0:02

G'day humans, welcome to the

0:04

safe space for dangerous ideas,

0:06

and it's certainly the scariest

0:08

idea that I've ever had

0:10

about the United States, which

0:12

is that that country, the

0:14

country which is more ostentatious

0:16

than any other about its

0:18

embrace of freedom, the country

0:21

for which freedom is baked

0:23

into its DNA, has

0:25

entered a period in which

0:28

The sort of fundamental freedoms that

0:30

have been around since the Magna

0:32

Carta Certainly since habeas corpus the

0:35

idea that a person who is

0:37

snatched off the street By his

0:39

or her government will have the

0:41

ability to challenge that snatching in

0:43

court will have the ability to

0:45

Prove themselves or not even the

0:47

ability to prove themselves that the

0:50

onus will be on the government

0:52

on the prosecutors to prove that

0:54

that person has done something so

0:56

vile beyond reasonable doubt that

0:59

their liberty deserves to

1:01

be taken away, that that

1:03

principle would no longer

1:05

prevail in the United States.

1:10

somewhat terrifying. And look, I don't want

1:12

to use this show as a way

1:14

to be reactive to the news. You

1:16

will have noticed, given the topics that

1:18

we've covered in the period since Donald

1:20

Trump's ascendancy to the throne of King

1:22

Emperor Grand Puba of the universe, that

1:24

I'm not spending my time talking to

1:26

people about that. You have plenty of

1:28

that in your feed anyway, but there

1:31

comes a time where one has to

1:33

address it. And the best person to

1:35

do so is Mr. Matt Welch, who

1:37

is a libertarian journalist. He is

1:39

the co -host of the wildly popular

1:41

podcast, The Fifth Column. And

1:43

Matt was on the on

1:45

real time with Bill Maher, the

1:48

great HBO panel talk show

1:50

last weekend. He did a

1:52

great job there. And I got

1:54

him on to Zeps Live, which is

1:56

my weekly streaming, television, video, chit

1:58

chat thing and me squidget you can

2:00

ask questions live and we respond

2:03

to them or we banter about what's

2:05

going on in the news. And

2:07

this is that recording. We don't just

2:09

talk about the crisis, the possible

2:11

crisis of American authoritarianism. I also wanted

2:13

to. think to hear what Matt

2:15

thinks about Doge and Elon and government

2:18

waste and red tape and whether

2:20

or not that's all the distraction since

2:22

he generally has a preference for

2:24

much smaller government. And I really wanted

2:26

to understand the criticism of what

2:28

Donald Trump is doing, not from the

2:31

perspective of a wild -eyed Trump loathing

2:33

lefty, but from someone who is

2:35

measured and has their bona fide as

2:38

Yeah, as a person who has no

2:40

necessary partisan interest in taking down

2:42

the president, but is deeply concerned about

2:44

the consequences for American liberty. This

2:47

is a wide -ranging conversation. I

2:49

hope you enjoy it. If you do,

2:51

then tune in for the next Substack

2:53

Live. They're on at 9 p .m.

2:55

every Tuesday evening, Eastern time, which is

2:57

11 a .m. Wednesday mornings in Australia. Otherwise,

3:00

just subscribe to Substack and you'll get

3:02

pinged every time we go live. I

3:04

hope you enjoy the one, the only, Matt

3:06

Welch. Congratulations

3:10

to everybody who's just joining

3:12

us. The wonderful Matt Welch

3:14

is our guest on Zeph's

3:16

Live this evening. Libertarian

3:19

extraordinaire, commentator,

3:21

co -host of The Fifth

3:23

Column, podcast, sub

3:26

-stack, media empire, and delightful

3:28

guest on Real Time

3:30

with Bill Maher last week.

3:32

Oh, thank you. Matt,

3:35

it pains me that all of

3:37

your best zingers and best arguments with

3:39

Bill were on the overtime segment

3:41

that doesn't go to air on HBO

3:43

but goes on YouTube and I

3:45

think CNN and you can get it

3:47

as a podcast because I rarely

3:49

take this opportunity to piss in the

3:51

pocket of my guests as we

3:53

say in Australia, which means to blow

3:55

smoke up your ass. uh

3:58

thank you for calling out bill

4:00

on his environmentalist bullshit where he was

4:02

going on about how how thankful

4:04

he is that he was born in

4:06

the you know he grew up

4:08

in the 70s when everything was so

4:10

much cleaner and there weren't toxins

4:13

around and the nowadays kids are just

4:15

so contaminated by toxins and you

4:17

said but that's nonsense because things are

4:19

much cleaner than they used to

4:21

be, and he was like, well, I

4:23

don't know what kind of science

4:25

you're talking about. What kind of libertarian,

4:27

flat trap? Environmental toxins

4:29

is really the story

4:31

of my lifetime. I'm

4:34

glad I was born as old as

4:36

I am at a time when everything

4:38

wasn't completely polluted. I think that's why

4:40

I'm still alive today. And it just

4:42

got worse and worse and worse. The

4:47

air is less polluted, the water

4:49

is less polluted. As countries get

4:51

richer, they pollute less. When

4:53

they're industrializing, they pollute more. There

4:56

might be individual environmental toxins,

4:58

yes. But as a broad

5:00

description of the status of

5:02

OECD countries, we are polluting

5:04

on net less. And

5:08

then he accused you of being deluded by libertarian

5:10

ideology in believing that, and you were like, well,

5:12

I can see the mountains from Long Beach, which

5:14

I couldn't when I was a kid and he

5:16

didn't have a response to that. Yeah,

5:18

not being from Long Beach, right? He's from

5:20

New Jersey. He doesn't understand our pain out

5:22

there in the flood plain of Southern California.

5:25

Um, no, it's a common, uh, it's

5:27

a common thing for one, Bill, who

5:29

I, uh, I, uh, obviously enjoy

5:31

quite a bit and I'm always happy, um,

5:33

that he is generous enough to invite me

5:35

on his show. Um, he's always, he has

5:37

a little bit of kind of some woo

5:39

woo environmental stuff. He always has. I mean,

5:41

he's talking about the plastics and the toxins.

5:44

And he's also in excellent shape. It

5:46

must be said. So whatever he's doing,

5:49

including smoking all of the world's marijuana,

5:51

seems to be working out for him

5:53

for the most part. But

5:55

he's got a little bit of

5:57

that RFK. I don't know how

6:00

much he agrees with RFK about

6:02

anything, because I don't follow it

6:04

that closely, but just sort of

6:06

that. intuition that we're being contaminated

6:08

by the corporations and that big

6:10

pharma is trying to push all

6:13

this kind of stuff. There's some

6:15

overlap there and some definitely some

6:17

skepticism about the efficacy of certain

6:19

vaccines, not all of them. So

6:22

he is definitely right for

6:24

some of that. And I

6:26

think whether you're coming at

6:28

it from the RFK angle

6:30

or the more kind of

6:32

classic environmental sort of pessimist

6:34

angle, It's always striking to

6:37

learn the weird truth about

6:39

wealth, which is say

6:41

what you will for wealth, but it

6:43

makes your air cleaner and your rivers

6:45

cleaner and also a reforestation of lands

6:47

and a bunch of other happy things

6:49

that happen once you're on the other

6:51

side of the industrialization curve and. People

6:53

get there, countries get there for a

6:55

lot of different reasons. Sometimes

6:58

it's going to be because they

7:00

did the regulation. That's actually part

7:02

of the story in my native

7:04

Southern California is that they cut

7:06

lead in the car. We did

7:08

no longer have leaded gasoline and

7:10

they made some actual environmental regulations. Sometimes

7:14

it just people are wealthy enough

7:16

so that they can demand the regulations

7:18

or you're just rich enough that

7:20

the companies themselves operate a

7:22

lot cleaner. And for those who

7:24

think that you got to be

7:26

a good solid, you know, commie

7:28

to go clean, just those of

7:30

us who were like around the

7:32

Iron Curtain and around 1990, that

7:34

was some of the most

7:36

polluted places. Trees would

7:38

not grow in Northern Bohemia in

7:40

then Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic,

7:42

you know, because all of the

7:44

uranium mining that they've done there

7:46

and the coal that was everywhere.

7:48

So yeah. It's better

7:50

to be it's better to

7:52

be clean and wealth allows

7:55

for that kind of cleanliness.

7:57

It strikes me that this

7:59

this kind of Bill Maher

8:01

RFK junior like woo woo

8:03

rift on the left is

8:05

a bit reminiscent of another

8:07

battle that's happening between the

8:09

sort of Ezra Klein abundance

8:11

liberals versus the restrictionist liberals,

8:13

which I think is interesting

8:15

Matt like that. Pretty much

8:17

throughout my life, the left has

8:19

been associated with a kind of Ralph

8:22

Nader style conception of what it

8:24

means to be on the left,

8:26

which is we should empower communities to

8:28

push back against powerful companies and

8:30

governments that want to travel on their

8:32

rights. Therefore, we should insert as

8:34

much red tape and as many impediments

8:37

to the doing of big business

8:39

and government as we can. And

8:42

now that seems to have

8:44

led at least America. at least

8:46

blue state america to a

8:48

position in which it's impossible to

8:50

do anything like build high -speed

8:53

rail or build skyscrapers or

8:55

you know create affordable housing or

8:57

whatever it might be because

8:59

there's so many pressure points at

9:01

which self -appointed spokespeople for the

9:03

community can obstruct and now

9:06

there's a renewed energy on the

9:08

left to say actually we

9:10

should be the party of building

9:12

things as a libertarian what

9:14

do you make of that clash

9:16

I'm heartened to see that

9:19

there is a movement among a

9:21

count among one hand, maybe

9:23

two number of blue state left

9:25

-leaning pundits who've got a nice

9:27

book out that they're popularizing

9:29

and starting conversations with. That's great.

9:32

It's better than the alternative. At

9:34

the same time, there aren't a

9:37

lot of elected politicians in this

9:39

country that are acting anything like any

9:41

of that. Even a little bit.

9:43

I mean there aren't You know, maybe

9:45

an abundance Democrat as Jared Pole

9:47

is the governor of Colorado But maybe

9:49

not I have friends in Colorado

9:51

who get really mad when I talk

9:53

about that he's you know better

9:55

than the average Democrat on economic policy

9:58

He has signed some things into

10:00

law that are not so great as

10:02

well. It's just not there aren't

10:04

a lot of of great examples of

10:06

like oh We're doing this in

10:08

this place. You know, Austin seems

10:10

to be pretty well -governed. I presume

10:12

that the Austin local government is dominated

10:14

by Democrats just because Austin tends to

10:17

be a left -of -center city. I could

10:19

be wrong about that, but they build

10:21

housing there. You know, they have

10:23

incredible population growth and the costs are not

10:25

really going that high in that because they allow

10:27

for stuff to be built. You

10:29

mentioned Long Beach. So I'm from

10:31

a part of north Long Beach right

10:34

next to a city called Lakewood Lakewood

10:36

was the biggest Levittown West of Levittown

10:38

they built something like 50 ,000 houses

10:40

in a year and a half two

10:42

years after World War two is all Uh,

10:45

incredible. This is a huge kind

10:47

of planned community, all GI, uh,

10:50

bill. There's about three models of houses,

10:52

all three bedroom, two bathroom, just depending

10:54

on like where your porch was. And

10:56

they just built it all like that.

10:58

They probably built more houses there in

11:00

two years than have been built in

11:02

Southern California or in LA County, um,

11:04

in any given year since, uh, you

11:06

know, the nineties or something. It's just

11:08

astonishing. There aren't abundance dem, Democrat. kind

11:11

of examples anywhere. And

11:13

if there's anything to make

11:15

that should make Democrats

11:17

feel really awful about their

11:19

governance is that you

11:21

mentioned high speed rail. California

11:23

has one of the

11:25

most infamous, pointless and expensive

11:27

and unbuilt high speed

11:29

rail projects. that has

11:31

gone from like Merced to, you

11:33

know, Outer Merced, maybe, at

11:36

this point. Is

11:38

there an Outer Merced? great.

11:41

I want to visit Outer Merced. I want

11:43

to visit the suburban paradise. If you

11:45

haven't seen physical graffiti in a while, it

11:47

was all, mostly it was shot in

11:50

Merced. It's a lovely place. I love it.

11:53

But Florida just went ahead and

11:55

built a high -speed rail and it's

11:57

functional now. your Ron Deft -Santis

11:59

himself under his governorship or under

12:01

the last two governorships, this thing

12:03

was built mostly private money, if

12:06

not all private money, and it's

12:08

up and functional. You can build

12:10

stuff in Florida. Taxes

12:12

low. But buy high -speed rail in an American

12:14

context. That means 40 miles an hour. I

12:16

think it's faster in that case. I don't have

12:18

the details in front of me, but it's

12:20

not a joke of high -speed rail. It's

12:22

straight. It's straight. There's not a lot of

12:25

mountains in Florida. There's not

12:27

stuff in the way. It's difficult to

12:29

do that. Everyone wants... There's only

12:31

one line on Amtrak that ever makes any

12:33

money or comes close to it, and it's

12:35

the one between DC and... New York City

12:37

or DC in Boston and People bellyache about

12:39

they're not being high -speed rail, but there's

12:41

a lot of cities and there's a lot

12:43

of curves and like rivers and stuff It's

12:45

kind of hard to get a thing and

12:47

like same thing in California You've got gigantic

12:49

mountain ranges all over the place for their

12:51

high -speed rail projects But Florida just goes ahead

12:53

and builds it like you drive into those

12:56

talking with I was talking with my driver

12:58

like Thomas L Friedman in California.

13:02

Was it an Egyptian driver and were

13:04

you talking about the fate of

13:06

the CC regime in Cairo? Because

13:08

that tends to be Thomas Friedman's bread and

13:10

butter. You parachute in three hours. We weren't talking

13:12

about Thomas Friedman's, you know, the thing you

13:14

talk about is the Egyptian and the peace process,

13:16

or you're talking about how in China you

13:18

can build things fast. But in this just case,

13:21

it was like the quality of the roads.

13:23

As soon as you get into the city limits

13:25

of Los Angeles or the city limits of

13:27

New York City and I do a lot of

13:29

driving between where I'm at in Brooklyn and

13:31

upstate New York couple hours away. And

13:33

it's like you drive in and

13:35

it's the welcome to the Bronx. You

13:38

just start like it's like

13:41

you're on the airport road to

13:43

Sarajevo in 1994 just like

13:45

dodging sniper fire and gigantic bombed

13:47

out craters. It's incredible. So

13:49

you're paying all these taxes. Nothing

13:51

works. All the infrastructure sucks

13:54

and you can't build anything. So

13:56

long story short, I'm glad they're

13:58

talking about it. It beats the

14:00

alternative not talking about it. And

14:02

there isn't any real evidence that

14:04

I've seen on the ground that

14:06

this is changing the basic dynamics.

14:08

of especially state and local democratic

14:10

governments. There's a, I think one

14:12

of the ills of American politics

14:14

for the last 10, 15 years

14:16

is that everyone just thinks about

14:18

the presidency. Everybody thinks about the

14:20

federal government. And so they

14:23

can tell themselves, including my tribes, such

14:25

as I have one, just sort of

14:27

independence and small L libertarians, they sometimes

14:29

say, oh, it's just the it's the

14:31

uniparty that all agrees with each other

14:33

about something. And there's some something to

14:35

that critique, although it's overly simplified. But

14:38

on the state and local level, there's actual pretty

14:40

big difference in the way these things are governed.

14:43

This came to the fore, especially about all

14:45

things related to COVID. If

14:47

you were a heavily democratic place,

14:49

You had heavy lockdowns, you

14:51

had heavy vaccine mandates. You

14:53

just basically Australia, your schools are closed.

14:57

There's a lot Hey, don't throw

14:59

us in with that. I'm gonna

15:01

just throw you forever because fun.

15:03

When you go back, we've revisited

15:05

the data recently on a very

15:07

interesting episode that I did with

15:09

an economist about comparing the metrics

15:11

of various countries. And for

15:13

the majority of Australians throughout the majority

15:15

of the pandemic, there were no lockdowns,

15:17

schools were open. And then

15:19

at the very end, when we fucked up a

15:21

vaccine, the vaccine rollout, there was like a

15:23

100 day period long after the rest of the

15:25

world had forgotten about COVID. But if I

15:27

would have tried to visit you, you would put

15:30

me in a concentration camp for like three

15:32

weeks first, right? Yeah,

15:34

you'd say, yeah, you would have

15:36

to go to Auschwitz, but only for

15:38

15 days. And then once

15:40

you were out of Auschwitz. That's all

15:42

I'm saying. But no, I

15:44

asked David, I asked David

15:46

from about the, you know, the

15:49

claims of hysterical. idiots online

15:51

like Tim Poole who were calling

15:53

Australia's quarantine facilities for inbound

15:55

travellers returning home at concentration camps.

15:58

And David Frum said, I'll tell

16:00

you how you can tell whether something's

16:02

a concentration camp. Are there pillows? Fair

16:07

enough. Fair enough. Anyways,

16:11

but at the risk. Sorry. No, go on. I

16:13

believe it's your show. I was going to

16:16

say at the risk of being all Thomas L.

16:18

Friedman on you. I just got back from

16:20

Japan. Yes. And on the point of

16:22

you saying that it's difficult to build high

16:24

speed rail in the northeastern corridor in the United

16:26

States because there are rivers and mountains. I

16:29

did take the Shinkansen from Tokyo

16:31

to Osaka and they are currently building,

16:33

in addition to the Shinkansen, a

16:35

maglev between those two

16:37

cities, which is not

16:39

impossibly expensive and will

16:41

actually be successful. And

16:44

you know, if you know anything about

16:46

the geography of Japan, there are rivers

16:48

and there are definitely mountains. So it's

16:50

possible. Yeah. In

16:52

New York, I think

16:54

the cost per subway

16:56

track mile is something

16:59

like twice as expensive as the

17:01

next most expensive subway system in

17:03

the world. It is

17:05

astonishing. The New York Times ran

17:07

a great three or four part

17:09

series about five years ago. I

17:11

think it was pre -COVID about the

17:13

dysfunction in that system. And it's

17:15

all that. Just, you know, when

17:17

there's guaranteed revenue streams or the

17:19

perception of guaranteed revenue streams in

17:22

American politics, um people and

17:24

maybe this is true everywhere but um

17:26

but it seems to be um heavily

17:28

true in america these days people just

17:30

treated as like a A

17:32

feather bedding system rather than we're going to build

17:34

this you would have a member of Barack Obama when

17:36

he was president was like, you know, we used

17:38

to build golden gate bridges Why don't we do that

17:41

anymore? And it's true, but it's

17:43

also true that the federal government didn't

17:45

build a gold gate bridge and That's

17:47

kind of part of it. You know,

17:49

there were right but who did it

17:51

wasn't a private consortium, right? There was

17:53

actually a lot of private Private

17:56

actors helping to build a concave

17:58

bridge. It wasn't you're right. It wasn't

18:00

a fully private project, but it

18:02

was It's been a while since I

18:04

looked into this and wrote about

18:06

it But I did at the time

18:09

and it's if there was like

18:11

five different actors involved and some of

18:13

them were you know Bank of

18:15

America or local Wells Fargo I forget

18:17

which Acting more on their own.

18:19

Yeah, you just you can't build big

18:21

things. There's a Both states, environmental

18:24

review and national environmental review things that

18:26

are designed to gum things up.

18:28

interesting you mentioned Nader earlier, who's a

18:30

presidential campaign in 2000. I covered

18:32

and I remember the first press conference

18:34

I saw him at. I was

18:36

just struck by how many times he

18:39

used the word corporate. Or very

18:41

corporation and I just started like it

18:43

was running a tally and I

18:45

think it was like 63 times in

18:47

like a 25 minute thing It's

18:49

like wow just using the seaword dropping

18:52

sea bombs all the time but

18:54

nader in the 70s was a bit

18:56

more complicated than all that. Like,

18:58

Nader was a force for deregulation in

19:00

America. He was part of the

19:02

conversation about deregulating airlines. He

19:04

saw the dangers of having

19:06

the government enforce kind of

19:08

cartel arrangements with companies, and

19:10

he would see them sort

19:13

of cementing the corporate power

19:15

that he does not like. So

19:17

he had this just odd bedfellows

19:20

that could exist in 1970s American

19:22

politics, but could not by the late

19:24

80s, where, you know, Teddy Kennedy

19:26

was part of that, a part of

19:28

the deregulation thing. Jimmy Carter and

19:30

Ronald Reagan, and I think the only

19:32

real debate that they had, presidential

19:34

debate, they were just like,

19:37

arguing which one was the bigger

19:39

deregulator. It was like,

19:41

crazy. Like, we don't think about

19:43

that because we see the end

19:45

of it when deregulation was seen

19:47

as the sort of Thatcher Reagan

19:49

evil right wing plot or whatever

19:51

or fantastic liberation against the commies

19:53

But it was more mixed than

19:55

all of that at the dawn of

19:57

all that activity in the 70s

20:00

One of our viewers on Substack Live

20:02

and a big hello to everybody. I'm

20:04

Josh Seps. I'm here with Matt Welch.

20:07

This is Zeph Live. We do it every

20:09

Tuesday at 9 p .m. Eastern time, US

20:11

time. This will also go out as

20:13

an episode of Uncomfortable Conversations. My podcast, which

20:15

is different from the live stream, but

20:17

you should subscribe to anyway. You

20:19

know how to do that. You're already on Substack. And

20:22

Matt, one of the listeners, Nell,

20:24

just chimed in saying, is the

20:27

labor force in Japan local or are

20:29

they migrants? And I'm pretty sure

20:31

that in Japan, the people who are

20:33

building the maglev or Japanese people,

20:35

they don't have a policy of importing

20:37

migrants. I don't think for big

20:40

infrastructure projects, which raises the question, why

20:42

is American infrastructure so diabolically expensive?

20:44

Do we even know that? I mean,

20:46

presumably it's not like American union

20:48

workers earn more than French union workers.

20:50

Maybe they do. They probably do

20:52

on average. I'm

20:55

just guessing. No, it's

20:57

a lot of made in America. stuff,

21:00

a lot of rules and regulations. The

21:02

MTA here in New York City, their

21:05

average salary is a lot. It's

21:09

a whole lot. So,

21:12

you know, again, just

21:15

sort of like the bigger the city, the more

21:17

like semi successful it is, New York

21:19

goes through periods of success and failure,

21:21

but it's not like a Detroit or

21:23

St. Louis. It's not in terminal decline.

21:26

Then the barnacles can attach. To

21:29

it I from what I

21:31

understand about Japan, which is

21:33

basically nothing so but that

21:35

they haven't had a large

21:37

foreign based Immigration or certainly

21:39

not let that don't necessarily

21:42

welcome foreigners with open arms

21:44

culturally. No, that's right or

21:46

numerically, you

21:48

know, you can't build in New York City, you're

21:50

going to have immigrants no matter what, but it's

21:52

not like you're going to go to the local

21:54

Home Depot and hire some dudes to go lay

21:56

some track for the MTA. Those

21:58

are all really good union jobs. So

22:01

that's part of the reason, but it's

22:04

also just everything, to do everything in New

22:06

York is expensive. You've got to get

22:08

it inspected, you've got to you know, in

22:10

many cases use eminent domain or buy

22:12

this guy out. It's, it's a

22:14

notoriously tricky piece of land to try

22:16

to get anything done on. But

22:18

that doesn't explain why it's

22:20

difficult to build high speed rail

22:22

in Merced, California. Well, there's

22:25

no reason to build in

22:27

Merced, California. to

22:29

be absolutely clear. No,

22:31

I mean, the high -speed rail in, I can't

22:33

speak for China, I haven't ever been to

22:35

Asia in my life. So it's all pure ignorance

22:37

in my part. But I have spent a

22:39

lot of time in France. And

22:42

the high -speed rail that people

22:44

like to talk about and

22:46

compare to is the TGV, which

22:48

is lovely, especially the one

22:50

between Lyon and Paris. Which

22:52

is their version of the hey, you

22:54

know DC to New York or DC to

22:56

Boston sure works wide. Why isn't the

22:59

rest of the world like this? Well Leone

23:01

to France is a straight Leone to

23:03

Paris is a straight shot and there isn't

23:05

a lot of terrain

23:08

in trouble. That's the two biggest

23:10

population centers and people do work

23:12

and you can get going pretty

23:14

fast and you can commute, you

23:16

know, pretty much. I don't buy

23:18

this matter. The problem is not

23:20

a geographical problem in America. There

23:22

are lots of mountainous places in

23:24

Europe that have high -speed rail

23:26

in Switzerland and in Bavaria and

23:28

in northern Italy. There's

23:30

Japan. It's more complicated

23:32

to build. a train between DC and

23:34

Boston than it is across the

23:36

plains of Texas. That's a fair comparison,

23:38

but that's not the principal obstacle

23:41

that's causing things to be twice or

23:43

three times as expensive. There's not,

23:45

there's not, I mean, so

23:47

there's the expensive part and then there's just the,

23:49

there's no reason for this to be built part,

23:51

which are kind of related. In California, part of

23:53

the expense is that you have a lot of

23:55

earthquakes. I know you have earthquakes in Japan too.

23:58

The mountains are not are not nothing.

24:00

The Tehachapi Range is a big mountain

24:02

range, as is the coastal range that you

24:04

have to get through. And

24:06

no matter what you do, I think right

24:08

now there's a project that is being

24:10

contemplated or worked on between LA and Las

24:12

Vegas, which kind of makes more sense,

24:14

actually, because those are places that people want

24:16

to go really fast. And there's, you

24:18

know, the only other way to get there

24:20

with any kind of speed is on

24:23

airplane. But there's no way to get to

24:26

A place that you want to be in LA

24:28

and a place you want to be in the

24:30

Bay Area by train, even the most perfect imaginary

24:32

train you can imagine, where

24:34

the time and the money for the

24:36

ticket would be remotely worth it.

24:39

So even if the cost was good,

24:42

they wouldn't have enough ridership to be

24:44

able to justify the building of it

24:46

and all the assumptions that are based

24:48

into that. Why do you assume that

24:50

that's true? It strikes me as a

24:52

perfect... which is it's just far

24:54

enough to be, you know, to need

24:56

to get too quickly and you don't

24:58

to drive, but it's enough that still.

25:00

There's not enough people going back and forth. If

25:02

you could do it in an hour and 45

25:05

minutes or two hours or whatever it would be

25:07

if you were traveling at 250 mile an hour.

25:10

Yeah, you're just not going to get from downtown

25:12

LA to downtown San Francisco in two hours. If

25:15

you could, then it would be

25:17

a more interesting project, but that cannot

25:19

physically happen. And there's not enough

25:21

of a population that's going to and fro.

25:23

Las Vegas and LA, that's a big population

25:25

every single weekend, right? There's a lot of motivated

25:27

customers who want to do that. And there's

25:29

basically only two ways, and both of them

25:31

kind of suck in their own way. And

25:34

there's a lot of no man's land. There

25:36

aren't farmers that you have to buy out.

25:38

There isn't a complicated, nearly as

25:40

common. There are mountains, but there's

25:42

also a lot of empty space. there.

25:44

So it's easier to deal and

25:46

work in empty space between larger population

25:48

centers that are motivated to go

25:50

to and from. There's not a huge

25:52

daily traffic number going from the

25:55

Bay Area to Southern California. It's sizable,

25:57

but it's not enough to support

25:59

the amount of time that it would

26:01

take to go back and forth.

26:03

The ridership numbers just aren't remotely close

26:05

enough. I'm skeptical. There's a lot

26:07

of lift. There's a lot of air lift between

26:09

those cities. And it may not be two hours,

26:11

but it's not to be more than two and a

26:13

half hours or something. Isn't it like a six

26:16

hour drive or a seven hour drive? Yeah, you have

26:18

to whole ass to go five and a half,

26:20

six hours. Yeah. So if

26:22

a train is going four times faster

26:24

than a car does. Yes,

26:27

I like. I'm

26:29

taking the under on

26:31

that being what the final

26:33

destination is. It sounds

26:35

to me like a conversation

26:37

that I have a

26:40

lot with Americans, which is

26:42

that they bank the

26:44

wins that American audacity and

26:46

ingenuity provides in areas

26:48

of technology, military prowess, innovation.

26:51

And then they make excuses for

26:53

the failings about the things that

26:55

America doesn't do well like the

26:57

healthcare system or. Like infrastructure and

26:59

if you just get if you

27:01

gave a different example if you

27:03

just imagined a scenario in which

27:05

the Elon Musk's and Thomas Edison's

27:08

of the of the world had

27:10

created incredible high speed rail. And

27:12

it was Europe that was doing

27:14

really good AI and tech. Stuff I

27:17

can imagine a different version of

27:19

you making excuses about why you know

27:21

there was something specific to the

27:23

European condition that made it more conducive

27:25

to technology and. Why trains were

27:27

easier to construct in the United States

27:29

because it's big it has large

27:31

population centers and so on and so

27:33

forth it just sounds like. Like

27:36

excuse making frankly and if Elon Musk

27:38

really wanted to build high -speed rail

27:40

and if the Legislative and regulatory framework

27:42

were in place for it to do

27:44

so There's no reason why the San

27:46

Andreas mountains would be an impediment. I

27:48

think he has a he had a

27:50

boring project idea to go through some

27:53

of those mountains build a gigantic tunnel

27:55

and look I would love for I

27:57

first of all I'd like to him

27:59

to get a government and Which I

28:01

think it's gonna happen by the end

28:03

of this podcast anyways, but Um,

28:05

I would love for him to to

28:07

work on that. But part of the problem

28:09

in California is that you can't have,

28:12

um, uh, that allow that amount

28:14

of private sector involvement in a big project.

28:16

Every government has to get their fingerprints

28:18

on it and that makes everything more expensive

28:20

as well. So in the Florida case,

28:22

not just for the high speed rail there,

28:24

but a lot of the building of

28:26

highway system in Florida, which is big and

28:28

it works pretty well is that a

28:30

lot of that's been private. If

28:33

California allowed for more of that

28:35

and I think that if I'm

28:37

not mistaken You're forcing me to

28:39

talk out of my ass a

28:41

lot here, but I'm going on

28:43

memory. It's my job the I

28:45

think that the LA to Vegas

28:47

thing is much more kind of

28:49

private concept than then Being like

28:51

top -down kind of a government

28:53

thing. So I would give it

28:55

more of a chance to succeed.

28:57

I think technologically we can do

28:59

all kinds of great stuff but government's

29:03

managed technology is not working.

29:05

Think about space. You mentioned

29:07

Elon Musk, Nat Jeff

29:09

Bezos, and all these other people. I

29:11

remember arguing with the late

29:13

Lou Dobbs on the Red Eye

29:15

program on Fox News during

29:17

the Obama era. God rest his

29:19

soul. God rest his soul.

29:21

Because one of the topics was

29:23

some jackass rock singer was

29:25

talking about going to the moon

29:27

or said something silly about

29:29

that. And I was on a

29:31

panel of Lou Dobbs and

29:33

I'm old enough in in media

29:35

years to remember back when

29:37

Lou made a desperate gambit to

29:39

a desperate lunch for that

29:41

early comm money and he went

29:43

from CNN to space comm

29:45

and And and so like Lou

29:47

started his like answer to

29:49

the question by trying to dig

29:51

Barack Obama And I

29:53

said something along the lines of

29:55

like far be it for

29:57

me to step on the toes

29:59

of the founder of space

30:01

calm But one of the few

30:04

things that I genuinely appreciate

30:06

about Barack Obama's presidency is that

30:08

he Unlocked the ability to

30:10

for private industry to go to

30:12

space He said okay, let's

30:14

let's have private industry help with

30:16

NASA to deliver payloads They

30:18

removed a lot of the kind

30:20

of monopolistic NASA stuff And

30:22

we see the fruits now, like

30:24

we are starting to do

30:26

those big insane dreams again. And

30:29

a lot of that stuff was the path

30:31

was cleared by Obama so that people could actually

30:33

start doing those things. So if we allow

30:35

people to do things, solve all the problems, it'd

30:37

be great. Before we leave the subject of

30:39

high -speed rail, Matt, one of

30:41

our viewers on Substack Live, Alex

30:43

has this insightful question for

30:45

me. Alex says, hey, Vegemite breath.

30:48

Where's the train from Sydney to Perth,

30:50

if they're so easy to build? So

30:54

sitting to Perth is not a good

30:56

candidate because it's the same distance as like

30:58

New York to Los Angeles It's too

31:00

far flying is better for those distances the

31:02

better own if you wanted to own

31:04

me would be where is the train from

31:07

like Sydney to Melbourne which is true

31:09

There should be one and there isn't and

31:11

I'm not saying that Australia is is

31:13

great at this stuff either But there should

31:15

be a train from Sydney to Melbourne.

31:17

I mean there is a train. It takes

31:19

12 hours. It should take four hours.

31:21

There should certainly be a fast train from

31:24

Sydney to Canberra, which is currently, get

31:26

this, Matt, just in case anyone thinks that

31:28

I'm lauding my Australian -ness over inferior Americans.

31:31

The drive from Sydney to Canberra,

31:33

the nation's capital, is a three -hour

31:35

drive, and the train takes four

31:37

and a half hours. Mea

31:41

culpa okay another person and also

31:43

before we leave this whole thing

31:45

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31:47

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31:49

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31:51

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31:53

mentioned Elon so there is

31:55

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31:57

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32:00

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32:02

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32:04

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32:06

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34:24

progress versus

34:27

the abundance agenda.

34:30

But then on the right,

34:32

there is also this

34:34

conflict between a, I suppose

34:36

a populist working class

34:38

oriented, like let's get things

34:40

working for the Heartland

34:42

again agenda, which it strikes

34:44

me would actually need

34:46

government to function and would

34:48

need government to be

34:50

deft at empowering the working.

34:53

class and the poor against what

34:55

seems to be the Elon

34:57

Musk attitude of like, Al Franken

34:59

used to have a saying

35:01

about Republicans, which is that Republicans

35:03

get elected on the platform

35:05

that government doesn't work. And then

35:07

when they're in office, they

35:09

prove it. It strikes me

35:11

like you need a certain amount of

35:13

government functionality in order to have to

35:15

get government out of your life. It's

35:17

not enough to just rip it apart

35:20

and expect it to be benign. When

35:22

you rip it apart, often you end

35:24

up with the rules without the human

35:26

minds to interpret those rules and you

35:28

get what the Soviets called a face

35:30

-eating machine, which is just like a

35:32

mindless bureaucracy that ruins your life without

35:34

any way of actually engaging with it,

35:37

the DMV or the IRS. What

35:41

is the best case for

35:43

what Elon is doing? How

35:46

could it be better? Well,

35:48

I think that what he

35:50

has ended up doing is

35:52

instead of having a Department

35:54

of Government efficiency It's more

35:57

like the Department of Government

35:59

disruption. It's how can we

36:01

use sometimes technological tools sometimes

36:03

just Hey, let's change this

36:05

rule and kind of do

36:07

this and Or just pull

36:09

the rug out under an

36:12

entire agency They are More

36:14

like attacking perceived strongholds on

36:16

the left perceived an actual

36:18

in many cases strongholds on

36:20

the left in ways that

36:22

gets people on their heels

36:24

and like what so they're

36:26

disrupting businesses usual. I

36:29

would again point to the

36:31

gap between national republicans and local

36:33

republicans, where there is much

36:35

more a focus on how do

36:37

we get stuff done, actually,

36:39

how do we work efficiently and

36:41

be, you know, more like

36:43

a Mitch Daniels as the governor of

36:45

Indiana than as Elon Musk sort of

36:47

jumping around the federal government. As

36:50

part of that, I had a

36:52

pretty early intuition that we wouldn't

36:54

be getting a lot of actual

36:56

sort of efficiency style reforms by

36:58

the fact that I'm now old

37:00

enough. I know, I

37:02

don't know, 25 people that

37:04

you would definitely tab if

37:06

you were serious. About

37:08

like oh, here's someone who's been thinking

37:10

on the problem of government efficiency

37:12

and doing a lot more a lot

37:14

more effectively and with less and

37:16

they've been thinking about this and working

37:18

on this and actually getting some

37:20

wins here and there sometimes For the

37:23

last 25 30 years. They're obvious

37:25

people. Let's go to them. He's gone

37:27

to zero. He's gone to absolutely

37:29

zero one I would name That I

37:31

work with at reason who's been

37:33

here for 50 years and held to

37:35

work on airline deregulation and transportation

37:37

issues high -speed rail too, Bob

37:40

Pool. Like, you would

37:42

just hire Bob Pool, or you would consult

37:44

him and figure out what his idea

37:46

is. You would go to people who work

37:48

at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. People have

37:50

been working at AEI, other places. It's not

37:52

just that they've been twiddling their thumbs

37:54

at Cinecures in Washington and accomplishing nothing. They

37:57

actually have been thinking on these problems

37:59

in a productive way. I don't think that

38:01

there has been much, if any, expressed

38:03

interest in any of those people and their

38:05

work and those have been some of

38:07

the more strenuous critics not even like oh

38:09

we've been frozen out just like dude

38:11

you could there's so much you could be

38:13

doing right now we want this to

38:15

work we are the target audience for it

38:18

and also we could be henchmen for

38:20

it um and they are not interested in

38:22

that i think they're more interesting in

38:24

punching the left in the mouth um and

38:26

you know occasionally i might be interested

38:28

in some of those actions,

38:30

maybe it's going to lead to things that are good. It's

38:33

really hard to say because he's

38:35

not transparent and Musk in particular is

38:37

a really horrible communicator every day of

38:39

his life. But I

38:42

just don't see the government becoming

38:44

more efficient because of this and certainly

38:46

not measurably smaller, which is another

38:48

concern that I have at a time

38:50

that we're just a few years

38:52

away from what is looking like a

38:54

debt crisis. Nate makes an

38:57

interesting point in the chat in the

38:59

Substack Live comments, Matt, saying

39:01

the abundance faction, meaning we

39:03

were talking about the left's

39:05

battle between restrictionists, you

39:07

know, Ralph Nader -style people who

39:09

want to put impediments to

39:11

progress versus the Ezra Klein abundance

39:13

agenda, Nate says the abundance faction

39:15

is a relatively new phenomenon. I think this

39:17

is in response to you, Matt, saying that

39:21

It is still a vanishingly small proportion

39:23

of the Democratic Party. Nate says,

39:25

the MAGA takeover of the GOP took

39:27

nearly a decade to complete. If

39:29

abundance Democrats are going to rest control

39:31

of blue state party governance, that

39:33

will likely take a decade plus to

39:35

complete the cycle. So we can

39:37

be hopeful. Let's talk

39:39

about human rights. Yeah, sorry. Do you

39:41

want to jump in on that, Matt? Yeah,

39:43

just that there aren't a lot of

39:45

notable uh, ideological

39:47

takeovers that have originated at,

39:50

uh, in opinion journalism. Um,

39:53

much as it pains me, much

39:55

as I would have perhaps liked to

39:57

do one myself. I don't know.

39:59

I'm not interested in power. Um,

40:01

uh, politics in America stubbornly, um, happens

40:03

at the consumer level and I'm not sure

40:06

that there is, I wish them all

40:08

the success in the world, but I think

40:10

that's a little bit different than what

40:12

Donald Trump's been doing. DJB

40:16

writes in the comments, Clive

40:18

James had a relevant quote to

40:20

this topic of government bureaucracy. He

40:23

said, it's only when they go wrong

40:25

that machines remind you how powerful they are.

40:29

Great Australian, great Australian. Flip

40:32

says on the, by

40:34

the way, I can't suffer the ignominy

40:36

of you holding your fingers to

40:38

your ear. So don't even bother. Just

40:40

give up. Just take one out

40:42

and put it in your mouth. You're

40:45

the one who's been trying to make

40:47

me look this ridiculous and congratulations, the

40:49

humiliation ritual. You're doing to me what

40:52

Donald Trump did to Paul Ryan 10 years

40:54

ago. I

40:57

appreciate it. Flip

40:59

says, can you guys get

41:01

into the whole Trump will

41:03

patently be a disaster versus

41:05

the relax the guardrails? guardrails

41:07

will hold perspectives pre -election. Matt

41:10

and his co -podcast has downplayed the

41:12

threat, whereas others like Josh felt

41:14

it was fairly clear it would

41:16

be really, really bad. Obviously, hindsight

41:18

is 20 -20, but we'd like to

41:20

hear both your takes on how

41:22

it's going and what you got

41:24

wrong or right. Flip, I appreciate you're

41:26

throwing Matt under the bus like

41:28

that and referring to my perspicaciousness,

41:30

foresight, soothsayer -like

41:32

abilities. Matt, defend yourself.

41:34

Yeah, I would commend people who

41:37

are interested in my record,

41:39

which won't be a lot of

41:41

people. But I wrote, I

41:43

think on the election day or

41:45

the day before, the frustratingly

41:47

unknown stakes of election 2024. And

41:51

the thing that I pointed to that was

41:53

unknown with Trump was not his desires, which

41:55

I think stated plainly, he's going to

41:57

get his tariffs, and he's going to

42:00

do things that shock the conscious on

42:02

immigration. What is unknown

42:04

is the Guard Wales question,

42:06

particularly in light of the Supreme

42:08

Court giving the president kind

42:10

of a lot of power to

42:12

do crimes, to do crimes

42:14

while he's presidencing. And also

42:16

the sort of question of the

42:18

type of staffing infrastructure and how

42:20

people would be setting it up

42:23

so that they wouldn't have as

42:25

many obstructions as they did in

42:27

the first 100 days of his

42:29

first election. I had

42:31

no illusions about that he would

42:33

do these things. I

42:36

am perhaps surprised by some

42:38

of the velocity on kind of

42:40

the doge or ending USAID. But

42:43

I wouldn't describe what I have

42:45

said about Trump to be downplaying at

42:47

all. I wrote a cover story

42:49

for Reason magazine in front of the

42:51

2020 election under the headline, The

42:53

Case Against Donald Trump, you

42:55

know, when he first escalated.

42:57

Into our lives really

43:00

think though Matt stop reading

43:02

around the book. I

43:04

you know, I think that

43:06

he is a a

43:08

malign force in American and

43:10

global politics He's also

43:12

a a response that he's

43:14

a tool that people

43:16

use to express their they're

43:19

real and deserved indignation at how

43:21

the elites have screwed up as well.

43:23

So I think it's a little

43:25

bit more complicated than pointing to him

43:27

and saying, you know, he's going

43:30

to be the embodiment of the worst

43:32

adjective. I can think of a

43:34

politician throughout human history. I

43:36

don't think that I downplayed

43:38

or used the word guardrails to

43:41

describe something that was around

43:43

him. It's part of the the

43:45

disquiet in advance of the

43:47

election was like, okay, guardrails look

43:49

different this time. And

43:51

he looks a little bit more

43:53

seasoned, and he has been running more

43:55

vociferously and specifically about tariffs in

43:57

particular, which is something that I care

43:59

about than he did previously. So

44:01

it looks like he's serious with it.

44:04

So I can only speak for what

44:06

I have done, but I don't think

44:08

that it has been to minimize the

44:11

latitude that he has had, latitude that he himself

44:13

helped expand and the Supreme Court helped expand, and

44:15

then Joe Biden helped expand too. In

44:18

the Substack Live questions, Jack says, would

44:20

the US and by extension of the world

44:22

be better off now if Kamala Harris

44:24

had won? I

44:26

think so. I

44:28

was rooting for that to be the outcome.

44:30

I didn't vote for her. I live in

44:32

a state where my vote doesn't matter. But

44:35

she was going to win no matter what I did. I

44:37

had no enthusiasm about her. I don't think she's

44:40

a good candidate or a good politician or

44:42

a good person. And I

44:44

think many of her policies

44:46

to the very limited extent we

44:48

knew about any of them

44:50

were not great. But so I

44:52

think that it's a worse

44:54

thing to bust up the entire

44:56

global trading system than whatever

44:58

she was going to do. But

45:01

she would have been a holding pattern, like

45:04

Biden was a holding pattern, this

45:06

sort of exhausted, faded memory of

45:08

a post -World War II America -led

45:10

order that no one really believes

45:12

in anymore at a time when

45:15

there's just kind of a lot

45:17

of understandable, societal, disquiet, and feeling

45:19

of alienation from the elites who

45:21

govern over you. So, you

45:24

know, it would have been in its own

45:26

way also very bad, I think. Trump

45:30

is using power more aggressively,

45:32

I think, than she would

45:34

ever have done, and in

45:37

ways that I perhaps idiosyncratically

45:39

do not like. The extraordinary

45:41

thing about Trump is that

45:43

he's so much focused on

45:45

American greatness, yet from my

45:47

perspective as a friendly foreigner

45:49

from a medium -sized ally, it

45:51

strikes me that he's doing exactly what

45:54

you would do if you wanted to

45:56

accelerate American global decline. by

45:58

relinquishing America's role on

46:00

the world stage, basically

46:02

forcing allies to figure out a

46:05

way of doing business around, let's like,

46:07

forget about the economics. Let's just

46:09

think about national security and Ukraine and

46:11

the fate of Central and Eastern

46:13

Europe. You know, Europe is

46:15

going to come together and probably

46:17

extend the British and French nuclear

46:19

umbrella to a kind of mini

46:21

NATO across the European continent. Countries

46:24

like Australia and South Korea and

46:26

Japan and India are going to form

46:28

their own alliances. We already have

46:30

a thing called the Quad between Japan

46:32

and India and Australia and the

46:34

US, which we can continue without the

46:36

US on a sort of multilateral

46:39

ad hoc basis for our own security.

46:41

In terms of the US dollar, they

46:44

are dramatically reducing faith in

46:46

the US dollar. The bond

46:48

markets, obviously, are becoming less

46:50

confident in the American economy

46:52

and in the credibility of

46:54

American guarantees about future payouts.

46:57

So it's like, I don't quite

46:59

get it. I don't

47:01

quite get the connection between

47:03

the rhetoric about American

47:05

greatness and the practical insularity

47:07

of the outlook which

47:09

is going to, which

47:12

embodies a kind of

47:14

withdrawal from international leadership.

47:17

Can you reconcile those for me? Yeah.

47:19

First of all, your globalist cuck. So

47:22

that kind of explains a lot. Second,

47:26

he has a theory of

47:28

the case. His theory of

47:30

the case is that the

47:32

global trading order, the thing

47:34

that America designed after World

47:36

War II and made very

47:38

copacetic for American interests in

47:40

many different ways, places at

47:42

the center of the universe,

47:44

that whatever it has Whatever

47:46

it started to be it has

47:48

become a system for the world

47:51

to rip us off and to

47:53

do bad deals and to take

47:55

us for granted and to snipe

47:57

at us No matter what

47:59

we do that part is true,

48:01

and you know it is and

48:04

and that Once we go through

48:06

a certain restructuring We are going

48:08

to have a more kind of

48:10

1900 isk -esque economy Sorry

48:13

to interrupt you again Matt, but

48:15

I'm actually, I'm looking at the comments

48:17

and it's just funny how so

48:19

many people are focused on the positioning

48:21

of the earbuds and I want

48:23

to pander to them. Position the long

48:25

bit downwards. So they're

48:28

pointing down, vertically down away

48:30

from. I want you to publish

48:32

our text string in which

48:34

I use the word fiasco. About

48:36

75 times and like before

48:38

we went live Matt was prescient

48:40

he was like this whole

48:42

thing's gonna fuck up because it's

48:44

not gonna and but now

48:46

success look Tim just said. And

48:48

someone else said the solution is to put

48:51

the earbuds in the trash. Which I think

48:53

is also a good solution. Absolutely correct. Here's

48:55

the thing. To people who are just tuning

48:57

in, the wonderful Matt Welch is joining us

48:59

of the fifth column. You might have seen

49:01

him on Real Time with Bill Maher last

49:03

weekend. We gather

49:05

together with a fascinating person

49:08

like Matt every Tuesday night

49:10

at 9 p .m. Eastern or

49:12

Wednesday daytime Australian time. And

49:14

if you don't subscribe to

49:17

my podcast, Uncomfortable Conversations, you should

49:19

do so because this will

49:21

come out crisp, clean audio. Like,

49:23

see that mic in front

49:25

of Matt? It's capturing every little

49:27

fart, every sniffle, every ASMR

49:29

mouth noise is going straight

49:31

into the podcast, which will be

49:33

released on Thursday and you'll

49:35

be able to hear it then.

49:37

But if you're tuning in

49:39

live, Matt now has, thanks

49:41

to the crowdsourcing of our

49:44

wise viewers, his AirPods in

49:46

correctly and continuing to hold

49:48

the floor. Hold the flow take

49:50

it away and an 8 %

49:52

on my phone. So this

49:54

is not gonna last much longer.

49:56

Anyways, I Can't be held

49:58

responsible for that. Yeah, why not?

50:00

No, he just thinks that

50:02

at the end of this once

50:04

we've restructured that those factory

50:06

jobs are coming back to America

50:08

and that we're going to

50:10

build a bigger and That the

50:12

world won't be able to

50:14

rip us off anymore and it's

50:16

all gonna work out There

50:19

aren't many uh uh economists not

50:21

named peter navarro who of course is

50:23

not an economist um who believe

50:25

that but he does um and he

50:27

thinks that tariffs can make you

50:29

rich and can make you great so

50:31

in his his idea we are

50:34

um we're sort of ripping the band

50:36

-aid off of the soft american empire

50:38

um because it created all these

50:40

distortions and allowed china to get rich

50:42

at our expense. and allowed

50:44

flabby Western European countries to

50:46

kind of coast under our security

50:49

umbrella, which again is true, and

50:52

people to snipe at us

50:54

and somehow take advantage of us

50:56

by buying all of our

50:58

dollars or investing in our country

51:00

as much as they have. So

51:03

again, I think he's wrong, but

51:05

I think he has a theory. about

51:07

it. That's fine, but it's not

51:09

a theory of American greatness. It's a

51:11

theory of American complaint about being

51:13

taken advantage of and therefore we should

51:15

hunker down, close the shutters, focus

51:18

on ourselves. It's America

51:20

as Switzerland. It's not America

51:22

as empire. First

51:24

of all, Switzerland's awesome. You take that

51:26

back. And

51:28

second of all, Yeah.

51:32

It is based on a

51:34

lot of complaint. I think

51:36

he just thinks that the

51:38

same system where we have

51:40

or had until recently half

51:42

of the world's capital markets

51:44

money and most of the

51:46

world's best universities and all

51:48

this kind of ferments and

51:50

technological development that makes Europe

51:52

look like a backwater, that

51:54

that will go on after.

51:56

We break bonds with the

51:58

empire that we created. And

52:01

that is a reality that I think

52:03

more and more of his advisors are saying,

52:05

hey, I'm not sure this is working. We

52:07

got to back down from China now. That

52:10

vision is not paying off.

52:13

And we aren't even at the

52:15

place yet where the tariffs have

52:17

really hit consumers. They're going to,

52:19

sooner rather than later, it's going

52:21

to hit them probably in their

52:23

workplaces before it hits their pocketbook.

52:25

But what does that mean, man?

52:27

It just means that that like

52:29

you know the the stuff on

52:31

order hasn't the prices haven't really

52:33

risen too much yet, but they're

52:35

going to I mean when you

52:37

say that it'll hit them in

52:39

the workplace before their pocketbook. What's

52:41

that distinction? Truckers

52:44

don't have jobs. It'll have

52:46

you know, the LA ports are

52:48

already down. I think 20

52:50

LA Long Beach port is already

52:52

down about 20 % Not that

52:54

everything is that but you

52:56

know two -thirds of the imports

52:58

that we get in this country

53:00

are used in American manufacturing

53:02

and those manufacturers facing investment uncertainty

53:04

and facing inputs being way

53:06

more expensive, especially if they're from

53:08

China or Canada are Suspending

53:11

orders our tourism is way

53:14

down. It's falling off a cliff

53:16

in Tuesday in February and

53:18

and March already. Well, that probably

53:20

has less to do with tariffs and

53:22

more to do with a lot of the

53:24

chatter that I see on forums and

53:26

tourism sources here in Australia, which is about

53:28

people's anxiety about going through airports and

53:30

stuff and being like not being a citizen

53:32

and being snatched and then finding yourself

53:34

in some El Salvadorian prison or some shit.

53:36

Yes. The way that it has to

53:38

do with tariffs is just that as part

53:40

of the tariff conversation. Trump has

53:42

repeatedly demeaned Canada. Canada unhelpfully in

53:44

this context is the greatest single

53:46

source of foreign tourists. And I

53:48

think they've cut their visits down

53:50

by like 50 % overnight. So

53:53

the tourism industry is absolutely really. Matt,

53:56

you've been talking a lot

53:58

about tariffs, but to be honest,

54:00

the thing that alarms me

54:02

the most and that I failed

54:04

to predict the most was

54:06

the extent of Trump's trampling of

54:09

habeas corpus. and individual liberties,

54:11

I suppose, and the ability of

54:13

Republicans to go along with

54:15

that, the party that is supposed

54:17

to care about individual rights, and

54:20

the looming showdown with the courts.

54:22

Even I didn't think that it would

54:24

get this dire, this fast. But

54:26

the idea that, you know, to Americans

54:28

who don't know what it's like

54:30

to be on a green card in

54:32

the States, I should say, Once

54:35

you're on a green card when

54:37

i transition from my temporary work visa

54:39

to a green card as far

54:41

as i was concerned. I

54:43

was just functionally a citizen who couldn't vote

54:45

i mean i thought you know you're a

54:47

permanent resident i talk to my attorney immigration

54:49

attorney about and i was like is there

54:51

any reason to eventually go for citizenship and

54:53

he was like not really i mean there's

54:55

no practical benefit to being. A

54:57

citizen like he was like you can come

55:00

and go you can use the residence lane

55:02

at the airport you know you can. You

55:04

can do everything that a citizen can do

55:06

if you've got a green card you won't

55:08

get the consular protection if you're you know

55:10

locked up abroad in or something. Then

55:12

the US government won't go into bat

55:14

for you but I was like well the

55:16

Australian government would go into bat for

55:18

me anyway so there's no real difference now

55:20

I'm hearing green cards and permanent residency

55:22

status. being kind of poo -pooed as

55:25

if it's just you're here at the whim

55:27

of the State Department, so don't be surprised

55:29

if we kick you out for no reason.

55:32

And oh, by the way, we may

55:34

even kick you out to a

55:36

foreign prison that we pay you to

55:38

go to and that we pay

55:40

for your residency at. And when a

55:42

court insists, requires us to facilitate

55:44

your return to the country, our

55:46

answer will be, we are

55:48

facilitating it because if the

55:50

country that we're paying to

55:53

incarcerate you somehow returns

55:55

you to the border, we

55:57

will not turn you away. Like,

56:02

that's to me a

56:04

foundational constitutional crisis moment

56:06

in a sense in

56:08

which like tariff policy

56:10

is not. It's dark. It's

56:13

dark. Yeah, I mean, tariff policy.

56:16

is a constitutional problem in that

56:18

the Constitution spells out the power

56:20

to levy taxes and tariffs in

56:22

the Congress. And Congress is

56:24

just like, eh, maybe not. So

56:27

that is... That just tends to

56:29

be Congress's attitude towards everything. Correct.

56:31

That's been trending in that direction

56:33

for a long time. But this

56:35

is Trump telling the Supreme Court

56:37

to get stuffed while spiriting away

56:39

residents of the U .S. just

56:43

kind of willy -nilly based on Lord

56:45

knows what legal justification and then

56:47

you know Marco Rubio combing through the

56:49

op -eds of every college newspaper in

56:52

the country to deport hundreds of

56:54

people on student visas. There's even been

56:56

secret revocations of people's visa status.

56:58

They thought they were legal but somewhere

57:00

in secret they were made illegal

57:02

and then like bounce out of the

57:05

country at a time when they're

57:07

like wife's in the hospital giving birth.

57:09

There was a U

57:11

.S. citizen in Arizona was

57:14

pulled, Hispanic guy pulled over

57:16

by cops and sent to

57:18

an immigration detention center for

57:20

10 days. Because he

57:22

didn't have his ID. We

57:24

haven't been a papers, please

57:26

country up until now, but

57:28

now they're starting to do

57:30

that And he was also

57:33

let me just separate. I

57:35

just want to clarify Matt

57:37

the sharp line that I

57:39

as someone who comes from

57:41

a liberal democracy that has

57:43

an incredibly harsh immigration policy

57:45

see between a harsh uncaring

57:47

immigration policy and secreting

57:50

people away into black vans

57:52

and sending them to black

57:54

site gulags in foreign countries

57:57

without a trial. These

57:59

are very different things and I don't

58:01

think that Americans should make the mistake

58:03

of getting them confused. If you want

58:05

to boot someone on a student visa

58:07

out of the country, be my guest.

58:09

It might be harsh, but that's any

58:11

country's right. If you

58:13

want to change someone's immigration status, if

58:15

they're not a permanent resident, that's

58:18

any country's Right. Like put me

58:20

on a plane and fly me back

58:22

to my homeland if you must. If

58:24

I try to enter illegally, you

58:27

can even do what Australia does

58:29

and force me away from the

58:31

border and lock me up indefinitely

58:33

in a concentration camp on a

58:35

desert, Pacific Desert Island while my

58:37

case is being processed. Again,

58:39

not nice, but within the

58:41

rights of a liberal democratic country

58:44

to decide how people are

58:46

going to enter its sovereign territory.

58:49

What is not okay is for

58:51

someone who is on your sovereign

58:53

territory for whom you have a

58:55

duty of care to without a

58:57

trial with no respect for habeas

58:59

corpus with no respect like for

59:01

rights that go back to the

59:04

Magna Carta a thousand years ago. To

59:07

simply lock them up and throw

59:09

away the key and wipe your hands

59:11

of them and disavow any responsibility

59:13

for it because they are now no

59:15

longer in your possession that is. Fucking

59:18

pinnish a stuff and it has

59:20

nothing to do with immigration policy. It

59:22

has everything to do with what

59:25

I regard as a massive dangerous Line

59:27

that's being crossed the way that

59:29

I'm not the way that it has

59:31

to do with immigration policy is

59:33

that it's being done in the name

59:35

of immigration policy and the thing

59:38

that that Civil Libertarians been trying to

59:40

point out to Americans who are

59:42

more immigration restrictionists is that When you

59:44

crack down um and you crack

59:46

down in a i don't care if

59:48

i'm coloring outside the lines type

59:50

of way on immigration and for instance

59:53

you get blase about due process

59:55

as part of that you are going

59:57

to get american citizens caught up

59:59

and that is already beginning to happen

1:00:01

um and uh and americans will

1:00:03

discover that uh far too late in

1:00:06

this process. I think you can

1:00:08

hermetically seal it off, say, well,

1:00:10

you know, what part of breaking law did they understand? And

1:00:13

just sort of shrug that they're

1:00:15

being sent to foreign black site

1:00:17

prisons. It's a dark

1:00:19

place that we are at right now.

1:00:21

And it is It's an

1:00:23

open question. It is clear that the administration,

1:00:25

if they wanted to, they could bring back

1:00:27

Garcia from El Salvador and deport him to

1:00:29

literally any other country. It would be over

1:00:31

in a second. He

1:00:33

is a deportable by law. They

1:00:35

could do that. They're choosing instead to fight against

1:00:37

the Supreme Court because they want the latitude to

1:00:39

be able to do this. And

1:00:41

Trump said with Bukele's Presence

1:00:44

at the White House like wouldn't it

1:00:46

be great if we could do this

1:00:48

to Americans to like you should build

1:00:50

more presence for us. Let's go. Um,

1:00:52

he's got this sense of he wants

1:00:54

to expand, um, his authority. Marco Rubio

1:00:56

is expanding his authority. Again, not necessarily

1:00:58

black prisons site, but doing it a

1:01:01

way that's antithetical to American values by

1:01:03

targeting people for their speech, for their

1:01:05

political nonviolent. not doing anything else wrong

1:01:07

speech or expressing opinions and they're being

1:01:09

bounced to because the law is over

1:01:11

broad giving Marco Rubio power it's all

1:01:13

of a piece but you're right that

1:01:15

one piece of it is particularly particularly

1:01:17

dark right now so there's a lot

1:01:19

of people sort of their There

1:01:21

are claws on the chalkboard waiting

1:01:23

to see what comes next. And it's

1:01:26

just clear Trump is relishing this

1:01:28

fight because he has the intuition that

1:01:30

the fight is going to give

1:01:32

him more power. And he believes, and

1:01:34

I think he believes wrongly, that

1:01:37

the American public is going to

1:01:39

be behind him in the name

1:01:41

of wanting to be hard on

1:01:43

immigration and more robust policing the

1:01:45

borders, that they're not going to

1:01:47

care about violating due process. running

1:01:49

over the Supreme Court and sending

1:01:51

people to an authoritarian hellhole prison. I

1:01:54

can see in the comments on Substack Live

1:01:56

some people are saying, well, yeah, but it

1:01:58

was anti -Semitic speech that these people are

1:02:00

guilty of. Yeah, so what? In America, you're

1:02:02

allowed to be an anti -Semite. You're allowed to

1:02:04

say whatever you want. Another people saying Pinochet

1:02:07

was a killer. People

1:02:09

are saying, don't compare it to Pinochet.

1:02:11

Pinochet was a killer. Well, what do you

1:02:13

think goes on in El Salvadorian prison

1:02:15

for terrorists if not occasional murder as well?

1:02:17

It's certainly reckless. If

1:02:19

someone who the United States

1:02:21

sends to that prison ends

1:02:24

up dying in it prematurely,

1:02:26

that may not be direct

1:02:28

murder, but it's certainly manslaughter

1:02:30

of a kind or reckless

1:02:32

disregard for their life. I

1:02:34

just don't want Matt this

1:02:36

conversation to have any ability

1:02:38

to land in the minds

1:02:40

of Republican -leaning Americans as

1:02:42

being similar to the discourse

1:02:44

about, there is no such

1:02:46

thing as an illegal. And

1:02:48

ICE is a criminal enterprise and we shouldn't

1:02:50

be deporting people and children in cages. It's

1:02:52

got nothing to do with any of that. It's

1:02:55

got nothing to do with deporting people.

1:02:57

It's got to do with incarcerating people

1:02:59

without a trial. Deport who

1:03:01

you want, but you can't lock them. You can't

1:03:03

pay for them to be locked up in

1:03:05

a foreign jail. And then pretend

1:03:07

that recourse and no appeal and then

1:03:09

pretend you have no control over

1:03:12

it that you've washed your hands over

1:03:14

it. No, it is it's absolutely

1:03:16

dark and bad business and and I

1:03:18

don't think that I don't think

1:03:20

that Americans are ultimately going to stand

1:03:22

by it like more than 80 %

1:03:24

of Americans are against the president. defying

1:03:28

Supreme Court orders, even if he doesn't

1:03:30

like them. We don't like it when we

1:03:32

deport. We want to deport illegal immigrants,

1:03:34

especially criminals, but we don't want to deport

1:03:36

people who have jobs and US citizen

1:03:38

families. So I think that there

1:03:40

is going to be a public opinion

1:03:42

break on this, even if Republicans, elected

1:03:45

Republicans do absolutely nothing. Another

1:03:48

person says in the Substack

1:03:50

Live chat, what they're doing is

1:03:52

equivalent, they're talking about the

1:03:54

El Salvadorian prison, is equivalent to

1:03:56

Australia's refugee islands. Whilst

1:03:58

I oppose Australia's refugee islands in

1:04:00

terms of the harshness of the

1:04:02

way they're used, and just to

1:04:04

clarify for people who don't know,

1:04:06

Australia has a policy that if

1:04:09

you try to arrive here illegally

1:04:11

by boat, the navy will intercept

1:04:13

you before you reach Australian shores.

1:04:18

small neighboring countries, namely Nauru

1:04:20

and Papua New Guinea, to

1:04:23

let us build prisons on them

1:04:25

where the people are processed and you

1:04:27

will never set foot in Australia.

1:04:29

You will be repatriated to friendly countries

1:04:31

if you're a refugee or sent

1:04:33

back home if your case is found,

1:04:35

not to be a refugee. The

1:04:37

difference is those people are being intercepted

1:04:39

before they get to the country.

1:04:41

And they're aware of the risk when

1:04:44

they get on the boat that

1:04:46

they're never going to get to Australia.

1:04:48

The difference between what Australia does

1:04:50

and what President Trump is doing is,

1:04:52

A, it's not taking place

1:04:54

in Australian soil. And B,

1:04:56

it's happening to people who are making a

1:04:58

very conscious choice to come illegally and

1:05:00

who know all of the legal perils that

1:05:02

that might put them in. It's a

1:05:04

different thing. I mean, the whole

1:05:07

point of intercepting the boats off Australian

1:05:09

shores is so that we are not, they're

1:05:11

not yet in our duty of care

1:05:13

and that we don't, it may seem like

1:05:15

a distinction without a difference to a

1:05:17

libertarian, but I do think it makes a

1:05:19

difference whether or not a person is

1:05:21

wandering around in your country with an expectation

1:05:23

that their human rights are going to

1:05:25

be expected, be respected versus making a hazardous

1:05:27

journey across oceans, you know, with all

1:05:29

of the perils that that entails. Yeah. Yeah.

1:05:32

The, as always

1:05:35

in America, I think half. or

1:05:37

so of our illegal immigrants or people

1:05:39

who came here legally, which

1:05:41

is also a distinction that

1:05:43

people sometimes lose. They think

1:05:45

everything is just a border

1:05:47

crossing illegally through a river

1:05:49

or a boat or something.

1:05:53

What happens with the courts now, Matt,

1:05:55

and how concerned are you and what

1:05:57

would you like to see the courts

1:05:59

do in the extent to which they

1:06:01

push pushback. I ask this because there

1:06:03

are a few schools of thought. You

1:06:05

know, one school of thought is the

1:06:08

cautious one, which says the courts should

1:06:10

try to play. Trump and sort of

1:06:12

kind of retroactively make it seem like

1:06:14

Trump is doing what they ask him

1:06:16

to do and be as generous as

1:06:18

possible towards extending to the administration as

1:06:20

much of a benefit of the doubt

1:06:23

as they can in order to avoid

1:06:25

an overt confrontation because they know that

1:06:27

the worst thing that could happen to

1:06:29

the credibility of the court would be

1:06:31

and the executive to defy it overtly

1:06:33

and create a constitutional crisis. Another

1:06:35

school of thought says that the

1:06:37

Supreme Court should go full Harvard.

1:06:40

and stand up to him and

1:06:42

call his bluff and bring it

1:06:44

on. Yeah. I

1:06:46

mean, the rulings so far have

1:06:48

been pretty nine to nothing. And

1:06:51

seven to two was

1:06:53

the most recent one, I

1:06:55

think, the injunction, midnight

1:06:57

injunction about deportations under the

1:07:00

Alien Enemies Act from

1:07:02

1798. So Damon Root

1:07:04

had a good piece of reason. Many

1:07:06

time guests on the fifth column,

1:07:08

legal analysts, great. author, where

1:07:11

he said, he pointed out that,

1:07:13

you know, the Supreme Court under

1:07:15

our division of government, it doesn't

1:07:17

have any guns, you know, it

1:07:19

can't, it can't make you do

1:07:21

anything, ultimately. And there have been

1:07:23

times in American history where Supreme

1:07:25

Court come up with the big

1:07:27

ruling, Brown versus the Board

1:07:29

of Education in 1954, being

1:07:32

probably among the most

1:07:34

famous to desegregate schools, and

1:07:36

the people with guns.

1:07:38

in this case, George

1:07:40

Wallace said, in Alabama,

1:07:42

like, ah, no, no,

1:07:45

we're going to take that

1:07:47

one under advisement. And we're, nope,

1:07:49

we're not going to do

1:07:51

it. And what happens in that

1:07:53

case, it was, there was,

1:07:55

you know, massive resistance against this

1:07:57

on the state level. And

1:07:59

eventually the, yes, there

1:08:01

was federal troops that were

1:08:03

sent down But there was

1:08:05

a big public opinion swing

1:08:07

that came with it, especially

1:08:09

when people saw the brutality

1:08:12

of the resistance of it

1:08:14

against nonviolent black school children

1:08:16

and protesters of all hues. People

1:08:19

became disgusted at those

1:08:21

who were not following

1:08:23

the Supreme Court's ruling.

1:08:26

And so there is, in

1:08:28

my optimistic heart, if

1:08:30

Trump keeps doing this, he's

1:08:32

going to Back himself into a

1:08:35

public opinion corner. He can

1:08:37

defy he can and absolutely will

1:08:39

I think Try to defy

1:08:41

supreme court order. I mean the

1:08:43

fact that he's not Bringing

1:08:45

still not just not bringing Garcia

1:08:47

from El Salvador and I

1:08:49

don't I can't remember all his

1:08:51

other names. So just Garcia

1:08:54

apologies to his family but You

1:08:56

know, they're they're like red

1:08:58

penning in crayon or red crayoning

1:09:00

New York Times headlines about

1:09:02

this and like crossing out things

1:09:04

and saying you know illegal

1:09:06

alien criminal MS -13 and and

1:09:08

we're never bringing them back. Sorry

1:09:10

that kind of crap. They're

1:09:13

acting like juveniles just thumbing their

1:09:15

nose at the Supreme Court

1:09:17

and other courts and the Fourth

1:09:19

Circuit Court of Appeals especially. the

1:09:23

very stirring opinion by the

1:09:25

conservative Reagan appointed jurist J.

1:09:27

Harvey Wilkinson. They

1:09:29

are just saying, no, screw it. So I

1:09:31

think they're going to do that, but they're

1:09:33

not going to get the high fives from

1:09:35

the court of public opinion that they think

1:09:37

that they're going to get. But there are

1:09:40

various things that the court could do, right?

1:09:42

The court could follow up by saying, by

1:09:44

facilitate, we require the

1:09:46

administration to and then get

1:09:48

more specific about what

1:09:51

they're trying to do. I

1:09:53

mean, withhold funds from

1:09:55

the incarceration or proactively. They

1:09:57

can't withhold funds. So they

1:09:59

will be more specific. They will

1:10:02

be a lot of stirring

1:10:04

judgments. And I think you'll see

1:10:06

some administrative administration figures being

1:10:08

placed in contempt of court. Yeah,

1:10:11

so that's the other thing I was going

1:10:13

to say. So like you said that they don't

1:10:15

have any guns and that's true by design, but

1:10:18

they can escalate. Of

1:10:20

course, the penalties still need

1:10:22

to be imposed or followed through

1:10:25

with by the executive branch,

1:10:27

but the judiciary can get a

1:10:29

lot more granular and specific

1:10:31

about what it's requiring in ways

1:10:33

that make it increasingly uncomfortable

1:10:35

and implausible for anyone to Decline

1:10:38

so, you know, yes, you

1:10:40

can start holding people in

1:10:42

contempt. You can specifically order,

1:10:45

you know marshals to arrest

1:10:47

somebody who has been held

1:10:49

in contempt. Right.

1:10:51

And then it really does become

1:10:53

a clear, in other words,

1:10:55

you can make the violation clearer

1:10:57

and clearer and clearer. And

1:11:00

I just wonder whether the Supreme Court

1:11:02

will do that and should do that

1:11:04

or whether it should just write it

1:11:06

out. I don't think that the contempt

1:11:08

citations are going to be where it's

1:11:10

at. I can't imagine currently the Supreme

1:11:12

Court doing that, but it's also, it's

1:11:15

possible that I lack imagination to kind

1:11:17

of see the next three steps ahead

1:11:19

because we're always, every day it feels

1:11:21

like we're in some kind of semi

1:11:23

-new territory that we hadn't contemplated previously. So

1:11:26

but I think if supreme

1:11:29

court comes down with pretty

1:11:31

heavy contempt citations for high

1:11:33

-ranking administration officials that is

1:11:35

some showdown territory and You

1:11:37

don't necessarily want to do

1:11:40

a showdown if it's going

1:11:42

to hasten both Really highly

1:11:44

politicized conflict. I think John

1:11:46

Roberts you justice has already

1:11:48

come out and criticized the

1:11:51

Trump administration for intemperate

1:11:53

kind of words about impeaching

1:11:55

justices and trying to put

1:11:57

pressure on judges who don't

1:11:59

act in the way that

1:12:01

they want to. Roberts

1:12:05

is a very political figure

1:12:08

and always has been. His

1:12:10

Obamacare decision is a classic

1:12:12

of him just trying to

1:12:14

invent legal doctrines that no

1:12:16

one ever thought existed because

1:12:18

he wants to keep the

1:12:20

legitimacy of the court in

1:12:22

the public mind and in the

1:12:24

bipartisan mind at the same time.

1:12:26

And he's very... And look, if

1:12:28

you know that, and if Trump

1:12:30

knows that, or at least Trump's

1:12:32

aides know that, then they

1:12:34

can play the court. I

1:12:37

mean, if they know that Roberts'

1:12:39

main motivation is to maintain the

1:12:41

credibility of the court by avoiding

1:12:43

an overt clash, then they will

1:12:45

just keep... fucking

1:12:48

around and saying, oh, we are

1:12:50

facilitating the return of these

1:12:52

prisoners because if they ever show

1:12:54

up at JFK, then

1:12:56

they can come in. That's

1:12:59

a nonsense response, but

1:13:01

it's not direct defiance.

1:13:03

I would crudely guess

1:13:06

that instead of

1:13:08

looking for citation, contempt

1:13:11

citation avenues,

1:13:14

Roberts will be looking for how

1:13:16

to get as many nine

1:13:19

zero opinions as possible. How do

1:13:21

I just seem because it's

1:13:23

a six three, you know, Republican

1:13:25

appointed Supreme Court right now.

1:13:27

And so the kind of clown

1:13:30

show conservatives like Sean Davis

1:13:32

of the Federalist and Elon Musk,

1:13:34

of course, whatever he's conservative

1:13:36

or not, like, ah, we need

1:13:38

to impeach justices or we need to like

1:13:40

somehow overthrow the Supreme Court. Lord knows what

1:13:43

they're saying today. But

1:13:45

they've been increasing these attacks

1:13:47

for the last couple of

1:13:49

weeks It becomes more difficult

1:13:51

to have that Gather any

1:13:53

kind of groundswell if all

1:13:55

the opinions from this six

1:13:57

three court are nine zero

1:13:59

in the other direction. So

1:14:01

I think that's where Roberts

1:14:03

will be Spending most of

1:14:05

his attention is corralling those

1:14:08

things and then trying to

1:14:10

appoint the best writers to

1:14:12

to write those opinions

1:14:14

because that's hard for Trump

1:14:16

to keep weathering. And already,

1:14:18

his public approval ratings have

1:14:20

been sinking really, really fast.

1:14:22

Among young people, they've just

1:14:24

cratered. They was really high

1:14:26

before, but now it's not.

1:14:28

Independence down on the economy

1:14:30

down, even on handling of

1:14:32

immigration down. So,

1:14:34

you know, he is

1:14:36

used to governing as

1:14:39

an unpopular president. But

1:14:41

that's going to be a lot

1:14:43

of unpopularity in a short period of

1:14:45

time. So I think the Supreme

1:14:47

Court's going to play that more than

1:14:49

they are going to look for

1:14:52

artificial shackles. Right. So

1:14:54

Justice Clarence Thomas can put his

1:14:56

feet up while Justice Amy Coney Barrett

1:14:58

does all the legwork this term,

1:15:00

presumably. So lastly, Matt,

1:15:02

what's your sense of

1:15:04

dread about the possibility of

1:15:06

the United States in

1:15:09

the longer than short term

1:15:11

in the medium term

1:15:13

becoming a sort of functionally,

1:15:16

I don't want to say authoritarian, but

1:15:18

like, you know, I

1:15:21

don't think the risk

1:15:23

of it becoming Chile in

1:15:25

1973 or Russia today

1:15:27

is very small. But I

1:15:29

do think that the

1:15:32

risk of it becoming Hungary

1:15:34

or Turkey for a

1:15:36

while at least. is

1:15:38

not the close to zero that

1:15:40

I would have put it at

1:15:42

10 years ago. How

1:15:44

do you think about it? I remember when

1:15:46

Trump got elected, even before he got elected in

1:15:48

2015, when it was clear that he

1:15:50

was going to be dominant in Republican politics. I

1:15:52

couldn't believe it. I was wrong about that, been

1:15:54

wrong about many things. But

1:15:57

once that was clear that his popularity

1:15:59

was not going go away, I

1:16:02

remember... in touch with

1:16:04

all my friends who worked

1:16:06

as foreign correspondents in

1:16:08

Central Europe in the 1990s.

1:16:10

You know, we covered

1:16:12

Viktor Orban in real time

1:16:14

as he was switching

1:16:16

from a cosmopolitan, anti -communist,

1:16:18

anti -Soviet activist to a

1:16:20

nationalist repudiating all the fancy

1:16:22

pants, Budapest people around

1:16:24

him. I remember that I

1:16:26

was there. We

1:16:28

covered Vladimir Mechiar who like

1:16:30

has so many commonalities with

1:16:32

Trump, he'd just be constantly

1:16:34

suing journalists, very funny, going

1:16:37

to parts of Slovakia

1:16:39

that no politician ever

1:16:42

would think about visiting,

1:16:45

never condescending to people, like actually doing

1:16:47

democratic retail politics in a way

1:16:49

that elites hate to do oftentimes, but

1:16:51

also being very thuggish and crude

1:16:54

and politicizing everything and forcing people

1:16:56

to kiss the ring in a

1:16:58

lot of corruption. Anyways, those

1:17:00

of us who cover those people

1:17:02

we just there's nothing there weren't

1:17:04

that many of us at the

1:17:06

time We just were in shock.

1:17:08

We never thought never ever thought

1:17:10

that our country would have politics

1:17:12

like that Like that just seemed

1:17:15

like some weird cheap -ass post -commit

1:17:17

shit when you're transitioning from you

1:17:19

know communism to sort of insecure

1:17:21

nationalism and delusions of grandeur and

1:17:23

always like agitating against Brussels and

1:17:25

New York and Tel Aviv in

1:17:27

Washington Actually

1:17:30

against George Soros, you know,

1:17:32

he was a big demon

1:17:34

hate figure in in all

1:17:36

of 1990s century Europe by

1:17:38

nationalist politicians and to see those

1:17:40

things to happen again that

1:17:42

shock that alarm level and

1:17:44

also just knowing Certainly by

1:17:46

the time that Trump got

1:17:48

elected That this seven decade

1:17:50

run was over It still

1:17:52

is something that I think

1:17:54

people are only now beginning to

1:17:57

really fully appreciate In

1:18:00

and I presume in Australia as

1:18:02

well. I go shit.

1:18:04

It's really over like that article

1:18:06

five thing in data. Oh, that's

1:18:08

not really there anymore. The just

1:18:10

the assumptions that we had this

1:18:12

post World War two world and

1:18:15

the institutions that that were created

1:18:17

as part of it. it's

1:18:19

done. I knew it was done

1:18:21

then, but now we really know

1:18:23

that it's done now. But

1:18:25

it's one thing for NATO to

1:18:27

be done. It's one thing for, you

1:18:30

know, the US has always

1:18:32

had this fuzzy relationship, this

1:18:34

weird relationship with the rest

1:18:36

of the world. I think

1:18:38

even since, I think probably

1:18:40

in my lifetime, starting with

1:18:42

the Iraq war, that was

1:18:44

the beginning of the erosion

1:18:46

of faith in the bankability

1:18:48

of American truthfulness and commitment

1:18:50

to the global world order,

1:18:52

the post -war order. But

1:18:55

for America itself,

1:18:57

domestically, to become

1:18:59

a place where people can randomly

1:19:01

be snatched off the street

1:19:04

and disappeared, that's

1:19:06

new and

1:19:08

shocking, genuinely.

1:19:12

Yeah, shocking. I

1:19:14

would, I would point

1:19:16

out that, you know, in

1:19:18

the first, in

1:19:20

the second Bush administration,

1:19:23

a lot of the kind of debates

1:19:25

that we're seeing now, bad debates among

1:19:27

the Trumpist right, we saw the Bush -Chandy

1:19:29

right. There were battles

1:19:31

over habeas corpus then, there were

1:19:33

battles over extraordinary rendition of dark sites

1:19:35

abroad, of if you're

1:19:37

either with us or with the terrorists,

1:19:40

or you're giving material aid to

1:19:42

the bad guys. Um, sort

1:19:44

of eliding the difference between, um,

1:19:46

speech and, uh, and, you know,

1:19:48

actual kind of terrorism and joining

1:19:50

the bad guys. Those things

1:19:52

happen. It's kind of an irony

1:19:54

that we, that the Trumpists

1:19:57

who came into power, Trump and Vance

1:19:59

in particular and some other people, they

1:20:01

hate the neocons and have smitten them

1:20:03

and driven them to the margins of

1:20:05

life. And, you know, they had a

1:20:07

comment in large respect. And

1:20:09

sometimes I cheer. You know when

1:20:11

Trump went to South Carolina in

1:20:13

the 2016 primary and absolutely trashed

1:20:15

the Bush family in front of

1:20:17

a heavily military audience and people

1:20:19

cheered it was like Oh something

1:20:22

news going on and I like

1:20:24

it because the Iraq war was

1:20:26

a disaster and it deserves to

1:20:28

be You know hanging under hanging

1:20:30

on people's neck Like

1:20:32

a millstone so that's all good,

1:20:34

but now they're just taking the

1:20:36

same stupid arguments that we heard

1:20:38

I was waiting for the torture

1:20:40

arguments come around like it also

1:20:42

came in so we've done some

1:20:44

of these things before They seem

1:20:46

to be categorically worse now the

1:20:48

fight with the Supreme Court is

1:20:50

more brazen I think the corruption

1:20:52

associated with Trump Is a level

1:20:54

that people just didn't contemplate in

1:20:56

any recent presidency And it

1:20:58

doesn't even get that much play anymore, because

1:21:00

there's just too much stuff to pay

1:21:03

attention to. Yeah. And Matt, I heard a

1:21:05

legal analyst talking about the difference between

1:21:07

the Bush administration and the Trump administration on

1:21:09

the human rights front. And she was

1:21:11

saying, the difference is that

1:21:13

the Bush administration really tried to

1:21:15

push the law to its limits.

1:21:17

But it still respected at least

1:21:19

the Kabuki theater of believing that

1:21:22

the law was something worth adhering

1:21:24

to. tied itself in

1:21:26

knots trying to figure out legalistic

1:21:28

ways of saying that enhanced interrogation

1:21:30

wasn't torture and Guantanamo Bay wasn't

1:21:32

in the United States and therefore

1:21:34

we can do this and we

1:21:36

can do that. Here

1:21:38

there is just a seeming disregard for

1:21:40

the question of whether or not legality

1:21:42

comes into it. It's like there are

1:21:44

bad people. bad people deserve

1:21:46

to have bad things happen to them.

1:21:48

We don't need them here. It's

1:21:50

really a strongman worldview where like, we

1:21:52

don't need to give like, habeas

1:21:54

corpus rights to these nasty people. They're

1:21:56

bad hombres. Just get rid of

1:21:59

the bad hombres. That strikes

1:22:01

me as like, I

1:22:03

mean, maybe I'm being hysterical,

1:22:05

but as a different level

1:22:07

than Chinese malevolent dark war

1:22:09

on the forces of Islamic

1:22:11

evil. I mean, they did. They

1:22:13

did. robustly try

1:22:15

to expand the unitary executive.

1:22:18

They had a theory that

1:22:20

had been simmering since Watergate

1:22:22

where a lot of those

1:22:24

guys cut their teeth training

1:22:26

in Rumsfeld especially. And

1:22:28

they wanted to push it

1:22:30

both by legal pushing and

1:22:32

then by actions that were

1:22:34

on the outside. But it

1:22:36

is a different scale and

1:22:38

a different kind of brazenness

1:22:40

and openness. and

1:22:43

contemptuousness level that we're seeing

1:22:45

right now. And I

1:22:47

think I'm not ultimately as

1:22:49

pessimistic as I think you

1:22:51

are at the moment. Probably

1:22:53

because I'm still American and Californian

1:22:56

and very naive about these things. But

1:22:58

I have some faith in American

1:23:00

public opinion not being with us. I

1:23:02

don't think that this is a

1:23:04

winner in the long term. I think

1:23:06

Trump thinks he is. Um,

1:23:09

and I don't agree with him. Uh,

1:23:11

yes, we want to deport MS 13

1:23:13

criminals. Absolutely. It's like, that's a 97

1:23:15

to two issue. It's not even close.

1:23:17

Everyone wants that, but that's not what

1:23:19

he's doing. He's being, he's using it

1:23:21

as a test case to say, I

1:23:23

don't, we don't need to do habeas

1:23:25

corpus. We don't need to account for

1:23:27

the people that we send to foreign

1:23:29

black site prisons. Um,

1:23:31

and I just don't think Americans can

1:23:33

stand for it. It might take a

1:23:35

year and a half for the

1:23:37

not standing for it to manifest

1:23:40

in a way that provides relief to

1:23:42

people now. And so that's going

1:23:44

to be a real rough 18 months.

1:23:47

Yeah. And you're reminding me

1:23:49

that I should take some

1:23:51

solace in the fact that

1:23:53

the chief characteristic that political

1:23:55

scientists look for in determining

1:23:57

whether or not a power

1:23:59

grab is going to be

1:24:01

successful by an authoritarian in

1:24:03

the case of Erdogan or

1:24:05

in the case of Orban, is

1:24:08

do they have a popularity of

1:24:10

70 to 80 % before the

1:24:12

power grab? And if they do,

1:24:14

then we're in trouble. And if

1:24:16

they don't, it's pretty difficult to

1:24:18

bend the country to their will. So

1:24:21

hopefully... not there. Last question from

1:24:23

one of our viewers on Substack

1:24:25

Live. Alex says, how did Matt

1:24:27

feel about Bill Maher's defensiveness regarding

1:24:29

the dinner with Trump? I

1:24:32

will admit to, I

1:24:34

could feel that he wanted to talk about it. So,

1:24:37

as I said, I think

1:24:39

on the show, I thought it

1:24:41

was great that he went to the White House and I

1:24:43

thought his report was interesting and I think that's the right

1:24:45

approach. I would go to the White House if they asked

1:24:47

me and I don't like Trump. at all. I'm

1:24:50

also not perhaps slightly less impressed

1:24:52

by the gap between his private

1:24:54

persona and what he does as

1:24:56

a president because I just care

1:24:58

about power more than anything else.

1:25:01

That said, I could tell he wanted

1:25:03

to talk about that he was still like wound

1:25:05

up about it. And so I just poked him very

1:25:07

slightly. to let it out.

1:25:09

It needed to come out. It was going to come

1:25:11

out anyways. He wasn't going to be able to fully

1:25:13

concentrate until he got that out of the way. And,

1:25:16

you know, I'm trying to make a

1:25:18

better show. We're trying to do good

1:25:20

broadcasting. And him being

1:25:22

mad at me is fine. Fine

1:25:25

broadcasting. And he wasn't really. No,

1:25:28

no. And he seems surprisingly thin -skinned about

1:25:30

the reaction, about the negative reaction that he's

1:25:32

got to that. It seemed like for the

1:25:34

first time he's been reading his own comments

1:25:36

and he probably just shouldn't. I

1:25:38

don't think anybody gives a shit that he wants to.

1:25:40

Larry David does. Does he? Yeah,

1:25:42

Larry David had a piece in the New

1:25:44

York Times, a satirical piece called My

1:25:46

Dinner with Adolf. It wasn't

1:25:49

funny. Sadly, like funny headline, but the

1:25:51

rest of it was really kind

1:25:53

of cringe inducing. And it was

1:25:55

just like a clearly a shot at Bill Maher. So

1:25:58

there are people in Mars universe, I'm sure

1:26:00

giving him a lot of guff for this

1:26:02

and so he feels maybe a little bit

1:26:04

defensive about it But he also feels indignant

1:26:06

like that. No, that's that's why you fail

1:26:08

is that you don't talk to other people

1:26:10

And that's one of the best things about

1:26:12

Bill through thick and through thin love him

1:26:15

or hate him, whatever. Plastics

1:26:17

or no plastics He's

1:26:19

going talk to all sides. And

1:26:21

And no, I love the guy. I think he's I think

1:26:23

it's great that he went. I think you did a great

1:26:25

job on the show Yeah, I

1:26:28

think But I

1:26:30

agree with your diagnosis

1:26:32

that Simply because

1:26:34

a -known showman is

1:26:36

good at being a showman for a few

1:26:38

hours doesn't tell you anything about what

1:26:40

he's doing or, you know How we should

1:26:42

think about his presidency. So what

1:26:44

he can charm you great on

1:26:47

his turf. his turf exactly. Yeah. Matt,

1:26:49

it's great to talk to you

1:26:51

As come back any old time and

1:26:53

next time I'm in New York

1:26:55

City, I forward to a big night.

1:26:57

I promise that might wear my

1:27:00

stupid AirPods next time.