'This is what a free society looks like.'

Talking political polarization, cancel culture, generational conflict, libertarianism and postmodernism on Spencer Greenberg's Clearer Thinking podcast.

Me, at a recent Young Voices event held in NYC at the wonderful bar/restaurant Gadfly (258 West 15th Street).

“For the past 25 years at least, what we've been witnessing is a massive democratization of access to the means of public discourse…. We're living in a golden age of people being able to express themselves and engage with other people. This is a sign of a robust society, not one that is dying or falling into chaos.”

That’s a cleaned-up quote from a very lively, optimistic, and upbeat conversation that I recorded late last year with the endlessly fascinating and curious Spencer Greenberg for his Clearer Thinking podcast.

The podcast went live just a few days ago and I’m happy to post it here, along with a VERY ROUGH AND UNCORRECTED AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED RUSH TRANSCRIPT (please check any quotes against the actual audio of the podcast!).

We talked about everything from political polarization to cancel culture to postmodernism to Sam Bankman-Fried and the FTX collapse (it was unfolding as we recorded the episode). What strikes me most about this conversation is my optimism. I’ve long prided myself on being optimistic, even when many aspects of day-to-day life seem to be hitting the skids, especially related to attempts to control and regulate speech, movement, and all sorts of economic, commercial, and cultural transactions. We need to constantly be fighting for more space and autonomy to live how we want, but we should do so with the confidence that things have improved vastly over the the past few decades and centuries and there is every reason to expect that progress on those lines can continue—if we continue to articulate and defend the benefits of living in a freer, more-open society.

Josh Castle [00:00:09] Hello and welcome to Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg. The podcast about ideas that matter. I'm Josh Castle, the producer of the podcast, and I'm so glad you joined us today. In this episode, Spencer speaks with Nick Gillespie about the culture wars, postmodernism and generational animosity.

I highly recommend following Spencer Greenberg on Twitter, Facebook, etc. He’s always asking really sharp and probing questions and bringing new research and frameworks to light.

Spencer Greenberg [00:00:34] Nick, welcome.

Nick Gillespie [00:00:35] Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

Spencer Greenberg [00:00:38] So I think our conversation today is going to be on a range of topics about society and how to think about what's happening in the world. But let's start with the culture wars, because I think you have a really interesting take on it. You know, a lot of people say that all of this fighting that's happening and polarization is a sign that society is falling apart. So what do you think about that?

Nick Gillespie [00:00:57] Yeah, I think that fundamentally gets it wrong. And this is a drum that I've been beating at Reason magazine. I also at various points was columnists that places like The Daily Beast and Time and whatnot. And consistently [00:01:11]for the past 25 years at least, you know, what we've been witnessing, I think is a massive democratization of access to the means of public discourse. [9.8s] You know, when this started in the nineties with the proliferation of cable news, really, which, you know, meant there were just vast hours to be filled that didn't exist before. And the Internet also created this massive supplemental space that people could kind of homestead on. And what happened with that was that we needed more people to fill more time and more space. So we got a wider range of views and even within kind of, you know, well curated or manicured points of view on a political spectrum or ideological spectrum, we started seeing more and more subdivisions among those people as they argued amongst each other and with other people elsewhere. And then, you know, I think over the past 15 years or so, with the advent of social media in particular, we've got further democratized, you know, to a point where, you know, I look at things like Twitter, I look at things like Facebook, Snapchat, which is weirdly, you know, much bigger than Twitter, but just doesn't get any media attention because the people who use it are involved in media. [00:02:23]We're living in a golden age of people being able to express themselves and engage with other people. And what that means is, you know, this is a sign of a robust society, not one that is dying or falling into chaos. [13.1s] I've likened it in the past to in the 17th century in England, they had a civil war which ended, you know, at one point with King Charles, the first being beheaded. At the root of that were many issues. But fundamentally, one of them was about the right of conscience to worship God as you defined him or her, or to not worship at all because you didn't believe in God. And one of the big fears there was that if you got rid of a state church or a single church that everybody had to attend and everybody had to believe in and worship at and things like that, there would be no more religion. And what you actually got when you de-regulated, you got much, much more religion and you got much, much more argument about religion. And that's a good thing. And I think we're in something that is roughly analogous. [00:03:25]It can be very chaotic, it can be very anarchic. It can occasionally rise to the level of violence, which is problematic and needs to be dealt with. But fundamentally, everybody everywhere has more access to more information for more points of view, which is great. And I think, you know, as important, we're able to express ourselves and to stage the arguments about the things that are most important or most, you know, kind of trivial in our lives, You know, this is what a free society looks like. [27.7s]

Spencer Greenberg [00:03:53] So I think we can draw some clarifying distinctions here. One is just the level of debate, and I think most people would say, yeah, it wouldn't be good if there wasn't much debate happening like that, that something broken about society or that's what you might expect in a authoritarian regime where you're not allowed to debate. Another thing we could talk about is tribalism, where instead of just a lot of people having different opinions, it's like, you know, there's two opinions and everyone sort of gravitates for one or two opinions. And I'm wondering, do you feel on that front that things are getting worse? And is that a you know, is that bad, that people are kind of like going to one side or the other?

Nick Gillespie [00:04:25] Yeah, that's a great question. And this is, you know, in many ways, the topic of a book that I co-wrote about a decade ago called the Declaration of Independence enters with my reason colleague that Welch in the political arena and actually more specifically in the electoral political arena because I make a lot of tedious distinctions between, you know, politics and partizanship and even politics of movements or of kind of policy areas and, you know, elections where you're electing either a Republican or a Democrat. I mean, there's no question we have seen over the past 50 years a kind of paradoxical and bizarre. And generally, I think for me, anyway, a disheartening development, which is that fewer and fewer people actually identify as either Republican or Democrat. But, you know, the political discourse when we talk about elections and when we talk about partizanship, it's much, much more. You can only be a Democrat or a Republican, and that's pretty much that exhausts the range of meaningful opinion or meaningful tribal identity. And I do think. We've been getting more tribal in terms of partizan politics. Ironically, or maybe not ironically, but, you know, at the same time, we're not necessarily becoming more tribal in what we believe. There is a political scientist at Stanford named Morris Fiorina, who for at least since 2000, has been tracking kind of public opinion about many topics that are important to people, things like gun rights, things like immigration policy, things like marijuana legalization or gay marriage or marriage equality. And what he finds is consistently there are large and growing supermajorities on most of these matters. You know, something like 65 to 75% of Americans think immigration is a good thing for the country. And that has been growing. More people believe that marijuana should be legalized. More people believe that, you know, there should be marriage equality, you know, among at least two individuals of whatever their sexual orientation. So on the one hand, our politics are getting more and more tribal. And the way that we express things through voting for specific individuals in elections, much more tribal and much more, but now stupid and destructive. But on a wide variety of other topics, there's a much more you know, there's there's large and growing consensus in what I would consider a broadly libertarian position, meaning that at least on social issues, people are very much of a kind of live and live mindset. So this is something to contend with. And I think one of the reasons why our public discourse is oftentimes very confusing or non clarifying is because we're constantly muddying or, you know, combining partizan politics and these other larger social forces or consensus consensuses that we don't really have a way of talking about outside of. Did a Republican or a Democrat went.

Spencer Greenberg [00:07:24] Right because you could have two parties that are actually not that dissimilar in their views and yet be extremely tribal. Right.

Nick Gillespie [00:07:32] Yes. And that's effectively what we had in America up through, you know, probably sometime in the eighties or nineties. There's, you know, the old dominant theory of of if you want to have a national political party, you had to represent everybody in America a little bit, every region, every ideology, every point of view. And as a result, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party were really not that different. Both. And there's a couple of great books written about this in the past 20 years or so. But after World War Two, a new theory took hold and it took a while to come to full form. But the idea of the way to have a successful national party is to make it ideologically unified. And it actually started, interestingly, more with the Democratic Party, at least theoretically. But it really took the form of starting in the late fifties and through the sixties, and then with Reagan within the Republican Party of saying, now the Republican Party is going to be a fundamentally conservative party. And they kind of purified the party. And we see this now. You know, most of your listeners are probably have seen these, you know, kind of distribution charts of where Democrats and Republicans really have sorted themselves into a, you know, broadly speaking, a liberal party and a conservative party. And there's not as much overlap as there was among positions taken by members, say, 40 years ago.

Spencer Greenberg [00:08:57] Another metric you could look at is how much animosity there is between groups. And it seems to me just anecdotally, that we almost are at peak hatred that I've seen in my lifetime. Do you think that that's true? And if so, what do you think's driving that? Yeah.

Nick Gillespie [00:09:13] And can I ask how old you are?

Spencer Greenberg [00:09:15] I'm 39.

Nick Gillespie [00:09:16] Okay. Because you know that matters. I'm. I'm actually. I've got to 20 years older than you. I'm 59. And in my lifetime, I think that we have reached peak contempt for, you know, when we're talking at least narrowly about politics, the contempt that Democrats, the typical Democrat, has for the typical Republican and vice versa, I think is at a peak level. The good news is that fewer people use these identifiers as their first, second or third category of, you know, identity. But for those who do, it's as bad. I think it's worse than it's ever been in my lifetime or your lifetime. And I think that's being driven by a variety of factors. One has to do with media, you know, and I'm a political journalist. I've been a political journalist for most of my professional life. And, you know, the way that we tend to talk about things, I think the way cable news talks about things, I think the way that social media is increasingly or talks about or stages conversations, it leads to that. And there is more, broadly speaking, again, within discussions of politics and apocalyptic rhetoric that has really been kind of on the march and on the grow, you know, at least since the 1990s. And it comes and goes in American history. But I think that's part of what's. Driving it. It's an interesting question then to ask. Once you get outside of political rhetoric, do people feel that way? And again, I you know, when you look at things like the Pew surveys of general public opinion, you know, you don't really find that. [00:10:47]You find like more people are comfortable with lots of different ways of living. People are more comfortable with immigration. People are more comfortable with different types of racial groups, different, you know, I mean, so there's you know, it's an odd thing when we talk about politics as politics, we're at each other's throats and in many other profound ways. We've never been kind of more welcoming and kind of okay with a pluralistic and very diverse nation. [27.0s]

Spencer Greenberg [00:11:15] So the beginning of this conversation, we talked a little bit about debate happening on social media and how you view that actually a good thing. It's a vibrant society, but how does that interact with the sort of animosity of groups towards each other? Do you think that this kind of debate that's happening is feeding that animosity?

Nick Gillespie [00:11:33] That's a good question and I am, generally speaking, my my backgrounds. I've got a I've got a Ph.D. in literary and cultural studies and, you know, and in that [00:11:42]I've always been drawn to theories that say that media does not dictate public opinion or, you know, it doesn't make people think a certain way. It tends to reveal more how people think by enabling them to kind of express themselves and to build new coalitions or discover things. [16.6s] So I never want to say that, you know, social media is causing this, but it does reveal it to a certain degree. But then we need to take a step back. So, you know, when you look at, you know, a service like Twitter, which is very most people aren't on Twitter, I think it's something like, you know, 10% of Americans have a Twitter account or or have used the service, you know, in the past month or something. And then it's like one or 2% of, you know, the users dominate, you know, the amount of content that is published and stuff. And and I think this is particularly true in politics and in the media and in many ways an elite discourse. We tend to think the conversations we're having on Twitter in particular is what people actually care about and think about. And, you know, there's no question, I think that on certain levels, Twitter and other forms of social media tend towards more extreme rhetoric because it there's a sense, you know, you're not in the same room with a person. You don't even necessarily know if the person you're talking to or about is real and things like that. And that tends to a kind of more exaggerated and hyper dramatic kind of rhetoric. Having said all of that, you know, I don't know about you. I've been curious. You know, my Twitter habits are mostly like people who are constantly posting old pictures of, you know, either what, you know, politics or technology was like people are you know, my Instagram feed is 99% Seinfeld related accounts that, you know, there's a great account that mashes up Twin Peaks and Seinfeld, as you know, kind of the two great TV shows of the of the nineties. And, you know, [00:13:40]there's a lot of imaginative work out there that in no way as polarizing or as hostile or as angry or something like that. It's just kind of creative and it acts as a kind of way of remembering the past and kind of imagining potential presence and futures that are alternative from whatever we're doing. [17.1s]

Spencer Greenberg [00:13:58] You know, it's funny because the algorithms are trying to give you what you click on, and so you can consciously choose to click on only certain types of things to follow, only certain types of things, and then you will create that in your feed. And yet there's such a pull that so many people have to click on things that are actually maybe not healthy for them or.

Nick Gillespie [00:14:17] Yeah, that feed your like, you know, your anger or your kind of elation at kind of owning somebody or something like that. So you know that there's a real issue with that. It's fascinating, too, that we, you know, or maybe, you know, that like in our conversation here, which obviously it's just started, but like, we're not even talking about Facebook, which has kind of receded, even though it's, you know, by a factor of eight or nine, it's probably by ten is bigger than, you know, any other social media platform in North America, much less the globe. But I think, you know, one of the large questions that and I mean this is for me is a much larger question and it's a really important one, is like how do we perceive and how do we grasp social reality? Because it used to be that what we read in the newspaper or saw on on network television was kind of our reality or a proxy for our reality. Then that kind of shifted to cable TV and the Internet in the nineties, and now it's kind of shifted to social media and it's clear like none of this, you know, it's a really bad kind of proxy for what is actually going on in people's lives. And I think we have everybody talks about narratives now as somebody again who is, you know, school then kind of literary and cultural studies. I've been talking about thinking about things in terms of narrative for decades. And, you know, it's really important. [00:15:38]One of the things that was this was a very tedious, but I think true insight in the late eighties and early nineties kind of cultural studies, discourse, literary studies, discourse, critical theory discourses, you know, never confuse the map with the territory. And in a lot of ways, our I think our social media discourse, that's the map and we're confusing it for the territory. [19.5s] And oftentimes that, you know, with these things, social media is not a good way of understanding what's actually going on. In reality, however, we wanted to find that.

Spencer Greenberg [00:16:07] I did an analysis of intellectuals on Twitter and what their most popular tweets were, and I tried to categorize them saying, Well, of the most popular tweets, what sort of tweets are they? And some of the categories were kind of funny, like when people tweet really specific stories about animals that make them see human like like people just love it for some reason. But the most disturbing category was when people call out a person in power, especially someone who's polarizing. We're like, some people love them and some people hate them. Those were some of the most popular tweets ever. And I think it feels to me that that sort of the thing we associate something like Twitter with, like toxic behavior, it's because there is a genuine reward that people get from not to say they're calling out bad people in power is necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes it's a bad thing. Sometimes it's a good thing, sometimes a bad thing. But whether it's good or bad, depending on the case, like they're getting a reward for, it's creating a feedback loop. Right?

Nick Gillespie [00:17:00] Right. For sure. And then the question is like, you know, where does that Twitter feedback loop are? Like, you do well on the economy of Twitter. You get 5000 retweets and likes and comments on on an outrage post, and that raises your stock or your value within Twitter. But then how do you kind of leave that economy and do you parlay that into something in, quote unquote, the real world, or do you make money on it in the real world, etc.? That's I think is also a kind of interesting question because depending on who you I just went to lunch the other day with somebody who is young, really smart in her early thirties, has created a job where she places speakers at tech conferences and things like that. She had never heard of Jordan Peterson and I was like, Wow, that is kind of amazing that somebody who is smart and engaged in the world and whatnot, but doesn't really do social media and doesn't know who Jordan Peterson is. And that's kind of fascinating, don't you think? Because you we would we all know everything about Jordan Peterson, including his, you know, benzodiazepine addictions and, you know, being put into a medical coma in Russia for a while and then coming back and, you know, is young in archetype worldview and things like that. So he's very big in certain places and maybe not so big and others in that, you know, I don't know what we do with this other than kind of make note of it.

Spencer Greenberg [00:18:25] Yeah, It's interesting how you can get this fragmentation of information sources where, like, for example, the Kardashians. I couldn't tell you anything about the Kardashians. I really I know that they exist. I know they're really popular. I don't really understand who they are, what they do. Whereas some other people would be like, what? You don't know the Kardashians. That's insane, right? It's like and.

Nick Gillespie [00:18:42] I mean, they are the people who are most, you know, who are most aspirational right now. And, you know, in 21st century America to a large number of people or something, or we use them to speak about race and gender and self-creation and identity. Yeah. And you know, what I try to do in my work is I wouldn't say, well, you know, Spencer, you got to fuckin start watching reality TV or like, you you can't be a serious person if you don't know who the Kardashians are or you can't be a serious person if you don't know who Jordan Peterson is. And it's not really that. This goes back to my larger point of, you know, [00:19:20]we live in a world of kind of beautiful, terrible freedom where, you know, and I don't want this to sound at all kind of solipsistic or autistic or something, but like where we can live in our worlds, we can build a world and live within it of information and, you know, certain kinds of commercial transactions and cultural meaning and things like that. It's very liberating. You don't have to know who the Kardashians are, and other people don't have to know who Jordan Peterson is or, you know, conceivably even Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell or something like that. [32.4s] We can argue whether or not, you know, you better know certain things because those people can really affect whether or not your life, you know, is possible or not. But, you know, this is it's we live in an age of radical freedom. I think where people can live more and more in the worlds that they want to build and occupy.

Josh Castle [00:20:16] Do people of different genders actually have different personalities? We've all heard that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but we've also heard that men and women are actually no different from each other at their core. Clearly, both of these perspectives can't be right. Is one of them accurate or are they both just sensationalized nonsense to try to answer these questions? The team at Clearer Thinking Dawg analyzed enormous amounts of data, ran 15 separate studies, and have now published their results in the form of a free data driven test called the Gender Continuum Test. You can take this fun test to learn about the relationship between gender and personality based on data from more than 15,000 people, and you'll probably learn some things about yourself in the process too, since it will provide a personalized analysis of your personality. Take the gender continuum test or to find clearer thinkings, other free tools and many courses. There's a clearer thinking board.

Spencer Greenberg [00:21:21] So let's change topics here. One thing I want to get your take on is postmodernism. You know, a lot of people talk about postmodernism these days. You know, the people on the right say, you know, postmodernism has infected society.

Nick Gillespie [00:21:33] And it's somehow Marxist. You get a lot of the postmodern Marxists, people like Jordan Peterson actually would use that phrase, which is kind of incoherent, but.

Spencer Greenberg [00:21:43] Right. And then, you know, there are people on the left who sort of deny like, what are you talking about? Like, our philosophy is not postmodern, etc.. But anyway, I think the interesting take on this, did you want to kind of tell us what is postmodernism in your view? Yeah.

Nick Gillespie [00:21:55] Great. And I'll just preface it by saying, you know, I Reason magazine was started in 1968. It's a libertarian publication. And when I talked about when I started talking about this got in the nineties, really that libertarianism and postmodernism have a lot in common. You know, people are like, Are you crazy? Postmodernism is somehow communistic, socialistic, left wing, you know, nihilistic, etc.. So like, you know, I've been used to people using postmodern to either describe something that they uncritically love or uncritically hate for a long time. But for me, when people talk about postmodernism or what postmodernism means, [00:22:35]Jean-Francois Leotard in the late seventies, published a book called The Postmodern Condition, and he defined postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarrative and broadly speaking, and there are kind of cultural and philosophical and political, you know, kind of versions of this and whatnot. But essentially what postmodernism is for me, it's, you know, it's, it's a temperament or a mindset that focuses on the limits of human knowledge rather than the extent of human knowledge. [28.1s] So incredulity toward metanarrative means that even as we recognize, we need theories and we need big theories, you know, theories of all society, theories of all economics, theories of science and, you know, physics and all of this in order to go out in the world and kind of get to where we want to be. We're constantly interrogating, you know, those theories that are helping us explain the world. So it's we're always kind of checking our eyeglasses and our prescription and making sure that, you know, that the the lenses were looking at the world through are not warping us or or, you know, are just like kind of blinding us to certain things rather than other things. And I find that this is something that, again, gives rise to a lot of anxiety and a lot of people modernism in this sense, or modernity you see in its fullest and darkest kind of manifestations in totalitarian theories of society, you know, and they can take the form of something like Nazi ism or, you know, Stalinist communism, where you believe that you can control and should control and direct every aspect of human life, you know, from a single source or from a centralized source. But you can also do that more kind of from a knowledge base. So you can say we're going to use Darwinian evolution as we understand it to explain every aspect of human society, or we're going to use Marxist economics, or we're going to use free market economics, or we're going to use Freudian psychology. And these are gigantic matter narratives, and we need to be incredulous towards them. And [00:24:38]I think what happened in the 20th century is that the value in being incredulous, which doesn't mean you dispense with them or you don't try to come up with better ones, but you know, you question them and you are skeptical of them, especially when people are using them in order to regiment and structure human society. Because we saw what happens when you give in to a totalitarian or a total mindset. And that belief, a kind of epistemological hubris that you can actually design and dictate and determine everything in human life from your theoretical possession. And for me, just to finish up on the thought of why this comports with a lot of, I think, libertarian thinking, or at least the way that I am drawn to libertarianism, is somebody like Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who ended up winning a Nobel Prize in the early seventies. He was always stressing the limits of human knowledge and that that implies being very careful whenever you are creating policies or trying to design societies in which things are mandatory, things are coercive and whatnot. So to me, postmodernism, by emphasizing the limits of knowledge, if we keep that in mind, we will be well, we'll always be in freer, more open societies where more innovation, more experimentation and more play happens. And that's how we actually discover who we are, what we want, what works and what doesn't. [91.7s]

Spencer Greenberg [00:26:11] I guess the way I think about it is that meta narratives are often good, but what's dangerous is kind of going all in on one metanarrative or Yeah, well you really wanted to build. Do is be able to take one look at the world through it, but then take it off and put on another one and look at the world through that. Yeah. Would you agree with that, brother?

Nick Gillespie [00:26:28] Yeah. And you know, and I think broadly speaking, that is the liberal project that came to a certain level of articulation and even implementation starting in the 19th century of liberal political philosophy which gave rise to things, you know, like free speech or the idea that, you know, I mean, in many ways it was the secularization of this religious argument that people should be allowed to, you know, to worship God in the way they see fit or not at all. [00:26:56]Liberal political philosophy kind of secularized that and said, you know what, Like generally speaking, we should give them a large sphere of autonomy to kind of make the decisions they want to kind of live how they want and to form voluntary communities. You know, that respect certain you know, you have to respect certain types of rights that everybody holds, etc.. But it's effectively it's a non extremist, non hyper ideological perspective. So it's not saying, okay, we're going to go all in on this and we're never looking back, but rather we gain knowledge, you know, by having a society that allows for open discussion and debate and alternative ways of living you create. You know what John Stuart Mill talked about as experiments and living. [42.0s] And that's good because that way you kind of you create a more resilient society and one that is always kind of changing and growing and kind of kicking the tires of its own vehicle so that you are less likely to to become a monstrous version of some single mindset.

Spencer Greenberg [00:27:57] Now, I'm not an expert in postmodernism, but my understanding is that early postmodernism, a lot of the skepticism was born out of this distrust of power that people in power create metanarrative or or support meta narratives that sort of maintain their power. And I'm curious how you think of that aspect of postmodernism.

Nick Gillespie [00:28:18] Yeah, and that's actually one of the most interesting kind of dimensions of this intersection between our kind of French postmodernism certainly, and an American libertarian. What I would consider an American libertarian postmodernism is Michel Foucault, who's, you know, the French social theorist who's one of the most influential and most quoted, you know, whatever you want to call them, social theorist philosophers, you know, writers of the second half of the 20th century in the late fifties and early sixties, wrote books called The Birth of the Clinic and Madness and Civilization, which looked at the way specifically that a lot of medical rhetoric which was used to say, certain people are sick and we have to help them, and doctors help them through medicine and intervening and restraining them for their own good. That was very similar to what Thomas saw as a psychiatrist who wrote a book called The Myth of Mental Illness, a line of argumentation that he was putting forward, that a lot of medical discourse is always kind of pushed in a kind of it's a helper rhetoric. It's, you know, we're just trying to help people, etc.. And it actually oftentimes masks this mass of, well, too power of certain people being able to dictate how people live, whether or not they can walk around, whether or not, you know, are they in straitjackets or not, what is considered sane versus insane. And that is why I think, you know, postmodern skepticism of power was was welcomed and was also necessary because in medicine in the mid-twentieth century, you know, and you have the extreme versions of, you know, things like Nazi ism and the Soviet Union, But even in the West, you had a rise of expert classes that would tell you, you know, how to work, you know, based on your scores in certain tasks or like where to go to school or if you should go to school because you either have the brains or you don't, or you have the right work ethic or whatever, you know. And when you look at in an American context, things like, you know, the brain trust, which brains trust was the actual early formulation under FDR, where he was going in order to fix the economy during the Great Depression. He was going to get the smartest people in the room and they would figure everything out. And then later, under somebody like John F Kennedy, you know, we would talk about the best and the brightest who, you know, led us into Vietnam or into other kind of public policy debacles. So there's a lot of fear of skepticism and fear of people who can kind of tell you what is right and what you should be doing, especially when that means minimizing choice. You know, they weren't really acting in an advisory role. And there's a lot of coming out of the libertarian economic kind of world. There was a lot of fear of people, you know, wanting to plan economies because they knew best, like they knew what everybody would want and how many years of corn you would want, how many soybeans, how many widgets, how many this, how many that. And it's a kind of lunatic fantasy of control and omniscient. Sense that people were skeptical because it you know, it didn't work. And it you know, and it restricted other people's equal ability to kind of figure out what they want to do with their lives and how to live in the world.

Spencer Greenberg [00:31:34] So do you think that the critique of postmodernism coming from the right is confused about what postmodernism is, or do you think that they sort of have a point, but maybe they're missing part of what's going on?

Nick Gillespie [00:31:44] I think it's mostly that they they misunderstand what postmodernism is and it's that, you know, they identify it with kind of beret wearing intellectuals in the university. And you know, it's it should be extremely disturbing to the right. It's definitely disturbing to anybody else that the you know, the the right in America has become so openly anti-intellectual. And, you know, and by that, I don't just mean they're against universities, they're against ideas, they're against thoughtfulness in kind of profound ways. But I think it's mostly a complete misunderstanding on their part of what postmodernism actually is and how it might function to inform public policy as well as kind of social cohesion and a vision of a world where, you know, that is generally amenable to freedom and to, you know, kind of lifestyle pluralism, which are some maybe maybe they're intuiting that, you know, there's, you know, part of the right in America. And I don't consider myself either right or left. And, you know, I don't wear that as a badge of pride. It's just sociologically, I've never felt particularly home in the right or the left. But, you know, there are elements in the right that don't like true diversity and difference difference of opinion, difference of demographics, difference of food, things like that. They oftentimes prize uniformity or unity in certain kinds of social groups. I think, you know, that's also true of the left, but it's certainly true of the right. And a political scientist named Karen Stenner at the early part of this century, maybe 2425, wrote a book called The Authoritarian Mindset, which talked about that, you know, that she lumped people into two broad groups of what she called authoritarians who like kind of unity in experience and in demographics and in social units. And then she called the other group libertarians and not really meaning and in our contemporary kind of political context, but just people who liked diverse experience and being around different types of people. And I think the right broadly is kind of authoritarian in that sense. And so maybe in that way their right to be against postmodernism, because I think postmodernism is something that complicates the idea that you're going to have one single idea or narrative that really kind of dictates everybody's experience or how everybody should let.

Spencer Greenberg [00:34:16] Something that confused me is I have a sense that people on the left tend to think of libertarianism as a sort of more right leaning philosophy. And I'm curious, have you heard that kind of attribution and what do you think of that?

Nick Gillespie [00:34:28] Oh, yeah. Yeah. And as far as I'm concerned, you know, I think that that's generally mistaken. But at the same time, I think it's kind of accurate from a sociological perspective. I think the libertarianism in postwar America, you know, has largely been kind of housed on the right side of the political spectrum so that you see, you know, when National Review, the magazine founded by William Buckley and a bunch of other people in the in 1955, there were some self-identified libertarians who were part of that right wing coalition. And it meant mostly that in that context that they were individualists who also promoted free market economics as opposed to a kind of planned economy. And, you know, even people like, you know, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises and, you know, writer historians like Corey Robin Robbins have on the left have talked about people like Ludwig von Mises and Hayek as reactionaries, I think is mistaken about that. But he's right that they lived on the kind of right side of the aisle, partly because after World War Two, the big thing that everybody oriented themselves around was it questions of communism and planned economies versus what was sometimes called the free world or free enterprise. And in that sense, it's legitimate to say, you know, the libertarian movement has largely been affiliated with the right in postwar America. But then there comes this question of after, you know, certainly after the end of the Cold War, when that major question like, are you which side are you on, the Soviet Union or America or, you know, communism or free enterprise or something that doesn't make sense anymore. And I think, again, kind of philosophically, that libertarian, you know, a libertarian sensibility the way that. I think about it is not necessarily right wing or left wing, and particularly in the first decade in the aughts of, you know, of the 21st century. I know a lot of people on the left who were like, you know what, There's a lot to learn from libertarian thinking because it is about maximizing individuals ability to have meaningful choices within their lives, to make meaningful choices in their lives. And there were even books talk about how there's a lot to learn from people like Friedrich Hayek, Michel Foucault, who died in the early eighties in some of his last lectures actually in France, talked about how people on the left should read Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises with special care because their ideas actually spoke a lot to a powerful way to constrain power, which was, you know, part of his larger project. So I, you know, without going on and on about it, I think it's both right and wrong to talk about libertarians as fundamentally part of the right.

Spencer Greenberg [00:37:17] So one thing that I think we can agree on regarding libertarianism is that it tends to think that government is dysfunctional or that government just doesn't do a very good job at solving society's problems. And you've made the argument that this view has actually become increasingly accepted in society. You want to talk about that?

Nick Gillespie [00:37:36] Yeah. And this you know, this is the libertarian argument that has, I think, run the table. I think it's one, you know, when when Ronald Reagan was running for president, you know, a thousand years ago, he talked about how, you know, the worst thing that you could hear is somebody knocking on your door and saying, I'm from the government and I'm here to help you. And by that, he meant, you know, government was at best incompetent and at worst was malevolent, you know, And it was just trying to boss people around or, you know, force people to do certain types of things. That's an argument that comes broadly, you know, from a libertarian critique of the efficiency and efficacy of state power. I think that's one it became more and more extreme within libertarian circles. People like Milton Friedman talked something like that, first in a book called Capitalism and Freedom in the early Sixties, and then he reprised it later in the I guess, very late seventies, early eighties in a TV series and book that he did with his wife, Rose, who was also an economist called Free to Choose. You know, and it's gotten to a point now where most libertarians will say the government is incapable of doing anything positive. You know, all taxation is theft. I mean, it's almost become a hyper anarchist movement. But when you look at public opinion surveys, most people believe that the government is trying to do too many things, that it's not very good at what it does, etc.. And, you know, and there's a huge amount of skepticism about whether or not the government is even a good faith actor. You know, and again, places like Pew and Gallup ask these questions and have been doing it for 57 years. And like what you see is a straight line decline in the trust and confidence that government is trying to do the right thing. So in that broad sense, I think a libertarian argument about government has, you know, has succeeded. And what I've written about and I write about this in a piece a couple of years ago for raise Them, which was controversial for reasons that I think are obvious, I said, you know, this helps explain why over that same period, we have seen massive increases in the size, scope and spending of government because it turns out that libertarians thought that a precondition for reducing the role of government in everybody's lives was to undermine its competency or belief in its competency and effectiveness. And it turns out that when societies go from being high trust to low trust, high trust, both the government, but also in the public and the private sector and whatnot, to low trust people vote in or they they call for more and more government regulation because they feel like things are getting out of control and whatnot. And I think that explains a lot of what's been going on in the United States over the past 50 years or so, where people are more and more worried that the government, you know, nobody trusts the government. We don't literally don't trust the government the way we did in 1970 or 72 or something like that, for good reason. You know, because of Watergate, because of Vietnam, because of, you know, Iran-Contra, because of the church commission that showed that the CIA and the FBI and the NSA were all illegally spying on us, which we found out again, when Edward Snowden, you know, revealed a bunch of things under Obama. We don't trust the government the way we want to, but the government spends more and more and it regulates more and more. And it you know, it's more and more in every part of our lives. And that's because when people feel that things are going to hell and that nobody's in charge, they ask for people to be in charge, even if they know those people will not actually do a good job or be honest.

Spencer Greenberg [00:41:12] What makes you think that people viewing the government as incompetent then causes them to call for more? Like. Like what evidence would you point to on that?

Nick Gillespie [00:41:22] I talked to a couple of economists and political scientists, and they said, you know what happens with say, you know, it's not like they're calling for a cop per se, but after the tech bubble burst, we got a bunch of new financial regulations because people were like, the stock market is rigged or it's fixed. And, you know, the stock market going back to since the 1920s has been among the most heavily regulated parts of, you know, economic activity. I mean, everything is covered by a regulation. And when the tech bubble burst, there was a spate of new massive regulations. When the economic crisis happened and two, that started unfolding in 2008, we got an even bigger slate of, you know, economic regulations. So people respond to, you know, these large scale failures of existing regulatory schemes or economic programs by calling for more. And, you know, and that certainly seems to be what's going on over the past ten years and things like that. It's hard, like you just see more and more regulations being called for. You see more and more government spending on more and more programs because, you know, housing isn't working or housing is too expensive. Let's spend more money on housing, things like that.

Spencer Greenberg [00:42:39] But doing a lot of people view these as failures of the free market like they think, Yeah, yeah. And so they're saying, well, this is a failure of the free market, so we need to regulate it further.

Nick Gillespie [00:42:48] Somewhat, although it's hard to do that when, you know, when you look at the fact of the matter is, is that like these are heavily, heavily regulated economic sectors. So part of it, it gets sold as you know, this, you know, the housing market, which everywhere is like totally ensconced in all kinds of regulation, just in developing things, you know, in terms of land use and zoning and all of this kind of stuff. But then it's also on the financial side, you know, and on mortgages and things like that. You know, we you know, it's so thoroughly ensconced. One of the ways that you sell more regulation is by saying these are unregulated industries. But the larger, you know, on the highest level possible, what we see is government continues to do more and to spend more. And then when there is a failure and people end up voting for more spending, more regulation.

Spencer Greenberg [00:43:43] It's really interesting how when people look at a system like housing, some people's reaction is, oh my gosh, this is like way over regulated and it's causing all these problems. And some people's reaction is, oh my gosh, things are not working well. We need more regulation clearly to solve it. And yeah, and you know, you sometimes you can see, you know, both sides, like have a point there. Yeah, sure. But it is just fascinating how like opposite their reaction is Totally.

Nick Gillespie [00:44:08] And you know and also like you know you hear this a lot of after the financial crisis was at the end of George Bush's term and then Obama's. And between the two of them, they spent, you know what at the time were record amounts of peacetime spending increases and things like that. And then within a couple of years, you also heard people saying, we didn't do anything. You know, the problem, you know, the government really didn't intervene or spend money. And it's kind of like, well, that I don't think is correct. But you're right. What to me, what is most interesting and kind of contemporary moments, you know, talk about something like the housing market is that we're seeing new alliances forming between people who maybe ten or 20 years ago were not really in conversation, but particularly on something like the way that land use local zoning and local land use or planning ordinances, you know, are contributing to the inability to build more housing. And so, you know, in places like San Francisco and a couple of other cities, you have the rise of Yimby is, yes, in my backyard. People who tend to be kind of progressive leftists and kind of libertarian activists who are saying, you know, one of the problems, the reason why there isn't more housing being built is because it's technically illegal. You know, every there are all kinds of litigious restrictions, so let's get rid of those. And so to me that, you know, this is one of the things when we talk about these large stories that get told about stuff and kind of start to critique them, new types of political or social coalitions start to crop up. And that's kind of interesting. You see something like that with criminal justice reform, with drug policy reform and things like that. So for me, that's exciting and interesting, partly because it kind of it moves beyond, you know, a kind of binary choice that seems to tend to, you know, dominate most of most of public discussions about any given policy issue.

Spencer Greenberg [00:46:02] Yeah, I've heard interesting stories from people with New York real estate. I'll just say tell two of them really quickly. One, I was talking to a real estate developer recently and they were telling me that they actually leave some of their apartments on rented on purpose because. Is the way the law is set up is that the only way they can rent them out is to essentially charge a price that it would not be worth renting it out for. So given the amount of like improvements they'd have to do to make it livable. So essentially, they have to have a whole bunch of spaces that they literally just can't rent. And I was like, Wow, that's like, it's really bizarre and shocking. And on the other side, I have a friend who he had mold in his apartment and it was causing problems and he just like, couldn't get his landlord to fix it. And his landlord, the only way his landlord would accept money is like dropped an envelope with bills that he'd have to, like travel 25 minutes to pay his rent every every month. And you're just like under both sides of the equation. It's like this totally bonkers and insane by it's like.

Nick Gillespie [00:47:05] And now and you know this. And [00:47:08]New York is an interesting story for all sorts of reasons where, you know, New York is simultaneously one of the most heavily regulated cities. And by that, I just mean, you know, like there's there's laws governing everything. And, you know, but then there's also social practices. It's also one of kind of the freest cities in the world where you can live however you want. And, you know, there are all kinds of workarounds and things like that. So it becomes, you know, go back to a large question of how do you kind of apprehend social reality? Like, is New York a nightmare city? Everything you do is technically illegal or potentially illegal, or is it a place where people continue to come to in order to be their authentic self and live a life that they could not live anywhere else? [42.8s] You know, it's kind of a mix. I mean, one of the things that's fascinating about a place like New York and I think that's particularly true of Manhattan, is that, you know, the city, every once in a while does an inventory of the number of apartments or living units that are allowed, you know, that are available by, you know, to own or to rent. And there is not there has not been a lot of change. And the number of units of, you know, since the mid sixties when they first started doing this. And it's a strange, strange world.

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Spencer Greenberg [00:49:35] Before we wrap up, another topic I wanted to touch on with you is the sort of relationship between boomers and then the younger generations, millennials and Gen Z. Do you want to kind of introduce that topic to us?

Nick Gillespie [00:49:48] Yeah, I used to write a lot. This was particularly in the aughts and, you know, the early teens a lot about what I call generational warfare. And this goes back to, you know, a kind of post-modern libertarian critique of the rhetoric of a lot of social policy. You know, people are constantly told that things like old age entitlements, Medicare in particular, and Social Security are designed to keep old people, you know, over 65 from being impoverished. And the fact of the matter is, as you know, people over 65 now are among the as as a class are the wealthiest people in American society. You know, and it makes sense because they've been saving their whole lives and they've, you know, acquired a lot of money and capital and, you know, savings and things like that. And younger people, you pay for these programs through payroll taxes, which are somehow not considered income tax, even though they you know, they are a tax on the first dollar of income and up to about $120,000 of salary, which is far more than most people in America will ever make in a year for Social Security. And it's limitless for Medicare. And they're sold as these, you know, the thin line that's keeping old people from, you know, not being able to afford medical care or drugs or rent or anything. And that's just totally wrong. And it's a terrible I mean, younger people are getting ripped off to pay for these programs, for people, most of whom cannot afford to pay for the retirement and pay for their, you know, their health care in old age. So on my side, even though I was technically born in the second to last year, the baby boomer, my mom, [00:51:26]I am completely on the side of millennials and Gen Z, Relatively young people who are relatively poor are getting ripped off in order to pay for old people who are relatively rich. And I think the whole concept of old age entitlements should be gotten rid of and instead what what the proper role of government should be is to help people who who need assistance regardless of age. [23.6s] You know, it's it shouldn't be based on that. But beyond that, more I think what we're in the middle of and this actually goes to a different kind of tribal ization or tribalism, which isn't about, you know, right or left. But we're in a moment now where, you know, the baby boom, which at the time was the largest cohort in history. And and Gen X is kind of part of that, whether they want to be or not. Our time is ending as a kind of ascendant hegemonic force. And this is a lot of the tension because millennials and Gen Z have grown up in a different world. They have different priorities and different sensibilities, and I disagree with a lot of them, but it's like just in the way that, you know, the Greatest Generation gave, you know, eventually gave way to baby boomers. You were going through that same kind of generational shift and like it was in the sixties and early seventies, it's very heated. It tends to be apocalyptic and it can be very ugly at various times. But that's you know, that's what's happening. And [00:52:49]the one thing that I would caution millennials and Gen Z to think about is that a lot of the apocalyptic rhetoric, you know, when you hear stories like you will be the first generation not to have the same standard of living as your parents, that the planet is about to be fried to a crisp, that crime is epidemic. You know that it's going to be pandemics for the rest of your life and stuff like that. Interrogate those apocalyptic narratives, because a lot of the times they serve the status quo or they serve the people who are in power to maintain power, not to actually elucidate anything that's going to help you. [39.0s] And I, you know, that I guess is kind of like an old man warning, like don't trust anybody over 60 and trust, you know, don't trust but verify what they're telling you that it's true.

Spencer Greenberg [00:53:41] Very convenient. As a 59 year old say that.

Nick Gillespie [00:53:46] Yes, that's right. And by the same token, I mean, there's something weird going on. I wrote a lot in the nineties about kind of changing attitudes towards children and child raising. And this was something that was on the right and the left, you know, where both people on the right and the left were saying that kids in the nineties, you know, kids born and being raised in the late nineties and early 2000s were somehow living in a world that was harsher and more brutal than ever. And it just isn't true from a material, you know, perspective. You know, there is more equality, there is, you know, better health are things like lower lead levels in blood. You know, the idea of being molested was lower than it had ever been. You know, kids were doing better than ever. They're going to school longer and learning more and etc.. That is also something that I think we need to reevaluate as a society, because we've told younger people that the world they are about to inherit is just fucked up beyond belief. And, you know, when you look globally, a record low percentage of people around the globe are living in what the UN calls absolute poverty in many parts of the world. You know, with the exception of the US, actually lifespans are increasing and have been for the past hundred years. More people are, you know, able to actualize themselves like these are all pretty damn fantastic, amazing things. But we're kind of living, you know, we've been telling, I think, younger people in America that the world that they live in is absolutely brutal and horrible. And that's just wrong. You know, you're not going to have a lower standard of living than your parents. You know, you're going to go to school, you're going to have more options. You can be more fully who you want to be. And yet we're somehow turning these positive trends into a nightmare kind of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome world. And that's not good, you know, And it's not good partly because it's simply inaccurate. And then secondly, it leads to horrible public policy. It leads to bad social relations, and it leads to people turning away from building a meaningful future, I think, which is, you know, what we should always be striving for.

Spencer Greenberg [00:55:58] You mentioned that you think these narratives are serving people in power and that sort of frightening younger people. Has this kind of benefit for the older people? Could you elaborate on that?

Nick Gillespie [00:56:08] Yeah, If you say terrorism is an existential threat, if you say, you know that they're climate change, you know, which I believe in, I believe climate change is real. I believe that it's manmade, or rather that human activity contributes heavily to it. But it does not mean that the world is about to end if we don't immediately decarbonize the and, you know, the economy and, you know, ten years or something like that, you put into play a scenario where everything is super heightened. Everything you do is a matter of life or death, and that tends to freeze up. [00:56:44]You put the entire planet on a kind of war footing where everything is an emergency. And what happens in emergencies is that normal, everyday life gets suspended and people take away your rights. People take take away your speech rights. They take away your ability to move. If we are living constantly in a world that is about to explode for X, Y, or Z, reason that helps people who are in power to maintain power and actually extend and enlarge it. So we should always be skeptical of people who are predicting the world is about to end, or that some large part of it is about to go down the tubes because that inevitably that comes with a demand that you, you follow their orders or you live in their mind and do their bidding. [51.3s]

Spencer Greenberg [00:57:37] How cynically do you view this? Do you think that people in power are actually lying about these things, or do you think that they're just sort of believing these narratives and that just happen to benefit them?

Nick Gillespie [00:57:49] Yeah, it's that's a great question, and I think it's always a mix. And I actually I tend to always think that people are kind of arguing in good faith, but there are times where it becomes kind of inescapable. You know, for instance, we, you know, we can look at the way in which the Bush administration, you know, seems like ancient history. And it's really not very long ago. But the way that they got Congress to write an authorization of use of military force in Iraq. I think some of the people in the Bush administration believe that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. And I think other people knew that he did not and that this was a lie for the greater good. When you look at somebody like Anthony Fauci and the way that he acted during the pandemic, he admitted that he lied about the efficacy of of masks or, you know, PPE because he was afraid of a run on it, you know, for first line responders and things like that. So it's always a mix of, you know, some people are cynical, some people are not. I think, you know, in a in a closer to home or, you know, more recent thing, you know, the stories that have been coming out about Sam Bankman-fried, he was cynical in a lot of the things that he was espousing. You know, he he was cynical about, you know, crypto is cynical about certain types of effect of altruism, etc.. So you got to look at it. And I dislike people who assume that everybody who they disagree with is lying, because I think that that's a again, it's usually wrong. But also, like we should always you know, I think it's just a better way to be to assume that people are being honest, even if you disagree with them. But then sometimes they are being cynical. I think about major. Figures who have kind of receded from public view but are very responsible for the politics of the current moment. And I'm thinking of somebody like Newt Gingrich, who was, you know, the Republican speaker of the House in the nineties, and he probably more than any single political like elected official, is responsible for the way the parties talk about each other, you know, in very venomous, hyper polarized, very derogatory terms. He was mostly a bullshit artist. Like he didn't he didn't believe, you know, a lot of what he said. But he used that rhetoric because he knew it would be effective. So I think the proper antidote to all of this stuff is when you're making arguments and when you're doing kind of, you know, public discourse or interaction, whether it's on Twitter or not, is to, you know, argue in good faith and to also, you know, kind of try and make your case, not through personal invective, an ad hominem, but, you know, by actually marshaling, you know, the types of data and argument and logic that actually win people to your side.

Spencer Greenberg [01:00:35] Yeah, I tend to think that most humans won't just lie in the public sphere at great length. Like most people, they might exaggerate, but a lot of what's going on insofar as they're not telling the truth is that there's a certain self-deception going on. Obviously, there are exceptions. There are people that are willing to just absolutely lie, just don't give a shit. But I just think that they're not that common.

Nick Gillespie [01:00:58] No, I agree. But there is, you know, and this goes back to that question of like, if the world is about to end or if they believe it's about to end, they're more comfortable making noble lies, you know, or lies for the greater good and things like that. And, you know, that's another reason to always, you know, kind of like really make sure the world is about to end before you start espousing things that should be done, you know, if the plane is actually crashing. But I agree with you completely. I think that most people are you know, they're doing the best they can and it's just we're fallible. This goes back to that kind of, you know, incredulity not just toward metanarrative, but towards, you know, you should be credulous towards your own bullshit. Right. Because we you know, we are very good at tricking ourselves into believing stuff that may not be fully warranted based on what we know or you know. But but we want it to be true.

Spencer Greenberg [01:01:54] So you mentioned Sam Bankman-fried and obviously that there's a huge catastrophe that occurred recently. I'm curious how you think about that with regard to both crypto and its future and sort of how people are going to view it going forward?

Nick Gillespie [01:02:09] Well, one thing I'll say is that it it concerns me greatly, partly because crypto, I think, is the most you know, it's hard to say about, say, crypto. And then I'm like, well, no, maybe I just mean Bitcoin or maybe I'm talking about blockchain more broadly or just Bitcoin and Ethereum, whatever. I think that the rise of cryptocurrency and particularly Bitcoin and maybe the Ethereum blockchain, but is the most important kind of invention since the internet became a mass medium in the late eighties and nineties. So whatever affects it is really bad. And one of the things about the FTX scandal and breakdown and everything and I think there's a significant amount of fraud going on there, which really is is terrible, but that it is going to lead to the bad sort of regulation of an entire kind of parallel financial system, which is incredibly liberating, especially for people in authoritarian regimes. Reason has been covering Bitcoin, you know, since the white paper, the Satoshi Whitepaper, came out and it was always our interest is fundamentally in the idea of a non-state backed currency. The power of that is really in the way that it helps people who are in truly authoritarian countries to kind of root around the worst forms of of oppression and repression. And so what concerns me is, you know, there are nobody in Washington, with the exception of a handful of people, you know, are in favor of kind of the crypto economy because they see it as a threat to their power in the status quo. And so that really worries me. And I think [01:03:49]one of the things to think about with the meltdown of FTX and whatnot is that in many ways SBF his actions, or at least what we know about them right now, underscore the power of Bitcoin and of abilities to get rid of the need for third parties. Because what SBF did regularly, the way he got credibility is that he went to third party, effectively third party brokers in ideas. He went to elite media, he went to politicians, he went to VCs and things like that and got their confidence and trust in their imprimatur through various ways that had nothing to do with blockchain or crypto or anything, got certified by them. And then that allowed him to opt. Right in a certain way. The whole genius of something like Bitcoin is that you don't do that. You don't need to do that. [52.3s] That the transactions that happen happen between individuals and then they are registered in a transparent, open way. So in a weird way, this collapse, which may well be the final impetus to do a lot of what I think will be bad regulation of Bitcoin and crypto more generally. It actually proves the the need for what Bitcoin actually can deliver as a as a kind of parallel financial system.

Spencer Greenberg [01:05:13] It's really interesting how crypto and blockchain they have this promise of not needing trust rights is decentralization. And yet in practice we've seen all of these cases where crypto actually gets centralized. You know, this is a great example. It's like, well, actually it turns out you did have to trust someone in this whole in this whole thing.

Nick Gillespie [01:05:32] Well, you don't, because then this is a colleague of mine and I interviewed Jesse Powell, who's the founder. And, you know, one of the principles I crack and which is, you know, one of the very largest crypto exchanges, and we talked a lot about that. And he was like, yeah, you know what? In in the real Bitcoin world or the real crypto world, like you wouldn't be using exchanges because if you don't, if you don't own your if you don't have your keys, if you don't have your crypto and you know where Bitcoin in your own wallet that is not subject to some kind of intermediary, you don't really own it. And it's kind of reminiscent of, you know, the existing financial system and things like that. So but I agree with you. You know, it's in its infancy and at this stage, like we are in the training wheels stage of figuring out how do you work this and how do you interact with other people. But one of the promises and I think we're still in the promising stage, even though, you know, for a while and before the recent bear market, Bitcoin, according to Deutsche Bank, was the third largest currency in daily use on the planet after I think it was after the dollar and the yuan. And, you know, like people are using it as a form of payment because it makes you know, it makes sense and things like that. It's not ultimately it's not about speculation and it's not about becoming a Bitcoin billionaire or something like that. It's a it's a it is going to be a payment system. I mean, that's what the original whitepaper talked about. And it replaces the need for trusted third parties with trust in the math and in the program that actually accounts, you know, tabulates what's going on. But yeah, we're not there yet. And I think it's also true that until we get there, you know, this type of stuff is going to happen in various ways. But I think, you know, primarily or fundamentally that what we're witnessing with FTX it has nothing to do with crypto. You could be doing. You could be doing the same kind of, you know, kind of scam or the same kind of fraud with, you know, regular money. It's it's not qualitatively different than, you know, than Bernie Madoff. It's just it's using something new and cool and it's probably going to give rise to really onerous restrictions and regulations on it, which is a shame. It's kind of like I don't know if you're familiar with this, you know, with absinthe or the way absinthe became banned after, you know, a part a guy went on a murderous rampage and like basically, you know, the last drink he had, I mean, he was fucked up on all sorts of other things, but the last thing he drank was absinthe. And then that became a pretext to ban absinthe in Europe and America for the better part of a century. And it really the crime is the problem, not the underlying technology here.

Spencer Greenberg [01:08:19] Nick, thanks so much for coming on.

Nick Gillespie [01:08:21] Really a pleasure. I appreciate it.