whole situation was lines like if your state has numbers that are falling, that means you're doing good things. but if the numbers go up, well then you're being bad. and the problem with that is that that requires me to believe that, for example, california, nevada, arizona were all at the same time and then not complying at the same and then complying again and then not complying. get it at the same time. that's not a that's not a useful explanation for the data that we're seeing. and so in case after case, like if i said to you, here are four and i can do this because i have the charts in the book. here are four counties in tennessee and one of them restricted, you know, restaurant occupant see to 25% and closed the bars. here are their charts, which is that which one is that? you cannot figure it out or this place had a really, really severe mask mandate like in in

bavaria and berlin. they even mandated n95s the super serious masks. if i plot bavaria in berlin against the rest of germany, you can't tell me which which. so my point is not i have all the answers. my point instead is let's have some humility and say maybe we just don't understand what's going on and we got a little glimpse of that a little glimpse in 2021 when andy was on msnbc, he was a white house covid adviser, and they asked him adjusting for age florida and seem about the same. and that doesn't seem possible. what do you think the explanation and i thought, oh my gosh, they actually asked him that question which you would think everyone would be asking. and his answer was underwhelming. it was, well, there are a lot of things about this virus that just continue to surprise us. sorry, that's not good enough. i mean, if you're decimating people's businesses and life savings and their dreams and postponing their surgeries and and, you know, and you have more mental health problems and alcoholism and that's your

answer. that's not good enough. so was spread of covid inevitable? and would any mitigation efforts work, in your opinion probably the best thing that could have been done and as the some people tried to do was to look at the people who were most likely to be vulnerable and have special provision for them, which in this case was easy to determine because of the thousandfold mortality difference between young and old. now we don't always have that luxury, but this time we did. and so i remember asking dr. bhattacharya from stanford, i said, i, i just don't understand. i said in, even i couldn't explain what was going on in florida, where i live, you know, i was going to comedy shows and 2021 they had concerts like everything was not entirely normal, pretty close to normal. and i said, does it seem like that shouldn't work, but why does that work? and he said, it because in those

places that are making the most provision for older people, that's where they're getting good results, where they're just focusing because we can't do everything you take the limited resources you have and you focus on the who are most likely to be in danger. and dr. jay bhattacharya wrote the foreword to this book, tell us who he is, dr. bhattacharya, is a holds a ph.d. but also an m.d. and he teaches at stanford, where he's been for quite a while. and he is he's a professor of medicine, but also a background in economics. so he can talk to you about health policy, but he can also talk to you about the medical side, which is, you know, balancing. not everybody can do very well. and until this all came along, he was a very mild mannered academic, very well respected and he wrote a great many academic papers. and he had absolutely if you've ever talked to him, had zero interest in being in the public eye. that is the last thing on earth he wanted to do, but he felt like he got thrust into it.

when something like this happens and of his work had to do with age and health policy and then covid comes along, how could he not write that? and he found that his colleagues were deserting him, were criticizing, i mean, criticism. criticism is one thing. but there were posters around campus smearing him, calling him a liar, even though he did his live air. it's just reporting his research. so jay bhattacharya, who had been a scholar at stanford for years, felt completely alienated by the experience that he had. he went from being a celebrated scholar to somebody on the fringes and his argument was everything i'm saying about the counterproductive nature of lockdowns and the collateral damage caused by lockdowns comes only from the standard preparedness playbook that we had had for a very long time. up, up 2010. i didn't invent a j on a chariot invented. i'm just telling you the playbook. we always went back and in his forward he refers to the

tyrannical public health response. yes. now that's provocative language. but if you don't like provocative language, this is not book for you. but it was it was also the the arbitrariness. it like i'm in florida and in alachua a county, you know, this is i realized this is a small trivial thing. but i think it's it's illustrative of what happened. we found. i don't know if it was like the towns of the board or whatever. i don't live there, but they came up with a rule that said retail establishment can have one person per thousand square feet. and when they were finally asked, well, how did you come up with that figure? the answer was, well, we just thought it would be simple math for everybody to do it. but yet the impression was being given that, no, no, no, i mean, we've been locked away in lab coats with test tubes. we've come to this conclusion. but a lot of it was just arbitrary and it should have been obvious as as time went on, got the data like we had google mobility data early so we could see people who are moving around and people who aren't. it doesn't seem to matter like

the things that where the virus is just doing what it wants, laughing at our feeble efforts. but it just doesn't seem to do anything. and so if i look japan and south korea, i have a graph in there the final quarter of 2020, japan versus korea, japan, south korea had very different. but their project trees are identical. so again, unless i'm supposed to believe that they all complied and then didn't comply. and then the other thing is that goes to the psychosis language because when around april of 2020, it was clear that japan was not undertaking as severe a response as other asian countries. and so the headlines and i wrote them all down, the headlines were in effect, japan is going to get what's coming to it, you know, and it was almost like it wasn't like, you know, japan's doing something wrong and let's pray that it all works out for them. that was not the tone of these articles. it was they they're going to get what's going on mean. that is not that's not humane.

but the fact is they had a fairly lackluster lockdown and they were they have a very high elderly too. and yet somehow their results are drastically better than ours and on par south korea's even though they had completely different policies. why doesn't this at least make us say that's curious. i wonder why that is. maybe we shouldn't have this absolute certainty that we know exactly what's happening and what to do in japan. they were actually saying, look, the experts here are stumped. we really don't understand. that's all i wanted was some some humility. instead of your you know, your brother's a bad person because he went to you know, he went to this motor cycle festival or something that had no discernible effect on anything. but meanwhile, people are dying without the presence of loved ones. people are missing surgeries. i have an acquaintance who had cancer and they actually said for more, just hang on.

what? it's not urgent. we'll come back to you. he finally gets to the hospital. this was in the uk and they say, oh, sorry. at stage four. i mean, you can't do that, you know, and there are so numbers now that are baked into the cake, cancer deaths that will occur because the screenings happen. the new york times said that about 2 million extra people are going to die from hiv, malaria and tuberculosis because of lockdown related reasons. we have maybe a million deaths related to all the unemployment because that has effects as well we're hearing that in the developing world, people like in myanmar were reporting that people were reduced to eating rats and snakes. and if you can't, there were parts of the of the world where there was no education, not not just, you know, online, none for two years. none unless you can those numbers better jump off that graph. i better be able to tell which one of these places did this.

and one didn't. and in fact, of my last little story will be my faith. one of my people in the world is who's at this conference, catherine hewitt. she went the ohio legislature and she said, i've got a graph, but i haven't the timeline, it's just a graph of covid deaths. and given that these policies were supposed to be so effective, i'd like you to tell me when where on graph did the curfew go into effect? where did the mask mandate go into effect? where was it lifted? where's thanksgiving on this graph? because thanksgiving we should see a spike after that. and of the legislators couldn't pick out anything because the graph is entirely random. so all i'm saying is we need to try to figure out why is it random? this stuff didn't do anything other than decimate extremely vulnerable populations around the world. thomas woods what what's your background in writing about the covid virus? i'm writing this in capacity as a u.s. historian, and so so in the book, it's overwhelming an american point of view which

means, by the way, i lost a translation deal. the polish we're to translate my book. and then they looked at it and they this is all u.s. forget it. so i had to give them the money back. but that's okay. but so so do this as a u.s. historian. but i do that. i'm not making medical claims in the book. i'm not saying, well, this treatment works better than that one. that's not my place to say, but it is my place to say. they said x would happen, but x didn't happen. they said, if i compare this and this, i'll see a big difference. but i don't. i'm a smart guy who can read charts. i have a ph.d. in history from columbia. so, you know, i know what i'm doing and the results weren't what were promised. why do you think it took on a moralizing tone and do you see anything in history that's comparable for now? that's a good, i think in part, and i hate to be unfair to, but i really do even though i can be a provocative writer, i hate to be uncharitable, but it does seem like there were an awful lot of who felt like, here's my chance to be involved in

something that matters. and all i have to do is stay in my house. stay in my house, and render moral judgment on everybody else. look at me. you're right. i'm sitting at my house and i'm saving, you know, 11 gajillion lives or something i think that's very, very tempting for me. you know, like death of a salesman. everybody wants to be somebody everybody wants to have a legacy, you know, everybody wants to feel like they contribute into something. and this was handed to them on a silver platter. so now if i had more leisure, i no doubt i could come up with historical examples. we were told, throughout the pandemic to follow the science. do think that we did? i think we followed people who were held up to us as the official experts. but i don't think that's helpful because i think especially a time could you imagine like i don't care your political stance is or what you thought about the covid policy if we're in in an unprecedented why would we know i understand you know some

somebody who has no business saying anything you would listen to him but we have seer mostly accomplished people in many many of people signed that great barrington declaration. what don't you think it would be a good idea for us to let them talk it out? just let them freely talk. like the thing about the ventilators early on in new york, they were saying we got to get everybody on the ventilators. it was lone doctor who made extremely amateurish youtube video saying, i think these ventilator is are actually counterproductive. now if had all said banish him because he's not part of the consensus about ventilators. a lot of bad stuff would happen because of his video. people took a second look at it and said we should be them on ventilators like this. so that's my point. you know, some people will be wrong, but that's how science proceeds. it always proceeds by making mistakes. it's clumsy and it's messy but eventually we reach a consensus on something. i think the consensus was premature early declared. this is a chart from your diary

of a psychosis. can you walk us through what we're looking at there? yes. so this is a chart of the statistic known as excess deaths. so that is to say, we look at a of where we would expect the death numbers to be based on past experience in various countries. and the the the issue is we are curious know of the various country now this is mostly europe but you can see there are several countries outside of europe. which country did best in terms of excess. and the reason that this is helpful is that this includes not just covid deaths, but there are some people who died because of the mitigation measures mean that was unavoidable, that that would happen. but there's also the problem of how do you decide if something is a covid or not? and norway and sweden right. you know, practically, you know, feet away from each other actually have different ways of deciding if something should be classified, a covid death or not. this gets rid of all those

complications because we're just looking at deaths in general. so you eliminate all the confusion. and what we see is that sweden had the low list excess death percentage. now, if we had said in march 20, if sweden doesn't do this stuff, where do you think it'll be on this on this chart? well, a lot of people said, well, dead last. obviously be the worst one. and it'll be an absolute catastrophe. and in for three years, the main epidemiologist in anders tegnell was condemned and vilified by experts all over the world and. yet so unlike anthony fauci, who is welcomed and fed it and celebrated at every turn, this guy was smeared and called a killer for three saw it years and he said, i'm going to be vindicated. it's going to take three years because you imagine having the you know, what's to go three years, not being vindicated and having the worst things on earth said about you. but he had the guts to do that

and he was vindicated. now that should make us say if something like this happens again, we have more data now and it's not as as we thought. no one who favored the alleged mitigation measures would have predicted sweden would have such a favorable. none of them would have predicted it. so better have learned something. and what can we learn from? the countries at the bottom? well, in some cases it it's hard to understand why like for example brazil and brazil was more laissez faire. peru had a brutal lockdown and they had almost the same results. bad result in both places. so it's not a policy difference. or, for example, in japan and i mentioned japan had a good result cambodia had a pretty good result. south korea had a pretty good result. so that's led some people to think that for some reason, maybe in some parts of asia, maybe there was some preexisting

immunity to it because no matter what policy you implemented, you got a pretty good result. aj calls it policy invariants. like no matter what you do you get a pretty good result. but i would be willing to bet that at least of the explanation has to do with the age difference in the countries if you're not correcting for that. but also, we haven't corrected for obesity levels because we know obesity was another marker for this and the us has a big problem with that. as we know. professor woods, did you get the. i did not. why i had covid in 2021. and i think now more or less conceded by everybody that that was better protection than i could have gotten any other way. what do you people to know when they pick up diary of a psychosis definition of of what tends to happen is that we we have a crisis in america and then a narrative gets attached to it. so whether it's the great depression, well, there's a narrative about that capitalism

run amok or whatever narrative is. but there's always another way of looking at these and but the other way is the one that i hold. and it tends to get trampled by the official version. and the official version is that we have a crisis and the wise come along and solve it for us and so next time you stupid rubes better listen to the experts, i would say hold your horses a little bit. the experts could stand a little bit more humility because this one, they got dead wrong. thomas woods is the author of a psychosis how public health disgraced itself during mania is the book. thank you for your time. pleasure'sthe book is called cey trap. the author, university of illinois, alan redstone. the subtitle why need to question ourselves more and how we can judge others less. professor redstone, what is the certainty trap? well, thank you so much for having me.

the certainty trap is the problem. it's a problem in how we that shapes how we view world and how we view other people. in particular, it drives our sense of moral righteous indignation and when it comes to political topics, in particular contempt and contempt for people who disagree. and it does that in two ways. one is certainty. certainty tells us that our knowledge is definitive rather than provisional. so in the sense of, you know, what is the relationship, gender and biology or is immigration good or bad for low skilled workers or, you know, or even something like, you know, does having a baby during high school lead to lower earnings age 40? all of these kinds of questions that relate to social problems have that don't come with definitive answers. now, when you talk about the

provisional nature of knowledge, you can into some philosophical weeds pretty quickly, which i do a little bit in the book. but that's one part of what the certainty trap does. the other thing that certainty does is it leads to be really sloppy in our thinking, in the sense that we treat our values goals, beliefs, etc. as and like they don't need to be said out loud and that actually creates all kinds of problems. is this a term that you coined? is it a term that's been around for a while? i'm always i'm not i mean, there was i think there was a book called the certainty trap at one point that had something to do with christianity or i'm not sure it was. when i was looking at titles. so i came up with it in world, i came up with it whether it existed ever had it ever been uttered by anyone, i don't know. a lot of redstone from your book, we are most prone to falling into the certainty trap. we are confronted with something that we find from a moral,

ethical standpoint. but even then we can and should avoid it. for example, when uganda passed of the world's strictest laws in the world against homosexuality, i wrote a piece called the problem with calling law homophobic. in it, i argued that, calling the law homophobic was a way of giving yourself permission to simply dismiss its supporters with a wave. the hand. can you expound on that? yeah i mean, i think it's so what i was when that law passed and it must have just a kind of contextualize this a little bit most of my work actually ends up focusing on the united states. this example came up because i thought it was so it seemed like it made it it made for a sort of an illustrative example. so when the law was passed and i was thinking like, okay, here's a law that, it's not only sort of objectively, it's one of the strictest against some the sexuality in the world and something that i would

personally disagree with. and was thinking, well, okay, there's going to be an impulse to say, well, this is homophobic, etc. and what would happen if i. what would a conversation look like if i were and having having a conversation with the president of uganda and what would that look like? and what would happen if i told him? well, that's the most homophobic thing i've ever heard. and where would that go? and so challenge i was trying to think for myself the answer to this question, which comes up a lot in the context of the certainty trap, which is what is the what is the version that actually this sort of two pieces. one is what is the version of the argument that would make sense to me that i can't that i can't sort of hang on my assumption about the person's intent or an assumption about that they just don't have the right information. right. so like how can i disagree in a way that doesn't hang an argument on either of those

things. and so i don't get to say, well, you're just homophobic. right. and so what is the thing? what is the principle for me that's being violated when i have when i disagree with that law and it might be something like i think people should be allowed to love who they want. i think to consenting adults should be allowed to do you know what they want in the privacy of their own home, whatever. right. it could be some sign of like that. but but whatever. however, i words to it, i've not hung my argument on my assumption about the other person's intent. now the corollary to that and avoiding the certainty trap is that there are no beliefs, values etc. that are exempt from criticism, questioning or examination. so that means if i say that, and you're the president of uganda, you get to say to me, if you will, if you want. okay. you think people should love who they want? are there limits to that? like, should you polygamy be legal?

i don't know if it is legal in uganda or not right now. i said, what about if i want to marry my dog? i mean, whatever. like they can i get to that person to challenge me because there's nothing that's there's nothing that gets a free pass on being challenged. but as long as i'm willing to do that, i can stand right? i was before disagreeing with him about this law, but i've done it in a way that is not making an assumption about his intent. does that make sense? you didn't start your question to him with how could you possibly think that right, right? yeah. how could you possibly think that? you know, and it be like if you asked me if you asked me, for example, is there a version of that argument, an anti-homosexuality law, that would make sense to me? could i come up with could i think through a version of that justification for that law would make sense to me? yeah, i could. does that mean that i get behind the law and i'm just using this law as an example. no, it does in this for me.

it doesn't. but but it but if the question is, can come up with a version that would make sense to me, someone that i think someone could justify. yes, of course i could. and that makes it that the contempt piece a lot harder to get. can i add one? so one of the things one of the reasons that i if i can just back up for a second, one of the reasons that i would focus so much on the problem of contempt is we tend to think when think about and particularly at this time with the election coming up in november, we think about democratic stability. and we think threats to democracy and people mean different by that. but i mean sort of anything that really threatens the social fabric, that threatens the stability, our democratic of our institutions, etc. and we tend to think of those as coming from the left or the right. and so you get into arguments about whether it's wokeness or it's election denial or whatever. and people are focused on defending their side, explaining

why the other side worse, there's actually a different model that i would argue fits better for how we should think about threats to democracy. so if you think about instead, instead of this left right spectrum, you think about almost three blocks, just picture three blocks stacked on top of one another and if the ones underneath fall break or whatever, the whole thing comes down. so the block at the top is the machinery democracy. that means free and fair elections that means the separation of power. it means limits on executive power. all of things that we think of that make democracy go the middle block is a commitment and unwavering commitment to political pluralism. right. so if that block sales, the rest of the top one doesn't it doesn't really matter underneath that block, underneath that commitment to political pluralism is the absence of contempt for people who disagree. uncertainty is what drives. so i'm focused on that bottom block when i talk about the

certainty trap, does that make sense? what kind of feedback did get from that article about the uganda homosexuality law? i think so. that was just on a i think that was actually a substack piece. and i remember one of the comments was something like, you know. yeah, but stakes are really high. like, you know, something, some kind of comment about how the stakes really high and they're talking about people's lives, etc. but what i would say to that, it's actually because the stakes are high that what i'm saying matters. it's not only when the stakes are low, like how we interact with people matters more, matters because the stakes are high. yeah. back your book. yeah. the certainty trap. when we're righteous, we morally virtuous and justified. and when we feel morally virtuous, virtuous and justified, we see the person who

doesn't agree as inherently morally flawed and unjustified. we find the person's positions threatening and in need of a swift, strong and unambiguous condemnation. yeah. mean this is again like so if you get this is at that bottom block this is this is and this is this lays behind when you hear people talk about concerns about free speech, concerns about lack of viewpoint, diversity, a lack of submissive discourse, political polarization, frankly, even just to some extent, trust in institutions around higher education around the media. you're talking about each of those. you can follow a thread back to the problem of certainty and the problem of how we communicate and how we fundamentally think about what we know and the assumptions that we make in the in the book i talk about three different fallacies. one is the subtle question

fallacy, which is just what it sounds like we this idea of treating the word and we think the answers are obvious and simple and we don't make our assumptions clear when we treat knowledge as definitive that to lead to i call the fallacy of equal knowledge. and so the fallacy of equal knowledge is the idea that. if you and i disagree on policing right that the thing that keeps apart is that you don't have the right information and that if you knew what i knew you would have the right opinion, you would agree with me. right. and this drives this assumption this fallacy drives an enormous amount programing and education, etc. right. so that's but it's a fallacy because the underlying assumption not i'm not saying that education doesn't matter. i'm not saying information doesn't matter. i'm making a narrower claim, which is that even if we had if we all had the same information, we still wouldn't all agree on abortion. black lives matter, you know, whatever, go down the line gun,

control whatever. and then the third fallacy is the fallacy of known intent. so a lot of times the fallacy of equal knowledge fails, like, let's say, oh you know, peter has the wrong opinion about immigration. that's just because he doesn't know any better. and then you and talk and either one of two things happens. either you to me that you have you actually know something about immigration and i can no longer blame your wrong opinion on your ignorance or i give you all my information and you don't change your mind right either way. but now. well, he has all the information. and why does he still have this opinion? it's got to be that he has some hateful he's got some hateful intent. so those are the three fallacies that that sort of work together to form. the certainty trap at the university of illinois you teach a class bigots and snowflakes do is it popular it's an so i've taught it for five i taught it five times it was one year where

i didn't teach it but i've taught it for i've got five times. i love iin love it. thirty-five or something. >> all political demographic backgrounds? >> i'm in the higher education sociology department so -- the work that i'm doing i could have a room full of people on the same page about something and in order to do the work i do, i don't need people to be standards for different political perspectives. it's about thinking through, what is the version? what i have to in order to come to the conclusion that everybody advocates everybody is, what would i have to treat for that

conclusion? ... viously, it's very self. so it's a great group of. i also teach a class called social problems which in we cover a lot of the same material and there's not quite the same self-selection happening but i in general i find students really receptive. yeah, sorry. go ahead. so when we hear about safe spaces and and students to me get offended by things. yeah. do we? how do you avoid. i'm not. i mean, know, every time i say this, i feel like lightning can strike down, but i've not i've never had an because and here's probably why like i'm not interested in telling what to think ab telling people what to think about anything. i'm not trying to tell them there's bunch of like, you know, soft thin skin witches. what i'm telling them, look, this is what's going on, this is the problem.

this isis the problem with political polarization, the lack cetera. you have values that are, you know, university campus, for o example.es really wanting diversity perspective. you can't have both. >> do you find most people are certain about things, certain about their view, certain about righteousness? >> i think we all are. i think that i'm asking people to do goes against human nature in some ways. with this lie, you have to in order toor get on board with th, you have to care about something

whether it's reducing political polarization or just understanding as best we canwh what is true about the world, care about something more than care about something be right and that turns out to be heavy lift for some people. the difference is that it turns out that most of us are not really good atng recognizing whn we lack intellectual humility. so if you only rely on your -- the moments, i should be more humble, more curious, i'm saying your cue is that the answer is easy, obviously ifs the person person is anis idiot, hateful, racist, whatever, that's your question to challenge and clarify your own thinking.

>> what's thec arc of the creation of this book? one incident, a couple of years building? >> i think it was years. i think it was years building. i think it's conversation -- i think it's stuffff that i've ben thinking about probably, probably for decades observatio, say, ten years, 8 to 10 years about i'm kind of more political topics, but i, you know, interest in kind of morally and ethically questions that's been i've been that's something was an interesting to me for a while and sort of how we make choices how we value different things. yeah. back to your book, the certainty trap at the start of the covid 19 pandemic in early 2020, much of the media coverage of and the public conversation shutdowns had a particular tone. often that tone that you either favored closing to flatten the curve or you were indifferent to

the deaths that might result from keeping things open. flattening the curve meant. supporting shutdowns to slow transmission and prevent hospitals and health care facilities from being overwhelmed. an influx of patients in this case many people treated the costs of this decision as so obviously negligible that anyone who brought them up as a concern was to be condemned. yeah, i mean, i actually talk as i go into some detail. i mean, book's obviously not about covid, but it's such rich. this is a rich set of examples that come out of it. yeah. mean our the way we sort of responded to and thought and our conversation or what passed for a conversation about covid in particularly in early 2020 and sort of how how that conversation about risk and that is and how we value life and how we think about risk and what have you, how do we calculate like that? and i don't mean like calculus, calculating like an hour. i don't i'm not talking about an

epidemiological, but i mean, what is the top able level risk that any society should tolerate, right? so, like you could imagine, if you run the thought experiment imagine there were some some sort of like highly contagious epidemic that had a 90% mortality rate. right. you can like there would be a clear you would have a clear i would think like there would no one will be arguing about shutdowns. right. like now, having said that, there are lots of things out there that that us in all that are risks and so that question about how should we how do we think about those costs and all of those things is interesting to me. and the fact that we all get sort of brushed aside is like, no, this is the right thing to and this is not this is your your monster. if you don't like that toxic to that. i think that's i think it's just a horror, a way to try and live in a country is again if you think of that middle block committed to political pluralism

and there's there are any time that we think the answers are easy like in those quotes there are questions there there are questions there about how we how should we trade off? you know, the fact that what is the what are the psychological of people being housebound? what are the economic impacts, what are the secondary what what are the what does that mean? how should we think about those things? how should we trade them off? like, how do we even calculate them? i don't i don't know. i don't have answers to them. and in the end, when it to covid, maybe we did the best we could. i don't i mean, i write like i'm not this is not my i don't feel informed enough to sort of golf or an opinion on that. maybe did the best thing we could given the information that we had that's very different from doing from saying this is what we're doing and if you don't do this you're a horrible person that's very different. does that make sense? are there any certainties in life death and taxes are? it's an interesting question.

like are there any certainties, life? i'm i have an epic new section at the end of the book and i had of the questions in the fake news is like basically what you're asking. and i the answer is sort of, well, maybe certainty, uncertainty. but then i sort of back myself a corner. i think are i think you can get into some pretty interesting philosophical and in some ways quantum physics level questions about certainties and, the nature of reality and sort of what we if you accept that there is something that we call that gets pretty far down, but most of us terms of what we actually limit answered way when it comes to the world, the world that we live in, everything is uncertain. there's uncertainty in everything when it comes to world of kind of morals and values, you can actually get pretty close to something that

looks a lot like certainty. drive time to give you an example. so here's an example like let's say let's say that i am let's say that i ask this question and i say, okay, if i have a lit candle here and i my hand over the candle, i hold my hand over the lit candle, am i going to burn my hand? and so if when i've done this exercise with students and they'll say, you know, they try and be like, well, you know, maybe you have a glove on, or maybe you have like scarring on your hand or something, i'm like, let's assume there's no there's no glove. like, i i'm going to hold. you're going to burn your hand i'm going to be right. and so then the question becomes okay, am i going to burn my hand? and the uncertainty is in the physical what we think of as the physical world. and einstein has made this point. carlo rovelli has made this point like right in the physical world. i don't know what will happen. right. like i could if i had a candle right here, maybe person comes over and is like, what are you doing? like throws a glass of water on it, or maybe like it blows over for something we don't. there's always i'm not going to do it because i don't really feel taking the risk in an

abstract when i'm thinking about a thought experiment, right, i can say, okay, if hold my hand over a lit candle, i can rule out all of this, all of the conditionalities, all of the low probability events in the physical. and i can tell you, yes, i would burn, right? that's what i'm saying. like in an abstract world we can you can get to something that. looks a lot like certainty in the physical world. there's always uncertainty. term. we use a lot these days missing formation, disinformation quote from your book when we something as myths or disinfo formation or doing so removed all the questions and doubt. in other words, we're using definitive language to talk things that aren't in fact definitive. yeah when i when i talk about when i'm talking about myths and disinformation, a lot of and i realize i have probably a fairly unpopular view on this on this particular topic, i'm talking about things people themselves

believe to be true. and so now you can there's because there's a separate issue about when someone is pushing information that they themselves don't believe to be true right ant control a narrative or they want to. but i'm talking when when we say something and, i don't care how whacked out it could be. it could be completely what someone might think is really far out there, as long as they themselves believe it to be. true. what i'm saying with myths and disinformation is partly it's simply that it's not. why do we label things, myths and disinformation? we things that way? because we want people want to ignore them, to understand, to be informed their sources to of to be careful about who they're listening to. all it takes is one time to something as mis or disinformation that then turns to. and we've saw this discussion as we saw this happen with covid like for when this happens and

have that be it be less clear on that does an enormous of damage to trust, to social trust, trust in institutions. i would say that this is and this is actually i don't there's an easy solution to this in my world rather than terms like myths and disinformation we would say we would just use much more precise language like on what we know now. this is what we this is what we believe to be true based, right? so whatever the claim is, here's why we believe that this claim here's why this person and that person or whatever believes this claim. now, what i'm suggesting in that is wordy, it's long. people don't have the attention span for it. it's a lot easier to just say this is misinformation, etc.. but i do think that the question trust and what that does, you get it wrong. what it does and also what it does to like there's i go into

some examples in the book about myths and disinformation. so we like to think that there are these examples like, you know, let's say i go on x and i say you know, the shelter on main street is giving away free bags. go grab one. like that's easy to verify to check, right? and so we think of misinformation or disinformation if i, i guess disinformation, i wouldn't be believing it myself. but anyway as being something that's easily verified, a lot of what gets labeled as is something that is what a lot of considered unlikely to be true. so what like of the examples that i talk about in the book is there were websites this is again a soviet examp you have out of

understand that questioning an idea doesn't mean disagreeing with it necessarily and playing with an idea doesn't necessarily mean endorsing. for example, if i say to students, why read that, i'm not arguing that i think it's not bad' i'm saying the school

value, words to why it's bad. i'm not saying it's not bad. so giving people the space. ii think that that -- i'm not arguing for anything -- i don't mean as a strategic ori manipulative thing. that's jus' how i think it's important to run. >> one last from the certainty y trap. >> it's another topic that once it comes up, people nod and appear and appear to have a shared understanding of what it is thatis the struggle to define it clearly. and i use that term cancel culture. >> two topics that often come up in class with students and people is think and wants you sort of dig in and start asking

questions and i go into a fair amount particularly in cultural appropriation. i talk about that a bunch in the book. there are questions there, find the questions, if you think thab it's obvious and you think that people who disagree are idiots or hateful, that should be your cue that -- you don't have to change your mind. you may end up with the same opinion grow you had before and that's still your cue to start coclarify your thinking. it's just not -- the world is not that obvious. the problems are not that obvious and when they are, actually more egregious they are sometimes, sometimes people ask me, what are you trying to do.

so when it comes to slavery, maybe it's something that i believe all lives have equal moral value or that no human being should -- and i can say why, why that's -- why i'm disagreeing with that. the book is called the certainty trap. why we can judge others well, the author, university of illinois professor. >> thank you so much, peter. >> cooper, put y'all back in

chains, joe biden's policies hurt black americans. >> mr. cooper, that's a pretty strong title? >> i thought it was needed. our president often saysio he's the champion of black america but his policies have not been the champion of black america, in fact, quite unpopular. what a lot of people don't realize and this is the reason that i wrote the book, black americans are assumed that since the large percentage of democrats that they're morens progressives, black americans are not what progressives as a group. there are some but like any group. when you talk about crime

especially during george floyd riots, polling numbers whether we need law enforcement or more law enforcement.ac black americans in many polls were saying they wanted more police and not less. what was the defund the police movement so visible. >> so in many m ways, most of america feels blamed for the plight of black america. what booker tv washington said, what fredrik druglas said, leave black people alone because the things that you're trying to do on their behalf are harmful. many news stories now have stopped covering the serious

level of crime when woke da's won't prosecute. here is what they will coverme when a tourist comes to town and gets harmed or injured. those kinds of stories are making thehe news. what's not making the news is overwhelming black americans who are victimized and when officers in chicago, in detroit, detroit claims that they are having a lot of progress, you're seeing police officers leave new york city. we need those officers especially in black communities. explain that. >> so, in the beginning of the 20th century, black men were

least likely to be in federal prison. if you say that the trend that we see now, the phenomena that we see now is outworking of slavery, what explains this talk. the truth of the matter is, if all the police did was arrest people and convict them who were last name were mcdonald, mock mcdonald havecd committed. would we then argue that somehow our prison system is antimcdonalds when young black youth and that's what i talk about in the chapter, young blacky youth are overwhelmingly more likely to be the victimizers when a grandfather reports to the police that she was assaulted, that she was

raped, what lessons would have us believe that she identifies black person that did that even though it was a white person man you see some of the brutal crimes that these people report they're telling us more did it and all too often the most likely victimizer is someone between the age of 14 and 28 who happens to be black. you're getting between 35 and 45% of all of the felonies being committed by this smaller cohort of people. is it no wonder that they're disproportionately arrested and behind? what should we be doing to prevent from assaulting grandma, from doing a home invasion? that's the conversation that we ought to be having. not a that says, well, he really

didn't have any choice. he had to do it. the issue, abortion. this is a quote from your book, the abortion industry preys on blacks, priests what do you say? so, margaret, one of the founders of planned parenthood, was a real bona fide racist. we overuse the word today anything that someone says that might offend a black person or any other minority is called. but racism is actually the belief that there a scientific that you could look at dna and see that one race group was in fear prior to another race group. margaret sanger that's what believed. and she often pushed to try to abortion and contraception as a way to get those communities that she believed were inferior

today planned, even though it says, oh, no, we don't we don't cotton to any of those views of margaret sanger. this proportionately locate their facilities in place where margaret sanger would have recommended them. let's change it out where. does david duke want the abortion clinics to be placed? planned parenthood today would be in the same locations that david duke would ask we should ask ourselves, why are taxpayers was funding this? and last point on this abortion issue is the abortion rate, which is so in the black community, we're not black americans would actually today be the second largest ethnic group. we're not the second largest ethnic group. we're the third largest ethnic group. and we are rapidly declining in

california. we're the fourth largest ethnic. you can't slaughter as many people without having the impact. how many members of congress. how many how many doctors are no longer here? because we have systematically encouraged people to skew life rather than to say it's valuable and precious. what could we do to make it a success and achievement and you report that the black population in america is about 13% of our overall population, but 30 to 40% of all abortions are done on african-american women. if that's the case, are are being victimized or is this service that they're looking for? i, i know we're not supposed to say i would just say when the

devastate of population removals has occurred, it's probably better if people say to and your community this is a service, not a disservice. but the impact is true nonetheless. now not every person that gets an abortion and even half the people that get an abortion. but significa percentages of women say they regret the decision because they didn't fully understand. when we ask that people see the child in utero via there are folks that say no, don't do that because a woman might choose not to have the abortions. so we want the ignorance in order to achieve horace cooper you author of put you all back in chain what's your background. so i'm a native texan i worked on capitol hill. i used to be a regular on c-span

when i was a staff member on capitol hill, but i've relocated back to point blank and i continue to regularly talking about and talking to my community about and you say you were a regular house so you guys often would me up and say, we want you to do our morning that you that you have really great calling shows in the morning and sometimes you do a democrat and a republican staffer sometimes you would stagger it do the republican staffer first and the democrats efforts. so this was during the nineties, right after a newt gingrich came into office. my was -- armey. he was the republican leader of the majority leader at the time. and you are associated with two think tanks project 21 and the national leadership for the national leadership for public policy research. if i get that right national center for foreign policy research. yes, that is correct. and what are so project 21 is an

organization of black americans who are trying to promote the idea that black americans are not uniformly liberal. black americans have a diversity of opinion on a lot of issues tax policy, abortion policy, crime policy. and we make sure that that word gets out. we were created during the rodney king riots when a bunch of black americans were funded to maxine waters, who said this of nearly a billion plus dollars worth of damage, is normal for black people when they're upset and we were formed to say that's not what black people think, that's what criminal ized people think. some of who might be black. and the national center for public policy research focuses on environmental issues free market issues and the like. horace cooper another issue that you take on is and the chapter is by is lynching black

americans economy. so a lot of people don't realize that there are some factors about black as a group that you could argue for instance a lower percentage of black americans choose the medical care or physician fields of study than the population at large. a higher percentage choose education and a significant of black america works in the public sector, a higher percentage of black americans work in the public sector than anyone else. so what i wanted to do was figure out what is happening with black america from an economic perspective given where we are it is very difficult unless you're the biden or you're a nancy pelosi to become a multi multi millionaire from a

government job. it's very difficult, not impossible, but is very, very difficult. so schoolteacher, fireman, police officer in my family, my mother my father, my brother and myself for four, four were a government employee, worked in congress. my father worked for the city of houston. my mother was a schoolteacher and my brother worked for county. we represent some of the regular ways of blacks. so black americans start off at a financial deficit since those kinds of jobs don't allow you to leave 100,000, $200,000 to your children so they get a leg up. so when you get ready to buy a house, that means that you're more likely get an adjustable rate mortgage. when the federal reserve starts

hiking the the adjustable, the mortgage rates, the interest rates, black americans more than any other group feel the pain more black americans are finding that being foreclosed upon because their thought was we're going to get this 6% rate and then rates keep dropping. we can refi, nancy, at four. that's not rates are doing. if you started six in 2021, you're at nine now. that's a high, high level during the years black americans, according to ford, set records for the number of f-150 pickup trucks they bought during the biden years. the man set record numbers of take backs of vehicles that could no longer be afforded it is harmful the way the president's policies have made

it. it's a slight annoyance, as if you make more than 150, $175,000 a year in america. his policies been a slight annoyance. but if you under 50, it's almost hell on earth for you and black americans are disproportionately more likely to be under 50 and they ought to be 175. his policies target those people regardless of race. but since more blacks are there more blacks are hurt. well horace going from trucks into what you call energy poverty for blacks. so another issue that seen is that all of us have to pay for our electricity under. the trump administration energy as a cost to the average family reach some of the lowest levels but under the biden administration energy as a percentage of the income

dramatic increased and what meant was that if you are a black household you find yourself having to make some tough choices, pay the electric bill, get the medicine, go to the grocery store, black americans suffer more from spikes in energy prices, not just at the gas tank. you will get the electric bill. and that's what i meant. what i said earlier. if you make 175,000, it's annoyance when you see electric bill is up 25 or $35 for the month, maybe even 50 for the month. but if you're on a tight, tight budget, 25, 35 or $50 every month can push you the top in your book, put you all back in chains. you look at the issue of equity versus equality. so we have been given sort of a fool's choice to undo all the

perception of unfair ness and injustice. and let's just equalizing outcomes. that's equity whereas we ought to be trying to do is saying that all as our premise that all americans are created equal all citizens are created equal from the beginning we didn't fully live up to that but we've now over that to some citizens need to be more equal than others. now they don't say it that way, call it equity. but if say that the son of a black engineer who just didn't score well on tests will still get into a top tier school maybe

harvard maybe yell and then a kid whose father has a minimum job, who hit those books super super hard and scored some 25% better or higher on exams. sorry we've got enough whites that kind of equity over equality creates enmity among races and actually when when the supreme ruled that harvard these other elite institutions that no use affirmative action they did surveys black americans agreed because implicit the equity argument is that somehow those blacks deserve it or wouldn't able to get it otherwise. and when i was a kid, my grandmother assured, assured me, you hit books, you study, you sacrificed, you make the effort,

anything want in america is possible now one of the things that i said in the book about our former president, mr. obama, a great model potentially of what's possible when he became president. no european nation had a minority. we had seen women as prime ministers in the uk and, in germany, but we had not seen nonwhite european leading countries. when america did that? that was a first. we're starting to see little bit more of it now. one of the things that barack obama could have done, notwithstanding his policies on energy on health care, on force in power, he could have said to students all over america go hit the books, study apply in america. you can do whatever you want you

can be president. he could have done that instead. he often said america is such a bad place that if you don't let me help, you'll never make it. mr. cooper, in your view, do we have a relation issue in this country? we have an artificially created relation issue. do you want to talk about where america really is? every year since 1980, racial intermarry, which has increased and in some decades dramatically. so there never been a decade since 1980 when fewer for whites or blacks or browns intermarry than the year before. and as i said, in some decades that has been like a 20% drop. people can't be loving one another while saying all of their neighbors hate people who look like them. that's just not true. the eeoc is saying that

workplace investor nations are declining with regard black americans, in fact, anti-semitism is a far higher area of investigation. the last decade and anti asian hostility hate and acts of of crime are spiking with to the eeoc. the met asia's of whether or black americans being mis unfairly treated or mistreated in america. the doesn't show this. now turn immediately to law enforcement. the truth of the matter considering the number of victims who identify blacks as their victimizer versus the actual number of arrests, blacks are not arrested. at the same if blacks were arrested at the same level as victims who identify them. we would an even higher number.

the fact is that most law enforcement, most police departments are intimidated by this idea, that they will be perceived as being anti black. you can't let someone get away with rape and robbery because you hate. it's got to be something else. the last point i'll make is it took the supreme court stopping affirmative action to end it because universities and law schools are so committed to this idea how. can we say that america is this place? it's so hostile to blacks or minorities in general who designed the cover puts you all back in chains. so i asked for something the publisher, did the design, but i asked for something that reminds it us of lbj's policy of giving people public housing facilities. i today wouldn't wish on my

worst enemy the sort of public housing facilities that were the norm in the sixties and the seventies and in fact today what we see are a large number of people where there's multi generational poverty that mom went in her kids got their own apartment later in their her kids got their own apartments. all of these hopes dashed. and so i wanted to make sure that we talked that and they had these chain link fence as around them. so as to quote prevent malefactors from coming in but in many instances it just people inside now you know the president said when he was a vice president that if mitt romney were elected president, black americans would be put back in chains horace cooper put

your back in chains. is the of the book the subtitle how joe biden policies hurt black americans. thank you for spending a few minutesruchir sharma thank you r

being here today to discuss your new book what went wrong with capitalism. why don't we just start off by answering the basic question what did go wrong with capitalism? yeah, i think that what's happened is that capitalism has been distorted much beyond what its founders had in mind, that what they had in mind for capitalism was a system which promotes assistant which promotes competition, promotes creative destruction, instead wein have a very disturbing form of capitalismy, today where the average person in america, in

fact, across the western world, system rigged against them. one of the basic pieces is that it should give a sense equality of opportunity. i think the average american means that there's no equality of opportunity for them based so what's going with capitalism today, arguing the book that the feelingss of government have ld to capitalist form today very much different than what founders had in mind. it's not just government and

debt, tendency to micro manage the business cycle and also the world of the u.s. reserve where it seems to acutely sensitive to fluctuations in the stock market. in the upside people are about to gain and on the downside no one is really allowed to fail bm bernie sanders in your book and you use it quite well where you say, we have what is right now socialism for the rich and competition or capital ism for the poor. you into a bunch of details about why that's true to an extent. but then you of course, finish it off with a massive amount of all, with a large amount of the welfare state that exists, which is mostly for middle class people, middle class people, the poor and elsewhere, and other types of people who aren't the

rich. the take away the question i have from this is who isn't covered by bailouts in the united states and how true is bernie's statement really? yes, i think that the statement of bernie signed sanders is the half truth, which is that it's true that we have had socialism for the rich. but what i argue in the book is that we seem to have social risk for everyone. so even the welfare state, of course, has grown exponentially over time. the middle class, you know, like in terms of i've got, you know, feel entitled that they need to get like all the benefits are giveaways as well so it's really become social risk for everyone. now, of course, the most galling part of that is that the rich are are also getting their risk, be socialized by the government, which is that if any company or large corporate even is on the verge of failure, the government's stands ready to

bail company out and that's something which is very new to american culture because back in the grand old days of american capitalism, you did not have this format where companies would get bailed out by the american government. the first big bail out of an american financial institution really happened in 1984, but that of continental illinois before that in the fifties, sixties, and even the seventies, when the idea was suggested that american government should bail out any company or even financial institution in trouble, it would be made with huge resistance in washington that that's not the way america is. but now we have had this very changed situation where every sort of company feels that they're entitled to a bail out. and obviously, when that happens, the person, the middle or even the poor families feel that if those companies are getting such bailouts about me and even their getting a lot of

government aid and support, but the most galling aspect is obviously when it's applied to the rich, which has become a sort of modern day form of trickle down economics, which is that when you bail out these big large corporations, the justification given is that if you don't do that, it will lead to complete economic collapse and it will lead to a lot of people being laid off. but the problem there is that it's a very self-fulfilling argument when you bail out these very rich companies or even, you know, like last year you had the s we be bail out, which took place of a rich silicon valley bank. then it's really problematic because it sort of makes everyone then feel entitled to the fact that they deserve government support and they deserve to be bailed out. i mean, it really is quite a change as bail out culture. when franklin roosevelt was governor of new york, the legislature proposed a system of deposit insurance for depositors and fdr when he was governor

opposed that. and in his sort of folksy way. he talked about moral hazard, about how having this guarantee for depositors would make them a little lazy in choosing banks that were sound. and as a result, there were choose banks that charged higher or gave them higher interest rates because if they lost money, the government would bail them out. so it's just all all upside. and i've heard moral hazard throughout my education, throughout my career, up through the 2008 bailouts after the financial crisis. but i haven't really heard it said in the last decade or so what what happened to this term? what happened to this idea that bailouts and shielding people from their own mistakes would lead them to make more risky choices that would result in more mistakes? well, what happened to this idea? exactly. i think that's a great point i think they too. what's happened is that there is this feeling that if the american economy is doing fine, then why should we worry about

moral hazard if all these bailouts have not led to any apparent crisis, why should we be worry about it? and that's one of the big issues that i address in the book, which is that there is a real price to these bailout outs and what you call, you know, like the moral problem, which is that if you look at the productivity in the american economy and as you know, the key to economic growth is productivity. productivity. american economy has been declining for the last few decades. and i linked that decline in to this bailout culture that we have in america, which keeps alive a lot of deadwood and also keeps alive or sort of promotes a lot of the big companies from getting bigger. so i think that the reason why there's still moral hazard may have faded is that it became a bit like diet and steel because a lot of people felt it is the policymakers that, like all these people, keep telling us

about moral hazard, but it's not led to any problem or any apparent problem in the american economy. and that's the link i make that no, it has led to a problem. it's just that it's much more insidious. most policymakers tend to view problems as an apparent crisis in your face crisis. so if the was facing some sort of a fiscal crisis or it running out of money to bail out companies or that was not working, then it would be, yeah, okay. this is a problem but i see that the problem is much more insidious because it's led to a decline in the number of new start ups in america that's been declining for the last few decades, right up until the pandemic it's matched by a decline in productivity in the american economy. so the moral hazard is a real problem just that it's been playing itself out in a modern, insidious way. and because it's not happening in your face in terms of a big crisis, people, wages, policy makers have stopped talking

about that. but the average american has, i've argued in the book, is very unhappy at the state of the american economy today. so for the average person, even though they don't think in these terms of moral hazard and stuff, something is not working for them in the way that the american economy is delivering. you spend some time, joseph schumpeter, to the late austrian economy as to among his many achievements, he coined the term creative destruction, the idea that market competition and an evolution in the market would weed out a lot of unproductive firms, firms that don't innovate, firms that aren't very dynamic and free up, those resources that are sort of constraining and and trapped to go to firms and to entrepreneurs who are more productive and can utilize those resources more effectively, efficiently. they are basically younger and have new ideas. right. and that this process is destroys all companies and causes economic problems and

dislocate asian unemployment. but the ultimate result is more creativity, more expansion and more growth. what you write about, which i think quite eloquently, is describe how you replace, how policymakers have replaced this system of creative destruction and replace it with this system of zombie firms, at firms that are supported by the government, that don't innovate. and we see this, i think most you know, most importantly in places like japan and europe, and now it's spread to the us. what do you think about zombie is like? what's the role of zombies and how does crushing creative destruction cause them? yeah, so i think that first let's define what is a zombie company, right? which is that a zombie company? these are definitions used by institutions institutions such as the bank of international settlements and others. these are defined as companies that have not earned enough profits to even make their interest payments for three years in a row. so are forced to keep going back to the market, to borrow and to

keep a, you know, themselves alive. so that's defined as a zombie company. now, this term became popular in japan in the 1990s that when the japanese economy was slowing down appreciably in the 1990s and the bubble was bursting, there was a big rise in the number of zombie companies or they were classified as zombie companies in japan. the american media that we, including publications such as the new york times, would almost walk this phenomenon in japan, saying that these zombie companies are being kept alive because of artificially low interest rates, easy money and america is very different. america does not do this at that point in time, the number of zombie companies in america was roughly about 2% of the total number of listed companies in america. today, the number of listed companies which can be classified zombie companies in america is by some measures, close to 20% of the total.

so just a massive explosion in zombie companies in america and across the western world. i would say so terms of that's what's happened that these very easy money policies, very low interest rates for a long period of time has kept alive. these zombie companies in america. now, when that happens essentially means that keeping alive the deadwood and there is a price for that, because if you keep alive so much deadwood, then you are keeping out new for coming in your keeping out new startups from, prospering and. we have seen the mirror image of that is that the number of startups in america has been declining over that period of time. so there's a real price to be paid when these policies are pursued that you're keeping alive the existing companies. and yeah, that feels optically good that okay, you by keeping alive these existing companies even though they are not profitable and they are inefficient by every metric but keeping alive those companies,

you are helping maybe in the short term avoid some job losses or so. but what happening then is that you are choking new competition, you're choking new companies from being formed, and that shows up in the declining number of startup companies in america. so i think that that's what i'm trying to do in this book to illustrate that there's a real price for these things and the price that are offered can be insidious not something apparently in your face, but if you look at beneath the hood, there's a serious price to all these policies. yeah, i mean, you write about this in a lot of detail, right? the price is lower growth and the long term lesson evasion, less income growth, less economic mobility. as a result of a lot of these these policies. the fed the federal reserve plays a large role in this and your book and other central banks do as well. how does the fed through its policy or other policies is create this system of of low growth and malinvestment and

investment in zombie firms and keep them going? right. i think that if you just trace back the fed and this is where i say that a lot of people think that we entered this know, incredible free market era in the 1980s. and yet if we look at the role of the fed, there was a seminal shift in it back in 1987. yeah, the stock market had a big crash in october 1987 at that point in time. alan greenspan, the fed chair for the first time, became the head of a major central bank. to say that we are going to intervene in a way to help prop up stock prices, which are that he cut the interest rates to rescue the stock market at that point in time that had not been done so explicitly in america's financial history. now, once he did that, the signal he sent and that came to be known financial markets circles as a greenspan put, which is the fact that on the upside people were allowed to

benefit and to make money on the downside. this view came about that federal reserve had your back you that the market failed to match. the fed would intervene to prop up the stock market and after that we saw that play itself out repeatedly where the fed became very conscious of the stock market and led to this asymmetrical risk. as far as the stock was concerned, that on the upside people were free to speculate or do what they wanted. on the downside the fed would be there to protect that capital. so i think that that is what has led to this feeling now that you can make as much money you want on the upside. and another downside, the fed will be there now when you have the idea, it obviously leads to people making their decisions accordingly when they are going to sort of feel that their losses are going to be socialized. but the profits are all for them

to capitalize. so you are a fund manager, you work in finance. that's been that's been career. you've seen this play out from the inside is and you sort of have embraced this sort of austrian business cycle theory of like booms and busts caused by monetary policy dislocations in the long term caused by this. what in your career? when did you have this aha moment. where you realized what was going on. because i just assume that giving you a front row seat to all of this, you had some moment or some time when this when you became convinced this thesis. yes, exactly i think that, you know, like it's happened over time. i mean, it started out in my childhood. i trace it back to the 1980s. i grew up in india, which was then a very socialist country. and i saw that for me, capital in america was all about giving people more economic freedom, right? so it started off with a love

for capitalism, but it came from a sense of economic freedom. but the government playing a role. so i'm not a true austrian in a way that i think there is a role for the government to be played. the government needs to provide a basic welfare. the government needs to intervene in crises. but then i saw in america over time that how the government's kept on increasing and the government now started to do things with socialist india once used to do. that's really what sort of got to me that that is what the american brand of capitalism was all about. now you speak about the aha moment. see that a couple of things which really disturb me. one was that in the 2000 and tens, even once economic recovery got going, the federal reserve then was still seemed determined to engage in policies such as quantitative easing because it felt that as long as inflation was dead, it could put as much money in the system was required to try and prop up the

economy. so that was a very new policy. why should the fed be doing that, which is to throw all sorts of money at the economy, all because it feels that consumer price inflation defined in a very narrow way is contained. but what about asset price inflation? what about the fact that property prices are surging, which puts homes outside the reach of the average american? so that was the first moment in the 20 tens when i felt something was wrong. and then the idea of this book really took hold in the pandemic that at the time of the pandemic the american government decided to shut businesses down fine. i mean, it was a serious crisis but and then to compensate for that to just throughout amount of stimulus the kind of stimulus governments in the west particularly like in america which they inject monetary fiscal credit got into this was huge and i was saying who's

benefiting from this stimulus? a lot of the stimulus checks ended up in people in people's pockets who were earning more than $100,000 a year. the fed, to try and intervene in the market to say that they're propping up and unfreezing was buying commercial paper off tripoli credit quality such as berkshire hathaway and all these really well-to-do corporations so and then you had this incredible explosion wealth which took place with people shattered at home that the stock market just surged and the surge in billionaire wealth, which took place in the year 2020, was that people are sitting at home. you've shut the economy down, the economy is contracting, but the stock market is surging and. all these billionaires who are there are making tons of wealth sitting at home because amount of money which has been injected into system is unprecedented. so it's then really which you know, like i got me thinking

that what's happened to capitalism, this is an economy and this is a country, america, that i was so optimistic on. i came to this. i wrote such optimistic about this country. but then when i saw that the week was being distorted and connected it with the fact in 2020 that the average american is not feeling satisfied. and today here we are in 2024 and the top ten, 20% of americans feel that they're doing well. but anyone in the bottom 50, 60% are stressed out in terms did you know their incomes are getting squeezed? they've got squeezed by, you know, the high inflation we have had. they've got squeezed by this feeling that, you know, that the rich are benefiting and they don't have the equality of opportunity. and they're also feeling squeezed by the fact that all this liquidity has led to an incredible increase in property prices, but it's put a home for the average american of reach. so i think that that's when i

really made the connection in the last few years in the post-pandemic. and this book in many ways is a pandemic baby. so there are three different main draw causes of a lot of these problems. you identify in your book. and we've talked about the first two, you know, these huge bailouts and governments concentrated on preserving, bailing out a lot of individuals and firms as you have federal monetary policy through the federal reserve and. then the other one you discuss at length in your book is regulation. and it seems like the thread that ties all these together is where the government is trying to protect people from the consequences of their own behavior, from the consequences of their own decision. how does regulation fit into this model of yours? yeah, so i think that when the government sees any problem, impulse is to regulate. as i say in the book, that the road to hell is paved with good

intentions, which is that every time that you see problem, then you think that all we need to, we regulate this or that. and as a say in the book that those regulation in fact end up hurting the average person and benefiting the entrenched, particularly the big businesses. how does that happen? so first, let's look at the numbers that we hear. an explosion in new regulation over the last couple of decades. the american government in. 3000 new regulations a year and that's been going on for the last couple of decades. this massive piece of increase in new regulations. how many regulations has the american withdrawn over this time period? over the last 20 years, they've 20 regulations in total, right so just look at this asymmetry. that's happened. so now these regulations are happening everywhere. if you want to open a new registrar, you want to start

your own fund, you have to deal with a phalanx of new regulation is now the you support my experience in the fund management industry. i know for a fact that the cost of setting up a new fund management operation today for a fact is ten times larger than it was 20 years ago because you have to comply with new regulations and other things. now, who benefits from all of this? obviously, if you're a big business, it's the costs of meeting these new regulations is still relatively small. but if you're new, start up with a small or medium sized business, the costs are incredible too. to meet those new regulation is. secondly, those same big companies are able to lobby in washington given their power and given the money to write regulations in such a way that benefits. so the biggest lobbyists in washington today tend to be the big corporations, particularly the big tech companies. and for the average person, this

all feels onerous in many. one, as i said, is just the cost has up a lot. so therefore you have the decline in new companies being formed in america. but secondly even for the average employee, this means a lot. who's already working at firm? one statistic that i put out in the book is that today, according to some studies, the average person spends 16% of their time at work dealing with legal compliance scores. is other, you know, like red tape is ism to meet the requirements can you imagine 16% of the time is being spent on those factors and that's costing the american economy millions, if not billions in dollars of lost output. when the average employee is spending 16% of time doing these things. so that's what i try and show that the regulatory state is really hurting the average person and benefiting the big entrenched businesses with their

money, power and their influence in washington. yeah, i mean, it's is about 16%, but it certainly feels like lot more because it's some of the most boring work you're ever going to do on your job. you sort of hit on something right there, which is the influence of large, firm arms and sort of guiding the creation, these new regulations to punish implicitly or explicitly to punish their competitors. economists call this regulatory capture. it seems like and this is my you know, my libertarian angle coming here, it seems like if you have a government that is going to be involved regulating portions of the economy and through creating regulations or running a welfare state. i sort of large enterprises they're going to be moving around trillions or hundreds of billions of dollars and have regulated patterns that impact firms and individual lives. and on every level, it seems almost politically impossible

all to avoid a situation where this happens, where you're not going to get a large amount of regulatory cap. sure. so what kind of hope do we have for trying to put this back in the bottle or at least build build a wall around it? well, first thing is, you know, just to put this out in the public, to raise awareness and consciousness of that, as i say in the book the first step to a cure is to diagnose the problem. so in terms of that, let's make people aware that this is what's going on. because today the solution that many people offer whenever there's a problem is even bigger government. you that of this is a problem. the government needs to intervene and do this. the government needs to, you know, put in more regulate. and as i show that at the most charitable thing that you can see about the government, that it's playing whac-a-mole, which is to put something down in here and something else pops somewhere else. so the first thing we have to do is to make people aware. and i think that that's what

i've tried to do in this book, which is that you have had, you know, some of these arguments out there in the public sphere about the fed's role, about regulation and stuff, but how do you tie it all together to show in a systematic way that the last century how the role of government has crept and gotten bigger and bigger over time, and what are the negative consequence of that already the i think the broader problem is that many people have been focused on the expanding role of government in a bit of a superficial way. they speak about just government spending and then there is this constant threat which is raised, oh, we need to increase, you know, the government's you know that the government's increasing debt and deficit will lead to a crisis. some day. well, that's not happening. and so, unfortunately, that argument really appears still a bit discredited. the average person thinks that, okay, all these people keep fearmongering about these rising debt and deficit. some people are still worried about it, but it doesn't feel

material in any way. and you have a lot of people, economists on the left, dismissive these arguments, saying that all these people have been telling us about how increased government spending and debt and deficits will lead to a crisis. nothing has happened. and, you know, like america is beyond this, it's the world's biggest financial superpower. the people will keep piling in here. dollars will keep coming in. we have taken other strength in our economy. but what i'm trying to do in the book is show that these government habits over time extend to just beyond government spending. it's about regulation. it's about bail out. it's about micromanaging the business cycle. it's about socialized risk across the curve from the most galling leave for the rich and that what are the negative consequences that have already happened in terms of declining startups, declining social mobility in america, declining mobility in america, where the average person feels that they cannot move up the ladder. only 35% of americans today feel that they're going to be better

off than their. where does that number a generation or two ago used to be close to 70, 80% of the average american felt that they could be better off than their parents. that's a very depressing feeling, but it's make the connection that why are people feeling so depressed even though at the you know, at the superficial level, things appear fine and that's the connection i'm trying to make in this book to again, put it here in summary, which is that first i have to make people aware of what is the problem, otherwise they're going to keep doubling down and keep doing the same thing that got us into this feeling of economic pessimism. so you grew up in india and you over the course of your life, have seen indian economic policy transformed. you went from license raj to now a much open, free market. not as much, i think, as either of us would like, but certainly in the right direction. we've seen like benefits.

the problem, of course, in the rest of the world is we have this sort of myth that in the beginning of late and early 1980s that the us and western countries became these radical laissez faire, free market, free trade, free immigration, free capitalism zones. where anything, when we went to this sort of radical laissez faire model of capitalism and you see nowadays right wingers, such as orin cass, who is embracing a lot of big government policies, including some aspects of planning and industrial policy and people on the left, bernie sanders, aoc and others who are saying, we've tried this radical laissez faire policy over the last 40 or 50 years. it hasn't led to the outcomes that we want. but you write in your book very convincingly that, no, we actually didn't have this, and i believe you use the term the neo liberal revolution was more of a

revolution. and sort of terminology or an idea rather than than actual policy. yes. so i think that it's, again, important to look at the evidence because i come from a space where i'm very driven by data and as i look at the evidence, then how does firstly how does impression gain ground? we are in this neo liberal era where the markets are allowed to rule and conquer people's lives. and so i say that the reason why that happened was because, yes, they were few, you know, like free market followed, policies followed across the world, which included globalization, which is about more integrated free trade, it the fact a lot of the former socialist countries from india to china adopted a more free market model. yes. in countries like america, you had a decline in some union

power when reagan came to power. governments growth declined bit, but it never really reversed course. so if you look at all the evidence, the fact is that the role of government in western societies like america has only increased since the 1980s on a net basis, it's not decreased. there reason why we got this impression that we had in neoliberal era is because of what was mostly happening outside of the western countries, where a lot of former socialist or even communist countries were giving their people more economic freedom and, moving and moving towards a more free market society. it happened because of globalization, but there was a greater embrace of free trade for for sure. and and also immigration, as you point out. so that led to the impression that we had into some neoliberal era and also because of the fact that the financial markets took off and became so big, partly because in the eighties there some financial market deregulation, but even that

reversed. but at least for the eighties, it was there for a while. and so markets took off. but as i in the book that the main reason the markets have done and financial markets have done so well is partly because or for the major reason of the fact that there is this asymmetry trade and risk which is that the big you know that on the upside all these firms and companies are benefiting from you know like the fed's policies and like easy money but on the downside they you know, they have the governments back. but more than that, if you look at all data objectively, what's happened to governments as a share of gdp, it's only gone up since the 1980s. what's happened to the government's debt and deficits? it's only gone up significantly since the 1980s. and now we are in a situation where the government is running a deficit. the us government of 6% of gdp. so we have double down, you know, like the 3% of gdp kind of deficit that we used to run in for the last couple of decades.

and even that was a radical shift that in the first 200 years of america is economic history, the government really ever ran a deficit. it did so only when there was a major crisis or a war. but in the last 50 years, the american government has run a budget deficit. in 45 of those 50 years and a surplus in only five of those years, mostly during the clinton's late second term, when you had a big tech boom and the revenues really took off and there was some spending restraint, which was done then, but otherwise government spending has gone up in the last hundred years from 3% of gdp to 36%. today, the government's debt has similarly exploded. the deficit today is at all time high as a share of the gdp outside of a major depression also so on every scale that we've spoken about regulation, we've spoken about the culture of bailouts on every single metric, the role of government has increased. so in my book, you know, in

terms of the real problem of the last 30 to 40 years, has not been some big neoliberal era has undermined the life the average american it's been the role of government that's gone ahead. so the tagline i have in the book is that capitalism was ruined by big government. that's really what's happened is not functioning today in the it was supposed to function is supposed to be pro-competition, pro-choice and procreative destruction. a lot of that is not happening today. so you've mentioned in the interview in your book about folks have been worried about deficits and and the government debt for a long time. they've been saying that doom is going to happen. it hasn't happened yet. so a lot of those concerns are now just sort of wiped away. they're just gone. i hear very few people in politics or outside of politics, even talking about these issues.

some of my colleagues, aside of course, who are talking about these issues and in very big way is so it hasn't happened. we haven't had a fiscal crisis, but there are obviously limits beyond, you know, just how do you think this is going to fall unfold? when are there going to actually be limits and how on what the government can spend on debt on borrowing, on deficits? when are we going to see those? you think and how are we going to see that manifest? how is that going to actually hit the real world? well, unfortunately, the history of our nations is that unless and until a country hits a crisis point, which means that the government literally runs out of money to spend more, that is rarely a course correction in the book, give examples of countries greece or countries like even sweden, which, you know, many liberals as their paragon of economic virtue that those countries got into big

trouble because their government spending increased too much and it got out of control. sweden in 1990s was forced to reform and government spending going out of control its deficit and debt were too large and then they were forced to prune it back. so in fact sweden such an interesting case that the liberals hold up. but i think that they sort of missed this important detail in history, which is that sweden, too, has been cutting back its government spending as a share of gdp and being and become much more fiscally responsible after it got into crisis in the 1990s. and in fact, it entered the 2008 financial crisis with a pretty significant government surplus. so that's a big change that happened. but the unfortunate example from history is that unless and until you get to a right point or a crisis point, governments do not course. correct. so as far as america is concerned, because it is the world's biggest superpower and the dollar is still the world's reserve currency, it has a very long rope and a way to itself

that it can keep on running these debt and deficits for much longer. other audrey nations can. having said that, i think that we are getting a point where this is, you getting quite scary because as i said that today, america's deficit as a share of gdp is 6%. it's much higher than any developed country is running. so similarly, america, a debt as a share of its gdp today has gone up by 100% and is lagging. that of only japan and italy. and we will cross even the italian levels of the share of the economy by the end of this decade. given the current path we are on. so i think that we are getting to a point now where these very large debt and deficits could become a real problem because even know, like america with all its resources, we run out of people who are willing to fund and maybe demand higher and higher interest rates to pay for it. and then that becomes a negative

feedback loop because if an increasing share of the government's revenue go to just being interest on its debt, then it begins to compromise the government's ability to spend on anything else, including on welfare. so that's the fear i have that so far we have, you know, not had any crisis and we have said that, you know, like all these people have been fear mongering and they've all been wrong for a long period of time. and now, though, we have taken this argument to a different where we are saying it doesn't matter how much debt and deficits we ran could be 6% if we have a downturn the loss in revenues will mean our deficit gets to nine or 10%. it doesn't matter. it's america. and because everyone's been wrong about these fears before, this can continue. but that's exactly what the anc is. you know what sowed the seeds for the next crisis. so that's what worries me about the future. but as i say in the book that my focus is to first point out that what already happened, what's the damage that has already been

caused because at least let's raise awareness of what's happened rather than waiting for the crisis to come and then starting the course correction. yeah, we're set right now to get even higher levels of debt and gdp and spending is sort of on automatic on autopilot historically, right at the end of world war two, the debt to gdp ratio was about the same as it is now, a little bit higher. but the spending ended because the war ended and so the government could run some surpluses, so it could reduce spending, it could cut taxes a little bit and still maintain the ability to pay off the debt incurred during world war two. now we're at this phase where the baby boomers are retiring in very large numbers. they starting to draw down significantly on social security and medicare to the extent where the congressional budget office projects that the social security trust fund, which is really a phantom fund anyway,

but that on paper it'll be exhausted in the early 2030s and medicare trust fund is going to be exhausted even earlier. and i don't think serious person looking at this that congress is going to sit around do nothing when these points happen. they're going to fund benefits out of general revenues and they're going to borrow a lot of money going forward. and we're going to get and more close to this example where all of a sudden it's to be prohibitively expensive to borrow or people just won't lend money to the federal government because they don't think they're going to get their act together at that point. knowing what, you know, political incentives in the united states about what voter thinking, what you delved into in this book and what voters think and what politicians think and what others think, do you think americans going to choose higher and less growth to shore up these benefits, or are they going to choose to cut these benefits and get a little bit of dynamism back? well, i still have some optimism

about america. the end, you know, what was that famous churchill? that america does the right thing after having tried every other option? so i think that once we get to that point, i'm optimistic that the role of government will begin to get dialed back and that america will course correct. so i think that i feel that you that's when the spending cuts will happen, when it becomes apparent to people about what's happened with this runaway growth in spending. and that's what even happened in other economies from sweden to greece as well as i cite in the book. so i think that eventually i feel america will do this right. but unfortunately, i don't see that point now. so for me, the immediate focus is to point out, as i have in the book, that the what's the history of capitalism? what's happened? and let's, you know, like that definition of insanity is that, you that if you keep sort of doing the same thing and expecting different, you know, that's just not, you know, the definition of insanity. so at least let's get to a point

where we define, okay, what's the problem today? why, like is this, an issue that we need to be looking at. and also, it's an ode to capitalism, is that, yes, capitalism can still work if you keep giving people economic freedom. and i think that's what that's the part that america has been stripping away, which is that, you know, if you look at these indices of economic freedom, america rank in the top five for decades now, it's slipped all the way to number 25. and, you know, we need to be aware that what's getting us there and how that's hurting the average american. so is political party. you think more to blame the other is or is this just like a bipartisan effort to get us away from freedom? no, i think this has been a bipartisan project, you know, because even someone like trump came to power in 2016 talking, you know, the language of deregulation, talking the language of, you know, like doing something the average american. but if you looked his track record in terms of even on

things like deregulation, he didn't move the needle much. he spoke about. but by the end of his term, he had put in so many new regulations that, you know, like the regulatory picture, america did not change that much. similarly, when it comes to debt and deficits, he ran the largest deficit by cutting taxes during a during a peacetime effort. and in terms of the fact that with no matching spending cuts. so this has really been a bipartisan but yes the biden in the last three years has taken this to a totally different level and magnitude. it's double down on everything. so this has been a progression where even the icons of so-called free market capitalism, such as reagan and thatcher did not do much to reverse the role of government. if you look at metrics such as government spending or regulation that was done under the, you know, their era, but here under trump and now under

biden in particular we've taken this to a totally new level. and that's the kind of awareness i'm trying to raise through this book and yeah and you really raise it consistently, thoughtfully throughout the entire book. i'm glad you brought up these statements by trump about the deregulation and how the statements have really fed into this perception that trump was this radical free market president expanding capitalism and where the opposite was true. i mean, spending as a percent of gdp went up. trade barriers, enormous numbers of new regulations, immigration restrictions on the flow of labor across borders, just an enormous amount of increase in that. and then you have on the other side and then trump also, by the way, says about, you know, american carnage and how bad american have it and how terrible it is. and then democrats will say the same thing, how awful it is in the united states, how american have it terribly in this

country. and you explain how this perception feeds in to this idea. these statements feed into the perception that capitalism is, you know, crushing people's economic opportunity when really it's the government doing this in most areas. but i'm i am kind of concerned or i guess interest in in the book because you have that is half of it this perception and how the perception is that capitalism is ruining people when it's the government. and then on the other hand, you also gave a little you give a little bit of credence to some of the ideas on the side. right. the idea that inequality is increasing and that this this this is a bad thing are you and i know you struggle with this in the book about whether giving too much credit to the people who are skeptical of capitalism on these areas like economic equality and equality or can undermine capitalism a little bit can undermine and push for a

lot of these policies? you how how do you reconcile this about about equality and inequality and what the government's doing these perceptions. yeah no, you know like as i say in the book that i don't expect capitalism to produce income equality necessarily because as i said, that capitalism is about equal off opportunity. it's not about an equality of outcomes because any capitalist society, society should reward meritocracy more. but what i see in the book is the fact that it's that the kind of policies the government has followed has fueled inequality and fueled the sense that there is an inequality of opportunity as well because of declining economic and social mobility and. even the billionaires are getting the feeling that, you know, that they can survive much longer because, yes, there will be billionaires produced under any capitalist society, but

there should be a feeling of churn. the top billionaires keep changing over time. now the average billionaire stays on that list of billionaires for much longer than in the past. the entrenched billionaire has become much more of a common feature now, so i think that's the way that i try and reconcile this, which is that, yes, capitalism will lead to wealth and income inequality. there's no denying on that. but it should lead to it in reasonable way and it come from a space that there is equality of opportunity. instead we have today these incredibly easy money policies, first by the fed and then all these government intervention grants from regulation to that have kept the billionaires more entrenched. and as i've said so earlier, that during of very easy money, it's led to an explosion in billionaire wealth without them having to do much. so i think that it's that

feeling which needs to be corrected for the average american. otherwise, i think the average american, in fact, some we still celebrate wealth creation in a way and see many like of these billionaires as people that they can aspire to or look up to but when the feeling is that those billionaires creating their wealth just because of government help or too much easy money. i think that that's what fuels the resentment. so your concern, the source of the inequality rather than the inequality yourself? let me just ask you a hypothetical then. let's say, you know, we have the types of free market that you support. we don't have these bailouts. we don't have this crushing of creative destruction. and but we get a situation where economic inequality is the same as it is now. do you see economic inequality as a problem then, or is it just still the source that matters. yes, i think the source is more important, but i'm also willing to bet that if the government

was not following those policies, we would not such high levels of wealth inequality, because i think the source is the problem is in fact like this is a very interesting thing that you know like i created this index like over a a decade ago called the billionaires index and what that did was that it used three metrics to measure the wealth of a nation and inequality across the those three metrics were what is the share of billionaire wealth of the economy from where has that wealth been created? is it in industry is which are innovative and don't require much government help or has the billionaire wealth been created because of industries such as real estate or even commodities which required a lot of government help and? the third that how much of this wealth that the billionaires have created is inherited and how much of it is something which is self-made. so i created that formula to say

that whenever that the countries around the world where the there's too much billionaires that the share of the economy and too much of it is being created by the so-called rent industries. and a lot of it is inherited wealth. those are countries much more susceptible to populist revolts compared to countries where the wealth is much more created due to innovation and is not so much in your face? so i think that since you raised this topic, this billionaire index is something that i pay a lot of attention to and that looks at the source as much as the size. but yes, i'm willing to make argument that the government was not playing this role to distort capitalism this much. we would not only have a better source problem, but even the would not be as large and disproportionate of the economy it is today. so one of the things i'm a little worried about in your prescription here and along with me and tell me why you think i'm wrong about this is, that if we give a lot of credence to the

idea that inequality is getting worse and that this is a bad thing, sort of in principle, then we open ourselves up more of these policies that increase moral hazard to more redistribution, to more bailouts, targeted more people on lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. and then we get more of these problems that we talk about. one of the things come to think over the years is that a lot of the support for redistribution and higher taxes on the wealthy and and and trying to take their resources and give the people less fortunate. some of it, i think, comes from the good places that that you're talking about. people are aghast at the inequalities. there, aghast at what they think is a lack of opportunity. but in most cases, or at least half of cases about it's more of a case of like malicious envy, right? where they just a lot of people just really don't like successful people and want to take their money and hurt them,

even it hurts themselves in the process. do you think i'm off base with that? no, i mean, but i make it very clear in the book, which is the that i am in favor of equality of opportunity. but i totally understand that we need to appreciate that capital is does lead to an equality of wealth and inequality of income. so i think that the idea of leveling leveling inequality is misguided on its own because that because then you then you have socialism and that's what the kind of india i came from where any wealth that was made was taxed away. and so people didn't create any wealth. so i'm all wealth creation. but as i said, it's about the idea that you have have a feeling there's equality of opportunity and america that in the as i say in the book that right up until three or four decades ago, when most americans felt that they could be better off than their parents, when

most americans felt that they could afford to buy a home, there was no great, you know, sort of talk about this talk of inequality has really surged as we have seen a surge in the number of new billionaires which are being created as those billionaires become more entrenched. i think that's where we have seen this surge take place. and sometimes the government solution for these is, you know, like only makes things worse. i mean, the one thing that the governments are now doing much more is they think that they have to spend a lot more on the welfare state to protect, you know, people. and against this anger that's been building up. but in doing that, i think that, you know, like in terms of that, they're only sort of making things a bit worse because, you know, like who keeps spending so much? you're compromising on the fact that you're doing it in a way that will be unsustainable. and so in the future you will not be able to support even many people given the amount you're spending today. so i think that there has to be an appreciation of the fact that

equality of opportunity is what the focus needs to be, not in terms of eliminating inequality, not what capitalism is about. one of the sections of your book that i thought really extraordinary is you explain burak crats and politicians and other government making decisions about regulations and how this basically uniformly pushes in one direction which is more regulations, more control, more more bailouts, protection for firms that have these political connections. but then i was a little surprised in another you wrote about your support for anti trust laws and more vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws and competition policy and are. can you try to reconcile these things? for me, because i do see a lot of antitrust, at least historically. and today, i think with some work by lina khan at the ftc is like a fairly arbitrary, fairly

capricious, leads to a lot of uncertainty in the markets. so i'm just curious, do you sort of reconcile this, the seeming contradiction, or is it even a contradiction in my misreading? you know, i think that as i said, that i think that the first step is that the role of government has expanded a lot. but i'm not in the camp which believes that the should have zero role, which is that there is a role for government when there's a crisis, when there is you know, there is a role for government in some basic welfare, you know, like for a society. and the antitrust, i mean, i think that when things get too far, something needs to be done about it, which is the fact that something is wrong in america when a handful of companies are earning extra ordinary amount of profits and then they're using those profits to just keep gobbling up new entrants, which slows down the of innovation and then they using those, those incredible amount of profits to

lobby in washington to get regulations done and you know, like in the way that suits and also then you know like terms of any new technology which comes requires massive spending only these companies seem to have the cash to be able to do that. so i do feel that capitalism is at its true level should naturally work in a way where not just a of companies make super normal profits, but the profits are more distribute. it takes a while for private sector enterprise making lots of profits, but when reach a point where just a handful of are making extraordinary profit, then you know something has gone wrong somewhere. we need to recognize that otherwise you know that's not going to end the fact that the same companies dominate the lists of the top companies like microsoft often. what do we want to call at the top of the pyramid? every decade does something, you know, which is going a bit wrong there. so, yes, i agree that you can't have arbitrary antitrust or, you know, those of policies.

but i think that that's one area where i do feel we to closely examine that these big companies, the way they've come to dominate not only our lives, but entire investment landscape. and this is not just about the innovative ability. it's the fact that they have they are producing these extraordinary level of profits, which is inconsistent with any capitalist society because capitalism at the core needs to be pro-competition, broken and pro new companies coming up. so that's the concern i have, that there's something which we need to do antitrust, you know, which is the fact that, you know, in a in a systematic way where big companies are not, you like just going to keep gobbling up all the small and have a disproportionate influence on our lives. and it happens in many you know which is that one of the big frustrations of many americans today is the fact that many towns in america today are dominated by just one big company. and when that one big company dominates, that, they have like

this incredible bill about the bargaining power. and then it also creates this feeling, you know, for the person that they're being oppressed because they, you know, like are just being to work for that one big company. they get to set all the rules. so the domination of these handful of very big companies, i think is inconsistent with a true capitalist system. and so therefore, i have some sympathy with the antitrust being like enforced in more systematic way. but we need to recognize that at times when that happens, something wrong has happened. of course, i argue that the origin of that is too regulation. so we need to do something about that too. we just can't do antitrust. then expect that, you know, this is going to go away because if you don't deal with the source of the problem, which is too much regulation, too easy money, then that problem is just to come back after you've arbitrarily killed off something. so it needs to work all, you know, thoughtfully, rather than on a piecemeal basis that you deal with antitrust. but you don't deal with the source cause of what's led to

this big domination of these companies. right. and if you want to, just because we're about the wrap up here, but if you don't mind, 30 seconds, your book gives us a lot to worry about in the united states. some reasons for hope. why don't you tell us what's the biggest reason why you're optimistic about the future of the united states? an economic freedom here in capitalism? because i think that eventually america does the right thing after having tried all options, which is that i expect that america in the end will course correct. it's a country that has done so. and i and the fact that we can have this debate out here i think is great. the fact that i'm being able put this argument out here is terrific. i can't put this argument out there in china and even in places, india and all its more difficult to do. so the fact that i can put this argument there, you know, and the fact it's like it's early days but the book has just come out and i'm getting, you know, like a lot of positive feedback from both the right and the left

on some of these issues, makes optimistic. the fact that, you know, that, as someone put it, that is a capitalistic critique of capitalism. and i say, yeah, because you know that someone from the inside has seen this and also from the outside has seen as an immigrant who came from a socialist country. so the fact that i can put this argument out there, we can have this hour long debate here and discussion still me reason that in the end will course correct. well, thank you, rogier. i really appreciate it. and the book is what went wrong with capitalism. so thank you very much. thank you. enjowell on booktv.

we want to introduce you to andrew doyle. his newest book is called new puritans how religion social justice captured the western world. before we get to book mr. doyle,

introduce yourself to the american audience. okay. my name is andrew doyle. i'm writer. i'm a broadcaster. i'm a comedian. i have a show on a uk channel called gb news every sunday, which is called free speech nation. so i'm interested in the issues relating to liberal values and free speech, and i also write various comedic projects and plays and that kind of thing. so how would you describe as a channel? i would describe it as, i suppose. well, it was set up to provide within the media landscape in the uk. another alternative voice. in other words, we a problem in the uk with a kind of ideological bias shall say from the major mainstream media channels, not much. if i said, if you type bbc news, it's not really a bias of party politics because they do try their best to be impartial. but there is an ideological bias when it comes to issues that are now known as woke issues or what i might call the critical social

justice movement. so there's a bias there. so the channel was set up so that conversations could be had, which are not being had elsewhere besides the bbc. would you say that sky news might have a bias issue as well ideologically? 100%, yes. similarly with channel four news, i would say all them. i would say they, as i say, they do try their best to hold people to account from both sides, the political aisle. but it when it comes to issues of gender, race, the identity obsessed movement that has seized so much control of the major institutions both in the uk, the and in the us, certainly in canada, the bias is absolutely palpable. so you need to have another. so those conversations take place. what gb news does is it brings in voices from the left and the right and in between it always goes out of its way to hear the opposing sides. so it's an echo chamber, i

suppose. if you and i were walking down the street in london right. would people stop you? it happens occasionally. i would say only occasionally, maybe once, twice a week. i wouldn't say i'm a celebrity. i you know, when you were at oxford. you got a ph.d. in renaissance poetry. yeah. oh, well, i was i my aim at that point was to be an academic so i was. i mean, i was a part time lecturer when i was finishing my doctorate so that was the route i was intending to take. but ultimately, i suppose fate moved in a different way. what was that fate that moved you? well, i mean, at the same time, i was also writing plays and comedy and performing stand up and i moved to london. and i suppose it just deviates. and i also had a supervisor at oxford who said, whatever you do, don't into this world because you'll up running around

the quad screaming, have i wasted my life? so i took that to heart. and also i did find all the time in the library. i used to work a lot with manuscripts and manuscripts and there was only one part of the library where you could do that. high school, the duke humphreys library. it's actually quite well-known because it was used in the harry potter films as the library of hogwarts. but you're sitting in there, it's very dusty. there's not much light. there's lots of sort of people there who spent whole lives there and driven mad through manuscripts. and i thought actually, i'd rather get out and do something else. well, turn to your new book, the new puritans. who are they? that's just a an analogy really. i'm not talking in very of the book that i'm not talking about the puritans of old who had some sort of sense their own up. of their own unworthiness before god they certainly were not similar to what describe as the

new puritans what i mean by the new puritans are these kind of zealots who would like to reorganize around the basis of group who are pro censorship, who would like to curtail the arts so that it becomes a conduit for the message. i suppose the comparison with the puritans makes sense if you think about what happened to the theaters in london in 1642 when they were when the puritans managed to gain control of the parliament, they shut all of the theaters. you have a similar kind of thing now with the woke movement. if you want to call it that. activists who will say, well, we need these certain scenes from these comedy shows to be excised so that people aren't corrupted by the message that you if you watch comedy shows in the uk, on bbc streaming services, certain scenes of old sitcoms will be removed. there's a very famous of a show called fawlty towers probably know it's john cleese show and a very famous episode called the germans. and there's a whole scene taken

out because. there's a use of a racial epithet, that scene, but the whole in that scene is at the expense of the doddery old man who's using the term and so therefore this kind of puritanical idea about the senate the need to sanitize and comedy so that it better reflects this idea of diversity equity and inclusion that's going on quite a lot. comedians, the uk are sort of policing each other, making sure they don't joke about the wrong things. it's a disaster for the arts, but it's also a disaster for society more generally. and the reason i wanted to compare them to puritans, particularly in the book, specifically mentioned salem. i opened the book by talking about what happened in salem, massachusetts. you say you have a group of young girls who claim that they can see the devil's in the shadows, that people are possessed, that witchcraft is afoot, and all they have to do is point their finger and make an accusation that is very similar to the accusations that are flying around now from activists who point the finger

and say, you're a racist, you're a transfer of your home. if you're a nazi, you are far. and the accusation is taken as and the accusation is sufficient to have someone condemned. this is very similar to what happened and also in salem when decent people stood up and said this isn't real, the girls aren't being truthful. people like rebecca nurse, she was hanged herself for for being skeptical. similarly now, very, very few people are on board with the woke movement. it's a minority in every generation. and yet you would think there is a kind of established consensus, their lines, because they are so intimidating, that people are very, very wary of standing up and saying, no, i don't agree with any of this. so you're finding companies unconscious bias training sessions are implemented by departments and very few people believe they any effectiveness, but we know they don't. i mean that's actually up for debate all of the research into this shows that they have no effectiveness whatsoever. but no one's going to say, actually, i think you as my

employer have the right be probing around inside my head. i don't think you should be doing that because if they do that, they won't be promoted the next time the promotion round comes along. so everyone shut up and goes along with it because they want an easy and i suppose what ultimately happened in salem was it really the girls screaming and pointing and screaming about witches, they weren't really the problem. the problem with the magistrates and the ministers went along with it. the figures of authority who went that's identical to what's happening. it wouldn't matter if all these activists were calling everyone racist and homophobic and demanding that they be fired and what we call cancel culture, destroying people's livelihoods and reputation. none of that would matter if those in authority not capitulates their bidding. and i mean by that, politicians, the managerial class, all of the major figures in major institutions, they go along with this partly because they're terrified of these kids, but also because they don't to be seen to be on the right on the wrong side of history, shall we say. so the paralyze that so that

that that is why i called them the new puritans. a kind of analogy, i suppose, to show firstly how this kind of power works, but also we might overcome it. do you think that in a sense the conservative party britain capitulated to this movement? yes the worst excesses of this movement have been presided over by the conservative party. so this is not a party political and often the culture is misunderstood as a battle between left and right. and it's really, really not it's something that transcends left and right in the in the uk, it is something that is in fact in the conservative party and more so the labor party who are now in power. of course, you know similarly in america. i don't think this is something that is just a question of of a left wing problem. you know, we've had these initiatives being pushed through at every level by people the right as well. you know, people have been goals into thinking this is something some progressive and it really

isn't. from your book bad ideas are allowed to spread unchecked. they take on an illusion of incontrovertible ability, and when figures of authority are by dangerous ideologies, resistance becomes a feat courage that few will to attempt. yes. would you like to comment on it? well, i mean, i, i emphasize the notion of courage there precisely, because there's a lot at stake. i it's not the same as you. you know, no one's being burned at the stake here for heresy. but you can you can pretty much make yourself unemployable. and that's not trivial. we've seen it in all industries in the uk, in the nhs, our national health service people are wearing rainbow lanyards to signal their fealty to the movement and if you don't do that, people well, they were raised eyebrows and people say maybe that person isn't on board with that message. people are encouraged to write their pronouns in emails or to

open meetings with with use of pronouns. now there's need to do. what that does is it is a it's almost a declaration of faith, almost like it's a test of purity tests. are you going to do this thing? or if i ask you your pronouns, are you going to respond? but of course, the vast majority people don't believe that there is such a thing as gender identity. i mean, i'd say more than 99% of people don't believe, that we have a kind of sex soul within that might not align with all of physical, biological sex. so why are all these people playing along with this religious declaration that they see their religious, you know, on the day that the that putin invaded the ministry of defense, the uk were putting out tweets about pansexual, coffee, morning. they're not getting that priority right now, as far as i'm concerned. that is just a declaration of fealty to a cause that very few of us actually believe in. and why i mentioned the idea of

courage, because it is it is as though there is a new religion that has ceased control of the corporate world, certainly, but also all of the major institutions, media, the arts, the judiciary politics, academia, certainly education and there's incredible power. there is incredible clout. and yet at the same time, these very people claim to be the underdogs. they claim to be fighting for the marginalized. there's something quite incoherent about it. so my my argument there is have some courage. if everyone stood up and said, no, we don't believe in this, we believe in genuinely progressive values. we believe what martin luther king said about jedi people on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. it's the price inverse of what the likes. robin d'angelo, the author of white fragility believes, which is that actually i mean she explicitly in that problematize is the idea of colorblindness the idea that was espoused by martin luther king. she effectively problematize it as being a form of white

supremacy. and there you have it, a middle aged woman claiming effectively the martin luther king was a racist. everything's upside down and actually what we should be reiterating, the ideal of colorblindness is a beautiful. it's not that we don't notice. right. so that we don't see race is we don't treat people differently on the basis of race. that's what it means. and we should be striving for that again so that you don't have situations as you have to be was in a brentwood school in california where parents were segregated by skin color in order to have conversation with the teachers they were put into separate. similarly in the most expensive day school in london was the american school segregated children for after school activities on the basis of their skin color and they thought they were doing to be anti racist and of course i would have liked to believe that most of us that there is a consensus racial segregation is wrong. so why are we implementing that in the name of de?

it doesn't make sense. you you write about british writer j.k. rowling getting in trouble over pronouns. yes. well, there's a very good example that j.k. rowling is a feminist she believes that there are to sexism. those sexes are immutable, that it is not possible to change sex. that's not actually a belief. that's a matter of fact. no human being has change. sex shouldn't be a controversial to say. and what she's also saying that women's rights depend upon to recognition of biological sex differences because of safeguarding is. very important given that the vast majority sex crimes are committed by men towards women, that women have single sex faces. this particularly matters when it comes to hospitals of accommodation, prisons, domestic violence, refuge. j.k. rowling has set up a domestic violence refuge center for victims of rape in scotland because there wasn't such a facility which admit men who

claim to be women, men who as women. so obviously if a rape victim you don't want to be abraham, then it doesn't matter if they think of themselves as women, that's a reasonable request. so you need to have it. so but she's been monstered as a transphobe, as hateful as a bigot on the basis of no evidence. all and this gives you another example of the the the the fantasy that a lot of these activists is that they generate a narrative that is far removed from the truth. and they demand that everybody else believe it. and not only that they demand that people article that view in the way that you read 1984 by george orwell by the of that novel the lead character winston is parroting the party two plus two equals five. and he says it and he believes it because is no other alternative. similarly, you will have now people who think themselves as progressive, forward thinking, parroting the line transwomen are women. by definition, a trans woman is not woman.

a trans woman is a biological male who identifies as a woman and shouldn't. that isn't to say that people don't the right to identify as they please call themselves what they want to live the life that they want to live, so long as they're not encroaching on other people's rights. but that does not take change. reality. and it's important that we are able to say that. but andrew doyle a person like j.k. rowling has the clout to defend herself and to not worry too much, about being counsel. yes. good. you make a very good point insofar as cancel culture predominantly affects those who are least able to defend themselves, they don't have the financial resources or they don't have the connections to do so. i mean, there's a bit of a myth about cancel culture because the only time you ever hear of people canceled is celebrities, people who make news. you. when kevin hart lost his gig at the oscars because of jokes he told ten years ago, that was big news. but of course, with someone like kevin hart, you know, he's a fairly rich successful guy

losing that gig. it's not very nice and it shouldn't have happened, but it's not going to be the end of the world for him. but what the people who are really the casualties of culture are the people who don't get reported in the news. the guy who works for a supermodel gets get sacked because of a post he's put facebook and can't find employment again. the gender critical feminist who stands up says, no, i'm not going to say my pronouns at work. i'm not going to pretend that men are women and vice and loses their job as a result of that. there's a group in the uk called the free speech union set up by toby, which has been invaluable because. he has been inundated with people who've lost their jobs, be disciplined at work for stating their sincerely held beliefs. beliefs. those are the people who are really affected by cancel culture. j.k. rowling is in the realm of the young council. she's far too rich, is far too powerful. but that is not to say that she hasn't been incredibly courageous.

i mean, she didn't have to say this stuff. it would have been an easier life for her not to because as a result, she receives daily rape threats. threats, murder, threats of violence. because remember, the people who position themselves as being on the right side of history can be some of the most ferocious and vicious and downright cruel individuals in the world. and you know that from history, some of the most tyrannical people, the people who were the most cruel, the people who in the inquisition strapping people to the rack thought they were doing so. so they were on the side of the angels. often those two things glue. so you know, i have nothing but admiration, j.k. rowling for sticking her neck out. it's also made it easier for. other people who who don't have her resources to do the same. i mean, for instance, when the scottish government implemented its hate new hate speech law, this was a law that could have criminalized people, a law, an law and actual law. this came into force on april the april fool's day, which sounds like a joke, but it wasn't and effectively would mean that you could be criminalized for something you

said in the privacy of your own home if it was deemed to be hateful, you could be criminalized for a matter of opinion. you could be criminalized for saying that transwomen are men so j.k. rowling tweeted out some opinions that would violate new scottish hate speech law. it said, come at me, come and arrest me. and she also said that if any other woman tweeted out an opinion and the police went after her, she would tweet the identical opinion and therefore they would have to arrest j.k. of course, they're not going to do that. they don't want that publicity. so she tested law and she won. i mean, the scots the scots scotland is out of control, really. i mean, the snp, which is the ruling party in scotland. well, until the last election it was last week, they were ideological zealots, they brought in 100% to this movement and they wanted to implement law that would criminalize anyone who. well it was a new blasphemy by a

guy humza yousaf who was the first minister, but he started this law when he was justice secretary. and it's been i mean, i went up to scotland on april first with my comedy night. we a night of comedy unleashed and we told problematic jokes because the police in scotland in readiness for this law had been undergoing training of how to deal with jokes that people offensive. so we went up there and told a lot of offensive jokes no. one arrested us and it was fine, but technically, they could have done under the new rules. scary stuff. i think. have you ever been canceled because of your views? yeah, no, i don't think i think partly because my job has always been to express honestly, if i was still a schoolteacher, as i used to be, i wouldn't be able to express in the way that i do. or if i did, probably would be canceled. i'm in a very privileged position and i'm canceled. i never have been. i can write what i genuinely believe at no risk to myself.

i mean, there are jobs. i'm not going get. i'm not going to get onto a bbc comedy panel show anytime soon. there are avenues that are closed because i express the that are deemed to be heretical by the established ones, but i don't particularly want those jobs or covet those jobs. i would much rather be in a position where. i can say what i think, write the books that i want to write. i consider that a much more healthy way to live. and let's go back to the new puritans the culture war is poorly understood is the attempt destroy the progress of social liberalism in favor of a return to politics of division. it is sustained only through an imagined dreamscape in which fascism is flourishing, which in turn justifies the aggressive demolition of a liberal system that failed to bring about the desired utopia. yeah, it's a bit complicated because of the american definition of liberalism. think in the uk when when we say

somebody is liberal, we mean that they believe in traditional liberal values, such freedom of speech, freedom of the press, individual autonomy. that notion, john stuart mill writes about in our own liberty, which is that you should have the right to do whatever you want and think whatever you want, say whatever you want right up until the point until you are encroaching on the rights of others. that's what social liberalism means. it means that you don't get to prevent someone from having a job simply because they are gay or black or whatever it might be. you don't get to censor other people's views. you live in a society where there are a plurality of views and and tolerance is at the heart of that as well of course in the us. i think when people liberal they generally mean it as being synonymous with the left or the democrats in australia, the liberal is the conservative party. so actually word is kind of fraught with various and misunderstandings. so i'm being very clear in the book what i by liberalism, i'm using it in terms of the old fashioned definition, what i

believe to be the prevailing definition. and so what i'm saying there is that those are the values that underpin a functioning liberal democracy, a society, what you would call a constitutional. those are important values. and we we we let them slip at our peril. and at the moment, what is happening is there is a narrative brewing that neo-nazis and fascism is on the rise actually genuine neo-nazis. the uk you could barely fill this hole with them. there are very, very few. all of the evidence tells us this, and yet we're told that they're absolutely everywhere. the word nazi or fascist has been subjected to people who use it promiscuously so casually, almost to denuded of its meaning. it's very specific meaning it isn't someone who believes that you can't change sex, you know, it isn't someone who wants to preserve free speech. i mean, even that is treated with suspicion now by many people. they think that the nazis were

for speech. well, they don't i don't know their history, do they? so it's very important that we don't allow these false narratives to flourish that when people are crying nazi, you say to them, well, hold on a minute, why don't you reserve word for people who are actually of that ilk rather than people who just believe liberal values? andrew doyle let's go to the subtitle of your book, how religion social justice captured, the western world what's the role of religion in this conversation? simply as an analogy. as an analogy i want people to understand. i mean, a lot of people find this stuff very, very confusing because the words that describe the movements seem to be the opposite of what the movement aims to achieve. so they describe as progressive. but the upshot of that movement is very regressive. they describe themselves as liberal, but they're completely illiberal. they talk about social justice, but what they actually achieve is its precise opposite. they talk about being

anti-racist, whereas the phrase anti-racist in their lexicon actually rehabilitates a new of racism and seeks to see us first and foremost through our skin color and secondarily through our individual characteristics as human beings. so people are confused because. they hear about a movement which calls, woke and calls itself a progressive and anti-racist and they want freedom and liberty and all those buzzwords. and what i want to be part of that, i want to be on side. and then they look a bit closer and they realize that actually the movement does exactly the opposite of everything it says on the tin know. so in to make it accessible. what i tried to do in the book the puritans is make this analogy with religion because all of a sudden it makes sense, it becomes comprehensible, you know, religious fundamentalist believers believe all kinds of nonsense and and they do so because they have a belief system in place, a kind of

ideology a kind of structure. i mean the notion if you take any ideology, it's not just religion you could it could be marxism. it could be any set of rules that are provided for you so that you surrender your own critical faculties and, are effectively reading from a script. and this makes sense. why are good people suddenly saying we should segregate people by skin color? why are decent suddenly saying that freedom of speech is a bad thing? well, it doesn't make sense. it's and you see it in religious terms. why are people saying that we have an innate sex soul which for which is no scientific evidence. again makes sense if you think of it in religious terms. it makes sense if you analogize, i don't know the doctrine of transparency in the catholic church, how can that piece of bread actually become the flesh of christ, that sense in religious terms, it doesn't make sense in scientific terms. and that's what the trans movement is asking us to believe, that a man can't physically become a woman by merely declaring to be so.

so it's a way to make accessible what, i consider to be an incoherent movement and it does work, as you describe it, as a religion, it seems to say. that's what this is. people get it and they understand why they're suddenly being asked to declare fealty to it in the way that the church used. say, you better go to church every week and declare fealty or otherwise will burn you at the stake. same when i ask you about two other books before we close here. the author is titania mcgrath woke a social guide to justice and. my first little book of intersectional activism who author titania mcgrath. tony mcgrath was a character i invented about six years ago. who was an embodiment of a woke social justice. in other words, very upper middle class, very wealthy, privileged, but liked to lecture everyone about their privileged races. they all she could see racism in anything. she could see homophobia and absolutely. and she wanted people to be

sacked and she wants to sense abuse that she doesn't agree with. and i created that character on twitter because because that's where the activists were that was their playground, that's where they consolidated their dominance. and then i wrote a couple of books as her, and i was outed as against my will and my book of intersectional activism was deliberately a response to all of these books that were coming later. children's books, such as anti-racist baby by ibram x can. there's a book called woke baby. this book, feminist baby, all these books aimed at little kids, which this book called who am i? which is about something like it's a five year old's guide to gender identity. know talks about things like being to spirit or non-binary. this is not something that children passive can possibly comprehend but what it really is is adults trying to indoctrinate and impose their pseudo religious values on the young because of course, if you get people young shopping, how is it you can have them for life. and he wasn't the only one to have said that because it's

common sense. so book was a reaction to that, you know, to try and get and the title i think says it all my first a book of intersectional activism. obviously a kid can't understand what that means, but you place this book in front of them and you demand that they learn. so yeah, that was that was i. my idea of that was to try and laugh it out of existence. i suppose, you know, if you can make it funny if you can expose it's absurd it is maybe the movement will it looks like it is on the way to collapsing, by the way, not anytime soon, but all the seeds are there. it will eventually fall because no incoherent movement can really sustain itself too long. but it has a frighteningly long period. how did woke my first little book do in the marketplace? oh really? well, particularly the first one because i was outed as the author in the week of the book's release sounds, doesn't it? but it wasn't my choice. an investigative journalist

found out that i was the author and i ended up on tv a lot and on radio talking about it. so it's all very and there was a lot of and i was on the joe rogan podcast talking about it. so it a big book but it also generated lot of anger obviously from the activists because no it likes to be mocked it's the thing they don't like at all and so so i started getting a lot of death threats and angry comments online but i guess that comes with the territory. and i also think if, you know, if they liked book i'd be doing something very wrong so they hate it and that's fine by me you see andrew doyle on gb news, host of free speech nation there, his newest book written under his own name is the new puritans. religion and social justice captured the western world. thanks for spending aand now jos mark scouser. he is author of 25 plus books.

we'll get to those in just a minute. but he's also the founder of this libertarian gathering called freedom fest mark skousen. how? how did this get started? actually, 2007, maybe even earlier, because when i was made president of the foundation for economic education, it was the oldest free market think tank. but it kind of fell out, fallen into obscurity with cato and heritage and reason being the really big libertarian conservative type of organizations. george made president v and i said, what can i to jump start the. and i said, well, let's have a feed fest. let's have a national and let's do it in the most libertarian city in the world. las vegas. and it was a big success. we had 850 people show up. we had ben stein as our keynote speaker. and unfortunately, i was not very good at fundraising. so only lasted a year the president fee. but i love the idea of getting

together this. and so i started a four profit organization called freedom past instead of dfs and we've been going great guns ever since and. we have a couple of thousand people show up every year in vegas. when they shut us down in 2020, we the next year we went to a mount rushmore, rapid city and a great time there. we had a huge turnout and then we went back to vegas. and then last year in memphis. so we we now do other year in vegas and the rest of the time we go to other states. what do people get? this is kind of a renaissance gathering. so we talk philosophy, history, science and technology and not just politics. yes, we have rfk coming and we have the party and we have a president. we have presidential debate with all the third parties have shown up. the two major parties have not up. so that's kind of frustrating that they won't they're not

willing to debate third party candidates. and i think rfk has a good criticism of the parties. so. but what do people get out of it? it's an incredible feeling to get together of like minded individuals who believe in freedom within the rule of law. it's the adam smith model, the system of natural liberty, within the rule of you want maximum freedom to to choose your occupation to decide where you want to go to what price pay, who you hire, who you fire, maximum freedom. that's what this conference all about. so we attract people. we actually don't call it a libertarian. we call it the largest gathering of free minds. so if you have a closed mind, we don't want you here, but they come anyway. prior to getting involved with freedom fest, what was your occupation? well i still am. i write an investment newsletter called forecasts and strategies

is published eagle publishing. i've been doing it since the greatest president of the 20th century was elected. so who would that be in your view would be ronald reagan? that's correct so in 1980, i started my newsletter and i'm going for 44 years. that's my major, main source of income. i'm still writing the newsletter, but i'm also a professor or i have i hold the doty spogli chair free enterprise at chapman university in southern california. i taught at columbia school, columbia university. barnard college, rollins college, and now at chapman university. you know, i have one sort of but you've also taught somewhere else. well, i've taught it since saying penitentiaries. all right. yeah, 12 years. not as an inmate, but as a as a teacher. and as a volunteer. and that was an incredible my wife and i were very much involved with inmates who were in a maximum security prison,

state prison, or something quite infamous and about. it was great to see their lives changed and. so it's not just about, you know, it's about changing their lives. so that when they get out, they're not going back to the same crimes and the recidivism rate with our program of education. is a 3% versus 60, 70%. traditionally. so it's been a very successful program at sentencing. we were glad we were part of it. mark scales and as we mentioned, you're the author of 25 plus books, mostly politics or economics, things like before economics and politics. your latest book, there were giants in the land. yeah. what is this? so this is a story, in his own words, of my uncle cleon skousen and cleon skousen was what i regarded a giant in the land, but more known in the west. he was based in salt lake city. i mean, he had a nation wide

program. he was very much involved with the fbi. he was a special assistant to jager, hoover in the fbi. he was assigned to help. he was assigned as a special assistant to georgia hoover. he was there on december 7th, 1941, when japan attacked pearl harbor. so he was the communications director for j. edgar hoover at that time. then he was assigned to the los angeles bureau, and he was assigned to hollywood dealing with the whole anti-caa communist movement during that time period and also organized crime. he had. there's some incredible stories here about him with mickey cohen and bugsy siegel and people like that. so it's quite an interesting book. i think my perspective, but it's all in now, basically in the story excuse me, this is all, in

his words, what we did. my wife and i, joanne, who's an english professor, we took all of his private journals and we compiled and edited and reduced it to 500 pages to tell his own story in his own words. and we got lots of photographs and stuff like that. and what's really cool is you can see if you take hat off and i put my glasses on. there's quite a resemblance. let's see if we can. let's let's see if we can get a little closer on that and we'll let that happen. why did you write a book about your uncle? is this a tribute? well, you could call it a labor of love, right? well, what would a general audience out of this? well, there's a lot of it's a story about a motivational story in many ways, because clarence

gougeon was born dirt poor in alberta, canada, and he kind of became, you know, like a lot of these people like ben franklin, a lot of the other great leaders and stuff, they started with nothing and they built up an empire. he was an empire builder. he was mormon was mormon ancestors. and they built and so forth. he was very an entrepreneur, but he was firmly he was born in 1930. and he said, had me become come into the earth in 1913 because three legislation occurred in 1913, that was all bad legislation and he was there to reverse it. what is what happened in 1913? the income the federal reserve was created and finally the i'm not sure which amendment the constitution had direct of

senators. instead of by state legislatures. he thought these are all bad. and so he worked hard his whole life to reverse these. well, guess what? he failed on all three counts, despite all his efforts. and yet he was always an optimist because at the i tell this story at the end of his life, people would ask him, dr. and he had a j.d. degree as fbi agent, said, to have a degree in law and. so he said, dr. and how can you be so optimistic? all the terrible things that are happening in the world? and his answer was a religious answer because he was a christian. he said, well, i've read the book and in the end we win. so he had kind of optimism stuff, but there's some great stories in here, motivational stories in the fbi, his stories with organized crime, with

hollywood. i tell the olivia de havilland in this book, which is about gone with the wind, the one of the main actresses in gone with the wind who was an actual communist and was very supportive and giving of money to the communist party in 1940. and so my j. edgar hoover said, i want you to visit the home of olivia de havilland and i want you to thank her for her wonderful role in gone with the wind. but needs to know that the communists bad they she needs to learn about the american story. can you do that for me? so clean on makes an appointment to see a lady to have the fbi so she agrees and he goes in and says listen jagger hoover loves your book and wants you to be follower of america and you not you shouldn't give money to the communist party. she said, well, they're my best friends. they're really support. i'm really supportive of them.

so thank you very much. told you edgar hoover. thank you, but i'm going to stay with it and who and so clinton says but before we leave have a tape recording here we have been secretly taping the meetings of the communist central party and your name comes up and i have this recording here. why don't you listen to it? i'll step out and i'll come back. and if you feel the same way. i'll take the tape recording. you never hear from us again. she listens to the recording. she comes outside swearing like a mule skinner and. she said, i can't believe these people are calling me money back and stooge and we're taking we can know how to take advantage of olivia de havilland. she said, i'll have nothing to do with them ever again. it's quite story. so it's stories like that. by the way, clients said, do not publish this story until after olivia de havilland dies. i'm not sure why, but in any case, she lived to be like 103.

so. but fortunately she has passed away in the end. so the story is there. there's a chapter in here called my friendship with black panther, eldridge cleaver. mm hmm. so julian always had a weakness for. people who? he was a communist he was involved. he had to flee the country because he was involved in some murders during the sixties and seventies protests, the black panthers somewhat a revolutionary group that engaged in violence and so on. and not ideologically anything in common with cleon skousen, but but eldridge cleaver changed it and came back to united states because he lived i think he lived in a communist country or something like that it was not what it was cracked up to be. and so eldridge cleaver back and and changed mind about life he said communism.

he rejected communism. and he befriended cleon, my uncle cleon skorzeny, and they went giving speeches together. i've got pictures, them together and so forth. he he still had drug problems and things like that. so the end, the friendship kind of disintegrated. but it was a remarkable story. that's just a little bit of were giants in the land episodes in the life of cleon skousen written by freedom fest founder thanks for being with us. my pleasure, peter. thankactor comedian rob schneids with us to talk about his new book. you can do it. speak your mind, america mr. schneider, what are you doing it? freedom fest. first of all, the libertarian convention. i didn't think it would be necessary to have a freedom in the united states of america. i think there's itself. it would necessary, however it

does, the state of our politics, the state of the. the current administration and our culture does seem to necessitate a festival for freedom. i think that's a i think very telling free speech. have you been in with free speech with the issue of free speech? well, when segun in trouble. but i mean, i say people have problems with unfettered free speech and the whole idea of free speech going back to, you know, the free speech advocate in the those champions. it's free is you're either for all of it or you're for none of it. so you know, as noam chomsky said, you know, joseph goebbels and joseph stalin, they were all for free speech. if you agreed with them. so the free speech, the stuff that they don't like and, it has to be all of it. and it's messier.

but, you know, once you start getting into people's feeling that they you're protecting people who gets to decide what free speech is. so i think it's a pretty simple thing. it's all of it or none of it. and i'm for all of it. from your book in human history ability for humans to have free unfettered speech is remark doubly short rare and for very privileged few. that's true. i mean, if you look at the history of humanity, there's not been a as a real sustained time for this individual particular liberty. and there is there is a reason why founding fathers in the united states made it the first amendment. they could have made guns first, but they seemed to think they wanted to arm the citizenry with something that they could truly defend themselves. and that's with their ability to

stand up against potential tyranny and actual tyranny from own government. so that that's important. a i didn't ever think in my lifetime that that could be under attack, but it is i mean, thankfully for elon musk and great you know journalists actual matt taibbi and michael shellenberger that they were able to expose actual an infringement the first amendment rights of americans through the twitter files where the biden worked directly with google with youtube with. to and facebook to really undermine our first amendment and to censor those they disagree with. and so while people will say you know free doesn't come free from consequences. well it's it's true you know if

you work for a company and they don't like what you say, they can fire you. however, the government can't do it. and the government did do it. and there's been absolutely no consequences for this administration and that and the state of missouri went to the supreme. the supreme court did not defend free speech in its most recent in the united missouri versus the biden administration ruling came out two weeks ago. so i do think we're as free speech is certainly under attack in our own country the very best you write are holding up a mirror society and saying, quote, this is what's happening. let's talk this a little before we accept it as part of our culture. well, i think in the book, i to talk about comedy because i do think that if if something's happening in society that's crazy or you know we need to at least as it's moving so fast

now, we need to at least look at this before just adopt it as part of the culture. you know, before we, you know, whether it's men allowed in women's restrooms or whether it's, you know, limiting and deciding what can be quantified as free speech, we should at least discuss these things and comedians have a good way of doing it because the audience doesn't lie. they laugh or they don't laugh and. if they laugh, you're on to something and then you can maybe take it further. but i will say, like this joke, you know social justice fallacy is thomas sole talks about in his book the fallacy of social justice. it is it built on a house of cards. i mean, the it's a trojan horse term. it sounds good. who would be against justice. but the truth of the matter is it's just redressed form of tyranny that is kind it isn't a kind of it communism.

it is control. and it is trying to rein in people's individual. mr. shaw. mr. schneider. have you gotten in trouble with your comedy? well, i mean, you have to quantify trouble is and have you been shut down? have i been shut down? yeah. i mean, if they've tried to, i'm still here i'm still performing. but i think i comedians purpose and my purpose as a as i've become i mean, i didn't i didn't start out in show to become a disruptor against against news to say it's waves of of of oddness which i call it but yeah i, i can be an interrupter and a disrupter and a questioner, and, but it does come at some costs. i mean, it's not like i'm going to get a beer commercial any time soon. if you put your neck out there, i mean, when oprah decided to

support barack obama for president, she knew it's going to cost her money. when you anytime you put your toe into the political ring, it does. but i feel the higher cost is to not say something, just especially if you have kids and you want your kids to enjoy the same career opportunities, the same freedoms that that i've enjoyed. you've been pretty active social media, especially on x, and here's a recent x post. my family left california and moved to the free state of arizona because individual liberties were trampled in the guise of liberalism, etc., etc. well, they. yes, exactly right. i think that that i think that i know that that individual liberties are trampled on. if if if the government can shut down your business and say, we're protecting you, it's for health. i mean, it's always for health that or safety that they starts.

and during the pandemic, i got out of california because i realized it was time to go and. interestingly, you would think that after the pandemic, the destruction of businesses restaurants, we don't even know the trauma. we won't know for decades, the actual the trauma that children went through to mask two year olds and and knocking out of schools. you know me children out in front of starbucks trying to get trying to either get wi fi on their computer because they didn't have it at home for their schools. this is a pretty sad sign what was happening. so, yeah, i think it the legislatures in these have not done anything to rein in the emergency of the governor. no, i don't think any state has done that. so, in other words, we're set up to do this again. so unless people stand for their liberties and their freedoms and

have freedoms. speech was trampled during the pandemic and i was one of the ones that was silenced, you know, banned. and unless people up for freedom, they're not going to have it. i want to show this post as well. you endorsed robert f kennedy. yes. well, robert kennedy actually talking about issues that matter to people. we have we have two candidates, president former president trump and president biden, who really aren't talking about how the how is this new generation kids going to be able to afford a home? how are we going to bring the interest rates down? how are we going to rein in blackrock and vanguard and state street from buying up so many homes and causing the price of rent to rise in america? why do 54% of children in america children suffer from chronic? we need to get a handle on the

fact that our agencies our governmental agencies whether it's the food and drug administration whether it's the environmental agency, our have too much in the food and drug administration they have too much influence and there's too much of a revolving door between industry and the regulatory boards. this actually impacts americans. we have a third of americans who are obese. we need to we need to handle things that actually affect americans. and robert kennedy, the only candidate that's really talking about these crucial issues. the new book is called you can do it, speak your mind america. the author is rob schneider. thanks. spent a few minutes with us here

and now joining us on booktv is

author, actress, entrepreneur or sam sorbo. how many books have you written and what's your newest about? oh seven maybe. i'm i'm guessing as i because i have to count the newest one is the parent's guide to homeschool and. that one i'm very excited about. you've written about education in the past. i have i've written i wrote words for warriors, specifically for adults. and this is another that's specifically for adults. that is my that is my target audience, because i'm trying to reach the parents to, open their eyes to understanding that educating your children yourself is the greatest gift you can give yourself that. the education of a child is not only about the education the child, which is what our school system tells us, that they're only about educating children. but if you talk to any teacher, you you should hear from them. my gosh, no, i got so much out of it i was so blessed to have these children that i could come alongside and watch them grow, whatever, and parents to

willingly give up that that tremendous gift. my children, i have three and they're all grown. have taught me so much and have and have brought such such richness to my life that when they were when they were teenagers. and i finally well, they weren't actually even teenagers, but when i homeschooled them for a while and i realized how, how fulfilling it was, how much richness they brought into my life, i became angry at the school for trying to take away from me, for trying to rob me, of. so i've said this. the schools have robbed the culture of the family unit, and that's dangerous to our republic because that's the that's the building block of our nation. and if we lose the family, which we are in the process of squandering, we've lost a lot. well, sam sorbo, you said you've homeschooled, you homeschooled your children for a while after. i had done it for a while, i

started having these realizations start at kindergarten, in homeschool so actually so my oldest went to first and second grade and after second grade or during second grade, i realized the school was just not as academic as i had thought should be. i'm an academic. public or private? public. we moved to the. we moved to good public schools. the good ones in california, which is, you know, last the nation or second to last in the nation that the the the whole school experience. and i looked at the entire school experience. the fact that my son was going to be a very good bully. he was awesome. you've met him. he's he's very powerful. he can get anybody to do anything like he's he's very persuasive. he was in second in first grade. all the fifth graders knew his name. he was on his way. and i didn't like the attitude that he was coming home with. so so it wasn't just the

academics, it was sort of the whole package. i was like, i'm not i'm not sure that this is the best thing. and i remember picking him up one day and the the teacher telling me, oh, it was so great because he sat next to my very misbehaved child. and i was hoping that he would rub off on the misbehaved child and it worked. and i'm like, not his job. like, i want to hear that he's asking too many questions and he's so excited about learning. and so i realized that basically their their focus child was behavior management. my focus was academics. and so i took them out. so my next to did kindergarten in the public school. then i took them out, but i thought, oh, it's a preschool. it's like a play school, kindergarten. it's just going to be fun. it's a half day. they'll have a good time. and it wasn't until daughter was 16 that she said to, me, mom, i, i, i think, i realize now where i learned that i was stupid in kindergarten was, was so, so

were doing site word readings in front of the class, which was probably the worst thing that they could possibly have done to my very shy little girl. just put her in front of the class and then test her. and she didn't perform as well as she had wanted. and they laughed at her and. and i tell you, like the scenario i'm sure was, you know, i picked her up and the teacher said, oh, so cute. the class laughed, but it's, you know, maybe work on her words a little more with her so that she does better next time. and i didn't think anything of it. it took ten years for her to sort of come grips with the fact that she's not stupid because she's brilliant. she just do things the way the rest of world does. she doesn't the way the rest of the world does. her thoughts are difference and fascinate and brilliance and all the time that i was trying to tell her how clever she was, and i would she would say and i'd be like, hold on, i need to write that.

that's how smart they were. ways of thinking that i don't i don't process that way. she thought i was lying to her because she went to kindergarten. and that's why i just tell parents, just don't send your children to other people who you don't know. and even if you know them, like be a little bit reticent about it because, you just don't know what they're going to say that could damage your child and you'll do enough damage to your child. dissolve don't let someone else in to that next. you know what i mean? like, what do you say to parents who may not have the resource sources to homeschool their children. yeah that's that is literally the question right. i say you probably do. you just don't realize it. and the reason that i say that and that's why i wrote this book, the parent's guide to homeschooling is you need to think about education differently than it being school. you don't need the time that you think you need to do this. you don't need the money that you think you need.

because the schools have like vast resources, they're always claiming that they don't have enough. right. you don't need those resources for you to educate your child. so a plumber who runs his own business, he thinks, well, i can't give my child the math that my child needs. well, how much math do you need? you run your own business and you're successful. let's just look at that for just a minute. do you think that you're being successful in the world and running your own business is? not more of an education for a child than the girl who's 22 who just graduated the marxist teaching college and knows about classroom management because that's her. parents have so much more to offer their children in terms of education than the school does and all the answers are in the books. what's another hint that you give to parents? oh, that's a good question. it's it's easier than you thought it would be.

and it's more rewarding than you ever dreamed it could. it's it's so much better. it's like going from black and white to technicolor when you when you start the education process of your children yourself, because you start to realize how much you have to offer them. and that's fine. i mean, if you have ever taught child to tie his shoe and then he titus and he was so proud and you were proud and it was like this, right? you get to have that every day with your kids and think, i can't manage. my children. well, that's because they go to school. so they've learned that you won't manage them because you offload them to the school every day. so parents think that we as a culture we think teenagers. rebell that's just like a given that that we've accepted as a culture. i say no. i say that's a product of the schools that come between child and the parent that that our an alternate authority figure. so the child gets confused and goes well if i obey this authority, do i have to obey this authority?

so don't let another authority figure come between you and your child. it's really i mean, i the the big secret is it's called parenting. it. we shouldn't call it school. we shouldn't do school. we should do education. education is parenting. parenting is the education of the child's sam sorbo. were you working while homeschooling children? yeah. how did that go for? how do you manage that? well like i said, it's not a full time job. it's it's a full time job in the sense that it's 24, seven. but the actual effort of the school work and i overdid it was less than 3 hours a day for me, for three kids. and yeah, maybe some nights you have to give up your nights because you need to grade that paper. you need to read that essay and tell kid what he did wrong. yes, but i would forego drinks with the girls to spend time with my children every every night of the week. i mean, you make the what they

call sacrifices you make those concessions because on the on flip side, what you get as a product that is beyond your wildest dreams. that's that's really the biggest sort of thing. this whole thing is schools are not better than homeschooling. and the proof is there. the homeschoolers score better academically. they do better socially. they, they that's why harvard recruits home schoolers, yale's recruiting homeschoolers, businesses are recruiting homeschooled kids over graduates. and if you have a mass i just heard this yesterday here if you have a master's degree that's like the kiss death for a business to hire because you've been taught to think inside the box. you've been institutionalized for too long. and there's like, we can't we can't fix that. but a homeschool child is somebody typically who thinks outside the box. they're much freer, they're problem solvers. and they and they get things

done themselves. they're do it yourselfers because. the other thing about, educating the child is when you buy the textbooks and you set the child up with the textbook, you very quickly learn that you teach the child to read the chapter first before trying to answer questions, because all the answers are in the chapter. and so the kids then, oh, so i can teach myself i'll have to do is read the book. and so then you have self learners they're they're autodidact because they, they go oh well i really want to learn about you know combustion, engines, then they go to the library, they get the combustion engine book and they learn all about combustion engines. and so it's, it's a completely different paradigm. whereas in school they're, they're basically taught or trained to hate learning because it's so industrialized, it's so mechanized that loses its allure. it's it's, oh, you're, you're, you're reading really good book and put that down 10:00 time to do math. so stop doing the thing that you're enjoying doing. do the thing that you don't

really want to do right now because there's no leeway in school, because it has to be. and that's just that's the nature of school. that's why i say i just say it's not better than homeschool because it can't be because that's the nature of school. was your husband kevin sorbo, involved in the. yes. he taught my schooling. that's what he says. yes, because he was very much in the raising of the children. and so he would take them on trips with him. they would work for him. so that was training. that's education. you know what, you start to realize is that everything is educational for a child because they know nothing. and so then it's fun everything just becomes about getting the child up to speed and the child loves it. that's what want. and, you know, children want to be their parents until their parents things that make them not want to be their parents, maybe like send them away to school or not talk to them because the are busy on their

phones or. right but initially children just want be and they want to be adults. so them to be adults don't send them to an environment where they just have to be a child. the day we infantilize children in our schools, is there an association, an informal or formal of home schooling? yes, several. several. you just it. how did you use it? i joined classical conversation lines. i actually advocate for them. i'm not a paid spokesperson or anything, but i do love their program. they open the world of classical education. to me, i quite like it. it's rigorous, it's academic but it does produce critical thinkers. it does produce in the children the ability to to weigh things and, try to understand both sides and. you know, we've very much lost that in our culture because our schools don't teach that our. schools teach tolerance, but not the idea of discernment.

that's just everything. don't discern. that's the sort of the the overarching lesson in our schools. and so yeah, so classical conversation but there are plenty there are state organizations for homeschooling in every state and there are groups that just together for park days just to have fun and there's lots of different ways. yeah. what's the reaction of your children now that they're young adults to being home state? they they mourn for other children who have to go to school. they are staunch. all of them are like, okay, kids all want to have kids right now? they're 22, 20 and 18, and they want to homeschool because so my oldest son is 22, he wants to have eight children. he wants to homeschool them. the reason that he sees that as a goal is he understands that raising a child is the ultimate

fulfillment of being a man, being the parent of a child is is the fulfillment of manliness to him. and so, yeah, they they've they're they're fully indoctrinated. it. but it's the truth. so, you know, i, i don't regret stepping away from my career for my kids. i don't regret it in fact, i, i'm sad women who are proud to have done things against their children in order to have the the awards and the accolades because that's not what's going to make your life full. and tucker carlson talks about this. you know, wealth is having children wealth is having family, having relationship. we are a relational beings and we've squandered that because schools have taught us that wealth is money and go for the money sacred place, anything to

get the good job, the high paying job, the office, the fancy car. and then we an age and we go, okay, i have all that stuff, but i'm not happy. why am i not happy? because wealth, that type of wealth doesn't make you happy. but dinner with family makes you happy. sam sorbo in her latest book, the parents to homeschooling. thanks for spending a few minutes with us on book tv. thanks so much.on your screen ia hudson her new book is called the soul of civility the timeless principles to heal and ourselves alexandra hudson where did your interest in civility come from? my interest in civility has been lifelong and, quite adamant. i came to my interest, honestly, my mother is called. i'm not even joking. judy, the manners lady, she's this international expert on manners and etiquette, and she's dedicated to the social project.

and as i learned while writing this book, my mother is actually one of four women who are international experts on manners and etiquette, named judy. my mother is just one of four. the most famous is probably miss manners. judith martin, the washington post comments. but my mother, judy the manners lady, is my favorite of these. judith's in the in the courtesy and she taught my brothers and i you know to mind our p's and q's. and i always questioned them. you know, i always wondered, why do we do things the way we do them? and i hungered for kind of a moral and philosophical underpinnings for our our our social norms and expectations. but i generally followed them and they served me well because my mother said they would lead to success and work in school and life. and she was right until i found myself in federal government. i served in washington, d.c., 17 to 2018 and there everything i thought to be true about the utility of the rules of politeness was questioned. well, in fact, in your book, the soul of civility, you write, when i moved to washington,

d.c., and took a job in politics, my confidence in politeness was shaken. i discovered that those who survived and succeeded in washington often did so using two tactics punishing, ruthless meanness or extreme politeness. that's exactly right. so those that these are the two extremes that i've observed and experienced when i was in d.c., in federal government. but these are two extremes that also define our body politic and public discourse writ large today as well. and i realized, you know, i thought i saw people on one hand who were hostile. they were bellicose, they were belligerent. they knew what they wanted. and they used, you know, violence to get their, you know, emotional, you know, social violence to get there. on the other hand, there were people at first i thought they were my people. they were polished and poised and but these were people who would smile and flatter me and others. one moment and then stab us in the back the next. and that really perplexed me. that scared me. and at first i thought these

were polar opposites, but i realized they're actually two sides of the same coin. these modes, extreme hostility and extreme politeness, because both have an insufficiently high view of the dignity and beauty of the human person, that they're hostile contingencies, others as pawns to be steamrolled and silenced into submission and bully to submission, whereas the polite contingencies others as pawns to be manipulated, used and discarded, but neither have a sufficiently high view of what we owe other human beings, just by virtue of our shared common humanity. and that's what led me to realize this essential distinction between civility and, politeness, who were you working for at the time? i was at the united states department of education with secretary davos, going back to the soul of civility, democracy depends on civility. you write major thinkers in world history, from confucius to

buddha, aristotle to jesus christ, muhammad and beyond, all cited human selfishness as the cost of as the of suffering and social discord. they did this because they were astute observers of. the human experience, civility and selfishness. so where i'm honest about my priors in the book, in the introduction, i talk about my christian faith. i talk about how i am a classical liberal. you know, we're here at freedomfest. there's a reason i'm here. i'm on the main stage today and really thrilled to be here. but there's also a remarkable content quality across religious, philosophical ethical, cultural traditions is about the timeless principles that help us flourish, even when we deeply disagree. that's what my book is about. how do we how do we peacefully coexist amidst competing visions of the good which is the essential question of our moment, especially as we head, we are amidst very divisive 24, 23, four presidential election

cycle. and what i found was there is kind of a singular cause with this is a timeless problem. yes, we feel that there is a problem with incivility right now, but actually every era has felt that they are the most uncivil moment. and so what my book does is look to other times, other places, other, other, other wisdom, traditions to say how can we revive these timeless principles of civility, of selflessness, of overcoming our baser instincts and helping us flourish across difference today? and what did you find? well, i found that, you know, human nature doesn't change. we are the same today as we were at the dawn of our species and humans in all times, in all places have been defined by two competing forces. love of others and love of self were profound we socially become fully human and relationship with others and yet morally and biologically, we're driven to meet our own needs before others. and those two facets of who we are are intention. this is the timeless problem, the timeless challenge to civility and to flourishing with others across time and across

place. but just as timeless is the solution. and the solution, as i discovered is civility, which is the art of human flourishing. it's the bare minimum of respect that we are owed and owe to others by virtue of our shared humanity. it is more than mere politeness. it is more than just going to the that the rituals of etiquette and manners and propriety. it's not it's not just the technique of politeness, the outward form of goodness and virtue. civility is an inner disposition of the heart. it's a way of seeing others as our moral equals who are worthy of a bare minimum of respect, just by virtue of us all being human. and that crucially, sometimes respects someone, someone sometimes actually loving someone requires telling them that you think they're wrong, requires disagreeing with them being impolite, telling a hard truth, engaging in robust debate. and i still feel i said too

often today we are content settling for your politeness. the appearance of virtue and niceness and respect and tolerance. but we fail to actually respect people when we when we hold back, we feel that actually we actually respect ourselves, when we hold back and don't speak up when we have things to say. alexandra hudson one of those timeless principles is when it comes to disagreeing with somebody politically, how would you approach it? well, one thing i would do, and this is something i address in my and my final chapter on misplaced meaning and forgiveness. i do talk about how curiosity is an underrated superpower of the 21st century. we live in this age of categorical, more uncertainty where we think we know every thing about someone based on one aspect of who they are. their opinion on one thing, who they voted for. this there's one election cycle and we use that as a heuristic to say, okay, i know this one thing about you, therefore i know everything about you, and therefore i either want you in my life or i don't. and instead of that sort of categorical black or white

thinking, what what might it mean to curious and say, you know, recognize that every single one of us is infinitely complex. we come to our views about the world for many different reasons. and what does it look like to be curious about those reasons instead of saying, you know, this is your view on the vaccine. this is your view on donald trump. i know everything about you and some saying, you know, that's so interesting. you have that opinion. tell me more. how did you come to that opinion? that is an underrated curiosity, staying open and curious and not just assuming we know everything about someone based on one aspect of who they are. another thing that i think could be very helpful, especially in our all and composing 20, 20, 2024 presidential election cycle is actually counter-intuitively talking about politics less. i argue in my book that we've actually as a society and many of us as citizens have made idols, quasi religions out of politics and political views.

as these traditional touchstones of meaning, such as, say, family, community, have been on the decline in recent decades. people have found their meaning. not in these, not in these entities, but in politics. and political, political candidates, political issues. and there are three symptoms i see of this misplaced me in this crisis of misplaced meaning that is detrimental to our democracy and ourselves. one is the way in which people can go from 0 to 60. you know, peaceful and fine to apoplectic at the just the mere mention of an issue, you know you've you've you've flicked their sacred cow, treated something they care deeply about insufficient insufficient deference and they go insane. and that's a symptom of a lizard brain being activated. and they're put into fight or flight because you have you've, you know, aggravated the core aspect of who they are when you see that, you see that that's a symptom of someone who has misplaced their core identity, their core meaning in a political issue and in politics. a second symptom is the equity of politics.

it is everywhere all the time. previously apolitical venues of life. you know, sports where we grocery shop, where we go, where we send our kids to school, where we live now. everything has a political dimension to it in ways that that didn't that wasn't the case a few years ago. and that is, again, bad for democracy. bad for ourselves. if we're overdoing democracy and we're undermining democracy as a result, we need a break from it. and a third symptom is the tragedy of this misplaced meaning and the crisis of it is the tragic number of people who have ended friendships or family relationships over politics and political disagreement. you know, again, these these hot button controversial issues, they realize there's a rift in the relationship. they say, i can't our disagreement the relationship. and instead of seeing that difference in the context of a 20, 30 year relationship or a lifelong friendship, they say, that's all i need to know. i can't have you in my life anymore. that's that's a symptom vastly disordered love. that's not how it should be. so we need to actually save seeing it's saving democracy

means doing democracy less, you know, making it making it work, covering things in our lives that that give us joy in life. like, like beauty and the sublime and curiosity and actually cultivating friendship across difference. and we're again, we were overjoyed. democracy and undermining our democracy as a result. you write in your book the soul of civility, and you work in the trump administration. donald trump's ascendance to the pinnacle of american public life was a stressor in our nation's and our world's problem with incivility. it's a great point. you know, early drafts of my book did not mention donald trump once. i didn't want to mention donald trump in my book. my book is not a political tell all that it does, not its purpose. i. i left government after a deeply despondent, disillusioning experience because i desperately yearned to be part of the solution that i wanted my work to be a tool of reconciliation and healing and dialog across difference.

and i did not want i knew that it meant mentioning trump. that's all people would go to. that's all they would. they would. that was their worst shark test, right? like they were going to judge my whole book on how i treated trump. so i didn't i, i didn't even mention him. and then i was persuaded to at least have this one paragraph about him. and what i say is there's no that donald trump coarsened our public life, no question. but it is a misguided assessment to say that he caused our problem in civility. i show that throughout the book. i show that, you know, the oldest book in the world written 2350 b.c for millennia ago is book on civility, right? people have been grappling with this question of how do we peacefully coexist for a very long time? and if we misdiagnose the problem and misdiagnosing, oh, donald trump's the problem the moment he is gone, we're going to be perplexed because. there's still going to be a civility problem, you know? yes. new episode, dominance like, you know, controversial public figures or new technologies, new things in our in our world, new

trends will always cause stress and it will contribute to incivility. but to say that they cause it is misguided and wrong. you have now moved to indianapolis from d.c. what were you doing prior to joining the education department? i was in local education policy in milwaukee, wisconsin. i did my i'm a history and philosophy undergrad. i love intellectual history. i love i love i love storytelling. but i wanted my work to be i wanted to understand how ideas could help people. so i did my master's in public policy at the london school of economics. and after that, i got married and moved to milwaukee, wisconsin, with my new husband, who was clerking for a federal judge there. and i was at a local think tank there doing education policy. and it was my big break to move to d.c. and be offered this post in that in the federal government, it was my chance to take i'm fresh out of grad school, fresh out of undergrad, where i had these platonic of of what ideas that could make america's education better.

and then i was just so disillusioned while i was in government to see how little actually could be done and how little i could do. well, do you see a difference between d.c. and indianapolis when it comes to civility? it's a great question. i remember the day very clearly. it was fall of 2017. it was maybe, you know, nine or ten months into my tenure in federal government. and i came home one day and said to my husband, who's from indiana originally, i said, i'm done with washington. i'm done with d.c. and with politics in the swamp. let's move to indiana. it was my idea to move there. and he said, we've always talked about one day moving there to be close to his family and to have children there. and he said, okay, sounds good. we'll move to indiana. no take backs and a few months we were out there and when i first moved out there, actually, i took a job in government once again in the governor's office. and i you know, in my mind, in that transition, i was escaping the swamp, the toxicity, the the

political angling. and it was i was i was moving to kind of pastoral, blissful rolling hills of the american midwest. that was my vision. that's what i thought i was getting into. and what i realized is the human condition is the human condition. it doesn't matter the time, the place, the geography, the locale, whether it's politics in indiana, politics dc, the same dynamics exist. human nature is the same. there are still going to be the back biters, the people who are, you know, angling for for power and success. and so i actually didn't last long in indiana politics, but i realized it was actually much the same that i just fled from in government. so after i sailed out of that second and fled that second job and indiana, my husband finally said, okay you know, you can focus on this book. and that's where i really threw myself into it. but but you i indiana did teach me a lot about civility. i one of my first friends in indiana, her name was joanna taft. she came up to me after church one day and said hi, i'm joanna

taft. would you like to work with us time. and i never heard the word port she used as a verb before. but i was curious and we went to her home that day and i realized is that joanna is staging a quiet revolution against. our atomized, divided and alienated status quo from the vantage point of her great front veranda, she created people across politics, across geography, race, just to inhabit a shared space and that is radical in our deeply divided and deeply siloed moment and as i wrote this book, i realized there are people across the country hundreds, thousands, the same thing they're saying, i can't. who is going to win in 2024? i can't control what's happening down down the road city hall, but i can control myself. and i'm going to choose to make my sphere of influence a better and beautiful place. the book is called the soul of civility timely principles to heal society and ourselves. the author alexandrait's and ons

helen raleigh. she is the author of this book, the broken welcome mat america's un-american immigration policy. helen raleigh you have a chapter at the beginning of the book called foundation of our national identity. why do you go back to luther and the founding of the country? when you talk about immigration? well, i think very important because we always talk about as a country of immigrants. and i think many people misunderstand that as what does that mean? and some argue, oh, we're not so i think it's very important to talk about something because america, to a immigrant like me, means so much more. it's not a just a country. we come, make a living, raise our family. it's a country we represent the ideal. i know that's kind of is now very popular nowadays, but it's actually it's mean something to

especially people like me live in a i grew up in this very tourism so that's the regime that's why i think it's important to go back to see america's founding. it's not just a group of people. right. that ruled on the mayflower here. they brought the west. and so some of the best ideas, western civilization, you know, the religious freedom, you know, the libertine property rights, the brother, all these ideas to these lands and establish something with giving us hope and then generate action. so people, immigrants came to pursue that same dream. and with our collective effort as true and also a combination, a collective effort as well as individual, you know, rugged individualism that we make. this is one of the great, the greatest i should the greatest country in the world. so that's i think it's important that we go back to very early to set the record straight. why america? you know, it's such ideal, such a beacon of hope for people with

so many different skin, beautiful language, you know, very different food. but we identify as america's long before even, you know, you that you're an immigrant. what's your story. i'm an immigrant from a china. i was born and raised in china. i came to this country in 1996 as a student and i became a u.s. citizen in 2013. so. between 1996 to 2013, this is a 70 year period i went through almost all the major legal jungles, our legal immigration system. i was so fed up with it, i almost gave it up. but again, i started, you know, the american way is, not just to sit back about state houses, do not go right the american ways. is there something not right. i should fix it. you know, i'm a citizen, not i shouldn't fix. so that's a problem for me to write this to, to talk about not

only the history of immigration, but also how can we make this system better that benefited our country as well as creating win win for immigrants. now after 1996, did you return to china? i returned to visit, but i never returned to this. now that you're citizen, can you go back? oh, yes, but they probably not going to like me very much. let's go back to the beginning of your book the broken welcome mat. what do you think the role of religion in america's immigration system has been or the importance very? much so, i think the role of religion because the it's the in my book i spent a lot of time to describe early immigrants that were really driven by it because they were persecuted for what they back in europe. so they really tried to seek this promise a new age promise that they can practice what they believe freely without suffering persecution. and they want to do that for other people as well. and so religion has its

fundamental importance in our country. our countries first, i would say that's almost a birth mark was our country is it has this religions religion essentially christian attitude slavery. but at the same because our founding fathers had good had the you know insight that does christianity is not a they never that the christian ideas of national religion but as you all were they were all believers or at least they believe a higher super being oversees people. and i think that's important that's that's what's driving the moral gives them the moral clarity. so, you know, we how they designed the declaration there how the declaration of dependance was written how the constitution was written. there's such apostle of the moral clarity in it. and every time when they make those major decisions, they, you know, they're driven that moral clarity that's came from the

influence or the providence. i do believe that. well, obviously immigration is a contemporary issue. but in your book, you talk about some immigration legislation from 1790, 1795. 1798. what kind of immigration legislation are we talking about back then? historically, so historic. we our country's immigration had. so there are two aspects that make it because i think the people who do like to study history tend to misrepresent it. there's there's definitely one aspect that is very libertarian our country's very first immigration law was very simple people that back then did not write thousands of pages of legislation. it was a very simple the basically our founding father just wanted a any immigrants is welcome long as they demonstrate good moral and also a white person. unfortunately part was in there but it also really emphasized good moral character and just

from time to time there was a residency requirements. some time or two years, or sometimes five years or five years. the reason they have this residency requirement, our founding fathers will be expanded. although roman history, it would be kind of roman history and they learned this on the roman history that you want the citizens have a stake in the state. so that's why they want to give new immigrants time to build up familiarity with our country's philosophy and this law they can swear in to become naturalized us citizens. that's what the residency for. so other than that, the immigration law has been very simple for decades, a hundred years. then gradually became more and more complicated. and that's one that does this byzantine system we're live in today was the of every six succession of a of governments

have building out more and more bureaucracy immigration. so the more and this is the funny part it's not funny for immigrants but the funny part is every time add another layer to the bureaucracy, they always is doing it for the benefit of the immigrant. they want to take care. this is special. who this special needs that special needs that special. but what they end up doing is making it so count, placated with such a bureaucracy that it's actually hurt immigrants just let me just give you a quick example. two years ago, there were a group of indian american software engineers protesting in silicon. what's your reason for protest? because some of them, based on the estimates from, the uscis, the government agency in charge of citizenship, a green card based on the u.s.a., is estimate some will never see a green card until. have happy win for like over 100 years to see a green card. these are people who are very educated, have good experience.

they're working for like microsoft, google, amazon, and they have the families very well educated. their law abiding citizens. they love america. but we're making them to wait for over 100 years to give them a green card. that's just incredible and unfair. and it is the of bureaucracy supposedly helping immigrants supposed to help america and end up helping neither helen raleigh the next big change in immigration law came in the 1880s. why was that? well it was because. it has a lot to do with with me. so this book that that special chapter sub chapter about the citizens, it's going to give you a very emotional of about chinese immigrants history in this country. it means a lot to me as a chinese immigrants because

because of today we're facing a different kind of discrimination that often said, oh, we're part of america. we're all you know, we didn't give much to this country. we're just come here to take advantage of things. that's why i think it's very important to set record straight that the early chinese immigrants helped build america. you know, we built the real world. and, you still just railroad the agriculture kind of food. yes, agriculture, industry. it will not cut california. it would never become to become the breadbasket of united states. even now, the chinese immigrants, japanese immigrants korean immigrants who build the levees, you know, standing water, deep waters, you know, collecting dirt with barrels with hints. so so i think it's it's very important. what do we see happening? eight, eight, eight. 1880 was the discrimination

against the chinese because they were blamed labor union. canadian. chinese immigrants for stealing jobs for so their willingness to do anything at any wage in order to survive and then so they persuade the democrat party representatives in 1882 they passed the chinese exclusion act. it's the only immigrant asian law specifically targeted one ethnic group, especially after group. how instrumental they helped build cross, you know, transcontinental railroad that was basically a speed of the united states into modern era connect the east coast to west coast of their thousands of chinese immigrants died for doing that. and the communities finish that work they were pushed out. they were told you can never become citizen of this country. you give your blood, sweat, a life to how long was that

exclusion in place? the exclusion act lasted until the second world war. a towards the end of the second world war, when states became ally with china and went into war against the japan. that's when the united states decided to move to the, you know, basically cancel the exclusion act. now you report that. from 1790 to 1870, about 9 million immigrants came into the country. after that. did it slow down or speed up? it's definitely slowed down again. zero. you and this is a wave. this is this is why i think it's important you look at the waves of immigrants immigration because there's always this a push and pull the push of all the factors immigrants home country. normally because it was economic you know devastation you know or

persecution for various reasons like religious persecution they'll push people won't to leave their country. and believe me, it takes a special kind of person with with a lot of courage to want to leave single, single family the language, the culture of the middle, to go somewhere. so so it has to be devastation to push people out, to want to make that journey. and then there was a poll that just a poll and push out factory and then there's a present generation after they came here, they became established. then they consider themselves as native in the sense that you know they have to live here. then they joined the natives. the fear to say oh this new camp newcomers, you know, they are willing to work for anything for dirt cheap wage. they consider them as economic a threat. and they they seem to oh, there's a very limited economic

pie. so if they're willing to, you know, do anything, then we can have a smaller even though that's not what america is about. so so you see this every time we you see a big right after a big immigration wave, then you see this very nativist approach to try to push people out to say we need a set of various we can't just admit any, but, you know, too many people, you know, we need to jobs in america. we see this argument again and again throughout the history helen raleigh in your book, the broken welcome mat. you spend a bit of time talking about the 1924 immigration act signed by calvin. what did that do? well, it's basically a drastically the quota for immigrants from a united states and. basically, this is right after the big wave. so it's basically you can see from the statistics that the immigrant endured the number of immigrant united states does is

greatly reduced, you know, basically plunging to a deep, deep poverty. and that we also, as a society show of that of that act. there's also very strong. so the chinese exclusion act that we talk about it was initially targeted to chinese immigrants and it only targeted to chinese immigrants to prevent chinese immigrants to become u.s. citizen. but in the 1920s, during wave of really isolationist movement, not only the numbers of european immigrants dropped, they also the exclusion act to basically became the asian exclusion act. like any engagement with some, any asian countries are not allowed to become u.s. citizens. so it's this whole isolationist and southern were restricted to, weren't they? yes, yes, yes. what did the great depression do to immigration, to the united states?

i think in the great depression? what so time when the economic disaster was such as the great depression happened, because before that there were other economic crises to every thought when something like that, people became very fearful, which understandable because you see massive layoffs. you know, people here, u.s. citizens, they struggle to support families. they struggle to find a jobs. so whenever we experience economic crises, cycles like that the isolationist will win the day this you will see more isolationist talk, more populist talk about we don't need the immigrants because. william have enough jobs for america. like i said it's understandable but it's definitely not as we can see the time use them america's economic system is about we have ability as a free people we the ability to grow the pie is not limited to the size of pie. so. you use things to limit the size

of pie. you in the human capital is a barrier that you never going to go to pie. you're still going to shrink everybody, going to have smaller and less. so so i think again to give immigrants have proven to the rest of america that we are here to help grow the pie. 1940 was the alien registry asian act and in 1952, the word white was removed from immigration law. yes, that was a tremendous accomplishment. even though i do not particularly like the law, it still has a very limited quota for asian immigrants. but i think it's a giant a step in the right direction. that asian sort of first time for over a long period time other asian immigrants like who were not born here can finally apply and have opportunity to become a naturalized citizen. so it means a lot. and you can see you get your chart because that you move

immigration from especially to asian and south asia area you can see that number just gradually going up from that period, 1965. now we're getting into more contemporary times. there was a major overhaul or add on to the immigration law. how would you describe that? well, a profoundly impact for law. again, i still do not like it, but it's a profoundly impactful because we haven't changed much since then. so is it basically laid out it does framework where working with right now so you did a couple things. one is it's really emphasize family reunification as the primary of u.s. immigration system. this is very important because before that was not in the main goal, but after that it has become a major goal and it has major ramifications of a lot of problems we're facing today. so that's the one. number two is it's also have this giving this a priority to

basically divide the people based on different priorities within family category and like, you know, if you're a parents, your spouse or children or are you're older, younger than 21, then you wait. time is different. you know, this is what decided this system, this this is the one i like of this act is for the first time also allow for employment immigration but. i like to see more of it but this one because it's so emphasized reunification, it's limited to about a 2020 5%. and so it's a small it's a small portion of this bigger pie and the third part is this is the first time? well it's not a first time introduce a quota, but is the first time introduce a big quota. so nowadays we to about a 1 million legal immigrants each year and now quota has barely changed since 1965. so really we're now living under the umbrella of 1965 law, which

also told you it's really about time we updated because it's been a long time and that was signed by lyndon johnson, 1986, ronald reagan signed immigration legislation which did what he basically gave a what's so called an amnesty. he basically did their trade off. so he was working with the democrats majority congress. so basically the trade off was the democrat was supported. the border security, you know, measures that that he had that the republicans advocate and each change that he gave amnesties to illegal immigrants at a time was at a country i think he and his party underestimated because he was a key and the republicans were confident that you know you wait just give amnesty to everybody inside the border then will will not have much illegal immigration problem. i think he made them mistake that he didn't understand

immigration law is also about incentives. right. giving incentives, incentive, good behaviors. people will follow the law if. you incentive, bad behaviors. you will see more of it. and that's it. unfortunately, that's exactly what did. and so since then, the illegal immigrants number of illegal you move to united states keep going up helen raleigh given the short history that we've gone through here, where does that leave us today with regard to immigration? we're in the mess. and i think there is there needs to be a national of urgency to solve it and especially in the last a couple of years, we have regions stuck to the open border policy. obviously a total failure not only is a total failure, but has also poisoned the political will to reach a immigration reform. compromise from sides, especially from the right,

because as illegal immigrant immigrants, it's very frustrating to me that we don't have a voice in this debate because every time you turn on the news channel, everything you read, you know, you're writing every discussion with somebody else because every county is not a border town, all people can think up a talk about are illegal immigration. nobody wants to talk about illegal immigration, but i fundamentally believe unless we solve have this efficient, workable legal immigration system also good writing center to have people come on the front door and then we know who's coming here bring what skill sets and the experience we need to create a win win situation unless we create a path like that where continually incentivized illegal behaviors. so i really, really want us to come come back to focus on discussing how can we set up our legal immigration to also the right incentives to come some doors and not so much to come to

the back doors. i mean, what we know how this it's a mess well the first two items in the republican platform of for the 2024 election number seal the border stop invasion number two carry out largest deport tation in american history. what do you think of those? so i think those are the very first bullet point. the part sort of the first bullet point has a like a two parts. why seal the border? and what's the second one? to seal the border and stop migrants invasion and the word invasion invasion. i do not like the word invasion because we know we know majority of them are economic migrants. i mean, yes, there are definite bad actors with malicious to america know we we know that too. and we don't know how many of them. but i can guarantee you it's a small number that does not mean they're going to cause harm they still have the capability to cause a big harm. but a majority of the immigrants

we know, we talk, they are the ones who come here for economic reasons. so they are not they go army of you know, of evading army, i think is a condescending to call them invasion. but i do agree. but i do agree that we need to strengthen our border because right now, you know, public policy is always about a trade off. right. so when we have lawlessness border, then you have a border agent that you are supposed protect our border screening bad guys out. now they're all in process center to how will people to you know process immigrants for economic migrants and not protecting our border so. something must be done. so i can totally agree with the first half, the first one point. but i, i really wish the republic could come find a different term to describe it because on the immigration issues. you probably have a hard time to win over those immigrants and america. you know, part of america

because of that reason we need to learn to talk about immigration. this better. and then the second one, i definitely disagree on deportation. deportation. i think we should we definitely should deport people who commit a crime or people who always find that people have a criminal history or they commit a crime in america. we should deport them immediately. that's not true. but i would unfortunately, in the last three and a half years, joe biden. culture, 10 million people. and we don't know many of are where they are and then it's already already started down i think a mass deportation it's it's a fantasy i don't know how these are that like logistically workable right so and i think you again we talk poison the well for political compromise the immigration issue is not a left and right issue it's a national security issue it's an economic issue it's a issue that touches on so many americans, so

many towns, you know, we need to compromise from both sides. we cannot continue do or say things that are poison. the political to come to the middle to do this because even nobody's doing anything seems only going to get it worse everywhere is seen that in the last year three and a half years we as a country cannot afford to keep going on like this. this is the second edition of the broken welcome mat. what did you update? i learned a lot about the illegal immigration. just forgive me what's happened. the last issue, three and a half years. and i also updated some a policy especially on the asylum a part in my first edition. i do not think was as a big deal. so i a very simple solution to say, oh, we should review it. but in new edition i actually you agree to let us go back to the history, see how especially if i can you a quick example on the company the miners rights.

it was towards the end of the george w bush towards the end of his second presidency that the u.s. congress passed the anti human trafficking laws. basically, there's a a clause there to say, oh you weak users on company minor across the border illegally we must protect them not to send them back again we're talking about incentives so once that law came into effect, even though it was all the good intention to protect minors, that it became an incentive for those traffickers as well as these families who desperately escape their home countries economic conditions to minors across the border. so now we have this huge problem of hundreds of thousands of children came, you know, across the border illegally and the trump administration, you know, you heard there's you not it's it's not a necessary accurate description. the pictures overhyped of kids

in page you know discussion and the recently last week at the congressional hearing and whistleblowers of access at hhs homeland security came forward and talk about how the biden administration they were so desperate to avoid of the op ed optics kids in the cage so they released kids prematurely without without a lot of a vetting security value on who they released the kids to. so now there's this whistleblower came forward. it turns out that we are our government are releasing kids, minors to, emissary, gang members, drug dealers, human traffickers or release them to became child or released into prostitution. so instead of protecting the kids and we're choosing the laws intention to actually fact you set up contact matches work here

created a humanitarian crisis on minors. so this this is you know again we have to go back to how we write each law and what's it's intended consequences so that that's a section i really update quite a bit here's book it's called the broken welcome america's on american immigration policy and how we should fix it. the author helen raleigh, thanks for being with us. thank you,and now joining us ons

george gilder. he has been a frequent guest of ours. mr. gelder you have written what, 50 books, 100% of them on economics is that is that a fair assessment? no 21 books probably, depending on how you interpret additions

at all, all on economic one was sexual suicide, it was about sex. and then i got interested money later and then moved on to technology and most of my books have been about technology, the mixture of technology and money and cryptocurrency, seas and life there. google and you. i think you interviewed me about life after google several times, but your most recent book, how would you describe the israel test, how israel's genius enriches and challenges the world? what category would you put book in? well, it's it's it's its philosophy. it's the nature of capitalism. it's the sources of our super abundance. it's the israel's test of the

new edition is introduced by dennis prager and dennis has prager university. and they have an israel test video that you can see at prager university, which sums up the book as how do you respond to people who sell you? and. the six of achieve wealth, intellect? and do envy them and love hate them and try to do that. you that they somehow diminish you or do you emulate and admire them and use them as an inspiration and learn from them and call right with them and.

that's the essential israel's nose and do you see israel as a country to be emulated? yes. israel is of the great miracle in the world economy. it it's it's per capita income for arabs and -- is higher than german is or or britain's or france. japan's it's it's the source of many of the key technologies that drive the us economy. people often imagine that somehow israel was dependent on us. but it's just as true that the us is dependent on the genius of israel for the most rapid, rapidly growing companies in the us economy.

we give our example israel intel is our leading semiconductor company and israel, i mean, intel is really in israel only companies at. its yeah, they invented the end degraded circuit but the integrated circuit and the microprocessor but they didn't succeed and supporting intel in its early years and its early years intel was sustained by nonvolatile memory. those are flash is what we call flash memory cell e promises they were that were invented by froman who was an israel who was one of the key figures in the early intel group and all of profits for the first several years of intel from these nonvolatile memories.

then establish their leading wafer fab, which is intel's chips. leading edge chips are made you factor out god and of israel and many of their leading microprocessors were designed that there israel design center. of course intel, was an american company. it's also an israeli company. and and google it's, you know, google maps and everything. earth, waze is an is israeli company. that was by google and which makes possible all the features of google maps and google as a side centered intel. i mean sorry, ibm has crucial

designs centers in israel. it's it's just and you know, many of our leading medical technologies from pfizer, astrazeneca, you know, all the various. all are were invented in israel largely. and sdi i was a great advocate of. sdi actually showed ronald reagan, his first microchip and said this would enable of strategic defense to intercept missiles as they in. but the us never really developed sdi is too much bureaucracy, but the israelis were a partner, was in sdi from the beginning. they were the only partners and

then they created iron dome and sling and arrow three, the really the strategic defense, a vindication of reagan's vision, of intercept the missiles from iran and the current war in the middle east. and in fact, you write, when it comes to that issue, if there should ever occur an all out missile attack against the us, israeli technology will be the reason we will likely survive. no, that's george gilder you say that the israelis is also a book about philosophy. what do you mean? well, my my favorite chapter probably is on john von. no, i'm and john von was the originator of information

theory, but when von and he was also one of the key figures in, the manhattan project, which saved america during the second world war. but john norman started as an ally of hilbert, who believed in a determine mathematical model of the universe and von neumann and heard kurt gertz, i'll just give good charles proofs back in 1931 and girdles show that no intellectual system, no conceptual system can actually can function without proposition outside the system that can't be reduced to the system and von

neumann was hilbert's chief ally in trying to reduce all science to a single mathematical scheme. and he realized that girdles prove girdle was 20 years old when he offered that no one, no one in the room really understood its significance except von neumann and von neumann abandoned the hilbert scheme. that was his life pursued and this and decided that distributed com mutation would be possible and you could have as many computers as there were human minds and and and that however that was all ultimately reliant on faith. you couldn't have a system determined a system that exploited everything you couldn't have a singularity as

they call it now an artificial intelligence and john von neumann who really invented the von neumann computer model and also the von computer model, is massively parallel processing that you find error in video and in the data centers. he also invented that model it's called non von, but he also wrote the key paper that explained neural networks, which is the non von model. but anyway, it was essential of understanding that all intellectuals active depends on faith and a man made for the universe and. i tell that story and a chapter

of the israel says, quote as one of the world's most profitable economies built on one of the world's most barren territories, israel challenges all those material. superstitions of zero sum economics based on the distribution of natural resources and the exploited nation of landed labor. yeah, well, this is israel as less land than anybody else. just about 4% of the middle eastern land. and yet it's of economy is worth half a trillion dollars or more. and it's market cap is bigger and it's it's a key force in the world economy. and it shows that ultimately. well, stems from the human mind because here --.

5.4% of the world's population. but seven out of the half the prizes are won by -- of seven out of the top ten of richest men in. the world are --. -- led many of the leading companies all around the world and and and this is why the world faces an israel us. it's whether you admire these people and learn them and collaborate with them and expand your own opportunities in your own horizons or whether you resent them and try to tear them down. and that's really the israel test and that's what my is about. and you write that the central that israel's defenders is to accept the finding of the debate by its enemies whose idea is

that peace depends on some marginal but perpetually elusive improvement in israel's behavior. yeah, it's it's just really absurd. when i first this is my latest version of the israel test. it's revised and updated a lot. it's got a introduction by dennis prager, but and when i first did the first edition, i gave a speech in far rockaway in queens to a synagogue and after it ended the line up, sign the books. and one of the people gave me this little bit of volume of it's published in the. 19 four days by walter loudermilk and he was an

agricultural economist. and roosevelt administration and and he was responding the crisis of the dust bowl, which was a real climate catastrophe back in the 1930s, which was threatening american agriculture production and wreaking havoc the west and and so he went around world for the department of agriculture and and ended up in israel and discovered that just agricultural inventions that made the desert bloom and it's all in what loudermilk burke and it's it's it's expounded the detail with agricultural agronomy and subsisted creation and shows how and this is

continue israel still makes the world blown at it leads the world and they sell them as desalination while its economy is increased. it's 60 times that's. it's productive today by a factor of it it's use of water is actually diminished 10% it's agricultural production is up 16 fold since it was founded. but its use of water is actually down 10%. so israel polls shows that all our fears of a water crisis or a resource crisis. population crisis or whatever are all empty. if you affirm the genius of of

human beings inventing new technologies and making the deserts of our lives bloom with no possible. abilities and capabilities and operating hundred days, new horizons for human creativity. one more quote from the israel test. instead, what we find in the us is not the immense gratitude that israel deserves, but an insidious spate of abusive nonsense detailing the alleged indeed the sins of israel having built the world's preeminent high tech economy on a mere 4% of middle eastern territory, israel is denounced from continental america as somehow big, even staunch israel supporters tend to bend over backwards to conceive that israel deserves intense criticism for much of its

behavior. i think it is just an amazing thing to observe. i mean, this is, you know this is israel has been invaded six or seven times over the years from the same jihadist force and and somehow they're blame for responding to those six and a father or, the six terrorists invasion or the i mean it's really quite incredible particularly when you realize the arabs israel are the richest and the longest living arabs in the world. there are more than 2 million of them. and they are of. are 16% of the workers.

and israel high tech industries, they're among the most prosperous people in the world. the arabs of israel george gilder is the author of the israel test how israel's genius enriches and challenges the world. and he's spent a few minutes with us here on book tv. thank you so much,rainer zitelmn author, german book publisher and a german news editor, 28 books for 929, the 29th book is this vietnam poland and the origins of prosperity. why did you choose vietnam poland to write about this time? so first of all, you maybe this index of economic freedom, the heritage foundation, its rank every year how economically the free countries and i for me it's not so important to compare

different countries but to compare over time. and if you do this you'll find no other countries than, poland and vietnam, who increased so much over the last decades. give you an example. the united states they have now, the worst rankings. they started the index in 1995, lost seven scores. if you compare to 1995, vietnam gains 20 scores. at the same time. and this is important our curious to find out more these countries and what a lot of people don't know vietnam was the first country in the world, 99 to fewer than all african countries across the roster. war not only the world is united states the fathers war with france, japan, china and what was not destroyed. the war was destroyed by the plan the economy. and so they came being the first country in the world in 1990. but they are people then they

started with free market reforms, introduced private property, opened the economy for investors. and the result is this is amazing. the number of people living in poverty in vietnam decreased from 80% in 1990 to less than 5% today. so you can see what free market reforms can do they call themselves socialist today. don't believe it. i've there i had lectures at universities it's it's easier to find remarks in an american university a european university than in vietnam. they know what socialism is but you write in your new book, mr. seidelman today, vietnam, vietnamese economy is one of the most open in the world. at the same time, they're not holding elections correct? that's correct. of course, you have to distinguish between politics on the one hand, it's not a democracy of course. it's a one party system.

there's no freedom press. all the newspapers are owned by the government. so you have to distinguish in the economy, they became more and more free, but not unfortunately, in politics. this is true is a difference maybe to to the second country, poland. poland was one of the first country in europe in the eighties. even in the eighties, people had to 2 hours and hours in long queues to catch something to eat, to get products, sometimes even days in the eighties, not to the fifties. and then there started in 1990 with free market reforms, polish it all, which was a finance minister, an economist who believes that higher emissions and now since three decades poland is growth friendly. but this is the difference. vietnam they have also now democracy. so it goes hand in hand. in poland, capitalist reforms,

democracy. this is a difference to vietnam and poland write is more economically than spain. israel or italy. is it due to the finance minister in poland or was there a sea change in approach to economics? so yes, they started in the nineties with very free market reforms. i'm fortunately, in the last 15 years, not much as i've done on the opposite of the peace party road there they stopped even the nationalized something. so what's happened in the last ten years is not as good. but they did so much. of course they couldn't do more as. but today poland is in a way, on a better way as strongly. i compare it with my country. for example, the growth expectation for germany for this

year is 0.1%. in poland 2.8%. so you're seeing why is that? why they are not so ideologically driven? you know, we in germany what we are very ideology trip with climate change and remain to topics and you know what they did trump to forbid or phase out nuclear power plants to phase out coal power plants for fracking and now even they ban the registration of cars of the combustion engine so all ideology driven in poland is not so they're all pragmatic also in the migration policy. i think they are better in poland. we, we welcome germany from all over the world. millions have millions in the and state. a lot of them are only on social welfare. and with poland, too, also, they did a lot for people coming from ukraine but not for everyone. and people who come from other

countries. they work there. poland, not as it is in germany because they have not such a big state as we have rainer's eidelman if you were going to build a factory to make widgets, what do you rather go to poland where the wages is would be lower and the restrictions less than in germany is this part of their appeal. absolute. absolutely. and i would prefer to go to poland and the problem this is a problem for. germany, for example, that competition leaving trumka. i give you one example. all the companies that rely heavily on electricity prices like the chemical industry, they are leading. yes. after the biggest chemical company the world. now they go to because this age is bureaucracy. so the shopping china and the electricity is much cheaper. so this is this is a problem foreign direct investment. another topic of your book, how

nations escape poverty. what's what's the importance fdi? yes, this is a very good question because i would compare vietnam with another country. i was in the last 20 months, 30 countries, one of these countries was part they polish one of the ten first countries in the world. and they a lot of restrictions what you cannot invest and this is not welcome and they see foreign investors as an enemy for them. so they have a lot of restriction there. their regulations in vietnam, the opposite. they welcome them. can we attract more foreign investors from asia, from the united states, from europe? so they understood that foreign money will help them. and this is a very marked difference because a lot of also in africa they don't understand. it's it's not bad it's good have to embrace them and and another

thing that is the difference in vietnam. you know spoke about the war and the nineties they were so poor they could have blamed the states for their problems because of the war. and you know, if you know, this number in the in vietnam war, ten times smaller and explosives from the united states fell on vietnam then on many of the second world war. so they could blame the united states, but they didn't do this very important because african countries, you know, they are always like a victim are we are victims of colonialism. slavery, sometimes it's 50 or 100 years ago. they blame countries and then they ask how we more development aid. we are victims. so in vietnam not they never saw them as victims. they saw that they are for their situation. they saw that this was the crazy plan economy. and i think this is the same fault individual then for nation if you want change your life if

your playboys are the people for your profits. i'm victim of capitalism through racism, sexist, sexist, whatever. you will not change anything in your life if you take the responsibility for life, then you can change the same for nations. would you say it's fair comparison to say that vietnam today or in recent history is comparable to germany in the 1950s, post-world two as an economic miracle in a a little bit, of course and some things are different we had a longer tradition before the national socialist with capitalism but they did not have this role as a country with peasants before. but of course, the the approach that economic freedom and private property is what makes us successful. and another thing maybe that they have in common they admire rich people. they admire entrepreneurs.

i a poll for this book in vietnam and also in a lot of other countries about the attitudes towards relative and you know in a lot of countries like in france or germany rich people are scapegoats to for all bad things for them are role models. how can i become rich? everyone want to become rich. and i was invited at the foreign trade university, which is one of the most prestigious of our cities in hanoi. and they read my books, also translated some of my books, and they invited me to workshop with this topic. how can we improve the image of rich people? can you imagine that a university in the united states social science writes me for a workshop? how can we improve image of wealthy people? i was invited in germany to to lecture to a discussion two moments ago, but it was about redistribution. how we take away ball from rich

this part of the topic. so you see the attitude is also very poor. this is, by the way, similar in poland in poland. they they wealthy people are very not as scapegoats. this is what both of these countries a lot of things in common this is the reason why i took both together in the book because they have yeah they had both is touted was i don't know whether you know what a lot of people don't know the second world war more people working killed in poland than in any other country of course adjusted to the population and the numbers across from the soviet union. so they had to wall they had socialism that they tried to reform inside socialist did broke then they started with the reforms and then they started to grow. and so i think a lot of other countries learn a lot from them and hope that a lot of young people in the united at the universities, greek this that if they discuss with their professors and teachers will

tell that capitalism is to blame for hunger and poverty. no, it's not right. yeah, you have the fact in this book rainer zitelmann trade deals a difference the us did not sign trade deal with vietnam but the eu did. i know think they have a free trade deal is the united states with. the united states? yes they have more a free trade agreements than think any other asian countries. so what does that what does that entail? what that mean to have a free trade agreement? yes. that they have. no no or less tariffs and that they have not so much restrictions that even now, if you feel that something is not okay, you can go to an international court and sue them and they will accept it. vietnam, there's a difference in china. you can't do it they will never accept if an international will say this was but they accept it. so this is another thing they

are more free than china and china they had also a great story with thanks to helping the eighties their start is the free market reforms but now with chuchu ping it goes back in the wrong direction. mark less state. and so there's a there's a slogan escape from china and they go to vietnam now because it's small free also freedom of speech of course it's not as it is here in the united states or europe, but it's more free than in china. for example, if you go to vietnam, you can use twitter, you can use facebook at and all this in in china not possible here. it's it's not allowed, is it beneficial in your view for poland be a member of the eu as partly yes partly no. yes because they've got to also to be honest a lot of support.

money on the other hand now they we have all this crazy decisions from the commission and house every economy in inside the eu. i will give you one example they they are so bad for the registration of cobus from andries by 2035 in europe. what for all european countries for poland maybe is not so dangerous. as for my country, germany, because they produce not so many cars but for us for germany. have you ever heard that the country is voluntarily for its best product? we were so proud for our mercedes bmw. volkswagen and also that although we the registration of of combustion engines everything only electric and most happy

about china because they produce much cheaper cars electric cars that we do isn't it so i think it's not too easy to give an answer to your question. it was good in a way, in part. it causes also a lot of problems rainer zitelmann for the general reader. what are they going to learn from your book about and poland? first of all, fareed, it is support and development aid does not help. i have a chapter about this because a lot of people, leftist people think are for this prove controversial them more development aid redistribution may help. i a chapter on improve development aid is absolutely wasted money and there are no countries to give smaller development aid than the united states and germany give so much development. and it's wasted money. you should stop it totally. 100%. i don't speak about you know, if there's a disaster happen to

help, of course you should do. but it doesn't help. this conference to escape poverty is this is a first lesson. the next lesson is our book starts with adam smith. and adam smith wrote his the wealth of nations 250 years ago. and key message was that the only way to escape poverty is economic growth. and the most important precondition for economic is economic freedom. and i think it's amazing. are is proof, right? if you read this the history about fayetteville poachers and you know i think the book is good for people a lot of people they don't like it economy because it's so abstract with theory here you find zero theory and not i promise one not even one massive math problem. so it's about history you know i for example i did with people in vietnam they tell their story. how did we live in this time of socialism? did it improve? what happened? and so it's it's not a longer

abstract to speak about economic freedom or socialism you have it with concrete examples. generally speaking, how can all nations create negative or positive conditions for economic growth when? you think of a when you think of a central government, what can it do in your view for connotations or for positive results? i will give you a metaphor as a historian, i look at history. it's like test. you know, every country. there is no pure socialist man. you not a capitalist. nowhere in the world, even in north korea, they have a little private property. you talk about. and in the united states, people in europe, they think the united states is, this is this. you are a capitalist hundred percent. you know, it's crazy you have a lot of socialism in every country. you have a mixture of socialism and capitalist markets and state. and i as i look what if you add

more market you have this three examples. for example, poland and vietnam all when you add small states. i will give you another example. this venezuela venezuela was not in the seventies, one of the 20 richest countries in the world, one of the 20 richest countries that you started, regulation, regulations, market regulation, more government, less market. and of course, the situation became worse. and then they made a big mistake. they voted for hugo chavez. the end of nineties, and he started with even more government nationalization answer on what happened. you know, they a couple of years ago the inflation of 1,000,000% 1 million and now 8 million people escaped from venezuela million. this is 28% of the population escaped because. so you see what happens. you're you're in this test group you had small market vietnam

poland things become good small government as it did in venezuela it's bad it sounds maybe a little bit simple but it is that that simple sometimes how escape poverty is the name of the book vietnam, poland and the origins of prosperity rayner's. eidelman has been our guest thank you thanks a lot. i appreciajoining us now on boos randy barnett, his 12th book is entitled a life liberty the making of an american originalist. randy barnett the new york times described you as a passionate libertarian. is that fair? absolutely i am a libertarian and. i am very passionate. i'm passionate liberty. i'm passionate about country. i'm passionate about constitution and how should be construed according to its original meaning, would actually serve the purpose of protecting the individual liberties of. all our people. have you always been a libertarian? i was originally a conservative

at the age of 12. as i describe in the book, i debated on behalf of barry goldwater in front of my entire junior high school grade school student body, several hundred students. i was 12 years old in my 12 year old heart. i knew he was right and so i was a very passionate conservative i was a william f buckley. i read national review. and then when i got to college during my junior year, i ran across libertarianism. the book tells the story about how i became introduced to libertarianism actually at first a friend of mine told me about it and i told her, you know, i'd want to hear about this. and the reason why is that the word was weird weird, and i thought it sounded so that was it. but then she brought a speaker to the residential college. we in who would explain libertarianism. i was listening to it and i thought, wow, a rational conservatism. i could go for that. and by my last year, northwestern, i taught a student accredited on libertarian, libertarian ism. so at that point, by my senior year of college i was a libertarian then the book, as the book explains where i went as a first year law student, i

had written fan letter to murray rothbard, and when i went to harvard law school, he gave it to a classmate of mine. that guy brought me down to new york and i met the whole libertarian intellectual circle those days and eventually joined the of the center for libertarian studies. all while i was a law student. so i've been a libertarian for a long. so what's the difference being a conservative and being a libertarian, what kind of depends on what kind of conservative you are, because in fact, the term is very amorphous, could apply to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. but if you want to oversimplify things, there are kind of liberty based conservatives and then there are tradition or are or religious based conservatives that they basically in for first their religious and first their true are based on tradition that that that's where they get their conservatism other conservatives get their conservatism liberty and the concern of liberty and so there's in that sense there's a libertarian in core of at least conservatism. and that's the kind of

conservatism was kind of that's the kind of conservative i was. its kind of conservative. my dad, i got my political principles from father as the book charles and so there's an overlap between some conservatives and libertarians that but not all conservatives. well, there's a line in book where is northwestern? where were you raised? i was raised in a place called calumet city, illinois which is a suburb south of chicago, about 20 to 25 miles south of chicago. but culturally, it's part of northwest indiana. we're on the on the state line road. in fact. when i was a boy, i used to love to ride my bicycle on both sides of the state line, state line road. and so we were culturally part of northwest indiana. and so when i got my sat scores, i went to thornton, fractional north, also jewish, and there were hardly any -- in calumet city in my graduating class of 400, there were four --. but when i got my sat scores and i met with my counselor. he said, oh, with your score at test scores, you could get into northwestern. and i went really?

where is that? because as far as i was concerned, he was talking about somewhere in or washington and but that it turns out northwestern is actually in evanston, illinois, on the north side of chicago. i knew from skokie my parents had friends in skokie, but i didn't where evanston was. and so my best friend, jay and i drove up in our car and i saw northwestern had two beaches, and it was beautiful. and i had at that point, only to go to university of illinois. so i applied to two schools in illinois, which i got into. and then northwestern which i got into, and then they gave me a scholarship that equalized the cost. and i went there and and actually it was i was really glad i did and law school went to law school at harvard law school. i had no particular desire to go to harvard, any other school. again, i got a great outside score and it turns out i could get into harvard law school. but the reason i the main reason went to harvard, apart from the fact that, well, you know it's harvard, is that i did plan to spend my entire life as a criminal lawyer in chicago. i love chicago, and i plan to spend life there. and i really thought that if i

didn't go away at some point in my life i would always feel like i wonder if i just stayed here out of inertia. so going away to the east coast meant that if i went back to chicago it was intentional and it was choice i made not just a default position. and that is what happened. i did go back to chicago and i became a prosecutor in the cook county attorney's office there. randy, you mentioned calumet city. you mentioned being jewish. you have a chapter, your book entitled dirty --. yeah, well, one of the benefits of growing up in calumet city, as opposed to growing up in scarsdale or westchester county or skokie, illinois for a --, is that we're not under the misleading impression that we're some kind of large number of people where if a third of the group or or a half of the group i think american -- sort of unrealistic. and i felt way at the time. so it's sort of an unrealistic vision of our of our place and our in this vast country of, ours growing up far out of, you know, the school class of four out of 400, it's different

lesson. and the lesson started for me, when i was in second grade on the playground, my grade school and one of the my fellow classmates called me dirty --. and then i hauled off and hit him and we got a fistfight and we were both punished for this fist fight. and it wasn't until years later that it finally dawned on me it's quite possible that he didn't. i was jewish and he was barnet. i don't look that jewish. and it was just he was just insulting me with something he'd heard at home. but i vowed at that time that i would anybody i'd physically fight anybody who called me a dirty --. well as time went by the, tough guys got a lot tougher and i was never really not that tough anyway. and so i revised my policy against fighting anybody who might call me something. you try to avoid fights if possible, but then not backing down for any fights that might occur to me that might that any fights that sought me out, i wouldn't back down. i tell some of those stories here. and so there was an undercurrent of anti-semitism there, which was normal. i mean, i just want to stress

this was telling my city was not an aberration, was attrition. it was a polish catholic town. the poles were never historically all that fond of the --, and neither were many of the families that that raised kids that i went to school with. nevertheless i love being from calumet city. i go back to my school reunions. i spoke at my last high school reunion, i was moved by the response i got from the these those are my people. and i wouldn't be the person i am. i wouldn't be the man i was if i hadn't grown. i became a with the very special people who were there. what was the first case you argued in front of the supreme court. and how did you do? well, the first case, i argued, is only case. i argued. so i've had cases that i've worked on as a litigator since i've a law professor, and all three of them went to the supreme court. i tell the story of all three, the oakland cannabis buyers case, which i did not argue than the gonzalez versus reyes medical marijuana case out of california, which i did argue. and then the final one, which also didn't argue, was nfib

versus valley is the obamacare challenge. now, people, if a person has three cases that go to court, they must be doing a lot of litigation. but no, i just three cases and all three went to the supreme court. i consider myself and force first and foremost an academic and a scholar, someone who writes and does theory of the theory of libertarianism. the theory of originalism. that's what i do but that's how i did it in. the medical marijuana case we lost. case 6 to 3. we did get the votes of chief justice rehnquist and justice o'connor and justice thomas in some sense. i beat spread because i think most people have figured that i was going to get no votes or one vote. and by getting votes, if we're in vegas now. so if there was a betting odds on it, i could have bet that as to what the spread would and i would have beat the spread, i actually made this joke. paul clement, who's now an extra and esteemed litigator who i argued against in that, and i made this joke about how i beat the spread and his retort to me

was, well, i've the case and he's but one of the lessons of the book, considering that that was ostensibly a loss on paper. nfib the obamacare challenge was a loss on paper. one of the messages in the book is we in some respects we really won both cases an important way, and we won the medical marijuana case because medical marijuana, when i first got involved in the late nineties was a very crank fringe issue because that was the reaction i got from people when they heard i was doing it by time we were done with our litigation in 2005, it was a pretty mainstream issue and we've gone from that point to where most states have met legal medical marijuana and where there's appropriation rider on the government that prevents the doj from enforcing marijuana in states that have medical marijuana, that's a pretty big victory. and our case platform. the issue and particularly for my client angel rates he made a great deal of her platform and that really advanced the public policy issue. we also beat back the theory of

the government as to why they had the power to do what they did. and if that theory had been accepted, basically the government, the federal government would have no limits on it. so we also won to the extent that the court did not give them, they asked for the same thing sort of happened with the nfib versus sebelius. the obamacare challenge, which i talked about near, the end of the book and all that went into that challenge. i was grateful not to argue that case. the pressure of the first case was so enormous that i had no to argue. the second case, i didn't but i was one of the lawyers for the nfib, and in that case, we won on the law, had five votes that are that an individual insurance mandate was unconstitutional. and usually when you win on the law, you the case. and if you've lost case, it's because they rejected your version, the law. but we won on the law. we had five votes, but we lost the fifth vote on the outcome because justice roberts said, well, it was a purchase mandate. it would be unconstitutional like you say, but i can reasonably it to be a option to buy health insurance or pay a

modest tax, in which case it's not a regulation, commerce, and therefore it's constitutional. and that's how we ended up losing the case. but in a way, our victory was in some sense even greater number. we got five votes for the idea that purchase mandates are unconstitutional purchase mandates unconstitutional. because of that case, congress can do a lot things, but they can't do that anymore. but they tried to do that was a pretty big victory. that's what i was really fighting for. and the other thing is we, got the court to reject the government's argument, which was adopted by 99% of all law professors that essentially gave them a national problems. power gave congress a national problems, and the court definitively rejected that and reaffirmed that we are a government of limited and enumerated powers. that was another big victory that came out of that case. unfortunate we lost on the obamacare piece of it. but i'll take the constitutional piece if i can get it over the policy. so what is your day job. my day job? i'm a law professor.

i teach law. i teach at georgetown i love teaching at georgetown. i have great students there. i teach constitutional law, teach a seminar called recent books on the constitution it's like the tv of seminar where i invite five authors to talk about their books with my students. and we read we take two weeks to read each book, and it's a wonderful course. and so that's what i do. and though i could retire if i wanted to, i don't part because i have a i a personal trainer to keep me physically in shape, exercise every day. i have a regime fitness regime, but teaching is like a fitness regime for your mind. and it's getting up in front of 70 or 80 really bright students and having to present things to you and be by them. that i think keeps mentally fit and i'm hoping will prolong my year my productive years. how often. do you serve as an outside counsel? hardly ever as i said earlier, i really don't think of myself as a constitutional litigator. i am an academic person

foremost. i write books. this is my book. the next book, after that will be a sequel. when i discuss just my time as a criminal prosecutor in chicago, which had to be cut out of this because of space. and then the book after that is going to be a reconsideration or an updating of originalism. i had a piece on life, liberty on july 2nd called libertarianism and updated, which was based on the afterword of this book, which i ask, what's next for? originalism? what's next for libertarianism and what's next for american --? i to address that at the end of this book, but that these are all pieces of future work for. and so what i would like to do as sort of maybe the capstone of my book writing, i started my first book was about libertarianism was called the structure for liberty, the i'm sorry, it was not it was called the structure of liberty justice in the rule of law, published by in 1998. that was my first book, and it's possible my last will be libertarianism. revisit it why it's not it's not an abandonment of

libertarianism, but it's about how the principles need to be rethought and updated. the libertarian theory that people know of as libertarianism really was what i was involved with. as a law student in developing, and it's been somewhat frozen in amber for about 50 years, and it needs to be. how would you like to see it updated? well needs. for example, libertarianism is a state of nature theory based on natural rights. i believe in natural rights, but i also think it's necessary to bring natural law the idea of human and what it takes to be a human, which includes what it takes to be a human in society with others. and so they could they natural rights perspective should be supplemented by a natural law perspective. and they have about four other things that i think be thought about, which i describe on this piece that you can read on law and randy barnett, as a law professor and a libertarian, how do you answer the question, why should we rely on 1220 old white dead guys who wrote the constitution 250 years ago?

okay, great question. i've heard it before. and i will just say this. the constitution that we need to debate about is not the original constitution. it is the constitution have today. and the constitution have today was amended 27 times to be an original means you want to see the original meaning of the constitution enforced whenever that meaning was added to constitution. so the original meaning of the 14th amendment dates back to 1868. my last book was the was called the original meaning of 14th amendment. it's letter and spirit published by harvard university press. and that was all about what that meaning was. and so we don't need to privilege. maybe we spend a little too much time talking the founders, and we should talk a lot more about republicans who gave us the the republicans of their newly formed republican party, who gave us the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments having said all that. i do think. the people that happened to write the constitution were extremely smart and they were

extremely knowledgeable and well-educated about political theory. and that's the reason why they actually devised a system of government that was unique in its time. it some degree remains unique and it's uniquely good, but only if it's followed and. part of the problems we have with our government is that there have been important chunks of the constitution, which is what i call the lost constitu ation in one of my books, restoring the lost constitution that have just been ignored or discarded. and if we would be a better society, we would. we would better if we could bring back all the parts of the constitution and activate them all. and that's part of the mission of i have as an originalist is to revive the lost constitution. all of it. does the bill of rights stand, in your mind, does it stand? the bill of rights is important? it was something that the federalists did not necessarily to add. it was put into the constitution because of the anti-federalists. but when the federal that there was the federalists wrote the bill of rights. but the anti federalist wanted

were a bunch of amendments that would limit federal government. but the said we just set up this stronger federal because that's what we need. so can we satisfy the concern of the anti-federalists and remember, at the time they were writing this, there were two states that had refused to join union. north carolina had not joined rhode island, had not tried. so in the first congress, met to consider whatever were doing, you set up the government. they only had 11 states, not 13. and what james madison is, we know these people don't trust us. we promised them. we give a bill of rights when in order ratify the constitution. and so we need to honor our promise. but the way they honored promise was not to affect and explains this is not to pull back our powers, but to the individual rights that people have. and so that's the one reason why the bill of rights we have is focused on individual rights, because they could mollify the critics by giving them a bill of rights without, weakening the structures of government that they establish. and that's the reason why the anti-federalists were all dissatisfied with the

amendments, because, well, all this is giving us is our individual rights. we already have our rights, but it turns out over time, the anti federalists were right. as governmental powers have expanded beyond the original meaning of the constitution, we become more and more dependent on the rights that happen to be included in bill of rights. so we can thank the anti-federalists pushing for that. what's it like to be? a libertarian at georgetown? it's wonderful. it's great my colleagues are great. my colleagues treat me with respect. people think that if you're in a minority, a minority in legal education or even in undergraduate education, must be put upon all the time. but if you're nice to them. they'll usually be nice you back. and i haven't really had any unpleasantness with my colleagues. we have our disagreements internally about internal matters and concerning faculty governance, but politically i basically leave them alone and they leave me alone. and my job there is really to

focus my students not really on my colleagues my job. there is to be a resource for them to be a voice for them when they get into trouble. and i've been able to successfully do that and i get nothing appreciation from expressed by my colleagues. you write in a life liberty that when antonin scalia you went out and got drunk. yes, i actually met i first met antonin scalia when i was a research fellow at the university of chicago. as i described, i became a law professor and i sat on his contracts class because i knew i wanted to teach contract law. so that's when i first got to know him. i got to know him more a justice. when i came to georgetown, i had not realize until the day he died. how fond has become of him on a personal level? i didn't. it just sort of snuck up on me. i knew him. i liked him, but i didn't really. he came to my recent on the constitution class and talked about his recent book on reading law. he at georgetown, another he died. my coauthor josh blackman called to tell me the news.

i was obviously affected in ways that i had not really comprehended. and then i got i immediately got a call from cbs news to do the nightly news to talk about his legacy. and i said, sure, which would i want to do? and they were sent a car to get me and take me to the studio and i'm showering to get ready to go on the air to you already get picked up. and i realized, i can't do it. i'm just too emotional i can't go on tv now and talk about him. i just can't do it. and so i called him back and i said, i'm really sorry, but i just can't do this. and then i walk bike with my wife was out of town. i couldn't commiserate with her. and i walked to a bar, connecticut avenue, and just proceeded to have a series of martinis. and i got sloshed in commemoration of antonin scalia, nino. and i think. nino would have approved on the macro level, what's your take on the current supreme court. we have the most conservative supreme court in my lifetime, without a doubt have six conservatives on the court. that's unprecedented in my

lifetime when. i was a law student taking law constitutional law from larry tribe. i got very off of the constitution i gave up on the constitution at the end of that course, because every time i got to one of the good parts of the constitution, the ninth amendment, the 10th amendment, the second amendment, i, i turned the page of the casebook and would say the supreme court said, well, that doesn't mean anything and that's not enforceable and we're not going to do anything about that, the lost constitution. so by the time i got, i was at the end the course, i had sort of given on constitutional law generally. and if you had told me then that that was 1975, if you had told me that that 49 years later we would have the court that we now have writing the kinds of opinions they now write, i would have asked what kind of weed you were smoking, because in those days a lot of weed that smoke and i could i would never could have conceived gotten to this point. this is a book that tells the about a first person account about how we got to where we are today. now where we are today is, we

have five of the conservative justices who identify as originalism and now they're trying to navigate what they think that means. and they disappoint me a lot. they disagree with each other a lot. and there are opinions that they they reach the us. v trump opinion presidential immunities case, which is not originalist at all, whether think it's a good outcome or a bad outcome would really would be nice if they had given us. something about the original meaning of the text. the constitution, or there'd been a concurring opinion that did that, which sometimes is what happens. so they don't always do it. sometimes they will use conventional doctrine to reach results that are justified on originalist grounds. but there's a danger doing that because it involves what might call off the books originalism not really do it. you're not showing your work. and that might even be dependent on our originalism, which is where you haven't really done any work. so it's unreliable but nevertheless, it's better to reach conservative results if you're not using conservative

i'm sorry, originalist results, even if you're not using originalist reasoning. but then they still do use originalist reasoning. the cfp pb decision, which we had to do with what the meaning of appropriations was in the constitution. strictly originalist written by justice. again, they are not perfect. they're trying to work it out amongst themselves they disappoint me sometimes, but man, oh man, have we come a long way from when i was in larry tribe class as an originalist? what's your take on the chevron case? well in the book before last, the republican constitution book, i that chevron should be reversed. and so that was 2016. it's eight years later and it's been reversed. so i think that's a good thing. i think that the meaning of the of the law that passed by passed by congress is ultimately something that is for the judges to interpret not for the agencies who supposed to be bound by the law. you don't you have the people who are supposed to be bound by the law be the ones that are interpreting the scope of their

own power under the law. that's the reason why the court shouldn't defer to congress on what the scope of congress's power is it should be. deciding that when properly by an individual, you should have a neutral tribunal of justice decide what the how, what the meaning of the law is and apply it to the person who's bound it, which is the administrative agencies. this, however, is not the end of the as it been painted by its critics because one of the things the court has rejected is the idea that the courts will defer to agency expertise about what are expert about. they're expert about emissions, expert about other kinds of things the courts will still defer to their expertise when they're acting within their their their competence, their subject competence. but they're no more competent to interpret the scope of a statute than a court is. and in fact, that's the specialty. that's what courts are in. so courts are going to decide they're expert in. they'll interpret the law and the administrative agencies will still be left plenty of discretion to decide what

they're expert in is the subject matter of their governance. so if somebody picks up current book of life for liberty, the making an american originalist, what are they going to learn? what do you want to tell them? well, the first thing is they're going to see pictures which some people want to see. there's and white pictures throughout the text. and we have a nice color insert of some great color pictures. here's what there's a lot of things that i learned about myself and about writing from writing it and first thing i think is to think about. the first thing that i think you can learn is how you live a life that makes a difference while remaining true to your principles and still, you know, be happy and not drive crazy. this is an example how somebody as a ten year old kid can start off with a passion for liberty and by 12 years old, arguing for barry goldwater in front of his junior high school class and make a difference not running for office. an idea i had when i young, but

i quickly have added. but by being in and but in some respects by being a practicing lawyer or being a criminal prosecutor is how you can leverage life. and one of the takeaways from this that i would everybody, whether they buy the book or not, and that is i think would live a happier life if you lived your life as though you were going to write a memoir about it. because when i sat down to write it, i'm going to tell the whole truth about myself, including the bad stuff, including the stuff that i ate, the mistakes i made. and there's a lot of things about the mistakes made so you won't have to make the same mistakes i did if you're young, especially, and if you live your life as though you're going to write a memoir, i think you'll live a better life. you think about? would i be proud of what i'm about to do? i can put it in the book. or would i be ashamed what i'm about to do and i would never want to put it in the book. and there is one last message saying that i think get out of this. and that is about the importance of mentors and cultivating that it became immediately i was telling my life story that i am the man i am, that i am because others, starting with my father

moving to my grade school music and my high school debate coach and philosophy professors in college, they had to influence on me. it was my mentors who helped shape me. and this book is a thank you to that. and so the other little piece of advice give people is thank your mentors while you still can because some point you won't be able to thank them anymore. and i happily was to thank most of them while they were still alive. i didn't get every one of them, and that's another i think you can take away from this book a can be well-lived and make a difference and still be a pretty. joyous one. randy barnett, the for liberty, is his latest. we appreciate you joining us on tv. thanks for having me. it's always ayou know, i'm book.

we want to introduce you to matt ridley. he is a coauthor of this book viral the search for the origin of covid-19. mr. ridley, what do you do for a living, first of all? i'm pretty well retired these days from. most things, but i write books. i was a journalist. i was also a politician. i in the lords in the uk. but these days i see myself as a writer who does a bit of gardening as well. do you have a scientist background? i do. i a pristine biology and did some research. but then spent a lot of time being a science. so i was science editor of the economist and a science columnist on the wall street journal and the telegraph and the times. who is your coauthor? elina chang elina jan is a fascinating woman. she's a young, brilliant researcher at the broad institute of harvard and mit, canadian by birth, but chinese by ancestry speaks chinese, for

example. and she was doing really interesting work on the source of this pandemic, the origin of covid and so i reached out to her a number of articles i was writing and ended up proposing to her that we join forces to write a book because we were both then convinced that it was wrong to rule out a lab leak as as the source, but nor could we rule it in for it. and we began to collaborate on this, but we never met. by the way, we wrote a book meeting. welcome to the 21st century. we met because, of course, with the pandemic and lockdowns, we couldn't we met the day book was published in the us in 2021, but obviously pinged lots ideas back and forth across the atlantic and you know hammered out drafts and it was it was a wonderful experience. i've never co-written a book

with anyone before. she's a very good writer. she need me for the verbal skills and she's very good scientist. but it was i think we were both very good for each other and challenging each other. and so i really enjoyed the experience actually. it's 2024. does it matter where it came from? it matters. 28 billion people are dead, trillions of bound dollars have been wasted. and if. we don't find out how it happened. there are three reasons why that matters. one, because we owe it to the people who died. you know, you say to the families, a victims of a plane crash, it doesn't matter. do you do? because we need to learn lessons, we need to make sure it doesn't happen. again, if it was a lab leak, we need to tighten up lab safety. if it was a wildlife market, we need to up wildlife market safety. we're doing of those things. that's extraordinary you know, the focus has gone off lab safety actually globally in the

wake. and the third reason and i think perhaps the most is that rogue states and bad actors in the terrorism sphere are taking notice of this thinking. we need to have some biologist, we need to release viruses, because that way we can do heck of a lot more damage that we can do with explosives. and probably that world health organization won't even investigate this properly because that's what happened. so i really worry we're sending a dangerous message. they're just just this week, a fourth congressional committee given aspects of my mit testified that he had ordered the ingredients for making the 1918 influenza virus under a pseudonym and had them delivered no bother at. if he can do it, so can kim jong un. so can al qaeda. do you see what i mean was it did you conclude that the covid

19 virus was a bio weapon, biological weapon? no, we don't conclude that it's a biological weapon. i don't think it is. in our book, we are agnostic. as to how it began, we think it's more likely have been a laboratory leak than a a market event since the book came out. the evidence that has got much, much stronger actually. and we know i think it's almost certain that it a laboratory accident. the question is what were they doing, those dangerous experiments for? they were very dangerous experiments. they were done the wrong biosafety level and had very little upside. actually. you know, the theory was the reason why they were doing it. and i do believe them on this was to predict and prevent the next pandemic. well, that went well, didn't it? you do believe that that was there? i do believe that was what were trying to do. but in in the process, they got a bit away with some of the technologies that they were excited about doing and the idea

of compared doing an even more spectacular of science than the competitors, i think became part of it. and so they produced it looks like and again we can't be sure because of course the chinese will not collaborate and be transparent on this, but it looks like they together a virus from ingredients a bat virus souped it up a little bit with a single differing cleavage site, which was a unique ingredient. this virus not found in any of its relatives and, then probably had a simple accident. now there was military in that lab and they do have a bioweapons program in china, but i think it's mostly defensive as it is in the west. in other words, the reason studying these things is so that we're ready if our enemies release one. now you can see if both sides are doing that, it becomes a reason for doing things which isn't to be offensive, but can

even more dangerous in viral. it really me of david quammen search for the hiv virus and he came to the conclusion that it was a monkey in cameroon in the deep jungle of cameroon in the 1920s that started hiv is it is that a fair comparison. yes? no, there's no doubt that hiv from chimpanzees, not monkeys from apes, but how it into the human race? we don't there was a theory that it might have happened through a contamination polio vaccine trial which did involve chimpanzees being sacrificed for their organs in the late 1950s in congo. now i investigated that and i thought it's probably wrong but i do think it's you know it's not completely ruled out but either way both these viruses are from wildlife. so hiv is basically a chimpanzee

virus that was more dangerous in us. sars-cov-2 is basically a bat virus that's more dangerous in us. but it has been souped up probably in a lab since the wet markets. why has this not happened? more frequent? lee given the ubiquity of some of these markets? well, actually, that's a really good question. people are trading online mammals in markets all over south east asia all the time. curiously, wuhan is not a strong center for this kind of thing. it's further north. most of those markets, it's in southern china where you find most of these markets and of course, vietnam and laos and countries either. so that's where you'd expect a market outbreak to happen. and people have pointed to the dangers these markets. and we did have one very good example of a virus coming out of one of these markets and infecting people. that was source, the first source in 2002. and by the way that virus then leaked from a lab at least four

times in once it was eradicated in the wild. so, you know, so that tells you both sides of that story. so buying and eating live mammals is a risk. but on the whole this happened with sars-cov-1. it also happened with murres, the middle eastern virus and with things like nipah and hendra, which are other examples of spillover viruses from wildlife. on the whole, they start not very infectious, right? they're not very good at infecting people. it takes them a few months, adjust their genes to work out how to transmit from person to person. and to start with, you can only catch them from the other animal and then you can catch some of other people, but not very efficiently. and so on. this thing was different it was highly infectious between people. the get go a moment it appeared in the human species and it was highly transmissible and the weird about this is they looked

really the chinese for an infected animal in the market and they haven't found one to this day. the pangolins were infected in that market they found a similar virus in pangolins that were confiscated but were other pangolins on sale in wuhan no raccoon dogs? nothing. so a. 998 to 99% genetically similar virus is. what you would expect to find in the market that's they found in sales. and so they found in murres and nipah and these other outbreaks, they never found one. and that's where the chinese themselves conclude. it quite quickly in the spring of 2020 that this thing had not started the market, that the animal brought the virus to the market. it was a human being. that's the lab that's their conclusion. that's most scientific scientists conclusion. matt ridley what's the difference between? a spillover and a lab leak? well, a spillover is when something natural happens, you eat an animal and get infected that way, or you get bitten by an animal or something like

that. a lab leak is when scientists take a virus into the laboratory, do experiments on it. and then one of the scientists gets infected. the lab matt ridley variants. how has the covid 19 virus has mutated over the time we've known about? and it, by the way, did it exist prior to us knowing about it. well as, far as we can tell it did not exist the form it is what do know is there are some 96% similar viruses in bats. okay, so the bulk of virus is out there in wild bats. but the weird thing about this virus, it's not very good at infecting bats. so something has happened to it between bats and us to change its genes by about two or 3%. and that's enough and that's enough to make it highly adapted to us. and to not to bats. now, we don't know where that

happened. as i say, we think it looks increase like it happened in the laboratory because they were doing exactly the right kind of experiments at exactly the right time. when exactly right kind of virus. the closest the nine closest relative to cells to in the world before the pandemic broke out. we're in the freezer of the wuhan institute of virology. now, that's probably telling you something. now, what about the variants? how is it? sorry. yes. so obviously viruses evolve the time and we've been able to in real time during this pandemic evolution happening. they a lot these particularly these coronaviruses, they have rna genes instead of dna ones. that's more unstable. the single stranded. so they don't they can't correct themselves. so there's a lot of mistakes made in the and those mistakes often make the virus less effective but sometimes make it more effective and then those

get selected. so variation plus selection mutation and plus selection is evolution. and we saw very clearly rather beautiful graphs, graphs of of one variant being replaced by, another alpha the delta than gamma. then the omicron one and so on. and if you remember was was a particularly nasty one, but in each case the variant was more infectious than the last. so the virus is getting it was already good at transmitting between people, but it was getting better and better as time went off, omicron was extremely infectious variant. it was also an extremely mild. now that's good news because it didn't kill as many people, but also bad news in the sense that you could hardly tell if you got it. and so there were a lot of asymptomatic people out there spreading. and that's why measures to prevent the spread of the virus just to be abandoned. omicron can now, i would expect a respiratory virus like this,

not any kind of virus, respiratory virus to become more more mild over time. and the reason for that, because they want us fine. they want me going out to a party. they don't want me saying, no, i'm not going to go to the party. i'm not feeling well, because if i go to the party, i might give it to 20 or 30 people. do you see? i mean, so the virus spreads better if people aren't feeling too ill. and therefore the mild variants tend to do better than the harsh variants. now, that's not true of insect borne or sexually transmitted viruses. they actually prefer you in a darkened room feeling ill or or, you know, something like that. they don't care whether they kill. care is the wrong. of course, viruses are not conscious. you know, i'm not that argument. but there is a perfectly good theory due to purely what? that a respiratory virus will tend towards low virulence will become a just another common cold with 200 different kinds of virus that cause the common cold.

most of them rhinoviruses, some of them are coronaviruses some of the adenoviruses none them kill people. that's no accident. did you get the shots. i had three shots. yeah, i do. in a booster. but beyond that i'd had two bursts of covid itself by then. natural immunity is very good. i don't see any fighting going on getting. continuous boosters at the moment. it might better in the future, but yeah. think they they did not prevent that's disappointing but they did moderate the severity of the disease they did also have side effects and pretending they didn't was a mistake. i think giving them to giving the shots to kids a mistake because i think kids were not really at risk from this. it was not at all severe except you. i'm in my sixties i was glad to take the shot in. it saved my life. matt ridley when we started our conversation about viral, you

said trillions of dollars wasted. what did you mean by that specifically? well, i mean, if you shut the world economy for a year and, a half or for several periods during that time, you are going to set back human prosperity by trillions of dollars. that's what i mean by that, that, you know, the whole pandemic cost us a lot of money. you know, we spend a lot money on plexiglass and and masks and redundancy for airline employees who are laid off. you know, all these things add up to a huge cost on the on the economy, even when you don't take into account the human cost, the dead, the people who it made ill and so on. has the international public health system writ large lost interest in discovering how this virus came about and how to prevent the next one? have we moved?

my concern that yes, there is not nearly enough investigation going on. i know of no major research that is applied for grants to investigate the origin of this disease. that's extraordinary. i was told a senior scientist in the uk that he thought it was important. we never find. and i said but you wouldn't say that about a plane crash. why would you say that about this? oh, because i didn't want to offend china. well, that's very odd. and i think the world health organization has been talking about treaties, about how to manage it. they have got an a committee set up to, investigate the origin of viruses like this. as far as i can see, it hardly ever meets. it's shown remarkably little curiosity in getting to the bottom of this. some brilliant amateur and scientific investigators and a few journalists are digging and are turning up really important evidence about how it started. and if we don't learn the lessons, it could happen again.

and next time it could kill not a million americans, but 10 million americans. matt ridley how would you imagine a leak happening? what's going on to let this free? well, let's take it really example of where the lab leak did happen. there was a woman working in a lab in beijing on size. the first samples. this was in 2004. and she doing perfectly reasonable experiments and she was taking all the safety precautions. she was wearing all the right gear, some how she got infected. and we don't know how we think it was to do with one of the device is which was not cleaned properly or something like that. and so she somehow picked up this virus. she felt sick. she went home. she felt even so she got on a train to go and stay her mother in a different province. she infected her mother.

she infected the nurses who infected. suddenly they realized what was going on. by that time, the mother had died and some of the nurses were critically and they contact traced who had been in contact with thousands of people by then. now, thank goodness they were able to isolate everybody who got sick and everyone else recovered. but it it a near run thing that could have been another outbreak. now, if that had happened with sars-cov-2 this virus and she had caught a train anhui province and back to beijing. she'd have given it to one hundreds of people. it's a far infectious virus and there would have been no way we could have stopped it. so that's the kind of thing that happened in the another case in taiwan, there was a a researcher working at biosafety four, the top safety level, and he dropped a test tube inside a cabinet. it the virus all over inside of

the cabinet. he cleaned it up. he was in a bit of a hurry because he was going to a conference. he cleaned it up with with the wrong kind of bleach, which didn't really kill it. it most of it, but not all of it. he then got sick. he went to a conference. he came and he realized what he'd done. yeah, this is bizarre. not sars-cov-2. he isolated himself at home and his dad found out and made force, forced him to go to hospital. but he was so ashamed what he'd done that. so these are the kinds of stories that lie behind a lovely, horrible human stories. now that biosafety level four, where you're wearing an inflated with, you know, positive pressure suit and you're working with these huge gloves and and you're working inside a cabinet that has negative. so it's sucking the air out, you know, all precautions. the experiment they were doing on bat viruses in the wuhan institute of virology were

biosafety level two. now, you might wear gloves, you might wear a mask, but you don't have to. that's so it's a pretty picture. is the wuhan lab cooperating with the world health organization or whoever to change their practices to discover the origin as far, as we can tell, the zero cooperation. the world health organization sends a team to, wuhan. they went to the wuhan is to virology. they toured the biosafety four lab. well, that's of no relevance. that wasn't where these experiments were done. they didn't ask for the database that virus has the sorry that the lab has of all the viruses that it has collected and worked on. that's a database of 22,000 entries. they took it offline. one of the members of the w.h.o. team was called peter daszak, and he was asked by a reporter, did you ask for that that?

and he says, no, there's no point in asking for it because we know what's in it. so the report said, well, can you tell us what's in it? and he said, no, no, i can't share it with what's. so we still don't know to this day. now, if that database have a relevant virus in it, it would exonerate them in a flash. they will not share it with us. and shi, the head of the lab, has been asked, why don't you share that database? she says, because people are trying to hack it. well, that makes no sense. if if you shared it, you didn't worry about it being hacked. you know, it's it's now in the open. so there's no thing as hacking. so i'm afraid no has been almost no cooperation with international investigators on this. all right. to put a period on our conversation, you and lena chan have written a book called viral the search the origin of covid 19. how do you conclude and how much faith do you have in your

conclusion? well, as i say, when we finished the book, we thought it was more likely than not that it came out of a laboratory. since we've finished the book, more evidence has emerged and us conclusion has got stronger. both in chan and i think, it's now extremely likely that it did from both tracks. we can't be 100% sure because we weren't there in the room when someone got sick, as it were. but a lot of the key information and part of the point of our book was to tell the story of how we found out, not just what we found out, but how we found out. and a lot that came from some really ingenious individuals. the guy called seeker in india who simply online discovered how to get password for key chinese databases. websites and downloaded three cc's that turned to be incredibly important. that's the kind of thing that's been done. there's another who's a spaniard who who was very good at auditing companies. so he decided to audit the wuhan

of virology to find out where they'd been collecting bats, on which days, which samples they collected, and and he was able to put together what he called his big sudoku and work it all out. these are, you know, a lot of this come from talented amateurs. and i'd like to pay tribute to them. here's the book, viral the search for the origin of covid. we've been talking with the coauthor. matt ridley. thank youwell, on your screen is woods. he's the author of this book diary of a psychosis how public disgraced itself during mania thomas woods why do you call the covid crisis a psychosis? i think we all remember desperately clamoring for information in march 20, 20, and i was no different, but what i one of the things i found early on was when from time to time, a

little flickering of good news would come through. it was almost as if people didn't want. i would spread that on social media and it was like i was a criminal of. some sort. no, no, no. it's the thing ever. it was very strange was jay bought charity at stanford was trying to say i've done a seroprevalence study i think the numbers are saying about the percentage of deaths this and that is is off and normally in an under normal conditions we would say well he's got a and someone else does and he's got data and he's m.d. and he's an md and, you know, and and ph.d. so we should listen to each other but instead it was we somehow a priori that he must be wrong and this led to, shall we say, not very productive or in some cases, discourse. was it a pandemic. it looks to me as if in numerous there were more deaths than would have expected in the

absence of this. so i know there are some people out there who say, no, it's all it's all phony and it's all made up. but the death numbers do say that something happened. 28 million people reported dead by covid. do you agree with that figure? that i don't know. because even now there are still arguments about how do we code a covid death, like even within the scandinavian countries, norway disagrees with sweden as to what constitutes a covid. so so that is beyond my my pay grade. so what are you trying to do in this book? i am trying to show that the degree of certainty that the public health establishment had at the time about the effects of its mitigation measures was unjust. i find that i think people thought, in fact, i don't have to think it. i know that anthony, fauci said. you will see a distinct, a clear difference between the results of states that follow the

guidelines and the restrictions and those that do not. but now we have the data and if you plot the 25 most stringent states versus 25 least stringent, the lines are identical. and this just goes on and on. i can look at california blue state, nevada purple state, arizona, red, and they all track each other. and the problem was that the whole situation was lines like if your state has numbers that are falling, that means you're doing good things. but if the numbers go up, well then you're being bad. and the problem with that is that that requires me to believe that, for example, california, nevada, arizona were all at the same time and then not complying at the same and then complying again and then not complying. get it at the same time. that's not a that's not a useful explanation for the data that we're seeing. and so in case after case, like if i said to you, here are four and i can do this because i have the charts in the book. here are four counties in

tennessee and one of them restricted, you know, restaurant occupant see to 25% and closed the bars. here are their charts, which is that which one is that? you cannot figure it out or this place had a really, really severe mask mandate like in in bavaria and berlin. they even mandated n95s the super serious masks. if i plot bavaria in berlin against the rest of germany, you can't tell me which which. so my point is not i have all the answers. my point instead is let's have some humility and say maybe we just don't understand what's going on and we got a little glimpse of that a little glimpse in 2021 when andy was on msnbc, he was a white house covid adviser, and they asked him adjusting for age florida and seem about the same. and that doesn't seem possible. what do you think the explanation and i thought, oh my gosh, they actually asked him that question which you would think everyone would be asking.

and his answer was underwhelming. it was, well, there are a lot of things about this virus that just continue to surprise us. sorry, that's not good enough. i mean, if you're decimating people's businesses and life savings and their dreams and postponing their surgeries and and, you know, and you have more mental health problems and alcoholism and that's your answer. that's not good enough. so was spread of covid inevitable? and would any mitigation efforts work, in your opinion probably the best thing that could have been done and as the some people tried to do was to look at the people who were most likely to be vulnerable and have special provision for them, which in this case was easy to determine because of the thousandfold mortality difference between young and old. now we don't always have that luxury, but this time we did. and so i remember asking dr. bhattacharya from stanford, i said, i, i just don't understand. i said in, even i couldn't

explain what was going on in florida, where i live, you know, i was going to comedy shows and 2021 they had concerts like everything was not entirely normal, pretty close to normal. and i said, does it seem like that shouldn't work, but why does that work? and he said, it because in those places that are making the most provision for older people, that's where they're getting good results, where they're just focusing because we can't do everything you take the limited resources you have and you focus on the who are most likely to be in danger. and dr. jay bhattacharya wrote the foreword to this book, tell us who he is, dr. bhattacharya, is a holds a ph.d. but also an m.d. and he teaches at stanford, where he's been for quite a while. and he is he's a professor of medicine, but also a background in economics. so he can talk to you about health policy, but he can also talk to you about the medical side, which is, you know, balancing.

not everybody can do very well. and until this all came along, he was a very mild mannered academic, very well respected and he wrote a great many academic papers. and he had absolutely if you've ever talked to him, had zero interest in being in the public eye. that is the last thing on earth he wanted to do, but he felt like he got thrust into it. when something like this happens and of his work had to do with age and health policy and then covid comes along, how could he not write that? and he found that his colleagues were deserting him, were criticizing, i mean, criticism. criticism is one thing. but there were posters around campus smearing him, calling him a liar, even though he did his live air. it's just reporting his research. so jay bhattacharya, who had been a scholar at stanford for years, felt completely alienated by the experience that he had. he went from being a celebrated scholar to somebody on the fringes and his argument was everything i'm saying about the counterproductive nature of

lockdowns and the collateral damage caused by lockdowns comes only from the standard preparedness playbook that we had had for a very long time. up, up 2010. i didn't invent a j on a chariot invented. i'm just telling you the playbook. we always went back and in his forward he refers to the tyrannical public health response. yes. now that's provocative language. but if you don't like provocative language, this is not book for you. but it was it was also the the arbitrariness. it like i'm in florida and in alachua a county, you know, this is i realized this is a small trivial thing. but i think it's it's illustrative of what happened. we found. i don't know if it was like the towns of the board or whatever. i don't live there, but they came up with a rule that said retail establishment can have one person per thousand square feet. and when they were finally asked, well, how did you come up with that figure? the answer was, well, we just thought it would be simple math for everybody to do it. but yet the impression was being

given that, no, no, no, i mean, we've been locked away in lab coats with test tubes. we've come to this conclusion. but a lot of it was just arbitrary and it should have been obvious as as time went on, got the data like we had google mobility data early so we could see people who are moving around and people who aren't. it doesn't seem to matter like the things that where the virus is just doing what it wants, laughing at our feeble efforts. but it just doesn't seem to do anything. and so if i look japan and south korea, i have a graph in there the final quarter of 2020, japan versus korea, japan, south korea had very different. but their project trees are identical. so again, unless i'm supposed to believe that they all complied and then didn't comply. and then the other thing is that goes to the psychosis language because when around april of 2020, it was clear that japan was not undertaking as severe a response as other asian countries. and so the headlines and i wrote

them all down, the headlines were in effect, japan is going to get what's coming to it, you know, and it was almost like it wasn't like, you know, japan's doing something wrong and let's pray that it all works out for them. that was not the tone of these articles. it was they they're going to get what's going on mean. that is not that's not humane. but the fact is they had a fairly lackluster lockdown and they were they have a very high elderly too. and yet somehow their results are drastically better than ours and on par south korea's even though they had completely different policies. why doesn't this at least make us say that's curious. i wonder why that is. maybe we shouldn't have this absolute certainty that we know exactly what's happening and what to do in japan. they were actually saying, look, the experts here are stumped. we really don't understand. that's all i wanted was some some humility. instead of your you know, your brother's a bad person because

he went to you know, he went to this motor cycle festival or something that had no discernible effect on anything. but meanwhile, people are dying without the presence of loved ones. people are missing surgeries. i have an acquaintance who had cancer and they actually said for more, just hang on. what? it's not urgent. we'll come back to you. he finally gets to the hospital. this was in the uk and they say, oh, sorry. at stage four. i mean, you can't do that, you know, and there are so numbers now that are baked into the cake, cancer deaths that will occur because the screenings happen. the new york times said that about 2 million extra people are going to die from hiv, malaria and tuberculosis because of lockdown related reasons. we have maybe a million deaths related to all the unemployment because that has effects as well we're hearing that in the developing world, people like in myanmar were reporting that people were reduced to eating

rats and snakes. and if you can't, there were parts of the of the world where there was no education, not not just, you know, online, none for two years. none unless you can those numbers better jump off that graph. i better be able to tell which one of these places did this. and one didn't. and in fact, of my last little story will be my faith. one of my people in the world is who's at this conference, catherine hewitt. she went the ohio legislature and she said, i've got a graph, but i haven't the timeline, it's just a graph of covid deaths. and given that these policies were supposed to be so effective, i'd like you to tell me when where on graph did the curfew go into effect? where did the mask mandate go into effect? where was it lifted? where's thanksgiving on this graph? because thanksgiving we should see a spike after that. and of the legislators couldn't pick out anything because the graph is entirely random. so all i'm saying is we need to try to figure out why is it random? this stuff didn't do anything

other than decimate extremely vulnerable populations around the world. thomas woods what what's your background in writing about the covid virus? i'm writing this in capacity as a u.s. historian, and so so in the book, it's overwhelming an american point of view which means, by the way, i lost a translation deal. the polish we're to translate my book. and then they looked at it and they this is all u.s. forget it. so i had to give them the money back. but that's okay. but so so do this as a u.s. historian. but i do that. i'm not making medical claims in the book. i'm not saying, well, this treatment works better than that one. that's not my place to say, but it is my place to say. they said x would happen, but x didn't happen. they said, if i compare this and this, i'll see a big difference. but i don't. i'm a smart guy who can read charts. i have a ph.d. in history from columbia. so, you know, i know what i'm doing and the results weren't what were promised. why do you think it took on a moralizing tone and do you see

anything in history that's comparable for now? that's a good, i think in part, and i hate to be unfair to, but i really do even though i can be a provocative writer, i hate to be uncharitable, but it does seem like there were an awful lot of who felt like, here's my chance to be involved in something that matters. and all i have to do is stay in my house. stay in my house, and render moral judgment on everybody else. look at me. you're right. i'm sitting at my house and i'm saving, you know, 11 gajillion lives or something i think that's very, very tempting for me. you know, like death of a salesman. everybody wants to be somebody everybody wants to have a legacy, you know, everybody wants to feel like they contribute into something. and this was handed to them on a silver platter. so now if i had more leisure, i no doubt i could come up with historical examples. we were told, throughout the pandemic to follow the science. do think that we did? i think we followed people who

were held up to us as the official experts. but i don't think that's helpful because i think especially a time could you imagine like i don't care your political stance is or what you thought about the covid policy if we're in in an unprecedented why would we know i understand you know some somebody who has no business saying anything you would listen to him but we have seer mostly accomplished people in many many of people signed that great barrington declaration. what don't you think it would be a good idea for us to let them talk it out? just let them freely talk. like the thing about the ventilators early on in new york, they were saying we got to get everybody on the ventilators. it was lone doctor who made extremely amateurish youtube video saying, i think these ventilator is are actually counterproductive. now if had all said banish him because he's not part of the consensus about ventilators. a lot of bad stuff would happen because of his video. people took a second look at it and said we should be them on

ventilators like this. so that's my point. you know, some people will be wrong, but that's how science proceeds. it always proceeds by making mistakes. it's clumsy and it's messy but eventually we reach a consensus on something. ink the consensus was premature early declared. this is a chart from your diary of a psychosis. can you walk us through what we're looking at there? yes. so this is a chart of the statistic known as excess deaths. so that is to say, we look at a of where we would expect the death numbers to be based on past experience in various countries. and the the the issue is we are curious know of the various country now this is mostly europe but you can see there are several countries outside of europe. which country did best in terms of excess. and the reason that this is helpful is that this includes not just covid deaths, but there are some people who died because of the mitigation measures mean

that was unavoidable, that that would happen. but there's also the problem of how do you decide if something is a covid or not? and norway and sweden right. you know, practically, you know, feet away from each other actually have different ways of deciding if something should be classified, a covid death or not. this gets rid of all those complications because we're just looking at deaths in general. so you eliminate all the confusion. and what we see is that sweden had the low list excess death percentage. now, if we had said in march 20, if sweden doesn't do this stuff, where do you think it'll be on this on this chart? well, a lot of people said, well, dead last. obviously be the worst one. and it'll be an absolute catastrophe. and in for three years, the main epidemiologist in anders tegnell was condemned and vilified by experts all over the world and. yet so unlike anthony fauci, who is welcomed and fed it and

celebrated at every turn, this guy was smeared and called a killer for three saw it years and he said, i'm going to be vindicated. it's going to take three years because you imagine having the you know, what's to go three years, not being vindicated and having the worst things on earth said about you. but he had the guts to do that and he was vindicated. now that should make us say if something like this happens again, we have more data now and it's not as as we thought. no one who favored the alleged mitigation measures would have predicted sweden would have such a favorable. none of them would have predicted it. so better have learned something. and what can we learn from? the countries at the bottom? well, in some cases it it's hard to understand why like for example brazil and brazil was more laissez faire. peru had a brutal lockdown and they had almost the same

results. bad result in both places. so it's not a policy difference. or, for example, in japan and i mentioned japan had a good result cambodia had a pretty good result. south korea had a pretty good result. so that's led some people to think that for some reason, maybe in some parts of asia, maybe there was some preexisting immunity to it because no matter what policy you implemented, you got a pretty good result. aj calls it policy invariants. like no matter what you do you get a pretty good result. but i would be willing to bet that at least of the explanation has to do with the age difference in the countries if you're not correcting for that. but also, we haven't corrected for obesity levels because we know obesity was another marker for this and the us has a big problem with that. as we know. professor woods, did you get the. i did not. why i had covid in 2021. and i think now more or less conceded by everybody that that was better