297: The Infrastructure Bill, Inflation, and Andrew Cuomo -with Brad Polumbo

All right. And with that, returning to The Brian Nichols Show, it's been a while but good to have him back. Brad Palumbo, welcome back to The Brian Nichols Show. Hey, thanks for having me back. Absolutely, buddy, Brad, it's been a hot sec, we had you on there beginning of the year quite frequently. And then summer hit, we both got a little busy. I know you've been super busy over at fi doing a lot of new ventures over there. So it's been a while since we've had you on the program. Since then. We're doing this video thing. So Surprise, surprise. But also we've been really growing leaps and bounds, lots of new people coming into the audience. So let's kind of start off here, Brad, let's re Introduce yourself quickly to some of our new folks here at the audience. And let's talk about what's been happening over in Brad Colombo's world but specifically over at Fie.

Yes, so I am a Liberty libertarian leaning conservative journalist and policy analyst. You know, I work at fee the foundation for economic education, you know, covering news of the day from free market fiscally conservative perspective, talking about spending, government waste regulation, basically anything policy related. So I constantly have stuffs to rage about, as you might expect, in terms of what's been going on lately. I mean, we've just been covering the same thing. We've been pretty consistent on COVID and opposing the kind of COVID authoritarianism, yeah, on the stretch of government that we've seen, really stretching their powers to their limits and not letting go. That's been a big subject for us. We've also started talking about all the spending legislation, and the interestingly and concerningly, the increasingly high levels of inflation, which is something we haven't seen for a while, but it's really concerning to us, and in our view can ultimately be traced back to big government interventions into the economy. Yeah, well, I

wrote them. The two notes, you said that were top concerns government control, and then the government spending Now, let's look at the government control because originally, I want to have you on the show to talk about one of the biggest falls in really American politics and that is one Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York State. No more question mark, as he is officially said he will be resigning now as we record here on Thursday. What is it Wednesday, the 11th? I said 14 days so we're team is 13 days as of recording. So Wow. Like this was a whole revelation seeing andrew cuomo after not even a week ago, digging his heels in after the Attorney General report comes out in New York basically saying Yeah, not only did he go ahead and and really commit works of sexual harassment in the workplace, but a lot of this stuff is actually criminal. And he said, No, I'm not going to resign and fast forward a week. And despite all of this coming out, he still plays victim and resigns. But he's been one of the biggest, I guess. Let's be real Brad. He was one of the biggest governors fluffed up by the corporate media there for damn near what 678 months at the height of the pandemic, despite despite his policies ending up causing nine to 11,000 estimated nursing home deaths, putting COVID patients back into nursing homes bread. How did we get to a point where we had Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York winning Emmys on the book he wrote about how great he handled the Coronavirus in New York State now fast forward just a like, what a year plus later, and now he's no longer Governor of New York State.

Yeah, and he certainly shouldn't be governor of New York State. I'm glad to see him go to see him resign and be chased out office and disgrace. What it sounds like what he did to some of these women is truly horrible stuff. There was a very thorough investigation done by members of his own party. So this isn't canceled culture, right? This isn't like a witch hunt that they thoroughly investigated him and brought receipts about women that he's harmed. So it's good that he's leaving office. But honestly, and this might be controversial, because two terrible things can be terrible. But it seems to somewhat pale in comparison compared to the way that he mismanaged the nursing home policies and mandated that nursing homes accept COVID positive patients and then you know, listen, mistakes happen. Maybe he genuinely made a mistake there. It's an emergency. But then his administration tried to cover it up. They literally tried to cover up the data. So people didn't know how many people died in nursing homes. At the same time, he was doing media tours, writing a book about how amazing his leadership is, in accepting an Emmy Award for appearing on TV to talk about COVID. So this guy, I mean, he should have been impeached or resigned or chased out of office over a million different things. But it's it's actually about more than just Cuomo. This has to do with something that we talked about a fee called public choice economics, right? Yeah, same. The same selfishness and incentives in human nature that apply to everyone else also applied to the government. People tend to think of businesses as Self interested and profit driven, and they are, but they tend to think about government officials and politicians and bureaucrats as if they act in the public interest. But in reality, they act with the same human nature and incentives as everybody else. And I think ugly stories like the fall of Andrew Cuomo really prove that theory beyond all belief.

Yeah, well, and let's take that, and let's extrapolate it beyond just looking at andrew cuomo and the microcosm that is him in New York State. But let's look at from a grand national scale, Brad, and we're gonna kind of move away from Cuomo here, because I mean, there's tons of podcasts you talk about Larry Sharpe actually get a great overview of this too, about Cuomo following and you know, obviously, Larry has a little bit of a vested interest in running for governor back in 2018. Against Cuomo. So yeah, go check out the Sharpe wage check out Larry's take, but looking at, we've seen this appeal to embracing Well, there's an emergency there's a crisis, we have to do something. And this has to do something has resulted in number one, a brand new infrastructure bill, Brad, not in the billions of dollars in the trillions of dollars, but also that's led to rampant inflation. So now we've seen our do something leading to something maybe not something so good. So maybe dig into the number one, let's start here, the infrastructure bill, what is this $1.6 trillion monstrosity?

Yeah, so the bill is somewhere between one and $1.2 trillion. It's got a lot of stuff in it that isn't seemingly restricted to actual infrastructure. So for example, there's money to combat invasive plants. There's a whole list of odds and ends and random politician pet projects in there, including funding to create a commission on gender diversity in the trucking industry. So we're fighting the good fights, obviously, with this bill. It's sort of funny, but it also it's sort of kind of shows you how Washington works. Because I know and this isn't maybe Super anarcho capitalists are libertarian, but my own view is that there is a role for the government, in building infrastructure in roads and bridges and things like that. So the kind of core of the bill, which is about two or $300 billion of transportation, infrastructure funding, I don't really have any opposition to it, I if it was just that I probably be supportive of it. But it's just so peak, Washington, DC, that a few 100 billion for infrastructure, which is a lot of money, right? But even that ends up being, you know, 50, or 60% of this 2000 Plus page bill is totally unrelated. It's got everything from, you know, a welfare plan to pay for people's internet, to a bunch of crackdowns on cryptocurrency that are actually pretty alarming, some regulations there that could really harm the industry. But the boomers in Congress don't even know what a Bitcoin is, they shouldn't be writing rules for crypto at all, let alone putting them in an infrastructure package. So the idea of infrastructure itself has a lot of bipartisan support bipartisan support. And when most people hear, oh, an infrastructure bill, they like that. But you got to look at the fine print. There's a lot more to this than meets the eye.

Wow, doesn't that speak to the power of branding and messaging, and being able to have the art of influence? I don't know, it's almost like we should be focusing on how these these actual skills in such work instead of just ignoring them and saying they shouldn't be taking place. actually seeing how they're using people. It's like, that's a real thing. Oh, my God, Brad,

how about this,

let's talk about this infrastructure bill from a standpoint and I seen this argument across the board. I was making it myself, I would love to hear your economic take on how this is going to be impacting and you mentioned the boomers, they don't care because they don't really understand. But Gen Z, millennials, really the generations, and let's be frank, the generations yet to be born. They're gonna have to really foot the cost of this bill. That's just added burden. I mean, what's the average cost? Now I forget the number per citizen of us debt. And this is just gonna only increase that, Brad.

Oh, yeah, it's astronomical at this point, the debt and this will add about a quarter of a trillion. So that $250 billion to chump change, which actually, is a relatively small figure told you there to some of the bills that we've seen passed in the last couple of years, like each of the COVID bills was multi trillion, and a lot of that was added to the debt. So it's a lot of money. Absolutely. And it will pile on to the debt. And interestingly enough, what I what I tell people who are Gen Z or millennial often is that the national debt is kind of like climate change, right? Because the way they view climate change and there's some truth to this, certainly in my view, is But today's citizens are polluting carbon. And it's having a harmful effect that will be dealt with down the road, the costs of their actions aren't being borne by the people engaging in it. The national debt essentially operates exactly how that works in theory, right? It's exactly people paying for things that they're going to enjoy today by handing the bill to future generations. So the infrastructure bill was supposed to avoid this by being quote, unquote, paid for, but they used a bunch of very shoddy kind of loopholes and other things to pretend that it was paid for. And all the kind of objective analysis now it's not fully paid for, it will, it will end up adding a significant amount to the deficit and debt. But I actually think that's like not even the real problem with the bill. I mean, obviously, the debt is an issue, and we talk about it. But that's true for all spending. The bigger thing is that they keep talking about this as a job creating legislation that will put Americans to work. And the whole thing's kind of nonsense. I mean, an Ivy League analysis from the Penn Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, they analyze this, and they found that by 2030, or 2050, it will have zero impact on job growth and zero impact on GDP growth. Because this is the whole fallacy of government spending, driving growth for the economy, you can't just take this money out of thin air, it's got to come for the government to spend $1, here putting somewhere to work, someone to work building a bridge, they've got to take $1 from somewhere else, either through taxes or debt or inflation. And that so every job created for a bridge builder is a job that isn't created somewhere else in the economy. And that's something I wish people would understand and keep with them in their heads, as we talk about all issues, not just infrastructure.

Yep. And let's talk about So you mentioned inflation. And let's look at that a little bit more in detail. Because we've seen inflation just skyrocket. You were telling me the scary numbers here from July 5.4% was the the rate of inflation here for the past month. And I mean, it's higher than they were predicting. But what why inflation, and you look back to kind of this myth from the left, and that is, basically just give this money you this money just comes from the magic money tree. And I think we seem to forget sometimes that the money I say we tongue in cheek, obviously, but that money isn't just itself value is merely representation of the value. And if you're just printing the dollars, and there's nothing of value behind it, then it's just pieces of paper. We see this in Venezuela, just you know, below our southern border here, Brad, but we Is it the arrogance of Americans or we're like that will never happen here. Like we were the top country in the world like we've never seen throughout, you know, what World History these top nations ever collapse inward upon themselves from economic and societal ruin. Right? Well,

I get your sarcasm because we absolutely have. But it is interesting. I mean, we're nowhere near the Venezuela level of hyperinflation. But we're hitting serious inflation levels, and it's only trending upward. And we were told that this was just temporary, just transitory, just a blip the first month, but we're now on month five or six of these steady CPI readings. And CPI tends to the consumer price index. This is what the government releases, it's a data set, showing how like a bundle of typical goods that the average American consumer buys, has changed in their prices over the last time period. So the latest ones for July just came in, and it shows 5.4%. What that means is that from July of 2020, to July of 2021, over that one year, prices change by 5.4% increase. Why does that matter? Right? Because people just look at that. They just glaze over, right? It sounds like you know, the Wall Street Journal's business pages are things that a lot of people frankly, don't have a lot of interest in or pay attention to. But the reason that matters is because people think right now, for example, if you look at wages over the last year, they've gone up by three or 4%. More so people think that they've gotten a wage increase. But and this is you hinted at this, this is what economists call the illusion of money. They're actually poor, they actually got a wage decrease because your real wage is your wage relative to purchasing power, which is eroded by price inflation. If your paycheck doesn't go as far for what it can buy you. There's no value in just having a bigger number on it. Of course not. That would be silly. So what the reason that this inflation is so pernicious, is because essentially, it does stem from government policy, and we can get into that in a moment. But it's a way of eroding your wages and your paycheck and your savings. It's basically a tax. Because the government can use it to fund their programs, but they don't get blamed for it like they would if they actually directly raise people's taxes, because people don't have the full economic understanding. And that's what I'm trying to bring to this conversation is to help people connect the dots, because they should really view inflation, the same at high levels the same way they would view an increase in their income tax.

Yeah. And you having this conversation over and over the young turks with some some socialists, and you explain this, and everybody's just nodding their head in agreement, but you see that it's either, like, acknowledging that it won't work, but just refusal to like concede the point, or a acknowledging of your point, but saying, but don't worry, we're gonna just gonna put super, super super duper smart people who are just gonna do it better in positions of power, I had $1. Brad, for every time, I've heard that I think I myself would contribute to inflation. That seems to be the number one reoccurring argument I've been hearing from folks, it just we have to put better people in positions of power. But dare I say it's just the inherent nature of this system, this structure that is the Fed and the Treasury that are causing a lot of these problems to begin with? Well, yeah, I

mean, ultimately, the incentives baked into big government are what ruin the cake, right? It's not really a matter of putting the right people quote, unquote, in charge, because, for example, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jay Powell, he was actually put in by Trump during Trump's administration, and he's the one that's overseeing and pushing through these kind of harmful big government policies. It's not really when it comes to monetary policy, it's not really a republican or democrat or liberal or conservative, it's a government versus free market. And any government person put in charge of vast amounts of wealth and power, whether they're put there by a Republican or a Democrat, their incentive is to conserve that system, that gives them massive amounts of power, right? Even if they're supposedly republican appointee, or whatever. I mean, they don't care about that, ultimately, they care about preserving their job and their title and their power. In that comes first ideology comes second, they also kind of all agree on this kind of thing, the mainstream quote, unquote, that these two groups draw from essentially agree on the main things of monetary policy, and they don't really care about inflation, they Our goal is stimulus, they think they can just pretend inflation isn't an issue. They're only really now five months later starting to acknowledge, oh, this may not be temporary, this might be a little bit of a problem. But no, we're not going to roll back any of our stimulus or money printing. And so an economist I work with that fee, Peter Jacobson, he's explained this at length, but you really have to view inflation as something that has a bunch of factors, a bunch of causes that contribute it to it. But one big one, arguably the biggest, is federal policy, and what the what the Fed the Federal Reserve, right, the National Bank of the US, what they've done is in order to stimulate the economy, they printed trillions of new dollars. During the pandemic, they just put trillions of new dollars out there in the economy. But when you have way more money chasing the same amount of goods and services, actually, if anything, a decreased amount of goods and services because of the lockdowns, then prices go up. I mean, that's just exactly what anything would tell you to expect. yet. Now they're they somehow wanted to say that, oh, we'll just be temporary, oh, it won't be a real issue. And that's because it's the price they're willing to pay is stealth taxing America in order to get that them have the power and control that they want. And they have the naive belief that it will stimulate the economy, which it won't

with any success yet, by the way, this is completely off topic, because I noticed that you did a town circle challenge to Paul Krugman didn't get back to you yet, Brad.

Yeah, so the challenge has expired. So several 1000 donated meals will be canceled. Because he did not accept the debate challenge. All he had to do is take half an hour out of his calendar. And literally hundreds of people chipped in to donate 1000s of meals to charity. Now Professor Krugman had to do was get on Skype for 30 minutes. And

oh, yeah, no, my audience they're familiar because we just re aired our it was the debate between Eric breaky and Mark Claire on whether the Snowden revealed was a net positive for liberty. And we hosted that over on town circle and it was a great conversation and it ended up I think, we left the conversation both sides. I forced them to be real with you, Brad, listen to God, I

just looked it up. I just looked it up. My followers had pledged $4,000 and 124 to the to the food bank, which is The equivalent of 12,372 meals, and the child has expired, he did not accept. So all of that money will be returned and will not go towards feeding the hungry.

Paul Krugman doesn't like to help people, I guess. It doesn't like to talk about his ideas because he's afraid of Brad Palumbo, but I'm sorry,

a lot of people said this to me, they were like, Well, why would he debate you? He's a Nobel Prize winning economist, and you're just some conservative blob, or whatever. And I'm like, well, then it should be really easy for him. He shouldn't be like, wipe

the floor with you. Right?

What's the harm? That would be like, if I don't know, some crazy person challenged me to debate and said, here will donate $4,000 to charity, I would have said sure. And if the less qualified and less serious that person was, the easier it is right. So I don't understand why I think he knows, frankly, that his his work. And his arguments really don't live up to scrutiny. And so he writes his articles, but he doesn't do a lot of debates or a lot of media where he could be challenged on his views. And that's a shame because that kind of school of big government progressive economics, it really is intellectually bankrupt on many things. But it used to give him a veneer of seriousness and legitimacy and credibility to a lot of terrible ideas. And so that's why I really wish we could have shone shone a spotlight on it.

Yeah, well, and that also leads to part of the problem. And I see this I've had recently on the show, so Dr. Patrick Moore, formerly one of the cofounders of Greenpeace, and, you know, built his entire career through academia. And then most recently, Dr. Adrian zhaan. He is a lecturer and professor at Duke University, one of the leading minds in thermodynamics and physics. And he is one of the I say, one of he is the mind who helped develop what is called construct the law. And it really is the idea that as things flow through through nature, in all, always, they they look to do so freely. And having these two individuals who have built their entire careers in academia, come on my program, and tell me that they see their colleagues who think like them, who are willing to take a stand, but they are afraid, and they stay silent. So they have the same ideas, but they stay silent for fear of being reprimanded by their their peers and their colleagues. And I mean, like that, almost hearing that made me not give as much credence to the term peer reviewed than I did before. Because if this is the same mentality of people who are trying to basically groupthink people to death, in, in not even speaking their ideas, just imagine what their group thinking when they're putting out policy positions that are going to help get them funding, like, of course, incentives. I mean, you're an economist, Brad, incentive structures are real. We know that for a fact. Of course, we're going to see some of these people in academia take advantage of that, in my goodness, we see that the people who see it firsthand acknowledges such so I don't know man, it's like how do we how do we win over some of these people who they're terrified to speak, they don't even want to enter the conversation for fear of reprimand from their their peers.

Yeah, we see this a lot in the economics field, actually. So I'm an economics reporter, are kind of beat basically beat journalist and I do have a degree in it. But I'm not a formal economist. But when you go to like Econ, Twitter, right, and you see who is represented, it is so disproportionately leftist compared to the actual industry and the actual field. When you go to what economists are appearing in the op ed pages of the major media, mainstream media publications, it is so liberal disproportionately, but the actual field if you step off line, and you kind of look at surveys of what the majority of working economists believe and espouse on things like the minimum wage or government spending or the national debt, the majority tends towards a fiscally conservative or free market perspective.

But really, it doesn't speak to the fact that Twitter's not real life like it is quite literally, like the microcosm of microcosm of voices. And we give so much freakin credence and power to these voices. And then that becomes policy.

I have mixed feelings about Twitter, because simultaneously, it's important for my platform, and I use it to drive a lot of traffic to my work. And I've actually connected with a lot of influencers and people that have been very important for my career, through Twitter as a platform, but I have to constantly I've really strived to stop reading any replies to stop scrolling Twitter at all, and just post my own comments and dm people and then look at specific people's feeds that I value. Because Twitter itself, I mean, I just feel constantly gaslit by these extreme, far right people Have these extremist views on social issues or whatever or immigration who they form this like little digital echo chamber and they pounce on you. And all of a sudden you're holding a very mainstream opinion that 90% of the American people agree with. And you feel like a fringe because you feel like you're the crazy person. In same thing, like, there's this Tick Tock video going around from the White House about this flamboyant gay guy doing like a bit, that he made some social media video with Jen Misaki, or whatever, and everyone was saying it was demonic. And what did they call it degenerate and all this? And I was just like, it's a little cringe. Right? But whatever, right? Why am I gonna get mad about this? And I'm like, nine out of 10 people on the street, if you show them, that video would just roll their eyes and just or they'd be like, whatever. It's a little funny. But then these Twitter bubble extremists, they literally think it's demonic and evidence, this 1/62 Tick Tock is evidence that society's moral values are falling into shambles. And it's like, they're just so hysterical. And they convinced themselves that their opinion is actually the mainstream opinion. And if you spend too long on Twitter, you'll start to think that to the same thing with economics, I mean, Econ, Twitter has this strong built in progressive big government bias that's just unquestioned and unchecked. And they really attack and pounce on people who question that narrative. But in reality, in real life, they are in the minority. I mean, they a lot of their ideas. Modern monetary theory is this progressive theory from the AOC and Bernie Sanders crowd, and the few economists that kind of run in those circles that basically government spending is unlimited, right? They can just print as much money as they want, and it will be fine. And there really is no cap on how much the government can spend. Obviously, this is false. It's something rejected by most economists out of hand,

but I really quick on Can you enter, you'll think it's actually mainstream. Can you steal man that really quick, though, like, what would be the best mmt argument? Because like, I, I always like to see, like, Where, where could we be wrong, right? Like, I always want to make sure we're covering our basis, steel, man

of the mmt argument is that the government is not like a family, a family has to actually pay for their whole bills. But the government is both the consumer In this scenario, but also controls the currency. So unlike a normal household that has to pay their bills every month, the government has the option to create the money that it can then use to pay its own bills. And in the modern monetary theory school of thought, the only check on that would be inflation. And they kind of present that as a small caveat. And everything about modern monetary theory is literally true, it is true that the government controls its own currency, that it has the option of just printing money to pay its bills. But then they're like, oh, and the only reason that might be an issue at some point is inflation. That seems like a big issue. Like by debt. It's the issue, right? Because it's really it's like a one to one trade off, basically. I mean, if you just print money in then the amount of goods in the economy as the same aggregate price levels go up. That's very basic. So I mean, the idea of mmt it's not taken seriously, even by liberal and progressive economists. It's only some like a leftist economists that really subscribe to it. But I mean, it is a coherent theory. It's just the theory itself contains the reason why it's useless.

It's, it's, it's like, I feel like I'm in politics i want i want it's like when you hear the argument from your lefty, you know, lefty classmen, they're like, Well, listen, listen, communism, might not work in real life. But it's great on paper, right? That's the argument I hear all the time. And I'm like, No, it's not even great on paper, like the idea like you're trying to build this ginormous House of Cards. And and all it takes is maybe a little bit of inflation, to all sudden this entire house of cards comes crumbling down, because there is no strong foundation. If there's nothing of value, nothing real substance behind it, then what are you doing?

They're also they just ignore the consequences of that even other than inflation. So there are three main consequences of debt of the government debt. One is that every single year, you have to pay an interest payment on the debt. It's called servicing the debt. It's going to be trillions of dollars in the near future. We'll have to be shelling out trillions of dollars every year in taxes just to pay the interest on the debt. Though the modern monetary theory people would say just print the money to pay for that too. So it's like a big deal. It's like a cycle. It's like a circle that you faster, you run on it, you're the Gerbil on the hamster on the wheel, right, and you just run faster and faster and faster. I mean, at some point you're going to get sick and throw up. But they, the other consequences of debt are crowding out, right. So the reason that a lot of this, for example, the analysis of the infrastructure bill, the reason they say these Ivy League analysts say it won't lead to growth or job growth is because it involves running up government debt, which means the more government debt there is, the less money there is going towards private sector investment. There's only so much money out there so much resources, we're not really talking about money, we're talking about resources, there's a limited pool of resources available for investment. And the bigger the government investment through deficit is, the less there is for private sector. So even if it were true, that you could do unlimited government spending, without inflation, it would still be trading off the economy, because the bigger the deficit got the you're borrowing that money, and you're taking away investment from the private sector, which tends to be much more productive. So those are the two main consequences of the debt that the theory just can't really escape no matter how hard it tries, even liberal leaning institutions, like the Congressional Budget Office, like the nonpartisan committees in the Senate, they all acknowledge this reality. But mmt doesn't

see, this is why we can't go so long without having you on the show. Because I think every time we had you on the program, the audience isn't going to leave feeling much more well versed on being able to bring this information and talk about this with their friends. So I see. And as we kind of go towards the end of the show here, Brad, I see this a lot in my own circles, right? So I'm in the private sector, I'm on my day job, I'm not in politics, and I hear a lot of your co worker active sector. That's right. And I hear a lot of my co workers come up to me, and they'll ask my opinion, because I've gotten to the point now where, you know, we can talk about politics and stuff. And they know, like, I'm never gonna force anything on them. Like, I'm just gonna talk about ideas. And when they ask, I'll give them my opinion on things, but I'm never forcing anything. And I've gotten to the point now where I see that they have an internal desire themselves to want to be able to feel that they can walk away and talk to somebody at home, and feel educated, that they know what's happening. And it kind of spoke to me that all it takes is us to really start to be the trusted adviser and I talked about this a lot from a sales perspective, when I'm doing my trainings is being that trusted adviser being the solutions based person, but building that that not just the person that they know, they like but that they trust, that then we'll help empower them, because now they are going to be able to enter in to this kind of new world, feeling much more comfortable. And and when we can arm them with not just the information, but also showing them the importance of the information, the negative consequences of not paying attention. And then this is where we want to end the show, Brad, as we direct it this way is and then what can they do? And this is where I want to give you the platform here as we wrap up. What can folks do to feel that they have some control? I know right now, part of the main argument here is, what am I going to do about the Fed? I am one person in my hometown, how can I compete against Janet Yellen. And then you know, the Treasury printing trillions of dollars? So Brad, what are some tangible things that people can do right now to feel like they're actually making an impact? Well, I

guess I just put it like this, if every libertarian in America convinced one person to become a libertarian over the next year, the number of libertarians in America would double. That's how that works. Right. That's how math works. So I guess what I'd encourage people to do is, I constantly find this in polling bears this out that people don't actually understand what the other side believes they completely get it wrong when they're polls and asked what does a republican on average believe? What does a libertarian believer, so whatever your philosophy is, even if you are a liberal or a progressive, your goal should be entering in these conversations online or in the media, if that's what you do, but more importantly, in your everyday life, and leaving people with an understanding of what the serious and intelligent argument for your position is. It's just funny to me, because people know I'm a libertarian, but they don't know what libertarian means. You mentioned this, but for your listeners, I went on the young turks to debate socialism versus capitalism with you know, kind of a Bernie Sanders ask host, and he was great. It was nice. It was pretty confrontational debate, right? But it was great. It's on my YouTube page. If people want to check it out, just search Brad Palumbo. But the point is that at one point, he was asking me about capitalism, he was saying, but look at all what happens to illegal immigrants. They're exploited by the black market. And I said yes, so Give them all amnesty unless they've committed, you know, violent crimes or something. And he was just shook. He was stunned. He was like, What are conservative supports? And I'm like, Well, I'm a libertarian. That's what libertarians believe. Right. And they don't really understand that. So they don't even have the most basic conception. And this is true to in terms of what, how people on the right view, what people on the left think, in some ways. And so one thing I think people should try to do in their everyday lives, and they should try is just to imprint on people, what an actual serious version of your beliefs and your ideas looks like. Because if they're just consuming in echo chambers online, they're only actually getting presented with a character richer, but you have the power in real life, to show them what the real option and alternative looks like.

And and to make it easy for folks. To show exactly how to do that Brad, what we're going to do is because I love the new site that we use to host the program, because we can get our episode, not only our episode links with all the transcripts, and the the categories, but a guest profile. So in that guest profile we're going to have for you, we're going to have your YouTube links, so that people can go ahead and only find that but all your social media, but for our audio listener, I want to make sure we give them the plug your video listener they see here scrolling at the bottom of the screen, you're one of our sponsors, Brad breaking boundaries with Brad Palumbo and great interview show where you're having great conversations with, as I said in the intro teaser I did there for my ad. You're having conversations with the people who are in the driver's seats right now. I think you just had a conversation with Rand Paul recently, right? Yeah. Talk to me about that. How was that conversation?

So that was the second time he's been on the show. This one was about Dr. Fauci and the public health bureaucracy, and really the kind of the perils of big government, but that's the goal of the show is to talk to people, you know, politicians, think tankers, journalists, or just random individuals about their life story, in kind of things that are related to our politics, but not the news of the day. But talk about the big picture issues and themes that I take away from what's going on around us, whether that's immigration, or trade, or economics, or culture, war stuff, the kind of big pictures, zoomed out stuff, and just talk about the ideas rather than talk just about people or drama or what's on Twitter that day. So that's the goal of the show. People should check it out. If they like your podcast, it's kind of a similar vibe, just with a host that's even more dashing and stunning. So they should check it out breaking boundaries on any podcast app, or just search Brad Palumbo on YouTube.

Yeah, and again, we'll include so if you're on the app, go to your app, click the little Brian Nichols Show icon in the the artwork, and that will bring it to our website, click on the episodes and our guests. And of course, you can go ahead check out all of Brad's social media links. With that being said, Brad, thank you. As always, it's always a great chance to catch up with you. I always find that when we end these conversations, I myself feel much more educated, enlightened and inborn, but also better suited to go out and have these conversations with people who are like they're looking for answers. And I'll end with this real life. And I told this story before, but like you talked about talking about what people care about. I was in marshals returning something I'm in line. And I entered into this organic, just like five people outside of Philadelphia, having like a heated not like argument but like agreement about how upset they were about how things are going in our country and like with with the response to COVID and the economics in the health care and like, I just, I'm just kind of standing there watching and I'm like what has happened like you see that this is what people care about. It's not the microcosm of Twitter. So thank you for raising that up that. With that being said, though, Brad, thank you as always for joining us folks. If you want to learn more about Brad Palumbo, please again, head over to breaking boundaries, check him out in the show notes. But that being said, though, it's Brian Nichols signing up for Brad Palumbo. Thanks for joining again, Brad. Thanks for having me.

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