TRIGGERnometry - Sam Bowman

Episode Date: August 13, 2018

Former Executive Director of the Adam Smith Institute, Sam Bowman (@s8mb) discusses neoliberalism, libertarianism, communism, Nazism, Jeremy Corbyn, Donald Trump, Theresa May, Brexit, austerity, the housing crisis, technology, scarcity, drug decriminalisation and a lot more with the guys at TRIGGERnometry. Find us on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I sold my car in Carvana last night Well that's cool No, you don't understand It went perfectly Real offer down to the penny They're picking it up tomorrow Nothing went wrong So what's the problem?

That is the problem Nothing in my life goes to smoothie I'm waiting for the catch Maybe there's no catch That's exactly what a catch Would want me to think Wow, you need to relax I need a knock on wood

Do we have wood? Is this table wood? I think it's laminated Okay, yeah, that's good, that's close enough Carverna Carverna Pick up these may apply Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is a show for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about.

At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts. Our brilliant expert guest this week is the former executive director of the Adam Smith Institute, Sam Bowman. Welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks very much for having me. It's great to have you on and thank you for coming in. Let's just get right into it. We always ask our guests first of all what's been your your journey to the place that you're in now, how have you got to where you are? District line or...

Well, I call myself a neoliberal. I spent a lot of my 20s, I guess, calling myself a libertarian. From the age of about 12, when I read on Liberty by John Stuart Mill, I kind of thought, yep, this is the one for me. I am a liberal of some kind. Can I just interrupt you at 12? Well, I was interested in that kind of thing from quite a young age. Wow, okay. I mean, I probably didn't understand. I probably don't. don't understand it very well. But yeah, so for most of my kind of teenage years and

20s, I thought of myself as being a liberal or a libertarian. And so in the last few years, for various reasons, I started to kind of realize or identify my view as sort of split going on in the libertarian world and also kind of parallel that kind of split within libertarianism, a distinct group of people who were quite libertarian in some areas, but much less so in other areas. Sam, maybe for those people who are not fully familiar with the whole thing, can you just lay out what is libertarianism? So libertarianism is, I guess, the idea that individual liberty trumps pretty much everything else. So it's much more important that the state does not interfere, and other people don't interfere with your right to do what you want with your life,

to do what you want with your money, with your property, than all the other concerns that we have. So, for example, a libertarian and a socialist might disagree about property rights. A socialist might say it's reasonable for us to take money or property from rich people in order to give it to poor people or in order to provide things like health services or education services to poor people. Libertarians, to varying degrees, would disagree. Some libertarians would just say, no, it's never acceptable to take property from one person to give it to another.

Taxation is theft. Taxation is theft. other libertarians would say even though it might seem like a good idea that will lead to bad outcomes and then they'll get kind of some sort of you'll get a spectrum in between as well now I kind of always

they're also very very strong free speech people there are people who think that you should be able to have sex with whoever you want as long as they consent as well and they're adults you should be able to put into your body whatever kind of drug you want you should be able to more or less move around the planet wherever you want provided there is somebody in another country willing to take you

there, you know, put you up in their house or something like that. And the view, the kind of basic libertarian view is that individual liberty is the, it kind of trumps everything else. And where that differentiates from kind of conventional liberalism, which also agrees individual liberty is important, liberals are a much, much broader set of people and they tend to think that, many liberals tend to think that that kind of individual autonomy doesn't extend into your economic lives. Libertarians think that it very much does extend your economic lives and your economic liberty is just as important as any other kind of liberty that there is. So for a long time I saw myself as sort of working within that vein. And I had a lot

of time for libertarians, even though I no longer consider myself to be one. I was the, as you said, I ran a think tank called the Adam Smith Institute, which for a long time was the only kind of self-identified libertarian think tank in the UK. But for me, libertarianism was always a big tent, but I think began to, and I think it has really split in kind of not very nice ways into groups that I wouldn't really identify as being liberals. They might be libertarians in the sense that they use that word, but I don't consider themselves to be people who are that interested in individual liberty. And also, I think that, and I have become persuaded, and I did become persuaded,

that libertarianism was really not sufficient when it came to the kind of distribution of resources. My view, kind of in a sentence is a neoliberal, which is what I consider myself to be now, somebody who thinks that markets are very good at creating wealth, but they're not very good at allocating wealth, and that markets really are very brutal. They're very amoral forces, and even though they're very efficient, people who haven't been born with great gifts, people who have been unlucky in their life will often get a very, very bad kind of sort of slice of the pie, a very small slice of the pie at the end. So a libertarian would say that's meritocracy?

They would say that's meritocracy, that's tolerable. They'd say as long as that, you know, as long as the market process has been fair, then the outcomes, okay, that's a shame. That's a pity that that's happened, that there are poor people, basically. But the thing that I think sometimes are those types of libertarians, they go, well, that's fair, it's acceptable. And I'm always saying, yeah, you're saying that because it's not you, mate. Yeah, right.

That might be true. That might be true. I mean, that could be said of almost any political position, right? that there will always be losers in any political arrangement. And it's, and arrangements that are brutal, or arrangements that kind of don't do very much to help those losers, it's easy to just say, well, what if you were, what if that was you? And that's, there's a philosopher who I don't actually like that much.

A lot of people who consider, who have similar beliefs to me do, a guy called John Rawls. And one device he uses, I'm not a huge fan of his, but one device he uses is called the veil of ignorance. So if we were thinking about what a good sort of arrangement for society would be, imagine you didn't know who you were in that society, and then only if you would accept a society where you didn't know where in that distribution you would be, would that be a just, or could that be kind of a society that would be sort of morally acceptable?

And I think that's a reasonable tool to use. Where I disagree with roles is that he thinks that that implies a high degree of equality. For me, equality is not really the end, the thing that we should be caring about. What we should care about is the well-being of people. I'd be much happier to live in an unequal but rich country. I'd rather live in somewhere like the UK, which is very unequal, than in a much poorer country that had a much more equal distribution of wealth. And that's where I think the kind of Rawsian approach isn't always that useful.

So what's your solution to this meritocracy is a brutal problem? For me, the kind of neoliberal arrangement is very low regulation markets. Markets that are regulated really only in order to make them work better. So you might have regulations against cartels or in some cases monopolies, but you don't have regulations that are there to, for example, give workers a bigger share of the pie. But after you've generated the wealth, the point of that being to have as much wealth generation and to have as much kind of efficiency and innovation as possible, and then after you've had the market process through a reasonably simple tax system and a reasonably simple welfare

system, you just tax the rich and you give it to the poor. And the arrangement being very, very free markets with simple redistribution of income from the rich to the poor. I mean, in theory that's great, but we can see now the problems we're trying to tax big corporations is that they find loopholes in loopholes and loopholes. And it's very, very difficult to tax effectively, like we've seen with Amazon or with Starbucks. I mean, how would you ensure that works? Well, I wouldn't tax corporations at all. Corporations are not the way.

Taxing corporations is a really bad way of taxing the rich, because that money comes out of investment, because it returns to investment lower, and it comes out of workers' wages. The evidence is reasonably strong about this. Where we should be taxing rich people isn't when they save or invest their money. Investment, I think, is really good. We should be...

Basically, investment is you not using rich people. resources that you have a claim to so that other people can and use those resources in a more productive way. So we should want as much investment as possible. What we should do, what we should be taxing is consumption. So it's when you draw down those investments and say, okay, I'm going to buy a vote, or I'm going to spend this money on a night out, or I'm going to just eat these resources by spending it on food. That's when that wealth is destroyed. That's when the wealth is no longer usable by other people and where we're kind of socially as far as society is concerned the wealth is no longer useful and that's the point where we should be taxing it so we can do that through

there are it's a bit maybe boring to go into different types of tax like that actually the value-added tax is a pretty good way of doing that i was going to say you want 80% VAT on boats is that way you are something like that yeah i probably wouldn't have different rates for different things what i would probably do is have a flat rate on everything and then give give poorer people a cash, just a cash payment, because having exemptions, so for example, having exemptions on food, even though, obviously the point is that poor people spend a higher fraction of their income on food than rich people do. Rich people spend more money overall on food than poor people do. So the money that we've not taken in in tax, we're actually effectively giving rich people

more, or, you know, we're foregoing more tax from rich than we are from the poor. So a better thing to do would be to have a kind of a flat VAT. There are other things as well. There's something called a progressive consumption tax, but a tax on consumption and also a cash transfer to poorer people, or in fact to everybody, we could just give everybody a cash transfer. That's what I was going to go next, is the universal basic income.

What do you think about the idea of? I'd like a cash transfer. Yeah, I'm sure you would make it. How much would you give? You're making it like Sam is going to be walking around, just handing out the cash. I'm a simple man, I deal in simple ideas. How much are you going to fucking give me?

Well, I've tried to work this. out for the UK and I can't I can't work it out because it depends on what what you get rid of right so you could have a so you're starting to dislike you now I'm starting to dislike you now I'm I've never seen France so engaged with one of our guests before so for example by getting rid of the exemptions on VAT in the UK we'd raise about 60 billion pounds extra a year so you could if you used all that that would be like an extra thousand pounds per person a year but that's just for the VAT exemptions now if we said that the welfare system so things like housing benefit, unemployment insurance, job seekers allowance, things like that,

if we said that we wanted to replace those things with just a basic cash payment, then the money will be higher. But the problem is that poor people at the moment get housing benefit and get job seekers allowance, and rich people don't get that. If you have a basic income, then rich people do get some fraction of that. So if all you do is eliminate existing welfare payments to pay for a basic income, then you're effectively redistributing money that we're spending. on the poor towards the rich.

That's a very bad outcome. That's not the kind of outcome that we want. So there are different ways of doing it. This is the reason that I'm kind of, even though I quite like the basic income idea in theory, I think that it's politically very difficult because what it would require would be for headline tax rates to rise

in order to fund quite a high basic income. It would be like saying, we're going to give you, let's say you earn a million pounds a year, you work for a... Close. So we're going to give you an extra 10,000 pounds a year in basic income, but we're also going to tax you an extra 10,000 pounds a year in your tax. That would be neutral for you.

That would be how we would kind of make the system work. But honestly, I think it's a pretty hard sell to say we're going to raise taxes by this much so that the bottom 25% of society get to have this extra amount of money. Another way of doing it is through something called a negative income tax, which is to just say, if you are nothing, you'll get 10,000 pounds a year or 15,000 pounds a year. and then for every pound you earn after a certain point will take away 50p. So you're always better off, you know, it's kind of fixing the marginal tax rate, so you always have an incentive to earn more,

but we're kind of slowly withdrawing the money as you do earn more. To me, I've become, I guess, less fixated on kind of grand schemes to change the welfare system and more fixated on kind of principles to do with, it's better to, if you're a liberal at least, it's better to give people money than it is to give people service. It's like which would you rather get? Money. A book voucher or money for Christmas.

Yeah. You know, if you're a grandmother or your aunt gives you a 20-pound Waterstone's voucher, you're like, well, thanks very much. What the fuck can I do at that? I wanted the money, you know? Amazon vouchers are the closest thing to money because you can spend them on you, Amazon has everything. So they're a bit like money, and so they're a lot better than, you know,

a body shop, 20 pounds, because I don't buy things from the body shop. They don't have anything I want. The same is true when it comes to kind of government services versus giving people cash. people cash. If you'd rather a hundred pounds worth of NHS vouchers or a hundred pounds worth of education vouchers to a hundred pounds, you're an idiot. Because a hundred pounds can buy everything that a hundred pounds worth of NHS vouchers or a hundred pounds worth of education vouchers can get you, but it can also buy you a lot of other things. And we might talk about this a little bit later. I have become convinced that the core liberal

belief, the thing that whether you're a left-wing liberal or a right-wing liberal, the core when it comes to markets, the core liberal belief is anti-paternalism, it's the idea that people in charge don't know better than individuals about what's best for those individuals, provided there isn't some sort of information that they're not aware of. And in that case, we should, if we do think that individuals are the best people to make the decisions for themselves with that money, we should be looking for a government that as much as possible, and it's not always possible, police and courts and things that that's not always possible. But as much as possible gives people the cash, gives people

the money according to what they need, but doesn't try and spend it for them. I mean, that's having trust and faith in human beings, isn't it? That's where you lost me. I don't trust. I don't have faith in anybody. Well, it's not actually a question of having trust and faith in human beings. It's which human beings do you have trust and faith in? I have no trust and faith in government human beings. I have a little bit more trust and faith that you have your own self-interest at heart. Oh yeah. It's not, so it's not a question of of, oh, well, you'll spend it in a way that's really good for everybody else. It's just you aren't a better person to judge what you can spend that money on than you are.

So it's purely that I think you have the knowledge and you have the kind of incentives to spend that money wisely, better than other people do. So it's actually, you know, I would say it's almost distrust of other people. It's kind of cynicism that makes me prefer sort of let the individual decide approach to government spending. So I'm in favor of quite a high degree of government spending and government redistribution. I just don't want the government to actually be spending the money. I want government to take the money from the rich, give it to the poor in cash,

and then let markets provide the services that they want with that. That actually makes a lot of sense to me. So we've got a kind of philosophical background to some of your views. Let's talk a little bit of more specifics. I heard you talking about Jeremy Corbyn, and we're not huge fans of Jeremy Corbyn on the show. Don't let that prejudge your attitude. But you talked about him being a Marxist.

And I don't know if you saw there was a woman on this. the Good Morning Show, by the time this goes out, it will be a couple of weeks ago, who supposedly shut down Pierce Morgan by ending her whatever she was saying with, I am literally a communist, you're doing, I don't know if you caught this. Yeah, sure, yeah. What do you make of the rise of this kind of far left socialism, communists? Because I'm from Russia, right? So for me, when someone says I'm a communist and no one seems to be amazed by this,

that's basically like someone saying I'm a Nazi, right, given what communist did in my country in China, in Venezuela, all over the place. Someone's basically saying on national television, I'm a Nazi, you idiot, and they're getting praised for it. What do you make of the rise?

Because some of the ideas you talk about, they sound a little bit like, you know, the far left, in the sense? Well, I strongly disagree at the last point. Yeah, I know you do. Strongly disagree. I think that the kind of fundamental,

the kind of defining characteristic of the far left is the idea that the state should organize people's lives. The state should organize things. It's not that. you know it's not that some redistribution is tolerable pretty much everybody I mean Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek who are kind of libertarian liberal heroes of mine both believed in quite a high amount of government redistribution so I don't agree

at that you're right that was an unfair point in the in the to apologize I would like to officially apologize to sound barb. For the other point I think we're seeing this on both sides I think the right is becoming is becoming much much closer the kind of mainstream right is flirting much more with the far right and I think the mainstream left is flirting much more with the far left. When it comes to the left you're right there's a total double standard. I mean communism in my opinion communism and Nazism are roughly as bad as each other. Communism killed more people. Nazism did its murder kind of on a per capita

basis in a more sort of brutal way and a more targeted way and a more targeted way. More racist way yeah yeah but in terms of outcomes I certainly would not want to live under either kind of regime. Both regimes are totalitarianism. That's the point. The obsession over kind of left and right when it comes to Nazism and communism misses, it's totalitarianism, that's the problem.

And you can give it whatever kind of flavor or whatever kind of banner you want. Ultimately, it's when the state controls people's lives to a total degree, that's when you get this sort of mass murder and evil and so on. Why is communism tolerated in the public sphere? Well, partly it's because culture, elite cultures, is just, in my opinion, much more left-wing, just institutionally.

I think I don't say that. I don't really even know what cultural Marxism is. I don't believe in that. But I think it's obvious that most journalists are on the left. It's basically impossible to be so left-wing in elite circles in academia and so on, that you're kind of considered to be untouchable, whereas it's very easy to be so right-wing that you're considered to be untouchable.

I mean, there's basically no way you can say anything that in terms of how left-wing it is that isn't just laughed off as like, wow, you're very optimistic, or you're very utopian. If you're a communist, you're at worst, you're a utopian. And that's not entirely true. There are people on the left who hate communism

as much as they hate fascism and Nazism. but clearly the fact that this is like a fun Twitter kind of trending moment that this woman said to the peers Morgan that she's a communist that really I think says something quite bad partly it's because your average 18 year old

because we have such a strong filter in society a strong cultural filter against fascism and Nazism and for obvious reasons we fought a war that nearly destroyed civilization to destroy these people and it's a very good thing that we did. We've built up sort of cultural antibodies. It's like a virus that as soon as it comes into the system,

everything shuts down. We're going to destroy this virus. And that's a very good thing. But we haven't developed those antibodies to come communism for various reasons, because we were allied to the Soviets during the Second World War because elites have been quite left-wing

for a very long time, long since the kind of beginning of the 19th century at least. And so they have a sort of, well, you know, I might not want to go as far as them, but I definitely sympathize with their aims and so on. And partly because fascism and Nazism just have much more evil kind of motivations. Communists can at least claim that,

well, I don't mean for it to go into death camps and gulags. I mean for it to go really nicely. Whereas it's very hard to say you're a Nazi and not, and kind of disavow yourself. of the kind of basically evil intentions. But I think that because we have quite a lot of tolerance for the 18-year-old communist or the kind of mid-20s sort of cool communist type person, because of that,

we allow that kind of meme to grow much, much more. In my opinion, we shouldn't be saying, look, you're evil if you're a communist, but we should say you should be aware that the thing you're in favour of is as evil as the thing that these evil Nazis are in favour of. You know, you don't mean for this to happen, but you should be aware that this is what happens. And I don't think we do that.

You know, there's very little in terms of history. I mean, history in the UK is very much focused on when it does come to kind of the 20th century ideological struggles, it focuses on the kind of evils of Nazism and fascism, and doesn't really go that much into communism. Communism is almost sort of treated as aesthetically quite interesting. You know, the British Library did, and it is quite aesthetically interesting. You know, I understand all these things,

and I don't think anybody's bad for this, but it's sort of treated as a curiosity and as a thing that occasionally went wrong, rather than something that... Well, it is. I mean, it is. Rather than something that's... Kill me now.

That's kind of inherently... you know, at best, like giving a drunk child the keys to a car filled with people, you know? That's the best possible way of describing communism, like the most generous possible way is it's something, it's like you're doing something so stupid. You might not realize what you're doing, but you're doing something so stupid that you are criminally negligent. But it would go viral on the internet. But it would, yeah, well, right, exactly. You know, and I, and look, Pierce Morgan is an asshole. Either Pierce Morgan actually is the asshole that he appears to be on screen, or he's

such an asshole that he acts like an asshole that he appears to be on screen. Neither, I don't know which is worse. I suspect Pierce Morgan being in on the joke is worse than Pierce Morgan not being in on the joke. So, yeah, it's fun watching somebody tell him he's an idiot on his show. That's great. But I think people are excessively generous, but for various reasons. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, so let me tell you about something that's actually right.

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to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. So it's about education. It's more about challenging than education, I would say. You know, I think it's important to just establish in terms of their outcomes, communism and Nazism are roughly as bad as each other.

That is a very, I don't want to get into, you know, which is worse. I don't think that's a useful, useful exercise. They're both very, very, very bad. Nazis had better uniform, sorry. Designed by Hugo Boss. Yes. But they, I mean, actually what's interesting is how much of Western kind of... I can't believe you're taking this seriously.

Well, no, but, I mean, think about how much of what we consider to be the aesthetics of evil. How much of that has come from Nazism? You know, it's, and a lot of the, I mean, there's a brilliant book Hitler and the power of aesthetics, and it's about the self-conscious attempt by the kind of Nazi regime to sort of develop a sort of quasi-neo-Roman sort of aesthetic. And that's now what we kind of associate. So this goes back, the reason I'm going with this is this goes back to the kind of cultural antibodies we've got. It's so deep into our consciousness that Nazism is evil, which clearly is, that even the sort of icons that are used in kind of Star Trek,

or in kind of Star Wars, that in other respects, you know, it's not that closely modeled on Adolf Hitler or anything, still uses the same kind of uniforms and so on. It's just so, it was that deeply ingrained into people's consciences, which is interesting. And you can kind of understand, you know, what I guess I'm trying to get across is, I can see why we've come to this point.

I have quite a lot of sympathy. The average, as I say, the average 18-year-old communist, I think is probably a bit silly. I don't think they're, you know, they're often not that stupid even, whereas the average 18-year-old Nazi is either probably a combination of both, deeply stupid and probably deeply quite evil. You know, so there's clearly a difference in terms of the intentions of people. But I think that rather than educating, or as well as educating,

I would like to be challenging those people more. And I would like to just establish, you might not realize this, but everybody else does think you guys are just as bad as each other in terms of what you're actually promoting. One thing that blew my mind is when Castro died. And so I'm in the comedy industry, which is incredibly left wing. And the amount of people who went on the internet mourning his death, I just found it unbelievable.

And especially because my mother's from Venezuela, Castro did a speech in Venezuela in 2005, I think it was, where he talked about the evils of the internet and how he said all young people shouldn't go on the internet. and he got openly booed. Yeah, wow. And it's just the fact that people would go on the internet and use a tool that he himself prevented his own people from using

to mourn his death. Yeah, that's astonishing, yeah. But I mean, again, they would probably tell themselves, well, he was an idealist. You know, he wanted it to be this way, but it had to be this way. And as if that's an important distinction, you know, I really have very little time. I mean, I know, so one of the reasons that I'm a neoliberal

is that I think outcomes matter above all else. I don't care what your intentions are, pretty much in any situation. I don't care about your intentions, I care about the outcomes and what actually happened. And what does this actually look like in real life? And I think that's when it comes to people praising Castro, because I'm sure he went really well in the 1950s, it's sad. It's really sad. So coming back to my Jeremy Corbyn question,

and I take back what I said about your ideas sounding left wing, what I meant was, yes, I understand the difference between a planned economy and what you're talking about, which is a very loosely regulated economy. But the wealth redistribution is kind of part of that, right? Do you think that the rise of someone, well, rise is a relative term, but the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn as a viable leader of the Labour Party, the huge popularity Bernie Sanders gathered from young people in America

during the last election? Is that an indicator of the fact that wealth redistribution is an issue that's really, really key right now? I think partly, I think the underlying cause of, of that and the broader. And I see Corbyn and Trump and Sanders and Le Pen and the Italians, the Liga Nordi and the Five Star Movement, as all being part of the same,

some are on the left, sensibly, some are on the right. But the people vote for them as a sort of, the system has failed us. What we thought was working isn't working. And I don't blame them for that, right? Productivity growth, which is the kind of bedrock of economic growth,

But getting better at doing what we're doing is that is economic growth, and that's what leads to wages growing. It's been abysmal in the UK. It's been worse than abysmal in Italy. As far as I remember, I think Italians are no richer now than they were in 2002, so they're effectively stagnant for the last 16 years. It's been a bit better in America, but it hasn't been, I mean, wage growth has still been pretty poor, and they had a much deeper recession than we did. if you are somebody who is on the median income, you're in the middle in the UK, you're lucky if your wages in real terms are what they were 10 years ago.

It's very, very possible that they are not what they were 10 years ago. I mean, of course, why wouldn't you be a Corbynite? I would be a Corbynite if I wasn't somebody, if I didn't have quite strong beliefs about economics and politics already, yeah, of course I'd be a Corbynite. It's not just to do with income growth in the UK. I mean, housing is the biggest expenditure for almost everybody, and housing in the places that people actually want to live is increasingly expensive and difficult to, and worse.

It's not just the price, but it's the quality. So you used to have flats with a sitting room, a kitchen, and two bedrooms that are now a bedroom, a bedroom, a bedroom and a kitchen. And that's not picked up exactly by the rents data. obviously house prices are very, very high and it's quite difficult to afford to buy a house. The reason is that we don't build enough of them. But yeah, of course, especially if you're younger,

why wouldn't you be a Corbynite? I would be shocked if I met somebody who didn't have pretty strong beliefs that would kind of almost inoculate them against Corbinism if they weren't a Corbinite. So to me, the kind of fundamentals, this sort of economic fundamentals, matter quite a lot and are the sort of explanation for why we have this sort of dissatisfaction.

And then the proximate reasons, the kind of specific to each country reasons, then might explain why you get Trump in one country and why you get Corbyn in another or why you get Brexit or something like that. So, you know, they have quite strong concerns about Hispanic immigration in the US, so people are more inclined to vote for Trump and there's pretty good evidence around that. You obviously have the migrant crisis, which leads to support for Orban in Hungary and Lega Norde in Italy. So in each country, there are kind of specific things in those countries that kind of might tell you the flavor of, if you want to call it, nationalist populism might be the best term for it.

And Corbin is a nationalist populist. You know, Corbin is very pro-Brexit. He's very pro-hard Brexit. And in my view, he is just a... much a nationalist really in I mean I he's he's not in favor of freedom of movement with Europe he's he's a person who is just as much a nationalist as Nigel Farage just in a different way so if you were talking to a young Corbynite what would you say to them are the reasons that they shouldn't be a young Corbynite

I mean I don't even know if I would try and argue them away from being a young Corbinite I'd say I think you're wrong I think that my solution I'd say I mean I'd say I'd say that I don't have a lot of evidence right now that I'm Right. I would say that my solution, I think, I do have evidence that building more houses is a better way of getting house prices down than rent controls. And I have evidence that if the private sector builds those houses, they'll be nicer to live in than if the government or local council builds those houses, that you won't have people dropped into sink estates and forgotten about if it's done by the private sector instead of done by the government. I'd probably agree that Corbin is no worse on Brexit than the government is, because I think the evidence is reasonably clear that most younger people are disproportionately anti-Brexit

and as am I, and I think I'd say, well, yeah, he's not much worse than the government on that. A lot of people seem to be voting him on the assumption that he is a lot better than the government. He's a lot more kind of pro-EU or kind of pro-British membership of the EU than the government is. But I feel like the real people that I want to argue with and that I do argue with are the government because it's all very well for me to say to the Corbin voter, oh, you should do what I want to do, but nobody's doing what I want to do. The people who should be doing what I want them to do, which is to deregulate the housing sector so we can build houses and make it cheaper for people to buy and to rent are the government. I think it's gotten a lot worse under

Theresa May, but the Conservative Party in particular is completely bankrupt of ideas. I think they have no idea where they're going. They have kind of intentionally choked off the sort of sort of ideas that in previous generations was think tanks and kind of newspaper columnists and so on. And I think that they're, you know, they're really, they're the ones who deserve the blame for, in part. The slow global recovery since the financial crisis is not their fault. But just as the financial crisis wasn't Gordon Brown's fault, but the government could have done and could easily do a lot more to increase economic growth here, and that would mean wage growth, and to lower house prices, and that would mean the cost

of living falling, and they're not doing any of that. So I wouldn't be arguing with the Corbyn voter, I'd be arguing with the Tory voter, and I'd be saying, get these people to actually do something, to make the market actually work for people, instead of just trying to put out across the economy. But isn't the issue with the housing prices that no government politically can afford to allow housing prices to fall because the people who vote, the vast majority of the people who vote and own homes,

don't want that to happen. And so you end up in this, I think it's called a wealth trap in economics, where you can't allow house prices to fall because the price you would pay for that politically would be so high, you probably wouldn't be elected again for generations because the people who lost value in their homes would never vote for your party again? That's possible.

In 1992 there was a pretty sharp reduction in house prices and obviously the subsequent years weren't very good for the Conservative Party but it doesn't seem like they were it wasn't house prices in particular that it was more to do with the kind of I guess people were bored of having 17 years of conservative government and so on I'm not completely convinced that

house prices falling would be put the Tories out of power. I do think that a kind of grand policy like abolishing the Greenbelt would be pretty bad for the Tories. I think that we possibly overestimate in politics how much people vote out of self-interest and underestimate people's idea of what, and don't properly appreciate people's idea of what's kind of good for society. My view is the Greenbelt. Yeah, some people are voting to protect the Greenbelt to protect their own house price. I think a lot of people are protecting an idea of England and an idea of kind of green lungs for cities that people can go to. And that's, on the one hand, that makes it more challenging as an

economist to kind of design a system that might sort of satisfy them. But on the other hand, it means that if they could be convinced that we could have a greener system, for example, we could say new developments need to have more parks and gardens. Parcarsal gardens tend to be environmentally a lot better for the environment than the farmland that's on the greenbelt because they're biodiverse and Greenland Farm Belt is usually a monoculture. There are things like that that we could do. We could point out that people go to that. garden and go to their local park much more often than they then go to the Greenbelt. In fact, I think the statistics for London are that the average person visits the Green

Belt to actually for recreation less than once a year, which is pretty bad if the Green Belt is supposed to be there for recreation or for kind of immunity. And I think we can do marginal improvements, so we can make it easier to densify streets. We can allow streets by streets to have just votes. I live on a street in South London. There's no real reason that I shouldn't be able to, perhaps in association with some lucky property developer, set up a little vote for my street. Everybody is allowed to add one story to their building.

And there you go, that's 50 extra flats, maybe 60 extra flats on that street. There's no reason that that shouldn't be possible. All of the individual house owners, their benefit, they get to improve their property. And there you've sort of improved the connection between new house building and the existing homeowners benefiting. There are things that we can do to just allow more density in general without necessarily having a lot more towers, although I would like quite a lot more towers. But I think being fatalistic about it is the thing that we have to avoid, because really, if you don't build more houses out of fear of homeowners punishing you, you're going to have

non-homeowners punishing you. You know, somebody's going to punish you. And at least by building more houses, you create more growth, you create more wealth, there's more stuff, people are better off. Generally in politics I think the best thing to do is to think one step ahead, not two or three, because the world is so complex that even if you just get that one step ahead, right, you're pretty lucky. And do you think it's a problem, especially in London, where people buy flats, not in order to live, not in order to stay, not even in order to have a holiday home or whatever it may be, it's simply as an investment. Or do you think that is a problem that's been over-exaggerated by the media?

It's been massively exaggerated, especially foreign buyers. Foreign owners are more likely, I believe, to let the units be empty, which obviously if you're buying it to rent it out, that shifts the market somewhat towards rental. That isn't obviously a bad thing. Lots of people rent. And I have just this weekend, I made a decision I was considering buying a house and I decided I'm going to rent for at least another year

because it gives me flexibility and freedom. So renting isn't bad. Foreign ownership, just in general, of luxury flats in London is a very, very small fraction of the market in terms of actual units. It's quite a big fraction of the market in terms of the money because the flats are so expensive, but in terms of the actual number of units,

it's a drop in the ocean. So I don't think it's that important. I think it's more, I think any issue like that. So we also have the problem of, or the possible problem of land banking, where developers have permission to build on a plot, but don't build on it for five or six years. And there are actually rational reasons for that. It's because they need to be able to queue up for a given amount of kind of workforce and capital and so on. They need to have kind of an assurance that for the next six years they'll have plots they'll be able to build on.

But it's also pretty annoying. If you're a local council, you give permission to build on a piece of land and they don't go for that. you think, well, what's the point? You know, why are we bothering to go to this political effort? But all those things are kind of symptoms of a deeper problem. Housing shouldn't be an investment. The fundamental problem is that housing is an investment. It shouldn't be an investment any more than, you know,

a plane ticket is an investment or a car, you know, a used Toyota is an investment. Those things are consumption goods. They're things that we pay for because we like using them. Housing should be the same. the only reason that housing is an investment good the only reason that housing is more economically like a piece of fine art or a piece of gold is because the supply is nearly fixed

and that's because of the planning system. So the problems that exist, which I admit, in my opinion, the foreign owner's problem is a small part of the problem, but it's clearly any unit that's going vacant is sort of sub-optimal, you know, is not what we want if there are people who don't have places to live.

But the problem is that it's an investment, investment good and it shouldn't be an investment good. But the other problem there, Sam, is that housing is the only time in the normal person's life when they can borrow a huge amount of money to gamble with. Right? You cannot borrow 200,000 or 300,000 or 500,000 pounds from a bank to invest in a stock market as an ordinary person. But housing is one area where you can do that because you've got the collateral of the house.

And I think that's what's happened over the last 20 years is a lot of people have treated it as an investment, as you say. not because they have money sitting around to invest in it, but because they've been able to borrow money to do that. And the second Holmes issue, I think, is one of the reasons that also the government doesn't want to allow house prices to fall. Because if they were, a lot of these people would lose out. And again, as I say, politically, the price would be very difficult.

I think that's right. I view that as two blades of a scissors. You kind of need both for the effect that we've seen to happen. It doesn't matter how much you can borrow to fund the price. price of a car, right? Borrowing interest rates falling doesn't mean the car prices rise, even though people could in theory buy borrow more to buy, to get a bigger auto loan, because the supply of cars is pretty elastic. As demand increases, we just build more cars. So yeah,

you can borrow 100,000, but you just end up with five Toyotas instead of one, instead of one Toyota. And they all diminished in value over time. Yeah, yeah, exactly, because because they're not investment goods, because we can just build more of them as we want to, their consumption goods. For the most part, classic cars are different because they are actually fixed in supply. but modern cars are what I'm talking about. Can I just say this episode has been sponsored by Toyota? It's barely a car. Well, it hasn't, but if you'd like to sponsor us.

We are corrupt. I will take any money or cash payment. Anyway, sorry, Sam. You're not giving immigrants a good look here. Russian and a Venezuelan offering to do anything for money. That's a good way. Yeah, although accurate. But yeah, I mean, it's two blades of a scissors.

I think you're right, though, that there is a, what economists call a moral hazard. In the same way that when you bail out of bank, you encourage the bank to take risks, to take more risks in the future. And when the bank thinks it'll be bailed out, you encourage them to take more risks. Then there might be an implicit moral hazard in the system

where people, if you're looking at a mortgage, for one thing, you know, this, I'm sure isn't a system-wide problem. But it is very strange when you look at the cost of a mortgage that they only show you based on today's interest rates. When we know that interest rates are going to rise in the future. Now, I don't think the bank would lend that money out if they didn't think that they'd get that money back. But I do think it's possible that a lot of people are borrowing money without realizing that a much bigger fraction of their income is going to be taken up in interest payments in five years' time

once interest rates are probably up by half a percentage point or one percentage point, I don't know. That to me seems like a huge, nasty surprise what a lot of people are facing. But yeah, I think it's two blades for scissors. Well, let's move on a little bit and talk about technology. You're someone who's optimistic about the future technology. Our producer before we started this show was convincing me that we're about to eliminate scarcity

and everything is going to be dandy. Is he right about that? He's not allowed to join in, by the way. So you say whatever you want. No, I don't think we're going to eliminate scarcity. Ever? No, ever. I mean, we'll always...

You're wrong. That's it. That's it. You're wrong, Trey. I mean, time will always be scarce. we will always have a scarcity of time even if resources become abundant and super abundant

time will always be scarce so we'll always have to figure out ways both of using our own time and of using other people's time and a lot of what we want from other people is their time whether it's to do a service for us or to just spend time with us but I think we're very very far away from material super abundance

it's true that the kind of basic some of the basics of living are very cheap. To me, technology is more likely to expand the frontier of what we can do than it is to kind of make it trivially easy. Until we have kind of extremely good AI that isn't so good that it can, that it has a desire to eliminate us for self-interested reasons. A purely rational desire to destroy all humanity. Until we have that.

I mean, then we get into other questions about kind of the day, of AI and so on but I think what's more likely is that technology will make kind of recreation much more enjoyable and so I think that might be the thing that you know Keynes famously wrote an essay about a hundred years ago called the economic possibilities for our grandchildren and he sort of famously predicted you know we'd be working three hours three days a week and so on and his view is that what they had at the time in terms of resources like what your kind of weekly income was that was enough for any So as we get better at making things, we'll stick with that and then we'll just spend more time off.

And as it turned out, actually we just wanted more stuff. And we just, our desire for more stuff is just infinite. So we kept just our frontiers of sort of what we wanted just grew and grew and grew. And that's good. That's fine. The only thing that might push against that is that if actually leisure itself can become more pleasurable. So Tyler Cowan, who's an economist in America, he writes the marginal revolution blog, along with Alex Tabarok, he argues that to some extent, and this sounds a bit silly,

but to some extent, youth unemployment is probably partly driven by video games, because it's just much more enjoyable to be unemployed now than it was to be unemployed 15 or 20 years ago. There's more you can do with spare time. And I mean, as somebody who just spent the weekend playing on my Switch, the Octopath Traveler RPG just came out and it was a great weekend, you know, in between World Cup games, it was too hot to go outside. so I just play video games. And as that becomes better,

and as sort of leisure, as we come up with better things to do with leisure, so it might begin with virtual reality. I think simulated reality, when you actually experience the thing in your head, is the real prize that we really should be looking for. But as things like that, probably better drugs come available.

You know, I think that... This sounds like a great future, which is all going to be high playing computer games. Sure. That's basically my university. But I mean, that was fun. Oh, it was great. That was my university too, and I liked that.

Yeah, I'll happily go back there now. I'll be honest with you. So, yeah, so I mean, there are certain dimensions to do with, in terms of kind of making the world better, I think it'll be a lot easier to feed people. I think it'll be a lot easier to prevent people from dying of disease, and that's obvious. But I think the really interesting dimension would be as leisure time gets better and better.

It's inconceivable to me. that the kind of advances we're making in biochemistry and in genetics, that we will not figure out how to, for example, give a kind of time-limited experience similar to taking ecstasy or cocaine in a very safe way. I just think it's inconceivable. I like you. I mean, the argument, the best argument against what I'm saying is how bad artificial sweeteners still are. It's been legal to research artificial sweeteners forever, and they still suck.

You know, they're still unbelievably bad compared to sugar. But they operate in slightly different ways. And I think that as we move towards drug legalization, and I think we are, and I think we will legalize most, if not all, drugs quite soon. Really? Within my lifetime is what I mean by quite soon. Oh, within your lifetime. Yeah.

I think cannabis will be legalized here within five years. Within five years? Yeah. So in 2018, we'll have you back on in 223. And if we can't have a joint on set. Yeah. And actually, we can't because we're smoking indoors. That's no longer allowed.

Oh, yeah. That's very bad. very, very bad. You'll have to smoke in special government-approved areas. Which will take all the joy out of it. Yeah, well, that's, so that's the grayification of life. As we kind of move towards

greater liberalism in terms of drugs, I think we are. The reason I say five years is because I don't think it'll happen before the next election, but I think it will happen straight after the next election. Hold on, what's your evidence for that? Because the major parties, both opposed to it, the last time this issue came up in a massive way

I think it was about 2010. The guy who we were trying to get him on the show and hopefully we were David Knuck, Professor David Nguer. He got basically, he got us to be fired. He got us to leave, right? For saying that marijuana is not as bad as alcohol, I think. Yeah, I think he completely correctly compared the dangers the deaths from ecstasy to the deaths from horse riding.

Yeah. And for making a correct, completely clear, anybody could check the data comparison he was fired. Yeah. Right, so that's my point. Politically, this issue doesn't, I mean, Tell me what you're saying that I'm not saying. It's the shift in the United States.

It's moving there for different reasons. One I think being that the paradox being there, much more illiberal drinking culture, means that it's much more normal for just smoking cannabis is just much more widespread in the US than it is here, even more widespread in the US than it is here. That has now led to it being legalized on the entire West Coast now.

California, the really crucial state, because it's so culturally important, because most TV shows in America, most kind of sitcoms and things like that are filmed in California, these things have an enormous cultural impact, and I think they normalize it in a way that is sort of the key to getting, to me, gay marriage happening. The cause of that was cultural normalization.

It was having gay characters in TV shows that weren't kind of jokes, they weren't kind of people that were there as like, ha-ha, let's laugh at these people. They were just normal human beings who happened to be gay. And I think that that helped people who maybe didn't know people like that in their lives and maybe didn't see gay people like that to begin to see that in that way. And I think a similar thing would probably happen with cannabis. Are you saying Willing Grace made gay marriage?

Yeah, almost certainly. Yeah, I would say that it had a huge, huge contributing effect. Yeah, I mean, I don't have data for this. So I try to, you know, I'm straying off my economist's territory. But, yeah, I think normalization is the kind of a key to that kind of liberalization. and I think that as it gets normalized across America, we just follow America. I mean, the UK just follows all political discourse follows American discourse. You know, we have arguments about things that have nothing to, you know, but just are not relevant in the UK. We have huge arguments about, like, Black Lives Matter, which just isn't a thing in the UK.

Like, you know, there are problems to do with the police and so on, but the kind of things that Black Lives Matter were campaigning about still somehow, this became the kind of number one thing that we were talking about because we consumed so much American media. We just take, and this happens left and right politically. We look to Americans for what we're, for what we talk about. You know, one of the major, the woman, Ash Sarker, who we talked about earlier, who was on, who said to more. I'm literally a communist.

Yeah. She was in teen vogue, which isn't actually a thing that teenagers read, I don't think. I think it's like a weird adjutant prop magazine that is sort of, it's a weird thing. But anyway, and she was sort of saying, why am I a communist? And it was something to do with, she's against sort of military imperialism, which is a big thing.

Yeah, the communists never did any of that, right? Sure, sure. Military imperialism, putting too many people in jail. Yeah, communists never did any of that either. And the third one was something to do with, I wish I could remember, but either way, they were things that are American talking points. that we don't have a mass imprisonment in the UK.

We don't put millions of people in jail in the UK the way they do in America. All of the things that people think about are driven... Oh, yeah. And sorry, the third one was the separation of children and their parents when they migrate into the US, which I think is appalling, which I hate. But this isn't something that we do in the UK.

And so you're defining yourself by American talking points, by American political wedge issues. And everybody does. You know, Liz Truss, who I think is wonderful. The Chief Secretary of the Treasury gave a speech about occupational licensing. Now, in the U.S. occupational licensing, you need to have a license to become a hairbraider.

You know, everything is licensed. It's insane. In the UK, you need to have a license to be a doctor or a lawyer and maybe two or three other things. Just everybody just adopts these American political talking points and political wedge issues wholesale because that's what our culture comes.

comes from. So I think with cannabis it's no different. As America legalizes, we will legalize as well. The parties don't define things really. They just follow the rest of it. They just follow culture when it comes to stuff like this at least. That's fascinating. In my view. So, joints all round within five years. I'm actually I hate cannabis. So, yeah, for me. You're such a square. No, I know. I, yeah, I really, I think it's an awful drug. So. Why? It makes me feel ill and makes me sleepy. Oh, there you go. One of them.

Can't hack it. Oh, so what do you think about cocaine? I mean, do you enjoy it? No, no, I'm joking. I mean, in terms of, do you think that's going to be legalised anytime soon or do you think that's going to be a much harder cell? I think it's a harder cell. Probably cocaine is

harder than MDMA because cocaine is reasonably easy to turn into crack. And if cocaine became widely available, I actually don't think people would move on to crack because of reason you smoke crack is because it's cheaper per kind of the effect it has than cocaine is. I mean crack exists really because cocaine is expensive and legalization would make it much, much cheaper. But that might be an issue. But I think MDMA cocaine and cannabis over three

that really there should be no debate about legalizing. Heroin, it becomes much more difficult because it's so strongly addictive. And it's much more like a kind of medical problem and kind paternalism where you know which I said earlier being anti-paternalist is a sort of defining liberal trait but but heroin is where most people um I think including myself although I don't I don't know for certain would say that you're kind of not in your right mind if you if you take heroin you've sort of become uh you've kind of you lost you're you're not you don't have your full faculties available to you but cannabis MDMA and cocaine no question they'd be much safer for one, they'd be probably a lot more enjoyable,

which is important. Maybe you'd enjoy enjoying. I think I would enjoy the MDMA and the cocaine. All right, we've outed you. So drugs all round. So what's the future, according to Southam, where are we going to be five, ten years from now? What are we not seeing that's coming towards us?

Well, I think politically, a lot depends on productivity growth. I know it's an exciting and sexy concept. A lot depends on us getting, being able to return to the kind of trend that we were at before the crisis. It really seems as if something has broken in the economy that means that it's sort of fundamentally, in terms of output, growing in different ways and that people at the top, the kind of software engineers and the people who are very gifted will be able to grow and grow and grow and grow. and be able to be extremely productive and innovative. And that's good for everybody because you get to use the products they make,

but it's not so great in terms of incomes if this sort of coming apart of the kind of cognitive elite and the kind of everybody else continues. And I don't think that's just an economic problem. I think it's a social problem. I think the feeling that somebody else has a great life and you don't have a great life, I mean, that's a very troubling feeling.

feeling that your kids aren't going to have a great life and somebody else's kids are going have a great life. That's a very, very troubling thing. And I think that's maybe at the root of kind of where we are politically right now. And I don't know if, and that's why I think the kind of economic fundamentals matter so much because that's what determines whether you feel like tomorrow is going to be better than today was and next year will be better. But for your kids than this year is. And whether that changes, I don't know. I think it probably will. I tend to think that the economy and the global economy is more robust than people give it credit for. I think China not stagnating matters a lot.

If China continues to grow, then that's very, very good for everybody else. That's not only a country that is just producing things, demanding things, buying things, but it's also a country that has a strong stake in the global kind of trading. the global liberal trading order, the kind of relatively free trade order, being preserved, and in kind of peace in the sort of Eurasian continent being preserved. So I think that's a good thing. And India might drive that as well, but I don't know. I think it feels to me like Europe and the United States are kind of stagnating a bit,

and it feels, apart from the Silicon Valley element of the United States, like Europe is too focused on... AI, it's too focused on kind of getting the rules right and getting a perfect set of rules when it comes to technology and when it comes to the economy and trade and so on. And when it comes to migration actually, when it comes to kind of refugees coming in, Bruno McKayse, who's a former Portuguese minister for Europe, has his book called The Dawn of Eurasia. And his, sort of the way he describes the European Union is, and I say this as a person who's anti-Brexit, is as people trying to design a system that can run without human control. And so they're trying to devise

kind of formula for allocating refugees to countries. And it's just crazy because that's not what the real world is and that's not what politics is. And I worry that that sort of obsession with kind of building this sort of perfect, beautiful structure, a perfect, beautiful constitution, will really hurt Europe because they've missed the kind of energy and dynamism that is what really drives economic improvement. And in the US, I think all sorts of, you know, the kind of the Trump madness seems to have infected the whole political culture there. And it really, the ultimate problem actually in the US, and I think possibly we'll come over here because the downside of us taking all American politics is that we take all American politics, but is the bleeding of politics into

every step of people's lives, you know, is everything becomes a political action. Politics, really, in my view, should be a thing that weirdos debate amongst themselves, and that doesn't really matter very much to people. He's talking about us. Yeah. It should be, like, football, you know? It should be like a hobbyist thing that if you like it, you like it, and you can choose a team, you know, we can have a fun argument, we can some, maybe, you know, we can argue and maybe

change each other's minds or not, whatever, and that's that. It's like a kind of a hobbyist thing. It shouldn't be something that obsesses people at every point in their lives. And unfortunately, whether people like it or not, it is now something that affects every element of their lives. And that, for me, is a kind of modest case for a small state or for a limited state, is that politics makes us hate each other. Politics makes us enemies and adversaries,

because politics really is zero-sum game. Most of the world is not positive sum game. We can interact with each other and we're both better off. but politics is zero-sum game. If you get this, I don't get it. And so we hate each other when it comes to that. And I think that the more that kind of mindset bleeds into the more elements of our lives

and the more our interactions with each other are defined by what side are you on, the more will hate each other. And my fear is that that will happen in America and I worry that that might spread to the rest of the English-speaking world as well. How much do you blame social media for that? To some extent, a little bit,

I don't know how much I blame social media. I blame, certainly I blame old people using the internet for a lot of it. But it's true. I mean, young people know that most of the internet is bollocks. You know, young people, they kind of have an inoculation against what they read online, whereas old people are much more credulous because they're used to what they read being true, and they're used to having kind of gatekeepers only let them read what's basically true. So, yeah, I blame, and I mean old people are much, much, much more susceptible to fake news and to, not just fake news, but kind of crappy news.

You know, fake news is like actually just lies. Crappy news is heavily biased. You know, there's probably some truth, like the words are probably true, but what they're omitting means that they've slanted the story in such a terrible way. Old people are really susceptible to that because they're used to news being a thing that's fairly neutral and that they can trust. So I think it might be a little bit, I mean, this is a kind of, you know, the expression, apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how is the play? It might be a bit like this, but to say that this might be a bit like the printing press, which we eventually got used to. It took about 100 years of bloody civil war and everybody hating each other because religion is what to find their lives. So it might be, I hope it doesn't come to that.

I'd leave social media to some extent if I could push a button and just sort of magically mean that nobody wanted to talk about politics online I think that would make the world a lot better place I wouldn't censor them because I don't want to give anybody power to censor that but they kind of

I'm a huge free speech person because I think that free speech helps us arrive at the right answer I think free speech in science is what helps us arrive at the right answer and if you didn't have free speech in science then you would often get the wrong answer. And I sort of draw that into other areas of our lives. Free speech in markets is good because it allows us to say, this is a good product, this is a bad product,

don't go to this company because they'll rip you off. That's a really great way of making markets honest. But I don't know if politics has the same kind of correction mechanisms. Politics seems to not have the kind of correction mechanisms of science and markets. If a theory is wrong, you can test it and it's wrong. If a product is bad, you can try it, and it's bad. In politics, it's kind of hard to what's the, how do we figure out what the right answer is, what the wrong answer is? Because there'll always be 100 explanations as to why it failed, even if you do it and you think that it's good.

So, you know, that's a very long and rambling way of saying, my biggest fear is that politics ends up dominating economic growth and trade and technological advances. I think it might, I think it might, but I'm generally an optimist. If you're an old person watching this online... Just get off the internet. Yeah, yeah. You're taking up space.

Get off the internet. You're bad. Why are you even here? You're susceptible to fake news. Just turn this shit off. Do you have a nice, positive, and not turn to podcast? Yeah, yeah, I thought so. Excellent. So, pro-drugs, anti-old people. Yeah, yeah.

If you combine the two, you can combine drugs and all people, kill off the old people. Yeah, yeah, problem solved. Problem solved. All right, I feel that we've taken it in the wrong direction. Sam, the last question we always like to ask our guests is what is the one thing that we're not talking about, that we should be talking about.

Animal welfare. Animal welfare is the thing that we should be talking about. I think that this will be the thing that has the technological solution. I think that as we are increasingly able to grow meat, not meat replicas but actual meat in factories and in labs, I think that we will begin to realize that the way animals are treated in our world is very, very bad. And I suspect it's the thing that our children will look to us and say,

why on earth, why the hell were you treating animals that way? Wow. There we go. Are you a vegan? No. I'm a hypocrite. Because meat tastes good. I do eat humanely reared meat. My view is that it's better to have lived a life that's good and then to be killed than to have never lived at all. I would much rather if my own life, if you said to me you can either never be born

or you'll live your life and then at the age of 40 somebody's going to kill you and eat you, I would definitely take the second one. And I think that most animals would probably make that choice too if they could. So I think that veganism isn't actually demanded, but eating humanely treated animals is. Can you write that down for me so I can regurgitate it the next time someone lectures me about you? You had Diana Fleischman on a few weeks ago,

and I have this debate with her occasionally. She completely thinks I'm wrong, and she's a lot smarter than me. All right, well. Now we've had you on as well. Thank you so much for coming on. You're on Twitter at S-8M-B. the number eight, like Sam B, but with the number eight for an A. Perfect. We'll put that at the bottom of the video.

And is there anything else that you would like to promote? Is we, anything in particular? You're not writing a book yet? No, no, I don't have the attention span to write a book. Well, when you do, which I suspect you probably will at some point. Let us know. Well, thanks very much. It's been really, really enjoyable coming here.

Yeah, really nice conversation, I thought. Yeah. Great stuff. Thank you. Thank you. I'm at Constance and Kishin. You can follow me on Twitter as well. I'm a failing human. and if you've enjoyed the podcast

please give us a rating on iTunes five stars thank you comment thank you tell a friend you can also go on YouTube give us a follow sub us in and there was something to do with a bell what was it was the bell?

There's a bell next to the subscribe button if you click that you will actually get notifications when we put a video out there you go Francis is an old person he's not familiar with technology I know I love fake news all right thank you very much and we'll see you next week

Thank you.