Axel Kaiser on Chile, Power and the future of the Right

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Hi Diego, we are back again with the podcast.

SPEAKER_05 0:24

Rashid, welcome to another episode of Somewhere Anywhere.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Yes, we're gonna have another very fun interview. It's very funny. We did a recent Chile episode. Chile comes up so often on our podcast.

SPEAKER_05 0:38

We've had our series of guests that through the years have been interested in discussing the dynamics of political life and economic life in Spain and Chile, which intertwine a lot. And we had Alberto Fisher on the podcast as well very recently, which was a very fun conversation. And we are always talking about bringing in John Mueller, who is a Chilean journalist based in Madrid. But today we have such a superstar, a towering figure of not just Chilean, but rather, I would argue, one of the most influential figures in the Latin American sphere, and just in the Anglo-Saxon sphere as well. He's a well-known figure there. And of course, I'm speaking of our friend and guest today, Axel Kaiser, who hails from Chile. He's the author of uh more than 10 books at this point. So quite a prolific author. He's the president of the FPP board, FPP being one of the more relevant think tanks in Chile. And surely, he is the senior research fellow for the Adam Smith Institute at the Florida International University in the United States. So, Axel.

SPEAKER_02 1:41

Well, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you here in Madrid, beautiful city.

SPEAKER_05 1:47

Which you know very well because your books are released here in Spain and you visit regularly.

SPEAKER_02 1:52

Yeah, I'm very happy because the books have been successful here in Spain. We've had a lot of impact with them, I guess. And every time when I come, we do a presentation, interviews for media. It makes a lot of waves. So I'm very happy.

SPEAKER_05 2:06

Do you think Madrid has become sort of a capital for like we make this case very often in the podcast that it's become kind of a hub where you have free market governments at the regional and local level, you have free marketers from Spain converging in Madrid, and then a lot of people from Latin America doing the same.

SPEAKER_02 2:22

Yes, Madrid has become like a safe haven, I would say. There is more freedom here than anywhere else in Spain and most of Europe. So people are moving here. You can see if a place is okay by the way people vote with their feet. And everyone is moving to Madrid. Uh, many Latin Americans with wealth have come here to live here and invest. And yeah, I mean, it's Madrid or Miami? That's the question for Latin Americans with money.

SPEAKER_05 2:53

That analogy is made. We're lacking a beach, man. You will just build a beach.

SPEAKER_02 2:57

Yeah, Madrid is beautiful, it's Europe, location is perfect. Uh, and the policies are good, as good as I can get, uh, considering that you have a central government that's not really home and free markets and all of that. So, yeah, I mean, and it's a very safe city. It's very safe.

SPEAKER_05 3:16

Axel, you're of German, you're German born, in fact.

SPEAKER_02 3:19

Um no, I was born in Chile, but you know, yeah, I grew up of German descent. So I had a German upbringing, I studied in Germany, and I've always had I have the passport, speak the language, I have the German culture in her.

SPEAKER_05 3:31

Yes, because your new book is called Nazi Communism.

SPEAKER_02 3:35

My latest book is Nazi Communism, and I explain in the book why essentially Marxist-Leninists and Nazis and Fascists are are the same, essentially. There are differences, but in essence, they are the same. The book was published first in Chile. It created a lot of uh reactions among prominent left-wing figures, not only in Chile, but all of Latin America. President Petro from Colombia started attacking me on Twitter, even if he had not read the book, of course. Of course. But he of course was saying, oh, the communists are the good people, and the Nazis, who is everyone else who doesn't think like he does, are the bad people. But what I did in this book is it's a deep research with primary sources, and also I have a lot of secondary literature showing the ideological identity between these two totalitarian movements, Marxist-Leninism and Nazi fascism. And I found things that I would have never thought I could find, and it has also become a best-selling book in all of Latin America. Now I'm presenting it in Spain. It was endorsed by Maria Corina Machado, also mentioned by Miley recently in an interview. So this credibility that the left has moral credibility because they were the heirs of people who fought against Nazis and the Marxists were against the Nazis, and therefore the Marxists were good and the Nazis were evil. All of this thing collapses when you really know about the philosophies behind people like Lenin, people like Stalin, Hitler, to some extent also Mussolini, and what Marx and Engels thought. I mean, if you consider Marx-Engels respectful people and thinkers that you should somehow follow and admire, you are no different than someone who thinks like Goebbels and Rosenberg and Adolf Hitler really were intellectuals that you would follow. And because in essence, fascism or Nazism and communism are exactly the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 5:33

In fact, I was in Santiago in March, and I went to a bookstore in Las Condes, and I saw that in the bookstore the entire entryway was full of your book.

SPEAKER_02 5:44

Yeah. Yeah, I sell a lot of books. I've probably become the most successful writer in Chile and in what is the field of politics, economics, in the last 10 years or so.

SPEAKER_05 5:59

So you did write a novel.

SPEAKER_02 6:01

I did write a fantasy novel, like A Lord of the Rings type of fantasy novel that was published by a very good publishing house in Spain and Chile. I'm working on the second part because it's a trilogy. And I'm working also on a script for a movie that we want to produce in the United States. It's of course full of philosophy and libertarianism and some would say conservatism, the defense of the Christian tradition, and it's anti-woke, anti-socialist, and all of these things. Because you need grand stories. You see, grand stories survive the passing of time. If you think about the most influential book in the history of humanity, it's the Bible. And the Bible, it's a story, it's not a technical treatise or not even a philosophical treaty. So you need big stories, epic stories that can inspire us and that you can pass from one generation to the next one. And that survives the passing of time. Other books, not so much, with few exceptions. So yeah, that's what I'm trying to do, fighting for the West. And I think part of it is fighting against this idea that the Marxist tradition is like somehow a good tradition, or it has good intentions, and therefore doesn't have to be condemned. And you see people with Che Guevara t-shirts and the treatment that, and I explained this in the introduction of the book, that are given to communists and Nazis should be the same, but it's not.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

One of the most obscene things to me is this perfect clash that makes the point. If you go to, for example, like gay bars and gay clubs, you will see Sheikh Rivara pictures on the wall. And you think the one place you wouldn't find that you find it.

SPEAKER_02 8:00

Yeah, it did not do very well in Castor's game. He was completely homophobic. Completely he put gates in concentration camps, and you know, many were persecuted and killed. And this is something that I don't know if it's because it's not a well-known fact. I don't know if it's that's the reason, or simply the epic and the feeling that the Che Guevara as a symbol invokes.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

No, it's complete ignorance. Because I ask people all the time. If they have no idea who he is besides a revolutionary from Cuba.

SPEAKER_05 8:35

Think a Palestinian Palestinian scarf today, and what do people know about the realities of people know more about Palestine?

SPEAKER_01 8:42

Than they do about Che Guevara. Okay, that's more.

SPEAKER_02 8:46

Yeah, probably. But I think these things are connected because you know the utopianism that you find in Marx and Lenin and Engels, and also in the Nazis, the Nazis had their own version of utopia. It's somehow also part of what drives the left today, you know, the idea that somehow, if you turn down the Western world and Israel, you will find an Arcadia where we will all be living happily because the problem is the you know, white straight guy or the Jews or whatever. And and you see that the LGTBQ movement endorsing Hamas and Palestine, these people would be killed right away on the spot if they were living there. And it's impossible for them not to know that nowadays, nevertheless, they support you know the all of this hatred against Israel and genocidal even narratives.

SPEAKER_01 9:41

Yeah, they call queers for Palestine movement. Yeah, yeah. Which again is the one of the most obscene things you can have in modern world, but you see it constantly, especially in the cosmopolitan centers of the world, where you think people have more culture, more education, but no, it's one of the parts where they have the least.

SPEAKER_02 10:00

Exactly. They have least. But my impression is that studying the 20th century and 19th century, when I was writing this book on Marx, Engels, Lenin, of course, Hitler Rosenberg, who was the main theor, you know, theorist of Gabriels, all of these guys. Um what drove them really was hate. Uh Marx was entirely driven by hate. But this ideology sounded like they were going to create paradise on Earth, which is what they promised. And I think there is an element of that in the new woke movement, which is anti anti-rationalist, as as Nazism was, as communism was. And and the promise of a world is somehow without oppression if you get rid of the evils that you see in so in society nowadays, which is, as I said, white guys, white heterosexual men and the Western culture. So they are united in hatred, they want to destroy something. This is the thing. And this is more powerful than the ability to reason and to be aware of the how lucky they are that they live in a civilization where you can be trans or gay or whatever and be respected. And this is very sad, and also for women, because lots of women support this out of compassion, but then they are not compassionate towards the women that are being completely oppressed with real oppression, not the imaginary oppression they claim that we have in the West. In in this in countries like areas like Gaza or in Iran or countries like you know, Muslim countries, or even in Europe, among Muslim communities, where women cannot do anything they want. I mean the men control everything and they do whatever they want with them. And that is not a problem for all these girls and feminists, and until probably they start being raped by these men. Then you see a change in perceptions in Germany and other countries because of the massive raping that has been taking place in the last years by immigrants coming from Arab countries and from Muslim countries mostly. And then some women are start are starting to reconsider their position. But still you have an awful amount of women who would say let's bring everyone in.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

I do think a lot of that comes down to this carnage concept of the sacred and the sacrifice. When the people who are living in the cosmopolitan centers, in some very hideous way, for them to really feel comfortable, they really need to have that idolatrous feeling. So you need to want people to sacrifice, you can't escape that feeling. So when they see the people in Palestine and the different parts of the world in some underlying concept for their own scapegoating culture, they don't really want that to go away. They need that to have that self-righteous behavior in their own culture.

SPEAKER_02 13:09

Absolutely. This has a lot to do with narcissism, also, like the idea that you are an anointed one to make the world a better place, which is the type of psychology that Marx had, that all of these people had. I don't want to say this is exactly identical, but it's the psychology of I'm the one who is chosen to change the world, and I'm the good person because I feel compassion. But at the same time, you're saying everyone else is a sinner, is not good as I am because they are not aware of the original sin that we have in society and the oppression and all of this. And so I have the right to impose my truth on everyone else because I am someone who can really see the reality for what it is, and everyone else is deluded somehow. And this is self-righteousness, this is narcissism, this is a very uh pathological way of presenting yourself to the world, like you are the Messiah somehow, or an instrument of God on earth. Even if you're an atheist, you think you're an instrument of God on earth to make a perfect place or paradise or whatever. And so it's never about really the victims that they're claiming to protect, it's about themselves. And appearing virtuous, virtuous single.

SPEAKER_01 14:28

There's a famous Kissinger quote where he mentioned the idea that the greatest problem is not evil people doing bad things, it is the righteous people doing things they perceive as good.

SPEAKER_02 14:42

I think it's for Edmund Burke originally, but yeah, I mean we have lots of good people not doing enough to defend our civilization, and I think we are in decline in the West. There is no doubt of it. I don't know what's the end game. I think some people are underestimating the you know the situation and the gravity of the situation in which we are find ourselves.

SPEAKER_05 15:11

You you have become you have always been very active on the political sphere in the realm of ideas. Yeah. But in the past several years, you have also become more open in terms of leveraging your intellectual persona into some political projects that advance your ideas, your causes. Is that your way of taking action? Did you do you see it as the natural route? Writing books and being as successful as you are, that was not enough. You needed to take that extra step, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 15:37

Yeah, I have not become uh politician myself, despite the fact that for now?

SPEAKER_05 15:42

May I say for now?

SPEAKER_02 15:43

Maybe I don't know, but many people have asked me to run for president. My my brother did that. He did very well.

SPEAKER_05 15:51

He was the third, he the third most voted candidate in this election.

SPEAKER_02 15:55

And yeah, he he got like for starting a campaign with no money and last minute and all of that, and I mean competing against very established, well-established politicians, he did very well. But you know, I've been very I think I have been influential in Latin America with my ideas, and of course I've been close to Javier Miley for 10 years, and I I've helped everything I mean with all my resources and intellectual resources, not that I have not that I have a billionaire or anything like that. And I've been very influential in Argentina, so I'm very happy to see what is going on. I'm I can keep I'm helping out there also in the cultural world so that we can have Miley re-elected next year and that the transformation of the country is successful and sustainable because if you don't change mentality, you don't change, you don't you cannot have sustainable institutional change. And this is something that I I contributed a lot to Millet's way of thinking. He wrote my book, The Fatal Ignorance, many years ago.

SPEAKER_05 16:58

Um which which which to summarize, it's a book in which you obviously make a play on the fatal conceit, right? Yes, it's quite high. And in fact, the fatal conceit in Spanish translates as la fatal arrogancia, whereas the fatal ignorance would translate as la fatal ignorancia. So the the word is actually very similar. And it was a call for the Latin American elites to commit to funding think tanks, intellectuals, those in the political sphere, fighting the good fight, in arts, in pop culture. And that was something that you were very concerned with. Correct me if I'm wrong, 15 years ago.

SPEAKER_02 17:32

Yes, I this book came out in 2009, but the most powerful part of the book was that I predicted predicted exactly what was going to happen in Chile five, seven years down the road or 10. This is what impressed some of the leading business members of the business community in the country, and that's how they approached me and why they approached me. And then we started our think tank, Foundation for Progress, which became the most influential think tank in the country, especially among young people. Um so it's about the mentality, it's about the ideas that prevail in society. And that part we have won for now in Argentina and Chile, and we are gaining momentum in other countries, even Bolivia, even in who, despite the fact that there are a problem now with the election, but even in other parts, this Ecuador too. Ecuador, it's this movement, especially a lot of young people in Latin America, they want more freedom. And there have been only a few of us who have maybe three, four people who managed to change, who made the big difference. I'm not saying there were many other people working on this, but now I'm very worried about the United States and and Europe. And I'm trying to, my book, Nazi Communism, is gonna be published in the United States. I don't know.

SPEAKER_05 18:45

Um Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Peter Tiedl himself, who you've been he met alongside José Piñera and others uh in Argentina and Chile. He likes he's a big fan of this book, right?

SPEAKER_02 18:57

Well, I mean, he hasn't read it. Um the idea, therefore, yeah. Yeah, the idea sounds interesting to him, and I'm sure he will like it once he reads it. Um so he shared the things. And yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, absolutely. And I think this is something much needed now in the United States to understand because you have democratic socialism gaining momentum, and socialism is very popular among the younger generations, and people need to understand that socialism is a destructive collectivist criminal ideology, and there is no difference between a national socialist, an Nazi, and a socialist, so-called left-wing socialist, or Marxist socialist, or communist, or even a democratic socialist, because if circumstances are right for them, most of them would create a dictatorship. It's not that I'm not saying Man Damney is now saying we have to do a revolution and kill all the rich, but he's clearly engaging in class warfare. Yeah, and he's clearly engaging in this class warfare rhetoric. And if he had power, real power, you I don't think he wouldn't he would create a dictatorship. I have no doubt about it.

SPEAKER_05 20:11

To me, it became very apparent when we had a local government in the hands of the communists here in Madrid. And what does a local government do besides regulating traffic and cleaning the streets and some other areas of it? It's a six billion budget and it's essentially city management. And for example, I was chased out of an event after being pointed out by a political leader of this local council. And it the whole thing just felt surreal to me because it was just about local policy, and we were just covering the bad stuff that they were doing, but nothing was that personal or shouldn't have been, that these folks, whenever they have power, that power mentality is does not tolerate dissent. So if that happens, and I know you and I have we once had to cancel an event here in Madrid because we knew you would be targeted, so we quote unquote canceled and we changed the date and we held it secretly. But the term I learned from you is funa, which is a Chilean term for like when you get harassed. You get people show up at your event and you get harassed. But I'm just saying, even at the local government level, at the smallest level, you get singled out, pointed out, and dissent is not tolerated under this people.

SPEAKER_02 21:23

It's not tolerated, it's their mind is completely full of mental parasites. You know, it's this God's ad book, the parasitic mind. And this has uh even biological explanations. When you endorse all of these doctrines, your brain changes. And you can become a fanatical, a killer, even. Like look at what happened to Charlie Gierk. I mean, the guy who killed him was a normal guy from a middle income class family, or even more than that, good university, good education. And nevertheless, no red flags.

SPEAKER_05 21:58

No, no red flags.

SPEAKER_02 22:00

Became radicalized by these ideas, and then he decided to kill Charlie Kirk. And then you had all the people trying to kill Trump. The guy who tried to kill Trump when he who was killed by the Secret Service. He was also a young student. Yeah. I mean, you would think these people have all their lives in front of them. They can do so many things with the time they have, they can marry children, try to make something out of their lives. And never and they choose to become killers. The same happened with the killer of the of this executive in New York. And so this is always the left. And when they started to set the CE. The healthcare CEO, the health, the Teslas on fire. When Elon Musk was doing Dodge. Yeah. And then they started vandalizing the Teslas. Who does that? And these were regular democratic people who vote for the Democratic Party.

SPEAKER_01 22:54

This is almost in line with the Hannah Arendt argument, the banality of evil. People can be radicalized through just normal, everyday people can be radicalized.

SPEAKER_02 23:04

Yeah, but I think this is even this is in a sense, this is even more worrying. Because when Hannah Arendt explained the banality of evil, she was saying, okay, this guy Eichmann was just like a cog in the whole engine of murder. He wasn't particularly anti-Semitic, he was not driven by hatred, he was not driven by anything particular, but he lost the ability of thinking because he received orders, he executed them as a result of the genocide. But these guys who are doing this on the streets are driven entirely by hatred. These are upper class people, sometimes, often even, who see a Tesla when Elon Musk was doing the Dodge thing, and they go and they vandalize the Tesla. This is terrorist behavior. But where does it come from? And you see the same thing in universities, Harvard, Yale, all of these universities full of this pro-terrorist, proto-terrorist activists. It comes from the ideologies, from the ideas. There are natural, of course, material circumstances that encourage this, but this is mostly these white upper class people that have been indoctrinated to hate themselves and hate the West. And somehow, by hating themselves and hating the West, they have found meaning in their lives and purpose, which is to destroy our civilization and behave like real fanatics that claim to have been in possession of the truth and that are therefore not open to any sort of rational dialogue. And in the end, violence takes place because, of course, when dialogue is not away anymore, then the only thing you have is violence to solve your differences.

SPEAKER_05 24:53

May I ask you as well about the very violent uprising that took place under the second Sebastian Piñera government in Chile, in which policemen actually were targeted, metro stations and buildings were set on and churches were set on fire, the streets were savaged and destroyed, and these were by the wealthiest generation of young Chileans in history. These kids had had it better than any Chilean generation before, and they were burning the streets.

SPEAKER_02 25:26

Well, I five years ago. In a book, I predicted I predicted that this would happen also in my first book, Estallido Social, a Social Explosion. It has a lot to do with the ideas. People were convinced that the country had never been more unequal, that the system had been serving only the rich and powerful. And you can see this in surveys. One of the most serious surveys conducted in Chile is by the Centro de Públicos. In December 2019, they did one, two months after the social explosion. And 56% of people claimed that the crisis had been due to inequality. But if you took a look at the numbers, at the inequality numbers, Gini Index, and especially the intergenerational genie index or the Palma index, any index you want you. The world declined. Inequality had never been lower in the history of Chile. So what happened was a combination between two factors, which was one was material, because when Michelle Bachelet came to power, she was a socialist. Her second term she said, we have to get rid of the system of the Chicago boys. We had to destroy the neoliberal system. And that's exactly the way they framed this. Why? Because of inequality in social justice. These were the arguments they used. Despite the fact that it had been the best system in the history of the country, where most people had become middle class and you had to be reduced from 50 to 10%. 10%. OECD criteria was met, so now it's considered to be a and the income of the bottom 10% grew at a much faster pace than the income of the top 10%. So there was no evidence to support this, but socialism, it's about the it's a sort of religion. And so they passed this tax reform and other reforms that completely ruined the ability to grow the Chilean economy. And so when Pinheira came back to power in his second term, after Bacheless's second term, he said, I'm gonna restore the better times. That was the slogan of his political campaign, but he was not able to do it. And so after six years of stagnation and rising costs of living and so on, many people were frustrated. If the economy had been growing at 4%, you would have never had this social explosion in 2019. People were very angry. And this is the problem when you lose the battle of ideas. People were angry because the economy was not growing, they didn't have they were losing the jobs, they didn't have growing salaries anymore, the cost of living was going up. So it created a lot of frustration. But instead of acknowledging the fact that it had been Bachelet with her socialist reform that created this situation, the left, because 90% of journalists or everything and intellectuals in Chile are left-wing, in their narrative was saying the problem is that we have too much neoliberalism. That's why the country doesn't work. So we need a new constitution that would change everything because this is a neoliberal constitution of Pinochet that would change everything, and then paradise will be here, and you will have a better pension, you would have better healthcare and education. I was fighting this idea.

SPEAKER_05 28:41

That's a boric messaging. That's boric.

SPEAKER_02 28:44

And all of the left and even some people on the right were saying this. And so Pinera, when he was facing this huge crisis, and he had no, he had he didn't have the support of the military to do anything about it because he had betrayed them in his previous term. So he was faced with the situation that he could lose his job as president, that he could be deposed by the Congress. And there were two attempts to depose him by the left. Because the political left, there are this is the political left is the terrorists that are sitting in Congress, and then you have the terrorists on the streets creating the chaos and the violence. And this was the Swiss support of Venezuela and Maduro in Chile. They destroyed dozens of subway stations and buildings and things like that, attacked Polypolice and so on. And so they came with up with the proposal to open up the possibility of a constitutional referendum to create a new constitution, which is exactly what the left wanted to, in order to start from scratch and create a country along the lines of Venezuela. Fortunately, and so Pinera conceded, and then fortunately, we had two referendums, one entry referendum to create a new constitution. 80% said yes. I said no. I was one of the few who said this is nonsense and this could end up in a complete catastrophe for the country. But then, when the public in Chile, and then we engaged like never before in the battle of ideas, when the public in Chile realized what the left really wanted to do, which was to create a socialist dictatorship in the country, and that the constitution that they were proposing created the foundations for a socialist dictatorship in the country, then we voted against it. And then we managed to dramatically change the the you know the tide, the intellectual tide in the in the country. And so now you have José Antonio Cast as president, is the first right-wing president elected probably in the history of the country because it's more to the right than the traditional. Pinera was a social democrat. He was not a right pro, he was not a really pro-market right-wing president. He was pro-market, but he was more like a social democrat type of pro-market people.

SPEAKER_05 30:49

Why? I've obviously you knew him and I only interacted with him briefly. But to me, there's always been a striking difference between him and his elder brother Jose. They were both grew up in the same household, they were both US trained. Uh Jose was a key reformist minister under Pinochet, and uh Sebastian has been twice the president of Chile. But the economic policies that Jose has always advocated for, they those laid the foundations for Chile, whereas Sebastian always seemingly wanted to take you know the more moderate route, whereas those on the other side were just going full-on radical. And that just I think it destroyed support for the traditional parties of the right and led to opportunity for cast or even your brother to run a campaign.

SPEAKER_02 31:33

Yeah, I met President Piñera many times.

SPEAKER_05 31:36

By the way, rest in peace. I mean, he died in really tragic circumstances, and he was a nice human being.

SPEAKER_02 31:40

You know, I really liked him as a person. He was like he was funny, very smart, extremely smart person, very successful, a billionaire, a businessman. And I was very grateful in the sense that he would at least listen to me occasionally. He would invite me to speak with him at his office. But he had the idea that Chile was some sort of European social democratic country. I think he never really understood the enemy nor the political reality of Chile. Because this is what happened, and Chile no one would tell you this because it's politically incorrect. But the country had been a mess for the whole of the 20th century because of the political statist and socialist politicians, both on the left and the right. Like Hayek wrote in the you don't know in the road to serfdom, he dedicated it to socialists of both of all parties. And the end game of that was Salvador Allende, the first Marxist president to be democratically elected in the world, and then the economy was completely destroyed. He tried to impose a totalitarian Marxist dictatorship in the country, and then the Chilean military, led by Pinochet, intervened and put an end to this disastrous experiment. And then the Chilean military, yes, it was an authoritarian regime, they made all of the economic reforms and the institutional reforms, they created new and new constitution, they created everything, not from scratch, because they were also based in the tradition of Chile. But Chile was successful, not because of the Concertacion, which were the left-wing governments that came in 1990.

SPEAKER_05 33:18

All they were up to the late 2000s?

SPEAKER_02 33:19

Yeah, after Pinochet lost the referendum, which was in the constitution of 1980, democracy. So the Pinochet created a constitution that limited his own power because the restoration of democracy was already established in the 1980 constitution. So he lost the referendum, which was about if he would run for president, become president with Congress and everything, or not. And she stepped down. And he gave when he gave power to the transference power to President Patricio Alwin, who had been a long-term anti-capitalist Christian Democrat, but he was in favor of the coup in 1973, the economy was growing at 10%. And you had no problems with security or anything like that. The military had taken care of all of that. And then we had 30 very good years because the center-left-wing governments that came to power basically had to accept that this was a successful economic model. The Soviet Union had recently collapsed, so socialism was very discredited. But with the passing of time, they started doing what politicians do, especially if they don't believe in the free market, which is increase the size of government, raise taxes, and this and that. And in the end, they destroyed or severely damaged the system that had been inherited from the previous regime, the military regime. And so Pinera is one of the people who thought that the default situation in Chile was prosperity under a democratic system where you know the different political parties would discuss things like as if they were in Sweden. And this was nonsense because you always had the far left and you always have an anti-capitalist mentality in most of the politicians in Chile. Even in the right among the right-wing political parties, you had many of them. And this is what created Bachelet in her second term, who came with a radical socialist agenda, and then that exploded in the face of Sebastian Pinheira. And now we are in the phase of restoration. For the first time, Chile has the chance to prove that if we have democratic regimes, we are capable of solving problems, of creating decent economic growth and also solving massive security problems. Because we now have organized crime we have at levels we had never seen before in history. Also, due to open border policies by Bachelet and Boric. We had hundreds of thousands of immigrants coming, among them many from Trenderagua and others that are the most criminal people that we have ever seen in the history of our country.

SPEAKER_05 36:04

Violence began to be quoted as a real issue for Chile. It is the number one issue now. Yeah, and it was being a very safe country.

SPEAKER_01 36:12

You mentioned previously, a while back, that for now the tide is turning. Now, of course, for now is doing a lot of work in that statement. And that comes with a general wider question is seems to me on net, free market, liberal, classical liberals, right wing, conservative, non-deep state people, they don't focus that much on ideas. This is kind of partially along the McCloskey critique of liberal thought, which is ideas are so important, but yet people don't actually explicitly focus on ideas. Most liberals don't read much, they don't read Foucault, they don't read Gerard, they don't read Burke, they don't read Arendt. It's not the vocabulary they're talking, but this is the vocabulary that works in thinking about large to change in a long-term society. And if you do, why is it that liberals don't really focus on the culture war?

SPEAKER_02 37:21

This is exactly the case I made in my book, The Fatal Ignorance. I was saying Chilean people in favor of the market, so classical liberals and so on, if you can call them like that, were not engaging in the battle of ideas, we were going to lose the country as a result of that. And we did lose the country, and we were on the verge of really losing it with the constitution that we rejected. My explanation to the fact that people who believe in a free society, entrepreneurs and intellectuals and so on, don't engage in the battle of ideas and don't really care about the battle of ideas, even though I was the first one in Latin America, maybe Spanish-speaking world, to write a book specifically about this, which was the fatal ignorance that then became very influential in Chile and on Millet and people like that. It's because it's twofold. One you have that economics has taken over everything. And it's the poor version of economics, it's not the Austrian school version of economics, it's not the you know classical education slash economists that you had a hundred years ago with Mises and Hayek, who would always, in all of their books, not all of them, but most of the books, say ideas drive everything. Ideas are what really matters, which is something that even Keynes said at the end of the general theory. And so when political economy transformed into economics and economics became more and more an applied branch of mathematics, the ability to think among intellectuals on the right disappeared. Because if you do economics nowadays, you are not a thinker, you are sort of an engineer, but not a tradesman. Yeah. You're not even you're not even an engineer because engineering is a serious science, a natural science, and again and economics is not. So these guys, the only thing they do is read papers, but at the same time, they have so much influence because they deal with the material realities of the world, GDP growth, profits, and things like that, that they have taken over also the corporate world. You have everywhere these economists, you have them in the central bank, at the central bank, you have them in government, and the debate and the discourse is always technical, very technical, which leads to groupthink.

SPEAKER_04 39:48

It leads to groupthink, but also a lack of in ideas and a lack of understanding of reality.

SPEAKER_02 39:54

I am not an economist by training. I studied law and then I did in political economy, if you want, but I've read a lot about economics, not only the Austrian school, but other stuff. But I was able to predict many more things than any economist in the country. Uh and I became famous in Chile because I was the main defender, and I still am, I think, of the legacy of the Chicago boys. Because I had no complex uh defending the Chicago boys because they had done the reforms under Pinochet, because I think the coup was necessary to prevent Chile from becoming a Marxist dictatorship, and which is not to say that crimes were not committed, I'm not denying that. And I think the government restored, the military government in Chile restored not only prosperity but freedom and democracy in our country. So this was your PhD thesis. Well, as partly because I what I did was applying Tagna's North theory of institutional change and the way that ideologies interplay with the institutional transformation and reality in order to explain from the 19th century onwards the ideological development and economic development in Chile with a focus on the Chicago boys. So this thing I think we have to correct. And now there are efforts to do that. You have more and more programs at universities doing philosophy politic politics, politics and economics, for instance.

SPEAKER_01 41:17

I'm very against that, by the way.

SPEAKER_02 41:18

You are you're very against it. You are against it? Why? Why?

SPEAKER_01 41:22

So fundamentally, I don't think economics is a problem. I think economists are the problem. The actual economics itself is quite fine. In fact, even when you do replication studies, microeconomics replicate substantially better than most quote-unquote natural satellite biology, for example. So the found 80% of all economic knowledge is just microeconomics. That's why Jim McCloskey, for example, does not like the word microeconomics because it kind of misallocates the actual energy. She calls it applied price theory. It's a better terminology, very mercatous thing as well. Yeah, yeah. But the problem is that when you do so much price theory for three years, you don't do the history, you don't do the philosophy, you don't do the other things. The problem though, when you do PPE, is that you don't do enough of anything. So you just do a bit of econ, a bit of philosophy, and a bit of politics. So you are even worse off, usually at the end of it.

SPEAKER_02 42:34

But you can but yeah, but you can learn on your own. You can learn on your own for sure. If you have the tools, because I don't think universities should give you all the knowledge you need. I think universities should give you the basis.

SPEAKER_01 42:46

That's why I'm against PPE, because when you do PPE, you don't have a strong basis in anything. You don't do an extremely detailed Hegelian essay. You don't do it.

SPEAKER_02 42:55

No, but you would never do that. You could you could spend 20 years studying Hegel.

SPEAKER_01 43:00

But the effort is worth it for three years still. Yeah, you're doing PPE, you just do a tiny bit of many things that you can do. I disagree with you. I disagree with you.

SPEAKER_05 43:09

But what's interesting here is that what Axel has done with one of his books is actually take economics to the streets. And I think that kind of connects our fundamental disagreement with that.

SPEAKER_02 43:19

I could do that because I'm not an economist by training.

SPEAKER_01 43:22

You see, this is this is the thing. Our economists that have Tara had done that too. Yeah, whoa. Yeah, he had done similar books.

SPEAKER_05 43:30

Sure, but like what like in in the Latin in the Latin American three years.

SPEAKER_02 43:34

If he has yeah, I I don't know. He has written these sort of books, like Henry Hadzlitt Economics in One Lesson.

SPEAKER_01 43:40

In the bestia type of not the the had the Hazlett book, for example, but the idea of a in a popular book for non specialists based on political economics. He has written that kind of book. Yeah, because that's what he even had done that or play to the fool at Economist goes to lunch, and all the kind of things also that are pretty popular. But he's a trained economist. Too. But importantly, he does so much other non-economic things. Well, there's one.

SPEAKER_02 44:06

It's much more than an economist.

SPEAKER_05 44:08

When you see what to comment on that, when Axel has this book, which is we can translate as a street walking economist. The street economist. The street economist. It was published in the US. Which is very observational. And it connects with free economics.

SPEAKER_02 44:20

No, it's not like free economics because it's a treatise on positive economics. It's nothing, there is nothing empirical in my book.

SPEAKER_01 44:26

No, I mean in things of who's the audience. Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:30

Yeah, it should, it could be, but I don't like I don't like free economics because it doesn't explain you really the principles of economics. It's an interesting book for someone who really knows a little bit about economics, or you even you don't know you will get value from it. But you need to understand price theory, you need to understand trade theory, you need to understand innovation theory. And to translate all of that, I why I did that. I translated all of this into 120 pages in 15 lessons. Where does your income come from? This is all applied positive economics. So yeah, anyone can understand. It's a short book. It was the most old economics book in Spanish, I think, probably in history.

SPEAKER_05 45:10

It's it's very likely that it is from at least from Spanish-speaking way. Because you sold 50,000 copies. No more.

SPEAKER_02 45:17

That was only in Chile. In Chile, only in Chile. I sold much more.

SPEAKER_05 45:19

Yeah, I sold many more copies than it was kind of a viral thing in which you had people even using the pirate version of the book.

SPEAKER_02 45:26

Yeah, it was sold being sold on the streets, and it was number one best-selling book in Chile, an economics book for over a year, only self-help books, and my book, number one.

SPEAKER_05 45:36

I think it's because you were a lawyer, you're a lawyer, I think, that that helped you get that dive be more successful, because the economics profession has become too narrow, which I think is a point that we were having in the discussion.

SPEAKER_02 45:48

Because you were coming from outside the I don't think Tyler Cohen is really an example because he's much more than an economist, he's an intellectual with uh the a polymath more than more or less. But you know more than that but 90% of the economists, the only thing they do, they've never read something like it's not the point, like a quantitative paper, but ever in their lives.

SPEAKER_01 46:09

The problem is the profession, the actual underlying data, the underlying models, the underlying idea, the underlying structural theories and price theory. They're good, they're great. The problem is that we only know price theory, it's really that's also the McCafke thing. She's also fun, she wrote textbooks on price theory, but she also wrote history books.

SPEAKER_02 46:30

But the people who really dominate the debate are the macroeconomists.

SPEAKER_01 46:36

Yes, and the macro is the problem, to be clear.

SPEAKER_02 46:38

Yeah, exactly. This is the people who dominate the public debate because it's the aggregates, is the central bank with their monetary policy, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 46:46

But that's why I've always a professional problem though, because again, still the majority of economic knowledge isn't a macro, it's a tiny portion.

SPEAKER_05 46:54

Well, one of the things that by the way drives this is to our common interest on supply side economics and the work of Art Laffer, who has always been an outcast just because he doesn't fall within the orthodoxy. But he's always it's supply side, what is supply side economics besides price theory applied to taxes and taxes seen as incentives on success on people. So for many of that, I think that what we've gotten wrong in economics, many of these elements are coming finally round back to more sensible positions. But what I think the FPP think tank, where you've had such a successful run in in Chile, one of the things that's very interesting there is that you go to their summer university, I've been there, you go to their programs, it's not just economics. You guys have a fantastic podcast. The podcast that's with the hostess and a host, these two younger members of your staff. And there they are talking about virality and they're talking about OnlyFans and human relationships.

SPEAKER_02 47:50

They're talking about But we were focusing really, really, really. I we were focusing on the philosophical foundations of a free society. It's very Hayekian in that sense. You would never read a Hayek book or paper with math in it. No, yeah. No, thank God.

SPEAKER_05 48:10

Just side note, when Hayek makes it to the US and he's he needs income, he's placed as a law professor in Chicago because Friedman was the game.

SPEAKER_01 48:18

Friedman was against Hayek coming to the econ department because they lacked math. Math it wouldn't exist.

SPEAKER_02 48:23

It's not clear that Friedman was the one, it was the econometricians, and that that's not clear what role Friedman really played.

SPEAKER_05 48:29

But uh Friedman's, I think the thing's a brother-in-law, his brother-in-law, the Jennifer book.

SPEAKER_01 48:34

She had plenty of. Maybe bitch, but she tells it with opposed to it.

SPEAKER_05 48:41

The point that is made on the biography is that ultimately Hayek was zero formulas involved as opposed to this mathematicians that understood in the current commission.

SPEAKER_02 48:52

He understood economic reality much better than any of those. Exactly.

SPEAKER_05 48:55

Without the need to just fill up the board with uh this is what I want to convey.

SPEAKER_02 49:00

If you are even if you are doing microeconomics, applied price theory, and that's everything you know, you know very little about how the world works. Agreed. You know how prices work and your models, it how resources are allocated, but then you will lose you will lose the debate against some some left-wing philosopher who argues against you in terms of ethics or whatever, or a lawyer. In Chile, this is what happened actually. We had very good economists in Chile with PhDs from MIT, from Chicago, from everywhere. Remarkable. They were completely destroyed by the lawyers and philosophers of the left. Arguing for inequality and completely destroyed. And these guys were not, they didn't have a clue what they were listening to. Yes. They did nothing, they didn't knew nothing about economic history, they knew nothing about about political economy.

SPEAKER_05 49:51

Talented as you are, talented as you are, and you know you're very talented, and you're like one of the we're friends, so clearly one of the best intellectuals at the Latin American world, not just Latin, that's the most relevant scholars in the classical liberal realm, really, in the last few decades. But you've kind of had a monopoly because you've been one of the only ones with real curiosity, not just a narrow field of focus. You've spoken about inequality, you've written novels to convey different types of messaging, you've taken law, you've taken you've taken that renaissance route of just covering all fields. I think that has given you the the influence that you deserve.

SPEAKER_02 50:25

I think I have a solid philosophical training and I have uh I have uh uh I would say reasonable economics, economic knowledge. Of course.

SPEAKER_05 50:34

I mean your book about the US financial crisis is better than 99% of the books about the US financial crisis.

SPEAKER_02 50:40

Yeah, but I don't have the math, the tools to do the math and things like that in a sophisticated way, but but I don't mind. But I think yes, many of these economists have a role to play and all that. I'm not criticizing. That's why I like Dietrich, because D3 is also very critical. I once asked her, what percentage of the papers that are published in economics you think are worth? And which percentage is not? And she said 90% or more are rubbish.

SPEAKER_01 51:07

Agreed.

SPEAKER_02 51:08

And so this is the problem with the economics profession, and this is the way they are teaching you economics.

SPEAKER_01 51:12

But this is a professional problem. I think when it comes to people who have elevated the economics profession to be so high that they're then so up in flames when the economists can't have a philosophical conversation. But there are some economists, I guess like Tyler, like other people, will say, no, but you can think of modern economic education as trade school. You do a very particular thing very well, like a plumber. We don't complain plumber can't have a hacking conversation with you. But the modern economic education is very targeted to a particular thing. When you can conflate that with everything else, then this kind of world clash of things comes.

SPEAKER_02 51:50

And it's elevate the Well, yeah, that's okay. If you think about it like that, I accept that argument. But the problem is that economists become the most influential, almost uh in some respects, public intellectuals.

SPEAKER_01 52:06

But if that is that is without a fault, is that a fault of the other people who are who could be the public intellectuals don't fight for the spotlight.

SPEAKER_02 52:18

My problem is that as an economist, it's like Hayek was saying, if you're an economist and you only know economics, you know little about economics. You should have a economics is a social economics is a social science. It's not physics, it's not engineering, it's not learning how to fix like a plumber fixes your things in the house. It's a much more complicated thing that requires interdisciplinary, I think, approaches in order to have a wider comprehension of the thing that you're talking about. Depends on what you're talking about. Unless you you want to be completely disconnected from reality and only do microeconomics models and things like that. And because you don't need to be an economist to know that if you have lower taxes and you have more freedom and you know, property rights thinks you know we are gonna have flourishings.

SPEAKER_05 53:05

There's a Nassim Tolev quote that I like, or he makes it that economics is think of economics more as a cat than as a washing machine. As in, think of it as a science that is about adaptation and behavior more, and less about something you can just program and crunch and put to work as if it we were all pawns in a model that you can just put to process and you can just extract full-on universal laws off of it.

SPEAKER_01 53:32

That's a critique of macroeconomics. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 53:37

And let me share an anecdote here because I didn't drop his. Okay, okay, interesting.

SPEAKER_02 53:44

Because he's the most stupid, arrogant person I've ever seen in my in my in my in my life. And I corrected him because he he was wrong about Michel de Montaigne, about some something. And he just blocked you. And I corrected him and he blocked me. I think it was because of that, yeah. That sounds right.

SPEAKER_05 54:02

Thin skin. It sounds like him though. No surprise there. Let me share an anecdote about Art Laffer and Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan wasn't that good on economic policy when he was a governor. He was obsessed with macroeconomics. And macroeconomics had him believe that government deficit is the only variable he should care about, which sure enough is very relevant, but he was not focusing on growth. And if you don't focus on growth, you can you can't really get the deficit down substantially over time. You can't pay debt down on a sustainable manner, you can't create the incentives for a fast-growing economy. And he but he was subject to that to that group think at the time, and the Republican elites were all of the same opinion. They were very austerity-driven, but not growth and abundance-driven as they also should be. There should be more of a balance. And he started realizing this when, you know, he was in his final years as a governor, and he came across a young Arthur Laffer who was acquainted with him because his father-in-law was the head of the kitchen at the governor's mansion. That's how he met Laffer. And what when starting to engage with Laffer, and they would have lunch once a week in Beverly Hills, Reagan actually realized how the economy he was applying as governor had nothing to do with the economy he himself had studied 40 years before, 30 years before, as a well, 30, yeah, 30 years before so, when he was a student at the Eureka College in Chicago. So that's how far removed the profession went in just a few decades. We went from the idea that this is a social science that is mostly about understanding incentives, understanding overall frameworks that drive behavior among human beings and human actions, into the obsession in the 1950s, 60s, 70s about around planning, which also affected many on our side of the spectrum with this obsession for macro that still permeates today.

SPEAKER_01 55:55

I must say though, the and I know I know it began involving me defending the profession, but at the same time, it there was never a point in formal econ art profession where there was a good view of the profession. You know, and there's like people always complain, for example, now in the European Union about how the court here always had these weird results of the competition law problems. Oh, why don't you do it in the US and have better e-com models and your judgments? That's only an innovation from the 80s because of Chicago School. Prior to that, the courts in New York during garbage when it comes to competition law because it had no economics. There was no point in time pre- or post where they had a good intervention of public economists in the US. Only for a very brief window when Chicago School was dominant in like the 80s with the Reagan administration and too, then you had like a oh, this is really good econ profession. But before it was terrible.

SPEAKER_02 56:52

Yeah, it was terrible, but it also due to the influence of German intellectuals and economists who um oh in the American Economic Association when it was founded, it was very interventionist. It was statist, and they the German thinkers like Hegel and others were influential because many of the intellectuals that were influential in the early 20th century, late 19th century in the United States went to study at German universities, which were the best in the world. And ideas like from Gustav von von Schmoller, who was protectionist and completely uh horrible in terms of his ideas, became very influential among economists also in the United States very early on in the 20th century.

SPEAKER_01 57:37

You could check the first few Nobel Prizes for economics. Yeah, yeah, that's that's a very good example.

SPEAKER_05 57:43

Yeah. I mean Samelson grasped on the profession, that cannot be understated. And textbooks. In textbook, yeah, but that's I mean that yeah, but that's how you know most of the problem, yeah. That's the problem, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 57:55

Yeah, exactly. But in the end, I I insist that you if you have such an influence as economists do have in terms of public policy, you need to know a little bit more than your stupid models, which usually are completely disconnected from reality. I don't have a lot of respect for uh econom intellectual respect for economists who are only economists, sure, because I've discussed with many of them. And even if I don't have the formal training, I can see that they don't even understand very well what they are speaking and talking about, and they buy into all of this Keynesian nonsense. And this is the problem that Hayek warned very early on when he was concerned about the Friedman essays on positive economics, and he said they were dangerous because the economy, the economist has physics envy. And so they're trying to emulate physics and the methods. And it's never going to work. I mean, there are some things you can do, but it's never going to work the same thing, the same way. Um but it gives you a credibility. The Nobel Glory, the Nobel Prize in Economics should not exist. It was not one of the original Nobel Prizes, anyways. And you give uh you know license to kill to people like Stieglitz and Krugman and all of these clowns and who have done more damage than good with the Nobel Prize, and you know, so it's not serious science economics. You have a Nobel Prize to you give a Nobel Prize to one guy who says A, and then you give a Nobel Prize to a guy who says the complete opposite. Actually, Hayek shared the Nobel Prize with the was the names guy Gordon Miller, right? Yeah, who felt completely the opposite. I mean, he was completely against everything Hayek was saying. And I think in the case of Schiller and Fama was and so it doesn't make any sense to me that economists have this halo of you know superiority and then when they halo is the for me, the halo from society is the real asthmatic problem.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:00

Because if you didn't prize the dicta of this economist in the central bank as highly as you did, then you wouldn't really have the problem of oh he's being wrong about so many things. But I'm not sure exactly what social track that led to, but it wasn't always it was it's only very recently that economists have this social prestige.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:21

And I do think that has eroded, though. I think the peak prestige for economists has eroded.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:26

Well, after after seeing Bernanike saying there no housing bubbles and everything was perfect. I mean, come on.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:31

I mean, peak prestige for for economists was you know late Alan Greenspan. That the late, not as him him being dead, I mean the the late period of Alan as it has become much more statistic since then.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:45

Even the Chicago school. I mean, the what is Chicago? No, I spoke with James Hekman about this. Yeah, it's not what it used to be.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:59

When there is this this typical surveys of about how far on the left or right-wing spectrum do you lay on all areas of academia in the US lean left? Economics leans less to the left, but it's still leaning left. Yes, so economics is also lost.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:17

But also back to your point about the original question when you said, I mean, why is it that right doesn't care so much about uh ideas? And James Buchanan has a very good essay, Saving the Soul of Classical Liberalism. And and yeah, and there he explains the reductionism in economics, the idea of homos economicus, and all of this has played a horrible role in the sense of uh reducing everything to this you know, and losing uh sight of the wider picture, which is the ethics and the normative vision of classical liberalism, which is really the soul of classical liberalism that we use, we should be uh defending and in order to win the battle of ideas against the collectivists and the socialists and the Keynesians and all of these people. I'm not saying we and he does he he did not say we shouldn't do economics like the way that we're doing it. He was saying we cannot reduce everything to this. And in my view, he was criticizing the economics profession for this reductionism.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:22

Let me ask you, actually, because we're touching on very interesting points, about your interactions with now gone Mario Vargas Yosa, who you I know you were acquainted with and and friendly with, and you were uh regular in his events. As you know, Vargas Yosa is a Nobel Prize winner in literature, and uh he's also he was also a very influential classical liberal, was always very insistent that we do not reduce the ethics of liberalism to economicism, right? So I wanted to ask you about that, your memories with him as well, and also then also wanted to talk to you about Miley and how in the close distance when you're speaking with him, I I I tend to assume, yeah, I know you've had discussions with him about dollarization and whatnot, right? But I know that most of your relationship with him is about a broader conversation of what does a freedom political platform mean. So if you could elaborate on your connection with these two, because I think it overlaps with our conversation.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:14

Well, yeah, I well I had I met Mario many times, to be honest, and but many of them in Madrid, right? Because you were even in Madrid, yes, yes, he was a nice guy. I think he was a good person. He was, of course, a great writer, but he, in my opinion, he was not really solid in terms of a political philosophy. He was incoherent, he would say one thing and then he would say a different thing. And I had an episode with him, a very polemic episode, uh, where I asked him if he thought that there were dictatorships that were not less evil than others, and he reacted in a very scandalous way, like saying, No, you cannot speak in those terms, and and so on. But the same Mario, which was I was referring, I was comparing Maduro to Pinochet, and I was saying Pinochet was clearly much less evil than I mean no doubt about it. He didn't accept that. For a personal for a Fujimori defeat, I think he had this trauma with Fujimori because for him, coming from the upper class being Mario Argasciosa, yeah, he also has had his ego that nobody like Fujimori would beat him was traumatizing, I guess. But also he came from Marxism, Mario Argasciosa. And he had a very good image of Salvador Allende. Even when we had this conversation, he defended Allende, who was a Democrat. He said, Allende was not a no-democrat. Allende wanted to create a communist dictatorship, and he was saying that. Allende received field caso for a month when after he won the election in Chile, he was not really a democrat. He used democracy in order to come to power, like the Nazis did much before him. This is nothing new. But then he would like to use, I mean, he tried to not to the same extent that other parts of his regime, because he was he was also not really a revolutionary in the sense of I would take our up the arms and go and kill people myself. He didn't have the stomach for that. But he was uh convinced Marxist and he wanted to create a communist system in Chile. But Mario didn't see all of that. So I thought his response was very his answer was very absurd. It was more about himself than about the content that I was, you know, uh discussing with him. It was more about I need to look good here, I need to be pretty in front of the public. And he never understood that democracy in the for a classical liberal democracy is not an end in itself. It's not like we are in favor of democracy even if the majority decides to kill the minority. That's democracy. We will never be in favor of that. It's better to have an authoritarian dictator. That would not do that, and that would respect liberties. And this is a case that Hayek made. And in his book La Llamadau, where Mario speaks about different thinkers that were influential on him, he criticizes Hayek for this. But this is pure, in my opinion, frivolous thinking. It's absurd. And it's because you cannot stomach the idea that reality cannot be as perfect as you imagine it as your ideals, you fall into the Nirvana fallacy. And so you compare real the options that reality gives you with your ideal world. And of course, reality doesn't give you the option. You see?

SPEAKER_05 1:06:40

Because I've seen you with him in events through the years, and I know there was respect on both ends, but I did not recall that episode, and you're absolutely right. I I recalled that when it happened.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:49

It was very polemic. I had a very bad time because many people were watching, and he was, of course, I would have handled it differently now. I would have been much harsher on him. But then we spent the whole weekend together. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:01

He could he could take it on the chin.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:03

And we had a very good time together, and he dedicated me the book. A very nice, like we are very long, you know. Yeah. Um, how you say thank you no? Yeah, thank you, no, and so on. And so it was a very nice, and I'm kind of sad I never saw him after that again. Um after 2016, yeah, and he he also became older, so he wasn't traveling as much.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:28

Yeah, we saw him more in Madrid, but less. Yeah, yeah, he wasn't traveling as much.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:32

And I wasn't traveling so much to Spain, and he was not going so much to public events. So so, but I have a good, like I think he he was a good person, very you know, very uh big ego, also, but a very good person, but a big ego and um I mean vain, a vain person, okay, but a good one and a generous one. So it's kind of one of the anecdotes I will I will write in my memoirs. But this is my I mean it's my question.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:06

I thought it was a lot going to be a lot more surface-level.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:09

He could have never he was not really a classical liberal thinker, he did not know a lot about liberalism.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:16

So, Axel, that kind of makes the problem deeper then in the thinks of this. The people that explicitly try to defend liberal ideas in a free society are typically people who are professionally trained in economics, think tanks, for example. But the artists, the musicians, the writers, the historians, they're not really persuaded innately by these ideas, or at least after their education and brainwashing. But then how then do you get and you mentioned the economists are too shallow themselves? So, where do you think then is the actual place of the battle when it comes to ideas?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:01

Look, I I am as Diego was mentioning, I'm someone who have studied the different fields deeply. I have written books, this book, Nazi Communism, which as I mentioned, created a long debate with President Petro on Twitter and has become very impactful in Latin America. It's a history of ideas, ideology, history book. I've written economic books, I've written books on populism, politics. All of these books have become best-selling books and very influential. And I have not only written the books, I've gone on television and I've debated all the leftists. The leftist historians, the leftist lawyers.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:40

What was your role with Petro about the book? What was it about?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:43

No, Petro, when I published this on Twitter and I was doing promotion for my book, Petro's thankfully, I'm happy that he did that.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:51

That's good advertising.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:52

Yeah, of course. He started attacking me, and then we engaged in a debate like for 10 tweets or so, because he, of course, as being a communist, a far leftist, he of he says everyone terrorist who is not a far leftist as a Nazi. And if I'm saying Nazis and communists are more or less the same thing, he took offense with that. So he was attacking me on Twitter and so on. And I thought I enjoyed it very much because, of course, the arguments he was giving were also absurd, and many people on the left, prominent people on the left, gave the disagree with the Nazis were persecuting the communists. And I was saying, yes, but the Stalins eradicated the Trotskyists, so that doesn't mean anything. Yeah, and the night of the long knives in Germany, the Nazis killed Nazis, so that doesn't mean that they are not the same thing in essence, you know, and and things like that. So, but it was I enjoyed it very much. But back to the point, back to the point, we can win all of these debates. We can win the debates. We need more historians who do proper history and and and who come out and speak and have the courage to engage in this battle of ideas and go to television and debate with this guy.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:01

Why don't more of these people you think have the courage? I on one hand like a list of historians and because you pay a cost.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:08

I will tell you this the thing that has happened to me. If you are in academia and you want and you are in this, and I was for a long time at universities, I have the PhD, I have the written papers. I so but if you are in academia, you have to be sort of very moderate, and you cannot be very not far left or not left, you cannot be far right or right, and I'm saying far right, libertarian, let's say.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:33

It's office politics, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:34

Yeah, it's politics. You don't know so what's and I've paid the price because I go to television and I debate these people, and they are very aggressive, and I have to be aggressive against them because otherwise I lose the debate. So I do very high quality, very high-level stuff, but I also get myself dirty. You know, I'm in the front line, I'm debating these people who have no scruples in lying, in insulting you. And so if you're a serious scholar, you're not supposed to be doing that, otherwise you lose credibility. And the same if you write books that are very successful, like it's suspicious for them, and this is an idiotic thing, very idiotic thing, especially in Latin America, but also in Europe is. Yeah, the less prestige in academia. Well, Hayek had to endure this with the road to serfdom. Like the book was so successful that and first no one wanted to publish it in the US because some of them believed he was not going to sell, but Hayek wrote in his Hayek on Hayek, he wrote, I lose almost my entire academic prestige because of the road to serfdom. Imagine that. And it's the book that did most in the 20th century to defend freedom and capitalism. So this is nothing new. And I've paid the price because you become like a politicized person that then universities are having doubt about having you or not. And despite the fact that I am much better scholar than most of the uh or many of the professors that are at different universities, even with tenure in Chile or or in many other countries, you know. Um you're not being you're not being vain. I'm sort of not entirely cancelled because Tom University would have me, but I've paid the price. And some intellectuals say, Oh, you cannot take him seriously because he He goes on TV. He goes on, he they didn't say it like this, but they just say you cannot take him seriously. But why? I I don't know. I've never read a book of that he has written. Uh but some people say that he's too polemic. That's so so they don't have the courage and they don't want to go out because this is not rewarded. Influence, real influence is not rewarded by academia. You write papers that no one reads, you get the you get your score, you get your bonus, and that's it. And that's why universities are also completely overrated, self-serving, self-serving group of people that have less and less impact, with the exceptions, of course, but less and less impact in the public debate, and they are losing to TikTokers, to YouTubeers, and people like that. See, the reputation of universities in the United States is at an all-time limit. Yeah, and this is also because of the ideologization of universities.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:14

I also think there is this just like in water, once you get on the beach, the first 10-20 meters are just almost you know feet level, right? The water barely touches you. Then you can see there's a bit of a plunge, and then the water starts reaching half of your body. And if you keep walking, there good you get to a point in which you're oh, you're three, four meters deep. You can't you need to uh swim now. That degree of depth in which you go inside a cultural battle of sorts, it there's really a big difference because I can see myself as a B-level influence type of author, right? And I can see how that has brought me no issues. When people walk over to me, it's always complimentary. When people come and say hi, it's always out of respect. And if I see some people whispering or saying something, I know I know it's not good, but it's never going to affect me. Now, those that are maybe one step, just one step ahead in the chain, like I would consider, of course, you to be on the A level. That's a completely different animal. Violence, threats, yeah, I've been attacked, insults, cancellation. I've dealt with some of the bad. But like I have an eight-year-old, right? So my son asks me sometimes, Dad, are you famous? Because these are and I'm like, no, not really. It's just a niche thing. I am known in some circles, that's it. But for those that make the just give the ex go that extra mile and really expose themselves and lead to very lasting changes, you're really exposing yourself.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:46

I don't know if you want to detail, but I know episodes of your life.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:50

Well, they have family ten people and family members have been attacked. I don't want to overshare, but you know, I've been attacked well known in Switzerland. Physically, even in Switzerland by 10 people, communists, most of them Chileans living there, but others were Swiss, Antifa gangsters, mobsters. I've been cancelled at university. I couldn't speak there because of threats. I have picked, I've gotten death threats that I'm researching with investigating with the police now in Chile. Everyone knows me back there, and so many people want me dead. This is a fact. It's all leftist. This is the difference within the left and us. I cannot go to most universities in Chile and speak because I would be in danger. But any leftist can go to all universities in Chile and speak, even the more conservative universities, and nothing, nothing would happen to them. That's the difference, you see. Um, and so I was born to fight. I think this is my role. I'm careful, of course. I'm not uh exposing myself unnecessarily. Everyone knows me, so I need to be. But most people are supporting me now. When I started, everyone was against me. Now it's 80-20. But among the 20%, you can have one crazy, you know, guy. Yeah, sort of the guy who killed Charlie Kirk, and then that's it. You only have one chance.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:06

We had Daniel Walderstrom on the podcast, and he's reading about inequality and research about inequality, and you could sense that how Daniel is a very talented economist who's done great work on inequality. You've done the moral case, he scrunched the numbers, so it's a very good companion to your book about uh inequality. But Walderstrom, you could see how he was very careful in everything he was saying and how he was presenting it. Because at the end of the day, here is a quote unquote right-winger inequality scholar in a field that is a all left-wingers around him, and he's always one sentence away from he made the point.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:42

It took him 10 years to write that book. Like you were just so careful on all the data.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:47

There's one thing worse than censorship self-censorship.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:50

I'm not willing to live like that. What is important to me is not the approval of some mediocre scholars at different universities. By the way, I have the approval of much more important and intellectual people. They really value what I do and they like my work.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:04

Speaking of that, you haven't answered my melee questions.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:06

Yeah, I will go to that. I I care about freedom. I care about freedom. And if I have to sacrifice academic prestige in order to move things forward towards freedom, I will do it. And I have been successful doing it. Anyone would admit that in Chile, anyone would admit that in Argentina and many other parts. I don't want to sound like I'm bragging, but I've been the most influential public intellectual moving the needle towards freedom in Chile in the last 15 years.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:35

I think the data is pretty clear on that.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:37

Yeah, and I've played also a very important role in Argentina. Even Millet admits that. So I'm very happy to see that these countries are turning around because this is what I was fighting for. I don't care if I get another paper published in an index journal, which I, by the way, I also do sometimes. But if they applaud me, all these lefties and this center, they have no influence. They have really they are just in the comfort zone and getting their salaries every month, and they don't want to stir up things too much, and so on. So yeah, it's not I would I would prefer it not to be like that, you know, to pay that cost. That people would, and some of them do. Some professors tell me you have to keep doing this, we cannot do it from the university, but we really admire you. There are people like that, and not a few. But in general, the establishment doesn't see things that way, they don't even have social media.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:32

Yeah, uh true.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:33

Because it's like if you are a serious scholar, you don't have social media. Yeah, I have almost one million followers, and I have more impact. That's why I sell more books, and and and also because my books are, I think, are a good read and are original in the way. Don't be vain, though.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:47

You were you were saying you're talking about Mario being vain, don't be vain. Yeah, okay. No, but they are going, I'm just being fucking with you. What about Mile? We want some dirt on not dirt, like give us some give us melee.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:02

I want to get some what's wrong. Prep the Mile point with this. I'm pretty sure I'm correct when I say Mile is the only current president in the world that actually knows who Michel Foucault actually is. And Mile wrote a book, he co-authored a book in 2018, Libertad, Libertad, Libertad. Yeah, which is a line from the National Anthem of Argentina, which is a very good point there, but Liberty. In the introduction or in the preface, he in the very close mentions Foucault talking about how Foucault knew that before you change politics, you have to change people. And I see him so recently I did a podcast with a scholar from King's College, Mark Pennington. He actually wrote a Mark, he wrote a book about Foucault arguing how Foucault had a lot of very libertarian tendencies, especially the latter part of his life. And for years and years, because I did my undergraduate thesis on Foucault, I took it all the way through, and I was arguing for a long time that Foucault is not this left-wing person people think he is, but he has a lot of right-wing offerings, especially before he died. And his last lecture series at the University of Paris, he actually said, You guys need to read Austrians, you need to read Myces. Else Foucault that was saying these kind of things. And for a long time, people I only learned about this through you. Yeah, people on the right don't read Foucault. He's an evil leftist person, right? But kind of goes back to the point of people on the right don't tend to read. I mean and Mark again, the book about populism borrows a lot.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:44

I just published a paper about in the Canadian journal Hayek and the whole postmodern thing that is taking place right now because it's the is the it was the 65th anniversary of the Constitution of Liberty. So he contributed with a paper for Cosmos and Taxis.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:04

But Foucault is not influential for that reason. Foucault was influential and Foucault was also treasured by the left, even today. Not because late in his life said things like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:16

Oh no, I agree. I agree.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:18

Because of his previous work, which was completely toxic and disastrous.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:22

A lot of it was, but people, the point in making that in scholarship, people people do change. People do change how they can.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:30

I need to read the Mark Bennington.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:32

And he wrote a book about how he relates and he relates it a lot of the work from Hayek and so on as well.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:38

As long as you remain a postmodern in terms of epistemology, I I don't think that's true.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:43

I think you can still be postmodern, but also still be properly liberal in this sense.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:48

But it depends how you define post-modern. Correct. Because Hayek is clearly not a postmodern in the sense of denying the existence of objective truths, uh truths outside social constructions and society and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:00

But the postmodernism of Foucault isn't the post-Foucault post-modernism of the current academic left. That's the big difference. So a lot of work about Foucault is people that interpret Foucault.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:14

In a way, Keynes's Keynesianism is not exactly Keynes, just like Foucault Foucault's Chinese.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:24

Keynes created a lot. I mean, Keynes was probably not as bad as some of his followers, but he was very bad. He saw the the the Foucault was very bad. I mean, if you read not only him directly, I've read Foucault. I had to read it for my.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:37

You quote Foucault and Gramsci extensively on your book.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:40

Yeah, Gramsci seems to me, yeah, yeah. I think I think Miley is referring to Gramsci in the in the proper So Peace is a deeper point.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:48

He said Foucault, but he clearly meant Gramsci. Yeah, he because Foucault's idea of change is not actually top-down at all. But Gramsci had a very top-down view of change.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:59

Yeah, probably there is a confusion there. He used the wrong because also it's really interesting that in Argentina, Foucault is like you go to any bookstore, and it's everything is Foucault. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unbelievable. I don't I'm not saying he didn't have valid points, but I think overall the postmodern view created a lot of damage, and it's partly responsible for the decline of the West. I'm not the only one saying this.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:21

Sure. Yeah, the black. I agree with this point. I agree with that point. The post-modern, the general view of post-modernism, that aspect that's true, is a real deep, sinister problem.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:33

But but well, about about Millet, you know, um the good news I think is that he's gonna be re-elected next year. Last time I spoke with him was a couple of months ago. We spoke for a long time. They have done everything in their power, the opposition to derail the government. And he has been successful. Anyone who has bet against Millet over the last has lost. Has lost. And I've been always betting in his favor and I've won all the bets. And so I think he's gonna win next year because the economies also will be doing much better. Because he is like a founding father of a new Argentina, that's the reality.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:13

How did you guys converge? Because you've known each other for years.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:17

Yes, I mean this is a fun story, but he really liked my book, The Fatal Ignorance, and he was sort of following me before he became so famous. And we had a friend in common, and he organized uh like a coffee.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:36

Who is this? Can we do it?

SPEAKER_02 1:25:37

Alejandro Oñoani.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:38

Ah, okay. Yeah, sure. Who is now an MP in Congress.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:43

Yeah. And he and Miley had the books, I think one or two books of mine, and I went to him and he asked me to sign them for him. So and then we uh started keeping in contact, and I always defended him from the start because when Miley started to become famous in Argentina, the painful thing was that he was attacked by many classical liberals or pro-market people. What was he? The establishment.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:08

There was a very well-positioned establishment was attacking him anyways, but no, no, the the establishment of the liberal market establishment.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:18

Yeah, yes. I think it was mostly envy. Okay. Because when Millet started doing what he did, he became so famous so rapidly, overshadowing everyone else.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:32

There's two things you can do, right? You're a classical liberal promoting classical liberal ideas in Argentina, right? Or a libertarian. And suddenly this new guy comes up. You can either be proud that he's taking the torch and running real far with it, or you can get jealous. I think many people got jealousy.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:48

Was it was it from the beginning that Millet's public intention was politics or was just ideas first?

SPEAKER_02 1:26:54

Oh, he started, and I think I uh my book was very influential in that the cultural fight, the cultural war was for him like an eye-opener when he read the book.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:02

And he understood show business, the politics of media.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:04

Yeah, and he's also like that's his personality, also, it's not like he's completely different. I mean, but he didn't think that his aim originally, but he was uh deeply worried about the future of Argentina, the way things were going, and that this was an end game for Argentina, that he's gonna end up in hyperinflation, it's gonna be a complete catastrophe, 90% of poverty, we will have you know social collapse, everything. And so he's a very patriotic person, and he entered the you know this public sphere, and with his style and his arguments and things like that, he became extremely popular very rapidly. Social media helped a lot also. And I defended him all the way because I was seeing how he was moving masses of people that we were not moving before him. So yeah, that people were arguing, but he the way he's And insults and so on. See, and I was telling them this is war. This is war. This is not about you know meeting your future son-in-law. It's about fighting people who are very evil. Very evil. And he's moving the overton window, and he's bringing more and more people closer to freedom, which is what we need. And then when he was a candidate, I supported I was speaking in favor of him, and I thought he was going to win. I thought that may way before he became a politician, thought that this guy could be compressed, you know, I had his intuition. And when he was a candidate, I of course defended him. And when he was elected, I defended him because people were saying, oh, he's gonna last three months. And I never thought that was going to be the case for the simple reason that the cultural revolution that we did in Argentina, Millet being the main factor behind it, but changed the minds of millions of people that are not permanent anymore, but they are pro-market or libertarians, especially young people. So this is a structural change. It's not something like, oh, we are retired because this the government's corrupt. So we change governments.

SPEAKER_05 1:29:11

Let's bring Macri to see if it fixes things. No, it wasn't that.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:14

It's not what it was not only rejection of the Kirchner's and establishment. No, no, no, no. It's much something much deeper. This is what people don't understand that political scientists didn't see coming, they don't understand, and they never thought that he was going to be successful because all of these guys don't understand the importance of ideas and cultural change. This is not taught at universities, no one knows about it. Political scientists, they now they do math also now. They do some sort of nonsensical models to explain this and that. Yeah. Instead of really thinking, which is what they used to do. And I think this is the this is a one-in-a-century event that we are having and witnessing in Argentina. And I believe it's gonna be uh I hope I'm not wrong, in the next decades to come, the most prosperous country in the world. It's gonna grow at a faster rate than most countries at least. And we will have a lot of immigrants, I guess, coming from Europe because Europe, I don't see any future that Europe will recover from the stagnation. I mean, maybe it will, maybe Germany will start doing things if AFT comes to power, they would change things.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:20

I feel the same could have been said about Argentina. I don't see any future where Argentina could recover pre-Milay.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:29

No, I saw it when Millet. But it's the pre-millet. There is a I saw it pre-milay because we were seeing how ideas were changing. And when you have a change in ideas and the tide of ideas, you can have then real political change. Maybe it will happen. Probably if it happens in Germany, Germany will lead the way. But I'm not entirely sure. And also you have here the prone with migration and all of these issues. Okay might give a surprise, also. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:56

But think about this. Next year at the end of the year. But if you have next year, if Maloney wins again in December, if a Pepe advanced to a coalition in Spain next year, if Bordello wins in France also again next year, Portugal is a central right goal. All in the same year, then the actual European Council has a bunch of right people at the same time. Everything in the union depends on the council for change. The reason things in the union can't change because it's shoehorn in the council of legislation. So if they actually want change and they're concurrent, we can see a substantial change in the world. Yeah, I hope so.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:35

I hope so. It's simply hard to see, you know, and also an additional thing. And creating a surplus. And if you don't do that in Europe, and I don't know if you politically can, I mean, there is no way you're gonna I mean really have a major economic change. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:56

I'm by no means I'm saying anyone in Europe right now is close to being Miley. This is a true statement. Miley is a three-generous figure, especially current modern politics. But in Argentina, you talk about freedom. Do you find it a bit uneasy? Maybe you don't agree with the premise. Do you find it uneasy about some of the intellectual alignments that Miley has made people, for example, Augustin Lache and Marquez and so on, who any liberal, at least a European liberal, wouldn't call freedom loving in the open society sense.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:35

No, but I think they are freedom-loving people. There are differences between Lache and Marquez, of course, also. Marquez, I guess, is much more aggressive. It's harsh on different things, and he has these issues with more of the cultural gay thing and all of that, which I think I don't agree with him. But mostly someone like Lache is concerned about is concerned about the sustaining the traditional values of the West, but he's entirely pro-market. In that sense, he's pro-freedom freedom in the big thick way. Yeah, but he's pro-market, but he has like abortion, not so much, of course, because he's a Catholic. I'm more and more against abortion also with time. I I have to tell you. I've changed my mind on this. It's a legitimate debate in any case. And also anti-woke. That's the thing. I am also 100% anti-woke. I think all of the woke movement is complete totalitarian, it's nonsense, it's absurd. It brings you LGTB people in favor of Hamas. It's completely crazy deranged. Negating differences, biological differences between women and men, absolutely absurd.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:45

There's some readable, there's some reasonable parts of woke that are worth. For example, in right now in Uganda or Senegal, they just increase the if you're a gay person, you can go to the state.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:59

Yeah, but it's not woke to be against that.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:02

But this is the problem though, right? Which aspect of walk is considered could be not woke to be against something?

SPEAKER_02 1:34:10

No, no, no. Woke is a comp is a very specific thing. It has nothing to do with classical liberalism, which argues for equal treatment and respect of freedom of every individual. You don't need woke to argue that you shouldn't punish homosexuals. No, classical liberal person would agree. And even conservative people would tell you, no, you shouldn't put people in prison because they, you know. So that's a complete, it's like the feminist thing. You don't need Simon de Beauvoir to argue for rule of law, basically, equality before the law. What woke is basically an attempt to deconstruct and destroy Western civilization, including the rule of law. So all of these special quotas for special people, unequal treatment, the idea that there is no objective truth, and therefore you can identify as an animal and that's okay. Having men competing with women in sports, all of that, and cancel culture is very much part of it. Anti-freedom of speech movement, the victimhood ideology that you have systemic oppression against certain races and certain groups of people in Western countries, which I think it's complete nonsense, and there is no evidence to support that whatsoever. That is woke.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:22

But here's the problem. Of course, I agree, to be clear. I am by no means I am gay, but I am not at all woke either. However, oftentimes when people argue, not say you are doing this, but Marquez does this. When you argue against woke, you want to throw everything out with the bathwater. He said this by his book, by the way. Things like that kind of go into the same kind of directionality. Yeah, but that's the action.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:52

I think that's a very particular case in that that's that's Marquez. I'm not saying there are there aren't other people who've argued that, even in the United States and other parts. But yeah, that's that's that goes way too far for me. I mean, that's also a scientific question that I think it's not even a moral question. Are you as gay as you're uh do you have a mental illness or not? It's something that that medicine should answer. Sure. In my opinion, it's very clear that it's not the case. But yeah, I wouldn't take that as representative of you know a big movement. I think it's a very fringe group of people who would say something like that. And you know, sometimes you don't know what the real reason is for arguing something like this. So if I'm since we're not gonna be here, yeah, I know what you mean.

SPEAKER_05 1:36:36

We are throwing some interesting topics here. You are the co-author of a book on populism with with Gloria Alvarez, who is was very she's a very popular libertarian figure as well, and she leans more towards uh what we could say left-wing libertarianism or very anti-conservative. Uh, she has released a book about why she is not a conservative in which she makes points that many of those you have aligned with lately on the center-right spectrum in this platform, like for example, the Millet Camp, that's a direct attack on them. So you are the co-authors of a book. You wrote a book together about against the idea of populism and voluntarin's.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:18

Well, before you jump into the answer, could you I want to jump on that kind of question where the famous Rothbard essay about libertarian populism, where you sometimes actually have to do a coalition with more conservative elements, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:32

Let's mesh those two together.

SPEAKER_05 1:37:33

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:34

Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. I mean, if you have a common enemy that is uh trying to destroy your country or whatever. I don't think the difference between libertarians and conservatives are really that important when it comes to economics, they mostly agree. Not me either, by the way. They mostly agree. Maybe you have uh moral issues like abortion, which is a very divisive issue. Yeah, there you can have some, but this is not important if you're facing a movement or uh or someone who wants to create a socialist dictatorship in your country.

SPEAKER_05 1:38:04

But abortion, for example, that was the driving wedge between, for example, uh Lache and Gloria.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:10

I think there were more things I have a very nuanced approach to the abortion issue. I somehow don't, of course, I'm against abortion at the eighth month or ninth month. I would always be against that. And the window for abortion, in my view, worldview has been shrinking because I've been seeing the photos and of the embryonic development. It's like it's something very intuitive about it for me. But I don't think it's worth to fight over these issues because the left always throw these things so we can fight among each other and then they retain power and it's worse for everyone. So you see. So I I mean, if you read thinkers like Hayek, Hayek was not, first of all, he was not a libertarian. He was a classical liberal.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:52

And he was much.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:56

I think the libertarian proposal is a much more, in a sense, I argued against Werta de Soto in an essay I published, it was published recently, much more it has much more to do with anarcho-capitalism, it's much more utopianist, utopian than a realist position. This principle of non-aggression, which I share, of course, but it goes so far that you when you have to deal with reality and offer theoretical responses to reality, if you only keep the non-aggression principle, it doesn't give you good answers. It gives you very bad answers, actually. So that's a problem. So Hayek was speaking about the importance of family, the importance of religion, and all of these things, that the importance of Christianity, he didn't develop that deeply, but he saw collectivism as a reaction against the individualist tradition of Christianity, the Renaissance and Greece and so on. So it's much more sophisticated than people think. And that's where I I see people like Gloria, I think they have not studied it deeply enough. And I understand this is the thing. I understand people who have resentment against conservatives and conservatism. And I wouldn't conflate both things because it is true and it is the case that conservatives, especially in the Catholic Church in in Spain, Latin America, and other parts, have been very mean and very cruel to people who got divorced, to people who are gay, to people who are whatever. They have been in the past. I think this is changing now, but this is a fact. So it as an emotional position, I can really understand. But isn't it? I would come I would not conflate what Jesus said with what some people in the Catholic Church or followers or priests are saying or are dictating, because I don't think that Jesus would have agreed with you know treating homosexuals like or women or minorities, whatever, because they are not complying with what the bishop expects in a problem.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:01

Well, the problem people have is the church institution and the doctrine. Yeah, not distinguish the underlying ideas.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:07

I would distinguish between the two of them. And I think there are also good elements within the Catholic Church, but there has been. And I have family, I have friends who have had to endure this in the past, and so I can understand that people say, you know, they're not.

SPEAKER_05 1:41:20

But it does to me, it's always felt like some of these points are valid, but they remain not so relevant for current-day debate. Like if you want to take this read on history, I'm on your side 100%.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:30

No, no, but I I would just again I would distinguish between the doctrine and the behavior because the problem with the church.

SPEAKER_05 1:41:37

No, but look at behavior today, like any, I think the openness that was shown under Pope Francis towards these topics has been later continued by the socialists. Yeah, socialist. By uh Pope that is seen as more conservative or more moderate.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:52

But I'm not saying to distinguish, I'm not saying the Catholic Church should go and say, okay, gay marriage is either. Right? It's not that there isn't. But it's different if church you are going to in your city or your town, then you have a son who is gay or something like that. Oh, nowadays it's not an issue, but it 20-30 years ago it was an issue. If you were living with a partner, you were not married. Why, but why is it why is it and then they condemn you and you make your life impossible and you're a sinner and they they pawn you with the finger? Agreed. This is horrible.

SPEAKER_05 1:42:23

But these critiques uh are being done today, and these behaviors are not seen in the Catholic Church. Oh, yeah. These critiques are not valid today. And when Hayek was publishing Why I'm Not a Conservative, yeah, he was also kind of straw man, he was using a straw man type of argument because the sort of Catholicism and the conservatism and religious uh right that he was describing was more in the past than in the past.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:47

But I think he was referring to something different because, and there is actually a very good essay by Roger Scruton saying why Hayek is a conservative. Yeah, yes, and I think he was referring more to a type of mindset that resists all sort of change and progress because it's very scared and afraid of progress. And so there was a brand of conservatism that was very nationalistic and very anti-market. Yeah, you see post-war consensus of the right in the US is and so they were against free trade, against against free markets, you know, sort of more inclined to the government controlling. The Reagan anecdote I shared before. Exactly. So he he had more in mind this type of mindset, and you see a little bit of that coming back in the United States with all the protectionists.

SPEAKER_05 1:43:34

More than a little.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:35

Yeah, a lot, a lot. With all the protectionist thing, you know, the protectionist idea that we don't have a national economy and the free trade, and free trade is a threat to us, and all of this is of course doesn't make any sense. So in that sense, I think I wouldn't be a conservative either. But in the sense of in the sense of preserving institutions that have evolved over time, and you don't want to start from scratch and do a revolution like the you know socialist revolutions, yes, we are all conservatives.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:06

But let me then come to the end here. This is the call it a deep fissure between the politics of the right and politics of the left in a very called a sentimental way. No sentimental way, in the sense of simply intrinsically, right or wrong, but it's mostly right. People on the left see their politics as one of compassion, and people on the right try to make the argument that their politics is one of compassion, but the things that they all the major compassionate things a modern man or modern woman would say that came true were factually done by right left-wing people. For example, here in Spain, for example, the it was Pesoe that did the gay marriage against complete against the church, against most of society, against the Pepe. And for that single thing alone, you ask people now still, why do you support Pesoe? They're compassionate. But then when you hear another rhetoric of more liberal people, they they never really focus on this thing. They focus on abstract freedom, the abstract ideas of freedom, but the actual people, in terms of what people see, that's giving real freedom to population is still less than people. Why do you think, or in which ways could you think liberals in the right wing, the classical liberal libertarians, can actually move to become a more ideas or seen to be not only ideas of liberty in abstraction, but liberty in real life, real people's lives?

SPEAKER_02 1:45:51

It's a very good point, but I think the compassion side has also shifted because when you have, for instance, biologically male athletes competing with women, you see the drama of the women who are losing and losing and losing. And then, yes, it looks kind of like compassionate if you allow a trans person to compete, but at the same time, you are creating a lot of misery. And it's check a box and fighting. Intuitively, it's also unfair. Like most people will think, okay, you know, if you have a male body and all of that, it's unfair to compete against women. So I don't I'm not sure that they still have a claim of to compassion, probably more than the right hand. Yeah, they're they're perceived to have. And this is also one of the reasons that explains the movement against Israel and the Gaza story and so on. But I I think it has changed a lot. Also, the consequences, for instance, of open borders. You see, in Europe especially, you see the right-wing party is growing a lot because of migration. So yeah, I look like compassionate to say, well, everyone should come. But then when the experience starts happening and it's a disaster for many people or for millions of people, then it starts shifting. Now AFT is probably the greatest party in Germany and uh the biggest party in Germany, and this is uh would have been in consideration. Migration is the biggest concern in Spain, yeah, in box and so on. And so then other, I think, instincts start playing a role, and not only compassion, which is self-preservation, a national identity. Who are you? Who you really are. And so the violence and order, which is really important, not to have criminals, to be able to walk on the streets as a girl and not being afraid of being raped by someone and so on, which Europe had all of that. It was in Germany, it was very safe, even when I was studying there, and now it's not anymore. You know, people and especially girls, girls. All girls tell you nowadays I have to be more careful. Gays too. Gays too, yeah. Gays too, yes, of course. This is insane. And gays are now in Germany. I read, they are going more and more in favor for EF. Also France whose leader is so. Yeah, I mean, being compassionate is very easy when you don't pay the cost. Now this is changing, and other instincts are trying are connecting with people or with are starting to I think you've made a great point of balancing the compassion, which is necessary, but it's one part of a broader compassion. Compassion has to be very focused and very prudential and rational.

SPEAKER_05 1:48:24

And part of a like you said, part of a broader conversation. There is an element of compassion because then there is elements of many other variables.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:32

Everywhere in the West, but I I was in Germany, I saw it. When you said something against open borders, everyone coming in, it was like you are a Nazi right away. Yeah, or you're a Nazi. But now the conversation has changed dramatically. All of the talk shows that I used to watch are saying, oh, we should do something about migrants. How is it possible that half of the people getting money from the government subsidies, Bruggerkeld is the name in German, not even Germans, and Germans are having a very bad time because the economy is doing poorly and so on. So it has changed a lot, and this is a good sign, right? But you are right that I think the left drew a lot of political capital from this idea of compassion. And it's starting to lose the lose the battle because other things has become other issues have become more pressure. As I said, the idea of community, survival, identity, all of that has become more uh more pressing issues when you don't feel like you are in the UK anymore because in your neighborhood you are 50% Pakistanis, and and you are an old lady, 70-year-old lady that saw a different country. Yeah, yeah, and you start saying, I mean, I don't want to live, I don't belong here, and this is my country. And this is very, very uh traumatic experience. And I think that brings a lot of people to parties like reform or restore, and and so yeah, I mean, um so I'm glad this is changing because otherwise it would have been the complete destruction of everything.

SPEAKER_05 1:49:58

So we came here with no written questions. We said we would just go and improvise and have a great conversation, and we've surely no planning. Yes, uh the best plan is having no plan. But with someone that like I, Axel, we could really stay here all day and speak about many different topics. I just urge all of our listeners to keep an eye on his book, which will be coming out in English. Some of his books are already available in English as well, so do check those out. He's giving out interviews if you want to follow his work for the IA in the UK and other institutions. So there is a lot of Axel Kaiser work out there in English beyond the Spanish, of course. But the opportunity to have this conversation with you today was very fun. So, as always, you know, this is your home, so in your next visit, yeah, we'll have part two. And Rashid just wrapped this one up. But of my end, thanks for this, Axel. It's always fun.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:49

Oh, thank you very much. It was really interesting conversation. Anytime you want to repeat it, I'll be available. So perfect.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:56

So until next time, that's it for the podcast.