There's really two types of politics in the world. There's the politics of power and there's the politics of distribution. The politics of power is about figuring out who is going to dominate the other. And then there's the liberal world. The liberal world is a world where we all agree that there is this thing called the rule of law, that it is supreme. We all agree that we live within that common fabric, and within that common fabric, we are able to exert freedoms. The fact that we now are sitting here thinking about what are the possibilities available to me and what are the obstacles to those possibilities, be it government regulation or taxes or foreign policy arrangements, recognizing that the fact that you're even having that conversation is because you're breathing liberal air.
Good to see you, Mike Brock. How you doing?
Yeah, doing good, man. Although, you know, we got a studio in London now.
Yeah, I need to come see it.
Yeah, you have to. You got to come see. Turns out I have some time on my hands, I can probably make that happen. Come down, take some football.
I don't like not being in my studio now. There's a familiarity to being in your own studio, your own chair, your own surroundings. I think because we were a homeless podcast that roamed around the world recording in Airbnbs, once you get a studio, it becomes part of you. But I got to say though, like with your whole getup here and the tattoos, you look like you're right at home here in LA.
Well, yeah, I know, I love it. I told you this last time I was here. LA is a weird place in that there's so much wrong with it, but I love it. There's always an energy here. I think it's because it's a creative place and I'm a creative. I always like coming in here. My plan today is once this is done, I've got a walk. I'm staying in Santa Monica. I'm going to walk the full walk down to Venice, see all the crazies down there, and walk back. I love it here. I could live here no problem apart from the taxes.
Not the taxes. I've been good. It's been a year of transitions for me. So obviously, I'm not in my previous role anymore. I have moved into a new chapter of my life.
I started a Substack. I'm going to see where that goes.
Well, look, that's going to be the framing for the conversation today. Let me tell you where I'm at. So I am really trying to spend a lot of time understanding why the political discourse has got so bad, because it is terrible. And we also, alongside that, I think we're living in the most fragile time I've existed while having so much amazing stuff. We've got amazing technology, but there's so many crazy things going on. Paradox, it's a weird one, right? And so I started writing. So you pinged me the other day on Signal and you're like, 'Oh, read this article.' And I was like, 'Huh, it's kind of similar.' I feel like you're at least in a similar space to me. And you were like, 'This is serious. You wrote this? This is serious.' And mine was called 'Sausages.' But I'm in this place where I've rejected the political system. I'm out. I didn't vote in the UK elections because I knew whichever party I voted for, I was voting for decline. So I'm refusing.
You don't want to participate in the managed decline of your nation.
I don't want to vote for decline.
Okay. And so what I'm now in... that makes sense. I don't want to vote for the decline of America either.
I'm committed to its ascendance. I think you have a similar choice next month. I think any vote is a vote for decline.
Well, we'll talk about that. Yeah, we'll get to that. So anyway, my headspace at the moment is, in my little part of the world, is there anything I can do to contribute towards the reversal of decline? So what that means is I'm reading a lot, I've started writing as well, and I'm trying to think of ideas, ways, means to be part of something that reverses that decline. Because, got this big rambling opening, but it's setting the scene. Revolutions often come from a divided society and often come from, it's a prerequisite. It often comes from a wealth divide, a growing wealth divide, a bourgeoisie and a proletariat. And I feel like we're heading towards that. I see the symptoms. I'm like, what can I do to be part of that? So that's where I'm at. I started writing another article, where again we can talk about that. The title of the article is 'The Libertarians Need to Step Up.' And I'm not saying libertarianism is the sole idea, but I think libertarian principles within the current political framework are part of the solution. So that's where I'm at, Mike. That's all of it.
Okay, all right. That sounds like a one more thing. We can go deep today. And the reason I wanted to talk to you most of all is I obviously get to talk to lots of libertarians and I obviously get to talk to lots of Republicans, but I feel like the most important thing is talking to the broad spectrum of people so you understand where they're coming from. And so I know you are a Democrat functionally.
Yeah, functionally. Yeah. I mean, I don't consider myself a partisan. Like you won't see me trumpeting Democratic Party propaganda. You won't see me engaging in apologetics for them, selling their policies for them. I am not a member of the Democratic Party in that sense. But if what you're asking is, am I functionally driven towards supporting the Democratic Party's candidates such as they're presented to me on my ballots right now? Yes. I mean, that way. In the extent that I contribute money to a political organization in this country, I view the Democratic Party as the currently only viable vehicle available to me that seems somewhat coherent with my understanding of the liberal society that I believe is my inheritance, that was built up over several hundreds of years starting in a revolution in this country that brought our forms of government into a bit of a disunity, as we Americans and Brits like to joke with each other about. But I recognize that in what I would say the healthy politics of distribution, which is what... look, there's really two types of politics in the world. There's the politics of power and there's the politics of distribution. The politics of power is about the politics of figuring out who is going to dominate the other, who is subservient to who, who has the power, the raw Nietzschean power, the will to power world. And then there's the liberal world. The liberal world is a world where we all agree that there is this thing called the rule of law, that it is supreme. And this even includes your constitutional monarchy today, which has largely adopted these ideas, especially in the 20th century and the post-war era. This idea that everyone, I mean, obviously it goes back to the Magna Carta, but like an imperfect document. But I mean, at the end of the day, we all agree that we live within that common fabric, and within that common fabric, you know, we are able to exert freedoms that we wouldn't be available to us if we were all just like on our own as roaming bands in the wilderness looking out for ourselves, trying to have bandits not like steal our food away from us. Yes, we give up certain things, as Thomas Hobbes and his, you know, in the Leviathan, famously made the argument for this idea that yeah, like we are actually more free as humans than we would be if we were living in our state of nature by giving civilization control of certain things, giving away some of that personal freedom to the state. And obviously John Locke, who in many ways was once again, these are all people of English and Scottish Liberty, inspired Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence. This idea metastasized into this liberal civilization which has seen an advancement in human progress that is incomparable to anything that human history had ever seen before. Like even at the heights of the Roman Empire, those were achievements that spanned thousands of years, but these are achievements that we were able to undertake in the span of a few hundred years, most of those achievements in the last third of that trifecta of centuries. So recognizing the importance of that, the sheer beauty of that, and my belief that if there is to be a world worth living in in the future, at least in my conception of it, that I can understand that the path to that is through the continuation of these ideas. Most importantly, that there is something that's bigger than all of us. It's at the very least, if it's not a God, it is society and the civilization which you are connected to, that you came from, that you inherit your spoken language from and your written and all of your cultural references from. And you are part of that. You can't separate yourself. You're not this separate entity that existed out like, you know, you aren't some roll of the dice. Like to imagine sometimes I could have been someone who grew up in India or China or Africa, it's like, no, I was a man that was born in the suburbs of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. And the very fact that I'm sitting here championing what I see as the virtues of English Liberty in the liberal tradition is very much contextual on that. I'm living in a former British colony in the shadow of the American Global Order and its media that embodies these ideas and created this liberal cultural fabric which I think now is actually made, I mean, I don't know if you think about it this way, but I feel like more like Western Europe, Canada, the United States really just seems like the same people to me now in a way that it didn't before. There's a familiarity, you know, when I'm in Germany or some, or Germans are here, there's something about the way we go about our business as a Western society of this liberal culture that even if we have disagreements between some of our countries on like various social policies or economic policies, there's still a through line there that's very familiar. And I think that's been really hyper accelerated by American media as in some ways has homogenized the Western culture. And I think that's probably a good thing. But I also think that people are misunderstanding something. That the fact that we now are sitting here thinking about what are the possibilities available to me and what are the obstacles to those possibilities, be it government regulation or taxes or foreign policy arrangements, recognizing that like the fact that you're even having that conversation is because you're breathing liberal air. You're breathing liberal oxygen that you're even sitting here trying to engage in the politics of distribution, not the politics of power. Because once we start talking about the politics of power, this all goes away. This all goes away because all of these rules are just rules and rituals that we follow every single day. We get up, we like, there's nothing forcing us.
Separate the politics of power, politics of distribution. Can they coexist or is it an ongoing fight?
It's an ongoing fight, obviously. But what we tried to do with the liberal revolution is we figured out a few things, right? The American Revolution was the first attempt at politicizing this idea that we need a system of self-government, which means that we need to distribute power. And we have to make, we have to create, and we know that power is always going to compete for power. So what do we do with that? Well, let's create three co-equal branches of government that all in theory have the same equal amount of constitutional power and each one of them can't do anything without the other two. And let's make sure that these bodies are assembled through different processes so it makes it really, really hard for one singular entity trying to organize across all these different areas of power of the government. So this was their like, and I mean, and that's where you get the famous quote, right? 'An American Republic if you can keep it.' They weren't sure, right? The founders of the American Revolution were actually in some ways quite skeptical it would all hold itself together. They were quite skeptical that the forces of populism and corruption wouldn't consume it. Well, the forces of corruption have consumed it. That I would say is, I don't think, I don't argue, I don't think that, you know, this is probably going to like shock people on all sides, but I don't think we're at a high watermark for corruption in the United States or even in the UK compared to what I mean. I think if you look at our history, I would say that the post-war era in the United States was a highly corrupt time. Was highly corrupt. Like a lot of the, like the amount of crazy back room deals that had been done for the war effort, you know, the war economy stuff had led to all these like, you had all these regulatory agencies that had like all this power and there was a whole bunch of like, you know, like it was a very corrupt time. Like the regulatory state in the United States as it was also in the pre-Thatcher era in the UK in like the 60s and 70s was a cluster of corruption. And in the case of the UK, right, like was just pernicious, like pernicious labor unions, like themselves like very, very corrupt organizations which are like extracting rent for their own political power.
There was a story of that recently, wasn't there? The guy driving the Bentley in the big house.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is, I don't think we're at a high watermark. I think we're at a high watermark for understanding the nature of corruption today because of our social media, because of how many eyes we have on it. I think, I really strongly believe this, if we were to put today's eyeballs on say the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt for example in the Great Depression heading into the World War, like the New Deal era, right? These massive expansion and big government, I mean, I think we would have found like if we had enough, if we had enough wherewithal, I think the scandals we would have found, the frauds that went unanswered, the phone calls that powerful people made at the FBI to look the other way, I think you'd find that stuff and I think it would be quite outraging. So I think we've made this sort of epistemic error by looking at our society now and now having like more total picture of what's going on and seeing some of the, I mean, look, and by the way, like, I know that we hate to hate intellectuals now, but I mean, like, look, I mean, just go and read like Noam or like these guys and the things they were saying, it's like all these things, all the political corruption and all this stuff, like the elite, like that it was all happening back then and like the intellectuals were talking about the exact same things that we're sitting here between like, you know, two very sophisticated condenser microphones and a very beautiful studio in Los Angeles like talking about. But like these are not new things that we've been contending with. Because look, human society is messy. There's competing interests. When those interests are competing, there are different people will go to different means to have their interests served. Some of them will pass beyond what we might consider criminality. But then there's some, and then there's some argument on the other side about how just far are we going to enforce the law or not. And these are all a big complicated interplay of features of our society that have been playing out. And so I am in some ways simultaneously more optimistic but also, like much to what you were saying before on the strange paradox of our times, that living in a world of such plenty and opportunity and at the height of our existence in every material way seemingly teetering on the brink of our own destruction, I am definitely worried about those tail risks and I think they get bigger by the day.
Yeah, I'm an optimist as well, actually. I've become an optimist because I force myself to be an optimist. Because if you see a problem, you don't do anything about it, you got to put your head on the line. You got to try and make change, be the change you want to see. So I'm an optimist because I'm searching for solutions and finding them. But I think there's been a normalization of corruption.
I've, yeah, so many things. Like here in the US, I think it's worse here in the US than in the UK. That every single senator who earns $170,000 a year is worth 300 million and lives in a giant house and is very good at trading stocks. That to me is a normalization of corruption. And the vast, at least it has the appearance of impropriety.
Yes. Okay. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm not saying it's not corrupt. I'm just saying that like the point that I would make there is that when you hold an office of public trust, appearances are actually quite important. It's part of your obligation to society as a respect for that office to present yourself to society in terms of your own personal actions as something that looks more like a role model to society. So even if it just so happens that person has a really good wealth manager and they completely just like subjugate all their decision-making to them and it just so happens that their wealth manager is like really good, I mean, you need to consider like maybe it's just better to put something into a blind trust and ignore it to prove to people that there's no impropriety there. Like that's, so what I'm saying is actually in support of your argument. I'm saying even if those people aren't actually corrupt, even if they just so happen, there's just some self-selection effect that they're going to be more successful in their investments, they have an obligation to like go overboard and show us that that's not what's happening.
Or government has a duty to legislate so they can't.
Yes. But that's just examples. But the, you know, the military industrial complex and the endless wars, the pharmaceutical industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, all these industrial complexes. I mean, just some of the things that I...
I interviewed a guy yesterday who was, he's got a program about wrong works for people who've been wrongfully convicted of crimes. The estimate 2 to 5% of people in prison have been convicted wrongfully. And he was talking about this time in prison and it would be $20 to make a phone call to make the call and then 5 cents afterwards. We know in a free market that phone call doesn't cost $20. Only one supplier of goods in what do they call it, the commissary, the place where you can buy stuff in jail, the little shop. Oh, the commissary. Commissary. I can't remember what it was called. He was saying there's only one supply. He said everything is vastly more expensive than externally. And then if you work for the, within the prison, you get paid 25 cents an hour. Like all these things are just to me just exploitation of corruption.
Yeah. I mean, that passes a smell test for me of describing something as corrupt. And well, the problem with the prisons is a large number of them are the backbone of small towns where they exist. They provide the majority employers of the prison guards. Association actively lobbies against reform in the prison system. This is all, this is just the corruption of man that exists everywhere.
Yeah. Well, I mean, but this is where like I would say you're just describing political economy. This is what political economists think about, right? Which is the way in which all the interests come together to form a coherent whole in our society. And so yes, like when you look at something like that from the perspective of political economy, I agree with you that it's corrupt. There's corruption of a kind. But then as you've already started to note, once you start to tease that sort of corruption which exists at the scale of political economy apart, what you realize is you got a whole bunch of fabric of people in between and neither of them are individually corrupt. They all entered into contracts, they all went through job training, they, you know, are, they're paying their kids through school from the employment that they're gaining from all of this. And at the end of the day, and this is actually the delusion of the right-wing populist today, that there's actually just like one cabal of people that are sort of steering this ship. It's not true.
Is it true that people think that one cabal? I think so. Like because when you talk about things like draining the swamp, it even, like the thing is, is like we've already started to tear at the threads here of like the reality of the swamp. The swamp isn't just government bureaucrats. It's the, the people at the bangers and mash shop that the bureaucrat is going into because if that bureaucrat goes away, their bangers and mash shop in London is going to go under. The political economy basically reaches all the way around us because we're part of the society. We all, we interact with it through our individual choices, through our political relationship or the nature of power relationship that we have with the state. But we can't escape these interrelationships. So we can confuse ourselves into thinking that the corruption is merely a creature of government or it's merely a creature of a particular group that go to Davos, Switzerland once a year. And there could be like some truths to that in the sense that these are people whose careers are about keeping the system stable. Which by the way, actually, I would say like to remind and maybe we should talk about today, I could just openly talk about what my politics actually are. I know we touched on that when you asked me if I was a Democrat.
Well, let's finish on this.
Yeah. But from this perspective, like, yeah, like these are people, their incentive is stability. They want tomorrow to be a little bit better than today for them and their companies and their interests. And that makes sense. That there's nothing pernicious about that. But if you're on the outside looking in and you see these breakdowns of political economy like the one that you mentioned there, and you look at that and you're like, well, because they want stability, they're standing for the status quo, therefore they're defending this corruption. But then I think things get, I mean, but then I think what you recognize too is that when you go and talk to that Davos crowd about that aspect of corruption, they probably agree with you at some level that we should do something about that, right? But their inability to have the outrage that you have is tied to the fact that if they were as outraged as you, their entire company would be on fire and they'd be laying off tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. From their vantage point in the political economy, they have to prioritize stability and that's going to inform their political decision. So people are like, why is all of corporate America like mostly supporting Kamala Harris? This makes no sense. She has more left-wing policies. Like what is this woke capitalism? No, it's not woke capitalism. It's what I just said. In the political economy of things, these are people whose instincts are to pursue stability. Of course. Instability for them is potentially life and death for a company that's on the knife edge of profitability, you know, based on its access to foreign markets and distribution and supply chains that could be impacted by sudden shifts in foreign policy, radical unpredictable shifts. If you look at say something like that, you look at someone like Trump who is holding up his mercurial as a feature, right? The madman theory of foreign politics. You might look at Kamala Harris's talks of price controls and be like, well, that's like not the kind of world that we want to do business in. But the other, this instability that this other guy represents, we don't even know what's coming. At least we can sit here and get our think tanks going and start like trying to get our lobbyists like convincing the politicians in Congress to like water down this price control proposal. We can do that. We know people. We can make phone calls. I went to college with this guy, right? Like, you can imagine how in their minds they're like, yes, like we have no problem standing behind Kamala Harris because that's the way that they're viewing it. They're not viewing it as like we want to protect some corrupt status quo. They're looking at it from like I don't want to wake up every day with my whole company on fire because Trump just started another trade dispute in Vietnam. Like this is the way they view the world. It's not through this like, like you see like political commentators talk about like how it makes no sense that frankly people like myself whose economic views quite honestly probably code what people would say in the United States are center-rightish. Like I am like pretty positive on the existence of a social welfare state but I also think that I want very pro-business policies, like low regulatory environment. I'm pretty pro-free trade.
You're a classic liberal.
Yeah. And there are things that Kamala Harris and the Democrats like currently support that I think are, well, I mean, actually in some ways I've been surprised by some of the policies that she's prioritized. Like for instance, like her YIMBY policies, the Yes In My Backyard policies as a counterbalance to the what we call the NIMBYism, right? This absolute opposition to building housing. The fact that she's talking about federally enforced permitting reform and land use reform, I mean that tickles my classical liberal funny bone. Because I think it's like probably the biggest, more than any of the inflation that we've had for anything else, the run-up in housing costs over the last 20, 30 years in this country, which were rising at like even back in the Bush era we're rising at like 10, 11, 12% per year. We didn't like watch this housing shortage creep up on us. And that just meant that, you know, 40, 50 years ago people were spending like a quarter, maybe a third of their income on housing. But by like even the heights of the boom times of 2019 under Trump, right, that had risen to 50, 60% of the average person's income. And sure things felt like they were doing good back then, but we haven't noticed how the biggest tax that Americans have paid has been to their landlords because they operate a housing cartel where they keep competition out, they don't let developers build. So the fact that Kamala Harris has made disrupting that and enforcing land use reform, I think is actually from even my kind of more center-right economic views, it's pretty important from a matter of salience and the impact on the average American. I don't think, I don't see any of that coming from the other side. I'm not even sure that that man is fully with it these days, but like I don't think he's proposing something like that. So I just don't see these things in the contrast that it just seems like so many other people in these conversations are seeing them, which is in this very reductionist, really old school way of thinking. Like there's the socialists on the left and there's like the conservatives on the right and there's like this. And the reality is like none of these distinctions make any sense anymore. Like why? Not because they were largely irrational conglomerations of a whole bunch of series of like different views. Like it's an accident of history that cultural conservatism and free markets found themselves married together. And I think the only real reason that happened was because of communism and because of the fact that the communists were atheists. And that was in some ways what a lot of cultural conservatives in the West actually originally objected to. In fact, there was, people don't recognize sort of the slow evolution here. Like you go back and I mean Herbert Hoover, the Republican president, when the Great Depression hit, he wrote a book criticizing capitalism. I mean, go on Wikipedia. So I think that like conservatives used to be very skeptical of capitalism and free markets because remember conservatives care about cultural virtue. Like you don't want people engaging in prostitution or doing like, you know, like repugnant or vulgar things.
Traditional values. And capitalism was just an opportunity for the more libertine elements of society. And you saw this in the early 1920s, the conservatives of the time wanted nothing to do with free market capitalism. It was in fact like the liberals, the sort of the what you might have said was the center-left back then, but you've had so many shifts in political culture. But I think we're back there again largely. I think what we would describe as like the center-left today, to the extent that there is support for, and this I know there's people screaming at us right now through the screen or their headphones as I say this, is really the only serious game in town for free market capitalism. What is, what we might call like the center-left aspect of the political spectrum.
You're going to have to explain why that's the only.
Because it is the only. I mean, even though I wouldn't say it's exactly a place for laissez-faire ideas to flourish today, it's certainly a political space that's very much preoccupied with reigning in what it sees as the excesses of economic power, particularly the rise of the social media companies, really, really large powerful multinationals that seem to have more bargaining power than entire governments, has led to that space not necessarily being very friendly to a hands-off approach. And I think for good reason. I think there is dangerous excess here. But the reason why I would say like this is the only game in town if you're a free market capitalist is because if you're a free market capitalist, you should really care about the rule of law and impartial courts for like commercial disputes. You should really, really care about a stable political system that's going to have predictable results, that when the regulation gets passed, you may not like it, but you know how it will be enforced and it won't be enforced based on that bureaucrat's loyalty to the current president or the current ideology. Once we start doing that, the system really starts to break. And I would say that right now, and like this is like much to my chagrin, I think the Republican Party's destruction, and it has been destroyed, it has been destroyed. The party of Lincoln has been completely destroyed as an institution, as a functional institution, as a failed state of a party.
How? Because I think there will be conservative people say exactly the same about the, you know what, like in another era.
I am in some ways, I am a secular conservative of the center. Like I'm not, like I think like a conservative liberal if you will, not a social conservative. Like I'm, don't worry everyone, you're a classic liberal. I, you can go back and look if you don't believe me. But I was actually a very early advocate for same-sex marriage, for example, even when I was associated with conservative politics. Because I was always on the secular side of things. And those people still exist. A lot of them have been named now. Why has the Republican Party been destroyed?
Because some polls at the moment are saying the Republican Party is about to win another election. Quite significant polling data shows that. So how can a party that's been destroyed, or do you mean its ideology has changed?
It's not the ideology. The party is not functional. It's just, it's Trump and MAGA. And like the Republican machinery is still being used, but it has essentially been disassembled and it has been taken over by members of the Trump family. It literally is being run by members of the Trump. He sent members of his family into the RNC after he secured the nomination earlier this year and promptly began redirecting the Republican National Committee's funds towards paying for his criminal defense in the three cases that special counsel Jack Smith had brought against him, or sorry, the two cases he brought against him and the third in Georgia, sorry, that's a state case. And that was the moment I think that the Republican Party died. Like it died at that moment, right? Because if it was a functioning political party, then the party would be, not red, it has to elect like members, like, you know, local politicians at the city and the state level, District Court, like District Court elections, District Attorneys General. They, the Republican Party is responsible for getting tens of thousands of various officials across this country elected into various levels of office. And the machinery of this party is not designed, nor should it be fully designed for the disposal of just who happens to be the current presidential nominee or the president.
So are you basically saying the Republican Party has become its own authoritarian dictatorship?
Yes. I mean, the party doesn't exist anymore as an institution. Like it's gone. I mean, the legal documents are still there, but like it has, the establishment of the Republican Party that was its binding function that brought it all together, that kept things sane, has been removed. And the Trump organization, its family members and its acolytes have been sent in to run it.
Like I don't understand how the structure of these parties traditionally work. I don't understand how the DNC works. I don't understand how the Republican Party works.
Well, I mean, it's, I mean, what happens, what are the backdoor corridors of power?
Yeah, I mean, like traditionally the parties are very powerful organizations. But what is there a board of governance for a party?
Yeah, yeah. You have, you know, the National Committee is like made up of committee members and there's ways in which, you know, the party like comes up with ways in which those members are chosen. The current like leader of the party, like be it like a sitting president or like, I don't know what all the crazy rules are, but like whoever is seen as the most senior might have some like appointment rights. But like at the end of the day, it's not meant to be a dictatorship of a single person. There's many interests. There's sometimes there are even disagreement within the party. You've got like candidates, you have more centrist Democratic candidates who are running in red states that don't necessarily buy into the same progressive policies that a Democratic candidate here in California buys into. And the party has to be able to like reconcile both of these differences and be able to like put the party machinery up to get them both elected. Whereas in the Republican Party, Trump has removed all that. It's not there. In fact, like one of the things that I think is an undertold story going into this election in the next three weeks is how they destroyed their get out the vote infrastructure at the RNC. They gutted it.
Explain what that is. The get out the vote.
I mean, you have, I mean, it's the same thing in the UK or Canada or any other country that has elections, is that one of the important functions of a political party is to make sure that the voters who are voting for them get to the polls and vote. That can be everything from calling them, that can be everything from like knocking on their doors, it can be to offering them a ride to the polls for like somebody who maybe is disabled or something. And so you get volunteers to help people vote. And the party creates really sophisticated infrastructure. They put a lot of emphasis into knowing who their voters are and who their committed voters are and then sending out volunteers to target those people and make sure that they get their ballot in the ballot box. So both the DNC and the RNC like traditionally have like pretty sophisticated operations that work with like state and local parties on Election Day to like coordinate all this. Trump went in there and he gutted all this. He defunded all of this from the RNC like earlier this year.
How does that benefit him though? Should he wants there?
Well, I mean, you're talking about like you act like he thinks more than one step ahead. I mean, you at the time.
But I don't understand what's the benefit because the benefit to him is people out there voting.
Yeah. I mean, he, I just don't think he, I mean, this is why you have Elon Musk right now like trying to with this America PAC, trying to, because Elon Musk has figured this out. That Trump just completely gutted the RNC get out the vote operations. And so Elon Musk is camped out in Pennsylvania right now basically trying, he's going on tour, yeah, he's basically trying to orchestrate a get out the vote infrastructure in these past few weeks to compensate for the fact that Trump just completely gutted this operation.
Is this election coming down to Pennsylvania?
Yeah. I mean, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think depending on which way Pennsylvania goes, so will go the election. I think that's a pretty safe bet at this point. I mean, there's, are you following Polymarket?
Yeah. Let's have a look at the latest thing. I don't know what I think about that, but I was discussing it with Danny yesterday.
Here we go. Polymarket. Trump, comma, election, because it's, here we go, because it's different from the polls. Presidential election winner 2024.
It's way different from the polls.
Yeah. So although it does, you know, the PredictIt market which is an American domestic market, Americans can actually use Polymarket, you know this, right? American citizens can't use it.
It's not, well, you can with a VPN.
Yeah, well, and that's pretty simple to do because UK people can't use it. You can with a VPN. There's no KYC.
Yeah. I mean, betting markets here are, I've got like Kamala at 48 and Donald Trump at 52.
You mean, yeah, it's, I mean, but here it's got it, so it's got him at 60.3 and her 39.8.
The math doesn't need to add up. But I was chatting to Danny about this. I said, a poll to me, a poll is asking people who they're going to vote and that will give you an accurate percentage. Yeah. But if you see the polls that Trump are winning, I don't think a betting market is necessarily going to reflect that. A betting market that thinks, is more convinced one's going to win is just going to swing towards that. Yeah. And so I don't see it as a, I think some people are looking at going 60/40 on Polymarket and thinking, well, Trump's, this is a landslide. I just think the betting directs towards what the polls are saying.
Yeah. So, I mean, what would your Republican friends say to you about the Republican Party essentially being dead? And look, I recognize that like for anyone getting angry about us having this conversation, just listen. There are Republicans Against MAGA as a group I follow on Twitter. I'm intrigued to see what they say. Almost all of my Republican friends agree with me, okay? At least in private, even if they won't come out like vote for Kamala Harris, like none of them are voting for Trump. None of my Republican friends. They're just either not voting or they're doing something silly like write in a candidate. But most of them don't live in places where it matters anyways. So they're Republicans in blue states. But I mean, among my Republican conservative friends of which I have many because I've trafficked in those circles when I was younger and carried some of those friendships into adulthood, I mean, I don't have anyone that like actually thinks that like Trump is a good choice. Like these new converts like David Sacks or Elon Musk or like any of the Bill Ackman. Like I mean, my theory is, my theory, we should just go there. Why don't we just go there? This will make the conversation more interesting.
Your theory? Oh, I think they, let me tee that up with just by the way since I've become politically...
One of the best outcomes of that is being able to see with clarity, because the inherent bias people have means—and I've done it, but I've probed people from either side. If I, like in the UK, if I probe a Labour voter on the performance of Keir Starmer in these first 100 days, they're very defensive, you know, and will leap to say, 'Yeah, but the Conservatives did this.' And so it kind of ranges between defensiveness and what a bad 'ism'. And if I probe my Conservative friends, they're very direct attack on the Labour Party and very defensive to the point whereby, if you did a blind test with a policy that was by both sides, you blind tested it, I believe their views would change depending on who the party is proposing the policy. It's become so... it just becomes easier. You have like these almost like these X-ray specs where we can look at this.
I mean, like Gallup and Pew do broad-based opinion surveys of the American population every single year. You can look at this where they go into every single opinion that anyone could have on basically anything, and they try to get a pulse of where Americans sit on various things. Everything from marijuana decriminalization or legalization to their views on transgender issues. And obviously there are some divergences here, but I mean, you essentially have overlap in terms of policy agreement by 60 to 70% of Americans on virtually everything. Levels of taxation, how much should the rich pay, like should we give poor people money, like all these other things. You essentially have this actually really robust, if everyone just sat around and did it, a really robust 60 to 70% center that seemingly can agree on like most things, most of the time.
Yeah, but I mean, we all know this. It's the loud minority that control this. It's the loud minority who are the extremists on each side that drive the debate. They create the majority of the content, they create the talking points, they create the arguments. They're activated by the political parties themselves. You know, we have things we agree on. I think on a lot of issues you would generally be more progressive than I am, and certain things I'd be more conservative. What do you think? What I mean, now that I don't—now that I can speak openly about it, just throw it at me, I'm curious.
I don't know until we went through the topics, but let me just say the point I'm trying to make is even if we had somebody who wasn't even conservative on economics, you know, proper woke lefty, I bet if I could sit down, we could discuss the issues and kind of come to some kind of rational conclusions, things that we agree on.
Yeah, I mean, to the point where this other article I've got coming out where I'm like telling the Libertarians to step up. I said, can we just agree on some foundational things that we all want? I think we all want this is the basics: a strong economy. I don't think anyone disagrees with that. Okay, we all want lower taxation if we can have it. Okay, we want reduced poverty, we want less corruption, we want good healthcare and good education. I think it doesn't matter—'good' a lot there, well, but like better, the definition of it trajectory-wise, you want every one of those to go in the right trajectory. I don't think on any of those, unless you're there with a full Marxist, I think pretty much you sit down with whether somebody's a Libertarian, a super woke leftist, a super conservative right-wing person, and you said to them, 'Do you want a stronger economy?' Both would say yes. If you said, 'Do you want better education for your children?' I think they would say yes. If you want cheaper, better healthcare and better healthcare outcomes, yes, I would want that. I think we do. Do you want more security? Do you want a better rule of law? I think we all agree on that. And so the point is, I think we kind of all want the same things. The argument in politics is how we get there.
Most people do. Some people do want power, some people do want to dominate others, some people do. But just their relationship of their ego with the world around them is not in a healthy place. But that's the action. What I'm saying is the policy, what the outcomes, I think everybody wants pretty much the same. I would go higher than—I would say 95%, 99% would agree with those. Yeah, it's how you get there. In that, maybe a Conservative Party say we need to get there by more deregulation and lower taxes, whereas the Labour Party in the UK say we need to get there with higher taxes and more regulation, but they're trying to get the same outcome. And the truth is, what we need is objective, intellectual answers for how we get there.
Yeah, that means we can't—we cannot have that. You want to have a conversation about the politics of distribution while we're sitting here having a conversation about the politics of power.
Yes, and the problem is once we're talking about the politics of power, the politics of distribution is all academic. Like, we just don't—we don't have like—we're like, I mean, and you ask like—there's no—it's not hard for me. Like, I proudly voted—I already did my mail-in ballot two days ago with my wife. I voted for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I voted for the ticket, even though it doesn't matter. I'm here in Los Angeles, she's going to win this state and all of its electoral votes handily. With no reservations, none. Yeah, because what you just said, that most people want the same things even if they want to go about it different ways, I believe that about Kamala Harris. From watching her, I believe that she generally wants the same things as me, even if I disagree with her about how to go about that. And of which there are substantial disagreements that I'm not at liberty to get into right now because I'm not going to help Donald Trump do his job. I'll be more than happy to speak more openly about my misapprehensions about her policies once I'm not having a conversation about the politics of power in this country. Because Donald Trump is not a good person. He is clearly only out for himself. He clearly only cares about himself. He literally went to a memorial service for a dead man that was supposed to be a somber affair and danced to the Village People's YMCA. I don't know any details of this. In front of—this man is a narcissistic sociopath, and it's not hard to see that this is true because he has not shown an ounce of empathy in his entire life.
And so even actually, I saw a bit of that. No, it's funny you should say that. Did you see him on the Theo Von podcast?
It's—I tell you what, there was something in that that surprised me. He went on Theo Von's podcast and Theo talked about when he used to be addicted to cocaine.
Yeah, and oh, I did see this, yes.
And the way Trump spoke to him and asked him about it showed he was curious about it.
Curious and empathetic. There was a curiosity there. Yeah, but still, look, this is going to sound flippant and flagrant, and I don't trust him. But I'm sure that he had a real curiosity there because, as people know, Donald Trump has been afraid—very afraid—his entire life of mind-altering substances. He does not drink alcohol. He is afraid. Is he afraid? He just has interest. I'm not sure. But I imagine—I could imagine someone like that who has avoided mind-altering substances his entire life getting pretty curious about someone's experience on there. There was an empathy to his voice. It was strange. But the point you make there about him, I don't give him much credit. Sorry, this is so me able to sit outside of this one. I don't have a horse in the race. I can't vote in the US elections. Yeah, if I could, I don't actually know where I would. I possibly—I wouldn't vote for Kamala. It's—I don't—I probably still wouldn't vote at all, to be honest. I probably wouldn't vote because it's still voting for decline.
But the things—why do you think—why do you think that's going to drive us into decline? Why do I think? Yeah, because I think you have a root issue of corruption in the US system. You have a root issue of debt. MMT doesn't work, despite what Stephanie Kelton says.
You think the government's currently practicing MMT?
I think they think they are. I think parts—I don't think they think that. I think they think they're following like Chicago School monetarism badly right now.
I think that's what they think. Either way, nobody's proposing an answer to deal with the massive issues of spending, debt, inflation.
Yeah, nobody's proposing any of that.
No one, true. Yeah, so I mean, one of these proposals is going to accelerate our decline into debt by on the order of five magnitudes, if you want to go by what the Wall Street Journal—not hardly a left-wing publication—that compared the economic impact of Trump and Kamala's stated economic policies. 63% of economists, including the Wall Street Journal editorial board, all came to the conclusion that Kamala's economic policy was going to be far less damaging for the United States's fiscal trajectory than Trump's.
Yeah, I don't even know how to trust these things anymore. Didn't these are—this is conservative, yeah, but didn't 53 ex-FBI and CIA employees state that the Hunter Biden laptop bore all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation?
Yeah, but it wasn't—it did bear those hallmarks, yeah, but it was—it was simultaneously his real laptop, it was simultaneously what it appeared to be, and it was also a Russian misinformation op that was meant to try and use you opportunistically. I am 100% convinced, by the way, that both of these things are true at the same time. I totally understand the journalistic and editorial mistake that Twitter made in suppressing that story. And honestly, that's actually why the Russian propaganda was so effective in our system, because that is actually what Russian influence operations in our country are aiming at. They're not aiming at trying to convince us that the Hunter Biden laptop is fake. They're trying to get us to show that we're hypocrites, that we're corrupt, look how stupid we are, look at how the left overreacts. This is actually the reaction that they're trying to get.
No, Mike, we can't do this one. Listen, I mean, this is exactly what's happening.
Yeah, but listen, if the laptop is real, it's not propaganda. If the story is suppressed, it can both be real and propaganda.
How can something be real and be propaganda? The story is true, the laptop was real, the story was suppressed.
Let's back up for a sec. Back up for—so I get it. So like, I mean, the story on this—the Iranian hackers apparently stole all of this information from the Trump campaign that we currently know that journalists are currently sitting on and don't want—apparently don't want to irresponsibly publish because they don't want to interfere with the election. No, I'm serious. Like, I want to know—I just want to really dig in here a little bit because there is a crazy amount of hypocrisy on this. Hypocrisy is fine on this. Like, the very same people right now that would be outraged if whatever those dossiers of information that the Iranian hackers have put in the hands of journalists who have yet to—maybe they'll publish them between now and election day, but so far they have chosen not to for reasons I don't understand. Could you imagine what the populist right and people would be saying if this was 2020 and the tables were reversed?
Yeah, but it would be like Hunter—it would be like the Hunter Biden laptop times a million.
Yeah, but Mike, that's whataboutism.
It's not whataboutism. It's what about this. It's not whataboutism. You need to ground yourself in like what the are we actually talking about here. Because like, look, I get it. Like, his crack addict son, in like probably—I don't know what he was on—like walked into that store like high on meth or whatever he was doing, and like forgot that the laptop was there and like left a whole bunch of like videos on it of him smoking crack and all that other stuff. And honestly, if I was a journalist that happened upon that, like a few weeks before election day in the middle of the COVID crisis and everything we were going through, and we had a president that was like talking about putting bleach in us to wash COVID out, and also knowing that—like, that happened in 2016 with the Comey email thing that turned into nothing but many people, including Nate Silver, believe probably threw the election to Trump—would I be a little bit hesitant to just basically put it out there and be like, 'You decide, America'? Like, what are we talking about? Like, trying to say this is obvious corruption. I say it's well, and yet we're sitting here with journalists doing whatever they're doing to try and be responsible about this Iranian material that's hacked that no one's talking about that we know that they're in possession of right now. So like, which way do you want it? Is that corrupt that those documents haven't been published?
I don't know the details of that, so I don't know anything of it. I'm just dealing with this again.
No, but if you're going to start with this principle that the public has the right to know and they have the right to make up their own minds and nobody has the right to basically gatekeep and fact-check first before basically irresponsibly putting something out there that could potentially be Russian disinformation—like, we don't know, we haven't checked, we haven't got our forensic experts on the laptop. It's kind of convenient that just a few weeks before election day. I'm not trying to say that was right. I'm simply trying to say that if you're in that position, it's a completely reasonable thing to think that maybe this is Russian disinformation. It has the hallmarks of it. And I honestly think that it probably was somewhat that, in the sense—I think the Russians helped it along. I think the Russians helped along Giuliani finding that laptop.
Maybe, but the laptop—look, I have no horse in the race. This is the point I'm trying to make. I have no horse in the race. I'm just trying to say—I don't even know how we got here. It's from a number of people have said a certain thing. The point I'm trying to say is that it's so hard to know what to trust or believe anymore. It is so difficult. But I have no horse in the race, so I just see it all. The arguments you make about Trump, I could equally make them about Kamala. I could make equal ones about her being a narcissistic sociopath who's only interested in power. I could make this—I mean, all politicians that are successful are somewhere on the narcissism scale. But like, do I believe that she will put her own interests above everyone else to the exclusion of others? No. I mean, I look at her relationship with her family and the people around her, and then I look at the relationship of Trump and the people he—he doesn't even have loyalty. Look at—he doesn't even like one of his own daughters. Like, he won't even look at her. He's like embarrassed by her. And broadly, his wife won't hold his hand. You've seen all the videos of her slapping his hand away every single time he tries to hold it. This does not seem like a man that is good at putting others before himself.
But this idea that they're both equally the same kinds of narcissist, we don't need to be crazy.
I think crazy. I think what we're doing right now is we're contributing to what I see as the problem.
No, we're not. We're living in reality. We're living in reality. We have choices in front of us. And like, the reality is that look at John F. Kennedy. Like, you know, this exalted leader, and he deserves, I think, part of the credit for being the most powerful normative storyteller of America in the post-war era, at least up until Reagan. At that time, you know, he was also a corrupt philanderer. Like, we know his family had relationships with the mob, with the mafia. Like, we know that those connections were there. It wasn't a completely clean family. There was stuff going on, right? He had his brother as his attorney general, right? In one of the most nepotistic relationships. Like, I think that if you were to get underneath JFK—and some people have, and people don't want to look at it because they want to have a very positive view of JFK, and for good reason. He said so—I mean, his inaugural speech when he was first sworn in, right? 'Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.' Right? Like, that was the line that set the stage for what would come afterwards. And you know, his famous speech calling to land a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth. You know, we want to remember that, and we should want to remember that. But he was also a deeply flawed man that was surrounded by personal corruption. And he was like, sleeping with Marilyn Monroe and cheating on his wife. Like, we know that. Like, I don't know why we've convinced ourselves that we didn't have bad choices in the past and there were just some choices that were less bad than the others. Because unfortunately, the realities of power are very brutal. They're very brutal. If we find our way back to Hobbes' state of nature, we are going to struggle to find our way back, and hopefully we'll be alive on the other side. So we've always had to make these moral compromises. We've always had to do that. And we've always had to be like grown up about it and be like, 'This is the world I live in. It's not the world I want to live in. We all aspire to better.' But by the way, that is part of liberal culture. By the way, that is part of the liberal oxygen that we breathe. This idea, this pretense that we have that things should be better, that this isn't right, that our sense of fair play is like—we actually have our own yardstick that we can measure ourselves and others against constantly. To the point where people like you, using those yardsticks, get justifiably cynical about all that corruption that you see, and then you don't even want to cast a vote. And then you have me over here telling you, as the infinite pragmatist, that like, yeah, you really do want to contain the damage. Because if we're going to turn the ship around, it's going to be a lot easier to turn this ship around if it has less damage than it's going to have on this other path. Now, I don't necessarily think that—I can't speak to Starmer in the UK. I haven't been able to pay as close attention to it. But do I think that Kamala is necessarily going to manage America into decline? No, I don't. I actually think that America is at the beginning of an actual new economic renaissance, if it wants it. I think this will make the sound money theorists really upset, but the United States has basically pulled off an amazing feat. Sure, it's a heavily indebted nation, but it's also put itself in a situation of mutually assured destruction with China, at least for now. Because China's entire capital stock is oriented towards its export markets. It doesn't have the internal consumer consumption right now, especially not with all the local wealth that went up in flames with the real estate bust. There's no way they can just juice that demand without creating a hyperinflationary episode that basically collapses the Yuan. They know this. They're stuck. So they need export markets, and they need them badly. And the United States is sitting here, and it's got consumers, and it's also growing its manufacturing base back up. And it's moving its manufacturing to Japan and to Vietnam and to South Korea and to the Dominican Republic, of all places. You know, and so the United States actually, I think, has really pulled the wool over everyone else's head here. Actually, it's in a very, very strong negotiating position, even as it pertains to its debt structuring. Like, long-term, its technological advantage, its cultural advantages, its capacity to accept immigrants into the country. China doesn't have that capacity. It's a monoculture. The racism of the Han Chinese against all other ethnic groups is so pernicious and insane. It has led to expats leaving China over the last five years at an alarming rate and a cultural genocide of the Uyghurs.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so this idea that America is entering a period of decline—well, it's decline, I guess, if you want to do what Trump and his ilk want to do, which is to withdraw from the world, which is the source of all of that power and leverage I just talked to you about. Then yeah, you will push us more quickly into something that looks like decline, and you will simply allow China and others to gather their strength against us and carve up the world. If that's what you want to do, which it seems like a great number of my countrymen want to do, then vote for Donald Trump.
Yes. So there are a lot of very smart, successful people who want to vote for Trump. Yes. More than 50% of the country may vote for Trump in the next election. We talk about some of those people. I mean, what—no, but rather than talking about people, no, I think we should talk about Elon Musk. I think we should talk about Peter Thiel. I think we should talk about David Sacks. These are public figures that have put themselves out there and are absolutely game for direct criticism and questioning of their motives. Quite honestly, I don't believe are honest.
We should come to that, but they're not honest motives. My point—the question I have is, even forget these public figures who may have business interests or libertarian principles that they think are more achievable under Trump, but which I think is where you're going to go as part of it. But why do you think Donald Trump may win this election? Where—how do they see the world differently from you? How do they see America differently from you?
They live in a completely different information environment than I do. They consume media from a set of demagogic organizations that make money making them angry.
And can you not make the exact same argument to people who would vote for Kamala? I mean, my dad doesn't like Trump.
You don't think there's negative—yeah, there's of course there's negative partisanship on the Democratic side. And I'm acting out of negative partisanship against Trump, and I would own that. Like, what, sure, yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, you're making some normative judgment about what you think is right and what you think the sumum bonum of your existence is. And you're going to say, 'Well, I'm voting against that and for this.' You know, there's a—sometimes when I try to think of myself as where I am as this weird—like I said before, something that looks like a conservative liberal—and try to imagine where I exist now in the tapestry of these conversations. And I should say, what I mean by conservative, by the way, and like in the intellectual—no, no, I mean the idea that yes, stability needs to be considered against the forces of change. That when things change too quickly, society can come apart at the seams. That takes time. Society needs time to adjust. It needs mechanisms to work out its agreements internally through the culture, through the media, through political debate, through elections, through all of these aspects of democratic deliberation that permeate our society.
Isn't that just like a pessimistic view though? Isn't there an optimistic view that change could be good?
Change is good, but what is the rate of change? Rate of change is with everything in nature.
What is it you fear policy-wise that a Trump administration might do that might lead to more instability?
He's taking an end run at our rule of law, of our system of self-government. I mean, like, I get some people are in a media bubble where they think January 6 was just a little protest that got out of hand, and that they don't situate that in the full context of several weeks and months of Donald Trump deliberately winding that mob up into thinking that their country was literally being stolen from them in election conspiracies that everyone around him, including his own daughter, according to reports, Ivanka, were trying to convince him to basically back off from. And everyone around him eventually, including his own attorney general at the time, one of the most conservative—like, evil, quite honestly. Like, you should look into his background, Bill Barr, and his connection to the Iran-Contra affair. And I would suggest this man has a very unhealthy addiction to power and belief in the goodness of power. Even he was pushed to his limit on these election conspiracies and resigned. Hey, listen, in the lame duck period—and look, I'm aware of the Georgia phone calls and just the 'find me the votes' false slates of electors that he and his crew that he was speaking to like every single day. I mean, read the Smith indictment that just came out. Just read the whole thing. Like, read the things that he was doing that they have testimony on that he was doing. He was coordinating a whole group of people across the country, across multiple states, to create a false set of electors and then try to pressure Mike Pence to acknowledge those as the real electors on the Senate floor. That was a conspiracy to steal the election, Mike.
