 I want to thank everybody for coming. This is Reason's first live stream. I'm Nick Gillespie. And today we're talking about whether or not Ron DeSantis is good or bad for liberty. And I'm joined by Zach Weismueller, my Reason TV colleague, as well as Carol Markowitz. I'm going to introduce them in a little bit. But just as a general setup, no governor is more cheered and hated right now than the Florida Republican Ron DeSantis currently in the news for flying around 50 Venezuelan migrants seeking asylum refugee status from Venezuela to Martha's Vineyard. The 44-year-old Navy veteran and double IB leader also headlined the Third National Conservatism Conference, where he emphasized that the state should punish and reward businesses and individuals based on political positions. Controversely, DeSantis has yanked longstanding tax rates for Walt Disney Corporation after the company criticized his stance on gay rights. He signed legislation that would limit social media platforms' ability to moderate content and regulate users. The law has been blocked by a federal court. He's banned mask mandates in public schools and issued an executive order prohibiting businesses from requiring proof of vaccination from customers. He's also pushed cities such as Gainesville to abandon zoning reform aimed at creating more diverse multi-family housing. If such top-down edicts seem add-ons with traditional conservative support for local decision-making and support for business interests, DeSantis has also gotten the high marks for mostly keeping K-12 schools open during the pandemic and overseeing a boom in people moving to Florida to escape lockdowns elsewhere. When COVID death rates are adjusted for the age of residents, as they should be, Florida's rate is about the same as California's. Florida had 275 deaths per 100,000 people. California's is 267, and both of those are well below the national average of 302 deaths per 100,000 people. DeSantis is a strong supporter of gun rights and signed a $1.2 billion tax break package this spring promising even more cuts if and when he gets reelected in November. He's running against former governor current congressman Charlie Crisp and is up in the polls by the four or five points. Despite increased levels of spending each year of his governorship, and part of that's due to COVID, the state is currently sitting on a $22 billion budget surplus. Florida is also one of those odd states, wonderful states that doesn't have an income tax. So when you're cutting taxes and there's not even an income tax, that's really saying something. So how should libertarians think about Ron DeSantis? Is he a retaliatory culture warrior and the leading indicator of an authoritarian convergence of the right and the left? As some of us at reason have said, or is he a successful large state governor? The future of the Republican party and quite possibly the next president of these United States. How should libertarians think about his mix of bullying and bravura that is turning the sunshine state from a joke? We all remember the Florida man stuff to one of the hottest destinations in the country. I am leading in this conversation about DeSantis, Florida and libertarians with two recent blue state refugees. Riza and senior producer Zach Weismiller. I think you can figure out which one he is. He's the one where it says Zach Weismiller under him. So heteronormative. Yes, where nothing if not heteronormative, at least Zach is who pulled up states with his family from California about a year ago. He moved back to Florida. He's a Florida native. And also New York post columnist Carol Markowitz who hightailed it out of New York to Florida earlier this year in January and she had done a five month stint kind of trial run during the COVID lockdown as well. Zach and Carol, thanks for joining. Thank you for having me. Thanks Nick. Let's start with the migrant. Bit, you know, Zach, what what what's your sense? You know, DeSantis apparently paid about one point six million dollars in state funds to fly about 50 Venezuelans who are being processed as a stylist in America to Martha's Vineyard. You know, is this is this a good or bad thing? I mean, as a newly minted Floridian paying, as you mentioned, lower taxes than in California. I still don't love the idea of my tax dollars going to fly people out of Texas to Martha's Vineyard. I mean, we all see it for what it is. It was a stunt. It got a lot of attention. So I guess it achieved its intended effect to me as someone who's generally very pro immigration. I would, you know, I would love more Venezuelans to come live in Florida. I found it just really distasteful, embarrassing. Do you do? Waste of money. So Carol, what about you and you, if I may, you were an actual refugee from Congress and from the Soviet Union. What do you think about this? So, you know, well, part of that, you know, having that as my background is I kind of know the process. And I mean, it obviously has changed since the late 70s, somewhat, but I didn't, my family didn't get on a light and land in JFK like, hey, we're here, take us in. We actually, we had to spend time in Italy. So first of all, we had to be let out of the Soviet Union. How do you get that out? That's, you know, political pressure was applied on the Soviet Union to let us out. But the second part was being accepted in somewhere. And in order to be accepted in somewhere, someone had to vouch for you. Someone had to say that when they get here, we will take care of them. And for Soviet Jews, a lot of the time, it was Jewish organizations in America. Without that, just bare minimum of support. I don't understand how we can continue allowing people in and mass and not have anybody waiting for them. Is it a good thing? I mean, would you have felt pissed off if you were, you know, you were the mother and suddenly, you know, you sign a bunch of papers, you may not even know exactly what's going on and you end up at Martha's Vineyard and you realize that you are, you know, just a prop and some kind of weird prop. Well, I don't know. I mean, if I came without any, you know, permission to come or anything like that, I think I would expect that, you know, my life might be a little difficult, especially in the early days. And I think what DeSantis did here is bring the problems of the border to people who are completely inoculated from this. They never have to deal with the policies that they support. Why is DeSantis doing this though? I mean, Florida is not a border state. He did, he did, why didn't he take the, why didn't he, you know, I mean, because he won't shut up about Cubans coming, fleeing Congress and Venezuelans bring them to Florida and, you know, and they would fit right in. That would be the first. I think Venezuelans in a lot of cases would be natural Americans. But look, you know, when again, when my family came here, it wasn't like America said, hey, Soviet Union, anybody who feels oppressed over there, you know, come on in, it was really targeted. And so we've had this problem in the last few years where there is no target, there is no amount of people that we're allowing in per year. There's actually no guidelines at all that we follow. And so why is DeSantis doing it? I mean, you know, just my guess here is that all eyes on him because he is sort of the natural, you know, leader of the Republican Party right now. And whatever he does kind of resonates with the rest of the party and he sets the agenda. What do you feel about that? I just wanna ask, you know, as a fellow Floridian here, like how do you feel about that? And we should point out though, you guys are North Florida and South Florida. Oh, yeah. So we're gonna go to the top of the stage. Yeah, we side went by. Yeah. Yeah, okay. So how do I feel about that? Yeah, yeah, well, you know, just the fact that clearly, yes, DeSantis is kind of becoming the de facto face of the new Republican Party and he's doing, you know, this is a stunt to send a message. But, you know, what kind of... What's the message? Well, I would say it's not just a message. Yeah, it's to affect policy. I think again, like if the people who are making the policy are have to live by those policies where migrants do just show up on their doorstep, the way that they do in places in Texas, the way that the migrants just walk across people's backyards to get in. I mean, it's just, it's happening and it's been happening. And the resources have been really stretched in Texas. So when the people of Martha's Vineyard are like, oh my God, 50 people, what are we gonna do? It really does not only send the message, but also affect the way that they see this problem. Are you... But as a Florida, like does that advance? You know, this is always the problem when you have a governor who is, you know, starting to run for president is like, is this really helping the people of Florida? Because that, you know, moving to Florida, I was kind of like, you know, DeSantis and we're gonna get into all this, but he seemed to be making a lot of good calls that we're in the best interest of the people living in Florida. And now I feel like there's a level of, you know, the eye is somewhere else now. Do you feel that as well? Carol? Oh, did we lose Carol? Okay. I think we, she's frozen there. Carol, do you want to drop out and come back in? You could do that. Well, Zach, do we know DeSantis' take on immigration? Because this is, you know, it's one thing to call attention to the situation at the border, which is pretty fucked up. Yeah. And it has been that way for a long time. You'll recall that, you know, Trump, you know, at one point was separating families coming across the border. And then he, you know, he had the Remain in Mexico policy for assailants and people, you know, who are actually, I mean, one thing that's interesting to note or worth noting is that people at the border are being processed. They're actually following the law and these Venezuelans were processed, they're in the country legally and they're trying to figure out where to go next while they await their procedure, you know, their court dates and stuff like that. But do we know what DeSantis' immigration policy is or what's his attitude towards immigration? You know, all the statements I've heard from him is very much talking about securing the border. So it's in line with the kind of hard line GOP approach of we need to really control, that there's too many people coming in and we need to, you know, pair that down. And, you know, in terms of the dysfunction at the border, like I think everyone in every political camp can acknowledge that it is there, but it's being perpetuated by both sides. You know, you mentioned the Remain in Mexico program. Before that, it was the Obama administration who was building the detention camps on the border. So there's never seems to be, you know, a serious proposal to make either streamline immigration or if you are on the Republican restriction and it's side figure out a way to like rationally secure the border without, you know, building some useless wall that isn't going to accomplish much. You know, we're trying to get Carol back in on the conversation. Hopefully she hasn't been picked up by immigration. Maybe the papers weren't signed properly way back when. But, you know, why don't we up, I think, we're here. Okay, all right. Hello, Carol. I got to note that your audio is a little low, Nick. I don't know if you're able to boost that on your mic at all. Yeah, I guess. There you go. That's better. All right, Carol, thank you for, no, that's quite all right. This is the marvels of modern technology. So I just wanted to add just my final thought on this. Is that I don't love that it's a prep. Oh, no. The sound just went out again. She's yeah, she's just frozen. Okay. Well, let's glitch central here. So, yeah, you know, national conservatives are something we're talking about, especially from a liberal, well, you know, I guess from a libertarian perspective, while we hopefully we'll get Carol to come back in, it's I'm going to and you know, hopefully she will come back. But from a libertarian point of view, what do you think is the default setting on immigration policy? You and I attended the Reno reset of the libertarian party, which, you know, radically altered its immigration policy from one that was generally favorable towards more immigration, easier immigration to being agnostic on the question. So within the libertarian movement, things have been shifting, but what's your sense? What what should the libertarian position towards immigration be? No, my my position is that it should be as easy as possible for people who want to come and live and work here to do so, as long as they're, you know, peaceful, you know, not not obvious threats to anybody. You know, how that's done. I think the the practical questions are there's legitimate debate about how to achieve that goal. But that should be the end goal. Like should it be, you know, work permits, like an expedited path to citizenship, you know, visa visas that are just kind of like rubber stamped every few years. You know, those are all debatable policy questions. But I think like from a libertarian perspective, you know, as long as, you know, these are peaceful people seeking work and a life here, then I'm I'm all for it. Yeah, it's I mean, I agree with you. Obviously in this, I find worrying. OK, I think we've got Carol back. No, I hope so. All right. Now we're talking. Good to see you again. All right, Carol, can you this last? Yeah, let's let's give it a shot. OK, you were you were going to say something, Carol. That the Santas put this in the budget. He literally had it in the Florida budget that he was going to ship migrants from one place to another. And the Democrats in the state voted for it. So when they were outraged this in this last week or so, his folks, people could say, look, you voted for you. I think it's a real, you know, genius move politically. And I think it was the right thing to do. You know, we were talking a little bit about immigration more broadly. And Carol, I know you have libertarian leanings and you're libertarian ish on a bunch of things, but you don't identify as a libertarian and we're not asking you to. Right. But we're, you know, we're staging this conversation because, you know, we're libertarians. And so we I love libertarians. You know, we're the best. I mean, yeah, they're a good time. But, you know, what what do you think is I mean, do you consider yourself a Republican or a conservative? Yeah, I'd say conservative. I don't know. I think a lot of my idea, like a lot of my feelings and ideas are libertarian. But my work with libertarianism is that I think, especially during the pandemic, what I learned is that it's not enough for like one person to be a libertarian. It's going to have to be everybody in order for it to work. Like so, for example, I, my preference would be local school districts making decisions. It wouldn't be the governor making decisions. But what ended up happening during the pandemic was the Democrats would push for, say, DeSantis not to make decisions for local school districts, but Huckle or Cuomo at the time could make decisions for local school districts. It was like tails you lose, you know, heads I win. And stuff like that. But why in Florida? I mean, Florida has, you know, why wouldn't you just let school districts in Florida make decisions? Because in that case, why can't it be individual parents? Right? Just take it right down to the individual. Like why should just because somebody happens to live in our democratic businesses? Yeah. I mean, this is a wonderful, yeah. I mean, continue. So no, I would say that the things that I have disagreed with Governor DeSantis on, well, one of the things was the business mandate, especially for cruise ships. I thought like, you know, cruise ships are a unique thing and they should be allowed to kind of make the decision about the vaccine mandate. But I don't know. And now I kind of think I was wrong on that because I think that the businesses that had these mandates in place didn't have a better result. There was nothing. There was no business. Yeah. It is their business. And, you know, in general, I think I would support businesses making their own decisions. But look what happened in New York. Again, the businesses couldn't make their own decisions. The private vaccine mandate was only lifted today. We're going to get to, you know, how much better it is for each of you to be in Florida than to be in New York or California in a second. But just to close out kind of a conversation about immigration. And then after we talk with them a little bit about the places they fled folks watching on YouTube, well, we'll get to some questions as well. But in terms of immigration, do you think, I mean, Florida is a state which is gaining lots of people. It's one of the fastest growing states in the country. To put that into context, basically since World War II, Florida, and actually even before that, it's been one of the, you know, on annual or, you know, centennial censuses. It is, you know, it's been doing extremely well for, you know, 100 years. But it's got a lot of people moving there. Should, you know, does it make sense for dissents to be pro-immigration? Because that's where, that's how people are showing up in Florida. And that's me or Zach? Me? Yeah, well, I'll start with you. Well, I think that the Republican Party in general is finding it very hard to be pro-immigration right now because of what's happening at the border. When you're having 200,000 people enter every month and it's not controlled in any way, I think it's going to be very hard to convince people that, oh, we need more of this. I think if there were more controls in place, I don't see a Republican Party that used to be against immigration. I don't think that they, in general, would oppose immigrants. I think what's happening at the border is, well, I think they do now. I mean, Donald Trump was explicitly against legal immigration, as well as illegal immigration. Donald Trump is an X factor in a lot of ways in the Republican Party and elsewhere. But yeah, he, sure, he opposed maybe legal immigration as well. But again, I think it's tied directly to the influx at the border. Even for him, he came in with Build the Wall. And that's, you know, it's very specific. It's not like stop the flights at the airports. It's not like, you know, check everybody's student visa. It's Build the Wall because that's where the problem is. Yeah, I think that Florida Republicans should, even just from a purely self-interested point of view, they should want Venezuelans, for instance, to be settling in Florida. I mean, we saw that it was, you know, the hard core like anti-communist like Cubans down in Miami really helped sway Florida for Trump in a strong way. This is like, anyone who's escaping socialism, like they've seen it firsthand, they're going to have those kind of values that align with what Republicans say they want. I agree, yeah. I think, yeah. So that's, you know, that's good. Generally, I think immigrants add to the economy. They add to our cultural life. They make places better. That was my experience in California. It's been my experience in Florida. So I'm all for it. And, you know, I'm not, I don't object to the idea that governors should could work with each other and try to, you know, find places to settle immigrants that, you know, might be better if a town at the border feels like their capacity is being strained. That should be something that's worked out. It's the deception that bothers me. And also just, you know, going out of state, something has very little to do with Florida in doing this. And it's, it's the one of the things... Where have those governors been? You know, where have they been? This isn't a new problem. It's been going on. What did they think was happening in those Texas towns? And it's not like it's not getting any coverage. It is covered, you know? Actually, the moving company that moved me from New York to Florida does like this yearly cleanup in a different city. And last year, they happened to do a border town in Texas and they found like, I don't remember the story, all those immigrants onto the Del Rio bridge. That was like my mover discovered them like, oh, there's all these people under the bridge. Blue Line Moving, by the way, really good company. And, you know, and they did it again this year. They saw a dead body. They saw garbage shrewd everywhere. And it's a real, real problem that none of the people that would support, you know, unchecked immigration have ever had to live with. Yeah. I mean, obviously, if you're living on the border, you know, where people come through checkpoints, you're going to have more, you know, of that. It's true that, you know, Trump did not have a plan for border control that was particularly effective or humane. It's also, it's been decades at this point since we've had comprehensive immigration reform. This was something that George W. Bush said when he got reelected that that and so security privatization were going to be the two things he was spending his political capital on that lasted about six weeks. So immigration reform, whether it's comprehensive or piecemeal, has been elusive. I think, you know, this is for me as a libertarian, I have to say that the face of the Republican Party, and I think this includes Ron DeSantis and the national conservatives, or so-called national conservatives, are very hostile to legal and illegal immigration. And they'll, they'll key on illegal, but then they'll be like, well, we have to have a moratorium on legal immigration because we don't have a comprehensive plan or we are, our unity as a nation is, our identity is being challenged by too much too soon. That's a real problem for me. I think, again, if you fix, if you fix the illegal part, I think you will see a shift in opinion on the legal part. Yeah, but there's no way to fix the illegal part. I mean, you know, the, the, the big push, the big increase in illegal crossings, it's not because people are suddenly feeling more illegal. It's because the American economy is growing and there are a lot of jobs here. And if you're from Latin America, and, and we should also point out, by the way, that they, you know, the big sender countries, it's no longer simply Mexico, it's also India and China. And a lot of those people come in illegally, although not, typically not at the southern border, but, you know, you cannot regulate flows by treating people like, you know, like they're drugs crossing the border. You just create black markets and intensify all of the negative effects and just driving it further underground. Also, Florida, yeah, Florida's net migration and immigration, if you combine those things, you know, people moving within the United States to Florida and from without the United States to Florida, that number combined. The summer between 2020 and 2021, or that year between those summers, that was, Florida was number one for net migration and immigration gain. And both of those things, I think, have been very good for the state. Like that is, those are both reasons why we've seen pretty substantial economic growth here. So, that's something I think people might want to talk about. Somebody, you know, obviously, I'm dialing in here from New York City, which has a lot of immigrants, although Eric Adams, the kind of idiot mayor, the most recent idiot mayor of New York has said, you know, we can't deal with any immigrants. He's a peculiar character on that. Yeah. Wow. But I've lived in parts of the country, in particular, southwestern Ohio, that does not have many immigrants. And, you know, immigrants go to where the jobs are. And like, it's never a good sign. If you're living in a part of the country that doesn't have a lot of immigration, whether it's legal or illegal, you're basically living in a part of the country that is kind of dying economically and culturally, et cetera. But this, but this also goes against the point that these people are refugees and they need refuge in the country. Economic immigration is a completely different ballgame altogether. Yeah, I actually, I disagree with that. I mean, the Venezuelans are specifically, you know, they are, you know, they're booted because of political civil war and whatnot. But I think, I mean, my grandparents were all economic refugees from Ireland and Italy. And they managed to squeeze into, you know, the United States before the doors from Europe shut. And I shuddered to think what would have happened if they were even a few years later, they wouldn't have made it in. And I'd be in Argentina, you know, panhandling or something, to be quite honest. But OK, so I just want to point out a couple of questions here. Zink 17, before we even got started, wrote to write the words, the country's most controversial governor is a sign of reason being possessed by the enemy's narrative. OK, thank you. Zink 17, that's great. Who would you pick? Daniel Spencer says, who would you pick as more controversial? I guess talking back to some of those people. Let's and Zink is just talking about rejecting the enemy's framing of controversy. OK, Josh Joshua Baratheon Baratheon says, as a Floridian, I like the census. I don't agree with him on some of the smaller issues. But overall, he's a great governor. Let's talk a little bit about where you guys came from. And we'll start with you, Zach, because you traveled further. You were you're you're a Florida native, right? You grew up in what? Like Central Florida, the Orlando region in Orlando. Mm hmm. You went to University of Florida. Yes. One of the most overrated football teams really in history. Oh, there you went to National Championship. I was there. Thank you very much. And a terrible color scheme. But then you made your way to California to the land of, you know, lotus seeders and dreams. And you ended up you ended up working at Reason, you know, and but then you left a year ago. Why did you leave and why did you pick Florida as, you know, as your destination? Yeah. So I both traveled further and in a sense, not as far as Carol, because it was a homecoming of sorts. But, you know, it was multifactorial. You know, it was about family. I have family here in Florida. And during COVID, as we all know, everything changed. Things were just getting, there's just a more oppressive feeling creeping in in in California, particularly LA. I took a summer vacation to Florida during the summer of 2020 when they were open and California was entirely shut down. And the difference was just so startling. And I think that was pretty much the end for me. Like I was there in Florida just hanging out by the beach and being normal. And I read on Twitter that California just reimposed their indoor mask mandate. And I'm like, I don't want to go back there. So that was that was the beginning. And just like it just kept adding up, you know, things were deteriorating, the quality of life, kind of the situation on the sidewalks and public safety. And I think a lot of that will turn around, but I have young kids and I don't have a lot of time to wait around. I was disturbed by the schooling situation. Yeah, talk a little bit about that because, you know, you were in Los Angeles. So this, you know, not San Francisco, but Los Angeles, I spent the last three months of 2020 in the first five months of 2021 in Los Angeles. And it was it was disturbing. You know, I mean, it was very pleasant, but there was a real sense that things were kind of going down the drain. There was a veneer of civilization that seemed to be kind of blowing out to sea on a regular basis. Talk a bit about the schooling, though, because, you know, part of it is you guys both have school age kids. And that's a time when a lot of people leave cities or, you know, for a variety of reasons. But what was scary about the school situation? What were you in California? I mean, first and foremost was just the manner in which the teachers' unions were acting and the rhetoric they were putting out and the ways that the districts were caving to them. I realized just how much political power they had in terms of delaying and delaying school openings in terms of keeping masks on very little children in contradiction of evidence that this was not necessary, denying there could be any harmful social effects whatsoever of making a four-year-old wear a mask all day outside. There was rumors at the time I was about to head out that they were going to impose a vaccine mandate on every child. And, you know, I'm not against vaccines, but just the idea that the state is going to have that much say in the raising of your children and, you know, barring them from entry based on to, you know, businesses or everyday life. It just started to feel like a very, like, anti-parent, anti-child situation. And, you know, there were a lot of... How much cheaper is it for you? Like, did you own a house in L.A.? Yes. Okay. And so, like, can you compare just kind of roughly what your house was like there versus the one in Florida costs? I mean, yeah, the costs are not even comparable. And in L.A., you know, I got fortunate to get a house during the slump, but there's no way I would have been able to afford a house like at the current prices. And that's a huge reason why people from L.A. and I think New York and New Jersey are moving down to Florida is there's just, you can afford a little more space to spread out. And I think after being cooped up in an apartment, a lot of people wanted that space. And, you know, people like me and Carol, who are in the much derided laptop class, suddenly have, like, the flexibility to work anywhere. And so, lots of people, this kind of already existing trend of people moving to the cheaper Sunbelt areas just, I think, accelerated rapidly because of all those factors. Carol, what about you? You were living in Park Slope. You had a kind of like a mansion, right? I did. Like a rehabbed place. Well, yes, yeah. You know, we bought a house in 2019, that's 2019. And we spent, like, over a year plus renovating it. And we're, you know, two immigrants from the boroughs of New York. Park Slope Townhouse is literally the dream. Like, no, there is no other dream. There's no Fifth Avenue. There's no Park Avenue. It's a Park Slope Townhouse. And we put everything into it. And we definitely plan to raise our kids there. I know you said that this is the age that people usually leave the cities. I fully agree. I had so many people, you know, over the time that we lived in Brooklyn leave for the suburbs, but not us. We were named. We were staying forever. And in fact, how crazy things have gotten and how much things have changed. The only place that we had ever considered living other than New York City was Los Angeles. So the fact that we ended up in Florida is bizarre, but amazing. We couldn't be happier. And it's, it began in summer of 2020. The COVID restrictions were definitely at the forefront of that. The George Floyd riots were up there for us as well. But not, it wasn't even that. It wasn't even these things. It was not so much the restrictions and it was not so much the violence or what was going on. It was the abject denial that anything was happening from our neighbors. Just the Park Slope groups are so like, what crime? What are you even talking about? Like, and defund police signs and their $4 million brownstones. And it was really difficult to watch. And then when the schools didn't open and all these rich people got themselves, you know, tutors and pods and they moved to their beach houses to send the kids to public school there or they sent the kids to private school. And they didn't say one word after spending the whole summer marching for equity about all the people who couldn't afford to do this. And it was just galling and it started to hate everybody. And I needed to get out of there and Florida became the natural choice. And so can you roughly like you? So have you bought a house in South Florida? And how's it stack up to the? So again, I had a good situation in Brooklyn, which I don't think a lot of people have. And we had actually gotten the house at a fairly low New York price. And because we renovated it, it increased in value. So we have a lot more space here, but I already had a good amount of space there. It wasn't like we were in a one bedroom apartment and now we get to, you know. So it was just none of these things that people normally talk about with moving. And it was our whole family is still there. It was extremely difficult decision. And just the idea of us leaving New York that my husband and I are just hilarious. It seemed impossible in March 2020 that we would ever leave New York. If you had stayed in New York, would your kids have gone to public school? Because you have three kids. They were always in public. I now have a daughter in private here. She's like quirky and needs kind of advancement in a way that my sons may be. You know, we're calling that neurodivergent now. We call it a genius in our house. You know, but it is fun. I mean, and this is part of why Florida and, you know, this, this was happening under Rick Scott as governor. It was happening under Charlie Chris. It was happening under Jeff Bush. Florida is so significantly cheaper than a state like New York or California. Texas also is gaining people. But, you know, how I guess I'll ask each of you, do you, you know, do you miss anything from the places you've left? But then also like, is this is, you know, is Florida running out of space? Is it running out of housing? Because you hear so many people because of the migrants, right? Well, yeah, no, I mean, seriously, but you're, you know, I've been hearing more and more accounts that people are, you know, trying to find houses for like 300 grand, which is a large chunk of change. But it's, I think it's the average of housing prices around the US, which have been bid up during COVID and whatnot. But that it's getting harder and harder to find parts of Florida that are, you know, move in ready. Yeah, I mean, I, yes, I, there are things I miss about California. I miss friends that I had there. I miss. You can always replace friends. And family. I, I, I miss the kind of no humidity, like constant temperate. I miss like the mountains. I miss a lot of the food. So there's a lot of things I miss in terms of, you know, Florida and housing, the prices, yeah, they've been going up. Housing prices have been going up, rents have been going up, especially in, you know, the bigger cities. And that is something that I hope that Florida learns from California and New York, not to go down the super nimby route. I think that they've avoided that over the past decade. But now there's going to be more of that, that pressure and those political incentives to go that way. And you mentioned your intro, you know, our colleague Christian wrote about a case in Gainesville, where the local board there wanted to change some of the zoning to be able to build more multifamily housing and so forth. And the state came in and, you know, is fighting that. And that's exactly the kind of thing that happened in California that is bad news. So we need to be able to expand to meet the need because there's plenty of space in Florida. It's not like you walk around and you're, you know, bumping into people. It's purely like, will you allow that demand to be met or not? Yeah. And that is a strange thing that DeSantis, you know, in this Carol, I guess goes to some of the reservations that I know. Some libertarians feel he was kind of jaw boning of pushing Gainesville not to change zoning. Gainesville wanted to change some zoning laws that, you know, said that you had to have only single family dwellings in particular parts of town. They wanted to open that up a bit and he was like, no, don't do that. Keep it that way. I guess two things. One, do you worry that is Florida, you know, and New York certainly had this California definitely has this kind of nimbyism that creeps in and it's like, you know, no, everything is perfect the way it is. And we don't want to change. We don't want to expand. There's that. But then there's also within DeSantis, there seems to be this willingness to contravene conservative Bible, you know, where you say like, let localities decide more things. Everything is about pushing decision making down to local levels, except when you don't like what their what that decision is. And then you step it. So I actually, I don't know this Gainesville story. I'll definitely read it in reason. But, you know, Orlando, for example, right now is considering rent control. Something that we know is a failure has is always a failure has never been anything but a failure. Would I mind if the governor said no, you cannot. I don't know if you can. I have no idea if you can actually step into this kind of thing. But and that would align with my values, right? Like I think rent control is stupid and has never worked out. Florida, by the way, did I mean, they got rid of its crepe back in in various ways, but about 25 years ago at the state level, the state assembly banned. There was rent control in about five cities and they banned it at the state level. Right. So if it's possible, I mean, you know, am I supposed to oppose him doing that? Well, I guess. Yeah, I mean, there's a question of like, if he does it by executive order and whether or not that's technically legal or is that bullying or is that the state assembly, which is very Republican. Very, right. You know, can you, Carol, and, you know, Zach, I think I know your answer to this. But like, can you comment on the awfulness of the Florida climate and kind of topography? But I mean, that makes it all the more impressed. Every time I go to Florida, and it's the same thing with Texas, where I lived in Texas for two years in a horrible part of East Texas. But like the fact that people are moving there in droves is a testament to how shitty places like California and New York have become because it's not like you're not going to California or Manhattan, you're going to Flatsville with 110 percent humidity. I love the heat. I don't know. I thought like everybody kept telling me just wait for the summer, and I thought the summer was amazing. And I went back and forth to New York a lot this summer, because we were renovating here. And every time I was in New York, I was like, it is just as hot here, but nobody has a pool. And it's like, this is awful. You know, it's not like, who's pool would you like to go to my pool, your pool, their pool, you know, like it like it is in Florida, and New York seems to have the almost the same heat. I'm finding the rain a little bit more challenging in the fall. I feel like everybody was like, just wait till summer. Nobody said to me just wait till fall. And it's not hurricanes or anything. It's just that everything keeps getting rained out. And I'm not used to that. I will say that as someone who grew up in Central Florida, that is rough. And it's amazing to me that that is where a lot of the growth is is in Orlando, Orange County, because yeah, there's not a lot of kind of, you know, natural beauty. A lot of it is like very, you know, paved over and extremely flat. There's lakes and stuff like that. I live in North Florida, which I'm enjoying. It's, you know, there's some nice outdoor like little streams. And it's there's even a little bit of elevation every once in a while. You'll be surprised to hear. But I do feel like California, that's almost like a curse for California is that they have this embarrassment of like natural resources that they've been able to free ride on for so long that people will put up with so much that the government in a lot of ways just has not had to perform. And, you know, those natural resources attracted so much industry, the industry created wealth, the political class kind of just rode that wealth for as long as it could until it was no longer sustainable. And that's what we're seeing happening right now is kind of, as that wealth evacuates, what's going to happen next? What do you to bring it back to DeSantis, proper? You know, what's your sense of he ruffled a lot of feathers when he went after the Walt Disney Corporation, which at a certain point, you know, spoke out against the law that was called the don't say gay bill. And we should talk about public schools and about the interest, kind of the interplay between the government and the schools. But when he went after the Disney Corporation, how does that do you think that's good for business overall? Is it bad? Or is it, you know, just kind of it doesn't really matter. Finance is actually the largest business in Florida. Agriculture is big. Disney is obviously, you know, big, but it's not big in the way that those things are. But, you know, Zach, what I mean, do you feel what, you know, what's your sense of the business climate and how it is DeSantis making, you know, things better for business, worse for business, or it's not really a concern? So yeah, I made a short video for reason on the Disney kerfuffle. And I think that his defense is that Disney had this special government and he was just taking that privilege away, which is like, okay, fine, fair enough. But this has existed for, you know, decades. And it seems to have worked pretty well. And you're just, again, kicking the apple cart here because you are trying to make a big symbolic gesture for the national stage. I'm taking on woke Disney. There's the stop woke act, which just passed or that was signed into law that is actually regulating what kind of speech can be, or what kind of seminars can be run within private corporations. So certain types of diversity seminars are banned. And, you know, however you feel about diversity seminars, it's clearly like he's taking this to the next level in blurring the public private distinction. And he said that in public comments, he said that he believes that these big corporations aren't really exactly private. They're more like arms of the state. Do you want to run that clip? And then we'll come to you, Carol. Do you want to run that clip if you can, Zach? This is from the third annual National Conservatism Conference. And the National Conservatives are a group that oftentimes define themselves as post liberal. So they want, you know, they want the government to pick winners and losers. And they're saying, you know, like this libertarian ideal, this libertarian utopia that we have been living in my entire life, where, you know, the government doesn't put its thumb on the scale, and it just lets markets, you know, pick winners and losers. That's horse and buggy thinking and we've got to fight fire with fire. Okay. Run the clip. The last few years have witnessed a great American exodus from states and localities governed by leftist politicians, states and localities that are failing on core. Sorry, that was the wrong one. Okay. Now have a woke mind virus has infected all these other institutions. I mean, just look at corporate America. Most corporations, some of these big corporations are now exercising quasi public power. We're not just going to sit idly by if you're trying to circumscribe people's freedoms. And that's true of its government. It's also true of its big business. But I think the lesson for people on the right is I think there was a generation of people that kind of the muscle memory was just if it's private, just defer to it. And you know, by the way, that dig muscle memory, he's obviously attacking Donald Trump, right? Carol, you are objectively pro groomer. So you must feel threatened by people like Ron DeSantis. But isn't I mean, by the way, like isn't the and the groomer rhetoric that was coming out of his press secretary's office is insane, right? Like this idea, this idea that the Walt Disney Corporation is like this massive QAnon comet pizza resort international, you know, like I love association. That is that shit crazy, right? I think you're looking at it the wrong way. And so it's not that they're saying, oh, there's been libertas libertarian paradise the whole time. And now we're going to put a stop to that libertarian paradise. No, what they're saying is that the politicians have directed what's going on in these corporations the whole time. It just hasn't been us. It's been the other side. And so for them, they're saying, why shouldn't it be our language? They've made corporations live under a number of different liberal policies. I mean, and thinking about Disney Corporation, like, there is no Walmart in New York City, because they just don't like Walmart. And they're just like, no, we're not doing this. We're not letting a Walmart exist here. This place at the Chick-fil-A can't open. I believe Boston is one of them. And yet Disney wait, so what I'm saying is governments have always got gone after corporations that they don't like. What's different here is that it's a Republican doing it. And I don't know that I necessarily have a problem with that. I think that Disney waited into this political controversy. They had no business in it. And yeah, they got punched in the nose. I don't know. I'm okay with it. Okay. Now, why? And if we were in that libertarian paradise, I would fight to maintain that. I think I think it's a dividing line because yeah, for me, the answer is like to the extent that the government is forcing companies or businesses to do things, the answer is to stop allowing them to do that rather than ratcheting up the next step. How does the whole not letting them get involved in companies? There was a time when in certain places like where that was happening, in Texas, for instance, but now Greg Abbott, who is also kind of a shadow person, I don't think he's going to, I don't think he obviously doesn't have the profile of DeSantis, but there is a vying for what comes next in the Republican Party and Texas and Florida are kind of, they're fascinating because they're massive states and they are successful states and they are conservative states that have a model of governance where taxes are lower, spending is lower than in blue states. And people are moving there on that. Yeah, I think the more libertarian answer of how to fight back against some of these trends that we might not like is, first of all, to start turning down federal money for things because that is how often the federal government imposes its preferences on states and Texas has done that. Sometimes there's been small towns that have occasionally done things like that. There's the entire kind of decriminalization movement is an example of just ignoring federal dictates. You can sue the federal government or help a private company sue the federal government if you feel like their rights are being infringed. Those are the kinds of things that I would be more comfortable seeing rather than, okay, this has always been a problem. We have this marriage of corporate and state and so we're just going to embrace that and we're going to make the corporations and the private businesses do our bidding now. In the era of you must bake the cake. I just don't think that these lawsuits are going to mean anything. They won that case, well they won the case and now they're being sued again and so their whole life is going to be in the courtroom with this. How about we just don't allow this to happen? I will direct people, viewers, listeners, watchers, participants to the Arastaya, the cycle of Greek tragic plays where you don't, if you meet murder with murder, which is completely illegitimate and it's an eye for an eye, you just keep perpetuating a cycle. You need to have some kind of justice. You need a different system and I worry about this, that if you have right-wingers who are a Senate and Trump certainly signaled this, we're going to fight back twice as hard. I mean, it's the Godfather and it just ends with everybody. I love the Godfather. Yeah, I know, but you don't want to be living in the Godfather. You want to be the third or fourth generation. In Judaism, there's a big, you know, if somebody comes to kill you, kill them first. Well, this is, you know what, I think Ron DeSantis is with me on this. This is a Christian country, okay? It's not a Jewish country. It's a Christian country. No, that's a creation of the 50s and 60s. We believe in faith and salvation, but let's talk about schools a little bit because, you know, this is also something, and Carol, I think you would agree with me, like if New York City, and this is also true of LA, you know, and they're the two largest school districts in the country, if they could have done something, if they could have done anything to make the schools actually responsive to parents, it would be so much harder to leave these places, but they don't give a shit. They don't care. Florida, and you know, this is certainly at least started under Jeb Bush, if not before, was a school that was a state that was focused on giving parents more choice in K through 12 education and more control. Zach, you mentioned you have two kids in charter schools that are like near where you live, et cetera. Was anything like that possible in Los Angeles? Well, yeah. Los Angeles actually had pretty good school choice as well, thanks to Mayor Antonio Villarigosa. He was a big advocate of that. The problem is that the teachers union is still quite strong there and very adamantly anti-school choice, and they were leveraging this emergency to make it harder for charter schools, and they were not getting the kind of support that I would have liked to see to push back. I mean, they had in their list of demands, no more approvals on charter schools. It felt like there was, you know, like maybe the schools are being responsive to a lot of the parents there, and a lot of the parents there are just not on the same page as I was regarding COVID policy. So that was a big deal moving to Florida, as just a lot more of the parents, it feels like kind of wanted the same thing. They wanted their kids in school. They didn't want them wearing masks all day. And the momentum in terms of school choice is still going in the right direction, whereas I'm not sure where that is headed for LA, even though they've got some decent school choice now, I'm worried about where it goes next. Carol, we have you for about 10 more minutes. So let's rat a tat at you for a little bit. And I want to point out before I ask you about your kid's schooling experience. Jim Epstein, our executive producer writes that I just ran a poll for viewers, and it was asked, was DeSantis wrong to dissolve Disney's special taxing district? 71% said no. More importantly, another person writes, Nick and Zach are pretentious intellectuals living in La La Land. Carol is on point and real. And you know what, I just want to love you. You pretentious intellectual. I don't even know where I am. I just, you know, my house boy, would you please bring me another mimosa? So Carol, you're, talk about the school experience, you know, where you are in Florida versus New York. So it's funny because actually, I loved my kids' schools in New York. My daughter went to a gifted and talented school in New York City. It's one of the five, like standalone. So she's gifted and talented in Park Slow. And she's kind of, you know, she's autistic. Oh my God. But she's autistic in Florida. No, she's actually very social, socially just doing real great. Yeah, you know, don't ever let her see this. Okay. She's most likely to see this. She's actually a natural born libertarian. That's like another episode. The world will beat that out of her. Yeah, I know. And maybe the employees at Disney Corporation. So she went to this great school. It's called Nest Plus M in Manhattan. Amazing. Mostly immigrants. They didn't allow any woke nonsense. Anytime any, like, wokeness tried to enter the school, like, oh, the climate marched like my son's Park Slope school, they, you know, climate marched. Her school was like, do it on your own time. We're not interrupting math class for your climate march. It was great. But they closed the whole time for COVID the whole 2020 school year. Like, it wasn't even half days or part time or anything. They were just closed. So she didn't see her school until we returned from our original Florida trip in May of 2021. And I can remember us talking about when you announced your move earlier this year and whatnot, I mean, that the lack of, you know, accountability and transparency with the schools was a major factor. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I actually quite liked my kids schools in New York City. And my sons went to a school in Park Slope, which actually wasn't very woke either. And I think part of that is because all the parents are so woke, they just everybody assumed they're getting it at home. And I, you know, I was an open conservative in Park Slope. And I felt comfortable and happy. And had the pandemic not happened, I think I'd be living there today. So I liked their schools in New York. And then we moved here. And if a million Americans have to die in order for you to have an awakening, so be it. That's what you're saying, right? Listen, way fewer would have died if we had followed my, you know, my protocols. Actually, I haven't had COVID yet. And everybody got COVID at the reason holiday party, except me. So I did not, you know, you didn't either. Wow. Now, well, I had had it. I had had it again. So yeah, I haven't had it yet. So just follow my lead. And I've really liked their schools here. So the three of them went to public school. We moved here in January. My daughter's public school kept advancing her. It was just she needed some other things that we felt private school could offer. It's our first ever experience of private school that we've never had kids in private school before. It's kind of weird. And again, the private school there, and I'm sure it's a very good private school, but it's what about half the cost of half the cost of a school in New York City, maybe even less. That is, I mean, this is, you know, and I say this to somebody who was born in Brooklyn, my family left Brooklyn in the late sixties to move to New Jersey and all of my cousins, I hope we were not watching this, but who stayed in Brooklyn were like, how could you leave Brooklyn? Everything is here. Right. And then I lived all over the country. And like when you get outside of the New York metro area, you're like, holy shit, I can get three times as much space and opportunity, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Like a third of the price. What was, you know, you asked Zach what he misses about California. And for me, I like things like spicy Asian food. It's just, I have not been able to recreate that in Florida. They just, it's not as close. I go back to New York, I go like straight to like the noodle shop. But you can do that. I mean, that's, you know, and the distance and obviously like I ended up, I did a 30 year tour of, you know, the hinterlands and ended up back in New York for reasons. I mean, I like it here and I like it here, despite the costs. You know, I'm willing to pay a premium. It's different when you have kids, it's different if, you know, we're all in upper income brackets in a way that like one of my cousins from Connecticut moved to Florida, this would have been in the seventies. And they, she and her husband who did not have college degrees, were able to, you know, have a true middle class ascendant mobile life that would have been impossible had they stayed in the Northeast. That's right. I'm actually, I'm kind of optimistic about like the future of restaurants and some aspects of culture in Florida, just because of this, this influx. And even if you look over, you know, the past 10 years in the big cities in Florida, it's been, you know, Florida has always thought of as it's like you go there when you retire. But there's in the, in the cities, especially there's been growth in like the younger demographics. I've met lots of people who left New York because or New Jersey or whatever, because their business was shut down. They have an opportunity to start a restaurant here in Florida. All that is going to bear fruit if we're open and welcoming to immigrants and continue to be, you know, they'll bring that in. So, yeah. So, Carol, yeah, you've got a couple minutes. So, let's, let's just go to you and, you know, like finish up. What, you know, DeSantis, you're a big fan. Is there anything about him that gives you pause or is there anything about the Florida experiment that you think could really kind of screw things up? So, I guess I'm a big fan, but it's really like, it's like, I've never liked my own politician before. Like my representative, that's crazy. Other than Andrew Cuomo, right? You must love Andrew Cuomo and chocolate shimmers. You know, I was thinking about the last politician that might have had any kind of like actual change over my life, but I think it might have been Giuliani. I was going to say Eric Gorbachev. You know, Rudy Giuliani, right? But I was kind of a teenager, so it wasn't that dramatic. But I think with DeSantis, he literally made my family's life better. And it's, it's a wild thing to experience. It gives me pause. There were so many moments, I'm so used to careless politicians who don't dot the I's and cross the T's that every time a story drops like with Disney, it was like, oh, the taxes of the area around Disney is going to go up. And then his office was like, no, it's not. Here's why. Or with the migrants, it was like, oh, he stole these migrants in the middle of the night and lied to them. And then they have these signed papers showing that they told them exactly where they were going to go with the map of Martha's Vineyard and where it was and everything. And so there's a lot of moments where I'm just like, you know, used to politicians who just do things and don't really think it through. He's extremely smart. I don't know how much people know about him, but he is like super brainy. And, and just all the, all the like hip pieces on him are like, he takes everything very seriously. He is super careful. Like it's like, you know, his college roommate says everybody wanted to cheat on him and he wouldn't let them. Like it's just, it's stuff like that is in the hip pieces. So I don't know, I appreciate that kind of leadership. I like you're in love with him. Yeah, he also, I believe his Little League team on the Little League World Series or at least went to the finals, which is, you know, it's like enough already. Right, right. Enough already. Yeah, too much. Do you think he's a phony though, because he's, you know, he plays a man of the people, but he has a BA from Yale and a JD, a lot of great from Harvard. And he kind of seems to be talking like a dummy. See, I don't, I don't see that. I see him as being, okay, is he like a polished politician? No. But I think that's really just who he is. You know, his cowboy boots, like none of it's affected. I don't think that he is this, again, I don't know, I don't know the term for it except polished politician. He's not the guy who gives these perfect speeches. He's really just talking about what he believes and what he stands for. And I think it comes across pretty in a pretty powerful way. I don't see him as talking down at all. I think that he is using the language that he would normally use. So I had, you know, I've met him on a number of occasions and he's very personable, but he doesn't have that politician thing where you just like feel like they're driving you and like, you know, at all. So I don't know. I don't know that you are qualified to answer this question, but what the hell? If it comes down to, you know, Trump versus DeSantis, who do you think wins in that face off? You know, they're both kind of hanging out in Florida now. And, you know, Trump, the recent past of the Republican Party and he changed the Republican Party, he changed the direction. He made it anti immigrant. He made it anti free trade. You know, he made it a culture war struggle and what you are intensified that DeSantis seems to in many ways to be a refinement of it. He's obviously smarter, more talent. I want to say more talented, more detail oriented and more thoughtful as you were saying, like he's not, he's not an idiot, like he actually does the work and does the work. Yeah. So what do you what do you think is, do you think DeSantis is the future of the Republican Party or that you have to be? It's really tough to answer like kind of just between the two of them because Trump has this thing that people are just obsessed with, you know, for good and bad. I think the right that really loves him and the left that really hates him, he really makes people feel stuff. And I think that pointing to all this is all the policy work I've done is hard to beat that again, X factor thing that Trump has. I definitely think DeSantis is the future of the Republican Party, though. I think this is he's setting out a leadership model and these other Republican governors are following it. And I absolutely see that being the way that it goes. I don't know what happens between them just because Trump is this complete, you know, just random phenomenon. So it's hard to say. But primaries are a unique beast. And I have seen the candidate who everybody thought was going to win, not win, and some, you know, dark horse come in and win the whole thing or, you know, it happens. It happens quite often. So we'll see. All right, we're going to let you go. I regret to tell people that Zach and I will continue talking for a while longer. Thank you, Carol. Yeah, we're in Lala. Carol, Carol Markowitz. Thank you for following. Follow her at Carol on Twitter. K. A. R. O. L. Thanks again. Thank you. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye. Zach, what about you? You know, we didn't really talk about DeSantis in terms of things like gun rights, which is a big libertarian issue. Yeah, he seems to be yeah, very hardcore. He wants to get rid of basically all permitting of guns and things like that. You know, does that play well for you or does it play well for libertarians? Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, I think constitutional carry is a great policy for governors all over America to advance. You know, coming from California, the law there for the longest time was shall issue, which basically meant the discretion was left to the local sheriff. And if you're in a county like L. A. County, then you're not getting a concealed carry permit unless you're like personal friends with the sheriff or something, or you're a celebrity whose bodyguard can like you know, you can pay it off for your bodyguard to conceal carry or something like that. So that later, you know, California had to give in on that because of some some federal court rulings. But yeah, I think on that issue certainly DeSantis is aligned with libertarians. How do you make sense of you know, of like the overall package of ideas and not you know, obviously we've worked out together for I don't know, is it like 10 years or something like that? I forget when you but I don't know that we've ever had a conversation about kind of electoral politics or partisan politics. But when you vote, you know, and because you're in Florida, I don't know, does the does the Libertarian Party have a candidate for governor? They do. Yeah, I unfortunately don't remember the name right now. But yes, there is one. And you know, I know that, you know, Chris and DeSantis, you know, there are the polls I've seen or anywhere, you know, it seems like DeSantis is comfortably ahead. But I think it's within four or five points. So you know, a lot can happen between now and election day. But when you vote as a libertarian as somebody with libertarian proclivities, what do you you know, like how do you how do you map out? Okay, well, you know, there's Chris, whatever he stands for, then there's DeSantis and his things, there's a libertarian, etc. Like how how will you evaluate around DeSantis? Because on some levels that I know a lot of the times have reason we pick up on the things like his, you know, the don't say gay law, which was also rights and education law. Yeah. Yeah. And you had an interesting, you know, video about that because there are certain elements of it that are I find despicable. I do. I think the law is objectively kind of homophobic and transphobic. But it was also like part of what it was responding to was the idea that schools were not transparent at all with with parents about like what's going on with their kids. So I don't know like how do you how do you how will you make a decision whether or not to vote for Ron DeSantis? Yeah, the the I mean, the parental rights and education law, I, you know, yes, there's some unfortunate aspects to it. I think it's it's a little vague in, you know, what exactly a teacher is allowed to say or not say in a classroom that the thrust of the law was, you know, ages K through three, you're not supposed to teach about gender identity or sexuality in district schools. And then like you have to notify parents, older grades, it has like conform with some state level standards. And then you have to notify parents when things like, you know, gender identity issues arise in school, which I think is completely reasonable. And generally, like the idea of the parental rights movement that the parents are the primary caregivers and decision makers for children, that's good. That's not something that I was always getting from the state of California or the city of Los Angeles or LAUSD. Like, I was not getting that message loud and clear here in Florida. I do pretty much get that message. And that does, you know, put me more at ease, even if I might object to some of the particulars. And then, you know, that's how I try to evaluate DeSantis as a whole. I agree with a lot of what Carol just said, like he's, he's not Donald Trump, even though he's adopted some of his mannerisms purposely. He is more careful and considered. And he does look at data and understand it. That was an attraction to me when I was moving here the way he handled COVID. I thought it took a level of courage to be kind of the first governor out there really pushing back against it and say, we're going to swerve and try something different. And it turned out a lot of those policies ended up looking a lot more rational than a place like California. So I give him credit for all of that. You know, Charlie Christ so far to me has been running a fairly substance-less campaign. He's not a very substantive person. He kind of just jumps from party to party. Like he's a pure opportunist and kind of just defining himself as like, what is DeSantis? I'm not that. And that's not a very compelling vision. So as a Floridian, you know, I would not be upset to continue living under a DeSantis-led state house. You know, I will continue to have objections to kind of the excess that he's demonstrated. And this thing with the Martha's Vineyard has really thrown his judgment into question more so than pretty much anything so far. I don't get it. Is it too much to ask a Republican, a conservative, and particularly somebody in Florida, you know, which has this, you know, this particular history with Cuban refugees and Cuban exiles. But I, you know, and I realize who needs to hear this, but you know, if he had said, I'm taking 50 Venezuelans and I'm bringing them to Florida to highlight the fact that we need to be doing something different at the border, blah, blah, blah. Like he, you know, would that I mean that would have neutered the left and a critique of him as much as whatever, you know, gassy port on the fire here. I don't know. Yeah. Well, like one thing he's been pushing in education is to teach about the horrors of communism. Like he wants that to be part of the state curriculum. And I don't know. I, I, I'm not in favor of government schools, but if they are going to exist, then teaching people about the horrors of communism seems like a good thing. And that could be something he could lean into and say, you know, we are especially welcoming to immigrants who are escaping from communist regimes because we're anti-communism or something like that. And he could include, you know, the state of California and New York, you know, he can put them up there with Venezuela and Cuba, North Korea. So unlike Trump, I think DeSantis has some libertarian instincts. Like his whole reaction to the pandemic was to say, we can't only defer to these public health officials because they're only looking at one narrow slice of the picture. And our job is to weigh different concerns and kind of protect individual decision making and individual freedom and rights. And that was all very appealing rhetoric and action to a libertarian. And it seems like as that has receded, so has that attitude and those ethos. And I just hope that, you know, that, that that was, that was legitimate and that was real. And that's part of who he is as, as a leader. So I think this could be a plot. Yeah. I'm sorry. Finish that thought. Yeah. I was saying he, he, so, you know, to the like question of this video here, like I think he could be a boon for liberty if those instincts prevail. But I think it's, it's, it's uncertain whether they will, because he just gets so much attention by throwing himself into the kind of like right wing culture war, like we're going to go against the world corporations. One of the problems to just, I think as an electoral strategy, and this is something that Donald Trump has shown Donald Trump can't crack 47% of the vote of the popular vote when he runs for president. And I don't think that national conservatives and conservatives more broadly understand that they are a shrinking population in the, in most people are not conservative in that way or progressive in the way the left thinks. So you can lean into those, you know, those dumbbells, you know, those weights at the end of the barbell. But they're smaller, they're further and further apart from the center and they're smaller and smaller. And I wonder if somebody like DeSantis now sensing he's got, you know, he's got to win the reelection as governor, but then he's going immediately into mode to run for president. He's got to play to the base. And that means, you know, Sayonara at least for a while to any kind of libertarian sensibility because the new Republican conservative is explicitly anti-libertarian. And you can see this in our comments here. And this is that reason TV, which has been around since 2007, we have 800,000 subscribers and our comment section is filled with people who are calling libertarians pieces of shit, you know, right in our feed. And that's not indicative of our audience. But that's what conservatives here and that's what they see. Can we run the other clip that you have from the National Conservative Conference? And let's, let's play that and then talk about that and maybe have final thoughts about Governor Ron DeSantis. Matters of concern for the last few years have witnessed a great American exodus from states and localities governed by leftist politicians, states and localities that are failing on core matters of concern for everyday Americans. And they have fled the states like Florida. And we've really served as the promised land for record numbers of people over the last many years. The statistics are startling. Since COVID, there's been more adjusted gross income move into the state of Florida that has ever moved into any one state over a similar time period in American history. In fact, if you look over since COVID, the next closest state to Florida in terms of receiving adjusted gross income moving their state as a state of Texas, it is not too shabby. Florida has been almost four times as much adjusted gross income move into Florida as moved into Texas. Who are the states that are hemorrhaging? Well, California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, you know, you know the list. Florida has also led the nation in net in migration since COVID, who has lost people, same cast of characters, California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, California had never lost people in the history of its states and statehood up until the last couple of years. When COVID hit, I had never seen experience of pandemic. Probably most people here have never done that. And so I started to look and research and consume data, because we were being told what to do from, you know, the White House Task Force or this health bureaucrat or that. But did any of that actually make any sense? And was any of that justifiable? And I look back at Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address. And most people remember that for his warnings about the dangers of the military industrial complex. And I think those were very smart observations. But if you read that inaugural address, he talked about this new phenomenon of the federal government funding so much scientific research. And he says, when that's intermingled like that, that there's a danger that public policy itself could be held captive by what he called the scientific and technological elite. And he rejected that as something that was acceptable. He said a statesman's job is not to subcontract out your leadership to a very narrow minded elite. The job of the statesman is to harmonize all the different competing interests that are in society, weighing different values. And then coming up with the proper policy. And so my view was, we had to choose freedom over Fauciism in the state of Florida. We had to make sure that our policies weren't excluding all these important values. Okay. Yeah. Okay, there's a lot to go over there. But and let's let's do a kind of quick march through it. One of the things that's interesting, you know, he's certainly right that states like New York and California are, you know, are losing population. It's unclear, actually, if California will continue to lose in absolute numbers, but relatively speaking, and it did in 2020 was the first year that it, you know, and recorded history. The last congressional seat. Yeah. And the and it also lost people year over year, which, which is pretty striking. There are states like Colorado, which over the past dozen years is also one of the fastest growing states and is, you know, purple, if not bluish, and it has a model of a governor, Jared Polis, who I think in in many ways has libertarian leanings. And it might be that if the Santas is kind of a right wing, libertarian conservative, Polis might be a, you know, kind of left wing or centrist, democratic, you know, libertarian. And so it's not fully clear that people are all, you know, leave that they're all going to the same place. And even states like Arizona are becoming markedly purple after being very, very bright red for a long time. So which is another high growth state. But do you what, what do you take away from his comments in that section that you were talking about? What what's most important to you? Well, first, just to address the migration to different states, which is absolutely true. There's something I do think there is something a little different going on in Florida, because it has been the Santas has made it this kind of for better and worse, like weird beacon. And you'll you've noticed in while somewhere like Arizona has gotten more purple, Florida has gotten more red. And I would be shocked if Charlie Christ comes anywhere close to the Santas. He has a huge like boatload of money and infrastructure here. And has really like kind of changed the the politics of Florida. And a lot of people came here specifically to escape some of the stuff that he was talking about. And so the people came here. And it would be hard to imagine them just abandoning those values. But what struck me about that speech, you know, we played two separate sections of the same speech that he gave at the National Conservatism Conference. And it kind of exemplifies the mixed bag that I see the Santas has because so much of what he said there, I resonate with that, like, I agree that we have to balance all these different concerns in a free and open society that it can't all be, you know, following, you know, what is dictated from one guy at the top of the federal government. And at the same time, you know, the second three quarters of the speeches devoted to this culture war stuff that says that now conservatives need to, you know, make private corporations reflect their values through the force of the state. And, you know, I think that if DeSantis wants to ascend to the national level, the people at the National Conservative Conference or the people in the comments, they can bash libertarians all they want. But the reality is like, they need us to win. They need us to be part of that coalition. And if we join the other coalition, then they're going to lose. And that the message that he just gave there is what drew people into Florida. And I think that it would be smart if that was what was emphasized. And that was what kind of was on the front burner rather than this other stuff. I guess that's not sexy, though, right, to say, you know, what we're basically going to do, we're going to have generally low, low regulation of business. We're going to keep taxes low. We're going to give people more choice when it comes to things like school. That's not as sexy. I mean, I was sexy in the context of the pandemic, because it was like, wow, we're all feeling this, we're feeling this entity breathing down our neck. And he's, you know, branding Florida as the free state. And that branding actually makes some sense. And so we are going to continue to face authoritarian threats from at the federal level as well. And so there probably is a way to make it sexy. And hopefully someone like DeSantis can figure that out. We don't know yet what his like his views on foreign policy really are. Yeah, I, yeah, I, I, I'm not sure, you know, he referenced the military industrial complex there. So I don't know that's a good sign. Yeah, that's a good thing. Like maybe he has some suspicions having dealt with the kind of scientific academic complex of like the way that industry and, you know, military can work against the, you know, national defense true national defense priorities of America. So that would be great if he could kind of refine some of the better tendencies of the Trump foreign policy, like, you know, a skepticism towards just jumping into every conflict, if that could be refined and improved, that would be great. But I think so far, you know, as someone who went from state attorney general to like, I guess, serving in Congress to governor hasn't had a lot of foreign policy experience. So he is a veteran. Yeah, he's a veteran. I mean, he was like a lawyer in the Navy. Yeah. So that's going to be all about who he surrounds himself with. So that's what that's what is yet to be seen. Do you know offhand what are his what's what are his positions on drug legalization? Well, so Florida has legalized, has legalized medical cannabis, and it's been that way for a while before DeSantis got into office, he's been on the record as saying he is against recreational legalization and said he doesn't like the smell of marijuana. And so he doesn't want that all over. So an odd thing for a governor to be right. That like that's what's making him decide not to do it. But yeah, so I don't think he's, you know, libertarian on drug policy, he seems to kind of be, you know, I'm not going to mess with the current medical regime, but he's not going to be the person pushing things forward there. And in terms of the like abortion debate, I know Florida actually had a fairly permissive law on the books, which I think it was even after the Dobs decision was something like 15 weeks up to 15 weeks, you could get abortion on demand. But then he was pushing very quickly to kind of narrow that down. I mean, he is definitely a pro life person. Yeah, he is pro life, but he wasn't like these others. I mean, I guess this isn't all doesn't all come down to DeSantis because these other more socially conservative states had trigger laws that went into effect and just pushed it almost all the way down to conception. Florida doesn't have that. And I think that he he might talk about it, but he has not seemed to make it a priority pushing the abortion laws, you know, because he is a savvy political operator. And he knows that the that the Floridians are not going to necessarily react well to that, you know, right before his election, you know, pushing, you know, pushing some radical abortion restrictions. How do you and again to bring it back to, you know, DeSantis versus his major party counterpart? Let's say it's Joe Biden. Let's say it's Hillary Clinton or something like that. How do you Gavin Newsom Gavin Newsom? Yes, you know, and I mean, in a way, I guess we can, you know, we can say it'll be a clarifying moment if not for the libertarian movement, although I think we can get there. But for kind of major party politics, if you have Gavin Newsom versus Ron DeSantis, you have two relatively young relatively accomplished governors who have very different conceptions, not of the size scope and spending of government, perhaps, but of what what positions the state should take on all of these issues. But is that even a tough choice for you? You would you would rather want to live in Ron DeSantis's Florida than Gavin Newsom's California any day? Well, yeah, I mean, I think my decision speaks for itself on that question. If we're nationalizing the California model versus the Florida model, which increasingly looks like a possibility. I mean, Gavin Newsom just said, I think yesterday or the day before that if I don't run, I'm in. And so we we might see that showdown. And that's that's like my life playing out on the national stage here, the California. What about what about if what about if it is, you know, Ron DeSantis versus Jared Polis? Yeah, I have a pro business pro free speech pro social pro alternative lifestyle or I would say, you know, a libertarian lifestyle guy in somebody like Polis, not perfect by any stretch, but I don't know, you know, like is that is that a is that a tougher choice for you? It is. Yeah, it's a tougher choice. I will say that with the with Newsom, there's no way I am ever voting for Gavin Newsom for anything. Ron DeSantis at the national level, there's still a lot of open questions about foreign policy and things like this. That's a really important issue for me when I'm thinking about a president. But yeah, Polis versus DeSantis that we would I would consider us to be in a fortunate position as a country if that were the showdown. And then finally, you really spearheaded our video coverage of the Libertarian Party Convention in Reno earlier this year. I've worked along with you on that. Does somebody like Ron DeSantis present an issue for the Libertarian Party and it's kind of, you know, in its new skin where it seems to be, you know, it's it's more argumentative, it's more culture war oriented, it is less pro immigration, it is not, it's agnostic on abortion, etc. Does somebody like Ron DeSantis pose a serious challenge to the reason for the Libertarian Party running a presidential candidate? If he's the Republican candidate, you know, what would a Libertarian voter be getting by voting for whoever the Libertarian Party candidate might be, whether it's Justin Amash or Dave Smith or Spike Cowan or Joe Jorgensen? Well, that's the that's the open question because in the current Mises Caucus controlled iteration of the Libertarian Party, they could run Ron DeSantis as their candidate if he would do it, assuming that his foreign policy views aren't entirely toxic. I mean, he aligns with them on almost everything. They're all in on this idea that wokeness or critical race theory is like a neo-Marxist plot to take down America and therefore we need a neo-McCarthyism to fight it back like McCarthyism was actually good. And we need that again to go against this like subversive ideology. So they're like all in on that stuff that I find highly questionable, the premises to say the least. And the other stuff, so I think it would be tough for someone like Dave Smith to run against Ron DeSantis other than the war, the potential war issue. For someone if it was Justin Amash's Libertarian Party or he was the nominee, I think he would strike a more visible contrast with DeSantis and it wouldn't necessarily be that difficult because he could offer the kind of decentralized, individualistic and restrained government view that is stark contrast with the kind of national conservatism that the Republican Party is lurching towards. All right. I think we're going to leave it there. I just want to read, this is a new comment from Ryan S saying, if you're rich and entitled like Reason TV, then sure, fine, California is great for you. But I do like how Nick usually covers both sides honestly and equally even though the left means all the targeting. And then Alice Tusk says it was a benefit for the migrant workers to I'm sorry, this she just retracted her message. So forget that. And I guess we will, we're going to leave it there. I want to thank everybody who was watching on YouTube in real time, particularly the people who sent in poisonous comments. That's always, you know, that's what keeps us going. And Carol Markowitz has already left us. It was wonderful to hear from her and her experiences of moving from the People's Republic of New York to, you know, South, the South Korea of America, Florida. And I especially want to thank you, Zach, my Reason TV senior producer colleague who made the Long March from California. You had finally made it to the West Coast, the best coast, you know, where the sun set and now you've come back to the East Coast and we're happy to have you. But thanks for sharing your thought and your insights into, you know, a guy who is clearly going to be one of the major players in American politics and certainly Republican politics for, you know, probably the rest of our lives. I think so. Thank you, Nick. I appreciate it. Okay. Thank you. And thanks again to everybody. We will see the next time that we have a live stream on YouTube. Thanks.