 Okay, welcome to our latest in this live stream series. I'm Zach Weismiller with my colleague here, Nick Gillespie. And today, I am thrilled to have just one of my favorite people joining us. He's a clear thinker, an extremely entertaining podcaster, a dad, a successful entrepreneur, the man, the legend, Camille Foster. Thanks for joining us, Camille. Thank you for that. I don't think he's that great, but it's good to see him. You forgot to say sex symbol, Zach? Yeah. Well, you know, Camille, this is an honest, truthful outcome. This isn't one of your cable news programs. Fake news. I want to get a little meta this afternoon and talk about what it is that you like to talk about. And to set that up, I'm just going to play an intro to your podcast, the fifth column, which I have no doubt many of today's viewers are quite familiar with. We know of new methods of attacks. Greetings, and welcome back to another exciting installment of the fifth column podcast. This is your weekly rhetorical assault on the new cycle of people that made it. And occasionally ourselves, I'm Camille Foster. I do various things at Free Think. And today, we had a delayed start because apparently there's this really interesting, compelling, engrossing profile of. So you know, your weekly rhetorical assault on the new cycle and the people who make it, you like to talk about media. And in fact, I think of fifth column largely as a media criticism podcast. That'd be correct. Why is that such a foundational aspect of what you do? Well, I think media literacy is important in a free society. We need access to information. The people who bring us information play an important role, but they need to be held accountable. And citizens need to be equipped with the tools to be able to discern what makes sense and what doesn't make sense. I think there's an analogy that I've used of someone who's going down into a mine, which this is very filthy, difficult work. They bring up something. They kind of dust it off a little bit. And it sort of seems to sheen as a sheen and it's yellow. But is it gold or is it fool's gold? And making a determination between those two things is not always easy, but it is definitely worth doing. And I'd like to think that that's what we try to do at the fifth column with a great deal of levity. We operated a couple of different speeds. Sometimes it's very sober and serious. At other times, it is completely ridiculous and careens out of control. But either way, it's worth your time and your money. So subscribe. Oh, yeah. Always be selling, right? What is the worst? What's the worst job that you had? Because you are talking as if you've been in a mine. I've never actually I'm sure I've been in a mine. I've never worked in a mine. The worst job I've had was probably a clerical gig. I took it like 14 or 15. Apercash. Yeah, I understand. The physical labor that I've had to do has always been kind of rewarding, you know, like swinging an axe to chop wood or something like that. But it's fun. It's great. You get to be outside. How did you get kind of hip to the idea that the news is raw material or it's prepackaged in a way that you as the consumer, the reader, whatever, has to really do the work to figure out what this means and where does it come from? What does it mean and where does it go? Yeah, I think it's probably Carl Sagan's bullshit detector kit. It's actually not bullshit. I think he uses the word baloney, but bullshit is an appropriate word as well. And I believe I was introduced to that in one of his books. It might have been the one about, I'm forgetting the title at the moment, but that was one of the first things that I remember kind of touching this skeptical bone that I have in my body. But at the same time, I was raised in a very devout household and was surrounded by literature. And specifically, he had to read a lot of the biblical account and can distinctly remember the first time I encountered like the Downing Thomas and this notion that there is kind of it's blessed to be someone who believes without seeing. And that never sat well with me because it just doesn't seem like a good quality to have. So I'm a bit of a skeptic. But I think in a very productive sense, I think it's necessary to have kind of a skeptical disposition so long as it's productive. I think that's very different from cynicism. Yeah, you're also very libertarian. How did you come to, so you're skeptical to begin with. That can lead to a lot of directions, but then you're also libertarian. How did that come about? I can say with some certainty that the very first libertarian thing that I read was probably Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom. I was in college and someone said to me during a conversation, Camille, you're far too bright to be a Democrat. And I don't know how he got me to this book, but he did. And in the introduction to the book, there's this treatment of Kennedy's speech where he talks about, he says, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. And Milton Friedman goes on to explain neither side of this is consistent with the ideals of a free man and a free society. And goes on to articulate this vision of free people working towards their several goals within a free society and our goal being to maintain that kind of system of freedom. And for whatever reason, I'm a sophomore junior in college and I'd never been exposed to that clear a distillation of what freedom could be, ought to be. And it was immediately appealing and resonated with me. And I went on from there to read a number of other things, including Bastiatz the Law and a couple of other kind of foundational books. And then I discovered Reason and Cato and I started reading some guy named Nick Billespie. And yeah, and then further radicalized from there. Well, then I found Rothbard and that's what really, really got me going. Well, we'll get to Rothbard first, man. Where did you go to college? And what did you major in? University of Maryland College Park. I started as a biochemistry major. My end of my first semester, I went home and started watching C-SPAN like religiously. And I discovered Washington Journal and I got really hooked. And without telling my mom, I changed my major to government and economics like the very next year. And I didn't actually end up completing the term in a normal way. After my second year of college, I started a telecom consulting firm and slowly built up this lifestyle business and ran that for about 10 years. But I eventually completed my two degrees in government economics and that was important. But I think having that kind of protracted undergraduate experience also gave me an opportunity to just a lot of independent reading and to find and pursue my interests and to select where there were elective courses, stuff that was really consistent with what was most interesting to me. And I think all of that probably contributed to my odd development. It's interesting hearing you kind of put skepticism at the center of what you're doing. Like, how does that interact with or I guess inform your politics? Yeah, well, I mean, I think like skepticism and fallibility are critical foundational pieces of what you need, like the kind of culture of freedom. Certainly like the notion of free speech is rooted in this sensibility that whatever the dominant ideas, there is some new perspective which might be heretical today, but is ultimately right. And it is vitally important that we actually have a system and a culture that is okay with people challenging the dominant perspectives that are on offer and overturning them and that this is a natural process. And I mean, I think even today in our very modern society, my sense is that most learned people believe we've kind of reached the definitive end of history and the end of philosophy that there are no new inspiring ideas that'll be brought to bear and that there couldn't be anything that they believe that isn't absolutely right and true. It's this like thoroughgoing fundamentalism and it exists on the left and the right. But I think people with this kind of classical liberal bent libertarians have a much better appreciation of just how difficult it's been for us to get where we are and how likely it is that we're wrong about plenty of things and the ever present possibility that we could retrace our steps and go backwards and fall into something worse. And I think it all kind of flows together in that way. Yeah, I'm very worried about the retracing the steps and maybe we can talk a little bit more about that in a second with as regards to kind of your skepticism of narratives that come to dominate politics or media. I think a really good example of that was you've been a guest a couple of times on your friends with Barry Weiss who hosts a podcast called Honestly which I very much enjoy. But you were on there a couple of times talking about the so-called Central Park Karen case. And I want to play an excerpt from your first appearance where you kind of explained your thoughts about all that. And I want to go from there and just talk about how representative it is of the way you think about much of how the media frame stories, why they do it, why it might be a problem. So let's play that clip first. All this is happening against the backdrop of America's racial reckoning which is just in its earliest weeks. George Floyd, I can't breathe, George Floyd. And during that period you had nightly protests all over the country and New York City was certainly no exception. More tense clashes around the country including this standoff at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn where a police car burned as officers. There were demonstrations in front of the mayor's house in front of City Hall in the streets of Soho and from what I've learned about the case, it's hard for me to ignore the likelihood that the decision to proceed with this prosecution against the odds was largely a public relations stunt. So I mean, why was this case so interesting to you? And just what are I guess some of the lessons you took away from digging a little deeper into it? Well, I think the best way to give you contacts for that is to explain how I discovered that there was something worth looking into here. Fully a year after this woman, Amy Cooper, I had her encounter with a man named Christian Cooper, in a relationship in Central Park. I was reading a story on NBC, I guess it's just NBC.com, maybe it's NBCnews.com, probably that, and somewhere buried in the story about a lawsuit that she'd filed against her former employer for wrongful termination was a couple of lines about this guy named Jerome Lockett who had had a previous encounter with Christian Cooper and the NBC story, all it says is that Jerome Lockett, that a letter from Jerome Lockett to NBCnews was included in the legal filing. And NBC, the article goes on to say that NBC spoke to Jerome Lockett at the time that the attack happened or the not attack but the encounter happened. And it doesn't provide any additional detail. And I went looking for any story that they would have written related to this Jerome Lockett situation and the situation with Jerome Lockett was that Christian Cooper, the gentle bird watcher who recorded Amy Cooper and made her famous, he'd had two physical altercations in Central Park in the previous four months, at least two that we know of. And he admitted to this in a private context and I found the audio for that. And I think if people know that, they probably approach the story about Amy Cooper and that 30 second video with a slightly different perspective. And the fact that NBCnews had talked to Jerome Lockett, a 30 year old black man who had an encounter with Christian Cooper that ended with him having to push him away from his dog because he felt unsafe, that they decided not to run this story. And they never bothered to explain why they didn't run this story. I even reached out for comment to the editors and the reporters that were responsible for interviewing him at the time is kind of shocking. And what became more shocking to me was that as I continued to look around and I talked to more journalists, and I think this is ultimately, there's the human tragedy of sort of Amy Cooper being pilloried for something that isn't obviously what people imagine. But the heart of the story is that a number of journalists at media outlets, some conservative and some liberal knew about the additional details that there were other people and that they were too incurious or too afraid to actually complicate this story in a way that made it look like anything other than a crazy care in white woman calling the police on a black man in order to get him murdered. It didn't matter to them that Christian Cooper had in the weeks prior been advocating for more law enforcement in Central Park because he wanted to have cops there to enforce leash laws. He was not afraid of being murdered by the cops. At least that doesn't suggest those aren't the actions of someone who believes they'll be murdered by the cops. And yeah, does this kind of stuff happen? Sure. I think there are plenty of examples of it and we've seen lots of examples of rather crummy moral clarity, moral clarity is a phrase that we know now, motivated reasoning that is ostensibly supposed to be journalism, but is anything but. To Christian Cooper's credit, he really did not seem to want to pursue this once it became a media mouse drive. Now he's got like a Netflix show or whatever. But I was gonna say is it's readable. Christian Cooper decided that he didn't want to participate in the prosecution and at some point decided to no longer do media after having done a lot of media. I wouldn't want to prosecute either if I knew that when I got up on the stand and was cross examined, a great deal of things would be made public that thus far the media systematically ignored. Without focusing on him though, like the speed with which her employer canned her and the whole story became kind of set in stone that this is a woman who is the moral equivalent of the woman who said that Emmett Till had whistled at her, that was the narrative with capital letters. How do we guard against that in a world where there is a rapid response? We have all forms of media, everybody has a voice but some voices count for more. What, how do we slow the race to the narrative down in a way so we have better responses? Yeah, some voices count for more. And also we have this bizarre media ecosystem where you've got algorithms that press stories and journalistic outlets that publish stories instantaneously and a culture wherein we are primed to grab this 32nd clip, devoid of context and retweet it to all of our followers. And I think the best thing that we could do, the greatest safeguard would be for us to, one, be more skeptical, dutifully, rigorously skeptical. But two, to just develop and maybe that skeptical muscle is part of this, the appropriate set of cultural antibodies that allow us to exist in the world as we find it today. Like the current media ecosystem, the current level of connectedness is something that we are simply not designed to deal with. It manages to play on kind of all of our weird cognitive biases in ways that can be incredibly harmful. And I think it's imperative to imagine that this story that you're reading about the person who was purportedly the worst kind of person could be you. It could be that they said something inelegant. And if you actually care about the purported injustice that took place, then you should care enough to want to know the difference between an actual crime and an imagined crime between an impoliteness or a mistake and someone who is a vehement racist or an anti-semite. Like the difference matters. It's not trivial. It sounds like a good tee-up for some of the clips or go ahead. Yeah, I mean, one thing that I took from that was, especially the clip there makes it clear the context of this was coming on the heels of the kind of uprisings that were happening after the George Floyd killing. And there was all this energy around this issue. And so that's perhaps, one lesson for the skeptic to take is when there's a lot of discussion or energy around a particular issue, and then stories begin to pop up that just like very conveniently like further that, maybe that warrants an extra look. And like one of the political narratives that I think we could all examine right now as we approach the midterms is, and it seems like kind of the winds of political change might be coming. And there's a lot of stories, a lot of narratives about what exactly that means. One of the framings that you're hearing, especially from Democrats, is that this is a bunch of fascistic election deniers on the brink of seizing power. The reality might be a little more complicated than that, but let's play this clip from Hillary Clinton to get a sense of the message that Democrats are putting forward right now. This is for like a kind of pack that she is behind. It's like a, it's a fundraising appeal that this is the message that she feels is appropriate to be putting out right now. Extremis already have a plan to literally steal the next presidential election. And they're not making a secret of it. So what's your reaction to the discussion around election security, fraud, and the upcoming midterms? Anyone who's been paying attention ought to know that since the around the 2000 election, we're good Gordy Bush, which ended up in the courts in order to get decided. There's been growing skepticism in both political parties about the trustworthiness of our electoral process. And we've seen kind of a one-upsmanship in every single national election cycle in the midterms as well this year with people increasingly suggesting that the outcome is dubious, that the other side is cheating, that they're going to cheat, they'll definitely cheat. And you can tell who is going to, generally you can tell who's going to be the most full-throated in decrying the outcome of the election based on who wins and who loses. Except Donald Trump is the exception to the rule here because he was still insisting that the election had been kind of mucked with. Yeah, he never accepted the fact. Even when he won. Oh, yeah, because he was like, I would have won like with 54% of the vote if they counted all the ballots. Yeah, so he definitely has kind of perfected this entire thing in the worst sorts of ways, but this is hardly alien to Democrats and Hillary Clinton seems to be indulging in the same thing. And I mean, look, it's not as though there aren't extremists who are articulating their perspective on what ought to happen, on how elections ought to be taken, on reinstalling the former president of the United States. He himself continues to insist that it's ought to happen, but exaggerating the degree to which this is a thing. Referring to some marginal figure in the conservative movement in the fringes of the conservative movement and suggesting that there is this bold plan to steal the next election is precisely what Democrats would call this if Donald Trump was doing or any of his acolytes. It is dangerous rhetoric that increases concern and skepticism about the quality of our institutions at a time when what we should really be doing is talking about transparency, trying to build trust. And we're not doing that. And that is that's deeply concerning. Yeah, Hillary's that group is called the indivisible or indivisible. And she refers to them as the indivisibles. But, you know, their catchphrase is crush the coup. Yes. Like a violent image. That's crazy. Which is itself a violent takeover of the government. You have talked, you know, about how, yeah, I mean, there's no question. Trump is Trump is like the, you know, the Pavarotti of this, right? He can play, he can sing any song you want to hear about election fraud. And his followers, people like Carrie Lake, who's probably going to become governor of Arizona, is an insane sycophant of Trump, you know? But then there's people like Stacey Abrams, who lost a gubernatorial race in Georgia a few years ago and has never conceded. What are your thoughts about the way she represents a kind of democratic mode of challenging the outcomes of clearly legitimate elections? Yeah, no. I mean, Stacey Abrams is a incredibly interesting character in American politics. This is a woman who has been sainted despite having never really won anything in electoral politics. She's most famous for losing an election, insisting that she lost by a fraud. And now, several years later, we know launching an incredible, perhaps the most expensive in the history of Georgia, legal challenge to this election. Let me pull up, I pulled some clips from this recent Politico article on that. I just wanna just to give everyone a sense of how expensive and failed this operation was more than $25 million over two years on legal fees, mostly on a single case with the largest amount, going to the self-described boutique law firm of the candidate's campaign chairwoman. There's a judge who ruled against her, said the challenge practices violate neither the Constitution nor the Voting Rights Act. That's a slam dunk. You know, what she had claimed after she lost to Kemp, 50 to 48 was that thousands of voters, a disproportionate number of whom were people of color were effectively disenfranchised by overly restrictive voting rules. So yeah, I mean, what message does that send about trustworthiness of our institutions and all that money spent to come up with very little at the end of the day? Look, it's impossible for me to read her mind. I can't know whether or not there was deliberate fraud here. I can't know whether or not she was acting in bad faith or any of that other stuff. I don't need to speculate about her motives, but what we can say is that it is incredibly unseemly to be enriching to the tune of tens of millions of dollars your very good friend and campaign manager while you are drumming up all of these rather wild conspiracies about what happened in the election. I mean, they even included in the original legal firing which was incredibly complicated and long. This voluminous legal filing claims about election machines that weren't acting properly, that they had been hacked in some way, shape or form because people were trying to push Abrams but that it would switch to Kemp. I mean, this is hypocrisy that would be risible if it wasn't so consequential. There's the connection that I see here between what we were talking about in media coverage and all the kind of innuendo swirling around elections is just this decreasing trust, being able to trust what you see, being able to trust supposed outcomes. And part of this, you were mentioning earlier this confusion that is being created by I don't know, digital media in general or inability to cope with information overload and so forth. And now layer on top of that, the ability to manipulate for, purposely manipulate media both in, just by clipping things out of context and just like outright all spring clips. And we did pull a couple of examples of that from various political operatives that have engaged in that. This first one here is Jill Biden. This was a recent one. Dr. Jill Biden. Dr. Jill Biden, my apologies. And this is a, just everyone, this is a doctored clip, so be forewarned. Realize that even the smallest flame can illuminate our path home. That the sweetest delicacies are made with love. That the most rewarding gifts are those we give. Shut the fuck up! Hey! And then there's also this one that I saw recently. This is from a kind of political operative named Bubba Prague on Twitter. And this one actually earned him the stay informed tag from Twitter and a little correction on the sidebar. This is incredibly obviously fake to me. I don't know why people fell for it, but it's got like 40,000 likes on Twitter. And you can kind of see how he frames it. He's like writing that line between, trying to say that it's satire, but actually I wanna also dupe as many people as I can with this, so let's play this real quick. This raid happened and it was a raid. It's not a raid. I mean, with all due respect. Of course it was a raid. It was not a raid. They were serving a valid process in accordance with the laws and constitution of the United States and the state of Florida. They did it with integrity. They did it with honor. And to say it's a raid is disinformation. And you guys need to drive, excuse me. So yeah, I mean. Disinformation. Like problems I believe that I think, but. But that's fascinating, isn't it? Cause we now have, I mean, this was, you know, as somebody who was writing in the 90s about the rise of the internet generally lowered price and cost for technology. Suddenly you had, everybody became able to basically do really good fakes. And that obviously is only getting better and better. I don't know. I tend to find a lot of this stuff incredibly liberating because this is a millennial, millennia old impulse by people to recontextualize and reconfigure official discourse into whatever they wanted. I mean, in the middle ages, you could be in various principalities. This was true in England. If you were caught writing down what the king said in a public setting and you weren't officially his emmanuances, you could be killed because they wanted to control the, you know, the discourse. Right. So yeah, on a certain level, like I'm all for this kind of stuff and the more ludicrous and the better it is. Like the more believable it is, the better. But it does lead to cynicism, right? Where you cannot believe anything that you see. You really have to check. You got to check out whether your mother loves you and whether the footage of her telling you you're a piece of shit is real or not. Well, that's the old journalism dictum. And I think you make it a really great point, Nick. I had a conversation with someone about education the other day and they were saying something about these AI software is that can write entire essays for you. And as they get better, this creates a real conundrum for schools because I mean, you're assigned an essay to a kid and they just use the algorithm and writes them the thing and they get a great, perfect score. And my feeling about this is, you know, it's easy to kind of fetishize the tech and to think about this as this intractable problem will never be able to solve. But the reality is that there's two things going on. One that we've been here before and you could always hire someone to kind of write a paper for you. You probably need, to the extent this becomes a widespread phenomena, maybe you need to change the model. We evolve and we do things a little bit differently. And the second thing is that our countermeasures to these things are improving markedly every single day. And there are some really impressive efforts underway to do things like put digital content on chain so that there is a clear chain of custody and you have a sensibility about authenticity and entire organizations that I suspect will exist at some point in the near future to help verify content and to verify the verifiers. And yes, that is the world we'll be in. But in a very real sense, it's a world that we've always lived in. When there were only three media sources, the capacity of the state to lie to you in various ways existed. It was real and tangible. And I would say that it was almost certainly greater than today. Is it hard to know things? Sure, I suspect that's, it's complicated. There's a lot of things going on. Martin Gurrey's book Revolta the Public is really informative on that. But it's always been hard to know things. And for a lot of us, I think we probably weren't unaware of the degree to which we were being fed oversimplified narratives or outright falsehoods that benefited someone which shouldn't make you cynical. It should make you skeptical and being skeptical and concerned about what's true because the truth matters means that you should get serious, do more reading, read more than the headline, don't share shit that might turn out to be fake because that is embarrassing. You know, Jeff, on that point of the essays, my ex-wife and her husband, who are both full professors at Chapman University, I went to dinner with them the other night and they were talking about this because college professors now use a variety of programs where they check essays to see if they've been plagiarized. There's a database that they check again. But they say the AI stuff because they have a lot of Chinese students from mainland China whose English is not good. And the one way that they know there's something up is when the grammar is perfect because the words may not make much sense but if they're grammatically perfect. So this is kind of like a man in the high castle world where they're selling fake replicas of the old West and if they're too good, you know it's a fake. The only option you had before that was Michael Moynihan reading your thing to find some weird cadence in there and say, oh, you're a plagiarist. It's amazing, I think a lot going back to the 90s when email became was the killer app and then there were viruses and email you didn't know about this or that. And it's like we took care of that problem. You don't hear about computer viruses the way that you did circa 1995 or 96. Yeah, and I think that the perspective here on offer is that hysteria probably isn't warranted but concern is fine. And there's a real question about who will win the arms race and whether or not things may get out of control before we have appropriate solutions and remedies. But there are appropriate solutions and remedies and it is the case that we have kind of sort of been here before in some respects. And I think in general with most things if we could just bring down the temperature a bit the closing argument in the midterms for both the left and the right is those other people are complete monsters who will destroy everything you hold dear if they win power, this is the end of America. Either it's a cabal of groomers who want to mutilate your children's genitals or it's a cabal of fascists who hate everyone who isn't white and are going to put you into a camp and grind you into meat and feed you to their animals. It's all preposterous and absurd but it doesn't mean there aren't reasons for concern but I think the thing I'm most concerned about at the moment is the fact that there is just this bottomless cynicism and hopelessness and an inability to trust one another and we have to live together. That's just the case. Like there's not a possible way. Can I say too, let's blame the people who are most responsible for this which of course are not one of us, none of the three of us or libertarians but Zach, do you want to play the Fetterman Oz debate clip because this is who the two major parties, right? Who have all the money, all the power, all the institutional might. These are the apparitions that they're coughing up to run in the world's greatest deliberative body or something like that. Tonight that you support fracking that you've always supported fracking but there is that 2018 interview that you said quote, I don't support fracking at all. So how do you square the two? I do support fracking and I don't, I support fracking and I stand and I do support fracking. Jeez. So I mean, talk about cynicism. I mean, it's hard not to be cynical when you look at the Pennsylvania race. You have Fetterman who clearly has serious impairments going against a celebrity doctor who's famous for telling the bullshit supplements to people. I mean, and then you have people like- And you talked about the rising inflation in the context of cruditech. I mean, it's like, what? Yeah. David Soroto is a, you know, right in the nation, a person activist, work for Bernie Sanders saying, here's the truth, few will say aloud but I will. Being a senator is America's easiest job. If I say gay or nay, this notion that John Fetterman can't do that job because he's recovering from a health event is moronic and everyone in the media. I mean, you don't really get much more cynical about politics. It's like, why don't we have like a hundred chickens you know, pecking at large to decide everything? Go all the way, right? Go all the way. It's opportunistic cynicism there though. I don't think he actually believes that. My suspicion is if we look, he probably has some tweet about Herschel Walker being a dangerous idiot who shouldn't be anywhere near the levers of power, which I think is probably true. But it's important when you're only willing to say it, when it is to your advantage to say it. And I think that's actually what's going on there. But yeah, look, I'd say this, I've been saying a number of bad things about cynicism is appropriate to be cynical about most of your elected officials. They are bad, self-interested cowards who aren't really willing to do anything that might get them into trouble if they actually think that it's the right thing to do. They won't vote against their party. They'll write a completely innocuous letter about Ukraine. And then moments later, when it seems politically unacceptable to their counterparts in Congress, they'll say, ah, that was a mistake. We're really sorry. But what is it? Why did you write the letter at all? Why did you sign it? Why did you think this was appropriate to notify the media again about, if 24 hours later, actually eight hours later, the thing wasn't going to matter at all. They're just unprincipled people that can't be taken seriously. But how, this is a big question, I think, particularly for libertarians, because the libertarian rhetoric is that all government, oftentimes the stereotypical libertarian message is all government, all politicians are not just in a stupid and incompetent, but they're evil. Everything is bad. Is that a message? Is that a message that helps anything, or does it just compound the problem? And how do libertarians talk about governance, policy, the individuals who are going to make this up in a way that doesn't just give in to the rankest form of nihilism, where it really doesn't matter who's in office. If you believe that they're always going to be terrible, what difference does it make? Well, I wouldn't say that it doesn't matter who's in office, but I do have kind of some heuristics and stratagems. Like I prefer divided government. So the Democrats control Congress. I probably want a Republican in the White House. And that's, you know, strategic thinking. Maybe that doesn't always lead to the best outcomes. But I think maybe the way to look at it is like government is endlessly corruptible, which is very different than saying like the institutions don't matter. I think that the institutions are actually important. I think our civic norms can be very important in certain respects when they're healthy, when they're kind of pro-free speech and anti-censorship, when there is a kind of visceral reaction to the notion that some corporation will be coordinating with government to shut people up who are saying things that might be unpopular, because you just know that that isn't the way that we do things here. I think it's important for us to cultivate a respect for that. I think it's important even to have an admiration for the uniqueness of the American experiment. And I'm a weird, like a narco-capitalist bozo, but I know how unusual it is for there to be a country that is founded on the kinds of ideals that America imperfectly is rooted in. And those are ideas that are worth defending and that are worth celebrating. And I think the reality is that the personification of those ideas is not to be found in the halls of Congress. And on any given day, it's probably not in the Supreme Court. It's in our associations with one another, the way that we pursue our own interests, the businesses that we build, the coalitions that we forge on our own. And if we can keep in mind that the goal of all of the governance stuff ought to be to enable that flourishing, to allow us to do and build things that are better than the things that existed before, then I think we'll be in a very good place. But if we imagine that either the revivalists who insist that what we need to do is retreat back to a time in the past when everything was perfect or the redistributionists who insist the future is hopeless, the best we can do is take some stuff from those people and give it to you, then we will lose ultimately. And unfortunately, I think that's what we find ourselves in it, in fact, the revivalists have become reduced redistributionists as well explicitly and openly, which is another problem. No. I'm curious if you think that there is like a clear, like libertarian friendly antidote to both the cynicism and the confusion that is happening in our media and politics right now. I mean, there is the libertarian party which is in some of these Senate races and covering the spread in like Georgia and Nick and I did a documentary about the takeover that happened there. The party is having an identity crisis at the moment. Yes, you're right. It's having an identity crisis. And it was before these kids took over as well. It's just a different sort of identity crisis. Well, it has an identity crisis, yeah. I'm curious like what you make of that identity crisis and what you hope comes out of it and what you hope libertarians will be offering and doesn't even have to be big L libertarians, but what are the things that you think libertarians could be putting on offer that's just not out there right now in either party or kind of the general discourse? I've been generally optimistic about some of the trends that I'd seen happening. I can still remember when there was a story in the New York Times about the libertarian moment, which I'm confident Nick was profiled in and mentioned in because he was part of that. And I was excited. You had Ron Paul and you had Gary Johnson. And you still have Justin Amash and even Rand Paul, that's right. He was on the cover of the story was has the libertarian moment finally arrived. And it was... And Rand is a complicated legacy in that regard, but in either case, they were pushing a certain set of ideas that were in fact resonating with a wider and wider swath of the country. And my hope was that after four years of Donald Trump and a great deal of dissatisfaction and a rather lackluster crop of candidates on the left to oppose him, that there might be a real opportunity for a moderate establishment even, I know that's a dirty word libertarian party to appeal to a lot of normies who might not be interested in or even prepared to have a conversation about all the roads being private today or abolishing all private schools tomorrow. I know it's shocking for some of us to hear as near and dear as some of those concepts are to my heart that moderation and pragmatism is actually a good thing. And it's helped to create the world that we live in today, which is undoubtedly, indisputably freer in so many important ways than the one that we lived in a couple of hundred years ago. And the fact that pragmatism helped get us there should say something about the importance of there being a political movement and a political institution that operates within the electoral system, within those confines to try and bring more and more Americans into the fold. And I think at the moment, the party has adopted this kind of shock and awe strategy of meaming their way to victory and outraging people who are both outside of the movement and in the movement of being incredibly polarizing. And this isn't to a person. I mean, I've had conversations with folks like Dave Smith and I think Dave is a good guy who is smart and bright and interesting and has a tremendous amount to offer. I wish that the people who are around him and that are operating the party would do so with a little bit more thoughtfulness. There's a tremendous opportunity here. And I think mocking people when they die, which is generally something that isn't regarded as, okay, whatever the circumstances, mocking their children after they've died, generally not acceptable. These are probably just not great strategies. Will it go viral? Will you get a bunch of negative press? Sure. Is that what you want? Even to the extent that's how you could potentially win, I don't want to win that way. But I also don't think you'll win. I think ultimately you'll burn an ignominy and we don't need that. We're already marginal at the moment. I don't need to be notorious also. I wanna give Camille the, I know Camille has to run soon. There were a couple of questions I just wanna throw up here for you, Camille. One was here, I'll put it on the screen. I think there's one about the age of consent that we ought to go to immediately. Oh my goodness. All right, that's how it goes. Like in that moderation. The moderation must weigh in on that. Camille, across America, there are many students of Friedman and Ron Paul since they won't sell out for votes. How do we amplify their voices? So I guess just asking, that might get to the question of pragmatism versus purity. Like, if there's someone like a Dave Smith who fashions himself as like, I'm carrying the torch of Ron Paul, how far can that approach get you, do you think? I mean, I think it can get you incredibly far. I mean, I think that the stuff that they've been doing with respect to foreign policy, with respect to criminal justice is incredibly valuable. It's worthwhile to continue doing that work. I think there are profound disagreements about the appropriate approach to addressing some of the weird social stuff that's happening. A lot of the controversies in schools, whether or not it's appropriate to ban certain things out of existence about some of these gender debates. But to the extent libertarians can be a font of reason in these troubled times that they can help to foster healthy conversations. I have to tell you that outside of elite circles where the fire is burning the most intensely, there are legions of Americans, I should say, who are interested in moderate voices, who are interested in sane alternatives, who want people who they can just say, God, you seem normal and nice. I could actually pull the lever for you. Like they're making a decision between Federman and Dr. Oz. And you wanna give them like meme warrior as the alternative? Right. I think we could probably do better than that. Again, it's just a strategy. Maybe try to do both things a little bit. I don't know. How do you, not a question, but that is laudable. You sound like a good decent human. How do you think about deprioritizing politics? I mean, for me, one of the reasons why I'm libertarian is because I dislike politics. I want it to be in as small a space as possible because it is zero sum on some fundamental level. There are certain things that are gonna be decided where 50% plus one vote makes the other 50% minus one vote, eat it, and you just gotta live that way. So you wanna keep that minimal. There was a, there were various periods. The nineties was an example of this where there was a kind of consensus at the end of the Cold War at the beginning of the internet and economic expansion. Politics wasn't that important. Let's go out and roam the world and have fun and do interesting stuff. That has been clawed back. And it started probably with the 2000 election, certainly 9-11, the economic crisis. Suddenly we live in a world now where God is dead, but politics reigns supreme. How do we start to recalibrate? So that we're talking more about culture, business, lived experience and voluntary aspects of our lives rather than politics. I don't know precisely. My own approach to this is to remain optimistic and to believe that's possible to kind of come back from the brink because we've dealt with things that are far more difficult than this in the past. And to be determined to be involved in the system and in the process and to try always to get beyond the most controversial aspects of the debate. If we're having an argument about abortion, it's probably best that we're not having it at the margins of whether it should be completely outlawed or whether or not mom should be able to have an abortion at nine minutes before she gives birth. That's not going to be very productive if that's the only conversation we have. We're working at cross purposes. And I think in a similar way, there's questions about what public education ought to look like. If the argument is between the 1619 project and some America first version of history, that's not going to be particularly good either. So we've got to find not a middle ground but some common ground. We've got to find ways to address the actual problem. And I think when we're having arguments about whether or not propaganda is being taught in the schools and ultimately know that the schools aren't really teaching kids much of anything, that that is a more severe problem. And then it suggests that we're having these debates completely disconnected from the things that actually matter with respect to the stuff that we ostensibly care about. If we care about kids and we care about them becoming well-informed individuals, thoughtful skeptics who can contribute in a meaningful way to the polity, then the way to do that is with a functional school system. And I'd say school choice ought to have always taken priority over these preposterous ideological battles. So you're objectively pro-groomer. Got it. Exactly. And it's reductivist thinking like that that's going to get us, it's going to take us far. It's going to take us to the moon. Camille, thanks for joining us. I know you've got to run soon. Let me leave you with these final two thoughts from our commenters. Maybe libertarians can put out there a charismatic candidate who never flies coach. That is an interesting idea. It's a finer point on it. Camille Foster, I think. And you obviously would do as well as Dr. Oz or Fetterman. Fetterman is a seasoned politician. Yeah, well, this is true. He's had some difficult, he's had a difficult year and probably should have pulled out of the race. It's, it's, yeah, yeah. No comment. I have to talk to my wife about 2024. She is the decider and chief. Okay. Yeah. Good luck with that. Thank you for joining us. Thanks guys, I appreciate it. Talk soon. You bet. Well, I guess now we should just talk shit about Camille. But are there other questions that we should engage in here? Let's see. One person asks here, can there ever be peace with Chris Rufo referencing our, our live stream from last week. I think there can be peace with Chris Rufo. I think there is probably not ever going to be agreement, at least on a wide range of topics with Chris Rufo. The reason we wanted to bring him on here to talk was I produced this documentary about Florida's Stop Woke Act and Camille was kind of getting into that near the end here about, well, are we going to spend our time fighting over whether a curriculum should be centered around the Colhanna Jones' 1619 project or some sort of patriotically correct project devised by the DeSantis team or something? Or are we going to offer some sort of alternative vision where people have much more ability to select their own education choice? And we want to apply that kind of thinking to just about every realm of life. And so that's just a fundamental difference that we have with somebody like Chris Rufo. So I appreciate him coming on. But I'm not going to be able to make, I've only made it go so far towards that. Well, and I think the question is like one of, what does it mean to live in a pluralistic and a tolerant society where we don't have to agree with him, obviously, but he also needs to respect our rights to teach our children the way we want. And we accord him the same right. It seems to me like a very clear and compelling case that there are going to be many different ways in which people want to talk about American history, where they want to talk about any given matter, even what schools should be teaching, broadly speaking. And it shouldn't be complicated, really. Like he's free to teach his kids the way they want and attract more and more people. And you and I would have difference of opinions. And then you throw in other people and let 1,000 flowers bloom on that. And pretty much on every possible issue. I agree. Another thing that Camille brought up that I thought might be worth discussing a little bit more is the idea that there are some emerging technological solutions to some of the confusion that we were talking about and some of the inability to tell what is real and what is not real. And that is kind of the promise of blockchain. I mean, Nick, you recently interviewed Balaji Srinivasan who talks really eloquently about a kind of chain of custody over information. And I do think that we are, that need is increasingly urgent because what I'm concerned about mostly is the kind of memory holding that happens routinely where people do stealth edits or pretend like something never happened. We have the Wayback Machine, which helps archive some of that, but that's not perfect. Some journalists has even got their Twitter feeds exempted from that. And when you think about even like classic works being kind of revised to take out problematic material, I think it is really important to have a record of how things were because that is, the ability to rewrite history is obviously a big concern for anyone and not least of all libertarians. Yeah, I totally agree. And this is where we've reached a point, on some level the impulse is understandable either that something is so hideous in the past that you want to kind of wipe it out so that we never have to contemplate it again or you wanna control the present to crib from, or well, you wanna control the present by controlling the past. But that is something, I think the term that Camille used was cultural antibodies, like these ideas we need a resilient system where we're willing to look at what's happened in the past or even what's happening now kind of honestly and openly and deal with our failures as well as our successes in the past and recognizing that it's a process. But I agree, it's also true that a lot of digital technology and I'm thinking or even in terms of things like radio which doesn't leave much of a trace, but television, modern technology, oftentimes of races, its own past, partly like a lot of TV shows in the 50s just disappeared because they were either performed live or the tapes that they were taped on got taped over, things like that. The historical record is really important and I think we've been short changing it for a very long time. Another comment here, CRT is a combination of sexual Marxism and racial Marxism. It uses every racial and sexual variation as a weapon for collectivist power struggles. So this is like the rhetoric that you hear a lot. Anytime you get into this debate around conversations that people are having about race and gender right now, I personally feel there's a lot to criticize in terms of like intersectional theory and the way that these things are applied in like diversity seminars I think is very, is often very clumsy and counterproductive. But this theory, there's this overarching theory that people try to advance, that it's some like coordinated Marxist plot. And that is where I just think it gets a little bit dangerous but you have to take these things one at a time. You can't lump it all together and when you kind of catastrophize things, then that is how you justify authoritarian intervention because you suddenly have this emergency and we need to give these special powers to people to crack down on the bad thing that is. Yeah, this is, ironically, it's a Marxist influence theorist, Giorgio Agamben, the Italian social theorist who talks about states of exception and that modern governance, particularly in liberal democracies is very prone to people getting whipped up and then saying, in order to preserve a liberal democracy where we have individual rights and civil liberties and things like that, we have to suspend them because of this intense threat and it could be 9-11, it could be the economic crisis, it could be COVID. And you end up inscribing, like in that comment, I have to say, I mean, I appreciate the person sending it, but it's nuts to think that there is a Marxist kind of conspiracy or then also to be focusing on racial and sexual categories as if Marxism is predicated upon the idea that there are groups, there are classes that are always at odds with one another and that everything is a twilight struggle where one will win and the other will lose. That is one way of looking at the world which was rejected by the world. And it's bizarre to me that in many ways it's conservative critics of so-called critical race theory or Marxism are the ones who are keeping alive Marxist analysis. We need something better than that. I do think it's, we are in a time where, for some of the reasons that we talked about in all of this, all of the kind of verities, all of the truths that we took for granted that there are men and women, that there are blacks and whites, et cetera, like those are eroding not because of some evil cabal but because we're, I think we're more sophisticated and interested in individualism and speciation and things like that. But for many people, the idea that these basic categories are morphing or changing is terrifying and they want to stop the movement of the world and say, no, this is the way it always has been and always must be otherwise madness lies ahead. And that's just not a way, that is not a way to create a productive and positive future. It's reactionary by definition and it doesn't get us anywhere except into a worse version of an imagined past that we thought was so great. And I wonder if to wrap up the stream, Nick, if you might talk about this terror that people have of that shifting ground and kind of what we've been talking about, the confusion that all the fakery and all the kind of manipulative media that is out there and the cynicism in our politics, what would you say is like part of the libertarian antidote to that or like what messages do you think libertarians could offer to help clear that fog of confusion or give people just something else to aim for rather than what is being served up and say the Pennsylvania Senate race? Yeah, I mean, it's, first and this isn't particularly libertarian, but echoing what Camille was talking about, the centrality of kind of media literacy, or actually it's not even media literacy, I would say it's critical thinking is a basic component and that's what our schools should be teaching is like how do you create people who are more likely to be able to kind of analyze things and come to their own conclusions? That's like the core project of our, should be the core project of our educational system as opposed to making good citizens or making good workers or something like that. We don't want compliant people, we want people who are independently minded. It is wearying and I say this as, I was like a real utopian in the 90s and I still remain that. I mean, I'm optimistic about the future and I think today is not just better than 200 years ago, but in most ways it's better than 20 years ago and I think that continues to proceed at pace even if we never want to discuss that. But I think what libertarians have first off is a true optimism and a belief in the individual that individuals left to their own devices and armed with a little bit of resources and a little bit of analytical skill which most of us have and most of us develop over time are pretty good at figuring out how to live an interesting productive life that is social and functional and kind of community oriented. And so very few of us are inwardly looking kind of narcissists who just want to run the world for our own benefit. We're not like that, we're not designed to be like that and we don't end up that way. So I think that's part of the libertarian message is one of optimism and belief in individuals that it's tough, it's hard, but we're pretty good at figuring out how to live a meaningful life and coming up with interesting stuff. I think the other thing and this is something that I think libertarians, including myself has spent years kind of knocking down institutions both public and private or public sector and private sector. And what we need to do is to kind of really come up with, start talking more and more about examples of places where things are going well and looking at why. What are the underlying institutions, the networks of association? The temperaments or mindsets of people and how do we broaden the scope of freedom of individuals being able to choose more in their life? This is right out of Mises and Hayek. The liberal project was about people having, starting out with very few choices that mattered in their life to having more and more choices. How do we model that? How do we kind of look at the places where it's working and build out from there rather than a kind of nihilistic dismissal of all politics is equally bad. All policy is equally bad. We need to be thinking more in those terms. What about you, Zach? What is, where do you go for that? I agree, building on what works. And also I like the idea of emphasizing the individual and creativity, unleashing creativity and imagination and innovation. Like these are all things that sprout from the bottom up and this is something that sort of seems to be missing and really has been just squashed a little bit over the past couple of years with the pandemic and the extreme overreach and this kind of just flattening of individuals into these broad groups that need to... These large statistical categories, right? Like if you have COVID, you don't have COVID, et cetera. Like an urgent need to break all that down and I'm not hearing it yet from anyone in politics, but it starts with, I believe it's all bottom up and it does start with the culture and hopefully we can push towards that, yeah. If I might add, as you're talking, I'm also thinking like you do this automatically and take it for granted. I know I try to focus myself on this, but like this is where an understanding of history is really important. I am, you know, my grandparents came to the United States, all four of them in the mid-19 teens, my parents grew up during the depression, they were poor. And I mean, everybody was poor, but they were poor. I'm like one generation removed from the ghetto and what that has helped me and I didn't realize this until I was older, like having that in the near-review mirror was helpful to understand how things continue to get better and how much worse they could be, how much better they can be. My kids are living a life at least materially that is like, you know, was literally unimaginable by me as a kid and it's kind of great. And recognizing that progress, both material progress and moral progress, these are not things that have to happen, it's a choice and what are the ways that help make that happen, you know, that have worked in the past, that have worked in the present and kind of, you know, keeping an eye on history is really important because I think to the extent that we stay like mired in these small like inch by inch, you know, kind of battles over no man's land in every election, in every news cycle, all of this, if we're not thinking about transcendent values or where we wanna be, you know, then it's just every day is a slug fest and it's just like, you know, you're stuck in trench warfare from World War I or something, it's meaningless. So I think history, you know, and again, that's not particularly libertarian. I mean, people will interpret history in different ways but it gives a sense of perspective which is oftentimes the main thing that's lacking in debates over virtually everything. Yeah, I agree especially that there has to be both of these, the contending with history and what could go wrong and kind of like the villains, especially again, coming off the past couple of years, like we need to, that should be a reminder of how things can backslide because that really was kind of an experiment in like what happens if we suddenly centralize or politicize a lot of these processes that were left to the market and the outcome was not good and we don't want that. So that should be criticized and, you know, to some degree demonized, but when you demonize things, when all you talk about is, you know, the evil COVID regime and everything like that, but you're not offering like here is, you know, this is where we can be going and here are some concrete examples. That is what is sometimes lacking and sometimes much harder because it's easier to focus on an enemy, but much harder to sketch out that positive vision because then you actually have to answer the critics of what you're sketching out there. But I think that's probably a good place to leave it. And I wanna thank Camille for joining us today. Thanks for the talk again, Nick. And we'll see, thanks for everyone who left comments. Sorry, we didn't get to all of them, but we'll... Including sketch therapy, who believes that CRT is a combination of sexual Marxism and racial Marxism, but not class-based Marxism. Why not? Why not? Why not economic Marxism? Yeah. Well, thanks everyone. We'll see you next week.