Psychedelic Libertarianism
Coleman Hughes interviewed me about drugs, politics, culture, race, class, and much more. Watch the video, listen to the podcast, read the transcript!
On November 25, 2023, I appeared on Coleman Hughes’ interview program Conversations with Coleman. Not even 30 years old, Coleman is already a fearsome public intellectual, with a widely subscribed Substack, a vibrant Twitter feed (still can’t call it X for some reason), and his first book due out in a month. It’s called The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America and it’s as strong a case for that POV as I’ve ever encountered (here’s my interview of him on the subject). He’s also a CNN contributor and a great musician.
I’ve known him since moving back to New York City in the fall of 2018, when he was still attending Columbia. It was an honor and a mental workout being interviewed by him—we really covered the waterfront, talking about everything from my long (30-year!) career at Reason, how my libertarianism has changed over the years, getting engaged last fall at Burning Man, my views on psychedelics and other outsider movements, and much more. We talked a lot about how social change happens, too (he’s an admirer of civil rights legend and World War II conscientious objector Bayard Rustin) and how each of us creates our own identity out of a mix of inheritance, circumstance, and self-invention.
Here’s a YouTube link. Below that is a link to the podcast version on Spotify. And below that is an utterly uncorrected transcript generated by OtterAI (check all quotes against video and audio).
I hope you enjoy our conversation and share it. And I highly recommend pre-ordering Coleman’s book, which comes out on February 6.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
mdma, work, psychedelics, drugs, government, lsd, people, years, trust, libertarian, called, problems, experiences, leary, big, college, bad, talk, america, timothy leary
SPEAKERS
Coleman Hughes, Nick Gillespie
THIS IS AN UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT GENERATED AUTOMATICALLY. CHECK ALL QUOTES AGAINST THE VIDEO.
Coleman Hughes 00:03
My name is Coleman Hughes. I'm a writer and host of the conversations with Coleman podcast. In today's world, we can't escape discussions about race. It's an obsession that's taken center stage in our culture. But I can't help but wonder why. Why is our society so fixated on this topic? In my new book, The End of race politics, I argue for a return to the ideals that inspired the American Civil Rights Movement. I reveal how our departure from the colorblind ideal has led to a new era marked by fear, paranoia, and resentment. By fixating on race, we lose sight of what it means to be truly anti racist. I believe that a colorblind society is possible. And in the end of race politics, I provide the intellectual tools to make it happen. Join me on this journey to rethink the conversation. The end of race politics is available for pre sale now.
Coleman Hughes 01:05
Welcome to another episode of conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Nick Gillespie. Nick is a prominent libertarian journalist and commentator, best known for his work at reason magazine, where he's been for about 30 years, I believe. In this episode, we discussed Nick's experience getting engaged at the recent Burning Man. We talked about psychedelic drugs, the promise they hold, as well as the dangers they contain. We talk about the evolution of the libertarian movement in America. We talk about how we should message about drugs to kids. We talk about the differences between MDMA, psilocybin and LSD. We talk about why trust in government has declined, and much more. So without further ado, Nick Gillespie. Thank you so much for coming on my show.
Nick Gillespie 01:57
It's a real pleasure to be here. I love your couch and your furniture. Oh, well, yeah. So
Coleman Hughes 02:01
me personally, as you. It's really, it's really WTF studios. And you'll probably see lots of other podcasts that use this exact same backdrop. But aside from those tiny inconvenient facts, yeah, it's totally me. Yes. So first off, congratulations. Thank you. On getting engaged,
Nick Gillespie 02:20
thank you at Burning Man. Yeah.
Coleman Hughes 02:22
If people aren't aware of this, there's a there's a beautiful video on Twitter. Your your fiance Sarah, who I've met is wonderful. And you got engaged at the you know, what may go down as one of the most if not the most famous burning man's I guess you would say burning men. Yeah, Burning Man things
Nick Gillespie 02:40
men, man. It's like the attorney general. And it's kind of amazing. That burning man hasn't been D gendered yet, right. I mean, it's been around since the lady Oh,
Coleman Hughes 02:50
yes. And not burning
Nick Gillespie 02:53
them. And it's also uh, you know, it is still all about fire, which is really interesting. So, you know,
Coleman Hughes 03:00
this sort of like anti environmental in some ways? It's not, I mean, it's an interesting
Nick Gillespie 03:05
question, because this year, there were also people protesting environmentalists protesting, excuse me, the, the road in and it takes place in the middle of nowhere in the desert on Federal Bureau of Land Management land. And some environmentalists were protesting the fact that like billionaires use this as a playground and that it's not carbon neutral. And, you know, billionaires, of course, aren't driving in, they're flying in and things like that. But it is it you know, without becoming a cliched evangelist for it. It's a fascinating event, you know, that has now been around. I think this was 37th year, but what's really interesting about it, is that everybody who thinks they have it pegged that it's like, oh, well, you know, this is a bunch of like woke socialists or tech bros, or drug addicts, or this or that. It does, it can't be contained by that. And one of the most interesting things for me, you know, and I'm a professional libertarian and everything I do, I try to extrude through some kind of libertarian, like Plato die, you know, into something, but it's really a celebration of kind of human freedom and surplus wealth, because, you know, everything gets done once and then it's disappears. But like the fire element is really a big part of it. And, you know, everybody there is environmentally conscious, like the and one of the most amazing things about it is you know, you, you go in, you bring everything you need because this is a part of the desert where there are literally not even bugs for the most part. There's no vegetation, there's nothing it's completely dead as an environment and you take everything out. So everybody there is very environmental in the way that they think about stuff but they also have fun and they're not pretending this is that it's it's a carbon neutral activity to do Burn a bunch of stuff in the middle of the desert. So it's very interesting that when you
Coleman Hughes 05:05
make a good point that it brings together lots of different kinds of people in an unpredictable way and can be caricatures. Something about that. I think something about psychedelics may do that. Yeah. So I watched your 30 minute documentary, great documentary producer by reason. Right, right. Yeah, by reason about psychedelics, the psychedelic, what's it called?
Nick Gillespie 05:27
We call it Welcome to the psychedelic Renaissance. Second, Renaissance. You know, the starting point we went to in June, there's a group called maps, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which has been around since like the mid to late 80s. And they've been working to, among other things, get FDA approval of MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD and a couple of other indications, which is getting close. I mean, they've been saying this for a number of years, but it's like, you know, next year, it's going to be approved, etc. But they had a big conference in Denver called the psychedelic sciences conference, and it brings together doctors, therapists, researchers, activists, artists, and, you know, everybody a thrill seekers and whatnot. And there were 13,000 people this year, everywhere around a psychedelic you know, they've been decriminalized or legalized in places like Colorado and Oregon. The FDA is, you know, the maps is in stage three trials, which is the one before you get approved by the FDA for their system of using MDMA to help people am I
Coleman Hughes 06:34
right? Am I remember remembering right, that they, they were given breakthrough drugs status
Nick Gillespie 06:38
that was actually psilocybin and that's a different company of more traditional pharmaceutical company named compass, which is also in stage three trials using psilocybin mushrooms for similar things, I think, for anxiety and depression. And so like, and then culturally, you know, you can just see all around us things are popping up where psychedelics are getting a second and longer look. And, yes, similarly to Burning Man cite the psychedelic space is one where, you know, you kind of assume it's like, it's a bunch of, you know, burnt out old 60s cases, who were, you know, huffing the fumes of Timothy Leary, his corpse or something, and young people who just want to get high, or trip, but it's much so much more robust than that. And at this conference, you know, the two first, the first two big outside speakers were Jared Polis, the liberal Democratic governor of Colorado, who's behind, you know, who, who's backed a lot of this stuff, you know, and as governor of a state that was, you know, the is generally considered the most successful that legalizing recreational cannabis. But then it was Rick Perry, you know, the former governor of Texas who's a hardcore Republican who was in Trump's cabinet, and he's all about MDMA assisted therapy and other psychedelic therapy for veterans and victims of sexual trauma. And that kind of, you know, it's exciting to see, you know, people who normally aren't in the same room unless that you know, it's Thunderdome. You know, actually kind of talking and conversing. So
Coleman Hughes 08:15
there was an article in I guess it was, was it New York Magazine, I think it was New York Magazine, or the New Yorker rather about the this kind of dinner series that both you and I have gone to in the past. Yeah, hosted by Pamela Paretsky. It was called the club for the canceled, right. And there was a line that actually laughed out loud. He goes, quote, on average, the group probably leans right, at least when compared to the rest of the city. But a few socialists go along with a contingent of libertarians such as Nick Gillespie, who come ready for debate, quote, and you bring drugs, Nick added, yes.
Nick Gillespie 08:53
Wow. So our role libertarians are, you know, we're not the most popular or the most populous, you know, subculture but we know what people want. Yeah,
Coleman Hughes 09:07
I mean, I laughed out loud when when I when I read that because having been to those dinners, I know they're they're not dinners that other people are generally bringing drugs to like you were just kind of telling on yourself a little bit.
Nick Gillespie 09:18
Yeah. And to be honest, and to be forthright. I don't think I've ever done drugs at any of those things. I don't drink any more so it's you know, better though I'm I'm calm a libertarian a lot.
Coleman Hughes 09:30
Oh, did you quit drinking recently,
Nick Gillespie 09:31
I quit drinking in 2019. Why? Because I was drinking too much and it was becoming you know, the AAA parlance and I don't attend AAA but I found a useful and various things but my life had become unmanageable. Primarily be not because of drinking but the drinking was exasperating everything so I do other kinds of drugs, but I don't drink any more than Do
Coleman Hughes 10:00
do psychedelics? Did psychedelics help the transition from drinking to not drink?
Nick Gillespie 10:04
They do prime, you know, for a lot of people and I mean, I've even
Coleman Hughes 10:09
heard people that just kind of naturally lose interest in drinking without having had a classical problem. Yeah, as a result of doing so that's
Nick Gillespie 10:16
very common and you know, LSD was synthesized I guess in the late 30s. And then it kind of started getting used towards the late 40s. In the 50s, and early 60s Before it was prohibited or and you know, really started coming under a lot of negative scrutiny from the government, especially, one of its primary applications was to help cure alcoholism or treat alcoholism. And the guy who coined the term psychedelic was a British born doctor and researcher named Humphry Osmond who ended up in Saskatchewan for much of his life. And he you know, he had these fantastic results treating problem drinking he gave LSD or he treated Bill W that one of the founders of A, who was an evangelist for for psychedelics and LSD for a while before the AI people told him to cool it. But yeah, I did. In my case, I had I come, you know, I'm half Irish, and half Italian. So like, I'm already you know, two and a half steps behind everybody just coming out of the womb. And on the Irish side in particular, you know, very stereotypically, I only know, my family lived back through my father's father, my grandfather, he was an alcoholic or a problem drinker. My father was I was, you know, so it was in the cards to stop and I would say, for me, psychedelics didn't help me stop. But it's, you know, they, they probably helped me not feel the need to drink.
Coleman Hughes 11:55
What's your favorite psychedelic drug? And and why? LSD
Nick Gillespie 11:57
and it's kind of like there's, you know, within the psychedelic community, there's a lot of, you know, endless endlessly proliferating number of subgroups and because, you know, humans are kind of fractal. So like, every, every part of us and every subculture we do contains all the problems and all the promises of everything else. So you know, whenever you get into a subgroup, you know, whether it's musical or you know, literary or whatever, like people start creating dumb distinctions, but within the psychedelic world, there's a lot of like, natural versus lab and this and that and ritual versus, you know, kind of just doing stuff. I like LSD,
Coleman Hughes 12:38
LSD. Oh, so, so natural versus lab that was just
Nick Gillespie 12:43
you. Yeah. Based on of fungus, that's been around for a long time. Yeah. And it was, but it was synthesized in a lab, you know, in Switzerland. Yeah. Guy. Yeah. Who is? It's the absolute he's such the difference of like a dirty, smelly hippie. It's comical, really. And yeah, but in any case, I like LSD, because it's really you know, it's powerful. It's potent. It's, you know, I've had, you know, just a series of you know, both mundane and fascinating experiences on
Coleman Hughes 13:22
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Nick Gillespie 15:02
my problem child. Yeah, yeah. Beautiful, beautifully written
Coleman Hughes 15:07
documentary about Hoffman, who accidentally discovered LSD as a Swiss chemist. Well,
Nick Gillespie 15:13
he accidentally discovered the hallucinogenic properties have it right? Yes, he did it on purpose. And they were looking for, you know, he was doing various iterations of it. And then he didn't realize he had ingested it. Right. Yeah.
Coleman Hughes 15:28
And I remember in that book, he speaks of, I believe, two different occasions where he met Timothy Leary and had kind of really parently spirited arguments with him about the proper path for LSD to be disseminated to the public out. Timothy Leary basically thought it should be dropped in the water supply. And Albert Hofmann vigorously disagreed with this strategy, he thought that there would be a huge backlash, and that what it should, it should go through the proper institutional channels, you know, government, medical regulatory bodies and so forth. I think with hindsight, Albert Hoffman was completely right. And at least on one telling Timothy Leary's, you know, radical strategy led to backlash, which kept it illegal for many, many decades, would you would you agree with that analysis? Or do you think it would have been banned either way? Yeah, I
Nick Gillespie 16:33
think it would have been banned either way. And I think, having said that, though, Leary is you know, is he is a problem child. And in many ways, he was a man child, I'm a, I'm a big admirer of Timothy Leary for his public effect. I mean, by I reviewed, that got about 10 or 15 years ago, Robert Greenfield, a journalist wrote a biography of him, I reviewed it for The Washington Post. And it's, you know, Leary on a personal level is fairly despicable as a person. But, you know, we don't necessarily, you know, that that's not the measure of, you know, somebody's effect on the culture, but that within the psychedelic world, and, you know, there's people like Hoffman, who also by the way, it's interesting that he changes like everybody does this, like over the course of his life, he, you know, he kind of changes his mind or, you know, you rewrite and revise your past without necessarily like leaving the Track Changes visible. So his attitude changes over time a little bit. And towards the end of his life, he became a little bit looser about things, but you don't expect a Swiss chemist who is working for Sandoz, which is kind of down Novartis like to be like, ah, you know, like, let's let it all hang out. Nobody should just be doing acid all the time. But, you know, people like Aldous Huxley, who was one of the main figures who really kind of mainstream psychedelics in the 50s. With the book The doors of perception, he was given mescaline for the first time by this Humphry Osmond character who treated alcoholics and coined the term psychedelic, but they're, you know, that there's those guys were like, you know, what, we need to administer this sparingly and under certain controlled circumstances, either with a doctor or a priest. You know, Leary comes along. And at first he was, you know, a semi respectable, you know, psycho psychological researcher, and he was doing, you know, serious trials and stuff like that. And then at a certain point, something snaps and he's like, No, I want to be the high priest. One of his his memoirs is called High Priest. And he but he wants everybody or a lot more people to be doing psychedelics, but still kind of within the terms he would lay out. So he was kind, you know, it's interesting, because he's not a control freak in the way that maybe Aldous Huxley or the early Hoffman is, but he's also not a total let it all hang out. And that's actually Ken kisi, who had been a Merry Prankster or he created the Merry Pranksters on the West Coast. He's the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and another book called sometimes a great notion. He had gone to Stanford, he had worked in a hospital Mental Hospital where people were being treated with LSD. And he started taking it. He far more than Leary was like, Yeah, let's literally put it in the water and he would dose people at what were called the electric Kool Aid acid test in California were the Grateful Dead played. And he became a you know, he had to go on the lam. He ran away to Mexico for a while because he was, you know, being prosecuted. He was much more radical still than leery. So there's this continuum, which and that tension continues. That's a big part of the psychedelic Renaissance doc, is that almost everybody that we talk to from Rick Doblin to people like Julie Holland, a psychiatrist and researcher and Um, and, you know, certainly people like Rick Perry, they're all like, we need to not repeat the problems that Timothy Leary kind of manifested or conjured. I agree with some of that. There's no question that Leary was a provocateur. There's a, there's a strong argument that you needed to, like we don't and I say this, I mean, I realize you're like, half my age, I just turned 60. And, you know, we cannot appreciate how square and like, repressed American culture was. And like, I don't, you know, you, you're not going to change that by being like, you know, what, we need to wear tighter ties and do more lab testing, like the 50s and 60s, and they're much there's much more of a continuity there. Like in post war America, this is a big part of my larger kind of project is that in post war America, for the first time, a lot of Americans got rich, or, or they got richer than they used to be across every category. And they started to feel more empowered and say, You know what, like, Fuck it, I am not going to live by the rules in a system where I don't really have a lot of choice. And you know, and this takes on different forms for like, you know, the children of, of European immigrants, it took on one form for blacks, it took on another for gays, it took on another for women. But there's this profusion of I'm not going to take it anymore. I'm going to live more by my own rules after World War Two, after the depression after, you know, the depravations of war, and a growing swelling economy. And I think we win Leary seems insane now, but he was necessary, I think, in a profound way, to kind of crack the old America in the same way that when we look back, I think at early feminists and a lot of, you know, race, you know, people discussing racial issues, like, you know, on a certain level, it seems insane now, or like so over the top, but the world they were confronting, where he's like,
Coleman Hughes 22:00
the Malcolm X of Malcolm X of psychedelics and yeah, Hoffman was more like a
Nick Gillespie 22:06
Martin Luther King. Yeah, very good. But we're, you know, yeah, I mean, it's fascinating. Consistently,
Coleman Hughes 22:11
I much prefer MLK to Malcolm X and Hoffman to Leary. But yeah, so
Nick Gillespie 22:16
you like Bayard Rustin. Yeah. Right. And like Yeah. And so when you look at somebody like him, he you know, he's kind of a mix of both because he wasn't putting up with you know, and I don't want to diminish at all like the the idea that Martin Luther King was kind of like you know, a shuffling go along, get along type of guy is insane. You know, and he was triangulating off of, you know, the, the Black Power movement and Malcolm X and things like that, but somebody like Ruston is, you know, truly radical and like, you know, some of his most radical work, you know, was just in rejecting the draft and being a conscientious objector. Yeah. As well as being openly gay without apology and without even really comment. So, I don't know. You know, it's, it's more complicated, but these I think, it makes sense to think about characters like Leary and Ken kisi. And again, there's a lot of issues there but like, they were confronting a different America than the one we live in. And we live in a much better freer, looser, America, obviously, with many problems, because these guys were willing to just really say fuck it, like I'm going over the edge.
Coleman Hughes 23:27
So the only three psychedelics I think I've done are psilocybin, LSD and MDMA. And which
Nick Gillespie 23:39
did you like best? By
Coleman Hughes 23:41
far, MDMA? Yeah. Yes. So I mean, MDMA, I've done the most of those three, followed by psilocybin, followed by LSD, which I believe I've only done twice. And when people that haven't done any of them asked me, should I do them? Or would you recommend them? The only one I feel I can recommend without caveat, and really, at all is MDMA. And the reason for that is because among the people I've seen do MDMA, and I've heard of do MDMA, the number of bad stories of like, truly harrowing experiences, is like very, very, very low single digit percentage, possibly below 1%. Right, like really kind of a rounding error on the experience, and it's usually appears to be because it wasn't pure MDMA. Right.
Nick Gillespie 24:35
And by the way, you know, that I hate to sound like a public service announcement. But one of the, you know, I reason magazine is, you know, very libertarian, we were established in 1968 In our first issue, which was like, you know, four pages of mimeographed zine essentially, you know, there were calls to end the war on drugs. One of the reasons to do that beyond everything else is just so that people aren't taking poison in the name of taking something else. And like, a roundabout way of saying like, you know, everybody should test their drugs, regardless of who they get it from, because until things are fully legal, and the manufacturers and distributors are fully legally liable for the integrity of their product, you never know. Yeah.
Coleman Hughes 25:22
So. So MDMA, and I've done MDMA, not in the the typical context of going to a rave and remember a small amount of that. But by and large, when I've done it, I've done it with a small group of friends and just talked about our lives. Kind of replicating without knowing sort of what you would be doing in an MDMA therapy session, like often talk to you about your past reprocessing your past in a way that for most people is probably only available to you in the context of a drug like MDMA. Sorry, and I've noticed serious and lasting benefits from having done that. Now, personally, when it comes to psilocybin and LSD, I've had very fun experiences and horribly, horribly bad trips on both. And I know of enough bad trips and enough horror stories with people that I don't feel I can actually recommend that you just do it. Because I don't want to be responsible for someone that came back with a terrible experience. And, and so that that's kind of I mean, that that's kind of my approach to recommending it and not recommending this. Furthermore, it's it was It wasn't cool hasn't been clear to me from from LSD and mushrooms, that I've seen a longer run benefit. So I guess one question is, how, how do you recommend people who have not at all tried these substances, but are interested? What advice do you have to them about the differences between them? How to do them? And the caveats that you get?
THIS IS AN UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT GENERATED AUTOMATICALLY. CHECK ALL QUOTES AGAINST THE VIDEO.
Nick Gillespie 27:12
Those are great questions. And, you know, I would start by saying, like, I really don't recommend anybody do anything, and I'm not, you know, that's not a cop out. It's, I'm interested in your MDMA experiences, because, you know, that all makes a lot of sense to me. And, you know, within the broad, I mean, this is true of all drugs, really, of almost all experiences. But, you know, people talk endlessly about set and setting, and it's kind of, you know, part of part of the experiences, what the properties of the drugs, but it's really much more. So what's the environment you're doing them in? And what are you expecting to get out of them, and you're kind of mindset going in. And, you know, I suspect you could do if you replicated the kind of situation where you're hanging out with a couple of friends, and you do mushrooms or LSD like you do with MDMA, you might have a similar type of experience, or more similar to that. But sometimes you sometimes you never know, and what with all of these substances, I would recommend, you know, I'm a big reader. So it's like, my first step is reading about something and then talking to people and things like that. And regarding MDMA, there's a fantastic new book out called I feel love, which is a kind of cultural history of MDMA. And it's a wonderful way of like learning about the history of the drug A couple years ago, a book came out called listening to ecstasy, which is by a gestalt therapist who also uses ecstasy, not or MDMA. Ecstasy is a you know, another name for it, Molly's things like that. And he, you know, he talks about the mechanics of like, okay, this is how you might use it, these are the proper dosing. Those two books are phenomenal, you know, kind of introductions to what you can get out of MDMA. There are similar books like that, you know, and, you know, in videos and things like that online for the other drugs. And, you know, the one thing I would say is like MDMA, I mean, psychedelics in general, kind of tend to engender a recognition and, you know, as soon as I was raised Catholic, I'm not, you know, Catholic anymore. But of course, you know, that's, you know, it's in me, it's like a retrovirus or something. So, but and I'm not overly spiritual. But, you know, part of the allure of psychedelics is a recognition that there is something unifying all of us and that we all belong to the, you know, kind of some similar entity, there's a oneness and that we are manifestations of individual manifestations of that. And that's a profound feeling and you know, that It is worth exploring, I think whether you do it with drugs or philosophy or you know, God, first, God help us politics and things like that. But there's a lot of there's, you know, there's shuffles of books that are really good. And they keep coming out, you know, with more and more regularity. And I'm sorry, just as an add on, you know, part of part of growth, and this is true, whether it's, you know, chemically underwritten or not is finding those harrowing moments, and I'm not saying everybody should go and have a bad trip, you know, or whatever that means. And certainly, you know, you really have to be careful, people who have a history of like bipolar or, you know, it's a friend Yeah, and things like that, like, you know, these are powerful substances. I don't think they're as powerful as either the detractors or the proponents say, they're tools, you know, they're, you know, like super duper aspirin really, and, you know, part of the rhetoric of the war on drugs is that on the one hand, you have, you know, insane prohibitionists who say, you know, if you take one puff of marijuana, you're gonna start doing heroin like that, and drugs are in slavers of human desire and autonomy. And you know, they make all of these, you know, in that, like, if you're on LSD, you won't know where you are. And you know, you'll, you know, think you can fly by jumping off the building and my fiance Sarah Siskin, who is also a psychedelic comedian, you know, has a great line about that, where she's just like, if you think you can fly, why would you go up to the top of the building? Why wouldn't you just take off from the street? Right, but, but, you know, there's those horror stories that undergird so much waste and horrible things in America through the drug war, but that's mirrored by people like Timothy Leary, and, you know, the descendants of him who were like, man, you take this, you know, one dose of LSD, one trip, one, this one that and like, you're cured. And it's like, that isn't like that. I mean, like, it's like, every, you know, it's like working out, you can have one great workout and you're like, okay, and then you gotta go back to the gym the next day. And that's true with all kinds of discovery. But you know, individually, like growing as a person, sometimes you do, you have to look into the abyss and see what's looking back at you, or maybe even take the dive over and see what happens. I
Coleman Hughes 32:22
want to say, Okay, I want to say two things. One on the on the side of the bad experiences. I think there's a bit of an asymmetry there, because while the likelihood of those terrible experiences having has been really exaggerated by the anti drug forces, the likelihood is not 00. Yeah, no, I'm not, you know, like, yeah, the crate like the the person that does acid and jumps off of something that really does happen.
Nick Gillespie 32:50
vanishingly is
Coleman Hughes 32:52
very, and and it's rare. It's rare, but it's not so rare that I don't know examples of it from my own extended network of like, say, kids, I went to college with Right,
Nick Gillespie 33:02
right. I mean, what happens? I think a lot of the times when you look at those cases, but
Coleman Hughes 33:09
that's something I think can be prevented by doing it in one shared setting. Yeah, absolutely. And that doesn't mean if it's a social setting is not maybe necessarily controlled enough to totally because your friends might be idiots, ya know, especially if you're 18 Yeah, I agree. There may be so you know, it's something to think about with like, are you around truly responsible? At least one person that's truly responsible enough? The tail end bad out? Yes. It's,
Nick Gillespie 33:35
you know, if you have a designated driver, you should have you know, what's a trip sitter or something like that, for sure. And you need to be sear, you know, you need, you need to take all of this serious, even if your idea is to have fun and thrills. So yeah, one thing I will say is that, you know, when you read the stories, like, you know, the guy who founded reason magazine in 1968, apparently had a bunch of bad acid trips and kind of Mo schizophrenic like he ended up dying in a Veterans Administration Hospital, that does happen, so but his mental problems, it's, they can be exacerbated by psychedelics, but generally speaking, you know, it isn't the
Coleman Hughes 34:16
subs, they can open a door that like there's been a monster in your mind. Yeah, banging on a door and psychedelics can open it. And yeah, and if you don't, if you're unlucky enough to not be able to kill the monsters or somehow tame it, you could Yeah, I mean, these these bad things do happen. Let's see, there's one other point I wanted to make. So I think that um I see like lurking in what you're saying a little bit of this idea that that difficult experiences can make you stronger, which is true. I think that I view the mechanism a little differently, though, because I think it's like what it is that when happy, strong people have difficult experiences, they make them mean something in retrospect. And then they often tell themselves a story. Like I tell myself a story about how my mother dying when I was 18 was Act was a very important growth experience for me right. Now, does that mean I would actually prescribe someone's mother's dying as a growth experience? No, I think retroactively you make it yeah, as you say, you rewrite the life history and don't notice the track changes. That's kind of how I view like, truly bad trips. Truly bad trips. Like the few I've had are just, like, actually synonymous with deep mental illness. It's like, it's like what it is.
Nick Gillespie 35:41
I mean, can you put a little bit of detail on that? Sure.
Coleman Hughes 35:45
So I'll give you one example. The two times I've done acid, I had one fantastic trip and one terrible trip. And the terrible trip, I became convinced that one of my best friends in the world was trying to murder me. Like that night. So I became basically the, like, protagonist of a horror movie that I was creating fully out of whole cloth or out of like, slightly bad vibes, you know? Yeah. And so I was visiting him at, at Princeton, and I escaped him by taking the train back to New York at midnight. Like mentally I felt I was escape
Nick Gillespie 36:25
I have. So we're both from New Jersey. I Yeah. The idea of tripping at Princeton kind of is a nightmare, honestly,
Coleman Hughes 36:33
I mean, that that may have had something to do with it, frankly, set a set and setting. Yeah. But with the caveat that it's our priori, very difficult for the uninitiated, and maybe even the initiated to predict how set and setting will influence the truth. In some way. It's a moot point. First for many people. Yeah.
Nick Gillespie 36:53
And there's, you know, within the broad psychedelic movement, you know, people talk in a lot of different kind of vaguely woowoo terms or whatnot, but people so you know, a lot of people call psychedelic drugs, medicine. And they'll say, Well, you know, the medicine knows where you need, you know, what you need, and maybe you need like a bad trip, or you need this. And it's, that's a way of saying you know, it Yeah, the unpredict I
Coleman Hughes 37:17
think that this is that all that those kinds of things are all kind of like bullshit platitudes that healthy people construct. And they should I think you should actually reframe your past. It difficult experiences like that. That's what happy people do. Yeah, it doesn't actually make maybe, let's say, well adjust well adjusted, that's exactly what I mean. Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. In any event, my bad trip was it was what I have to imagine it's liked to have 10 out of 10 paranoid schizophrenia for about 48 hours. Yeah. You know, that sounds terrifying. Terrifying, right. So like, I can come up with a story about how this was good for me. Yeah, I think that story is not true. And it's important to keep that in view. So as to alert people to the real potential downsides of of these things. Yeah, I
Nick Gillespie 38:11
agree. I story to tell, it's also to, you know, in the same way that you don't try to run a marathon, you know, like, running five miles a day for a week now to run a marathon like, you know, kind of work up to it, because you can really, you know, go as you can't push yourself to the limits until you've kind of defined so this is,
Coleman Hughes 38:33
this is something I think is rarely discussed in the psychedelic community. I think so many of us our first experiences, were with the so called heroic dose, right? But ultra high dose of the substances. That wouldn't be obvious as a prescription in any other scenario, right? Like you if you work it
Nick Gillespie 38:56
with like antibiotics or something like that, like where you're going to take a high dose, your your
Coleman Hughes 39:00
point as well to deal with any other psychoactive drugs. Yeah. If you were to like if
Nick Gillespie 39:05
you started drinking, if you're getting drunk already. 151 three, you give your
Coleman Hughes 39:11
nephew one beer, right. And you work up to because if they have a terrible reaction to two beers, well, then, you know, they don't need 10 Yeah. And, and I think that's a that's, I guess that norm probably started in the 60s. But I think that norm should be broken. I think people probably should start with smaller doses and work their way up to there. Yeah, I because I but I do acknowledge the heroic dose. It's not it's more than the sum of its parts, like it can really do something it can break something that needs to be exactly
Nick Gillespie 39:41
the kind of scenario you're laying out for yourself and the way you've thought that through everybody needs to do that for themselves for sure. I mean, that's it's really illustrative and I'm getting a lot out of that. It's, you know, the the other thing to think about too, is just like it's You know, you, nobody has to do these substances, right? In order to have personal growth. One of the reasons that things like MDMA substances like MDMA are being used in therapy is because they do, you know, kind of open up your ability to revisit the past, particularly trauma in a way that is safe, so that you can actually experience and process it, you know, in a more productive way. And so, I mean, I, you everything you're saying I find interesting, and I generally agree with the other broad point is that, and this is something I write a lot about generational change, because, you know, I was born in the second and last year, the baby boom, and I kind of hate the baby boom, or I hate boomers, the who are, it's really the mindset of when we talk about boomers, we're talking about the first 10 years of the baby boom, roughly, from 46, to about 56. But, you know, one of the reasons why psychedelics were appealing to boomers, I think, in the 60s is that the rhetoric around them and there's some truth to this, I think, you know, is that they dissolve structures of regimentation, oppression, or just ordering. So, like, you know, if you grew up in a world where it's like, you were expected to be very male or very female, and there wasn't a lot of gray, you know, it's all binary, where you had to look a certain way, there were only two or three social types. Yeah, I was like, everybody, you were like
Coleman Hughes 41:32
cookie cutter, Ron Swanson, parks and recreation, there are two acceptable haircuts crew cut, and, yeah,
Nick Gillespie 41:37
yeah, you know, and then it's like, so you want something that dissolves that and kind of gives you room to kind of experiment and try things out. That's a very different experience. And I think people your age grow up with shirts that nobody's saying, like, you have to do exactly this. And you have to look this way, etc. If anything, you know, it's like, you're you have, you can do anything you want, you can be anything you want, like a lot of the structures, both large and small and banal. Like, you know, people don't learn how to do handwriting anymore. People don't learn table etiquette, like the number of agreed upon rules of decorum have disappeared. And it's kind of interesting to me, when I talk to younger people about their psychedelic experiences, they're kind of different than mine. Because for me, and again, I grew up lower middle class by the grandson of immigrants, you know, Catholic, like it was kind of an ordered universe. And so like, acid is acid on, you know, all of these things. And it's like, holy cow, I can live differently than my parents. And I can try, I can go to college, I mean, my father didn't even graduate, high school, etc. Like, it's like, that's a different world than if you're growing up in a sandbox, where it's like, if you can think it, you can do it. And younger people have, I think, a different experience on psychedelics just as they do in many other parts of the world, right of their lives.
Coleman Hughes 43:05
So, speaking of sort of young people and their introduction to drugs, I had dare, which I forget what the acronym
Nick Gillespie 43:15
stands for drugs are really expensive. Drug Abuse, resistance, education, education.
Coleman Hughes 43:24
Yeah. So it's basically when you know, a cop comes to your fifth grade class with a suitcase
Nick Gillespie 43:28
of drugs. Yeah. Did you have that where they're like, I mean, that's one of the stereotypical things is like, you know, they have a suitcase full of drugs, and then they open it up and show you what different drugs look like.
Coleman Hughes 43:44
Yeah, I don't know if that's may backfire. Oh, it definitely. But but, you know, basically, yeah, the cop comes to your classroom and just tells you all of the negative side effects and consequences of drugs, most of which are, you know, either exaggerated or
Nick Gillespie 44:03
saturates. You know, one of the things about MDMA is that it you know, it's going to put it's going to burn holes in your spinal cord. Yeah.
Coleman Hughes 44:10
Well, first of all, I should just add, I don't know what MDMA does, if you do it every other day. Yeah. I imagine it's fucking you up. Yeah. And you should leave a lot of time between when you do it. So. Yeah, but you know, that kind of education. Basically, they tell you all the downsides. You come away thinking, Well, why would anyone even be tempted to do this? Right? It's like you're describing it as if it's if it's like broccoli that also kills you. Yeah. And the moment you realize that drugs can make you feel better than you've ever felt for short periods of time. And they didn't include that in the lesson. You began to think, Okay, what else are they lying about? And if you're Any kind of smart, I think that kind of messaging. I don't know how well that messaging works, maybe maybe it works very well with certain people. But you know, just zooming out. Every parent that has done drugs, I think wonders how they should speak, if they should speak about drugs with their children. Right? You have kids? Well, how do you think adults should talk to kids
Nick Gillespie 45:26
about drugs? Yeah, you know, this is brutal. I used to write a lot about kind of early parenting stuff at reason. And we go through these cycles of what some people call hard parenting and soft parenting. And you know, this is the difference between like Benjamin Spock, you know, Dr. Spock and Bruno Bettelheim, for instance, or, you know, it's the difference between free range parenting and kind of Tiger Mom parenting types of concept going back and forth. And with, you know, with kids, you realize, you know, again, like you don't, you know, when your kids starting to read, you don't give them Tolstoy or something like that. I think with drugs, as kids get older, you need to talk honestly, about them. And you first and foremost about drinking, you know, and I say that not only because of my family history, and a kind of cultural, broader culture, cultural history that I'm part of. But because, you know, alcohol is vastly more ubiquitous, I choose to avoid it. Yeah. You know, and, and I think part of the starting point is that, you know, certain things, kids, you know, just aren't right for kids, or, you know, it is kind of like, you're in my house, you live by my rules, you know, and so like, in this house, we believe in science, and that kid shouldn't drink before they're 18 or 21, or whatever, or do drugs. And it's, you know, it's difficult, because as a parent, there's a lot of noble lies that go into parenting. And one of the things my parents have been gone for, like, 25 years, and as I get older, and my kids are adults, they're in their 20s. But, you know, I wish I had recourse to them to tell them how much more I understand about why they acted the way they did towards me. So, you know, parenting is kind of, you know, the ultimate kind of project management, you know, hellscape, because you are, you have to be honest with your kids on a certain level, and you also, don't talk to them about certain things, because the if that would be worse, you don't want to know certain things about your parents right now. Right. But with drug education, I think what needs to be understood is that people, you know, part of the human condition is wanting to change your mental state at any moment. And that can be to get hired and get fucked up to escape to be obliterated, or to, you know, tweak your performance upwards, or you're feeling anxious, how do you pull that down a little bit. And that we have this Pharmacopoeia in front of us legal and illegal, or the government says, listen, and listen. And you got to start to say, look, you're gonna be in a position where you're going to be making decisions. And you know, these things exist. Derr is a great example of how not to do it, first and foremost, by outsourcing it to schools, and then to law enforcement. And then to a rhetoric that just was shown actually, this has gone back, like, almost 20 years, the federal government under George Bush of all people insisted that drug education programs in schools need to be ScienceBase. Like they need to have studies that show results. And as a result of that dare, which was in more than half of all school districts. It was taken off the government approved list, because there was no good evidence that it had any effect on the use rates among kids. There were some where it may have actually had any presets for women,
Coleman Hughes 48:53
for girls. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I don't think any effect is no positive effect.
Nick Gillespie 48:58
Yeah, we need that. We need to be, you know, and I think as a society, it's weird, because, you know, we're we're very much in a kind of broad national funk and have been for like, the better part of a decade, I'd say. But, you know, in many, many ways, we're just a much more adults and serious society than we used to be. And I think that's happening with drugs, you know, because I know very few people even in, you know, the drug legalization movement. And there's a version of that called the harm reduction movement, which is that the goal of public policy regarding drugs isn't to increase or decrease use rates necessarily, but it's to reduce the harms that come overall from prohibition or from drug use, like in how do you do that? And it turns out that, you know, absolute prohibition doesn't always work. And you know, and it may be better to come up with ways to reduce the social harms through things like needle exchange programs or serious education about the benefits and the costs of drugs that that actually has been results. And you know what I think we're, we're having a better conversation about drugs than we've ever had. It's, you know, it's still ridiculous and woeful. But it's much, much better than it was certainly when I was a kid.
Coleman Hughes 50:14
Okay, let's talk, you say we're in a societal funk. And presumably, part of that has to do with. With that we've become a low trust society. And that's something you've paid it paid a lot of attention to, you had a long piece about it, and reason magazine and 2019. When he said, we have gone from a high trust to a low trust society, what do you mean?
Nick Gillespie 50:36
So one way of thinking about this Gallup, you know, the polling organization, since the early 70s, has been measuring what they call trust and confidence in societal institutions. So they asked people do you have, you know, a lot of trusts some trust, little trust, or no trust in things like organized religion, you know, government, you know, including like the White House, or the executive branch, the legislative branch, the judiciary, big business, small business, they ask across a wide variety of things. And what's happened since the, you know, the 70s, the combined average of that, and this is kind of, you know, simplifying it, but it gets at the large point, you know, about half of people in America had high trust and confidence in institutions that these parts of our world were, you know, the people running them, we're trying to do the right things, most of the time, it's now I was just checking before we talked, it's at an all time low, it's like 23%, or 22%. That average, so it's dropped from around 50%, to less than half of that, since the 70s, you know, in the past 50 years, so we don't trust the our, you know, our neighbors, we don't trust our government, we don't trust our businesses, we don't trust our schools, we don't trust our experts as much as we used to. And that has real ramifications in society. Like in general, you don't want to live in a low trust society. Because if you think everybody is ripping you off, and your government is ripping you off it predictably. And there's political scientists and sociologists, and economists have looked at this extensively, it leads to, you know, all sorts of bad outcomes, like it's harder to do business, right? If you don't trust the people you're doing business with, and it raises the transaction cost, because like, if I don't think you're gonna pay on time, I'm going to make you pay more and pay up front, which means everything gets more expensive, like credit goes out the window. We don't trust our government for a lot of reasons. You know, in this, it's interesting to note, you know, in the 70s, that was a moment where it became unavoidable that the government, the federal government, and in different ways state and local governments were just lying and bullshitting about stuff, in ways big and small. And, you know, to put a little bit of flesh on that, you know, the government had been working to kind of manage the economy so that we would have a lot of growth and low unemployment. And then suddenly, in the 70s, it became, you know, impossible, like things that economic theory couldn't make sense of, we had high unemployment and, you know, very volatile growth, like where we'd have 5% growth one year and negative, you know, a recession the next year, inflation went up, even as unemployment went up. And these things were always seen as inversely related. Like, on a most basic level, we, you know, the government wasn't doing what we had thought it could handle. We saw in foreign policy and things like Vietnam, you know, sudden we couldn't do what we said we were going to do, you saw, you know, absolute corruption and like secret governance and things like Richard Nixon and Watergate and, you know, secret tapes that came out where he was saying one thing to the public and something very different, in private, in the, you know, to bring it back to drugs. You know, in the mid 70s, there was a series of Senate and other hearings on how the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA were surveilling people illegally in America. And one of the things that came out was the this thing called Operation MK Ultra, where the CIA at one point in the 50s, bought the world's supply of LSD, because they were looking for Mind Control drugs, and they started testing it on, you know, on their agents on unwitting people. They had this whole kind of archipelago of rogue scientists who were just dosing people with stuff and they knew it didn't work, but they kept doing it. Like, all of this stuff came out and people were like, wow, like, Why should I trust the government? You know, can't do what it says it's gonna do. And then it lies all the time and And that's proceeded apace. I mean, like in you know, in every decade, since the 70s, we've had at least one major scandal in the government where it turns out the government is lying. You know, for me, one of the more recent ones, you know, and Trump, you know, Trump is a special case because he just lies you know, everything he said, even if it was not advantageous, he would lie. He's He's like a weird sociopath that way. But under Obama, you know, when, when it came when Edward Snowden revealed what was going on under Obama, who had said, Oh, we're getting rid of torture, we're getting rid of spying, we're getting rid of this. And Obama's response was like, Well, I welcome uh, you know, a conversation about intelligence surveillance on Americans. And it's like, no, you don't you were hiding it from people. You know, so there's that, you know, Biden has his problems, George Bush, you know, the, the way that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were funded was, you know, off budget for a long time or in secret supplemental hearings, etc. Lots of fakery. And this, you know, what happens when people don't trust it, you know, and I'm a libertarian, this is actually one of the biggest changes in my life. When I showed up at reason I started in 1993, in October, so like, you know, I turned 60, I got engaged, and I'm celebrating 30 years of reason magazine, one of the biggest changes for me was, it was just taken for granted, the way that you reduce the size, scope and spending of government is by convincing people that the government is ineffective at best, and is dissembling and lying at worse. And that's happened, like everybody agrees with the libertarian critique of government. But government is bigger than ever, and people want it to do more and more than ever, and that's something I didn't understand, you know, 30 years ago. Because then to go back to this kind of the article that I wrote, which is called, I think everyone agrees, government is a hot mess. So why do we get more of it? Or why do we want more of it? And, you know, it turns out, it's very reliable that in low trust societies, people ask the government to regulate more and more parts of the economy and more and more parts of social life, because they know the government is corrupt, but they're terrified of just free flow, you know, what they consider free floating kind of chaos and every aspect of it.
Coleman Hughes 57:23
So on that correlation, I was I was reading that. And it occurred to me could that could that be understood differently? In those in the sense that, is it just that low trust societies are the societies that have a ton of problems, partly because they're low trust. And the societies that have a ton of pressing problems are the societies where people are like, really urgently demanding solutions? Because like, they have, like, sort of runaway inflation, which are and then the government is like, who you who one demand solutions? Right, my
Nick Gillespie 57:55
God. And let me before I get to that, that's a really interesting challenge. But it's also true that declines. It's not just the government, we, you know, people have led media overall in the media, you know, it's like newspapers, nobody believes them anymore. Yeah. And for, you know, sometimes for good reason, sometimes, because people are becoming psychotic conspiracy theorists and whatnot. And one thing to point out, is that the declines in trust are almost everywhere in the world. So even the Nordic countries, Scandinavian countries, there's lower levels of trust than there were 50 years ago. So it's pretty much everywhere.
Coleman Hughes 58:31
It can't be a caused unique to America. Yeah. It's got to be some kind of wider structural thing. Yeah. And
Nick Gillespie 58:38
this is well, and to get to that question of like, saying, Okay, we need more, you know, it's societies that have more problems are calling for, you know, more urgent solutions. I would argue, in the United States, broadly speaking, we have many fewer problems, like material resource problems than we had 50 years ago. And I think, you know, by any seriously objective measure, like, you know, racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty, these are all lower than they were 50 years ago. And that part of what we're witnessing in America, and I think broadly defined kind of advanced economies is that we have mainstreamed and I think this is a good thing. This is how I tried to turn it around, like, what we are witnessing is the rise to ubiquity of of a kind of true enforced individualism where again, you know, I mentioned like growing up in a certain time and place and social milieu where it's like, I wasn't supposed to have an existential crisis because like, that's, you know, that's a luxury item that's like a luxury belief. You know, my goal was to get through grammar school, high school, go to college, if possible, and then get a job that would allow me to provide for my family, and have some money left over on the weekends to enjoy myself, you know what, like, when you reach a certain level of affluence that goes out the window, we're, you know, we're all on the mat, Abraham Maslow did not actually use a pyramid to talk about, you know, the hierarchy of needs. But, you know, we're all on the top of Maslow's pyramid, you know, there aren't any, you know, there aren't any slaves anymore, building the pyramids, we're all kind of on the top, we have enough food, enough education, enough spare time where we need to create meaning in our lives, we're working at mostly at symbolic levels, and more and more people. And that's really hard, and we have not been trained, we have not been educated we have not been,
Coleman Hughes 1:00:41
it's a brand new problem, I guess, it's always been a problem for the elite. And that really summed across their stock cracy. And who knows how how well they've handled it, but it's never been a problem for the majority of people, right.
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Nick Gillespie 1:00:53
And literally, the majority of people on the planet in, I think it was 2016, or 17, the Brookings Institution, using un data, for the first time said, in human history, a majority of people on the planet were at middle class or higher income levels. So like, when you look at local purchasing power, etc, was something like 55% of humans on the planet, were middle class. So you know, we've seen massive declines in extreme poverty, and regular poverty, but also like, you know, what happens to middle class people, you know, like this, you know, you you, when you're working your way up, you know, like, you know, the second or third generation and a wealthy family, that's where you start see more artists, and kind of philosophers, you know, it's like the first generation are working really hard. So that
Coleman Hughes 1:01:47
lawyer is the meaning of life is obvious, it's to get out of poverty, right, and to
Nick Gillespie 1:01:51
provide for your kids. And then your kids. You know, the doctors and lawyers, like doctors and lawyers on this is a ridiculous statement, I guess, on some level, but it's like, they don't they don't want their kids to be engineers, and lawyers, and doctors and accountants, they want their kids to be, you know, whoever they want to be, etc. And I think societally in an interesting way, that's where we are. Because, you know, I put a lot of trust in the work of an economist and sociologist that a guy named Scott Winship. And he's very clearly shown, I think, and convincingly that when you look at after tax income, and after transfers, which is the way you would do it, you know, poverty in America, we actually did kind of win the war on poverty in terms of like, nobody's starving, nobody's malnourished, you know, that we are doing extremely well, the middle class is doing well. And more of us and more of us are going to college more of us are living symbolic lives. And that, you know, that is really hard. I struggle with it, you know, and I mean, this is like, I get to work at a magazine where I get to push words around on a computer. But everybody is dealing with that, on some level, all of the old verities, you know, this is where I'm a libertarian, but I'm kind of a Marxist, in the sense of, you know, when Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto talked about how the great achievement, you know, in this in the very early pages, the great achievement of kind of industrialized society, bourgeois society is, you know, that it everything solid dissolves into air. And so like, all of these fixed truths, and social orders and hierarchies get thrown into jeopardy, so suddenly, you know, people like me, people, like you, people, like, everybody is moving up and down much more than they had. And that means, like, you got to figure you got to rationalize who you are, who you want to be, what your identity is, I would add, you know, when you were saying like, you know, it used to be only the upper crust, or the aristocrats and stuff, part of their, you know, crisis is that they no longer are secure and that are suddenly, you know, people are showing up in their space, asserting themselves in a way that they never imagined and that, you know, that pisses them off. That's where a lot of decline narratives come from in the, in the media, you know, it's you don't hear anybody at reason talking about how shitty it is to work in media compared to 50 years ago, because 50 years ago, we were a small think magazine that didn't have as much influence or circulation. For us, it's all been good. But if you're at the New York Times, you're like, Huh, you know, people don't take us seriously or we're not the only voice you know, that can open and close Broadway plays or movies or remove politicians, right. You know, it kind of sucks to be them and it's
Coleman Hughes 1:04:43
all relative, right? Yeah. Scott Winship in your I think you quote Scott Winship making a really fantastic point. People that say, you know Millennials are the first generation not to enjoy their parents.
Nick Gillespie 1:04:58
Yeah, that are gonna have a lower standard of living than their parents. Yeah,
Coleman Hughes 1:05:02
that they that often the people, the people who say that are people that had upper middle class parents. So if you're starting at close to the very top, yeah. You're gonna have a higher proportion of people that don't attain close to the very top and instead get one decile. Yeah, right, like at the 80th percentile rather than the 90th percentile, and they perceive their life in relative terms they didn't do as well as their parents and their, their
Nick Gillespie 1:05:30
kids are not good. You know, here's a newsflash I don't know how to pronounce most, there's gonna backslide relative to they're gonna be poor relative to
Coleman Hughes 1:05:38
him. And even the lesser case of someone that I mean, someone that their parent makes half a million dollars a year, at a big nice law firm. Their kids might not all make half a million dollars a year, they're
Nick Gillespie 1:05:51
gonna likely fantastic lives, and they're going to be free for everyone to dry.
Coleman Hughes 1:05:55
Certainly one for nothing in, in the grand scheme of things, you
Nick Gillespie 1:05:59
know, Jean Twiggy, who you had on recently, who, you know, a decade or more ago, I think, in the Atlantic, you know, wrote a story about how like Millennials are falling behind, like they're, you know, in in various ways, and she, her new book generations, I have my differences with her, I interviewed her after hearing her on your show, and I liked the book generations. Like it's her best. She also, you know, recently read an Atlantic story saying, oh, you know, what Millennials have caught up. So it's like, they're not going to have lower standards of living Winship, at one point, uses data, again, after tax and transfers, you know that 70% of Americans at age 30, are doing better than their parents were at the same age adjusted for inflation. And that figure has stuck for around 50 years, it used to be like 90%, because if you were, if you were 30, and 1960, you were definitely doing better than your parents, because your parents were like living during the Depression, you know, and so like, things start to like as, as everybody gets wealthier, it's harder to get to the additional shares. Yeah, but in real terms, you're you're, you're living a vastly different life.
Coleman Hughes 1:07:14
Okay, so the one I thought caveat that came to my mind when I read this sort of optimistic narrative about economic progress is the price of college tuition. Just absolutely, you know, eclipsing the other whatever wage,
Nick Gillespie 1:07:33
general rate of inflation, etc. A couple of things about that. One, is there's still a massive premium wage premium to go into college and, you know, people, you can split this all kinds of ways. And, you know, I'm, I mean, I have a doctorate I, you know, and I'm an English major all the way down. So like, I'm one of the problems, right, like, I got a bullshit degree, that wouldn't amount to anything, you know, but on average, you know, like going to college really increases your lifetime earnings by, you know, somewhere between, you know, after counting for the cost of it, like between 250,000 to a million dollars or whatever,
Coleman Hughes 1:08:11
which will then get in the future eaten away, if you try to send your kids to college,
Nick Gillespie 1:08:16
maybe here's the other thing is that tuition, what's interesting is to Wishon has actually been relatively flat for about the past decade or so it's the other stuff. So it's room and board and things like that, I think there and more people are going to college like basically, for the past 20 years, it's been right around two thirds of graduates of high school graduates immediately go on to some kind of college, which suggests me not that it's not getting more expensive, but that it is still affordable. Because if it was actually getting out of the reach of people, so it might just be in the same way, you know, we pay more for TV than we did in the 70s when it was free, but it's something we're willing to pay for. I think, you know, it's not say everything is great. And you know, there are no problems or anything like that, but college is still radically affordable. It's also what works, isn't
Coleman Hughes 1:09:14
it? Isn't that distorted by the fact that so many people are getting loans that are then like guaranteed, and don't have to be collected on because they can they can be you know, you know,
Nick Gillespie 1:09:28
yeah, I mean, there's there's some problems with the government issues, virtually all student loans. You know, there is a private market for it. But this was something that was changed a couple of decades ago, and it was done in the name of efficiency would reduce costs, etc. And it didn't work out. Well. You know, there's always unintended consequences. But, you know, the student loan crisis I think has been misunderstood in the sense when you look at the average person who goes to college and again, this isn't per Perfect, but you know, they graduate like about depending on the year, somewhere between 60 and 70% of students borrow something for college. You know, most of them, the median is like around $30,000. And you know, when you look at the rates that they're paying, and there's a lot of ways to forestall that until you have more income, etc, it's, it's a, it's basically like a car payment. And you could argue it would be better that kids, you know, our graduates are paying, you know, or, you know, get out of college debt free and then are buying a car on top of, you know, rent and etc. But it's not the backbreaking saying, like, these numbers get inflated by whenever if you don't, when people talk about $1.7 trillion in student loan debt, that always includes people who are going to medical school and law school and MBAs, etc. And it's like, that's just not right. When you look at the traditional undergraduate degree. And, you know, I know you went to Columbia. Yeah. And you also did time at Julliard, right. So like, once these are among the most expensive universities on the planet, there are other ways to go to college, and most have the benefit of a college degree accrues by going to college, not by going to Columbia or Juilliard. It's true. And this is actually something that's really interesting in the Student Loan Data, African Americans tend to borrow more to go to college. And they go to more expensive schools on average. And there's, there's an argument, were looking at different subpopulations where if you're going to do targeted relief, there's, you know, there's ways to do that. But broadly speaking, like, it's, you can go to college in an affordable way where you learn where you get the benefits of a college education, and it can scale to almost any budget. Okay. And again, the proof of that, really, is that, you know, we continue to churn out college graduates, you know, like, just like, affordable?
Coleman Hughes 1:12:06
wouldn't wouldn't fewer people go to college if it were truly free market in lending, rather than a market that was distorted by the fact that these the half private half public bodies, yeah,
Nick Gillespie 1:12:20
by up all all colleges on a profound level are private or public universities now, because they get so much money, either in terms of government grants for research,
Coleman Hughes 1:12:30
or would you sure people would go to college in that context? And also, what undermine your argument that, like the fact people are still going? Is some proof is in the pudding? Yeah,
Nick Gillespie 1:12:39
well, I'm saying, it's, you know, the higher education market and this, so you know, I'm a bad libertarian, because I, you know, in that article about trust and confidence, I say, you know, Libertarians we are, we have helped create a low trust society that then calls for more government, we need to kind of figure something out here. I'm also a bad libertarian in the sense that I, you know, higher education, something like 80, or 85% of students go to public universities, and I all of my degrees are from public universities, I don't get hot and bothered about like, oh, you know, that, you know, I went to Rutgers in New Jersey, and it's like, you know, they get like about 70% of their operating budget or something from the state legislator, not, not a lot. But like, yeah, you know, maybe all colleges should be private, it would mean that the schools would generally be more expensive and fewer people would go, I think there's broad benefits to having lots of different colleges, there's like 40 404 year colleges and universities, the vast majority of which are public or publicly assisted, the vast majority of which suck. I mean, like, only about 400 schools have any real entrance requirements or admission requirements. But I don't, you know, this is not like an area where I'm like, Oh, we, you know, we need to destroy, you know, publicly funded higher education. To your larger point, ever, you know, the price, it would be more expensive, there would be fewer schools, if the state was not involved in higher ed. It's also probable that the tuitions would be lower, because, you know, and this is a lot of research shows that every time the government says, Okay, we're going to make more money available in the form of student loans or Pell grants or whatever to to universities, universities raise their tuition because they people can absorb the costs. Okay,
Coleman Hughes 1:14:31
so. I mean, on some level, if I were to think from first principles and sort of definitions, when I define trust, I think trust is that is is the fact that I don't need to double check something, right. It's like, I don't need to double check that someone has done the work that I asked them to do and isn't lying to me, I don't need to check their math. You know, I know if if I trust my accountant, and I know them to, I know they're gonna make the they're not going to pocket someone, I don't have to check. And the fact that I don't have to check is it lowers the transaction costs, just everything. That's why it's great to meet
Nick Gillespie 1:15:24
students like reputation where, you know, because the minute you said that, I realized I am the problem, because I was like, Yeah, but Reagan, you know, said about nuclear weapons is
Coleman Hughes 1:15:33
one of the great bullshit, you know, politician, kind of kind of phrases, because it's brilliant. This is what politicians do is they don't acknowledge that there are any trade offs in the world, and they say, I'm gonna give you everything, right. And people idiots fall for it, trust, but verify makes no sense, the hallmark of trust is that you don't have to verify that's the wrong reason that it is so useful and so productive,
Nick Gillespie 1:16:01
right? Well, and it and it also gets encoded in things like reputation, or, you know, and we were talking about drugs like, this is I think my caffeine may either be kicking in or wearing off, but it's like, you know, you, you do a little bit of something. And then like, when you build up a little bit of trust or confidence in what it is, then you do a bigger dose or with with a with a merchant, or somebody, you know, you you do a small deal with them. And then like, if that works out, then you do a bigger deal, etc. And part of this gets pulled into, you know, the broad term reputation. So, online, you know, online merchants and this is also something I'm old enough to remember the emergence of online retail where you know, didn't exist, there was catalog there was you could buy stuff by the mail. And that was also weird, where it's like, you know, you would send it in order to somebody with a check. And like, kind of didn't know, if you were gonna get anything back. So it's, you wouldn't buy a house that way, right. But you might start with like, some T shirts or something like that. Similar. To bring it back to this question of trust and confidence. Amazon, you know, which dominates online retail, which is still under like, 20% of all retail in America, but, you know, it's, you know, Amazon, they have one of when Gallup and other places look at, okay, what do you think about these different things, you know, it can be Congress's always in, like, the single digits, but like, Amazon, it's like, 85% of people have a lot of trust and confidence in Amazon, because over time, like, never miss Yeah, they show up, you know, and when they do, like, they make, like, make it better you go or like, you know, now you can make it they don't make it hard to make you whole, they didn't know. Yeah, and it's like you could bring back you know, you can drag anything you bought on Amazon, you know, in like in your hands and throw it at a Whole Foods, and they'll give you a refund and stuff. So you build up that reputation over time. But and it does mean like every once in a while, like probably you you do want to check the math on your accountant. Not not because you think they're cheating you, but also because people make mistakes. And you want to also know, I mean, this is, you know, insurance agents, we don't really talk about them anymore, but they were famous for, you know, maybe like every year like this is, you know, a public service announcement. Like if you have auto insurance every year, you know, do a quick check out a Progressive Insurance or something where they'll give you a bunch of different quotes to see if your insurance company isn't kind of like bumping you up without telling you because that happens. So but you get wrapped up in a reputation matters in a trust society. Yeah.
Coleman Hughes 1:18:43
And so my point is, like, if that's what trust is, then as journalists, why should we trust the government? Shouldn't we distrust shouldn't the rational position be to distrust? Yeah,
Nick Gillespie 1:18:55
until like, people start, you know, if they start delivering on certain promises that they made, or, you know, and, you know, um, you know, for me, I, I'm not an anarchist, you know, a small l libertarian, and I think I'm, you know, what, sometimes called a classical liberal, coming out of the 19th century, I think government exists to do certain things that are easier to do or can rightfully be done at the societal level or collective level. But it should be much smaller than it is, you know, prior to in 2019, the federal budget was something like 4.4 $4.8 trillion. It's now consistently over $6 trillion, and it's probably never going to look back. I don't know what we're getting for that extra 50% that we've been, you know, that we're spending from four years ago, under Bush, George W. Bush. You know, the federal budget went from about $2 trillion to over $4 trillion, or around 4 trillion in a relatively you know, in an eight year period, and decrease overall spending by about 50%. And, you know, it wasn't like that's a bender it was all debt financed. That's a nother problem. And that has effects on economic growth. But it's like, I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal. This is like a career highlight. I got to write the anti Bush editorial for The Wall Street Journal the day after Karl Rove wrote, like, Bush was the greatest president ever, even though he went out with like, 20% approval ratings. And I was like, you know, like, we went on this Bender, where we're spending twice as much or not, yeah, well, 50% more money? And what do we have to show for it? Like, we don't have like a bunch of cars parked in the yard or anything like that, and that kind of a digression. But there are times when you can trust politicians, I think or trust governments like you, you need to be able to trust the government, that you know, that the police are not there to control you. They are to protect you, you know, things like that. Well, that brings me to education. Yeah, you know, that the money is being spent on education and not on bullshit, including, you know, paying the the pensions of teachers who retired 25 years ago, where to build new buildings, big new buildings for fewer and fewer students, things like that.
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Coleman Hughes 1:21:20
So in your piece, you mentioned that actually, there's certain segments of society that retain pretty high trust. And those segments are the military, the police. Yeah. And I think you also mentioned like local media, local newspapers, as opposed to OSHA or was it local government, it's
Nick Gillespie 1:21:38
a local local government, people have more trust and confidence in then then state or, or federal, it was gonna say foreign government, I don't know. But although I have to say like, I live for a variety of reasons, you know, for a good like, 20 years of my life in a small college town in Ohio, either full time or part time. And it was a small town that was run by a relatively few people. And I came to really dislike the local government, because, you know, they would show up when I was shopping for groceries and things like that, and they were terrible. But yeah, and, you know, it's also true that certain charities do well, things like Amazon do well, but, you know, the large point about the trust and confidence stuff in the way it plays out in reputation, is that there are times when there are reversals, a company like Volkswagen, I think I bring this up in that article. But Volkswagen had a really strong reputation for being honest and fair, and you know, their, their cars sold at a premium, but they were really good cars, and they would take care of them if they were fucked up. And then some years ago, you know, the it turned out, they were goosing the results of like how clean burning their diesel engines were. And you know, and it turned out, like they, you know, they, they were just lying to people and they got caught. And that hurts Volkswagens reputation, and they need to do something to build it back up the United Way, a major philanthropy had had a big scandal in the early part of the 21st century, the Catholic Church had a massive scandal about, you know, sexual abuse among priests, and they haven't really addressed it, you know, either within the United States or, you know, at the at the global level. And that's, you know, it's within institutions power to turn things around if they want to government and I point this out in the 90s, there are moments where trust and confidence in like the federal government or state government or whatever go up. And in the 90s, as you know, there was a good economy, which helps everything but also, there was an you know, there were a bunch of major pieces of legislation passed, that were kind of effective, you know, things like NAFTA, things like welfare reform. And you know, what, you saw bumps and people saying, like, okay, yeah, I have more trust and confidence in the government that it's trying to do the right thing.
Coleman Hughes 1:24:10
Okay, let's talk about libertarianism. You mentioned that you're now like, 30 years at reason coming up? Yeah. It's amazing and flat, the flagship libertarian magazine, and you are in many ways, the lead spokesman for libertarianism.
Nick Gillespie 1:24:26
I don't I would love to believe that. I don't think so. And especially because, you know, if I'm the Lead spokesman, we got a lot of work to do. So,
Coleman Hughes 1:24:36
what's what's what has been the most surprising development in libertarianism from your viewpoint, say 30 years ago?
Nick Gillespie 1:24:46
So a couple of things one was like on a personal level, that insight that I really believed and I think most libertarians still believe like the way you should, you know, Libertarians believe in You know, kind of maximizing individual freedom and liberty and autonomy and minimizing coercion, mostly through state government at various levels. And I really, really thought it was obvious, like the way that you shrink the size, scope and spending of government is by showing that it either can't work that well, or it doesn't need to, or that it's corrupt and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, yeah, we won that argument. And that ultimately leads to more government, like government at every level is spending more and doing more, etc. So that's a big reversal. One of the things that I'm actually really happy about, and I'm just thinking about the past 30 years is how so many broadly libertarian issues or themes or mentality have really seeped into, I think, the common culture, you know, and everything's always a battle and like, no victory is complete. I mentioned NAFTA, at the end of the 90s, there was a really big battle among, you know, activists, intellectuals, governments, businesses, about free trade, and the idea that like, if you create more free trade, it's a win win situation. And that one, and that one, partly, you know, because the NAFTA agreement, North American Free Trade Agreement, which was started under George HW Bush, but then it was completed under the Clinton Gore administration. And you know, Al Gore, famously, or you know, in its day, it was famously went on Larry King, and I realized now I'm like talking about like, burlesque or vaudeville in the early 20th century, or something, but like, you went on The Larry King show on CNN, which still exists, but in a much smaller version, Larry King is that Al Gore, I think is mostly missing, you know, in action. But any debated H Ross Perot, who was the reason why Bill Clinton got elected, because he pulled a lot of votes from George HW Bush, he had like 19%, the best third party showing and, you know, 100 years, and he debated him on NAFTA and on free trade. And, you know, free trade one now, people are revisiting that I think it's mistaken. But so no, victory is perfect. But when I look at things like the drug war, you know, many, many more people are now saying, you know, what, we need to give people more freedom. The drug war isn't working, it's not reducing drug use. And it causes all kinds of black market problems causes all kinds of issues. You know, we're in the midst of the beginning of the end of the drug war. That's fantastic. I think people are more anti war than they were certainly in 2000. And I think that's a good thing. I'm not an isolationist, but I am generally a non interventionist. And I, you know, I think that's kind of fantastic. I think people understand that the government doesn't need to kind of be in charge of everything, and fewer and fewer things that you can have things like internet commerce, and you don't need the government to sign off on everything, the internet, radically altered the ways that people understood they could voluntarily relate to one another and things like that, on big issues, like school choice, you know, like, people recognize that, you know, it's probably better to give parents more choices, rather than fewer choices, and that, you know, kind of the old model of having, you know, centrally controlled, even locally, but centrally controlled schools, and it's probably better to, like, you know, just let more schools experiment and, you know, help fund them to do that, I think more broadly, on a cultural level. And to me, this is what matters most, I'm a big believer in what I call like lived liberty, it is so much easier to just be who you are now, you know, for all of the, you know, the rancid conversations about, you know, gay and straight and trans and, you know, black and white and, you know, bipoc, and everything. It's just much easier to be the person that you are, and to experiment with that, like sometimes I talk about how people like David Bowie and Madonna and Prince were these kind of avatars of like, okay, what would happen if you could just explore who you want to be for a period of time without giving a shit? And and not only are you free to do that, like you've thrown off internal shackles, so like, Yeah, I'm going to dance like that. I'm going to dress like this, I'm going to have sex like this or eat what I won or whatever. But also, society is like, yeah, you know what, like, Yeah, we should give people more space. You know, to me, these are like, kind of broad libertarian themes that I think have, you know, really kind of bled into the common culture, and it doesn't solve everything. But in general, I think it's easier to live the way you want to now than it was certainly 50 years ago.
Coleman Hughes 1:29:56
I think about personal freedom. And I just had Eric Hoffman on, we were talking about this subject, like, which aspects of freedom lead to happiness and which aspects don't. So, like this notion that having a fluid identity that is like sort of constantly changing and searching, I think it may turn out that that's really not a particularly good path to happiness because it's inherently unstable, and searching and kind of potentially hedonistic in, in a in a way that doesn't tend to work out. But I don't think that's
Nick Gillespie 1:30:40
what most people do. I understand where you're coming from. And if I may, there's a great anthropologist, academic anthropologist who also works as a brand consultant now and a business guy named Grant McCracken. And he wrote a book in the 90s, which was very influential to my thinking, and to kind of the reason, I can only speak for myself, but he wrote a book called plenitude, and he pointed out that people don't escape kind of social hierarchy or a tradition in order to have no tradition, it's the kind of they they're exercising a right of exit, to find the one that fits them better, or to define it and create it. And I'm thinking also, of, you know, and he, his most recent book is called The Return of the artists, and it's about how, you know, like, good cooks, and chefs didn't leave like giant kitchens in order to just cook whatever, like they create their own places. You know, and, you know, there's a rise in artisanal everything, which is kind of incredible and great. And it's so like, it is a model is kind of religion, like people don't leave religion, religious people don't leave the established church, they don't leave the Church of England in order to become atheists. Usually they do it so they can worship God in the way that they see as more real and more authentic. And so your The question isn't like, are you going to live by a code of ethics or an identity? But it's like, do you have the freedom to choose? Or does it get pushed on you, and then you're not allowed to live. And this is where I think a lot of people who worry about kind of cultural chaos are wrong. And I take your point on an individual level, if you are just seeking, you know, like the next thing and you don't have a core identity, or you're not kind of trying to figure out where you go,
Coleman Hughes 1:32:33
you were like the same thing every time I've ever seen you. Like, you're such, actually a stable character. You're known as Nick Gillespie, he's wearing a leather jacket, he's dressed in all black, he's a libertarian, you actually have a very fixed identity, but it's one that you've chosen.
Nick Gillespie 1:32:50
Right? So I started if I may, I'd read you know, I had gone through a gas phase, I guess, in the late 80s. A bit, but you know, and, you know, so like, I wasn't uncomfortable wearing black, but I really started black, wearing black, I was picked to succeed, my predecessor had reason I took over the magazine in 2000. And part of it was like, Okay, I'm gonna be the editor of, you know, of a public thought magazine, you know, politics and culture magazine, like National Review, or the nation or Harper's or the Atlantic. And I was like, Okay, well, I, you know, I'd need to be a good figure or spokesman. And I talked with my then wife, and who, you know, the mother of my children were on very good terms. And we like, kind of were like, Okay, well, why don't we let's think about this. And it's like, I knew, like, you know, okay, so like, I'm a middle class white guy, I'm not going to dress super sharp, like, I'm not going to spend $5,000 on suits. I don't want to look like I'm just like a bad Catholic school boy with ill fitting coats and a clip on tie. And I was like, Okay, this, this kind of, look, I was like, this is memorable, it reflects who I am. And it also removes, and this is where I, you know, to go to a deeper point, I think that you were implying, it's like, if I don't have to worry about what I'm wearing every day, then I have more time to kind of think new thoughts or to explore new ideas or to engage more new people. And that, for me, is what's important because I don't, you know, in a way, you know, the kind of container of like, what you look like that, you know, and I and again, you know, people like David Bowie, and Prince and Madonna are all great examples of like, they changed the way they looked a lot. But for me, it's like, it's very liberating to have a uniform, you know? Because then it gives me more time to actually, I'm more interested in ideas. I'm more interested in experiences. And I think all of us I mean, to go back to I think something we were talking about earlier. We need to You know, we, I mean, it would be great if we thought more openly about this, like, you know, if the process of education wasn't like, how do you get a good job? And you know, this or that, or how do you sit still? But it's kind of how do you how do you develop the tools to kind of figure out who you want to be. I mean, it's, I, you know, it's like, I am, like, you know, a generation removed from Hell's Kitchen, when it was an Irish ghetto. You know, my father grew up in Hell's Kitchen. And it's like, I get to fucking, you know, talk and think and work for a living, you know, like, you know, whatever. And it's like, we need to help more and more people are in that kind of situation, we need to equip our society where people know, this is, you know, this is something that's worth thinking about and doing and working on, because we all need to build out our own traditions and our own sense of the past, etc. And just to blathering, I realize, but to throw in a little bit more, there's another great libertarian ish thinker named Kevin Kelly, who was an early editor at Wired, and he's still cooking. And he's a simultaneously he believes in the need for tradition and ritual and everything. But he says, and I think it's totally true. A lot of the stuff that we inherited from our parents, like, it's just played out, like, it's, it doesn't make sense in our world. And that doesn't mean you don't have tradition, or ritual or community, but like, he got a, you got to build it, you got to reinvent it. And then you also have to recognize when like, Okay, this isn't working anymore. It's time to start building a new, you know, a new settlement on the frontier.
Coleman Hughes 1:36:42
Okay, on that note, I think we've been gone for almost two hours. Nick Gillespie, thanks so much for coming on my show. Thank you call me to promote other than the documentary. Yeah,
Nick Gillespie 1:36:53
you know, reason, in New York, we do, you know, a couple events of months. And people can check that out at reason.com/events. I also, you know, this is not, you know, simply to, you know, you know, kind of tongue bathe you and praise, but like, you are one of the people that I you know, I moved back to New York, I was born in Brooklyn grew up mostly in New Jersey. And then I like wandered the, you know, the country literally in a prison town in Texas, a small town in Ohio, LA, Philadelphia Buffalo, and you know, and everywhere in between, I moved back to New York in 2018. Because it's like, you know, New York is the place to be the density of just people, and opportunities and shit that's going on. And like, people like you, cuz how old? Are you? 27? Yeah, it's like, you know, it's, you know, I been really impressed and enlivened by, you know, your emergence, I met you very soon after coming here. Yeah. And it's like, you are the type of individual who is conscious of all of the different kinds of tributaries that are that are making you yourself, but you remain an individual. And this is, I think, we need more individualism in America are in conversation and not, you know, like, Oh, I'm a self made man, and I'm an island or something like that, but that people who are willing to challenge, you know, they received categories, but then also, you know, focus on like, how do I make my life kind of a work of art? Or how do I keep improving? How do I keep iterating towards whatever is going to emerge as the the authentic me and I, you know, so I think you've been doing that in a remarkable way. And I just don't stop. I mean, like, because this is the other thing I you know, we I think before we got on, we're talking about this a little bit. In today's world, you can have the opportunity of building an audience for yourself and building a life and an identity and everything. But the really hard part is to build in critical feedback so that you don't just become the worst version of yourself or the cartoon version of what you start out to be. I don't know that I've done that. But you know, you like you were, you know, you're you're helping to show what is possible, and you know, things like that. So I really appreciate your work and your presence and your friendship if I missed you. Yeah. Likewise, I
Coleman Hughes 1:39:23
feel the same way about you. Absolutely. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks. That's it for this episode of conversations with Coleman guys. As always, thanks for watching, and feel free to tell me what you think by reviewing the podcast commenting on social media or sending me an email. To check out my other social media platforms, click the cars you see on screen, and don't forget to like, share, and subscribe. See you next time.
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