Nick Gillespie
speaker
229 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Nick Gillespie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Oh, well, thank you, John. It's a real treat. And it's always nice to be called grounded because normally I'm talked about as something less than grounded. So thank you.
Yeah, I think so. And part of it is that I grew up as a journalist, or I started working as a journalist, then I went to grad school for literary studies. And then I had to come back. It was still in my blood. Somehow that big payoff in being an English professor didn't materialize.
Well, I actually did get my start working at teen magazines and music magazines. I worked for a place called Teen Machine at some point. Teen Machine. But even in my teen mag days, I was always interested in starting with some facts. It's not like a card you lay down and then the conversation stops. I've been a reason since 1993. The magazine started in 1968.
I did a cover story about how everybody was talking about, and this was a big Hillary Clinton thing. children were at risk like they had never been before like you know worse than the little rascals those those kids had a good compared to kids growing up in the fucking like late 1990s and all i started with was like a list of you know how much better children are doing right
Well, you know, I'm 61 years old. I was born in 1963. The average lead levels in kids growing up in the 60s would have triggered massive medical interventions in the late 90s because, you know, lead, leaded gasoline, lead paint, lead pencils, you know, lead cereal, I'm sure.
And they filled you up for the whole day, yeah. No, but so, I mean, this just gets back to the point of like, I think it's always important to, when we start talking about stuff, especially today, because, you know, people are nuts, is like, can we agree on some common facts, right? Yeah.
You have to be because you want to go where the jokes are and you want to be able to think a certain way and then express it.
Yeah. So, and this is where I guess I am grounded because I'm not an anarchist or an anarcho-capitalist, which a lot of people say where, you know, no government is ever necessary or kind of the same thing that anything the government does is by force and theft and is illegitimate. And they also suck at everything they do. Why would we have them do anything?
You know, that's one strain of kind of libertarian thinking. I'm much more like Milton Friedman, you know, a proud New Jerseyan, everything good. Friedman? Where was he from? He's from, I think he was born in Newark and grew up in Robway. You know, Robway's two most famous residents are Milton Friedman and Reuben Hurricane Carter.
I was going to say, if you don't name somebody from the prison, you're just not working hard enough. Right. But over the course of my career, I've become much more of what I call a directional libertarian, which is that I'm not that interested in like, okay, let's build a perfect philosophical foundation that makes perfect mathematical and philosophical sense.
It's like, are we heading in the direction of more individual freedom where people can live how they want to, where business owners can do what they want to, where people you know, where things are looser and people are able to make more choices that matter in their lives.
For me, the question isn't, you know, whether or not the government is funding something, it's are we going in the right direction or not?
And so to bring that back to this question of regulation of things like lead, you know, the single biggest thing to help air quality in the United States, arguably, was the environmental pollution, you know, kind of standards that were passed in the late 60s and early 70s under the
Yeah, and by banning, and it took many years.
Well, no, because I'm a libertarian, I will pick a nit with you about DDT in just a second. But with leaded, getting rid of leaded gasoline, and the atmosphere is a common. So it's not like you can't say, oh, the lead you're emitting, I'm going to sue you in court for that because it would take forever and it's never going to work or anything. But
And, you know, by saying, okay, we're taking leaded gasoline. I mean, you know, most people in America now, I think probably were not, you know, grew up with leaded gasoline versus unleaded, you know, and all of that kind of shit. And it's like by taking leaded gasoline out of the air, that had a major positive effect on the environment.
Yeah, no, it's like, just breathe in, you know, because you're huffing anyway. That's right. So even when you're saying like, okay, we're going to build a consensus and say, we want to get leaded gasoline out of the air because it has these negative effects. You can do it smarter and dumber.
And like the way the government did it, and this was Nixon's EPA said, okay, we're going to mandate catalytic converters, which is a particular type of technology that takes a lot of the lead out of emissions. I mean, as well as changing how we formulate gasoline.
um but um you know it's like the government probably shouldn't be dictating technology or it could set a goal and say you have to reduce pollution by so much but then we're going to let you and we're going to let the market innovate to figure out what's the best way to do it are you for government then incentivizing those kinds of changes like is would that be or is that considered an intervention that
Yeah, well, I mean, it gets complicated pretty quickly and, you know, obviously, right? Yeah. But it's where it might be that, you know, we want you to reduce your amount of pollution, however we define it. That's one thing. But then say, oh, and by the way, we're going to give you a massive taxpayer subsidy and then give taxpayers credits to buy this one kind of technology.
Showing 1–20 of 229 · page 1 of 12
Next →