 This is the Human Action Podcast, where we debunk the economic, political, and even cultural myths of the days. Here's your host, Dr. Bob Murphy. Hey everybody, just want to announce that we had a Human Action Podcast raffle, which gives the winner attendance to the Human Action Conference. And that wrapped up, and the winner was Philip Boggs. So congratulations, Philip, and we will reach out to you so you can claim your prize. Nick, welcome to the Human Action Podcast. Thanks for having me. I'm glad that we're talking. I appreciate your, you know, I guess this all generated from a Twitter exchange from a while ago, and I'm happy to talk to you and talk about optimism versus pessimism, long-term, mid-term, and short-term, and how it intersects with libertarian ideas. Yeah, same here, and yeah, I am glad that we were able to do this, instead of it merely being an online squabble. So yeah, the, let me just give the quick backstory, Nick, because we don't do like pre-recorded intros for these episodes. So folks, Nick, what are you, an editor at large? Is that your title? I am editor at large, yes, that reason. All right, and so he's been around, he's sometimes known as the Fonzie of libertarianism. So Nick had, I had been talking with various people, and they're lamenting the, you know, the fate of our country, and you know, its woes, and so forth, and look at, here we are living through a collapsing empire, and then I saw a tweet where Nick, I mean, wouldn't I hand the reins over to you if you want to explain where you were, but you were given an interview or something, and you were making the case for optimism, and it wasn't just that you were optimistic, you said something like, you know, there's never been a better time to be alive, and I think that the... It is a great time to be alive. Yes, and in this particular, the thing that triggered me was you said, there was a, it was a good thing I was in a safe space at the time. You said there was a, like, you were lamenting the misguided pessimism, or unfounded pessimism, I forget what adjective it was, but it was definitely something you didn't endorse among libertarians. Okay, so I responded to that, and then, so I had written, yes, I had written something, and anyway, we were going back and forth, and so I thought, okay, why don't I, you know, Nick, do you want to talk about it? And so that's why you're here, and then folks, Nick and I both agreed, we don't want this to be a debate, we want it to be a discussion. However, I think it'll make more sense because, you know, you and I kind of exchange volleys in the written, well, I wrote a thing up in response. Yeah, yeah, we're separate. And we agreed, so maybe I'll literally just keep a watch, just to make sure I don't go over. But I thought we would each take, if you want to give, like, a five-minute-ish pitch. I'm going to try to do, like, three to five minutes, you know, my basic, and I'm already running out the clock here, but, you know, if a song like The Beatles, you know, like, you know, Hey Jude or something, or... As you guys say, it's getting better. A day in the life, now it's like, you know, three or four minutes, like, I should be able to kind of, you know, like, you know, I should be able to do this pretty quickly. I was speaking at the Students for Liberty annual event called LibertyCon, and I forget exactly what panel or whatever I was on, but part of it had to do with, you know, what's going on in the libertarian movement and whatnot. So what I was saying is that it's a fantastic time to be alive and that it's a good time for human freedom and human flourishing. And I believe that, and the way that I think about this and is that I was born in 1963. My father was born in 1923, and my older son was born, you know, so my father was born 40 years before. I mean, my oldest son, older son was born 30 years after me in 1992. So like, one of the ways that I think about are things getting better or worse, is I just peg it to the world my father was born into, the one I was born into, and the one that my older son was born into, just on a very basic level. And what I would submit, this is, you know, the main reason why I think about things getting better is when my father was born in 1923, life expectancy at birth, according to Social Security. You know, and we are both against mandatory Social Security, I think. So, you know, there's a lot of agreement here already, but in 1923 it was basically 63 years. When I was born, 40 years later, it had gone up to 74.4. When my son was born in 1992, it was 79.2. And if you run it up to 2022, just for the hell of it, it's 82 years, basically. Per capita GDP was about $7,000 when my father was born. It was 20,000 or 2100, 21,000. When I was born, it's about 40,000. When my son was born and now it's 62,000, 63,000 roughly. If you look at things like work hours, just a lot of indicators of material progress. People are living longer, they are healthier, they're wealthier, et cetera. So, you know, in that sense, that's a rough starting point. We're better off than we used to be materially. I'll also point out Brookings Institution using a World Health Organization data in the mid-teens, and they've kind of updated it. COVID is a little bit of a screwball and all this, but not much. They found that for the first time, like around 2017, for the first time in human history, a majority of people on the planet were living at or above a middle-class income. You know, we talk a lot about how extreme poverty, which can be defined in various ways, has declined very rapidly over the past 30 years. But what's even more amazing than that is that most people on the planet now are living at a middle-class or above lifestyle when you take into account local purchasing power. So that's a cause for optimism, and that does mean it's better to be alive now than to be alive 50 years ago or 100 years ago, I think. I would argue, and this is where I think we'll have more disagreement. Culturally and morally, we're also better off. And by that, what I mean is that culturally, I have a PhD in American literature. I'm a huge fan of creative expression, art, music, video, movies, literature, and things like that. Just compared to when I was a kid, we're so much better off. The costs to produce and consume creative expression have dropped almost zero. Everything, there is so much more available. All of the best stuff that has ever been written and said is available plus we can produce our own and we've remixed it in all sorts of unauthorized ways. We live in a world of permissionless innovation, certainly in the cultural arena. We need to do better in the economic arena, but even there, creative destruction is still really huge. And I would also say we're morally better off. I think about this when my parents got married. They were the children of immigrants. My father was Irish. My mother was Italian. They got married in 1950. My father's family didn't talk to my mother for a year or so because she was Italian, even though they were both Catholic. And it was like, wow, when I was born in 63, it was something like under 5% of Americans thought interracial marriages were moral. It took until the mid-80s before you got a simple majority saying that. I think you're morally now, we live in a world where we don't think about things like that. That's reduced to the ashes of history. Gay people can get married. Gay people can be accepted. We are across a wide variety of personal indicators, which are very important to me as an individualist and as a libertarian. We can more live our lives the way we want to. And that's true for more people than ever before, I think. We're also less violent as a society. We're less sexist. We're less racist. We have a better attitude towards, I think, intoxicants and whatnot. One of the things that is great, and I'm not saying this to endorse drug use, but the wind-down of the drug war, which is beginning, is a very important thing, not simply from human flourishing, but from a specifically libertarian angle because it's saying that nobody has a right to tell you what you can and cannot put into your body. You live with the consequences, of course, but we're certainly in our lifetimes, I think. We're at the best point for that kind of thing. So across these broad areas of human activity, human expression, human flourishing, we're doing extremely well. None of this is to say that we don't have massive and, in many cases, growing problems to deal with. You and I both are deeply concerned about things like national debt. In the national debt, the entitlement state, the surveillance state, all of these things are large and, in many ways, growing. Certainly debt is certainly surveillance, although I think there's workarounds and things like that. So there's many, many problems ahead, but what I was saying in that comment and what I think is broadly true, and I think is true not just from a kind of, okay, human beings are doing well, but from a specifically libertarian angle, we live in a profoundly libertarian world if you define libertarianism not in a very kind of narrow, you know, kind of doctrinaire way of saying, okay, if government is growing, then everything else is shrinking. But rather from the idea of, like, as an individual, do you have more ability to live the life that you want to live peacefully and openly and honestly and in the light of day? I think things are going extremely well. That's what I meant. Okay, great. I think that was closer to a Don McLean-length song than a Beatles one. Don McLean is a real downer. I highly recommend anybody read or listen to the American Pie album, any of his albums. It's amazing he, I think he died recently, but, like, how he didn't commit suicide is a mystery. Yeah, well, yeah, his Vincent is very poignant. Okay, so, again, folks, Nick and I are going to have just a friendly conversation, but let me just throw a bunch of stuff out just to set the table and I'll set mine for, I'll try to keep it to five. So, yeah, and you anticipated some of these. Let me just clarify at the outset, I'm going to narrowly focus on the United States. I agree if someone wants to make the case that, you know, the randomly selected earthling is better off now than 20 years ago or the prospects look good. And also too, I should clarify, even there, the way I just framed it. I am not denying necessarily that someone today or war like somebody who was born within the last 10 years is better off than somebody who was born 50 years ago. People can quibble, but I'm more specifically arguing with how you said, like, because, like, right now is the best time ever. I think in other words, on several of the dimensions you mentioned, the U.S. specifically peaked a while ago and now is in the decline. So let me just run through some of these. So the debt and part of this too was just so people realize, like, how bad certain things are in case they haven't been totally keeping it. So for example, the federal spending debt situation, the latest CBO report says, you know, the U.S. deficit is going to be about 1.6 trillion this year and it will never be lower than that ever again. Right. Which, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, there's a rough spot because of COVID or whatever, but we're going to grow out of it. Like, you know, so there's that element. It's classic Bob Higgs crisis on the bias and spending jacked up during COVID and it came down a little bit, but it's never going back down to pre-COVID levels. We've got one of my favorite go-to is there was a New York Times story, I think in 2012, talking about how the president has a secret kill list and that's not me putting words in the right. That was literally the copy and how President Obama at the time and his advisors would get together. They'd have PowerPoint presentations about should we send flying killer robots to take out drones and they were concerned and some of them could be U.S. citizens and they could be on foreign soil in a nation where we weren't at war with them and still they had determined, no, we can go ahead and send a drone and kill them and there was concerns about due process, but they said, no, they don't need a trial or we don't need a judge to sign off on it because we discussed it internally. That's their due process, you know? Yeah. And we weighed the pros and cons of killing them. So there's that element. James Clapper famously told Congress, no, we're not doing mass surveillance, collecting information on phone calls and such on Americans on a mass scale, maybe inadvertently leading us to believe the FBI's following some terrorists or whatever and then if they order a pizza that maybe the innocent pizza guy gets pulled into it, but no, then of course Snowden comes out and shows he was just lying through his teeth and it's not just that he was lying, but nothing happened to him, right? Like he's still, you know, he didn't get prosecuted for that. Maybe not as big deal of people who don't, who hate Donald Trump's guts, but this thing about the recent, the New York civil fraud verdict there, just to make sure people understand what's going on. So there, you know, the allegation, well, he was convicted. The crime, according to New York State, is that Trump engaged in fraud, inflating the values of a lot of his properties when applying for loans from Deutsche Bank for a specific example, and that, you know, this is hurting Deutsche Bank because they could have charged a higher interest rate had they not been defrauded by Trump's claims and inflating his property. And this particular statute that they used is one that has never been used in this way before. It's typically been used like, if there's like class action suits where people getting, you know, innocent people or old ladies getting defrauded, slick companies coming in and the consumer doesn't really know what they're doing and there's actual damages. You know, the consumer's got ripped off and then, you know, the Attorney General of New York will prosecute some company on their behalf. Whereas in here, the reason that Trump defenders are calling it a victimless crime is because they paid the loans back with interest. You know, they didn't default on the loan. Deutsche Bank's employees themselves testified in Trump's behalf at the trial saying, we're fine with this. This is cool. We did our due diligence. You know, this happens all the time in these markets where the promoter is real optimistic and puts a rosy estimate on the value of their property and several cases, Trump gave us a number, what he thought he was worth and we wrote it down. You know, that's how this works. And it's not just because they like Trump but it's a chilling effect, you know, that now investors aren't so willing to go into New York State because they're worried, like, this is kind of a wild card. In other words, you could do a deal. You're happy, the bank's happy, everybody's happy and if the Attorney General comes in and says, no, we don't like the valuations you gave on your, you know, even those disclaimers and stuff. So, you know, again, just to show how politicized things are. And then the last thing I'll say here, and then we can just flip it over to the conversation is yes, in terms of life expectancy but actually that peaked in his turn, so this is from Wikipedia from 2000 to 2020, more than 800,000 people died by suicide in the U.S., blah, blah, blah. In 2022 a record high 49,500 people died by suicide and that was the highest rate since 1941 at 14.3 per 100,000. Surging death rates from suicide, drug overdoses and alcoholism, what research is referred to as deaths of despair are largely responsible for a consecutive three-year decline of life expectancy in the U.S., this constitutes the first three-year drop in life expectancy in the U.S. since the years 1915 through 1918. Okay, so maybe one last thing I'll say, Nick, too, is on the you know, the you know, racial I would argue that yeah, you were mentioning like, so certainly racism clearly was better in the 1980s than in the 1950s. But I think it soft and then is an increase. So I think now people are much more conscious about race and in fact interracial dating is not universally accepted, but it's the other way around that there's it's well-known that like black women get mad at black athletes for dating white women, and that's a relatively benign, I suppose, but no, it's clear that white heterosexual males are not popular people in terms of the U.S. culture in many venues and settings, and so I think and that has bred, you know, more resentment, like people, there's far more open support for Adolf Hitler now than I've ever seen in my lifetime and you know, that has to do with October 7th and everything like that, but I'm just saying I don't like these general trends that you're talking about, I agree were true for large stretches, you know, going back, but I actually think things have been getting worse in the last 10 years, let's say, so I'll stop there. Okay, I mean, you know, I think while a couple of specific things, one, you know, I completely agree with you about the size of the national debt and the growth of government. These are issues and you know, whether you want to talk about somebody like Mancer Olson, you know, an older kind of theorist of why governments kind of keep growing until they effectively kind of collapse under the weight of their own kind of concretization and ossification and things, or somebody more recent like Jonathan Roush, who I guess now it's almost 20 years ago, talked about what he called, I think, demo sclerosis. You know, there's something in that, you know, that there's, you know, clearly something is wrong in the governance of a lot of what Donald Rumsfeld, who I am rarely quoting in a positive way, but called Old Europe. You know, there's something wrong in that, and there's a certain dimension to which America is becoming more like Europe, where it's just having a large kind of bureaucratic state that continues to ooze and grow and kind of try and screw things up or get in the way of everything. You know, and I think, you know, this is true of Republicans and Democrats. I was, you know, I started editing reason. I've been working since 93. I started, I became editor-in-chief of the magazine in 2000, and, you know, I can't think of a good thing, you know, really that I wrote about George W. Bush for the most part. You know, he, you know, it's liberals and conservatives in government, Republicans and Democrats, we just, you know, Trump himself. I am not an anti-Trump but I must say not a pro-Trump but he, even before COVID he massively increased the size, scope and spending of government. And then he was really bad during COVID, you know, for whatever he's saying now. He's the guy who pushed the national lockdown. He was the one who mainstreamed the idea of two weeks to flatten the curve and things like that. So everybody, there's a lot of blood or, you know, at least mud on people's hands and that's a super important issue. I think what's important though is that we also consider the ways in which we either can change that or how do we get people to come over to our side of the aisle or to kind of think about libertarian ways of dismantling, you know, a large and growing state. And I don't know that, you know, maybe, I mean, you might do it more through you know, kind of pessimism and kind of millenarian claims that like if we don't stop this, you know, right now it's all over baby blue. I don't disagree with that. Like the time to end the entitlement state was, you know, 50 years ago, if not 50 years ago or, you know, in 1935 when it kind of got cranked up in its current form. But, you know, that has always been the case. Government has almost always been growing at every level through our entire lifetime. So it's not new. Something like a presidential kill list. I remember when that came out and I wrote voluminously about it because I think this was the thing to stick in the eye of people who were saying, well, George Barack Obama was this enlightened liberal and, you know, and he defended, you know, civil liberties and things like that. That was just total horse shit. I had the opportunity and the honor, really, to interview Edward Snowden, you know, who was absolutely essential in bringing this kind of hypocrisy to light. Snowden also, you know, this was in 2016. I did it through the Free State Project. He acknowledged that he thought this was, you know, that the individual has more freedom now. He was calling in from Russia and he said the individual has more ability now to make their lives the way they want to than ever before. And I think, you know, I think he meant it. I think he knows what he's talking about in this case. And I think it's still true, which isn't to say that it's perfect. Kill lists, presidents have always had kill lists. And, you know, when you look at the history of the 70s, what the church committee or the church commission, I guess, church committee, as well as the Miller Commission unearthed, you know, about what the NSA was doing, what the CIA was doing, what the FBI is doing, it was terrible. That gave rise to, you know, the FISA courts and other things now which have become complete rubber stands for the surveillance state. But my point is, you know, presidents have always, this kind of thing has always been there. And it doesn't mean that we put up with it and we tolerated it. It's that we unmask it and we try to reduce it and try to get rid of it all the time. But it's not new. When you talk about things like, you know, race relations in America are, you know, they're not great, but I don't think there is, to be honest, I don't think there's any comparison to what was going on through, you know, certainly through the mid-60s in terms of daisy race segregation that was in place, you know, and things are not good now and they need to get better and we need to get away from identity politics and more to an individualist cause. But, you know, I'm a heterosexual white male. I have two sons both heterosexual white males and it's not, you know, they are a punching bag or we are a punching bag. Cisgender, heterosexual white males in many ways are punching bags in the culture, but I don't think we have it, you know, bad in a way that it is enough to say, okay, you know what, like, the world is a dark place now. You and I, my kids, I think a lot of people like us are doing extremely well. And, you know, it is the work of improving society and especially putting forth libertarian ideas where you reduce the ability of governments or other forces to coerce you and you increase the sphere of individual autonomy. That is always a fight. It's always a tough slog. But, you know, I think we're in, I think we're in very good shape, you know, and so I guess we'll stop yapping for now there. Okay, so, I mean, I think what's going to end up happening with this is you and I are going to say things that we largely agree, like with the statement of this is here's a statement about the world and I don't think we're going to say, like, no, I think that's just, you're not, that you're wrong. But, like, but then our, you know, our conclusion. Can I, then let me, let me throw something out there because I think this was part of, you know, the back and forth that we got into Twitter because I had posted a clip from that Students for Liberty thing and then you were like, wow, you know, I, you know, when I just had come out of a Bible study, you know, and my, you know, the people I'm there with are like, are you kidding? This is like, we are a couple of minutes away from, you know, the USS R of America, you know, like that we're in a terrible place and things like that. I, I don't, you know, I think cultural pessimism or pessimism in general is not particularly warranted at this point in time. Like, I actually, when I look at a variety of things that are specific to Libertarian, Libertarian critiques of state power, there are a lot of things that are happening that are good. It is extremely meaningful that the war on drugs is being dismantled. It is taking way too long and it's too slow, but because when you tug on the string, you know, without the drug war is on, it, it gets rid of a lot of stuff that you're talking about including, you know, racial classifications but about police powers about incarcerating people about regulating everyday life and, you know, people being able on a most basic level to change their minds the way that they want to. We're in the beginning of that. This is, you know, like I said, I've been at reason now 30, 31 years when I joined the staff, I knew that the drug war would end and certainly the war on marijuana would end. I didn't know how and I didn't know when, but it's starting and that's a good thing. That's a win for human freedom and more to the point I don't smoke weed, I don't you know, I don't drink, I don't do a lot of drugs, so it's not like this stuff, you know, is like oh, now I can get legal weed but it is the beginning of the end. It's a shift in mindset towards more freedom for individuals to live how they want. I think that's also true in terms of foreign policy and unfortunately in the 21st century you know, we had to go through the unnamed stupidity of the war on terror, you know, that was instituted and kind of misarticulated by George W. Bush, but then, you know, followed up on you know, certainly by Obama but you know, Americans now are more skeptical of foreign intervention than they have been in my lifetime. You know, and I think that's a good thing. You know, we're going after things like occupational licensing, we're going after things like zoning in a way that is really important and was unthinkable, you know, even 10 years ago I think. So for me, there's a lot of green shoots out there and this, you know the question is how do we how do we get to a world where you know, people have more space and more freedom to do what they want to do. Okay, so I guess the elephant in the room would be the COVID lockdowns and you know so there it's in terms of like to say I disagree that people in our age are more free to do what they want to do. I mean, that was so I agree marijuana legalization happened faster and particularly it was happening when I lived in Tennessee, I was talking with some of the people there that were, you know, they had me coming as a speaker and like the normal group and some other groups that were, you know, trying different strategies and I was surprised at how receptive even the Tennessee legislators were to that. I just had assumed, oh yeah, it's not going to, you know, happen in California and, you know, up New England states but I was surprised there, certainly especially coming like the medicinal angle they were surprisingly open to that but on the other hand, if you had told me that, yeah it's just going to be that your governor can tell you whether you're allowed to go to church or not on Easter and if you can have people come over to your house or your parents are dying in the hospital and you can't go see them, that would have been inconceivable to me too. Unless it was like, you know, a zombie apocalypse movie and people were literally piling up at the streets which we were told was going to happen in the beginning and then didn't actually happen. So anyway, I'm just saying like it's Oh no and I, you know, I live in New York City which is in New York state where, you know, we had such luminaries of Obama on a weekly basis deciding which businesses he considered, you know, essential or non-essential and, you know, who knows what that guy was, you know, what was his decision matrix, you know, because that was one of the things when Obama's kill list came up, people started talking about, oh, the decision matrix of Obama, like, would you kill people? Andrew Cuomo would be like, okay, well, you know you can have this or that, you know, it got to a point where he was saying like, okay, well bars can be open, but you know, you have to serve substantive food and it couldn't just be like guacamole and chips wasn't enough, but was maybe a burrito, you know, or a quesadilla with guacamole, okay, yeah, maybe, like what kind of world are we living in where you have to, you know, kind of, you know, go to the king and ask permission to just go about your business, especially if there is a health emergency, then you create the protocol which you say like, okay, if you follow this protocol, you're open it's not the rule of the state to say, well, you know what, we don't like what you're selling, so you can't open, but over here you can. So, you know, the COVID lockdowns which I push back on often and loudly from the beginning all the way through, I like vaccines and I don't like vaccine mandates, you know, we can roam all around that, it was horrible and one of the things that we can do, I mean, if we agree that it was unbelievable and almost inconceivable overstep and overreach of the government, now how do we make sure that people remember what happened so that if that gets tried again it gets slapped down quicker and again, this isn't much of a debate because we basically agree with all of that, but, you know, this is to me, it's kind of a question of attitude and I'm not sure that it's libertarian per se or it's not like, you know, we obviously, you know, we belong to different factions within the broader libertarian universe and things like that, but I think in a lot of ways what we might be talking about or where we might be disagreeing has more to do with kind of personality or you know, kind of attitudes towards things. I tend to see things and again, I will put it out there, this is mostly from a personal history level I grew up, my parents grew up very poor, I grew up lower middle class my kids grew up upper middle class I see that as progress and I understand you know, one of the reasons I'm a libertarian and why I'm a capitalist is because I firmly believe, I think I know and I want to say from personal experience but personal experience can be tricky and certainly you don't argue just from personal experience like capitalism and the, you know the freedom that comes with free minds and free markets you know, that is the best system for allowing people to rise according to their work efforts and to their ambition and to their abilities and things like that, but I you know, I see the world generally speaking getting better, I don't see it getting worse in Toto and in any case you know, what are we going to do with our lives like you know, if it's that bad and if it keeps getting worse, Bob why do you show up for work every day? Well well because I'm a Christian and so I think I'm supposed to go ahead and keep my chin up so I think partly it's I think you and I probably do have a fundamental disagreement about where we think things are going to be five years from now let's say so do you disagree with my assessment that the US had a global empire that is collapsing do you think that's not correct? Yeah, here I'll put it in slightly different terms and also in optimistic terms the hegemonic power that the United States both kind of exercised and more importantly thought it could exercise but did poorly during much of the Cold War and much of the period in the night like post-Cold War you know, the US thought it was in control of things, it thought it was dispensable, nation, etc. Yes, I think the United States no longer has the power that it might have once had and it always overestimated its power to do this you know and think of places like Vietnam and things like that. We thought we could go in and shape world history and we could dictate local disputes and local developments and things like that. That was always kind of arrogance and hubris on our part sometimes it worked especially if we did it through trade and diplomacy or cultural exchange rather through military might or kind of economic coercion we are in a different world now and I think one of the things that the US like I don't I don't bemoan or I don't miss the idea of an American empire. I think America is still we are the largest economy on the planet. I think we are the best country especially if we learn how to kind of redo our immigration policies so that we are bringing people who are you know really motivated and ambitious and smart and want to either work and live in the US or do business with the US if we can fix that and this is a major problem I think and in many ways it might have gotten worse over the past 20 years. I don't know that might be a place where I think we are doing poorly but the US has less ability to dictate terms around the globe. I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing unless America keeps insisting that we not only have the ability to do that but we have some kind of moral right and so you know if we go back into countries like we did in Afghanistan and Iraq that is really bad. It's not only going to deplete our resources but it's going to make the world a much much worse place. I look forward to living in in America and working to build a consensus to say you know what America is not the indispensable nation. America is not the world's policeman and that when we learn that we are a country a great country but one among many and that it's better to use Swazian and markets and open and equal exchange rather than military force to get our way. I think we will not only have a better country but we will have a better world as well. Yeah so just to be clear I'm not lamenting the fall of the US empire. I just want to make sure we agree on the macro view of what's in store globally. I don't think I think about this a lot and I think one of the places where broadly we probably agree about most things related to the Federal Reserve or a national currency but in a way that we might think differently about it is I think it is less countries now have less ability than they have almost ever had to either inflate or deflate their currency because markets are so linked to the US dollar. The US has less control over world currency than it ever did and this isn't even counting in something like Bitcoin which I see as a massive win for a stateless currency or a kind of hedge or a check on the ability of national currencies to just kind of do whatever they want with their money. I think countries national banks have less power than they had in mid 20th century and I think that's a good thing. I agree that they have less I guess my concern is I think the US government is going to be acting like a cornered animal over the next 10 to 20 years and maybe a cornered animal that's weak and has been partially clawed or something but still you don't want to be locked in a room with it. So I agree it's good for the world at large but that's partly why I'm so pessimistic about what is life going to be like for the average American over the next 5 to 10 years is I think I hear you on that I think about that in terms of the lunatic fantasies of control of economic, cultural political control when somebody like Elizabeth Warren who is your senator you're in Massachusetts and when she was at a year ago when she started talking about how plugs for electric appliances or computer appliances all of them should be standardized one way of looking at that is to say this is an insane person who is living in her own dream world what is wrong with her and it's dangerous because she can start passing laws that make this harder and harder to just innovate which is why you have a lot of different plugs and things like that another way of thinking about it is for people like that in a profound way and I think our job within the broad again the broad kind of Catholic Libertarian movement is to kind of call out these people and mock them but also to show do the math for why those kinds of fantasies of regulation are doomed to failure we've gone through all of this before I am worried the only thing that worries me more than another presidency in many ways is another Biden presidency and I think one of the things where I don't really get into partisan politics too much but in 2016 I was happy that Trump beat Hillary I kind of wanted Trump to beat Biden in 2020 not because I like Trump but I think the broad dynamics that would have been put into place would have been better for individual freedom but when you look at somebody like Biden who may win and be in power for the next four or five years every moment that he has any dial he can find on kind of the economy he's trying to turn it down a little bit right like he wants to control more and more things when you look at his SEC or his FTC they're insane and they're playing out a mid 20th century playbook where the best and the brightest run big corporations and are beyond market forces and the best and the greatest are running government bureaucracies that tell businesses how to split their markets up and things like that it's bad and we need to sadly re kind of relitigate or refight a lot of battles that I thought were settled 20 or 30 years ago. Okay so just even on that point though isn't that another side like to me in terms of just saying well this country is really screwed up now is just how openly and that's why I harped on the civil fraud suit or whatever verdict against Trump is because to me it's just so clear this is all there's just throwing everything they can at this guy because they don't want him to be president again and everybody's going along with it because they just don't like him and whether you like Trump or not like that's not a good like that's kind of banana republic stuff. I agree with that it's prosecutorial abuse or misconduct is not anything new again though and what we're seeing and this to me you know I live but what do you mean you say it's nothing new like you don't think this is qualitatively different I mean I guess if you think the CIA killed Kennedy which I don't yeah I do not so in a sense I get like no the deep state doesn't like you but put that aside this is I'll be open that's what I'm saying yeah but what I'm saying is is that like you know talking about what happens to Donald Trump and I'm not saying you know I don't think this is a nuisance lawsuit and I think it will probably get overturned on some level and you know people are weaponizing all sorts of stuff to get him okay there's no question about that but that is not necessarily something that is going to affect most people or the average person what I'm looking at when I look at the bigger picture and you know and again I say this to somebody who moved back to New York I was born in Brooklyn raised in New Jersey lived here before I went to grad school etc you know but I came back to New York City the most over-regulated place in the world and also you know weirdly I think the best city or the city I want to live in at this point in my life but people are leaving New York and California you know of the foremost populist states we're seeing something play out in real time which is pretty fascinating where you have in California and New York very clear models of a growing government you know that has always been too big but it's now reached the point where they are you know they're smothering their economies they're smothering many aspects of the life I think New York City is you know the city is too vibrant so it keeps punching through whatever you know weighted anxiety blanket gets thrown on it by people but people are leaving for places like Texas and Florida you know which are the you know two of the foremost populist states and we're seeing an experimentation in governance you know which is new and exciting and I'm not all in on you know either Greg or Ron DeSantis or those states but like I think it's pretty good we I guess another way of thinking about this Bob is I believe like we're at the end of an epoch right so in a way like you I'm kind of millenarian we're at the end of something and you know it's the 20th century the long 20th century is coming to a close finally it should have ended at least 20 years ago 25 years ago but it didn't but the methods the models the mindsets the temperaments the institutions that arose in mid 20th century America which were mostly built on a kind of command and control model you know this was the best and the brightest like we just get the smartest people around every business and you know the businesses get really big and then they don't have to worry about market forces we get a government that's bigger and bigger and full of smart people with a lot of degrees and preferably league schools or whatever you know and they run everything because we we figured it out like we're not dummies anymore that 20th century model was breaking down you know it started breaking down in the fifth even as it began in the 50s and 60s certainly in the 70s and I think we're finally coming to politics and we're finally breaking that down and it's not going to be pretty you may be right there's going to be a lot of dark years and it's going to be dark for places you know we're in the old part of the country right you know Massachusetts was the first side of the industrial revolution and you know it was the first rich super rich state New York was one of the first rich states we're in a bad place for this but there's rebirth going on and there's shifts coming around and I think a 21st century a model that is very individualistic that is more decentralized you know that follows from the internet and from bitcoin and from websites of you know many of the people that we find you know to be prescient and insightful thinkers this is the world that is starting to come online and I'm very excited to see that even if the end of anything is going to be messy I think it's great that we got out of Afghanistan it was a very messy departure but it was probably always going to be messy and it may be that in the next few years we see a messy departure from what I call the long 20th century and it's going to be messy but it's got to happen okay we got just about seven minutes are here so before I got to do a hard stop so let me this is going to be a little bit of an exaggeration but I feel like again we agree on the particulars and it's just the way we summarize so this is going to be admittedly an exaggeration but consider the world depicted in the first matrix movie right okay so I could be a pessimist and say holy cow like the machines enslaved humanity the vast majority of people are plugged in to this virtual reality thing where they don't even know their slaves and they're just serving their cogs in the machine and whatever and they're just being distracted by this and but then you know an optimist can come on and say are you talking look at look at Morpheus' ship that's cool there's nothing like that now we can't fly around that's awesome and look at how much freedom they have How are we communicating I mean like we're communicating in space age stuff Dick Tracy was dreaming of this but I mean you're you're underscoring my point right so I'm just saying that you get there that like those two things could be true so I'm saying I think that's what we're doing like I'm talking about it looks like the police surveillance state you know mass surveillance just hurting people like like the ability to control the masses like cattle and whatever that those tools like so yes they were always had kill lists but they didn't have drones they could just send out and so now that that's like been normalized I think you're gonna see more drone survey and then you know 10 years from now I think it's gonna be quite easy that everybody just knows yeah you don't want to speak out too much because a drone will come and you won't be seen again I don't yeah I mean you know look that's you know that's a plausible anxiety or a plausible fear right I would argue that even in a place like China which probably you know that you know that's what a lot of people point to is like okay that's one direction that we could be going in it's better to be alive in China now than it was probably in any time in the past 500 years of Chinese history and I guarantee or this is a bet that we can have in 10 years China is gonna be more liberal or it's going to have seen a mass exodus of people even you know from something approaching a prison camp because that is that's the way the world works and even within China with the surveillance and everything with industrialization and the growth of mega cities I guarantee that people have more individual freedom there than they had because you have to look at each place you know based on its own history and like you know in the late 60s you know people didn't have freedom in China and things like that but more importantly in the US and I think more broadly in the world what and this part of this is taste preference like I don't think this is something where we can say somebody's right or wrong but I would argue that what has happened in the United States is the ability of people to dictate what is a good and meaningful life has shrunk when you think about it the government can't do that the way that it may be it did schools can't do that families can't do that religions can't do that corporations can't do that they are all more limited power even if the government has more reach and as a result what it means is that we are competing like we have made a mass phenomenon out of existential angst because we are at a higher level of economic and material resources so we are way up Maslow's hierarchy and what that means is that each of us has to create meaning on a daily basis and then recreate it and keep it going and that is a daunting task and I don't think that Americans are have been particularly acculturated into that or educated for that and I think that's where a lot of the despair comes from and I think that's where a lot of the polarization comes from which I don't necessarily say is a bad thing like what I want in America I want as many people to be running as many experiments in living as they can come up with as long as it's peaceful and as long as it's not it's all to the good and this is another sign that the world in which you and I were born into is dying and that's generally it's both a sad thing because there were many good things about that world but it's also a good thing because it means that something new is being born and I think that new thing is going to be more individualistic we live in a world where people can express themselves more than in the past actually more people are expressing dissent and difference from whatever the conventional wisdom is or the status quo is than ever before how can that be bad? Let me give one pushback and then I'll give you the final word and we'll wrap up here because I also think this is going to be one where we do, we're coming from radically different places I think there are certain subsets of Americans that younger people where there is a very real sense in which they are not as free as their counterparts would have been 20 years ago so girls in the locker rooms and schools and you know heaven who they think our boys coming in and changing from they're not allowed to complain against that or they're going to be labeled transphobes or more generally it's certain college campuses if a speaker comes and they're allowed to shout that guy down and threaten violence I don't think the sphere of individual autonomy has actually grown or at least it's only defined in a certain way and I think there's other corresponding things where it's a negative zero sum game you get where I'm coming from it is harder to enforce a cultural orthodoxy I think now because people can say like okay well I'm a heterosexual male Christian and I'm not allowed to object to something in my public school it's like there may be something true to that but it's also true that like 20 or 50 years ago there were other orthodoxies that if you weren't a heterosexual white Christian male you weren't allowed you didn't have a voice when it comes to college campuses what is going on we've seen a breaking point and this is something like a fever has to break colleges that absolutely are prone to violence and to shouting down people rather than engaging in reasoned debate which is the whole purpose of a university are going to lose market share we saw recently Harvard announced that its applications were weighed down not simply because of the response to the objective embrace of Hamas of terrorists by large numbers of people on the Harvard campus it goes back years before that I interviewed Steven Pinker recently before October 7th Harvard had become a joke and applications are down at like the oldest and most prestigious university in America that's good news and people are pushing back against this stuff I think the solution to particular questions like trans stuff because I think it's really important that people who are trans and kids it's always a much more complicated issue than with whatever arbitrary age we assign to majority or adulthood but it's really important that people can express themselves and become who they want to be not at the expense of other people but one of the things that we're seeing in public schools which are atrocious and are minimum security prisons for the most part K-12 schools is we are seeing a breakdown of the old traditional traditional kind of factory model of education more people are leaving public schools they're not even doing necessarily homeschooling or going to private schools they're just doing what they want these are things these are inheritances of the mid 20th century model that long 20th century that are breaking down so it's not perfect in all cases and things like that but I think the trend lines are going towards a world of permissionless innovation decentralize power and living we have the technology that enables that we have the wealth that enables that and what we need to do is create a political movement that really supercharges this so that the next five years aren't terrible but you know they're actually pretty good okay well great and actually in my other capacity in my day job Nick we are building those tools to try to help people so it's never a cause for despair but I do have a different perspective for you so folks my guest has been Nick Gillespie thanks so much for your time thanks everybody for tuning in and I guess time will tell which of these perspectives is more accurate I hope you're right Nick I hope so too thanks and thank you everyone for tuning in thank you