0:00
We have, like 800,000 subscribers on our channel we're like gigantic on YouTube and we cannot get anybody on the phone, like when we have an issue, you know?
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And so in a weird way, this is another thing that I worry about is that, you know, as, as kind of new eras settle into, you know, the equivalent of middle age or something, you see this, resurgence of bureaucracy, um, you know, and that is troubling to me.
0:23
Um, and I think that's one of the things that some younger people, I think millennials and zoomers on a certain level, they were raised particularly millennials to believe in the system.
0:40
Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
0:44
Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
0:50
Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
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The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
1:14
We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens — including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis.
1:27
And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
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With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
1:40
Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
1:46
Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
1:56
All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
2:02
This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
2:13
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
2:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello everyone.
2:20
It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops, and I am super excited with today's guest.
2:27
Nick Gillespie, who is the host of The Reason Interview has been a journalist forever.
2:34
I've been reading him forever.
2:34
And basically, we share a credo, which is free minds, free markets.
2:41
We're going to get into that in a minute.
2:41
But what Nick has that I'm actually...
2:47
I'm very rarely envious of anything, but I am envious of this quote that he has on him, and it is this.
2:54
"Nick Gillespie is to libertarianism what Lou Reed is to rock and roll, the quintessence of the outlaw spirit."
3:04
And that was written, folks, in the New York Times magazine. Wow. Welcome.
3:11
Nick Gillespie: Thank you for having me.
3:15
I thought you were going to say Nick Gillespie is to libertarianism what Lou Reed is to rock and roll: dead.
3:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, Nick, that's funny because that's my first question.
3:25
When I was growing up, I was very, very seriously anti-authoritarian, to the point where I would do things that were against my own better interests just to show that I was not going to follow orders. Right?
3:38
And so, libertarianism was very, very appealing to me.
3:45
And my first question to you as the grand master here is libertarianism dead? Nick Gillespie: Yeah.
3:55
I'm going to answer that in a complicated way because why use a few words when many will do, but also because it is a kind of complex question.
4:03
What I would say is libertarianism isn't dead, but it's resting its eyes, at least as a political phenomenon, and to some degree as a cultural phenomenon.
4:15
We're of the same vintage, late 50s, early 60s. The golden years. Right? The peak years.
4:24
And I've always believed that politics is secondary to culture.
4:31
Matt Welch and I, my colleague at Reason, we wrote a book a decade ago called The Declaration of Independents with E-N-T-S, and we talk about how politics is a lagging indicator of where America is, or where society is.
4:41
And I worry that libertarianism, which is a credo of...
4:48
Nick Gillespie: And it's good that you've said anti-authoritarian because I think libertarianism properly understood is not anti-authority, but it is anti-authoritarian.
4:56
And this is one of the major cleavages of our time.
4:56
Authoritarian versus libertarian.
5:04
And the idea is that libertarians believe in free minds and free markets, free speech, free everything as long as it's peaceful, but it's rooted in individuals having more meaningful choices in their lives that they can actually access and do.
5:16
As opposed to authoritarian, which is always trying to narrow the limits of what is acceptable, whether it's through cultural coercion or political coercion.
5:26
Nick Gillespie: Having said all of this as a kind of throat clearing and everything, it's clear that libertarianism, for a good chunk of the '90s as the internet came online...
5:34
I started working at Reason and in the fall of 1993.
5:40
And the '90s turned out to be a fantastic decade for libertarian, with a small L, kind of thought.
5:48
I tend now, I use libertarian as an adjective. It's a descriptor. It's a sentiment.
5:54
It's certainly pre-partisan, it's pre-political. It's a default setting.
6:00
Do you think in any given instance, should people have more freedom or less freedom?
6:07
And my default setting is more freedom.
6:07
Sometimes that gets overruled.
6:07
And in the '90s, the internet kind of incarnated what the modern libertarian movement maybe since World War II, postwar America, was moving towards: decentralized knowledge.
6:20
Not the end of gatekeepers, but the deregulation of gatekeeping so that...
6:27
Nick Gillespie: For me, I wrote a story 20 plus years ago where I was talking about cultural deregulation, and when you have that, when Disney is no longer the...
6:40
ABC, CBS, NBC are not the only game in town, you don't get fewer gatekeepers, you get more gatekeepers. It's like religion.
6:48
For me, the 17th century in England when they had a civil war between the Cavaliers and the Round Heads, it's really kind of like the hippie...
6:59
It's Eric Clapton versus the Sex Pistols.
6:59
It's Round Heads versus Cavalier.
7:06
It's punks versus hippies.
7:06
But in the 17th century, people were afraid if you got rid of the Church of England, if you disestablished, it, religion would go away, and in fact, what you get is more religion than ever.
7:16
And that's what we've seen in America.
7:16
When you get rid of cultural gatekeeping, political gatekeeping, economic gatekeeping, you get more sects, you get more cults, you get more communities that flourish... Some die, some don't.
7:32
Others recombine and all of that kind of stuff.
7:32
Nick Gillespie: Again, I'm front loading a lot of stuff.
7:36
I think in the '90s, there was a lot of libertarianism was ascended.
7:42
And you saw coming out of Silicon Valley, everybody, whether they...
7:42
Their political commitments might be Democratic or Republican, but they were all small L libertarian.
7:47
After 9/11, there was a spasm of repression and I think of authoritarianism in American culture and politics, but the libertarian thread kept pushing through.
8:01
I was editor of the print magazine from 2000 to 2008 and then I took over the website and I launched our video platform.
8:08
And up through from about 2000 to about 2015, I think there was a strong push for libertarian ideas, especially in the Republican party, but also in the Democratic party and in the culture more broadly.
8:22
People were starting to get more comfortable with the idea that it's good to have people have more choices.
8:27
And nobody's ever fully comfortable with that because you and I, we'll make good choices, but those people over there we can't really trust them.
8:38
Nick Gillespie: But then, in a lot of ways, it came to a skidding halt when Trump landed at the bottom of the escalator.
8:46
People like Rand Paul and before him his father, Ron Paul...
8:51
And I have issues with the way they defined libertarianism, but that was a moment where it looked like the Republican party was going to go explicitly libertarian.
8:57
They were going to finally say, "You know what?
9:02
We don't want to spend as much money.
9:02
We don't want to control as much of the economy or of your private lives."
9:06
And that is not, not the world we live in now, and it's not simply Trump because when you look at somebody like Joe Biden or Barack Obama, they were good government types, they are a return...
9:20
And in his own way, Trump was too, to a kind of best and brightest mentality of the mid 20th century, which was kind of the high water mark of the authoritarian impulse, I would say, where you have a few wise men, usually men, now more...
9:33
it might be women and men, but who get to call the shots.
9:40
Nick Gillespie: And for me, and again we're the same age I think, and I grew up in...
9:42
I was born in New York in Brooklyn in '63.
9:49
I grew up in New Jersey.
9:49
My parents were lower middle class.
9:54
They were born in the '20s.
9:54
They came of age in the American century where they believed people like John Kenneth Galbraith and in Franklin Roosevelt and the Kennedy.
10:02
Kind of the best and the brightest type of stuff.
10:08
We come on the other side of that and we realize, "God, the last thing you would want to do is work for AT&T or IBM," companies that don't really exist in the way that they used to, thank God.
10:20
I have an older brother who was born in '59, and he graduated college in 1981.
10:26
And my parents' advice...
10:26
My father didn't even graduate high school so it's amazing that their kid graduates college, and they're like, "Get a job with the biggest corporation you can find.
10:39
Get a job at AT&T or at IBM or at Xerox, Kodak."
10:39
They would list off these companies that by the time I graduated college in 1985, they didn't even really exist anymore, and that's the shift. Right? And it's a great shift.
10:53
Nick Gillespie: But I fear people are trying to claw back on both the right and the left.
10:55
The right wants to control many aspects of our private lives, but also the economy.
11:01
They hate capitalism because capitalism will give you what you want, and they don't want you to want certain things.
11:08
And then the left, it's got its hangups and it's just as bad.
11:15
And they intersect, oftentimes, on foreign policy, where they want to control the world because they know better.
11:20
So, I'm worried about the current moment.
11:25
This a roundabout way of saying libertarianism is alive, but it is kind of dormant as a political force right now.
11:31
I think it can come back from that slumber at any moment.
11:31
But over the past 50 years, over the past 30 years...
11:37
I have a list that I wrote here for interviews of, not of communists in the State Department, but of big libertarian wins, and this is in the past 50 years.
11:50
Nick Gillespie: Reason was founded in '68 so I like to benchmark stuff against that.
11:51
Freedom of speech, the seven dirty words.
11:56
it's so much better now.
11:56
Deregulation of all cultural markets.
12:01
You can get whatever you want whenever you want.
12:01
That's a combination of technology and of changes in attitudes and mindset.
12:08
Marriage equality, lifestyle liberation more broadly.
12:08
People are anti-war finally in America.
12:13
Politicians are not, but the people are.
12:13
Gun rights have been expanding since the 1990s.
12:18
Drug legalization, not simply of things to get high, but we now believe in a world where you should have the choice to change the way that you feel with legal and illegal drugs.
12:31
And more drugs should be legal.
12:31
Technology allows us for different types of living arrangements.
12:37
No more organization men.
12:37
No more showing up at...
12:37
punching in at 9:00, et cetera.
12:37
There's so many big wins. Sexual freedom.
12:43
Licensing reform is taking place. Criminal justice reform.
12:49
Nick Gillespie: So, over the past 50 years, libertarians have won massive, significant political and cultural battles, but they don't get credit for it.
12:58
And right now, neither of the major parties is providing a microphone for libertarian ideas, so I'm definitely worried about that.
13:04
And in that sense, that's the current moment of libertarianism compared to six, 10 years ago. It's problematic. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
13:15
Well, a ton to unpack there because I agree with you on so many of those points.
13:22
I just sort of gave up on politics because it just seemed to me that this emotional mind virus, aided and abetted by social media, just created the in-tribe, the out-group, and basically, literally, they were just screaming, talking points at each other.
13:38
And so, I look to have however tiny an influence I could have much more on culture and society.
13:45
Because I agree with you, that culture and society lead politics; they don't follow politics.
13:51
Your list is a perfect list.
14:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: What I find really interesting is that I will often talk to people of a variety of ages, and I had an experience a while back where I was talking to an extremely well-known author and she claimed to be a dyed in the wool Democrat progressive.
14:19
And I started asking her a series of questions, libertarian-style questions.
14:26
Do you favor more freedom or less freedom?
14:26
And literally, she answered more freedom to every one of my questions, and I looked at her and I said, "You're not a dyed in the wool Democrat, you're a libertarian."
14:39
And she was like shocked.
14:39
And so, one of the problems that, from my way of looking at things, we are so laden with labels, and labels are lazy aggregations of ideas under a term.
14:59
And people tend to be label thinkers, and so trying to chip away at that is, I think, worthwhile because...
15:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The way I look at it is, much like you, I am, and try to remain, as a political in terms of discussion because they're not discussions; they're shouting matches.
15:26
And I believe that many people on both sides...
15:26
So, let's be very clear here.
15:33
I think both sides of the aisle in politics, we have the worst political class in American history and that is saying something.
15:40
That is saying something.
15:40
Because if you know US history, that is a bold statement.
15:48
But this idea of all of this emotional energy being put into shouting talking points at one another, it just seems to me to be such a waste of not only time, but of energy, mental space, the whole deal.
16:04
And what also really bothers me, and you touched on it, they have made politics sacred, and, as you know, the sacred cannot be challenged.
16:19
If you challenge it, you're a heretic, you're in apostate, and I happily wear both of those labels.
16:26
And luckily, we're still not burning people at the stake or hanging them.
16:32
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But one of the next things that I want to get your read on is I think...
16:33
I am by my nature a very optimistic, rational optimistic way, for what's going on and what's...
16:42
I believe like, holy shit, the internet is the greatest amplifier in human history, the tools that are now available, again, for the individual to make use of these tools.
16:57
I got sent some movies that were made exclusively using the new iPhone and a Mac, and they blew me away. I was like, "Holy fuck."
17:04
And so, I find that amazing and really energizing on my part.
17:13
But do you think, is there any way, is there a way to have conversations...
17:21
And we met at an Interintellect in-person.
17:21
And Anna Gat is a friend of mine.
17:27
I'm an investor in that company. I think that's cool.
17:27
But it just seems to me when...
17:33
I do a lot of coaching, too, and it's mostly of Millennials, and one of the first things that I hear from them is like they're afraid to say what they actually think. You run into that? Nick Gillespie: Yeah.
17:46
I have two sons, a 28 year old and a 21 year old.
17:46
That said, they're technically, one's a Millennial and one's a Generation Z or a Zoomer.
17:52
And to a certain degree...
17:52
They're both boys, they're white, they were raised upper middle class, they have highly educated parents, and they're kind of the villains of contemporary American discourse.
18:06
Possibly the only group that is more demonized just out of the box are white women of a similar kind of class.
18:18
And yeah, they're a little bit anxious about what you say because everything is supercharged.
18:26
I take some of that with a grain of salt, too, because it's also like, well, it's never easy to say what you think and what you believe, especially if you're a little bit out of step with maybe what you think everybody else is thinking, so you got to be brave and be human.
18:45
Nick Gillespie: But I think there's a lot of that, and I think part of the problem, to go to your optimism and your rational optimism...
18:47
Matt Ridley is a guy who's written for Reason and wrote a book called The Rational Optimist.
18:53
I think one of the things that we have the benefit of is having a sense of history, partly because we lived through it.
19:04
And I still have probably 20 or 30% of my brain is functioning.
19:04
And I can look everything up on Wikipedia.
19:10
But Millennials and Zoomers, don't have...
19:10
I mean, this to me is one of the ironies of technology and it's worth thinking through and fixing.
19:17
But now for the first time in human history, fuck the Library of Alexandria.
19:23
You have everything that has been thought and written and made into music and made into video or movies or whatever, all artwork, it's all at our fingertips and we're super presentists.
19:37
All we care about is what happened in the last five minutes and what's going to happen in the next 10.
19:42
Nick Gillespie: And if you look at history, it's just like, God, things are getting so much better for so many people.
19:48
In America, sometimes I think part of our problem is that we're...
19:54
And I think Trump intuited this, but he didn't know what to do with it.
19:54
But we may be in a situation where it's similar or analogous to France and England after World War II.
19:59
We're no longer really world powers, but... We're being displaced.
20:06
The US is being displaced, not by communist China or anything, but just by a multipolar world where there's more opportunity.
20:20
Certainly outside of Europe or the OECD countries, so Europe and some Asian countries, and in North America.
20:26
The world is getting so much better so quickly for so many people.
20:31
Nick Gillespie: And yet, we're walking around, we're moping around like the world is ending, and it's beginning in so many ways.
20:33
And I feel like a lot of Millennials and Zoomers, particularly in America, and North America and in Europe, feel this, like they're living through the end of the world.
20:44
And it's like, no, you have... The door is open .
20:49
Go out and you can go anywhere in the world.
20:49
You can be whatever you want regardless of where you come from.
20:55
And they're not getting that.
20:55
And part of my goal with the stuff that I write about and I say what Reason tries to do on some level is provide a usable past, a history of what does progress mean and how do you get more of it rather than less of it?
21:17
Nick Gillespie: You said, and I agree with you, labels can be a cheap trick to dismiss people, but sometimes if you think of it as a brand and brands do accrue, a certain amount of information, and the libertarian brand, the small L libertarian brand, which I care a lot about, that it needs to be updated for Millennials and Zoomers, I'm a big fan of Friedrich Hayek's work.
21:38
And he talked in his terrible...
21:38
I mean, he was writing in English, I guess, but it really...
21:44
He wrote as if he was writing in old German and translating it into new German and then making it even worse when it came out in English.
21:50
But at one point he said like you have to update the terms of the argument for liberal principles of individualism and of giving people the ability to choose among different ways of living.
22:04
And I think it would be helpful if libertarians started talking about empathy and autonomy, along with the idea that it's an adjective, it's not, "Here are 10 things, you must believe all 10, otherwise you are an apostate.
22:20
You're not a real libertarian," but, "Are you headed in this direction?
22:25
Do you feel this way about things?"
22:25
Nick Gillespie: And I like to think about it in terms of empathy and autonomy.
22:28
How do we increase empathy for people that we meet, everybody in our world, and how do we increase autonomy?
22:34
And when you start to talk about things in those terms, what are the institutions, both public and private? What are the mindsets?
22:45
What are the temperaments?
22:45
What are the psychological structures that do well in that world?
22:51
And it leads us to this free minds and free market world where it's like, well, you're given a lot of options and you're given the tools to make wise choices where you're thinking about other people, not simply yourself in some kind of narrow utilitarian calculus. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
23:07
I agree completely on focusing on those.
23:12
And I remember having a conversation with a friend not too long ago and just shaking my head and thinking I've lived long enough to find that my ideas of freedom of choice, so for the individual specifically, that means you're pro-choice on the abortion question, freedom of drugs if you're looking at the efficacy of just drug treatment trials that are being done right now specifically with psychedelics...
23:41
If you took the name of the drug off and you just looked at the clinical results, all psychedelics and euphorics would be legal because they're having profound effects.
23:54
By the way, we're of a similar vintage, I didn't grow up believing that.
24:00
I grew up believing just the opposite.
24:00
I mean, the propaganda worked on me at least. It was like, "Holy shit. LSD, are you crazy?
24:07
You're going to jump off a building."
24:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so, that gets me back, though, to this idea that the world...
24:18
They could do that back then. Right?
24:18
So, if you know history, you know that...
24:25
In my opinion, Nixon was potentially the craziest man to ever occupy the Oval Office.
24:31
We could go back and forth with others, but Nixon was bat crazy.
24:31
And he also was- Nick Gillespie: Also incredibly smart and well-read. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes. Yes.
24:43
Nick Gillespie: I mean, I don't know about you, but I didn't start paying attention to politics or politicians in a real way probably until the very end of the Reagan presidency.
24:53
But when I go back and I see interviews with Nixon, I'm like, "Wow, he's a good talker. He knows history. He knows philosophy.
24:58
He knows political science."
25:05
But I agree, he's destroyed by inner demons and resentment and all sorts of...
25:05
and really bad ideas because he wanted to control...
25:12
literally control the economy.
25:12
I mean, he put wage and price control- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Price controls.
25:17
Nick Gillespie: Yeah, and some of my earliest memories are gas lines.
25:18
First, I guess, in the early '70s and then in the later '70s, and because we had a couple cars in New Jersey.
25:28
I suspect all the states that this went, there was a period which is unimaginable in many ways, but where you could only go to the gas station, if your license plate ended in an even number today, and then it would be odd and people would swap in license plate so they could get gas when they needed it, and Nixon has that lunatic control fantasy, which in the end he hated John F.
25:53
Kennedy and he hated Robert Kennedy, and he hated Ted Kennedy, but he was the same as them.
26:00
His control knobs were a little bit different that he'd be twisting, but the whole idea is like, "No, now we're going to control stuff."
26:06
And yeah, that's goodbye to all that.
26:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally agree.
26:10
And the point that I'm doing a series called The Great Reshuffle, we'll probably use bits from this interview when we're talking about this particular segment, but I believe that we are witnessing what I call the great reshuffle, which is things are changing dramatically.
26:25
And I think that they're changing dramatically in favor of people in emerging countries.
26:31
For example, this podcast, time, space, geography.
26:31
They're absolutely gone and our hiring practice, proof of work.
26:39
We don't give about your CV, man.
26:48
I don't care if you went to school. I just don't care.
26:51
Nick Gillespie: So, you're a proof of work, so Bitcoin is really the future.
26:53
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, I put Bitcoin, and this might sound like a cop out, but I put Bitcoin in my too hard pile.
26:57
I have really tried to understand the use cases and I think, personally, that Ethereum has a better use case because of all the things that you can accomplish with it.
27:20
But I'm also a believer in putting skin in the game if you really want to understand something. Yeah, sure. So, I did that.
27:32
My son has a series of very popular podcasts and what made him well known was a series he did, I think in 2017 on Bitcoin.
27:39
And so, we were sitting at a hotel at a cousin's party, and I said, "Okay, we got 30 minutes till the bus comes.
27:47
Tell me what Bitcoin is."
27:47
He did very good- Nick Gillespie: Oh, okay. That's great. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
27:55
He did a very good job and I'm like, "So, should I pay attention to it?"
27:58
He goes, "Yeah, you really do need that to pay attention to it."
28:03
And so, we made an investment, actually, because I didn't have any idea what the fuck I was doing.
28:08
I gave it to a long, short crypto fund that went long, certain coins, certain protocols, short others, and forgot about it because in the first month it lost half its value.
28:23
And so, then my finance person comes in and says, "Jim, you might want to look at that fund again and it had 10 X."
28:27
And just being an old Wall Streeter, I was like, "Sell right now."
28:27
So, I am one of those, we'll see- Nick Gillespie: Yeah.
28:39
Well, what I meant is when you said you show me the proof of work, I was [inaudible] echoing that because in a way, I mean, I like Bitcoin.
28:46
If the internet is the most important thing, since the printing press or something, Bitcoin might be the most interesting development that's internet enabled since then, but the idea of proof of work that you we're going to have distributed ledgers where rather than relying simply on people's reputation or third-party saying, "Okay, this guy's okay."
29:09
You went to this university, so I'll hire.
29:16
Nick Gillespie: You want us to do what people can do and I think that's a reshuffling.
29:17
That's a big shift that's going back to, it's not... I mean, I love college.
29:24
I love higher education.
29:24
I learned so much as an undergrad.
29:24
I went on for a master's degree and I have a PhD in American literature and I loved it.
29:30
And it's really helpful in all of that kind of stuff but, mostly, because of the methodology that I learned and the knowledge that I gained as well as the perspective.
29:40
But I love the idea that we're going to a world where it's less important where you come from or who you come from, and this is just the long enlightenment of getting away from a status society to a society where people are...
29:58
Here, you have a certain amount of freedom and a certain amount of ability. Now go build your world. This is awesome. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
30:08
And on that point, that is the part of this that excites me the most in many ways, because essentially with that collapse of time, space, geography, a billion people just came online.
30:24
Like I said, this podcast, everyone, except for one guy lives either in Romania, India.
30:31
We're looking at hiring somebody in Africa and they would not have these opportunities if it were not for the internet, and I like your connection.
30:38
By the way, I too, think your higher education is awesome.
30:44
Never stop learning is my mantra.
30:44
It's just like keep going but then again, here we are again.
30:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, we have now something, if you took 1980 Jim who was 20 and dropped him here, he would be agog that you could for no money, get the best education in the world for free, that people a hundred years ago, even the richest person a hundred years ago could not have bought.
31:23
But at any price, as you mentioned, the Library of Alexandria, right? Nick Gillespie: Yeah.
31:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so, there's just so many really great things that are enabling people.
31:32
Now on the scary side, of course, there are the Vogons as I called them.
31:38
I don't know if you like Douglas Adams, but they- Nick Gillespie: I have largely steered clear of Douglas Adams, himself.
31:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, if I was going to give you a tip, if you read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, read it, thinking that he is a philosopher, as opposed to a sci-fi, humorous author.
32:01
Nick Gillespie: That makes it more appealing already.
32:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Much more appealing.
32:02
And so, the Vogons are the galaxy’s or universe’s ultimate bureaucrats and they are that viscosity that just slows those big companies you mentioned at the top, down to nothing.
32:17
And so, I think that back to...
32:25
Just to finish the thought on Nixon and why I'm also really psyched about what's coming.
32:25
So, in 1970, whatever one or two, when Nixon declared the war on drugs, made non-addictive, psychedelics illegal, and you went to Fedmax for those.
32:43
He could do it, because there were two newspapers that mattered, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
32:51
There were three networks and that was it, man.
32:54
Last weekend, I just did a deep dive because Spotify, for some weird reason, created a playlist for me of 1950s crooner songs and so I'm like, "I wasn't even born then."
33:10
So, I'm listening to them.
33:10
Oh my God, you should do it.
33:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: You think we're programmed now?
33:15
Holy shit like Rosemary Clooney, or I can't remember who's singing the song, but (singing). It's like, "What?"
33:28
And then, I watch some of the TV shows and then you start thinking about it.
33:28
I love Lucy, 64 million viewers every week.
33:34
The closest we've come is 18 million viewers for the finale of Game of Thrones, so in this atomization of culture, it's why you get these subgroups.
33:48
It's why you get planning up, that's the downside, but it would be almost impossible now for even a central authority, if we remain a democracy, obviously, to do what Nixon did, it would be impossible.
34:02
Nick Gillespie: And one of the knocks on Nixon, which I think is broadly accurate is that he completed the regulatory regime of the great society.
34:11
So, it's LBJ passed all of the spending programs and things like that, but then Nixon with the BATF, the Drug Enforcement Administration, OSHA, the EPA.
34:26
It's an endless string of alphabet suit regulatory agencies that are bureaucratic in nature, and I think one of the great successes of the past 50 years was getting away from bureaucracy and the internet, especially in its early days.
34:38
It liberated us from bureau bureaucracy and you could actually, directly deal with people who mattered or the catch phrase in the '90s was disintermediation, where you got rid of intermediaries.
34:56
Nick Gillespie: I worry now that in many ways, because the state keeps getting bigger, even if it's less able to control things and even if we're able to find little pockets of resistance and temporary autonomous zones, where we can do what we want at least for a while.
35:12
The state continues to grow and it's bureaucratic in nature, but so are many of the big corporations would.
35:17
I guess we can't call them FANG anymore, it's MANG- Jim O'Shaughnessy: MANG, mango. Nick Gillespie: ...
35:26
or Apple, Netflix, and Google, which I guess is alphabet, so which is great.
35:28
That's creative destruction that even a catchphrase for the big tech companies from a couple of years ago was outdated already, but they are getting more and more bureaucratic.
35:39
I deal a lot with YouTube because we put out almost a video a day during the work week and we have 800,000 subscribers on our channel, we’re gigantic on YouTube and we cannot get anybody on the phone when we have an issue.
35:54
And so, in a weird way, this is another thing that I worry about is that as of new eras settle into the equivalent of middle age or something, you see this resurgence of bureaucracy and that is troubling to me, and I think that's one of the things that some younger people, I think millennials and zoomers on a certain level, they were raised, particularly, millennials to believe in the system.
36:28
Nick Gillespie: I have a friend of mine who I went to college with, who taught high school in New Jersey for 30 years.
36:30
He retired a couple years ago, and he said he started out.
36:34
He would teach his kids Catch-22, which is the Joseph Heller novel about ...
36:41
Well, it's set in World War II.
36:41
It came out in the early '60s and it was a big book of the new left and of the counterculture, both right wing and left wing, actually- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Great book. Nick Gillespie: ...
36:49
because it's about how the system is.
36:52
It's not even malicious, but it's designed to fuck you over.
36:52
The only people that can get out of military service are insane people, but if you say I'm insane, they know you're faking, so you don't get out.
37:04
And he said, starting about 10 years ago, his students were like, "This doesn't make sense.
37:11
It wasn't necessary and the protagonist just go to the army and complain about bad treatment."
37:17
Nick Gillespie: They were raised in the sweet spot of where the system was actually responsive to them and the system isn't responsive in a long way, and so you want to constantly be narrowing down and whittling down what the system is capable of doing and starting new systems that are smaller and more responsive.
37:32
And I think in many ways that's been going on in the past 50 years is that we've been able to get to more responsive systems.
37:38
But now, again, there's both in the culture as well as in government, I think there's kind of pushback on that, which is deeply troubling to me.
37:49
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I agree.
37:51
And we've always had those, the explorers, and by the way, it's the same with ants peeling off to find new things, 5% of them.
37:59
Bees peeling off, same 5%. Termite mounds.
37:59
I don't know if you've ever been to Africa, but when you do deep dives on not just human evolution, but the evolution of the planet.
38:12
There are some very, very strong things in our base code, and one of them is this desire for illusion of control.
38:19
If you remove an illusion of control from a human being, you can literally make them go crazy, but then it makes itself real in these organizations where group think has taken over and the whole notion of a big company.
38:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I've been an entrepreneur, most of my life.
38:40
I worked briefly for a big company Bear Stearns, which was the most sort of libertarian, if you will, company.
38:50
Meaning no bureaucracy, if it was legal and you were doing it well, they left you alone.
38:56
And I had a lot of fun, met a lot of super smart people there, but literally there seems to be this trend like your experience with YouTube.
39:06
Big companies are desperate not to offend anyone and so they find themselves caught up where other people who might be using really extreme standards say, "Oh no, that's fake news," or "That's not a valid opinion or whatever."
39:23
And it's very tricky for them because- Nick Gillespie: There's also a shift to automation, early, really bad, like World War I era, plastic surgery, disasters of artificial intelligence or whatever, so that you get copyright claims, or something gets flagged for having bad language, and it turns out it's a misspelling or it's devoid of context.
39:56
And I go back and forth, I was just reading about the human scale movement of the late '60s and early '70s of the idea that small is beautiful and a diet for a small planet.
40:03
And I toggle back and forth between I want to live... I live in New York city. I was born here.
40:15
I worked here after college.
40:15
I went on a 30-year circuit around the country, and when I was able to, I was like, "Oh, I want to live in New York because it's so fucking big”.
40:26
Nick Gillespie: Everything is here and then you carve out little tiny bits that are as I have more solidarity here than I did.
40:28
I lived on and off, for 20 years in a small college town in Ohio and I have more tight-knit community here, but you want to be able to toggle between big and small, et cetera.
40:43
And I think a lot of corporations now, as they scale, they are like, "Oh, we got to automate everything."
40:49
And then, that screws things up because you lose the human touch.
40:53
So, these are good problems to have, I mean, if your problem is that your video which can now be distributed seamlessly and easily around the world.
41:07
Even in authoritarian countries, because people are using VPNs and everything and you're getting flagged for a copyright infringement or something, that's kind of good, but it can be better.
41:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, yeah.
41:21
I remain incredibly optimistic about what's going to happen.
41:21
I think we're going into a world where the tools that are available and especially to digital natives are just so extraordinary that, I'm probably wrong, but it would not surprise me at all to still be alive when there is a billion-dollar corporation with one employee and that's how useful and incredibly the leverage offered by these tools and the amplification offered by the internet is just amazing.
41:59
And it's one of the reasons why you see all of the older gatekeepers losing their minds because they can just go around it, and what I love is what I joke about The New York Times Substack railroad, where you have your great, perfect, progressive credentials like Bari Weiss’.
42:19
You go to The New York Times and immediately get fired for saying something and then you go to Substack and you're making millions of dollars a year.
42:31
Nick Gillespie: Substack it's the outlet that we need at a time when legacy media is becoming more restrictive, suddenly.
42:43
I interviewed Penn Jillette recently of Penn & Teller, he's a libertarian guy and he's had some issues with it because of Trump and COVID and whatnot.
42:50
And we had a long conversation about that, but I recall to him, I can remember him in the late '80s or early '90s on the old Bill Marshall on Comedy Central, politically incorrect, where he was like, "I am a super optimist because humans are the ultimate resource."
43:06
And he talked about how when tin cans.
43:13
We don't have tin cans anymore because tin got too expensive, and they developed aluminum cans and The New York Times in its moment was great or could be.
43:18
And then, when it gets restrictive or repressive, it doesn't go away but suddenly Substack or something else crops up and there are these new places that fill up these rooms that didn't exist.
43:35
Nick Gillespie: We're in heaven and our master house has many mansions and we're constantly opening up new rooms where you can do more stuff, and it's really fucking awesome.
43:45
I've been struggling to try and figure out how to describe to people because I have this sense and I don't know if its male menopause or something, but like you, I think there's going to be a step change that we don't know what it's going to look like, but I remember talking to my parents, who've been dead for years, but they were born in the '20s and they talked about the difference between 1945 and 1950.
44:09
And they grew up poor kids of immigrants in New York, in Waterbury, Connecticut and then they suffered through the depression and World War II.
44:21
Nick Gillespie: My father was in World War II.
44:22
He was wounded in World War II and all of this.
44:22
And by 1950, they were in a totally different world that was as unimaginable as the 20-year-old you living today.
44:35
In a five-year period where suddenly, the big problem was that everybody was getting fat, whereas their entire lives, they had been calorie restricted by brutal economics and whatnot and world war.
44:47
And yeah, I feel like we're in that moment, and part of, I like to talk about the long 20th century, which I would peg is maybe starting with Bismarck in Germany and the creation of a social welfare state.
45:00
Nick Gillespie: The idea that the government and corporations, and concert with the government are going to give you everything you need, and it's a top down regulated, restricted approach.
45:11
We're still in the 20th century, I mean, that's why Republicans and Democrats, they have fewer adherence than ever.
45:16
Fewer and fewer of us every year affiliate as Republican or Democrat, but they're still around, and we still have these lumbering organizations and mindsets that are just not speaking to how we live today.
45:25
It's like when you go into an old house and you're like, "What is this front parlor and back parlor, et cetera?
45:31
Nobody lives like this anymore, but we're aching to just throw off this shell and move into the next stage. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
45:45
And two thoughts, the humans, the ultimate resource, you're familiar, of course, with Julian Simon has two books and his very famous bet where he let his opponent...
45:53
Do you remember who the opponent was? Nick Gillespie: Yeah.
45:59
Paul Ehrlich who- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Paul Ehrlich. Yeah.
46:01
Thank you Nick Gillespie: ...
46:01
had written The Population Bomb that was... Yeah. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Thank you.
46:03
Yeah, and so Simon's like, "Hey Paul, you pick the resources.
46:03
I'm going to give that advantage to you.
46:12
I'm going to say 10 years from now, they're either going to be replaced or cheaper."
46:16
And Ehrlich was like, "This is the easiest money I ever made."
46:22
And, of course, Ehrlich lost because human ingenuity is the ultimate resource, in my opinion.
46:29
If you read David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity, which I think is a brilliant book at explaining why we're at the beginning of infinity.
46:34
It's the title of his book, because humans are the only universal explainers and connectors, and we also have the ability to think abstractly.
46:40
If you can't think abstractly, you don't get quantum physics, you don't get...
46:46
Bucky Fuller had a great thing where he said he preferred to look at people as tuned in or not tuned in and the example that he gave, or maybe it was Robert Anton Wilson, who was putting these words in his mouth, but the example was the microscopic world.
47:07
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, we didn't have microscopes and so we were not tuned in to the microscopic world.
47:11
We invent the microscope and we're like, "Holy shit.
47:18
There's this whole world down there that tunes us in."
47:18
But because of society and cultural lag, and all of these types of things.
47:25
It takes a while for the culture to assimilate that.
47:32
I've always had this idea that essentially there is ground state reality and what ground state reality really is, is just what all of the alive sentient creatures occupying that planet agree on.
47:46
And so, one of my favorite lines is from Jed McKenna, the horribly named spiritual seeker, because if you read him, he's throwing bombs.
47:56
He's not namaste-ing people, but essentially, he has a little exchange with a fictitious student and it's like, "So, wait a minute.
48:08
What you're saying is that reality is a numbers game."
48:08
And his response is, "Yeah."
48:14
And so, the respondent says, "You mean the more people that believe it."
48:14
And then his answer is, "That's what makes it real."
48:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And what's interesting about that is we were talking about Bitcoin earlier.
48:22
I've always looked at money as a technology and that's why I was very open to this idea that Bitcoin, Ethereum, et cetera.
48:35
We're just improving the technology and it's been a technology since people were carrying around clamshells, but the idea that there is a huge amount of stasis built into culture and I don't know that's a bad thing, right? Nick Gillespie: Right.
49:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I'm forgetting whose quote it was, but when a genius is born in the world, a confederacy of dunces unifies against him.
49:02
And everything that's new, for the most part, people hate.
49:11
And James Joyce, brilliant.
49:11
I mean the first postmodern writer, but at the time everyone couldn't make head or tails of this guy.
49:25
Nick Gillespie: And I think this is to my mind too, we're in a great moment where...
49:30
Also, it's emergent though, like geniuses.
49:30
They're not dropped from the heavens, they emerge from a particular time and place and traditions.
49:35
And so, you're building off of things and this is, again, toggling between big and small but also between traditional and radical, and in order to fully enjoy Joyce, and I have to say this as somebody who's of Irish American descent, I'm not a huge Joyce fan.
49:55
But in order to appreciate him, you not only have to be willing to go on the modernist ride, but you also need to know the classics. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes.
50:09
Nick Gillespie: And that's the best way to be, where you are, you're constantly toggling between tradition and radicalism and improvement and things like that.
50:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly. And I couldn't ...
50:21
fatalism basically states that yeah, of course we're going to fuck things up.
50:28
I can't remember whose quote it is, but it was like, man invented fire and then noted that there was some problems with that, so they invented the fire extinguisher, the fire department, the fire alarm.
50:38
But the point is that people think people who are of an optimistic bent are like Pollyannish or Panglossian, and that's not true at all.
50:47
In my opinion, we're creating new and better problems.
50:55
Nick Gillespie: And I think the big problem in a lot of ways, and again, I say this is somebody emerging from the mid 20th century, the high water mark of kind of a modern top down regulated best and brightest kind of approach, what we've done is we've made existential angst, which used to be reserved for very few people on the planet, people with means and people with disposable income and leisure.
51:31
We've made that a mass phenomenon, and that's an incredible triumph of economics and of technology and of political and cultural structures.
51:37
Nick Gillespie: But of late, I started out in my economic thinking related to libertarian stuff, I read a lot of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek and people like Ludwig von Mises and more and more I'm drawn to Joseph Schumpeter, who's the guy who coined the term creative destruction.
51:54
And he talked about in his masterwork, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, which was published during World War II, he talked about how Marx was right, that capitalism would destroy itself.
52:04
But Marx was wrong about the reason.
52:10
Marx thought that it would eviscerate everybody except for the 1%, effectively the capitalists, and then they would revolt.
52:16
And he was like, no, actually what happens is that it throws off so much wealth that people take wealth production for granted and they regulate it and they come to hate capitalism because it churns. The churn is too much.
52:32
And we don't want to live with the idea that you could be living it up one day and then within five years, your entire profession is gone because something new has come along that serves people's changing needs and desires better.
52:44
And that that's a rough ride.
52:44
And he thought he was witnessing that in the thirties and forties.
52:52
I think his timeline might be off and worries me.
52:58
Nick Gillespie: Again, this question of libertarian ideas of individualism, of change, of synthesis and whatnot.
53:02
There's a force against that.
53:09
And part of it, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump said this, Joe Biden embodies this of things were better 30 or 40 years ago.
53:14
That when Trump and Hillary were running in 2016, they were both kind of looking backward to the seventies when they were just starting their careers as a golden age.
53:24
Most people would be like, eh, the seventies weren't so great necessarily.
53:29
But politicians are backward looking.
53:29
A lot of cultural chieftains are backward looking.
53:36
And that's part of what libertarianism I think needs to do is to kind of give these injections of rational optimism.
53:45
Like this is how we got through it in the past, and we don't know what we're going to do to adapt in the future, but we know we've done it every other time and come out better.
53:55
So let's play those odds rather than saying we're got to lock everything down because too much change is too much for people to handle.
54:03
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, so that's the precautionary principle run amok. Nick Gillespie: Yeah. Right.
54:11
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And that leads to stasis and death and no meaningful change in society.
54:14
And I'm a huge fan of Taoism.
54:14
And one of the constant themes in Taoism is that movement is life and that water is often used as one of their symbols.
54:32
That it is the softest of entities, and yet it can destroy the hardest of rocks.
54:32
And that's constantly repeated in Taoism is, the old and stiff die.
54:40
The young and supple bend and snap back.
54:47
And so it's sometime maddening for me.
54:47
I used to do a joke on Twitter which was, I hate capitalism he tweeted from his iPhone while at Starbucks.
54:58
Listen, there are parts of the market that I totally get are not great.
55:09
And those get usually taken out if the market forces are allowed.
55:18
If they're not allowed, they perpetuate and they grow and you get zombie companies like Japan after 1989. And you just watch ...
55:25
Nick Gillespie: We're in like the fourth decade or something of the lost decade of Japan. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
55:33
Nick Gillespie: And we're increasingly aping its monetary, fiscal and political policies in order to keep dead companies.
55:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Which is absolutely insane.
55:42
So to understand things, you really have to be a system thinker, in my opinion.
55:50
And I wrote an essay in 1984 ...
55:50
I keep a lot of journals.
55:50
And I was so enamored of the idea that everyone was going to have their own computer and that big brother could never get in there.
56:04
I didn't envision that it would be in the cloud and that big brother could just turn that off or on.
56:10
But I was like, we were all going to have our own hard drives, and so you couldn't take that fucking book off my computer.
56:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But at the same time, again if you understand the system ...
56:19
there's a good book by a guy by the name of Howard Bloom called The Genius of the Beast in which he talks about capitalism as basically as a living organism system.
56:36
And it's really a good book.
56:44
It open my eyes about a lot of things about how there's the exploratory, but then there are the pulling back.
56:49
Because let's not get crazy.
56:49
And it does a very, very good job.
56:49
And one of the things that he says in there, and listen, this is coming from a guy with a degree in economics, what he says in there is that we're looking at the wrong thing when we assume rationality in human beings.
57:08
And he goes, if you want to get to the core of consumer demand, what you understand is desire, consumer desire.
57:17
And he says, that is an emotion.
57:17
And if you don't understand that basically we are emotional creatures, our greatest emotion is fear, fear of the unknown and that drives many, many of us.
57:32
But he's calling for a radical revamp in this book, The Genius of the Beast, many of the proposals, which I think are really sensible.
57:43
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But when you think about it as a system, you immediately, if you're approaching it from a certain angle, understand that the market is a complex adaptive system.
57:54
And what are complex adaptive systems?
57:54
They are systems that are impossible to control from the top down.
58:01
All of the change comes from the bottom.
58:01
All of the change in a complex adaptive system is emergent.
58:07
And so that's how we got all this.
58:13
Nick Gillespie: You can screw things up for a certain period of time, right?
58:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Absolutely.
58:18
Nick Gillespie: For me, I think I came around to the idea of drug legalization earlier of my life than you did, and it's partly because I was not necessarily using drugs, but I was looking at the cost benefit.
58:26
And liquor prohibition, alcohol prohibition did work to reduce the average intake of alcohol, but then the cost of that in terms of creating organized crime, of imposing people went from beer and wine to spirits, which were not sold in an open market.
58:49
So bootleggers, bad actors were selling booze that made people sick.
58:58
When you don't have ready access to something you want, you tend to overdo it every chance you get.
59:04
So there was more, there was cirrhosis.
59:04
So it's not that alcohol prohibition didn't work to reduce the amount of alcohol consumed for the period it was in place, but it created so many harms.
59:16
Anybody including some of the architects of prohibition within a few years, they were like, "Wow, this is not working out the way we wanted it to, so we should get rid of it."
59:28
It gives the illusion of control that, well you can take this complex system, whether it's the economy or it's society or it's capitalism, and we can regulate it and control it to our desired ends.
59:41
And it's like, yeah, maybe for a while, but you're generally creating more problems than you're fixing. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
59:50
Ceteris paribus is seldom true.
59:50
And I just read Bill Bryson's One Summer America, 1927. It's a great book. I highly recommend it.
59:59
He spends a lot of time on prohibition.
59:59
Because I always used prohibition as my poster child for why it's bad to do those things.
1:00:04
And he maintains in the book at least, and this was news to me, that actually drinking went up substantially during prohibition. It did not go down.
1:00:19
And the idea was that, something I had never known, was that the agency, the Feds who were the prohibition enforcers, they actually poisoned, put poison in whiskey bottles, not knowing who's going to drink that whiskey.
1:00:40
And so they literally murdered thousands of people.
1:00:46
Nick Gillespie: There's a fantastic book called the War on Alcohol from Liza McGirr who's a Harvard historian who looked at, one of the things is that there was no uniform prohibition because the Feds did not have enough agents to really control and regulate things.
1:01:04
And so she looked at how in New York state, and thankfully a good Irish American Al Smith was running the joint.
1:01:10
And he was like, "Fuck you, we're not enforcing any of this.
1:01:15
If you want to enforce it, go ahead."
1:01:15
And so New York state and particularly New York city was pretty wet.
1:01:20
But then in the south, the people who were pushing prohibition who were anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-immigrants, the dries that tended to be the old established wasp order, used it to crack down on immigrants and crack down on black people, minorities, political, ethnic, racial minorities.
1:01:38
And so that you had this very disparate impact of alcohol prohibition as well.
1:01:46
It's an endlessly fascinating topic.
1:01:46
Nick Gillespie: And I think it's great to illustrate some basic ideas that if you believe in a free society, it's better to live in a world where you say like, "Okay, you have a lot of choices and you're responsible for your choices.
1:02:04
And at the extreme ends, we're going to help people who are screwed up by bad choices."
1:02:09
But generally speaking, you create a world in which people know they have choices, you help them develop themselves so they can make good choices.
1:02:15
And that works out better than saying, "No, you, I don't like alcohol, so we're going to ban it, and then you can either drink it or not on the fly and whatever."
1:02:27
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally agree.
1:02:30
And I concur also on the use of power to terrorize marginalized groups like Catholics, like Irish, like black people, like homosexuals.
1:02:40
And I think one of the greatest things when you were listing all of the accomplishments earlier in the show, I think it's fabulous that there's so many people now can actually express themselves and don't express themselves without a fear of being rounded up or worse, murdered.
1:03:01
And that's yet another one of these things that need to be really celebrated as far as I'm concerned.
1:03:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I don't care what color you are.
1:03:14
I don't care who your sexual preference is.
1:03:17
I just don't care about any of that stuff.
1:03:17
And I just want to listen to your ideas.
1:03:24
And that's the other in that I think that younger people can be, you just approach it from that angle and you get somewhere faster.
1:03:32
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But you brought up immigration.
1:03:36
And so this has been one of my hobby horses for a long time.
1:03:44
I am simply flabbergasted that despite all of our problems, the smartest, most interesting and productive people in the world still want to live and work in the United States.
1:04:02
Why the fuck are we not letting them?
1:04:02
Nick Gillespie: No, it's awful.
1:04:07
And one of the unintended consequences of Donald Trump's presidency is that he pushed, according to Gallup and Pew, he pushed belief in the positive effect of immigration to historically high levels in America.
1:04:21
And when he came down that escalator, basically the first thing he said is like, "I'm not going to be politically correct."
1:04:27
And then he went on to talk about Mexicans being rapists and disease carriers and drug mules, that Mexico is not sending their best.
1:04:38
And he got people to say, if the choice is between not immigrants or immigrants, Americans at historically high levels will say they think immigration is good for the country.
1:04:53
We don't have those policies.
1:04:53
Nick Gillespie: And this is also what's frustrating is that Trump was bad.
1:04:54
And then obviously the COVID pandemic shut things down.
1:05:00
Biden has not been very quick to open up the borders again.
1:05:00
And in preparation for this conversation, you sent over some questions, and one was how would a libertarian go about solving the immigration problem in the United States?
1:05:13
And the first thing I jotted down on considering that was, we need to define it.
1:05:17
And the problem is that we don't have enough immigrants.
1:05:23
We don't have enough immigration.
1:05:23
And I choke up thinking about this because all four of my grandparents were immigrants from old Europe from small villages in Ireland.
1:05:31
That Ireland is the only country, as I understand it, in Europe that has fewer people than it had in 1800.
1:05:43
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, that's true.
1:05:44
Nick Gillespie: And then my mother's family was from Italy, from a small village in Southern Italy.
1:05:48
And these were people, they had no skills.
1:05:48
They were barely educated.
1:05:53
They may have been literate to sign their name or something like that, but no education.
1:05:59
And I have been to the places in Ireland that my parents or grandparents are from and in Italy, too, that for a thousand years, the Gillespies and the Guidos were raised to be surfs and peasants.
1:06:11
And they got to the US and within a couple generations, their kids are kind of masters of their own destiny, which is really fantastic.
1:06:18
And if my grandparents could do it, anybody can.
1:06:24
And we see this again and again.
1:06:24
Nick Gillespie: So defining the question, the problem with immigration isn't that we have too much immigration or that immigrants aren't assimilating.
1:06:31
It's that we don't have enough immigration to this country.
1:06:35
And I think this is one of the things where if you understand a systems approach where a country is not a fixed entity that absorbs people and stays the same, but it is this system that is constantly growing and morphing and changing and advancing so that it could ...
1:06:54
Nick Gillespie: In the 19s and 20s or certainly in the great migration from Europe from 1880 to 1920, Catholics were an existential threat to America, to the concept of America.
1:07:02
It was a Protestant country.
1:07:08
It was not a Judeo Christian country.
1:07:08
It wasn't a Christian country.
1:07:08
It was a Protestant country.
1:07:12
And we've done pretty well.
1:07:12
We've assimilated Catholics pretty well to a point where you can't tell anything about anybody by knowing their Catholic.
1:07:18
You don't know their politics.
1:07:23
You don't know their sexual orientation.
1:07:23
You don't know their position on abortion even.
1:07:23
And we need more immigration and we need more comfort with the idea that America is best when it is more open to new ideas and to, I don't want to say blood, because that conjures up a kind of genetic determinism, but to people with different experiences and different desires.
1:07:44
The best Americans may not even live here.
1:07:44
They're the people who want to be in charge of their lives and create the world that they want to live in.
1:07:50
And it just, it kills me that we are stuck, whether it's Democrats or Republicans, there's always this tendentiousness about immigration as if it isn't the thing that keeps a country young and vital and forward oriented.
1:08:09
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally agree.
1:08:09
And I honestly, and I'm not just saying this for effect, I just don't understand how ...
1:08:14
I'll give you an example.
1:08:22
This was what got me really going on this.
1:08:22
I used to do a lot of traditional media for O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
1:08:29
And so in one week, I was on CNBC Squawk Box, and with me in the green room was Paul Ryan, the previous Speaker of the House.
1:08:38
And I met him and I said, "Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Speaker.
1:08:46
Can I ask you a question?" And he's like, "Sure."
1:08:46
And I'm like, "Why isn't there a one page bill that simply split like baby steps?
1:08:53
Why don't we staple a green card or citizenship to every advanced degree that we grant from a US institution to someone who wasn't born here?"
1:09:08
And he goes, "I have that bill in my desk."
1:09:08
Now of course, he's probably lying to me.
1:09:13
But I'm like, 'Well, how come you're not passing it?"
1:09:13
And he's like, "Well, these things ...
1:09:20
" and then went into political talk.
1:09:20
And if you're a Claude Shannon fan, he says in Information Theory, information is actually new things that you learn.
1:09:26
So he says there can be a ton of information in a poem.
1:09:33
And he goes, there's zero information in a political speech.
1:09:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Anyway, so I was on Bloomberg Radio later that week and who was I sharing the room with, but Secretary Clinton. And I'd met her before.
1:09:41
And so, "Secretary Clinton, nice to see you again.
1:09:50
You know, I asked Paul Ryan last week, I just happened to run into him at CNBC, why isn't there," same thing.
1:09:56
And she was like, "Oh, I'm totally in favor of that."
1:10:03
And I'm like, "Wouldn't it be great if like the two of you could do a joint press conference?"
1:10:10
Nick Gillespie: And they would be joined by 75% of Americans.
1:10:11
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Of the American people.
1:10:14
Nick Gillespie: And it's like when you start to go down the line and you say, "Immigrants consume fewer social welfare resources than native born people, especially when you control for income and education level and things like that."
1:10:29
You get people start with the economic argument.
1:10:29
They say, 'Well, immigration is going to destroy the American labor force." And it doesn't.
1:10:36
So then they get to the cultural argument where it's like, "Oh, well, you know what?
1:10:43
Then it creates too much confusion in society."
1:10:43
One of the best books about immigration is by an Indian scholar, an Asian Indian, South Asian Indian Chandran Kukathas who's now teaching in Singapore, but he wrote a book recently.
1:10:59
It's called like Immigration and Assimilation or something like that.
1:11:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: We'll find the title.
1:11:06
We'll put it in the show notes.
1:11:08
Nick Gillespie: He talks about how immigration, one of the other things, if you care about freedom, when you have extreme limitations on immigration, it limits the freedom of native born people.
1:11:17
So maybe we can start appealing to people's naked self-interest that if you have maximally filtered borders, it means you're not as free to do what you want in your own country. I agree with you.
1:11:32
There is an emotional component to immigration that people either are for it or against it, and that can vary for a lot of different reasons.
1:11:47
Nick Gillespie: Over the years, I've lived in New York, Philadelphia, Buffalo, LA, a small town in Texas, a small town in Ohio, DC, a bunch of other places.
1:11:55
And one of the things that is stunning is when you are in parts of the country that don't have a lot of immigration, they tend to be anti-immigrant and they also tend to have weak economies.
1:12:06
So that's another thing, it's like don't let people who are in places that don't want immigration and immigrants aren't going to anyway, don't let them shit the bed for places that immigrants go and people are happy to have them.
1:12:19
Even within the border between Mexico and the US, the border towns are an anti-immigrant.
1:12:25
They have lower than average crime.
1:12:25
What they want is just a kind of regularity of everyday life.
1:12:31
And if everybody who's here is presumed to be legal, they can be verified and validated and they can pay taxes and they can work.
1:12:40
And you never go wrong by having more workers around.
1:12:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
1:12:50
And something like, I don't know if this is currently true, but historically true, half of all Silicon Valley successful startups were founded by immigrants.
1:13:02
And it's one of those things where we have such an obvious advantage that we are squandering.
1:13:02
Despite all of the sturm und drang and high drama and people shouting at each other, there are so many clever people who want to live and work here.
1:13:21
I am at a loss trying to understand any of the arguments.
1:13:30
Your point about the emotional side of immigration is well taken.
1:13:37
That's why, again, Bill's book America, 1927, I knew this but I hadn't reflected on it in a while.
1:13:46
We slammed the immigration window shut because of all of the anarchist bombings in America.
1:13:51
People, especially young people, this is the most violent time in America ever.
1:13:51
And I'm like, are you kidding me, man.
1:13:58
In the 1970s, five bombs went off every week around the country Nick Gillespie: And there were hijackings, et cetera.
1:14:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, and so again, perspective.
1:14:10
If you have some ability to gain perspective, then you get very, very bullish on these things. But I get it.
1:14:24
It was a travesty the way so-called justice worked, even in the early parts of the 20th century.
1:14:33
But at least directionally, we were pointed in the right direction, but let's not try to obscure the fact that there were a lot of fucking horrible things that happened in this country.
1:14:47
But that's true of every country.
1:14:47
Nick Gillespie: It's also, speaking of your idea of just giving, certainly anybody who, I would say, even, I think anybody who shows up here, and if you're saying, "Okay, everybody can come here and live legally."
1:15:02
You can actually have fast moving cues where you check people's identity.
1:15:02
And okay if you have violent crime or communicable disease, you're put to the side.
1:15:07
But certainly people who graduate college or higher education, and we have this influx, particularly of Chinese arriviste, upwardly mobile Chinese people who are coming to the US en masse for college because our colleges, despite whatever problems they have, are really remarkable and why we aren't...
1:15:32
All you have to do to sell America is like, "Hey, here's a work permit.
1:15:32
You can live here as long as you want, you pay taxes."
1:15:39
And instead we're humming and hawing about how many H1B visas are allowed this year and even agricultural workers and things like that.
1:15:53
Nick Gillespie: It's nuts. And I wish we...
1:15:53
This is again for me, one of the advantages of being a small-L libertarian is that you see a different set of continuities and the continuity between Trump, actually between Obama and Trump and Biden on immigration is disturbing.
1:16:10
The rhetoric is different, but the reality is the same.
1:16:10
And we should be opening up our borders because this is also, it's good for economic growth, it's good for cultural growth and it's also the right thing to do.
1:16:22
I mean, how do we make America great again, it's like, yeah, maybe by opening up the borders, and I think about this a lot.
1:16:36
Again, referencing our age in 1970, that was the lowest census where percentage of foreign born in the country was below 5%. It's the lowest level.
1:16:43
And it's like the economy during the depression, nobody was going to be coming here anyway.
1:16:51
Nick Gillespie: And then World War II, Europe was rebuilding, et cetera, but it's like, it wasn't until 1965, that immigration laws opened up again.
1:16:58
And suddenly we started getting a lot of people from Mexico or from Latin America, as well as Asia.
1:17:02
And the late sixties and early seventies when we had very few people coming here, it was not a good economic time.
1:17:11
I mean, again, self-interest, the more people you bring in, the more workers you create, the bigger the markets become.
1:17:22
There's a lot of economic data.
1:17:22
And I realize this, doesn't get to that emotional thing.
1:17:27
Nick Gillespie: Low wage American workers, native American workers benefit from having low skilled immigrants.
1:17:29
They actually, they do a certain type of work and it bumps up low, skilled native born Americans.
1:17:36
And I think we need to be selling that more, if free trade is good and I realized free trade is a great libertarian argument that seemed to have been won decisively at the end of the 20th century.
1:17:53
I think we need to revisit that now because a lot of people are protectionist again and again, this is continuity between Obama, Trump and Biden, buy America programs are bullshit, we need to revitalize that, but if you believe in free trade, you should also believe in free migration because people are more important than goods and services.
1:18:10
And we win when we allow more people into the country, I think.
1:18:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No question.
1:18:20
Well, this has been absolutely fascinating as I thought it would be.
1:18:20
I just- Nick Gillespie: Can I extend this just for a second?
1:18:25
Because I wanted to get to one of the questions.
1:18:28
I loved the things and we got to some of them and not to others, but you raised the question about social media.
1:18:35
Is it causing increased tribal affinities and accentuating all the bad parts of the human OS, operating system or can it be fixed?
1:18:46
Does Twitter get displaced by a decentralized system?
1:18:46
And the answer to that last question is, yes.
1:18:51
And Jack Dorsey, who I think is one of the most interesting large company tech CEOs, both at Block and formally at Twitter.
1:18:59
When he was at Twitter and he was doing it at Square, which is now Block, he's a big blockchain Bitcoin enthusiast.
1:19:05
And I saw him a couple years ago at the Bitcoin conference in Miami, say, "Look, my dream for Twitter at the time was a completely decentralized version of it where there is no kill switch.
1:19:18
There is no centralized anything."
1:19:25
Nick Gillespie: And that is emerging.
1:19:26
I mean, in a lot of these peer to peer or end-to-end encryption apps, it's dispersed, it's decentralized.
1:19:32
Even within Twitter, you've referenced Robert Anton Wilson, who I think is one of the great geniuses of the past 30 or 40 years. And his Illuminatus!
1:19:36
Trilogy is a great joke of a conspiracy novel, but even within Twitter and they ban people and this and that, but there's still a huge amount of freedom because it's such a loose and baggy monster.
1:19:51
You can be doing lots of interesting stuff in a way that I think Robert Anton Wilson would appreciate.
1:20:00
But Twitter and other social media apps are going to be disaggregated in ways where there's always going to be people on the frontier and then those will become the main settlements and then people will move on.
1:20:12
Like you were talking about with ants and termites and all of this kind of stuff.
1:20:17
Nick Gillespie: But more to the point, what I wanted to say about social media, more broadly, we're in a very negative space about technology for a variety of reasons.
1:20:25
And I wanted to make an analogy in the beginning of the cable era, cable TV was restricted for decades.
1:20:33
It was technologically feasible by the late sixties, but the National Association of Broadcasters had more political clout.
1:20:38
So it didn't get rolled out really fully nationally until the late eighties and early nineties.
1:20:44
And then you had at the time, people blaming all the ills of the world on cable TV and violence on cable, sex on cable.
1:20:49
And it's like, you look back on it and it's like, sex on cable was really like looking at encrypted Cinemax waving lines and seeing a boob on a show or something.
1:21:05
There was no sex or real violence on cable, but it was being blamed.
1:21:12
Nick Gillespie: And there were a bunch of people who were seriously had a lot of power within the Clinton administration, the Bill Clinton administration.
1:21:17
I know Janet Reno who was awful and was a control freak, but they were saying they pointed to how television was, when television was introduced this was a serious argument, television was introduced to South Africa in the mid-seventies.
1:21:37
South Africa realized, we can set...
1:21:37
And television is a hierarchical diagrammatic top down medium because it's like, you have to have a big broadcasting tape and then it gets sent out to dumb receivers, it's not a lot of interactivity.
1:21:57
And people were seriously saying, "Look, when television was introduced to South Africa in 1975, when they finally relented and allowed it, violence in South Africa picked up dramatically."
1:22:11
As if you could blame the end of the apartheid regime on television.
1:22:11
So what I want to suggest to you about social media is that the new media or the dominant media, the rising media or the incumbent media gets blamed for everything and social media is not that bad.
1:22:32
Nick Gillespie: What it does is it enfranchises many more people, more can speak with more freedom in more context and get heard. Some of that's bad.
1:22:36
I disagree with a lot of stuff, but I also, it's like what a great world.
1:22:43
We have a marketplace of ideas and people like Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist who I consider a friend and a fellow traveler in a lot of ways, is talking about social media is ushering in a new age of a Tower of Babel.
1:22:55
And we have to figure out a way to restrict it or regulate it and regiment it, and like, no, no we don't actually, what we need to do is recognize that we're in a moment where people are, powerful people, powerful interests, and not always in a bad way, are unhappy with the way the world is going.
1:23:19
And they're looking for things to blame and you always blame the new media.
1:23:22
Nick Gillespie: You blamed rock and roll.
1:23:22
You blamed the novel, you blamed movies, you blamed radio, you blamed cheap theater in the early 1900's and things like that.
1:23:32
And that's, I think fundamentally what's going on with social media because what's great is Facebook is losing market share.
1:23:37
Facebook in North America is a declining company.
1:23:37
Facebook doesn't even call itself Facebook anymore.
1:23:43
Twitter has been trying to grow its user base, its average daily user base for a decade and can't do it.
1:23:49
People are moving elsewhere, Snapchat, which is bigger than Twitter, but nobody talks about it because it's all just young people, it's not old farts like us who get worried about it, is stuck.
1:23:59
So we're already gravitating into new, more dispersed, decentralized places where people can speak freely. And that is pretty good.
1:24:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So the highest compliment that I can pay you is that I am going to steal every bit of that last bit.
1:24:17
You put that in such the right context, it's brilliant.
1:24:28
Nick Gillespie: Thank you.
1:24:29
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I had never...
1:24:29
I'm envious too, because I- Nick Gillespie: I didn't think of it until your question, the way that you...
1:24:33
And I love the idea of the human operating system, one of the things years ago in a review of two books about libertarianism one by David Boaz of the Cato Institute and one by Charles Murray who after the bell curve, Charles Murray wrote a book called What it Means to be a Libertarian.
1:24:50
And it's like a fence, wow, okay.
1:24:54
But I talked about capitalism or libertarianism, and I think capitalism is the economic application of liberal ideas of giving people more freedom and more choice in their life.
1:25:09
Nick Gillespie: But what we want is an operating system that allows people to launch as many applications as possible without crashing the system.
1:25:15
And those applications are like John Stuart Mill, Experiments in Living.
1:25:21
And there are bounds on those because people could act in a way where it just fucks everything up and you have to...
1:25:28
I'm not an anarchist, but that's the idea of an operating system, we should be using the metaphors suggested by the technologies that are improving our lives.
1:25:42
And I think that human operating system is a great metaphor that I'm going to be stealing from you. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:25:50
Well, I stole it from Brian Roemmele.
1:25:50
But again, how great is that?
1:25:50
How great is social media that I got to read Brian's work and have him on the podcast, everything and take the uniqueness of it and just like, oh, I love that word, human operating system, that makes a ton of sense.
1:26:14
And now I'm going to be taking the way you put them together just immediately as you were saying it, I'm like, "Of course, of course they're always blaming what the new."
1:26:19
I remember I was at school Foreign Service at Georgetown and I lived off campus and it was 1980 or 81.
1:26:38
And so there's a TV in the apartment I was living in.
1:26:38
I turned it on and there was HBO.
1:26:45
And I'm like, "What the fuck is this?"
1:26:45
And that's all I watched, because it had the most interesting stuff.
1:26:55
It had none of the FCC oversight.
1:26:55
I'm like, "This is genius."
1:27:02
Nick Gillespie: HBO didn't even have commercials, so it's getting better.
1:27:03
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No, right. It's incredible.
1:27:06
But I remember Al Gore's wife, Tipper and her war against music- Nick Gillespie: And against Dungeons and Dragons, and she- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right, which of course- Nick Gillespie: ...
1:27:20
Yeah, she wrote a book called Raising PG Kids in an X-rated World because she was disgusted when she heard one of her daughters listening to Prince's song, Darling Nikki.
1:27:26
And then the PMRC, the Parents Music Resource Center created a list of songs called the Filthy 15.
1:27:31
And a bunch of them were occult songs because they were like, they believed in backward masking and that Satanism and drug abuse were as dangerous.
1:27:44
One of the songs on the Filthy 15 was a Cindi Lauper song called She Bop, which is widely understood to be about masturbating.
1:27:50
And it's like social panics, moral panics, while you're going through them they don't seem as ridiculous as they are later revealed to be.
1:28:03
But I think a lot of what we're going through is a social panic, a moral panic over the fact that a lot of people can speak more freely and to go back, I'm going to call up my kids after this and be like, "You guys, I understand why you're nervous about speaking out sometimes, but you got to do it because that's all we have." Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. It is.
1:28:23
Nick Gillespie: And it's a better time to be speaking and listening than ever before in human history, which until next year, I hope.
1:28:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
1:28:32
And to cap that thought it's like, we now are in an environment where we can freely express a huge variety of ideas, some good, some bad that they'll get shaken out of the system.
1:28:48
You don't have the ability for them to just be like, "No, you may not consider or talk about that at all."
1:28:54
And I just look at that as, I find that so wonderful and so amazing.
1:29:01
And the other thing that I also think about is in the end, the new and better ideas won for the most part, they called the impressionist, impressionist as an insult.
1:29:16
That was the name, the French Academy gave them.
1:29:16
And they were like, "It is like a child finger painting."
1:29:22
Who has the last laugh, Van Gogh couldn't sell a single painting, greatest painter in the world.
1:29:29
Nick Gillespie: You mentioned James Joyce and Ulysses.
1:29:30
I mean it's complicated both by his literary estate, but by obscenity laws in the United States, it was really all over until the late fifties when it was easy to get US additions of Ulysses and things like that.
1:29:50
And a lot of other literature that is totally unobjectionable and that's a technology of living.
1:29:57
It isn't, the printing press, didn't change printing technology.
1:29:57
It's like, we're like, "Okay, we're going to be a little more adult about this.
1:30:02
We're going to be more libertarian and give people more choices rather than fewer choices."
1:30:05
And I think that's a better way to live, thinking about things from the real, it's not right or left, it's choice versus control, it's authoritarian versus libertarian.
1:30:16
And come on, what side of that chasm do you want to be on?
1:30:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
1:30:24
Well, you know what side I want to be on.
1:30:26
This has been awesome at the end of all my podcasts, I ask my guests the same question, which is I'm going to wave a wand and this is going to be a tough one for a libertarian, because you're going to say, "Well, I don't want to make other people do anything that they don't want to do."
1:30:42
But you are emperor briefly of the world for one day. You can't kill anyone.
1:30:42
You can't put anyone in a reeducation camp, but what you can do is speak into a magical microphone and incept two ideas in to the entire population.
1:30:56
And whenever they wake up the next morning, wherever they are, when their next morning comes, they're going to wake up and think that both of these ideas were theirs, that they came up with them and that they were going to start behaving or thinking or doing the two things that you're going to suggest. What do you got for me?
1:31:21
Nick Gillespie: I wish I had thought about this.
1:31:24
One of the things that I think I would want people to do is to transpose themselves into whatever subgroup in their village or their society is the most outcast, really to gain that empathy with the dispossessed, because I really feel part of the problem and the way that libertarianism has been sold in capitalism means that it is a system and it's a pretty simple system and it's an easy one to excel at.
1:31:57
You don't have to be smart.
1:31:57
You don't even have to be that hardworking.
1:32:02
And if you're a little bit smart and you're very hardworking, you're going to do fantastic.
1:32:05
But people don't know that there's a system and understanding why people don't understand that this is right in front of them.
1:32:10
So I think that would be one of them.
1:32:17
Live for a day in the world of the person that is considered the lowest in your society.
1:32:25
Nick Gillespie: And then the other is, live for a minute or for a day as the richest person in your society.
1:32:27
And see what doesn't change from your day to day life, because this is...
1:32:35
I recently, and I don't think I'm 1%, but I'm doing extremely well, certainly better than I could have ever figured based on how I grew up and where I grew up and everything.
1:32:49
And I recently went to France for a couple days and it was a jet set lifestyle, which I've really never done before.
1:32:54
It's probably old hat for you and it was fantastic.
1:33:00
Nick Gillespie: But the thing that stayed with me on a certain level was that my life every day, my entire life has been the same, I have more economic security and I was able to pay for my kids education and all of that, which is not a small thing at all and it was a choice, but I recognize that I have so much freedom and so much choice in my life.
1:33:21
That being much, much wealthier would not change that very much.
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And it gives me a newfound appreciation for what life is like in a relatively free open society, that is not only open culturally, but also open economically and whatnot.
1:33:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love both of those.
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On the first one, that's actually an idea that I've had when VR gets better, we'll be able to let people actually do that.
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And I think it will be- Nick Gillespie: Isn't that amazing.
1:33:58
And I know there are some early experiments of training for police and other people to go through a simulation as a minority group and it doesn't have to be racial or ethnic or gender or sexual orientation, it can be any number of things. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Sure.
1:34:16
And then the second one I loved too, because I have much the same thoughts as you expressed.
1:34:24
And so two books that I think you'd really love, the first is an upcoming guest Will Storr, who wrote his most recent book is The Status Game.
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And he explains, I think, really, really well how it's built into human OS and that even though you think you're not playing, you are playing always, but then he ends it on such a positive note, such a thoughtful and hopeful note that I think you'd love it.
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And then Derren Brown, the stage illusionist, who wrote a book on happiness, which I absolutely adored.
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As part of that book, he recounts it wasn't his originally, it was another scholar's thought experiment.
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And essentially what it was, was what happens if you wake up tomorrow and you're the only human left alive, everything else is still there.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: So what are you going to do?
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And basically when you think it through, yeah, I'm going to go live in the mansion.
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I'm going to go drive the Lambo.
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But then where he ends up is, you know what, you're going to pick a house that's easy for you to keep up.
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You're going to not care about clothes.
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You're not going to care about what transport you have.
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You're probably going to prefer something like walking or a bicycle.
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And then he brings it really home, Brown does, that basically much of what we do is to signal other people and that when we realize that the much saner route is, if you're the last one alive, man, you're going to go, probably you're going to go to the Library of Congress and just start reading books.
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Or if Google's still up, you're just going to learn about things, but you're not going to care about all those superficial things.
1:36:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So I think you're bang on about the, yeah, I mean, having more money in certain regards than less, I think once you get to the Maslow part of the hierarchy where you can start working on your internal things, that's great, but it's also fraught, you mentioned existentialism and that's what I call the bridge of nihilism.
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And what you've got to understand in my opinion, is you got to walk across the bridge of nihilism.
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And when you get to the other side, you realize if nothing matters and there is no reason for our being here, well, guess what?
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You get to create your own reason and you get to create your own purpose.
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And man that allows you to live in color as opposed to black and white.
1:37:04
So this has been fantastic.
1:37:04
Thank you so much for doing this.
1:37:10
Nick Gillespie: Oh, thank you. I really appreciate it.