 Matt, you've been studying the libertarian party in all of its different incarnations for many, many years now. Where do you think libertarians are likely to cluster now, given the sort of weird and changing presidential field? We have no idea, and it's also like small L and capital L are different things. I mean small L libertarians, like those of us with libertarian persuasions who may or may not be miffed by the direction of the LP. The, it's funny, you know, the people who know about the direction of the LP, right, who know about the Mises Caucus self-described takeover that happened that Zach covered so well in the past, and on an ongoing basis really, that is known by people like us who are very online libertarians. I'm not sure that it's known by the 750,000 Americans who are registered as libertarians, which is by the way three times the number as it was 20 years ago, which is pretty significant. Libertarians are on a three presidential election bronze medal streak, which is definitely a tallest dwarf category situation, but also like we haven't seen any party do that since the 19th century when it was the socialists. So by far they will have the most presidential ballot access of any third party. It remains to be seen what happens with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and how many ballots he gets. He's doing a mix of his own name and like hijacking or creating other parties to get on there. And I think all of that is one of the most underrated part of this campaign. I presume that we're going to see a lot more thought and activity about that in the very near future, certainly depending on what happens to Nikki Haley in the next two main primaries. Nevada has a caucus and she's not even competing, but there is such a huge sentiment. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is polling at 15%. That's crazy. We haven't seen that from an independent since Ross Perot. You still have Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson polling combined above 10% against Joe Biden and no one's paying any attention to them at all. There's even an outside chance that Dean Phillips might be a thorn in Biden's side in New Hampshire. It's all weird with righty and stuff. There's all this ferment happening. Americans hate this election and they have from the beginning and it's now looking even more like the thing that they've wanted to hate. Both Biden and Trump are underwater among independents who were always the swing vote in presidential elections. Biden won last time. People tend to forget this. He won because the people who voted third party in 2016, the majority of whom were libertarians, voting or at least voted libertarians, he won because those people didn't vote for third party, they voted for him. The percentage of the third party vote in 2016 was 5.7 in 2020 was 1.8 and what did the Democrat do compared to Hillary Clinton? He went up by three percentage points. So it's pretty clear that's what happened. People freaked out about Trump. They didn't like him. Independents soured on Trump from the moment he was elected just as they have with Biden, by the way. Biden actually had a higher ranking among independents when he was inaugurated like 61 percent and then it plunged to 34 within six months and it remains there. So when we talk about where libertarians are going to vote, we have to, I think, understand that libertarians, at least for the last three presidential elections, they just kind of vote libertarian. I'm not sure how much they know that there's all these feuds within Mises Caucus and not Mises Caucus, there's lawsuits at the state party level and all this kind of stuff. It might be something that interests them and it might also be something that they haven't even begun to hear about and that they have just created their own political identity as libertarians and if they see that word on a ballot they go, okay, vote for that. So we don't know. So my observation of the very online libertarians was a decent amount of enthusiasm for Vivek. I mean I ran an informal poll on my Twitter so take that for what it's worth and he was the kind of, you know, plurality getter on who is there, like which candidate would be most beneficial to your personal liberty and it just kind of confirmed what I've been seeing a bunch, among a lot of online libertarians. Now that Vivek is out, what do you make of that, that Vivek love among a certain segment of the libertarian movement? What do you think accounts for it and where might it go? Well, I mean he wants it to go to Donald Trump, obviously he's now asking the demanding. But I don't think it's going to necessarily. Well it's not that he has a large following to begin with, you know, he's polling nationally, like four or five percent in a Republican primary. The Iowa, the libertarian party did do like an Iowa caucus thing. There's a very small number of votes. But I pulled that up too. I'll pull that up. Chase Oliver got the most. Chase Oliver, that's an underrated story, right, in that people have been talking about the Mises Caucus takeover and this and that and the other. Chase Oliver, to my knowledge, and I haven't been following the LP very closely so far this cycle, he's not a Mises Caucus guy. That's not where he's coming off like. He's a two-time candidate who's pushed Democratic Republican elections in Georgia into runoffs twice. He seems to sort of clean up and present pretty well as a former military, I believe. But that poll is also interesting because Vivek Ramaswamy got four times as many votes as Jacob Hornberger. Jacob Hornberger, who last time was the runner-up in the libertarian party, he was and he was also the Mises Caucus choice or at least the by, you know, compared to Joe Jorgensen and she won kind of come from behind victory against Jacob Hornberger. This could be just an outlier and it could, you know, there was a talk of that Vivek's name got on that ballot through an odd way to begin with. Yes. I saw some math whiz figuring out that if that those like 1%, 1.1% numbers represent like one vote that about like 89 people voted in this, 99 counties. Yeah, so it should be. More grains of salt. There are dozens of us, dozens. Dozens, literal dozens. Vivek says things that some people like to hear, which is that, you know, January 6 was an inside job and that the election of 2020 is stolen. Of course, that's in direct contradiction to what he said about the 2020 election, literally 14 months ago, which was that people who are complaining that it's stolen don't have any evidence and that they're there. The one's drinking copium and that it's unseemly and they're becoming the grand old party of crybabies. But you know, whatever, we all we all change with new data, I guess. There are people who like that and also like his very like bold, provocative ideas about foreign policy, sort of a radical semi anti war or anti US intervention, depending on how you look at it type of things. Like he will negotiate with Vladimir Putin to give chunks of Ukraine to Russia in return for making sure that Russia and China don't cooperate. And if they do break that, then Ukraine goes into NATO. And I guess there's an audience for that. What do you make of that? Like what like tear that argument apart for me, because it seems a little bit, Josh Barrow has the great piece about, I believe it's Josh Barrow about how Vivek is basically section guy. At any fancy school, you always see these people in college, the people who are always in a hurry to raise their hand. And they think they know the answers to absolutely everything. And there's this, this ego, this narcissism, this sense of hubris and that they have all the answers to everything. When I look at Vivek's typically Twitter posts on foreign policy that talk about how actually he'll just solve China. And he'll just make it so Putin and China cooperate. It always strikes me as, I don't know, like a 19 year old larping as a foreign policy expert. Matt, you have way more experience in this. What do you make of it? Just no president has the magic wand. And we should have learned that from Donald Trump. Of all things, I mean, he was going to use the magic wand to build a wall or extend the wall on the southern border. And it extended somewhat, but the magic wand doesn't exist. It's hard to get stuff done. And it's hardest of all to get stuff done in the international arena. So the less that you know about it, and the more that you're going in there with instinct, rather, or just a feeling of vibe, rather than knowledge of how powers interact with one another, the more that someone imagining magic wand sounds great. And without without like a backup plan, I mean, we're living in a populist moment in the United States and the globe and we have been for about 10 years. And there's a lot of the part of that instinct is a correct one in my view, which is that the way that the world is ordered doesn't have as much democratic legitimacy, it seems to be happening, regardless of whether one wants it or not. That's the always the fertile ground for conspiratorial thinking. And I use that non pejoratively in this case. If you're trying to figure out why this policy or these conditions, these decisions keep happening and your vote has nothing to do with it, your attitudes have nothing to do with it, then you start developing some theories about that because it seems like you are powerless. I mean, you see this a lot in Western Europe, for example, because the world order is something that Western Europe hasn't had a lot of influence on. It's the United States that pretty much has the most influence on it. And so the average French person is going to think all kinds of conspiratorial things about how these decisions get made and where and by who. So Vivek plays into that or like he taps into that, I should say, that sentiment, that feeling, if we just withdraw from NATO, and if we just do this, do this, then something that has never been thought of before can happen. It's just naive. It's not how structures and parties work. I would say one way of thinking about it is Brexit. Brexit makes total sense from just like a sovereign T kind of point of view. And the people who are pushing Brexit had all kinds of very naive ideas about what would happen afterwards. They actually didn't have a very good plan for that. And then Brexit's still kind of a big mess afterwards. And the results were not what the people who were pushing for it promised or wanted. It's a lot easier to say, you know, to quote Steve Martin, I break with you, I break with you and you throw dog poop on somebody's shoes, then it is to build what replaces the post World War II order. So if your instinct is like, well, just fuck that order, then Vivek Ramaswamy is good. And there's a lot of people who have that instinct and would rather just express that than try to construct what comes next. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our new show, Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here. 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