Adrian Wooldridge - The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism

29:56And it made that transition. And I think that Islam can make that transition. And there are liberal versions of Islam in Indonesia, much less sort of intolerant than it is in Saudi Arabia. So I think it's a possible thing to do. You'd have to do a lot to persuade me that this big chunk of humanity represented by Islam can never make the leap to liberalism. And I don't believe that, partly out of hope, but partly out of an observation of what's going on. But I think it's nevertheless the case that the first liberal societies were societies which are reared within the Christian tradition. Sure. You just mentioned Mill a second ago.

30:40He laid out his four core freedoms, freedom of thought and privacy, the free market, experiments in living and self-development. Of those four, we'll call it Millesian principles, which of those four have we driven the furthest away from the original idea today? Well, I think the problem with liberalism as a faith is it's moved away from the notion of self-development, self-improvement, that you have two versions of liberalism, particularly dominant in the United States, one of which is sort of left liberalism, which basically says that what liberalism means is that you can choose your own lifestyle, you can do your own thing, and nobody has a right to interfere with that.

31:23Then there's the sort of more right wing version of liberalism, which says that liberalism is all about the free market, being able to be the consumer, being sovereign, being able to go to the supermarket, buy whatever you want. And as long as you've got that, then you've got liberalism. I think Mill's argument is a much more sophisticated and subtle argument. And what he says is that it's not just about individual choice, individual preferences. it's about the individual fulfilling themselves at a deeper level improving themselves so a liberal society if it just means having the right to choose whatever you want to choose having the right to live whatever lifestyle you choose that's not a fulfilling vision what he says is we must have a sense of choosing the right thing or choosing the better thing and that involves education in preferences, that involves education in self-restraint, that involves a culture of self-improvement.

32:22And I think that needs to be put right at the heart of liberalism. So liberalism is not libertarianism, and it's not social progressivism saying that we can just do whatever we want. It is a matter of choosing the better thing. Sure. When I hear that, though, So I think, well, gosh, you'd have to agree to a set of shared virtues. Let's call it shared virtues. Full disclosure, I have three of my four kids go to a classical school. So they're in classical school and they have the virtues for the elementary kids up on the wall and beauty, truth, knowledge. They're all up there. Those are virtues.

33:02But we don't necessarily agree on the virtues. So, for example, there was a world in the 20th century where I agree with you. there were certain virtues, like you played the game of life, and there was ways you wanted to play that game. There just was. And we all kind of agreed on those in different ways, but generally speaking, we don't really share those virtues. If you go play the game of life, someone might say, great, you win this game if you never have to marry and you never have to have children. Now, is that the form of liberalism that we will all build around? And to your point, Ultimately, humans will flourish and the individual will flourish.

33:41Isn't that the kind of discussion that we're missing to say what are our shared virtues for flourishing? Absolutely. I don't think a society can cohere unless it has a notion of certain shared values, certain shared virtues, which all members of society should aspire towards. I don't think that you need to have a very narrow set of virtues. It doesn't have to be narrowly within a particular tradition. It doesn't have to be Christian virtues. It doesn't have to be Islamic virtues. But it does have to be a sense of notion that lying is wrong, stealing is wrong, selfishness is wrong, a more Catholic, with a small c, set of ideas about what constitutes virtue.

34:30So one of the things I've tried to argue in this book is that liberalism has recently been confused with non-judgmentalism. Sure. That we can't judge people, that people should be allowed to find their own truths, their own way of life, or live according to their own rules. And I think that was, you know, it was reasonable as a revolt against a hyper-controlled, moralistic, Victorian-style society. But it's gone much too far. And I think liberals have to be willing to assert that if you want to spend your life smoking crack or injecting heroin or making money in a way that is constantly cutting corners, you're doing something that's bad.

35:17Yeah. I mean the other thing too is I think – I just heard a gentleman explain his story of drug addiction, drug abuse and really to your point how he was allowed to do that. In fact, in some cases encouraged where they would like hand off what he called a crack pack, like by the government. Now, does that allow the individual to do whatever they want? Yes. Is that what causes a human to flourish? No. Let me ask you this because, you know, I think the other place we see this and I think it's a losing it's this is where you can see the populace saying we don't we don't think that's good. I mean, they're in the common culture of America and in Britain today.

35:58There is this idea of like transgenderism. And is it good or is it bad? I think we've seen a shift to in America, the populace is kind of tired with the discussion. And they're looking at saying, you know, marginally, we just, you know, you can do this. It's civilly allowed. You're an adult. But we don't think that we want to spend a lot of time and effort discussing that. talking about it, promoting it, and allowing people to really go to that in the long run. It's kind of a nudging, if you will. Absolutely. I think on the issue of nudging, I think that we should try and nudge people to live a life that leads towards flourishing.

36:43And I think that we should be willing, as a liberal society, to say these things are true, these other things are false, and to assert authority, to assert public authority, to nudge people in certain directions and not in other directions. And I get an enormous amount of pushback against saying this from the libertarian left, says, you know, you've got no right to judge people, and from the libertarian right, who are you to sit above society and make judgments? But every society in the past has made judgments, and the cost of not making judgments about people shooting up heroin or about people drinking themselves to death or about people lying, driving at 120 miles an hour, let's say, the cost of all of that refusal is not just borne by the individual.

37:35It's borne by society in general. So for society to survive and flourish collectively, we have to have certain collective virtues which we apply through authority. We hope you're enjoying the podcast. You know, we work hard putting together this show, but we work even harder for our investors at Smead Capital Management. At Smead, we believe in disciplined investing, which is why the Smead funds have a proven track record of long-term outperformance. If you're an investor who plays the long game and want to invest in wonderful companies to build wealth, we invite you to visit SmeadCap.com. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

38:13Investing involves risks, including loss of principle. Please refer to the prospectus for important information about the investment company, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Read and consider it carefully before investing. Smead funds distributed by Smead Funds Distributors, LLC, not affiliated. I think at one point in the book, you talked about the idea of the state and like what could happen to man under the state. And really, it's like a stasis. It could be an absolute stasis. I think where we're seeing that with men in America today is the number of men who are able-bodied and yet not working is insane.

38:52So that's – I'll call it that is – that's the effect on men in America. You point out also in your book there is an effect on women. I think you mentioned that the incidence of depression among single women is three times that of their married cohorts. That's just the data. And so we know that we're in a world where men don't feel the need to work. I think that affects men more than their female counterparts versus we're seeing that marriage, the lack of marriage affects women more than it does their male counterparts. That doesn't cause human flourishing. What I find interesting about those data points, I don't think people think you should talk about that.

39:33To your point, it's like if I say that, it's like, wow, you think women should get married? You think men should work? Who are you to judge? And the answer is because we want them to flourish and live to their fullest extent here on earth. Exactly. I mean what I argue in this book is that we've had for the last 40 years a dominant philosophy which I call the double liberalism. And this double liberalism is social liberalism. You should allow people to do what they will. And economic liberalism. You should allow business to operate, the market to operate in the ways that are deemed to be efficient.

40:08and there was an enormous amount of virtue in those two beliefs when they came in in a big way in the 1980s. In the 1980s, markets were strangled in all sorts of ways. Liberating them was good. We had, you know, opposition. We had a way of treating gays, which made a lot of people very miserable. So we had this double liberalism flourishing. But there comes a point when the double liberalism ceases to be liberating and becomes restricting. It becomes something that is damaging the way society functions. And we've moved from a world in which this double liberalism was obviously a benefit to a world in which the costs have got bigger, the costs of just allowing people to do their own things, being non-judgmental, having no notion of virtue of the common good, things like that.

40:56So the cost of having people living a pleasure-seeking life becomes greater than the merits of that. The cost of having a complete free immigration system becomes greater than the merits of having a supply of labor. And we've reached, what I'm arguing in this book is we've generated a sort of crisis of liberalism by pushing this double liberalism too far. And when you create, when you do that, two things happen. One is you get a desire for order, which leads to an appetite for tyranny. And the second is you so weak in society that it's that our enemies in Russia and China can begin to encroach on our power.

41:43The man who really saw this coming, this, the evils of the double liberalism was actually Plato, who in the The Republic says that what happens when you have what he called a pure democracy and what we might call a pure liberal society is a world in which everybody feels as though they can do their own thing, he says. It's like a coat of many colours. It's a beautiful thing. It's very attractive. But it begins to destroy its own foundations. situations when when people can when people can buy what they want when they can entertain themselves when they want want when they can drink what they want when they can pursue their own short-term pleasures in the long term society begins to erode it becomes indebted people become decadent and when you get all these things going on at the same time they suddenly turn around to tyranny and so what plato says is that tyranny isn't the opposite of democracy tyranny is what happens when democracy becomes corrupt.

42:40When democracy becomes corrupt, people turn to a tyrant to take all their decisions for them, to look after them, to deal with problems of debt. What I'm saying is the only way that democracy, that liberalism can save itself from becoming decadent and corrupt is by putting a bit more judgmentalism in, a bit more notion of public virtue, a bit more notion of telling people that they can't do certain things without damaging themselves. So a bit of Plato is necessary for a flourishing society. Well, put another way, having public officials use cuss words on public reporting just isn't good. It's just not good.

43:19It's not virtuous. It's not who we want to be. Absolutely. Let me, let me, let me, because the other thing that's come out of this is the idea that because we got to a point that we might not necessarily all be in love with, admittedly, on both sides, therefore there is a faction that says let's destroy the past because it didn't get what we want so um so destroying the past could be trying to rewrite history for what it is could be saying these books so like we i talked about my kids you know being classically educated yes you know the old standard was these are this is the canon of western thought and things like the bible and your point Plato and Herodotus and the classics and great works of antiquity and modernity would play all into that.

44:07You mentioned in your book, Robert Maynard Hutchins introduced the great books at Chicago. British grammar school centered on classics and history. I tell people all the time that I think the 19th century educated person was far more educated than anyone that walks out of a university on average today. Why has classical education or just the idea of the canon fallen apart and can it come back? I mean, we're seeing it in charter schools here in Arizona, hence where my kids go to school. But isn't that a push at the education? And you talk in the book about the academic fix that we need. If it comes from the ground up, is that a potential possibility?

44:48Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating. I think, and one of the things I try and do in my book is to revive the great liberal tradition. What I say is that you've got all these people who are saying they're post-liberals now, that liberalism is dead. And I say, well, actually, if you look at the 19th century, look at this long history of liberal thinkers, you know, Montesquieu and Rasmus and Hobbes and Mill and Burkhart and the rest of them. Look at these great thinkers. And we mustn't be dismissing liberalism and Tocqueville, of course, you mustn't be dismissing liberalism without weighing up the extraordinary intellectual tradition of liberalism.

45:28That's what so infuriates me about the American right wing post post liberals is that they're not weighing up this great tradition. But to look at your, your bigger points, what we've had is a terrible sort of an alliance, a conspiracy between two groups of people. One is the progressive left. And the progressive left says that everything is so infused with racism and bigotry and capitalism and all of these things that we have to just throw it away. Start again. So every single book that you want to mention, you mention. Well, you mentioned Ibram Kendi, which is a great example of like, you know, you're inherently bad as an individual and we've ruined the world centuries ago.

46:13Yeah. So start again. And this is year zero sort of approach to things. And the second group of people are sort of utilitarian-minded right-wing business people who say that the only thing that really matters is technical education. We need a technical education to provide us with the guys who are going to build the AI and do all of the rest of it. So all the rest is waffle anyway, so we might as well get rid of it. And it's both utterly malign for two reasons. One is that casting aside thousands of years of wisdom and history is just insane. But the second thing is that at the very heart of the liberal societies, I've tried to say, is the individual.

46:57And the only way to educate that individual, to make that individual conscious of making good choices, is to immerse them in the great tradition. It doesn't have to be just a purely Christian tradition. It doesn't have to be purely Western classical tradition, but it's the best and most interesting and most challenging that mankind has ever thought. That should be the very essence of humanist education. And I think that if we lose that, we lose more than we do in losing technical education, actually, because technical education must be secondary to being a human being. And to be a human being, we need to understand truth, beauty, and morality.

47:48Well, and also it gives us a common bond to where even the person that's technically accurate in what they do versus more in another field, they can all sit down and agree on certain, I'll call it truths for better or for worse. I paid my 10-year-old. He's bored over the summer. School's about to start up. I paid him to read books. I said, hey, if you read books, I'll kind of pay you, right? Because just give him something to do. And he's been reading a lot. So he read The Great Gatsby as a 10-year-old, which I was kind of excited as a book for occult modernity. And he said, yeah, dad, it's just kind of a sad book.

48:28Yes. Great. you understand the context of human decay and folly and bad choices and how you can ruin your life in a marriage and things like that we have to have our children understand that and i i i was just kind of shocked by how easy for a 10 year old it was to figure that out okay um i want to just one more thing which i did i didn't mention um which is the the the the the left is worried about academic education, the classical education that you talk about, on the grounds that it reinforces inequality. And equality is the primary virtue for them, so it reinforces inequality. Well, in Britain, we've set up a whole range of academy schools in poor areas of the country, of London, basically, the East End, and in Wembley, near Wembley Stadium.

49:21They set up these academy schools, which are characterized by a focus on academic subjects, a focus on classical texts, not ancient literature, but the great texts, on history, on learning facts, on learning about the great things that have been done. These schools are overwhelmingly attended by people from poorer backgrounds. And they've been unbelievably successful academically. So these children are going from poor backgrounds, learning rigorous academic subjects, learning the great books, and going on to be successful, getting to university places. So if the left says you have to lower standards in order to create equality, they're arguing exactly the wrong way around.

50:11You have to have an evangelical approach to teaching poorer people, immigrant communities, these great books, these great academic disciplines, and then you will get social mobility. I agree. To your point, there are always countervailing forces. So I'll just give you a quick picture. The state of Arizona might be the real education project in America. I say that because we were the first state to do what we call educational savings accounts are what we call vouchers here locally. So every child that wants to go to school has three options in our state. They can go to public schools. They can go to charter schools, which are private schools from an organization perspective, but they're funded locally and through private donors.

50:57And there are good options. Basis is one. My kids go to the Great Heart System, which is a classical. So that's another system. And that's been around for a while. And then as of a few years ago, we created these vouchers. So to your point, the parent can wake up any day during the year and say, hey, I believe my child has a better opportunity at another school and another educational program. Now, everyone would think, well, what a great thing. First off, it costs the state less, which is kind of funny because we pay more for our public schools. But the irony is, well, who would fight that? And the answer is, it's very obvious who would fight that.

51:38Well, it's the Teachers Association, because they want to keep the kids in the public schools, not effectively ask what causes children to flourish. And so we are seeing identitarianism play out on our ballots here in November. There is an identitarian ballot initiative going on where it effectively tries to cap income. Now, why? Because if you can get rich and poor people to disagree or have differences, you can divide on education. To your point, it's not about whether we want to educate our children. It's taking these identitarian issues to divide ultimately. And it benefits one group. And the group that it doesn't necessarily benefit is children, right?

52:23So we see that playing out here, and we've been the model that many other states have been adopting. And so to your point, I see a lot of the themes your book, you know, even deeply in some of these subjects. One other thing, I think Tocqueville prophesied some of the things we're seeing. So he said, quote, to such an extent that the human race will halt itself and limit itself is what he called the turmoil of democracies that lay stasis. yes um we're seeing stasis in education we're seeing stasis you know like you pointed out in dealing with homelessness and the drug problem it is truly stasis workforce issues like we talked about but the birth rate we talked about the birth rate um ultimately humans saying i don't want more children and and and or i don't want to you know be a more community isn't that really just the easiest definition example of humans halting themselves, according to Tocqueville?

53:21Absolutely. Well, let me start off by talking about your point about the education savings account, because I had a very interesting conversation yesterday with a democratic education reformer. He pointed out that we have a peculiar situation in America, he said, whereby all of the best education reforms are happening in basically Republican-dominated states, and the democratic dominated states are falling behind. And a lot of Democrats, he was saying, are beginning to wake up to this fact and are beginning to ask themselves the question, should they remain in hock to the teachers' unions when it's quite visibly the case that the alternative models being experimented with in the Republican states are doing better?

54:07So he was predicting that there might be a revolution within the Democratic Party. They're beginning to recognize the price they're paying for moving in longshade, lockstep behind the teachers unions. And he also pointed out, which I'd not familiar, but the Trump's big, beautiful bill has a lot of provision for all states to. It's free money. It's your point. It's free money for the states. And the Democratic states are beginning to do that. I thought that was fascinating. Correct. So Jared Polis of Colorado, who's a Democratic governor. He adopted – Kathy Hochul in New York. That has not been adopted here because our governor is up for election in November, and so she'll decide to do that after because it's still politics.

54:54So I agree with you. Actually, let me pivot because I want to ask – I don't want to miss this question, and I totally agree with you on this. Can you explain to our audience and listeners what is the shadow of liberalism? Because this is really what's not being talked about. Well, Aristotle argued that every single philosophy, political philosophy, has a sort of dark shadow. So the dark shadow of monarchy is tyranny. The dark shadow of democracy is mob rule. and the dark shadow of aristocracy is oligarchy. And I think that's true. It's very much worth noting. But the dark shadow of liberalism, I think, liberalism is about tolerance, it's about limiting power, and it's about individualism.

55:48The dark shadow of all of that is populism. Populism is all about the merits of the mass, about removing restraints on power, So power becomes an all-consuming thing. And it's about the fact that the people at large are right. So they have a right to shout down everybody else. And populism takes many forms. It takes a right-wing form, but it also takes a left-wing form. And I would say in the United States at the moment, it's left wing populism that's really on the rise with the Democratic Socialists and the rest. But both the right and the left seem to me to agree on this collective wisdom of the people and collective wisdom of the people is the antithesis of liberalism.

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57:11Investing involves risks, including loss of principal. Please refer to the prospectus for important information about the investment company, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Read and consider it carefully before investing. Smead funds distributed by Smead Funds Distributors, LLC, not affiliated. When you talked about this, I agree. What I tell people is each party has two factions in the party. I call the liberal orders of each of the parties. I call that the court. So you're a court conservative or you're a court liberal. Versus what you're talking about is I call it country.

57:51You're a country Republican or a country liberal. That is the populist arms of these parties. And for better or for worse, the Clintonian Bush order was court. And really the parties have rejected that all the way out to the gentleman that just won the primary in Michigan, El-Sayed. He is very much the populist country part of the Democratic Party. Now, will that go through and will that win? We'll see. But I just say that because we can see this raging in the political debate in primaries right now. But I sort of only half agree with you because I think that the liberal cause has become the cause of the court or the establishment with the Clintonians and the Blairites here.

58:38But in doing that, it's lost a lot of its dynamism. It's been sort of captured by the status quo. And so a lot of the things that the populists are complaining about in official liberalism is exactly right. It's become corrupt. It's become the status quo. It's deafened itself to legitimate complaints about immigration and about all sorts of things. So insofar as the liberalism, the centrist liberalism, which I'm trying to champion, becomes also the cause of the liberal establishment, that's a problem. But if you go back through the whole history of liberalism, there have been these perpetual cycles whereby liberalism has gone from being a radical challenge to the status quo to being captured by the status quo and has then reinvented itself with another radical challenge to the status quo.

59:32So although I'm critical of populism, but I think populists have right to be angry about the oligarchies, about the establishments. But the way to deal with that is not to abandon these three core beliefs, individualism, tolerance, and limits on power, but to have a new wave of radical liberalism.

59:58So I'm saying it's sort of a populist liberalism, a liberalism from below. But I don't think the future of liberalism lies with supporting Clintonianism or supporting Blairism. Oh, sure, sure. No, no, yeah. I just say it because there was – like you point out in your book that Bill Clinton did many economic reforms like the Telecommunications Act, for example, of 96. That was a very – there was a lot of people on the left and the right that agreed with that as a liberal reform.

1:00:28Now, what came out of that? Well, we effectively supported technology companies to have no liability. You refer to Section 230. You talked about Tim Wu in your book. We just had Tim Wu come to our investor event. We call it our Investor Oasis last February, and he talked about all of this. And you referenced to they are attention merchants, as he says, right? So what we looked and said, okay, here's a good idea for this time. And I think to your point, there's a pragmatism that's missing. So at that time, that made sense. At this time, it now does not make sense. and we're unwilling to go back and say, let's go back to the rules we wrote and ask if they still apply, if they're still there for good reason.

1:01:13And ultimately now we have very powerful lobbying that doesn't want to readdress those. That's the problem. Rewriting that 230 would be, getting out of there or changing it would be incredibly difficult. The other thing that Clinton did was a lot of the financial reforms in the late 1990s, almost at the same time. It took a financial crisis to rewrite some of those things. I agree. I mean, back then when Citigroup and Travelers merged, Sandy Weil helped lobby to get rid of Glass-Steagall, admittedly. So I totally – and Charlie Munger commented on it. He said, you know, I don't think commercial banks and investment banks should be together.

1:01:53But America has decided it's fine. And I don't see that changing anytime soon, to your point. In other words, that's where the liberal order has decided, hey, we're actually more home with this than we were, say, 100 years ago. So I totally agree.

1:02:10So here's my question. So I want to use my Teddy Roosevelt reflection. Yeah. I believe in great man history. I think people are led. And you talk about this idea of paternal liberalism. And I think this is so good. I have my colleague, our chief operating officer, Connor, who is a Democrat, and I'm like the Republican. We talk a lot about the idea of smoky back rooms, right, as a context. And when we talk about the old school view of like don't host an open primary, have a smoky back room where people get together and kind of decide what should go forward for who the candidates are and things like that.

1:02:50it's not an idea of like be coercive or hide, but it's this idea that there are virtues and things we want to go at that need to get done, and we need to be making progress towards that. And if we always have this, you know, tyranny of demos, we might not progress. So how do you think about this? We talked about nudging, but this paternal liberalism of saying, you know, if I go to my children, like a father would in the paternal sense, hey, I want you to flourish, I want you to be a reader. I want you to go out and be educated. Someday find a spouse and have children because you'll learn a lot about what it's like to live with someone and love someone that might hurt you and all these individuals that ultimately will disagree with you for most of their young life and yet you still learn about humanity.

1:03:38There's paternalism that has to flow through this and just even saying that like the word paternalism is such a swear word today but but you're giving it in the context of paternalism for flourishing. Exactly. Well, obviously, the family is central to this. The school is central to this. And, you know, you choose a classical school, and that's an exceptionally sensible thing to do. But also, I think the city is absolutely vital to this. The community, I agree. I was just thinking of San Francisco. Again, to some extent, New York. If you have a system whereby the mayor tolerates any behavior on the street, the signal that you're sending to the population is just extremely negative.

1:04:21It's saying you can do whatever you want, you can lie in the street, it doesn't matter because all that matters in life is freedom of choice. So I think having public discipline in the streets, in the cities, having schools that focus on teaching right values and the great tradition and on having solid families is vital. And we've been destroying all of those things, you know, the double liberalism. You've, you know, had family breakdown. You've had schools being less willing to assert authority. And you've had cities just allowing, you know, littering and all of that sort of thing. So I think it was a great deal of talk at one point in the 1990s with Giuliani about the broken windows theory.

1:05:08The broken windows theory is, A, it's true, but it covers the whole range of moral development as well. We have to be willing. And as long as liberalism is mistaken for libertarianism or mistaken for rule of the Clinton oligarchy or things like that, it's never going to be revived. So in order to revive this faith, it needs to be willing to talk about virtue, needs to be willing to talk about public order. And it also needs to be willing to be radical, to challenge the status quo, big companies, the values that big companies are pursuing in the name of something, you know, richer, in the name of the values that you set, human fulfillment and self-development.

1:05:57the values that mill talked about yeah well i mean to your point on community i think this is a like you and you touch on this and you give it some shapes and forms i i um you know the double liberalism on the left would say you know again back to your point on drugs drugs are not you do you we'll help you out this is your choice it's not your fault um and ultimately you know you decide versus to your point saying, hey, we will possibly put you in jail and work on recovery or focus on recovery solely because you are not living out your life. And as a community, we don't want that for you. And we have the ability to tell you we don't want that and help you, okay?

1:06:39On the right, I see it as, you know, again, if it's all about money, our daughters could all become OnlyFans models that just effectively become modern day courtesan and prostitutes. And that's what it is. And as long as they make a living doing that, who are we to judge? I think the drug thing is particularly interesting because what we've had with cigarettes is that we haven't outlawed cigarettes, but we've made our social disapproval of cigarettes clear. So they're more expensive, they're harder to get, and smokers are herded into spaces in airports and things like that. And the result of that disapproval has been a massive decline in the number of people who smoke.

1:07:29At the same time, almost coincidentally with that, we've had a social approval of marijuana in particular, and the number of people taking marijuana, smoking marijuana, has gone up and up and up, even to the extent when I go to New York these days, everything smells of marijuana there's marijuana all over the place there's shops selling it there's people selling on the streets so it's become mainstream um i wouldn't argue for the complete legalization of of marijuana i think from from now i would argue for the tobacco strategy of social disapproval and of and of of public disapproval and of making it harder to get because i think it's much stronger it's much more uh addictive and it's much more personality changing than we'd recognized in the past.

1:08:16And I would argue absolutely for strict keeping cocaine and the rest of the harder drugs, you know, illegal and clamping down on them. And the cigarette example demonstrates that you can change people's behavior through social disapproval. Yeah. When you point out that Nancy Reagan's war on drugs wasn't crazy. It was absolutely right. Yeah. Let me – I want to ask you because you comment on this. I think I'll use this as the last question. You have a different view. You're sitting in the UK right now. I'd love for you to give our audience kind of a taste of how you're seeing this in the UK. I will say one thing.

1:08:59Western birth rates are terrible across the board, so I always tell Americans, who are you to look down your nose in the rest of the world? You're no different today. But we're seeing something incredible. I don't think people understand the shockwave this is going to cause in the EU context. But full disclosure, we own Unicredit. And what they're doing with Commerce Bank in the liberal capitalistic form is so shattering to the EU project, which was that you'll never have these groups of people ever agree. And therefore, they'll never be this kind of commingled network. And Draghi laid out the idea of European competitiveness or the future of European competitiveness.

1:09:36And he pointed out two industries, telecom and secondly banking. And so we are arguing to investors in the marketplace is that we're seeing this takeoff of what I'll call liberal capitalism where despite the politics not agreeing with it, but the regulators at some level and really the marketplace of ideas arguing we're going to watch a German and Italian bank come together to the dismay of many Germans. Yes. Now, what do I love about that? It's going to happen despite intense disagreement culturally. OK. And I think that is like a liberal thinker. I think, wow, this is experimental. This is interesting.

1:10:18This is not what anyone would have written three years ago. So I look at things like that in the EU context and say there's almost a dropping of regulation and a dropping of, stasis in Europe today versus, I would argue, we're seeing a buildup at times in many places in the United States based on, call it industrial policy. How do you look at the UK and the EU context for some of these bigger picture questions? Well, I would say the most important thing to understand about the UK and the EU is, particularly the EU, is that this is a declining chunk of the world. That when Clinton was talking about getting rid of Glass-Steagall and things, one reason they were doing that was because they thought American banks were relatively small compared with a lot of European banks.

1:11:09And the American economy was in some ways overshadowed by Europe. Since then, the American economy has just grown and grown and grown. And the EU economy is contracted. So we have in Europe, 20 years of very slow growth to make up for. So what that will take is a lot of consolidation, I think, particularly in telecommunications and to some extent in finance. So when I'm saying I'm worried about concentration in the United States, particularly in AI, in the tech companies, I'm less worried about it in Europe, because just because our problems are different. Our problems are really slow growth and we need to have some way of igniting that growth.

1:11:54And we're virtually nowhere in the tech space compared with you. So different problems. But the decline of the EU as a share of the global economy compared with the United States, was 25 % of the global economy in the mid-1990s. It's about 25 % now. The EU has gone right down to being less than 20 % of the global economy. The growth has been in Asia, particularly China. I apologize for that. No worries. So it needs to be – we need a kicking. And what Draghi said in his report, I don't fully agree about the industrial policy, but he was very, very right to sound the alarm about just slow growth.

1:12:41Yeah, because to this point, access to capital, and then secondly, access to information were really his two main points. And that has been a long-term problem. The other thing is the cost of energy because our energy prices are very, very large. And we had a situation when we were relying on Russia, particularly Germany relying on Russia to provide us with cheap energy and as though Russia was a reasonable status quo player, which it most certainly isn't. So our energy costs – so the costs of our inputs into our economy are just much, much higher than the United States. Well, I agree. And admittedly, watching the President of the United States badger oil prices low while you want more energy, that's – you're not going to get more supply out of lower prices.

1:13:28Absolutely. I don't think that's understood by the marketplace. But Adrian, other than your Bloomberg columns, where else can our listeners follow you? Are you active on social media? Do you have a website or anything like that? Yeah, my Twitter is at ADWildridge. So that's where I mostly appear is on Twitter. But the Bloomberg columns are also the main thing. Awesome. Well, you know, I just – there's so many people. I just want to mention a couple of subjects I skipped. We didn't talk about the college professors. I even skipped over, I told you before, George Bridges, the president of Evergreen State College that you talked about.

1:14:07I, you know, I readers need to listen to the academic side because I think to your point, the education is a serious, serious issue from all the way up from elementary school, you know, to the top on the collegiate level. And you just put out really good breadcrumbs, you know, throughout your book. I don't know if you want to give you like two seconds to just. I would say on the universities, I'm extremely depressed about the universities, not because I think universities are unimportant, because I think they are important. That particularly the humanities, the job of the universities is to preserve the flame of civilization and advance it through scholarship.

1:14:47And what they've had is the takeover of this identitarian, deconstructionist sort of thing. They've taken over the humanities, English literature, foreign languages, history, and they've killed them as sources of knowledge and of civilizational advance. And one of the things that's happened, strangely, is as these subjects have become more taken over by these trendy new ideas, they've become more and more unpopular. Students are fleeing them. Students are going to other subjects. I think the answer to that problem is not to get rid of them, as some people on the right claim. It's to reinvigorate them, to have history about the great achievements, about the great ideas, about some of the great men who've shaped history.

1:15:37Literature, again, refocusing on the canonical text, not to be just a constant exercise in self-deprecation and self-deconstruction. Adrian, your book, The Revolutionary Center, reminds me that the freedoms we take for granted were built by people who understood that liberty requires cultivation much like a gardener of character, virtues, institutions, and of the courage to disagree without destroying each other. If we forget what liberalism actually is, we will lose it in the pessimistic sense you talk about in your book. Our listeners should go out and buy a copy of the Revolutionary Center today.

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1:17:41Thank you.