what we have now is a government that pretty much at all levels, but certainly at the federal level, is spending way too much. It cannot or won't raise revenue to cover its cost. So it's creating debt and we can talk about why debt is a problem beyond some kind of accounting fetish. But we are trying to do, the government is trying to do so many things it is doing them poorly and it's unsustainable. And I think, you know, we're reaching a moment where this long period after World War II and even after the Cold War ended where, okay, there's a reset coming and you can't keep spending. you know, seven trillion dollars a year and taking in four and a half trillion dollars, which is what

we're doing. And we're going to have to make choices. And this is where, you know, I think if we would say, here's the goal of government. The goal of government is not to make sure that everybody ever, everywhere keeps the job they had when they were 25, even if they're 65. But it's like government is here to provide several core functions and to kind of keep things moving in a direction. Then how do we pay for that? Like, how much does that cost? How do we pay for it? And how do we empower people to, you know, to use, you know, whatever money we're giving that? Listen, I think you're putting your finger on the essential questions that we talk about. I guess the way that I would maybe address that is slightly different, which is government exists, getting back to the operating system,

the operating system being capitalism. Yeah, no, which is a wonderful metaphor for everything. In my mind, the government exists to soften. the blow that a, by definition, exploitative system is going to extract. You know, capitalism is extractive. Their goods, raw materials, labor has got to be the cheapest, drive the highest profits, and the people that will benefit that are necessarily a smaller slice of people because it's a shareholder operation, not a people operation. And the labor is not valued in the same way that investment or capital is. Capital is king. Can I push on this a little bit because, please. Yeah, what I was going to challenge is like capitalism is inherently exploitative,

you know, and that labor is always getting, you know, punched in the head or hit in the kidneys with a baseball bat by who was the guy and on the waterfront Johnny Friendly, I think. How did he get that name? He wasn't. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, and maybe he had a bouncer who was really fat that they called Tiny. I think it was an ironic universe, right? Oh, that's how it worked. Yeah. But I don't necessarily agree with that. And in a lot of ways, I would push back on it because when you talk about, you know, okay, you know, the boss, the boss man, and, you know, now we're back in Springsteen universe, right? Because, you know, for Bruce Springsteen, things have never recovered from the Great Depression. You know, he's still mumbling along

the mean streets of Rumson. You know what? We can. argue about economic systems, but you were in dangerous territory, my friend. Dangerous territory. What I'm getting at is that, like, you know, employers are desperate, generally speaking, like if you are a good employee, and I worked as a manager at reason for 20 plus years, like if there was somebody who was putting in a better, you know, than average effort, I would do everything to keep them. But you're running a small business. Yeah, yeah, I get that. Reason is a small. It's not a multi-ne. I'm. I'm talking writ large about multinational corporations.

And I'll make the case, I think, because if you look at wealth in systems that are poorly regulated in terms of capitalism, right, there is in the same way that political power is accrued through a kind of contrived incumbency, I think wealth also accumulates through a contrived incumbency by those that are wealthy. And what you find is, so let's go back to time. when capitalism was less fettered, and that would be sort of gilded age. It's one thing to say, oh, competition, you know, iron, temper's iron, it makes everybody stronger and it gets strong. But what happens is, as we've seen with monopolistic tendencies in capitalism, once wealth is accrued,

it becomes much easier to then keep tilting the table more in their favor. And it almost inexorably, it's a law of nature. It's a, you know, kind of Newton's law. I hear you, but I, I, you know, we will disagree with this to a large degree on this. Oh, okay. You know, not, I don't think it changed, but, you know, and I'm not saying that there weren't times where, you know, capitalism was, you know, red and tooth and claw and exploited it. When was it not? I guess that would be the easier question. Well, the reason what I'm, what I'm getting at is saying that when you, uh, You know, if you go back, and this is something, there's a type of school of economic thought called Public Choice Economics, which talks about how, you know, the story that progressives tell, capital P progressives, in particular, tell about capitalism is that it was awful. Not awful, but it's not awful.

But it's a system that requires exploitation and extraction. I mean, it generates more wealth than any other system, no question. But that wealth accumulates unusually. You brought up earlier the 50s, which I thought was a great time. And you're right. But tax rates then were 80% or 90%. And the GI Bill, which was a giant government expense, is what helped build that stable, middle class that you're talking about.

Well, first off, nobody paid those tax rates because those were the printed. No, seriously. But that's why people, that's why things like expense account. you know, and all sorts of things were invented for upper level people. Sure. And they cut all kinds of deductions and rich people always find a way out of it. True. The main engine, the main engine of things like people being able to buy their own homes

and whatnot, it was increases in productivity through industrialization and mechanization. It was not, I would argue, it was not unionization. It wasn't the GI Bill. I'm not saying those things didn't have an effect, but that it's because we became wealthier because suddenly we were building an economy that used machines and other things to become massively more productive. Wages went up. But I think that wages do not match productivity gains. They'll always lag. Sometimes they're higher. Sometimes they're higher, sometimes they're lower. But like right now in America, we're basically we have like the highest

median household income that we've ever had adjusted for inflation. Isn't 50 to 60 percent of Americans living paycheck to paycheck? No, well, you have to, you have to look into what that means. You know, like, you know, 60 plus percent of Americans own their own home compared to in the 50s. It was much lower. You know, they have college educations. They have more stuff. Oh, you're saying that our standard of living is now higher comparatively. Massively higher. And food is cheaper. You know, everything is more abundant. Plus, you get the personal liberty stuff, which I think is part of capitalism. I don't think, you know, It's not like capitalism is an economic thing.

And then, you know, it's the weekend and you're going to go to Plato's retreat or Studio 54. You know, they're all part, they're all part of a same system, right? Right. Having said all of that, I mean, just to get back to it, it's like what capitalism does and there's an economist named Joseph Schumpeter, the guy who created, he coined the term creative destruction. And in a book during World War II called Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, he said, you know,

the great achievement of capitalism was not making more silk stockings for the queens of England, the queens of Europe, but bringing them in reach of factory girls. You're saying the Henry Ford, the sort of the mechanization of goods and services allowed more people, which I don't in any way quibble with. I think that's why we use this operating system. I'm just saying the basis of this operating system is inequality. and you see it in fits and starts, it's why economics goes through cycles and that, like if we hadn't had done the new deal,

we'll talk about it this way, government intervention to ease the burden of those who are not able to protect their wealth through incumbency and really profit at that arithmetic or geometric level from the fruits of capitalism is what preserves the stability of the system. If we went more libertarian, I think you'd find the system is too volatile. And, you know, revolution then becomes much more inevitable.

So do you, you've heard of the massive economic crash that happened in the early 20s. That was like bigger than the stock market crash in 1929. No. Yeah. And the government didn't do anything and the stock market recovered very quickly. You're suggesting that after 1929, if we hadn't gotten the new deal, everything would have been fine. I'm not saying everything would have been fine. and it would have been difficult, but the New Deal, it's worth going back and looking at,

how did the New Deal affect the economy and did it string out bad times? Because there are two economic depressions in the 30s that economists talk about and that every government intervention, you know, has costs and benefits. And oftentimes we have lost sight of things. Well, let's use a more like a more recent example, which would be the 2008 financial crisis versus the pandemic. Yeah. In 2008 in the financial crisis, it's caused by risk-taking behavior within our investment economy, not our working economy.

And particularly if I might, that was behavior that was heavily incentivized by the federal government in terms of guaranteeing mortgage loans and things like that. Well, Freddie May and those guys got into the game pretty late. And I think it's, you'd be hard pressed to say that the hedge funds did. it because they thought the government incentivized it. No, I mean, but it was the Federal Reserve, first off, kept interest rates artificially low for a long time. And then the government had a policy of its, you know, government-sponsored entities

of buying up all of the mortgage paper that was going. So banks did not do the due diligence. But they jumped into that later. Everybody has, you know, some schmutz on their hands from all of this. The schmutz. It's funny. I think where you and I would like society. to settle is probably almost the same place. I think you and I would look at it as, and here's my

path to get there, and you would say, here's my path, and you've got to trust. Both of those paths, you've got to go, and ultimately you've got to trust me. That's where it comes down to theology. I would argue that it's also, you know, we would probably agree on, you know, on a similar path because I suspect, I mean, you know, we went, I was looking this up beforehand. In 2001, which was Bill Clinton's final budget year as president. You know, he left office in 2000 or early 2001 fiscal year last, you know, a little bit longer. He spent less than $2 trillion here. That was the entire federal budget.

We are over $7 trillion now. In 2019, the year before COVID, we were. were spending $4.4 trillion a year. That went up to $6.6 trillion in 2020. It is now $7.2 trillion in spending. And I suspect that you would agree with me that we should not be, it's not clear why we're spending $7.2 trillion. Well, I certainly don't think we're spending it effectively. I think that's for sure. But like why at all? Like, how do you go from, you know, we're post-COVID? So here's what I would say with that. There are different ways to stimulate the economy. So I think since Reagan and probably before that, probably Carter, there has been the idea that supply side sort of what they

would call neoliberal policy is the best way to stimulate the economy, which means that the money tax cuts for incentivizing wealthier people and corporations and allowing for more. M&A and allowing for consolidation within industries, which in some ways, you know, these, really, it's the rise of these gigantic multinational corporations. And it gets back to sort of what we're talking about in 2008 versus the pandemic. In 2008, the crash came from the financialization of all these products. It came from the white collar markets. We bailed them out as taxpayers. Which I would totally, totally against. As was I.

But not against bailing out homeowners. That's maybe where you and I would differ. It depends. But, yeah. But in the pandemic, when the era that rent assistance went out and the $600, the stimmy went out, what it showed to me was it took us 10 years. It took us a decade after 2008 to even get back to a semblance of where we were. The pandemic, it took us a year or a year.

a half financially to be back. What it says is, in my mind, direct stimulus at a demand-side level is far more fiscally responsible than these trickle-down neoliberal policies. I think we can spend less and get more. Yeah, no, we can definitely be more effective in intervening in economic, you know, situations. Yeah, I don't think part of the government's role should be like, it's not like going to a personal trainer and you come in and they're like, hey, you're looking a little fat. Let's do some abs today and have the government constantly be smoothing the economy. I think it's hubris to think that it can control things. It's one thing when you have a catastrophic adventure. But isn't it to prevent more catastrophic adventure at some level?

Well, this is where the theology comes in. No, but it's also like, remember, you know, in the early 2000s, you know, we had the tech bubble crash. Yes. And then we had a bunch of, you know, accounting rules that were going to make sure that, you know, big, you know, the financial sector never fucked around with shit anymore. Then, you know, the financial crisis hits, large, I would argue, it was largely because of government actions or was heavily abetted by government actions. But don't you think those actions were all influenced by the lobbyists from the finance? You know, when the government sets out to do something smart. that gets watered down almost immediately by the moneyed interests.

This is, you know, public choice economics talks about how like we think people want to think of the government as acting somehow differently than the private sector, but it's oftentimes completely captured by the interest that it's supposed to regulate or it is also just trying to build its own empire. So it's going to try and regulate more and more stuff. So is the idea, Nick, if we were to boil this down, let me ask you this, is the idea maybe that's fundamental to our disagreement, that because government can be captured by the same corrupt and corrosive interests that maybe business can be captured by. And I remember having Greenspan

on the show and saying, why did we have a crisis in 2008? And he said, well, I think we thought that the banks would have done a better job of regulating themselves. And I was like, well, yeah, I didn't. Yeah, yeah. But the point being, is the only way to prevent that to remove government, is that, Is that your sort of foundational principle? Not necessarily remove it completely, but minimize its attempt to rig the system in favor of particular outcomes, whether that's for the little guy or the big guy or whatever. And let the natural order. And you don't fear the natural order will be that the little guy's got no chance against money.

Yeah, I don't. And I say this again, you know, this is coming from, you know, my father was born and Hell's Kitchen in the 1920s. He did okay. I did much better than him. But what I'm getting at is the idea that I actually think that capitalism offers more opportunities specifically for people to rise up from the lower classes and the middle classes. You mean as opposed to communism or socialism? Is that what you mean? Yeah, or like a super regulated market where you're only getting into schools because of what family you come from and all of this kind of stuff. Right.

Which is still a large part of the operating system that we work with. Absolutely. No, and nothing is perfect, right? Nothing is perfect. But, you know, we came out of the financial crisis with, oh, now we know we're not going to do anything too big to fail, right? And it's like, in fact, the financial industry, the financial sector is more, you know, is more concentrated than it ever was.

And everybody in it knows that, like, oh, no, we're too big to fail, which also means we can fuck around and find out how bad. Just watch us. It is a very tricky thing. And once you start thinking like, okay, the government can control stuff and make good outcomes, like it does until, you know, you realize, oh, this was a big catastrophe. And I think with something like the COVID stuff, you know, when we're talking about, there's, there's economic issues, which are worth talking about. And I think, you know, the massive increasing and extending of unemployment benefits was really bad. And it's generated so much debt, that's not going away, even if like the annual GDP growth is, is increasing in things like that. There were so many interventions into the economy where

if the government had done smaller, smaller targeted things for shorter times, I think we would be better off. Well, I think they were also not practiced with demand side stimulus. And so maybe they just didn't understand quite what the real value of it was, because the amount of economic activity it generated, even with wrecked supply chains. So this brings us sort of around. And Nick, I can't thank you enough for sitting and having the conversations because there's so much in it that is relevant to today, but also so many places of agreement that people may not have thought.

Well, this is not an extreme philosophy and it is not a fringe philosophy. It is most people. Although can be exploited as such. Oh, yeah, totally. And it can be vilified wrongly and it can be taken in bizarre directions and stuff. But like basically what you're talking about is like you want to live in a world where you can, you know, figure out who you are and build the world that you want to live in. And, you know, and not to get too libertarian, you know, on this. It means, you know, that like if you want to, if you want to marry, you know, if you're a man and you want to marry a man, you know, like, you know, anything.

that is among consenting adults is good. If you want to smoke weed rather than, you know, then drink whiskey, like you shouldn't go to prison for that. And it shouldn't be illegal to buy and sell this shit. And, you know, and if you want to run a, if you want to run a business that does this versus that, like, you know, anything that's peaceful. Yes. And coming from somebody who still believes in government's ability to give people help. Yes. I also believe government is far too onerous, far too bureaucratic. If I could give it anything, it would be a moonshot to dispel unnecessary paperwork and to make it so that they don't have such ridiculous rules for every project that has to satisfy every interest group that ever walk the earth. But that's part of what

government is designed to do, right? I mean, I think that's, I don't think that's a bug. I think that's a feature of government. And you would argue, you know, and I understand this, capitalism's the feature is. That's what I'm saying. You know, it is like really, no, we need more girls in the shirt waist triangle factory. I mean, in some respects, like, because they started off with imperialism and colonialism and slavery. And so everything that they give us from that feels like, you know, it's a concession. You know, what are you talking about? We're paying you. you're not a slave. Yeah.

But let's flip it now to at least what's happening now, because I think, you know, there is a feeling that the Trump administration is libertarian friendly, and that Doge is libertarian friendly. And I guess my vision of what they're doing does not match. Like the idea that, you know, RFK Jr. is a give to libertarians seems crazy to me. But or that any of this is, it's,

they're not talking about freedom, they're talking about fealty, and they're talking about, yes, free speech is a wonderful value unless we don't like it and we will bring to bear an even more authoritarian way to, so how are you feeling in this moment? So that is, you know, it's a fascinating kind of question. And I can't really speak for other libertarians. Sure. But I am, you know, what I liked about Trump winning is that I think it put a cap on a broad series of developments and kind of policies and attitudes that had settled over the country,

kind of like, you know, a DDT fog that wasn't going away. Are you saying I'm riding my bike behind the Trump administration as a fire hose of popping a wheelie of my banana seat and all this. Right. Right. No, it, but, you know, and that had to do, you know, there were certain things about wokeness and about kind of, you know, policing of speech in a public way that was onerous. You know, and the only solution to that really is for people that say, like, you know what, I'm not going to allow you to call me a racist, you know, and I'm going to speak my mind.

I'm going to be public about that. Do you think that's purely a purview of the left? No, no. I mean, this is, you know, people are now talking. about the woke left is being replaced by the woke right. And, you know, I mean, the idea that, you know, policing language so that, you know, if you're in the presence of Trump or a Trump tart and you call it the Gulf of Mexico, they will be like, you no longer exist to me or something. And like, this is not progress by any stretch. See, I always looked at it more as a function of

social media, which kind of gave the villagers who wanted pitchforks and torches a way to go after everybody, you know, and that includes, by the way, things that have nothing to do with politics. If you were to criticize, you know, one direction, you would get a shitstorm coming your way. Oh, it was great, though, and I like that. I mean, I think it's empowering even as it fractures us, but. Well, that's the other side is that's people expressing their speech. Yeah, yeah. And I, I mean, I was early on in Twitter, or not that early on, but I remember when Bill Cosby, you know, he was coming back with like a Netflix special and a tour and stuff like that. And he had a Twitter feed, an official Twitter feed, and they would put out stuff saying like, you know, hey, you know,

Dr. Cosby wore great sweaters on the Cosby show, you know, post your favorite sweater. And everybody just like immediately went after him for all of the sexual assault and rape allegations. And it's like, that's a world I want to live in, you know, where, where like the big people and the little people are suddenly kind of in the same room. And that can be terrifying. It's especially terrifying if you're a big person, right? See, I never had a problem. Look, I feel like I operate, you know, a small artisanal talk shittery. And if people want to like operate their talk shittery back at me, that is only fair.

So I guess I'm trying to separate whokeness from people just giving each other incessant shit about everything. But then you get to places where it becomes implemented in terms of various kinds of speech codes as well as hiring policies at universities, at corporations. you know, because corporations are not in the business, you know, corporations are just doing whatever they can do to make the next buck. I got a bumper sticker. Corporations are pussies. Like they don't want any trouble. Like, I'll tell you what, in terms of content creation, the biggest sort of censoring blanket

that went over show business, I didn't think was wokeness. It was when Ron DeSantis sued Disney. Yeah. As soon as that happened, you saw people back off of content that they think. thought, or like when Trump threatens to jail Zuckerberg. Right. I guess that's my problem is just the hypocrisy of it all. I know, I agree.

And, you know, and I'll say, you know, because you brought this up, you had a really good and powerful and instructive moment when you were raising questions about the lab leak theory on the, you know, on Stephen Colbert show. On Colbert show. Yeah, yeah, on the late show. You know, and again, it's like, you know, what we found under Biden, and I suspect if you go back far enough, there was some of this under Trump and under Trump and under. Obama and Bush and like back before the FCC.

Nixon. You know, all of this stuff, but where the government was actively leaning on people to say, do not permit this discussion or tamp it down, etc. Have they ever not? Less now than ever. And this is one of the things to bring it back to Trump. You know, he signed an executive order saying that nobody in his administration should be trying to shut down conversation on social media.

Does he mean that? No, I can tell you he doesn't mean it. I think it's pretty obvious he doesn't mean it. Listen, man, I've honestly never seen a president, and I know they lean up here. I'm not naive. I've never seen someone threatened to jail people who don't use the terminology. I've seen them try and reveal sources in a way that I thought was I think what they did to Snowden was insane. Like all those different things, I've seen it, but he's making it explicit and yet was hailed as the free speech. King. Yeah. So what I will say, and again, this is, you know, I, I didn't vote for Trump. I voted for

the libertarian candidate because, you know, why not? But Trump will be ineffective in, he's not going to actually jail people. But isn't the threat of it all that matters? Whether he jails them or not is kind of not the issue. Yeah. It's terrible. No, it is, it's not, it's not all that matters, but it is bad and he should be called out for it. I mean, you know, in a way, Trump in a way, his whole career, his whole politics career is the triumph of talkback, you know, of telling the system, go fuck yourself, because nobody wanted him. The Republicans didn't want him originally. Nobody wanted him. So in a way, he personifies a world in which we are freer than ever to just say, fuck it, I'm doing whatever I want. Unless it's against him.

Yeah, as president, it is an awful thing. And when you look at governor, DeSantis did this. Greg Abbott and Texas did this, too, where they started writing laws that were tailored to screw over social media companies that didn't like because they thought they were censoring conservative voices, which turned out not to be true. Yeah. Or educators that were teaching in a way that they didn't, for all the complaints of the woke left, they've rarely ensconced it in law in the way that the right had. Yeah. And you could argue they didn't have to, maybe, but it's all bad. Like any, anytime the government, you know, Congress shall make no law, you know, a bridging speech. That's it. Like, and that,

that should be the case at the state level, too, and all of that. So are you aligning with their, their other goals of, you know, like, I personally, if you could make government more efficient, oh my God, I don't necessarily know that that's what they're doing. It feels awfully inefficient the way they're doing it. But, well, and it's a, it's a real mix of, you know, for me, the biggest problems with Trump as a figure were had to do with immigration policy and tariffs. And, you know, he's just categorically awful. You would not, a libertarian would not be protectionist in terms of, you even made the point earlier in terms of cars.

Yeah. You think that opening up that competition, let me ask you this, maybe this is a different way to frame kind of DEI. So for me, if you reframe that argument economically, it may be a lines. a little bit more with how you feel. Because what I think diversity and inclusion and equity means maybe not in the practice. And I don't think it means sitting through that hour long seminar where everybody looks at each other and goes, I never said that about her ass. Like, it's not that. But I look at it as more competition. Right. You know, we have supply lines in this country,

entrenched poverty and groups that have been explicitly kept out of, you know, equity through government action and all kinds of other ways. If you reanimate those supply lines, you strengthen the result. You know, don't think of it as diversity. Think of it as emerging markets. Yeah. Think of it as that. And suddenly you view it as an engine of economic growth. Right. I mean, is there a sports league that got worse after black, were allowed to play. And no, and, you know, in every possible way, right? It's just like, you know, you were, you were walling off a huge source of, you know,

powerful possibilities. Veterans have been walled off in many ways. Yeah. Women were walled off. Yeah. People in poverty-stricken neighborhoods are walled off. Appalachia has been walled off forever. That, to me, that's what inclusion and diversity.

and equity means. Unfortunately, those policies never, you know, had any, you know, they weren't reaching those people. I mean, that's. Because they're doing what they can, not what they should. What they're allowed to do is you can't address those shriveled supply lines and reanimate them and get those, you know, communities involved. So here's what we're going to let you do. We're going to let you have an office on the eighth floor.

and every April, you're going to give us a presentation for two hours that everybody hates. How about that? Yeah. And that's what we're doing. Are you excited about that project of Doe? Do you think it will bear fruit? Yeah. Well, I am very excited by the idea of having, you know, a government that has done an audit of

its workforce and of its activities. Which, by the way, I think it does do. I think it mostly ignores it. Almost every department there has to be audited. Only defense doesn't pass them, but they do do that. Yeah, no, well, actually, there's more like that. And, you know, and this is, I was excited the other day when there were a bunch of tweets, you know, saying that, oh, Doge has entered the Pentagon. And it's like, okay, yeah, this should be very interesting. The question is, what are they, what are the metrics they're looking for?

Right. I just don't know yet if they're actually looking at value. Yeah. Or they're just looking at size. That's right. And, you know, a good example of this, an economist friend of mine wrote about how at the FDA they had cut, apparently they had like cut 200 regulators, like people who actually go through stuff to see whether or not it's. The very people who are doing. And if you keep the regulations in place and cut the workforce that is going to see if they're complying, like you just make everything worse. And this is where I think the Trump administration, not across the board, but in certain circumstances, may actually be a good thing. So you take the FDA, they named a guy Marty Macquarie, who's a professor from Johns Hopkins, who's pretty smart.

You know, he'll be reporting, I guess, ultimately to Robert F. Kennedy, which is, you know, a whole other weird bag of weird, right? I don't know. Like, but no, but if the FDA, and, you know, and this is something coming out of a libertarian perspective and analysis, like, it costs way too much to bring new drugs to market. It takes too long and it takes, it takes too long and costs too much. There are ways to bring more drugs to market without compromising safety. And if the government would restructure the FDA and Macri has talked about, this RFK and the second, his deputy at Health and Human Services have talked about ways to do this.

Like, if they do that so that it doesn't take a couple billion dollars in 12 years to bring a new drug to market, that's a big win. And that is something that we could completely do. We could do it overnight. Until the shit hits a bet. The problem with government that using sort of first principles of business, like when I look at Elon, right, what he's been able to accomplish, like, however you want to feel about them, it's pretty fucking remarkable. Yeah, totally. But it's a different ethos.

Like, you have to blow up a shit ton of rockets before you figure out the right way. And the problem in the public sphere is the public demands agility and also perfection. Do you know what I mean? It's sort of like the same way with our criminal justice system. I totally agree. You know, we demand perfection that anybody who's ever let out of prison cannot re, you know, recommit a crime or else we have to make the system utterly ridiculous. It have, no, but, you know, and in its best iteration or its best kind of sense, if Doge is going

to help us go through and just trim out, like, you know, clean out the house. There's just too much shit in the house. Man, I just don't have confidence yet. I know. And I agree because of the question of, you know, like, are they doing it? Well, I have been thinking about this. You know, like Elon is bragging about how, you know, he's got like a bunch of preteen coders who are quants and they can go through spreadsheets and the stuff they're finding like, you know, they keep finding massive mistakes like where they were claiming a contract they ended with ICE was at $8 billion and it was actually $8 million and things like that. Like I worry that people think because you can fucking do Excel.

You suddenly have wisdom. That's going to be problematic. I'll go beyond that, Nick. I think it's actually the bigger problem is it's ideologically antagonistic that they are viewing those people immediately through the prism of a parasitic relationship to our money and viewing them immediately as enemies and suspicious. And even in the sense of when they sent the email, it is in no way an unreasonable expectation that people who work for you, you would want to know what they're doing and that they've

been doing something. But if you don't work in that department and just say to them, what are you doing? And they tell you, you don't know if that's what they're supposed to be doing or not. Meanwhile, they have to spend all this fucking time figuring it out, which is inefficient. And people at, you know, the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice and National Intelligence, you know, Tulsa Gabbard said, hey, don't comply with this. So you're already at odds. Having said that, it is important. And this is where Trump was, Trump won and more important, like he gained in almost every possible demographic subgroup. So people are ready for a change.

And that's the most important thing. And I think Trump has set the stage for this and he's opened up ground where we can start having more conversations. It's up to each of us to come up with like, okay, this is the way it should go. Like, I, you know, I was saying to my wife earlier this morning, like, I would love to go to Mars in my life, but I don't want to fly there with Elon Musk sitting next to me, right? That's your breakfast conference? What's that over egos? What are we talking about, Nick? Have you guys run out of shit to talk about? Yeah, we've only been married like less than six months. So I, yeah. Wait, is that really true? Yes. Oh, congratulations. In any case, you know, so what we're at, we are at a place where we understand, you know,

this is why the Republican Party and the Democratic parties don't make sense. Like, again, since the end of World War II, certainly the end of the Cold War, maybe even the beginning of the century, like, it's all kind of played out, and it's not working that well. Like, we need to, maybe the House isn't a complete tear down, but we need to clean it up. We need to repaint it. We need to say, you know what, we're going to. sublet that whole part of it.

Like, we don't need to be doing that. And that's really important and vital. And I agree with you in this sense of like saying if it's adversarial, if everything becomes adversarial, then what we've, this whole century, we've been going between, you know, control, whole or partial control of the White House and the House of Representatives and the Senate from Republicans to Democrats back and forth in a way that hasn't been seen in over a century. And it's because we haven't figured out a new consensus that is actually that people can live with.

And so we just go from Biden being insane in this direction, now Trump, you know, and we're not getting to a resolution. Oh, I think there's great opportunity. And I agree with you with that. Yeah. No, and I think it's true. And listen, I think one of the things I would say is a lot of people, I think you and I included, agree with a lot of the diagnoses that we look at these issues. and we say it's sclerotic or, you know, I would look at it as there's a really tough counterbalance now and that democracy is a by nature kind of analog system and we live in a digital world

and those tensions are really hard to resolve. But I would say in that moment, probably the conversation is about the remedies. And I'm looking at it right now with great fear that this is not the remedy that will bring that opportunity for that moment. Well, I think let's, yeah, it is the opportunity, you know, that's here. And then the remedies that are being proffered are not great. What is interesting is to see, you know, we're not even 100 days in, right, to Trump. It's like a month and change.

Honestly, it feels like he's never not been president. I don't remember. I don't know. Yeah. I've said this before. The presidency is supposed to age the president. Yeah. Not the people. I am withering.

Yeah, it's really, really hard to think back even six months to what was going on. But again, it's helpful and it's essential because, you know, when we look back on where we were, like we've gone through most of this stuff before and we figured out ways to kind of improve on the past or to, you know, be better at what we're doing. And I think we need to do that. You know, right now in a way, you know, Trump has the high ground for a little while. But this is also true of every president, you know, by the summer, you know, we'll know whether or not he is popular. Like if his specific fixes are popular or not, I suspect that they will be less popular over time. But again, some of them, like, you know, let's legalize drugs at the federal level and just stop worrying about a whole bunch of shit we've been worried about for 100 years.

Let's come to, you know, there is a broad recognition that the U.S. should not be the world's policemen. But apparently the developer of Gaza? Yeah, no. Well, that's different. Apparently, we shouldn't be the world's policeman, but we should just annex territories and build casinos there. Yeah, no.

I mean, this is where it's confusing, you know, and it's, we need to get to a place where the solutions that are being discussed are actually good and legitimate. And it'll be interesting to see if the Democrats, you know, like I'm, you know, very bothered by people being like, oh, my God, the Democrats have nobody. The Republicans will win every election for the next thousand years. Because that's how history works. Yeah, everybody has said that every, you know, when Bush was elected and then reelected and then when Obama. I'm old enough to remember when Fukuyama said history was over. Yeah.

Yeah. We were just done. We had triumph. It was over. And he was, you know, in a way he was right. in the saying, you know, that liberal democracy is the way forward. And the one thing, you know, I mean, even that's in retreat now. Kind of, kind of, but it's also true that like China is, you know, China is not democratic, but it's like it's more capitalist than it was when he said

that. But state run capitalism is not free markets. And that would be antithetical to everything that you're in. The more we become like Russia, the less we become like the free markets that I think. I totally agree with that. But all I'm saying, in China, is that people are getting richer around the globe. I mean, one of the most important and fascinating facts that nobody discusses, and I think this should be talked about much more. There is a global middle class. The majority of people on the planet are at the middle class or above level for the first

time in human history. Is that really true? That's actually very surprising to me. There's a guy named Romi Karras at the Brookings Institution. It's been writing about this for a decade. And most of it is happening in Asia and in Africa. Africa and South America. And so we don't really care about that.

But you know what happens, what happens when middle people, you know, get a little bit of extra money. And then you say, oh, you know, here, you've got more money in the bank, but you can't spend it the way you want to. People are like, fuck you. And like, you know, this is a good problem to have globally and things like that. But this is what I want to happen for the United States. I want there to be these, as we talked earlier, I want those entrenched places of poverty.

I think those are great untapped engines of progress for things. But Nick, I'm cognizant of your time. I really appreciate the conversation. I've enjoyed it so much. Thank you. I appreciate it too. And, you know, I mean, one of the things that you're doing, which I think a lot of people who would identify themselves, you know, as not being a, you know, republic, like a MAGA

Republican, right? Like, you are not freaking out? Externally, I am not. Well, I mean, yeah, but everybody is so oppositional that it's like, you know, you're either voting for Harris or you're voting for Trump. And if you're not, if you're not totally on board, people don't want to talk to you. Right. Well, there's a purity test and a litmus testing in almost everything. But there are more people now and this continues to grow, you know, that are independent.

And we can argue about whether or not there are real independence politically. but fewer and fewer people are willing to identify as Democratic or Republican in polls. And that's saying something. And it means that these organizations don't represent the large masses of people anymore. And parties work better when they figure out, okay, where is the majority at? And how do we deal with that? Well, it's funny. It's almost like we have a parliamentary country in a two-party government, you know.

And it makes it, like you say, it really makes it incredibly, you know, complex, but I'd love to have the conversation again. We'll pick it up again to see where everything's been going. Let's go to a child run factory in Bangladesh. Always so cheery. Is there a budget for that? The always cheery Nick Gillespie as the jersey comes out of him. Editor at large of the Reason Magazine, host of the Reason interview with Nicholasby podcast.

Nick, thank you so much for spending the time today. Really, really, really enjoyed it. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you, John. Thanks, man. We are back. We're joined by Lauren Walker, Jillian Speer, Brittany Mehmedevic. By the way, I love talking to that guy.

I felt like he's so smart and he's got such a breadth of knowledge. And even though we obviously, like, disagree on, especially I thought the biggest one was exploitation of capitalism being exploitative. That surprised me. I never, I do think it's an engine of prosperity, but it very clearly has losers. So, but I thought it was a very interesting conversation. and I very much enjoyed it. Did we ever get that definition of libertarianism? I don't know that there is one.

I was really listening for it. It's whatever you wanted to be. I think something that really stood out was just, while Jillian and I looking into this episode, just how diverse libertarians are, and I think a good example of that is the fact that some people feel RFK is within the libertarian camp,

and most libertarians also, think that Ross Oldbrecht is in the camp. So one person, you know, for legalizing drugs and the other for banning like red dye number three. You know? Hey, look, and in this world order now, it's like, Andrew Tate is the libertarian king. Yeah, I don't think that. I don't think that's what they're talking about. I think it's like a different philosophy. But, but he's an OG. Yeah. And I like, I, you know, I spent a few days kind of in their quarter of the public square. And like, while I vehemently disagree with a lot of the things that they believe in. I did appreciate that they don't arrive at those ideas with the same, like, gleeful cruelty that you see in right-wing media,

and they don't filter everything through that lens. It's really... It's clear there's a real intellectual, you know, anybody who's coming at you with, you know, Friedman and Hayek as the foundation of what they're talking about isn't just in it for the dank Pepe the Frog memes. Yeah, it's nice to be presented with ideas I don't agree with in ways that I don't have to recoil from. Bars, Jillian, put that on a pillow. I like that very much. Are people just writing in today to see if I'm still alive because it appears the fragility of when you cut your finger? I literally got a call from my mom or like, are you okay?

I'm like, you were with me in childhood. You know I'm like, I ran headfirst into trees. What are you talking about, woman? People are very concerned about your well-being, so nice to see you. When you're anemic to begin with. We did get one feedback that I'd love to read to you. Please. John, I love you, but if you keep using the line, democracy is an analog system in a digital world, I'm going to lose my mind.

I did it again today. I know. Why? What do they think is, is it too cliched? Is it trite? What's the issue you think? Well, listen to the rest of this. Okay.

I could get drunk in a drinking game for every time you see that. That is true. Much love, brother, but really. Well, we've been playing a drinking game this whole time. Wait. I got to say, though, it'd be a drinking game over a period of months, which seems like a long time to keep a drinking. I wish they had put in there why. So now I don't know if they think that's incorrect or just overused.

used definitely. Like, it's sort of like when you're trying to make something happen and then it doesn't happen. Like fetch? Yes. It's my version of fetch. But maybe that he'll write back and tell us. Or after listening to this episode, he may be too drunk. Have them to keep it coming. How can they keep it coming? Twitter, we are weekly show pod, Instagram threads, TikTok, Blue Sky, We Are Weekly Show podcast. and you can like, subscribe, and comment on our YouTube channel, The Weekly Show at Don Stewart. Bang on. Guys, thank you, as always, for the incredible preparation and detail that you provide

in every episode that allows me to just sit and talk to somebody. Lead producer, Lauren Walker, producer, Brittany Mehmedevig, video editor and engineer, Rob Vitola, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce researcher and associate producer, Jillian Spear, and as always, our executive producer is Chris Bichshane and Katie Gray. Guys, thank you so much. That was a really fun episode. And I will see you all next week. The weekly show with John Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Bus Boy Productions. Podcasts.