January 10, 2025 • 36 mins
In this episode, Karol speaks with Matt Welch, editor at large of Reason Magazine, about his journey in libertarianism, the evolution of journalism, the impact of educational policies in Brooklyn, the decline of public trust in institutions, and personal growth. They explore the challenges facing journalism today, the implications of equity in education, and the broader societal shifts that have occurred since 9/11. The Karol Markowicz Show is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Wednesday & Friday.
Follow Clay & Buck on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/clayandbuck
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Marcos Show on Imheartradio.
There's been a trend on social media of women taping
themselves telling their husbands that they can't pay the mortgage.
The implication is that obviously these women have never paid
the mortgage, and the men are confused by what they're saying.
(00:25):
I can't pay the mortgage this month.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
You know who our mortgage provider?
Speaker 1 (00:31):
I know, but I wanted to pay it and I
can't pay it. You don't even know who are coming
and you can, David, I really can't pay the rent
this month. Well, I can't help you depending on that.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
I just I spent it all and I don't even
think I'm gonna.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Have rent for next year. So I'm just like, you
don't know?
Speaker 2 (00:54):
So, yes, when have you ever paid rent?
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Everest?
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Where do you go to pay rent? Where do you
even go? Who do we go pay rents? You don't stop?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
I'm not going to pay the mortgage this month. Well,
I can't pay the mortgage this month.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
I tried this on my own husband, because I too
have never paid the mortgage. I was laughing so hard
that I couldn't get the words out I was crying.
I just thought it was so funny. I knew that
I wouldn't be able to deliver the words to him.
He thought I was trying to tell him that I
couldn't pee because I couldn't get the word pay out anyway.
(01:41):
The comments have been a mix of two things, one
women wondering where they can get a man who pays
the mortgage, and two women criticizing these women for letting
a man take care of them. It's this second group
that I want to talk about. These voices always from
other women telling women that they can't pened on men.
(02:01):
But here's an actual example of a bunch of women
depending on their man successfully, and they still feel the
need to criticize. This anti man thing has developed, and
it's been going on for well over a decade, maybe longer.
It's so unhealthy seeing men as bad or untrustworthy. It's
(02:21):
not good for any of us. And the women in
the first group they don't believe the second group anyway.
They want a man to take care of them. They
believe he exists. They see it in action, and they
want it. Why wouldn't they As we're talking about all
the woke stuff that we're hopefully going to leave in
the past this whole Men are terrible. Men will leave
you at any moment. My aunt once trust the demand
(02:44):
to pay the mortgage and he spent their money on strippers,
wide paintbrush. Thing has got to go. Some men are bad,
most or not. We focus on the outlier stories of
bad guys and ignore the masses of men living quiet
lives and taking care of their families and doing what
they have to do. The last thing I want to
(03:04):
say is that the mortgage video leads people to believe
that these women aren't contributing at home. Maybe they're stay
at home moms, Maybe they just don't do the mortgage payments.
I contribute, but it was still hilarious that I would
be paying the mortgage because that's just not my department.
It's okay. It's preferable even for spouses to have their
(03:25):
own lanes in a marriage. I've talked about it on
here before, and I think it works very well for us.
If you want to send in your suggestions or tell
me anything else, drop me a line at Carol Maarkowitz
Show at gmail dot com. Coming up next and interview
with Matt Welch. Join us after the break, Welcome back
(03:46):
to the Carol Marcowitz Show on iHeartRadio. My guest today
is Matt Welch. Matt is editor at Large of Reason
Magazine and co host of the Amazing Fifth Column podcast.
Hi Matt, so nice to have you.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
On a right Thank you for the nice words about
fifth Call. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
So, I mean, the most important question, do you miss
me in Brooklyn?
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Yes, although knowing that you we have a beachhead in
Florida is always is always helpful.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
And you know offline we're gonna have some conversations about that. Oh,
I love it.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Those are my favorite conversations.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Yeah, there's give me some visitations.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Oh, I'm a California I'm a California boy, so like
I just winters don't sit right with me. And this
is now my twelfth or so in New York City
and I've I've had enough, So I'm gonna I'm gonna
see some Florida in January.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah. Good. It's been kind of a chilly winter here,
except when I tell that to New Yorkers, they don't
like it at all. But it's been like seventy but
it feels like sixty five. I get it unpleasant.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
You know, I'm very sorry for your pain.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
So how did you get to be like one of
the top libertarians in the world.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Gosh, well, I've had Nichols, Biond.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
So I can't say top.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
You know, there are top there are so many liberties
and who would disagree with.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
With all of that assessment, I.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Said Kennedy On, I mean, you know, I really am.
I've had the elite of the libertarian world on.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
So I've mostly been really lucky that, starting with Nick,
that the libertarian world, both in terms of professional outlets
such as Reason, but also the broader audience has accepted me.
I mean when I started writing for Reason, even when
I started working for Nick with some regularity, I did
not describe myself as a libertarian.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
I made this.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Very tortured type of appellation of that I was a
century europe style liberal, which is stupid, but like it
made sense to me. I'd lived there for eight years,
and that that had more of an impact on me
than whatever stupid things are happening in American politics. And
so I now use libertarian just as a shorthand because
(05:52):
it doesn't you know, the other thing doesn't make any
sense or resonate with anybody, and it's as accurate as not.
Let's say, but I I am an outlier on a
couple of issues, and Planet Libertarian has just been you know,
with the obvious exceptions here and there, especially of people
who are trying to like market themselves in a differentiated
way from Reason and other places like that, they've just
(06:17):
been very tolerant. So I was really worried about that
when I was the editor in chief of Reason from
two thousand and eight to twenty sixteen, officially because I
felt initially like, my god, I'm speaking for libertarians. That
seems so wrong to me, let alone them. And people
were cool, first of all because I wasn't you know,
I'm not the spokesman of the entire tribe or anything
(06:39):
like that. But also like, if you just are honest
about places where you differ, it's fine. It turns out
that they are at the tolerant bunch. So anyways, Reason
allowed me to work there. It helped raise my profile.
I've just been doing journalism for thirty eight years now,
and so in most.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Of that I am not a tough call.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
I really am not. No, and you know, until I
was in my mid thirties, I was. I pretty much
lived in poverty with the exception not me, not I
didn't grow up that way, but like as professional with
the exception of a couple of years here and there,
and and so you can go from you know, obscurity toiling.
(07:26):
But if you do that in such a way where
you keep doing work that interests you and hopefully do
it in a way that is interesting. And then also
I've been involved a lot of different media startups over
the years. Most of them failed just by definition, but
some of them stick a little bit, and so that
tends to kind of jack up your profile here and there.
(07:47):
So I've just been fortunate. Like so many people I
know who like I went to school with really really
talented journalists, they pieced out at some point kind of early.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
They got burned out on.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
It because they didn't get to keep right either about
the stuff that interested in them or in a way
that interested them. And I've been fortunate, and the last
twenty years had some success.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
So I don't consider myself a libertarian. I'm a libertarian
leaning conservative, I guess, but I love libertarians, and not
just because you guys throw the best parties. I always
talk about it on here how Reason always has the
best parties. But even before I knew you, I knew
you like on people's photo accounts as having these amazing
parties in La in your backyard, like I had never
(08:31):
met you. Actually, the first time that we ever met,
sadly was at Andrew Breitbart shortly after he passed. We
had like a barvant But I knew you from Jackie
Di Nicky's and Kathy Sape's photo accounts is having these
like really cool parties in your LA backyard. And I
didn't think you'd ever leave La, but you did. What
(08:53):
made you go?
Speaker 3 (08:54):
So I had been I worked for a Reason for
a couple of years and off and on as a columnist,
and then the La Times hired me to be the
assistant editorial pages editor, and then when and I did
that for two years, and then when Reason got a
bunch of money, and then impetus from Drew Carey Television's
(09:16):
very owned Drew Carey to start a video division way
before everyone else was pivoting the video So we started
Reason TV back in two thousand and seven. I want
to say so, but we had to like learn from scratch.
So Nick g Lespie was the editor of the magazine
at the time, said Okay, I will go and help
start that, but I need someone to audit the magazine
(09:37):
in the meantime, And so he invited me, and as
did David not and reason it just opened up. It's
still headquartered in Los Angeles on the West Side, but
it had just started up a DC office for the
first time. It's sort of a main editorial office after
years of being very dispersed, and I thought, I'm going
to manage human beings, I might as well go where
(09:58):
they're working. And and it was, you know, it was
an opportunity. I've been I've been in LA for ten
years at that point, and I'm born and raised Long Beach,
and so like, yeah, let's see something new. Let's see
what Washington's like. I didn't like Washington. I didn't last there.
Four years was enough, but but he was. It was
a good reason to come cross country and see how.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
The other half lived.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Are you still having parties.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Fewer and fewer?
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Uh No, that's the sad truth is and always has been.
Like I'm kind of a professional extrovert who's kind of introverted,
So I don't really I don't like to I'm able
to converse with people, but it's it's taxing. So yeah,
(10:47):
we still we had reason, had a great party last week,
and you know, be throwing parties here and there, but
it's not quite the same. In that backyard was pretty
pretty special. It's just like a stupid Hollywood dirt bungalow
with party possum out back. But LA is such a
great freelance town. So you had all these people who
don't have really anything in common, certainly not politics. I
(11:08):
mean Andrew Breitbart's hanging out there all the time. His
politics of mine were not the same. And uh and
Kathy Sibe you mentioned, who was wonderful and we all
miss Hurt as well. But like they are all people
who work in their kind of silos. And what we
tried to do in our social lives and kind of
in our professional lives too with a couple of different
media startups that again failed, was to sort of like
(11:30):
coalesce and recognize that there's so much talent in LA
that was not being represented at the La Times, which
is the main institution at the time. Let's have him
in our backyard, and let's have him. Let's throw book
parties and so there's a lot of a lot of
effort to kind of get people to get in their
cars and go to a place and uh, and it
was very very fun.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
I have very fun laffort. Do you have a beat
at reason? Do you let you have something you particularly
like to write about?
Speaker 3 (11:58):
You know, I started way back when as being a
media columnist, and I still do that a lot. I
have a feature in the current issue of the magazine
with the headline of politics without Journalism that kind of
used the twenty twenty four election as an opportunity to say, hey, look,
this is a real moment when we've seen the kind
(12:18):
of final collapse of legacy media institutions. And I think
even people like you and me, you've been writing and
talking about this and noticing this for a long time,
tend to underrate how much the business, the industry of
journalism has collapsed and the basic building block units are
(12:38):
not there anymore. The La Times, for one example, I mean,
in nineteen ninety, when I was turned twenty two and
I had a lot of friends who worked there, La
Times was the most profitable newspaper in the history of
the world. They had thirteen hundred employees on the editorial side.
I mean we'd get at the the paper, and especially
(13:01):
on Thursdays and Sundays, but not only it was a
phone book and just cough, funk on. It was called
the velvet coffin because you get a job there, get
tons of money, always fly first class, and no one
would ever see you again because the paper was so
big that your stuff would get buried, and it was
it was tough to get visibility. So it's gone from
that to like it's you know, twenty or thirty pages
(13:22):
from no ads. Now it like just it loses thirty
forty million dollars a month and it just doesn't matter
in the same way. I mean, it was a it
was a king maker in the entire West, including like
an anti labor kingmaker.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
You know, the.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
Motto in the front of the building was true Industrial Freedom,
and like the labor unions were bombing the place and
stuff because they were so vociferously anti union them in
the Chicago Tribune. So it went from that and like
making Richard Nixon's career, you know, reshaping the West. I mean,
Chinatown is the story of the of the Chandler family
in a sense of the way that they kind of
(14:00):
rigged the whole system there, but they went from there
to and then you know, also having a lot of great,
just wonderful journalists, and the sports section was astonishing growing up.
And it just doesn't matter anymore. So long way of saying,
I'm still writing about the media and doing that. Starting
before COVID, I started writing a lot more about education
(14:22):
because my own kids were starting to go through the
New York City education process, and I had no idea
how much I was going to be like calling this
in advance. But when my neighborhood in Brooklyn, which is
not far from where you lived, same district, if I'm
not mistaken, District fifteen decided to be a trail blazer
(14:44):
on changing admissions standards in the name of equity. And
I wrote a really long feature about this, and I
don't know it twenty eighteen or so, twenty nineteen, and
I had to participate in all of these meetings because
one kid was going into middle school right as they
were changing all those rules. The other kid was starting
to get into kindergarten right as they were changing those
(15:05):
rules too, and the boundaries, and so I like, I
was meetings all the time, and I could not believe
how those meetings went like it was stunning to watch,
you know, official councils of government or even community education councils,
which are kind quase governmental. You know, a well meeting
parent asked a question and they are told in public
that they are a racist. And this is a nice
(15:28):
Swedish guy who's like, I totally support what you're doing
and everything about it. What are you going to tell
parents in case some parents decided to leave, I'm not
going to leave. I support you. And they're like, I
can't believe I had to hear such racism. That dude
that he's a character in one of the stories he
left he moved away from Brooklyn because it sucks to
be called a racist if you're not like working for
(15:49):
the New York Post and have a little bit of
a thicker skin. So I started with that that, you know,
and then all the COVID policies that came, and you
and I have talked about this a lot in the past,
so I ended up writing a whole lot about about
that stuff, and then I just shout to write about
national politics in general.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
I would say, yeah, I can't believe I think that
that twenty eighteen era in Brooklyn was actually the precursor
to the twenty twenty era nationally where everything became racist.
But it was hard to see it spreading. I always
thought it was like, you know, just Brooklyn insanity, Like
where we lived was super super left. We made that
(16:28):
foolish choice for ourselves, and we were going to have
to live with that. But I never thought it would
spread the way it did. And I feel like I'm
much more careful now about bad ideas that are localized
coming out of their local problems.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
I in my original piece on this, I positive that
this was going to come to a school district near
you because of the style of argumentation. I thought that
that was the kind of turnkey on rice, which is
to say that people.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Found a way. It's kind of like the you know.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
Slap lawsuits, strategic lawsuits against public participation. It's a whole
category in the law where you know, sometimes a big corporation,
let's say, or the Church of Scientology or something, will
if you write negative things about them, they'll just sue you,
sue you, sue you in even if they're going to lose,
and they know they're going to lose. But it sucks
to have to like defend yourself. So there's this category
(17:27):
in the law where you can file a slap lawsuit saying, hey, look,
you're doing a strategic lawsuit to prevent me from engaging
in public discourse. Well, I thought that that was the
comp for what was happening at those meetings. They were
taking normal people, consumers of a public education K through
twelve good, asking normal questions and driving them away from
(17:49):
the process and saying no, you must. And actually the
moment that really was the aha for us. We went
to a big community meeting with Brad Lander, who now
wants to be mayor in our we're city council in here.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
The worst people to push through.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
This equity plan, and it was supposed to be it
was billed as we're going to take a community input,
we're going to talk about it. And so that filled
a big auditorium near the park and hundreds of people,
like way more people than they thought that was going
to be there, and you know, and the crowd was
on edge, like what are you doing, You're like changing
the concept here is changing And one woman finally sort
(18:27):
of like breaks through with a question forty five minutes
in and the way that everybody he and then all
the people who were on the sort of activist groups
who obviously got government money to like push their ideas
through cording'ed her off and say, oh no, there's going
to be time for this. We're going to have breakout groups,
We're going to do this, do that. And I went
to one of those breakout groups and like the woman
(18:47):
wasn't taking notes and was like a college student and
she didn't care, Like you saw you are trying to manage, yeah,
and drive people away from the discussion. And like I thought,
oh my god, that is a very effective tactic, and like,
just make the field smaller of people who are going
to play, then you can dominate the field if you
have like money and the passion and the networks. And
(19:09):
by doing this you were going to come up with
crazy ideas. But also since you are in a big
democratic places, you know, you've just elected the politicians who
are going to negotiate your next union contract. It's just
you could see the whole cycle unfolding. But even with
all of that, and with the prediction, I had no
idea how fast it would all come true. Holy cow,
that was nuts.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
So I have to I feel like I have to
specify for the audience because we didn't define what they
were doing to the schools. But basically, this District fifteen
is a super left area of Brooklyn. It's largely wealthy.
I would say, right, it's to mix to mix.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
But Park Slope is in the middle of it, which
you know, it's where Chris Hayes lives and stuff and
has the famous food co op and and my neighborhood
here and kind of Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hills very
well to do, right.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
So what they did was they got they decid that
screens for schools, which is looking at kids' grades or
attendance or behavior or testing, any of that would be
done away with because having those screens in place were
racist and were contributing to some schools being better schools
than others, and you couldn't have that. And the best
(20:18):
part of this story, of course, to me, is that
the politicians that were most actively against these screens, Brad Lander,
who now wants to be mayor of New York City,
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was the previous mayor of
New York City, they sent their kids to the schools
that had the screens, but now that their kids are
out of school, they felt that those screens were obviously
(20:39):
obviously racist.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
Like literally right when their kids graduated, it was like, Oh,
we have to break up these bastions and privilege. It's
just really terrible, you know, And it had a predicted effect.
That school, in particular MS fifty one as it is,
was turned overnight from one of the most desirable and
successful schools rules in the city to being a basket case.
(21:03):
They've they've cycled through principles. It's just been terrible discipline
issues like it like it had to predict the results.
I was even agnostic about some of these changes. It
was more that seeing the way that they were being argued,
I had objections to just like you can't tell your consumer,
your tax payer these types of things. That's just awful.
(21:26):
It's really thuggish type of behavior. And then it sort
of led me to be more skeptical of those types
of changes over time and it did more research. But yeah,
it has not it has not worked out great for
New York schools at all.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Well, it was obvious also, you know, again the well
to do part, because I thought that anybody who didn't
get into the school that they wanted, and if those
schools did start to fail, could easily just pull their
kid out and go to private school, which is what
I know a lot of people did could make feel like,
including you, Oh and I know that. Yeah, I think
that that's you know, clearly the what ended up being
(22:00):
the result of this process where they were trying to
force equity and what they ended up doing was pushing
people out of the system.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Yeah, And I mean it's a it's a big underrated
part of our aspect of American public life and politics,
Like super underrated is that we've already passed peak public
school The number of kids enrolled in public K through
twelve schools was just over fifty million in twenty nineteen.
It's never going to be that high agend, even as
(22:29):
the population grows.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
It's not.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
And if you further tweak it and say, okay, it's
not just the public schools, because charter schools are technically
public schools, but they're not managed by governmental agencies, then
the peak was in twenty twelve, and we're talking about
twenty five percent of state and local budgets go to
K through twelve education for this product, which people a
(22:55):
free product which people are running away from screaming. And
then we've just had school choice bills or a school
choice fairly universal passed in a dozen states. This is
all breaking up right now. It's large, it's one of
the largest public policy issues, and it kind of gets
talked about a little bit here and there. Most people
just sort of yammer about the Department of Education as
(23:16):
if that really really matters, and it's it is interesting
and it's not insignificant. But the biggest single thing is
that you built all these schools. Like in la they
won on a historic building spree called the biggest public
works project west of the Big Dig in Boston in
the early aughts that I covered a lot because they
used a lot of eminent domain to like bulldoze neighborhoods
(23:37):
in order to educate them. They built these huge schools
and no one's in them.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Now, what do you do?
Speaker 3 (23:43):
And I don't think people have really thought through that.
Now they've had all this COVID money that is just
now finally starting to end, so they've had these artificial
kind of sugar high of being able to hire more teachers,
these buildings to the teacher to student ratio or the
administration to student ratios are insane. So it's a huge
issue and we're going to be seeing that on state
(24:05):
and local levels for the next decade at least.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
We're going to take a quick break and be right
back on the Carol Marcowitch Show. What do you worry about?
Speaker 3 (24:16):
I have worried since nine to eleven, and then accelerating
after that with the rise of both Donald Trump and
Bernie Sanders, kind of the rise of left and right populism,
that not only just that we're in the unraveling of
what happened of all the institution building and the ideas
(24:38):
in the post World War two kind of international which
the US was very much in the driver's seat of
and help shape, and what I think was hugely beneficial
to mankind, including your terrible people. And so that is unraveling.
And what I worry about is that in the unraveling
and in the sort of populist revolt against that, large
(25:00):
part of which is understandable because elites have really crapped
the bed, that we're going to get to a much
more or we continue to get to a much more
kind of nineteen thirties vibe. And I don't mean that
to go Hitler, Hitler, but rather to say that, you know,
nineteen thirties was a time of a great loss of
faith in the old democracies in England. You know, to
(25:24):
read the writings of George Orwell, it's always really interesting.
You know, He's like, well, certainly capitalism is going to fail,
so it's going to be a question between socialism and fascism.
And that was kind of a normal way of thinking,
and even of a clear eyed guy like he was.
And then also every you know, the sort of a
zero sum sense of competition between nations as opposed to
(25:46):
a cooperative arrangement where the US has an understanding that
you know, France will be a much better reliable partner
if it is participating in a free trade zone with
Germany and other people, and they can enrich themselves and
then pay for more of their security and so on
and so on. And you'll compare that against the commis
and the commedies are going to look worse and worse
(26:07):
when we lose that, when we get into you know,
a series of of we're erecting tariffs again, We're it's
it's there's a danger associated with that, more chance of
war more the long great eradication more or less of
(26:28):
international poverty, which has happened over the last three four decades,
just stunning, the whole kind of post nineteen eighty nine
incredible success. I worry that that might backslide, but also
like it. It's a very rich country type of concern
in the same way that we almost lost faith in
the nineteen thirties in America in our own kind of
sense of faith in the liberal order, in the liberal, capitalistic,
(26:53):
liberal science kind of project. I don't mean that left wing.
I mean that just that the Enlightenment is worth worth
continuing with. There's been I think a lot of cost
playing with people who are like I'm done with the Enlightenment,
not if already with these things, and I worry where
that's going to go. So it's not a day to
day like, oh my god, we're going to have fascism.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
I think a lot of that.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
I think almost all of that is insane, and we
spend a lot of time in the Fifth Column, especially
poking holes in that. But it's a broader worry that
we're in a twenty or thirty year rut and I
don't know what how that we cycle out him.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
It's interesting because I think a lot of what you say,
actually you know is libertarian, right that, you know, being
against tariffs and all of that, But then the kind
of trust in systems is that is that typically libertarian?
Speaker 3 (27:44):
No, but there is a libertarian and I think Nickollspie
has a lot of times a sense of conflict about
this because he's like, screw the institutions, they suck, and
then also in his next breath is like, it's a
real big problem when there's a collapse of trust in
everything because societies that stop trusting things, the solutions that
they reach for are are anti libertarian or anti smart
(28:07):
or anti prosperous, like that, you reach for the stick
in that moment. So we're kind of in a reaching
for the stick moment. There are reasons to have some hope.
You know, I didn't vote for Donald Trump and was
not rooting for him to win. I do see some hope,
and kind of unexpectedly so with doge effects of Vivacronama
(28:31):
Swaman and Elon Musk, it's actually more thought out than
I would have expected from the way that those two
have been conducting themselves publicly up up until they started
implementing this at least as a concept. And then Javier
mela is just like he has shown a different international path,
has Trump's ear, has like success to point to. And
(28:52):
he's a crazy libertarian. I mean literally a crazy libertarian
who clones his dogs and names them after libertarian economists.
That's nuts, like doesn't wash his hair. He's the weirdest
libertarian you know, is half as weird as Hawvr Malaius.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
There are reasons well.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
After you know, some weird Yeah, we all do the
blue faced guy and stuff. Yeah, but there are reasons
to think that, you know, we might have some aspects
for hope, but the the broader term thing, and this
is also I mean you said the most libertarians are
not really institutions. This is why I didn't describe myself
(29:30):
as a libertarian necessarily as part of it. Like I saw.
I see to this day, at least looking in history,
that the creation of the institutional Cold War order was
a good thing. The creation of NATO was a good thing.
The the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the UH,
(29:53):
the the precursors of the EU, which you know, the
trading community between all those countries was an important, the
necessary thing and the long term global mutual reduction of
tariffs that went along with that. I see all of
that as essential at the time for what it was doing.
My criticism of that order is that people got lazy.
(30:16):
And then also after we won the Cold War, we
didn't push for a post Cold War settlement in which
we would stop being the major, the main player character
in everything Europe I mean, which is a very much
a Europe's own fault for that. Europe should have devised
its own security arrangements after the end of the Cold
War instead of like, I don't know, you do it.
(30:39):
And I think so much of our modern problems stem
from that. And then the people who I had otherwise
agreed with in the kind of institution building post World
War two became very arrogant and stopped paying attention to
the importance the necessity of having public input.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
You've got to you've got to have.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
Public and political legitimacy for what you're doing. You can't
just say like, no, this is how we do it.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Shut up.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
And they've been doing this is how we do it.
Shut up for a really long time. And I think
that is as much why we're in the moment that
we're in as anything else.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
What advice would you give your sixteen year old self,
sixteen year old Matt Welch, what do you say?
Speaker 3 (31:20):
Sure, there's a couple of ways of looking at that.
One is that, you know, the boys kind of are
a little they go through their crisis I think a
little bit later than girls, at least. It's my anecdotal
observation having I have a sixteen year old daughter and
the twelve to fifteen was not awesome, not all. But
(31:44):
she's pretty good now and has a job at McDonald's. So,
like you know, Donald Trump, just like Donald Trump, she
appreciates all that. And I don't know if it's like
Kamala Harris or not, don't have that confirmed, but you know,
on one level, well, it's like, develop a work ethic,
show up on time, and it'll all sort itself out.
(32:06):
Have faith in like ten years or twelve years when
you go through your crisis, if you're at least doing that,
This is the cat Temp recipe for success. She was
an absolute mess of a human being for a long time,
dear friend of ours, but she had an incredible work ethic,
showed up on time and did whatever it took. So
you can buy yourself time and habits by doing that.
(32:29):
But I would if I actually was talking to sixteen
year old Matt, I think he knew that what I
would tell him to do with a finger and a
fist probably is like, don't learn how to lie. Stop
learning how to lie. Like I think you know, me
from sixteen to twenty five was pretty like tumultuous, an
(32:52):
eventful and productive period of time in my life. But
like when you sort of procrastinate whatever and then and
like have to come up with an excuse of why
you didn't make it happen, you start inventing like these
fabulous ideas of any Everyone knows you're lying, dude, you're
(33:14):
bad at it because you're sixteed, but you kind of
do it anyways because you just need to get out
of the thing that's right in front of you. Once
you start lying, then you're screwed because you're building up
these edifices. If I look at at like the major
cockups that I was involved with from the age of
sixteen too, I don't know twenty five, but probably earlier.
(33:34):
It's just that it's just like I couldn't face the
thing in front of me, and then I tried to
wiggle it out, and the ramifications were bad and hurt
people and did wrong things. So don't learn how to lie.
It's a bad skill. It's better just to take your
lumps in the moment, tell people you didn't do the
thing that you needed to do or whatever, and then
(33:56):
move on from there.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Like I when my.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
It's like, it's an unusual answer because people usually don't
acknowledge that they've ever lied.
Speaker 3 (34:05):
You know, everybody has has been a dick at some point.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
In their lives.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
That's more than others.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
You know, when my now sixteen year old was twelve
and I could see it coming, I was like, that
was what I told her. It was like, don't stop
it now, stop lying now, and you'll have a chance
to pull.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Out of the skit. And she's out of the skid now.
So that's helpful.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Well, I've loved this conversation. You're really one of my favorites.
I love reading all your stuff. You're just excellent. And
here with your best tip for my listeners on how
they can improve their lives. And maybe that's just don't
be a liar.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
Also, that's also helpful. I think everyone could use to
put the cap back on the toothpaste. And what I
mean by that is I remember again being a no good,
probably late twenties guy, and I was thinking of someone
a friend. I'm like, oh, he or she is the
type of person who always has their cap on their toothpaste.
And then I thought, for a second, why aren't I
(35:08):
the type of pay That's not hard, is it? But
like I was a slob, and so like, start doing
making tiny stupid little just have it change, because those
are the easiest ones to sustain. Okay, I'll just do
this every time. And once you start doing that every
time and you pocket that one build up from there
of the thing that you should be doing.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
I think about this even right now, Like.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
I read a piece of this week about a guy
who reads.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
One hundred pages a day. I'm not gonna do that.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
But I have the say that like a bunch of
us that like, because of the way that we consume media,
especially social media, that we've cut down our reading. Well,
ok for what's a little programmatic habitual change that I
can enact in order to do that? So it's like,
all right, late at night, that's when I'll do some reading.
(35:58):
Something stupid, So put the cap on the toothpase, make
an incremental habitual or change to your habits, and then
once you got that, move on to the next one
and you can continue doing that until.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Your data so good. Thank you so much, Matt. He
is Matt Welch. You could check him out at Reason
Magazine subscribe to his podcast, The Fifth Column. Thank you
so much, Matt. Thank you, Carol, thanks so much for
joining us on the Carol Marco which show. Subscribe wherever
you get your podcasts.
Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Marcos Show on Imheartradio.
There's been a trend on social media of women taping
themselves telling their husbands that they can't pay the mortgage.
The implication is that obviously these women have never paid
the mortgage, and the men are confused by what they're saying.
(00:25):
I can't pay the mortgage this month.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
You know who our mortgage provider?
Speaker 1 (00:31):
I know, but I wanted to pay it and I
can't pay it. You don't even know who are coming
and you can, David, I really can't pay the rent
this month. Well, I can't help you depending on that.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
I just I spent it all and I don't even
think I'm gonna.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Have rent for next year. So I'm just like, you
don't know?
Speaker 2 (00:54):
So, yes, when have you ever paid rent?
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Everest?
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Where do you go to pay rent? Where do you
even go? Who do we go pay rents? You don't stop?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
I'm not going to pay the mortgage this month. Well,
I can't pay the mortgage this month.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
I tried this on my own husband, because I too
have never paid the mortgage. I was laughing so hard
that I couldn't get the words out I was crying.
I just thought it was so funny. I knew that
I wouldn't be able to deliver the words to him.
He thought I was trying to tell him that I
couldn't pee because I couldn't get the word pay out anyway.
(01:41):
The comments have been a mix of two things, one
women wondering where they can get a man who pays
the mortgage, and two women criticizing these women for letting
a man take care of them. It's this second group
that I want to talk about. These voices always from
other women telling women that they can't pened on men.
(02:01):
But here's an actual example of a bunch of women
depending on their man successfully, and they still feel the
need to criticize. This anti man thing has developed, and
it's been going on for well over a decade, maybe longer.
It's so unhealthy seeing men as bad or untrustworthy. It's
(02:21):
not good for any of us. And the women in
the first group they don't believe the second group anyway.
They want a man to take care of them. They
believe he exists. They see it in action, and they
want it. Why wouldn't they As we're talking about all
the woke stuff that we're hopefully going to leave in
the past this whole Men are terrible. Men will leave
you at any moment. My aunt once trust the demand
(02:44):
to pay the mortgage and he spent their money on strippers,
wide paintbrush. Thing has got to go. Some men are bad,
most or not. We focus on the outlier stories of
bad guys and ignore the masses of men living quiet
lives and taking care of their families and doing what
they have to do. The last thing I want to
(03:04):
say is that the mortgage video leads people to believe
that these women aren't contributing at home. Maybe they're stay
at home moms, Maybe they just don't do the mortgage payments.
I contribute, but it was still hilarious that I would
be paying the mortgage because that's just not my department.
It's okay. It's preferable even for spouses to have their
(03:25):
own lanes in a marriage. I've talked about it on
here before, and I think it works very well for us.
If you want to send in your suggestions or tell
me anything else, drop me a line at Carol Maarkowitz
Show at gmail dot com. Coming up next and interview
with Matt Welch. Join us after the break, Welcome back
(03:46):
to the Carol Marcowitz Show on iHeartRadio. My guest today
is Matt Welch. Matt is editor at Large of Reason
Magazine and co host of the Amazing Fifth Column podcast.
Hi Matt, so nice to have you.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
On a right Thank you for the nice words about
fifth Call. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
So, I mean, the most important question, do you miss
me in Brooklyn?
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Yes, although knowing that you we have a beachhead in
Florida is always is always helpful.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
And you know offline we're gonna have some conversations about that. Oh,
I love it.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Those are my favorite conversations.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Yeah, there's give me some visitations.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Oh, I'm a California I'm a California boy, so like
I just winters don't sit right with me. And this
is now my twelfth or so in New York City
and I've I've had enough, So I'm gonna I'm gonna
see some Florida in January.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah. Good. It's been kind of a chilly winter here,
except when I tell that to New Yorkers, they don't
like it at all. But it's been like seventy but
it feels like sixty five. I get it unpleasant.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
You know, I'm very sorry for your pain.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
So how did you get to be like one of
the top libertarians in the world.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Gosh, well, I've had Nichols, Biond.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
So I can't say top.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
You know, there are top there are so many liberties
and who would disagree with.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
With all of that assessment, I.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Said Kennedy On, I mean, you know, I really am.
I've had the elite of the libertarian world on.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
So I've mostly been really lucky that, starting with Nick,
that the libertarian world, both in terms of professional outlets
such as Reason, but also the broader audience has accepted me.
I mean when I started writing for Reason, even when
I started working for Nick with some regularity, I did
not describe myself as a libertarian.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
I made this.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Very tortured type of appellation of that I was a
century europe style liberal, which is stupid, but like it
made sense to me. I'd lived there for eight years,
and that that had more of an impact on me
than whatever stupid things are happening in American politics. And
so I now use libertarian just as a shorthand because
(05:52):
it doesn't you know, the other thing doesn't make any
sense or resonate with anybody, and it's as accurate as not.
Let's say, but I I am an outlier on a
couple of issues, and Planet Libertarian has just been you know,
with the obvious exceptions here and there, especially of people
who are trying to like market themselves in a differentiated
way from Reason and other places like that, they've just
(06:17):
been very tolerant. So I was really worried about that
when I was the editor in chief of Reason from
two thousand and eight to twenty sixteen, officially because I
felt initially like, my god, I'm speaking for libertarians. That
seems so wrong to me, let alone them. And people
were cool, first of all because I wasn't you know,
I'm not the spokesman of the entire tribe or anything
(06:39):
like that. But also like, if you just are honest
about places where you differ, it's fine. It turns out
that they are at the tolerant bunch. So anyways, Reason
allowed me to work there. It helped raise my profile.
I've just been doing journalism for thirty eight years now,
and so in most.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Of that I am not a tough call.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
I really am not. No, and you know, until I
was in my mid thirties, I was. I pretty much
lived in poverty with the exception not me, not I
didn't grow up that way, but like as professional with
the exception of a couple of years here and there,
and and so you can go from you know, obscurity toiling.
(07:26):
But if you do that in such a way where
you keep doing work that interests you and hopefully do
it in a way that is interesting. And then also
I've been involved a lot of different media startups over
the years. Most of them failed just by definition, but
some of them stick a little bit, and so that
tends to kind of jack up your profile here and there.
(07:47):
So I've just been fortunate. Like so many people I
know who like I went to school with really really
talented journalists, they pieced out at some point kind of early.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
They got burned out on.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
It because they didn't get to keep right either about
the stuff that interested in them or in a way
that interested them. And I've been fortunate, and the last
twenty years had some success.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
So I don't consider myself a libertarian. I'm a libertarian
leaning conservative, I guess, but I love libertarians, and not
just because you guys throw the best parties. I always
talk about it on here how Reason always has the
best parties. But even before I knew you, I knew
you like on people's photo accounts as having these amazing
parties in La in your backyard, like I had never
(08:31):
met you. Actually, the first time that we ever met,
sadly was at Andrew Breitbart shortly after he passed. We
had like a barvant But I knew you from Jackie
Di Nicky's and Kathy Sape's photo accounts is having these
like really cool parties in your LA backyard. And I
didn't think you'd ever leave La, but you did. What
(08:53):
made you go?
Speaker 3 (08:54):
So I had been I worked for a Reason for
a couple of years and off and on as a columnist,
and then the La Times hired me to be the
assistant editorial pages editor, and then when and I did
that for two years, and then when Reason got a
bunch of money, and then impetus from Drew Carey Television's
(09:16):
very owned Drew Carey to start a video division way
before everyone else was pivoting the video So we started
Reason TV back in two thousand and seven. I want
to say so, but we had to like learn from scratch.
So Nick g Lespie was the editor of the magazine
at the time, said Okay, I will go and help
start that, but I need someone to audit the magazine
(09:37):
in the meantime, And so he invited me, and as
did David not and reason it just opened up. It's
still headquartered in Los Angeles on the West Side, but
it had just started up a DC office for the
first time. It's sort of a main editorial office after
years of being very dispersed, and I thought, I'm going
to manage human beings, I might as well go where
(09:58):
they're working. And and it was, you know, it was
an opportunity. I've been I've been in LA for ten
years at that point, and I'm born and raised Long Beach,
and so like, yeah, let's see something new. Let's see
what Washington's like. I didn't like Washington. I didn't last there.
Four years was enough, but but he was. It was
a good reason to come cross country and see how.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
The other half lived.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Are you still having parties.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Fewer and fewer?
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Uh No, that's the sad truth is and always has been.
Like I'm kind of a professional extrovert who's kind of introverted,
So I don't really I don't like to I'm able
to converse with people, but it's it's taxing. So yeah,
(10:47):
we still we had reason, had a great party last week,
and you know, be throwing parties here and there, but
it's not quite the same. In that backyard was pretty
pretty special. It's just like a stupid Hollywood dirt bungalow
with party possum out back. But LA is such a
great freelance town. So you had all these people who
don't have really anything in common, certainly not politics. I
(11:08):
mean Andrew Breitbart's hanging out there all the time. His
politics of mine were not the same. And uh and
Kathy Sibe you mentioned, who was wonderful and we all
miss Hurt as well. But like they are all people
who work in their kind of silos. And what we
tried to do in our social lives and kind of
in our professional lives too with a couple of different
media startups that again failed, was to sort of like
(11:30):
coalesce and recognize that there's so much talent in LA
that was not being represented at the La Times, which
is the main institution at the time. Let's have him
in our backyard, and let's have him. Let's throw book
parties and so there's a lot of a lot of
effort to kind of get people to get in their
cars and go to a place and uh, and it
was very very fun.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
I have very fun laffort. Do you have a beat
at reason? Do you let you have something you particularly
like to write about?
Speaker 3 (11:58):
You know, I started way back when as being a
media columnist, and I still do that a lot. I
have a feature in the current issue of the magazine
with the headline of politics without Journalism that kind of
used the twenty twenty four election as an opportunity to say, hey, look,
this is a real moment when we've seen the kind
(12:18):
of final collapse of legacy media institutions. And I think
even people like you and me, you've been writing and
talking about this and noticing this for a long time,
tend to underrate how much the business, the industry of
journalism has collapsed and the basic building block units are
(12:38):
not there anymore. The La Times, for one example, I mean,
in nineteen ninety, when I was turned twenty two and
I had a lot of friends who worked there, La
Times was the most profitable newspaper in the history of
the world. They had thirteen hundred employees on the editorial side.
I mean we'd get at the the paper, and especially
(13:01):
on Thursdays and Sundays, but not only it was a
phone book and just cough, funk on. It was called
the velvet coffin because you get a job there, get
tons of money, always fly first class, and no one
would ever see you again because the paper was so
big that your stuff would get buried, and it was
it was tough to get visibility. So it's gone from
that to like it's you know, twenty or thirty pages
(13:22):
from no ads. Now it like just it loses thirty
forty million dollars a month and it just doesn't matter
in the same way. I mean, it was a it
was a king maker in the entire West, including like
an anti labor kingmaker.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
You know, the.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
Motto in the front of the building was true Industrial Freedom,
and like the labor unions were bombing the place and
stuff because they were so vociferously anti union them in
the Chicago Tribune. So it went from that and like
making Richard Nixon's career, you know, reshaping the West. I mean,
Chinatown is the story of the of the Chandler family
in a sense of the way that they kind of
(14:00):
rigged the whole system there, but they went from there
to and then you know, also having a lot of great,
just wonderful journalists, and the sports section was astonishing growing up.
And it just doesn't matter anymore. So long way of saying,
I'm still writing about the media and doing that. Starting
before COVID, I started writing a lot more about education
(14:22):
because my own kids were starting to go through the
New York City education process, and I had no idea
how much I was going to be like calling this
in advance. But when my neighborhood in Brooklyn, which is
not far from where you lived, same district, if I'm
not mistaken, District fifteen decided to be a trail blazer
(14:44):
on changing admissions standards in the name of equity. And
I wrote a really long feature about this, and I
don't know it twenty eighteen or so, twenty nineteen, and
I had to participate in all of these meetings because
one kid was going into middle school right as they
were changing all those rules. The other kid was starting
to get into kindergarten right as they were changing those
(15:05):
rules too, and the boundaries, and so I like, I
was meetings all the time, and I could not believe
how those meetings went like it was stunning to watch,
you know, official councils of government or even community education councils,
which are kind quase governmental. You know, a well meeting
parent asked a question and they are told in public
that they are a racist. And this is a nice
(15:28):
Swedish guy who's like, I totally support what you're doing
and everything about it. What are you going to tell
parents in case some parents decided to leave, I'm not
going to leave. I support you. And they're like, I
can't believe I had to hear such racism. That dude
that he's a character in one of the stories he
left he moved away from Brooklyn because it sucks to
be called a racist if you're not like working for
(15:49):
the New York Post and have a little bit of
a thicker skin. So I started with that that, you know,
and then all the COVID policies that came, and you
and I have talked about this a lot in the past,
so I ended up writing a whole lot about about
that stuff, and then I just shout to write about
national politics in general.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
I would say, yeah, I can't believe I think that
that twenty eighteen era in Brooklyn was actually the precursor
to the twenty twenty era nationally where everything became racist.
But it was hard to see it spreading. I always
thought it was like, you know, just Brooklyn insanity, Like
where we lived was super super left. We made that
(16:28):
foolish choice for ourselves, and we were going to have
to live with that. But I never thought it would
spread the way it did. And I feel like I'm
much more careful now about bad ideas that are localized
coming out of their local problems.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
I in my original piece on this, I positive that
this was going to come to a school district near
you because of the style of argumentation. I thought that
that was the kind of turnkey on rice, which is
to say that people.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Found a way. It's kind of like the you know.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
Slap lawsuits, strategic lawsuits against public participation. It's a whole
category in the law where you know, sometimes a big corporation,
let's say, or the Church of Scientology or something, will
if you write negative things about them, they'll just sue you,
sue you, sue you in even if they're going to lose,
and they know they're going to lose. But it sucks
to have to like defend yourself. So there's this category
(17:27):
in the law where you can file a slap lawsuit saying, hey, look,
you're doing a strategic lawsuit to prevent me from engaging
in public discourse. Well, I thought that that was the
comp for what was happening at those meetings. They were
taking normal people, consumers of a public education K through
twelve good, asking normal questions and driving them away from
(17:49):
the process and saying no, you must. And actually the
moment that really was the aha for us. We went
to a big community meeting with Brad Lander, who now
wants to be mayor in our we're city council in here.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
The worst people to push through.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
This equity plan, and it was supposed to be it
was billed as we're going to take a community input,
we're going to talk about it. And so that filled
a big auditorium near the park and hundreds of people,
like way more people than they thought that was going
to be there, and you know, and the crowd was
on edge, like what are you doing, You're like changing
the concept here is changing And one woman finally sort
(18:27):
of like breaks through with a question forty five minutes
in and the way that everybody he and then all
the people who were on the sort of activist groups
who obviously got government money to like push their ideas
through cording'ed her off and say, oh no, there's going
to be time for this. We're going to have breakout groups,
We're going to do this, do that. And I went
to one of those breakout groups and like the woman
(18:47):
wasn't taking notes and was like a college student and
she didn't care, Like you saw you are trying to manage, yeah,
and drive people away from the discussion. And like I thought,
oh my god, that is a very effective tactic, and like,
just make the field smaller of people who are going
to play, then you can dominate the field if you
have like money and the passion and the networks. And
(19:09):
by doing this you were going to come up with
crazy ideas. But also since you are in a big
democratic places, you know, you've just elected the politicians who
are going to negotiate your next union contract. It's just
you could see the whole cycle unfolding. But even with
all of that, and with the prediction, I had no
idea how fast it would all come true. Holy cow,
that was nuts.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
So I have to I feel like I have to
specify for the audience because we didn't define what they
were doing to the schools. But basically, this District fifteen
is a super left area of Brooklyn. It's largely wealthy.
I would say, right, it's to mix to mix.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
But Park Slope is in the middle of it, which
you know, it's where Chris Hayes lives and stuff and
has the famous food co op and and my neighborhood
here and kind of Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hills very
well to do, right.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
So what they did was they got they decid that
screens for schools, which is looking at kids' grades or
attendance or behavior or testing, any of that would be
done away with because having those screens in place were
racist and were contributing to some schools being better schools
than others, and you couldn't have that. And the best
(20:18):
part of this story, of course, to me, is that
the politicians that were most actively against these screens, Brad Lander,
who now wants to be mayor of New York City,
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was the previous mayor of
New York City, they sent their kids to the schools
that had the screens, but now that their kids are
out of school, they felt that those screens were obviously
(20:39):
obviously racist.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
Like literally right when their kids graduated, it was like, Oh,
we have to break up these bastions and privilege. It's
just really terrible, you know, And it had a predicted effect.
That school, in particular MS fifty one as it is,
was turned overnight from one of the most desirable and
successful schools rules in the city to being a basket case.
(21:03):
They've they've cycled through principles. It's just been terrible discipline
issues like it like it had to predict the results.
I was even agnostic about some of these changes. It
was more that seeing the way that they were being argued,
I had objections to just like you can't tell your consumer,
your tax payer these types of things. That's just awful.
(21:26):
It's really thuggish type of behavior. And then it sort
of led me to be more skeptical of those types
of changes over time and it did more research. But yeah,
it has not it has not worked out great for
New York schools at all.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Well, it was obvious also, you know, again the well
to do part, because I thought that anybody who didn't
get into the school that they wanted, and if those
schools did start to fail, could easily just pull their
kid out and go to private school, which is what
I know a lot of people did could make feel like,
including you, Oh and I know that. Yeah, I think
that that's you know, clearly the what ended up being
(22:00):
the result of this process where they were trying to
force equity and what they ended up doing was pushing
people out of the system.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Yeah, And I mean it's a it's a big underrated
part of our aspect of American public life and politics,
Like super underrated is that we've already passed peak public
school The number of kids enrolled in public K through
twelve schools was just over fifty million in twenty nineteen.
It's never going to be that high agend, even as
(22:29):
the population grows.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
It's not.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
And if you further tweak it and say, okay, it's
not just the public schools, because charter schools are technically
public schools, but they're not managed by governmental agencies, then
the peak was in twenty twelve, and we're talking about
twenty five percent of state and local budgets go to
K through twelve education for this product, which people a
(22:55):
free product which people are running away from screaming. And
then we've just had school choice bills or a school
choice fairly universal passed in a dozen states. This is
all breaking up right now. It's large, it's one of
the largest public policy issues, and it kind of gets
talked about a little bit here and there. Most people
just sort of yammer about the Department of Education as
(23:16):
if that really really matters, and it's it is interesting
and it's not insignificant. But the biggest single thing is
that you built all these schools. Like in la they
won on a historic building spree called the biggest public
works project west of the Big Dig in Boston in
the early aughts that I covered a lot because they
used a lot of eminent domain to like bulldoze neighborhoods
(23:37):
in order to educate them. They built these huge schools
and no one's in them.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Now, what do you do?
Speaker 3 (23:43):
And I don't think people have really thought through that.
Now they've had all this COVID money that is just
now finally starting to end, so they've had these artificial
kind of sugar high of being able to hire more teachers,
these buildings to the teacher to student ratio or the
administration to student ratios are insane. So it's a huge
issue and we're going to be seeing that on state
(24:05):
and local levels for the next decade at least.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
We're going to take a quick break and be right
back on the Carol Marcowitch Show. What do you worry about?
Speaker 3 (24:16):
I have worried since nine to eleven, and then accelerating
after that with the rise of both Donald Trump and
Bernie Sanders, kind of the rise of left and right populism,
that not only just that we're in the unraveling of
what happened of all the institution building and the ideas
(24:38):
in the post World War two kind of international which
the US was very much in the driver's seat of
and help shape, and what I think was hugely beneficial
to mankind, including your terrible people. And so that is unraveling.
And what I worry about is that in the unraveling
and in the sort of populist revolt against that, large
(25:00):
part of which is understandable because elites have really crapped
the bed, that we're going to get to a much
more or we continue to get to a much more
kind of nineteen thirties vibe. And I don't mean that
to go Hitler, Hitler, but rather to say that, you know,
nineteen thirties was a time of a great loss of
faith in the old democracies in England. You know, to
(25:24):
read the writings of George Orwell, it's always really interesting.
You know, He's like, well, certainly capitalism is going to fail,
so it's going to be a question between socialism and fascism.
And that was kind of a normal way of thinking,
and even of a clear eyed guy like he was.
And then also every you know, the sort of a
zero sum sense of competition between nations as opposed to
(25:46):
a cooperative arrangement where the US has an understanding that
you know, France will be a much better reliable partner
if it is participating in a free trade zone with
Germany and other people, and they can enrich themselves and
then pay for more of their security and so on
and so on. And you'll compare that against the commis
and the commedies are going to look worse and worse
(26:07):
when we lose that, when we get into you know,
a series of of we're erecting tariffs again, We're it's
it's there's a danger associated with that, more chance of
war more the long great eradication more or less of
(26:28):
international poverty, which has happened over the last three four decades,
just stunning, the whole kind of post nineteen eighty nine
incredible success. I worry that that might backslide, but also
like it. It's a very rich country type of concern
in the same way that we almost lost faith in
the nineteen thirties in America in our own kind of
sense of faith in the liberal order, in the liberal, capitalistic,
(26:53):
liberal science kind of project. I don't mean that left wing.
I mean that just that the Enlightenment is worth worth
continuing with. There's been I think a lot of cost
playing with people who are like I'm done with the Enlightenment,
not if already with these things, and I worry where
that's going to go. So it's not a day to
day like, oh my god, we're going to have fascism.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
I think a lot of that.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
I think almost all of that is insane, and we
spend a lot of time in the Fifth Column, especially
poking holes in that. But it's a broader worry that
we're in a twenty or thirty year rut and I
don't know what how that we cycle out him.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
It's interesting because I think a lot of what you say,
actually you know is libertarian, right that, you know, being
against tariffs and all of that, But then the kind
of trust in systems is that is that typically libertarian?
Speaker 3 (27:44):
No, but there is a libertarian and I think Nickollspie
has a lot of times a sense of conflict about
this because he's like, screw the institutions, they suck, and
then also in his next breath is like, it's a
real big problem when there's a collapse of trust in
everything because societies that stop trusting things, the solutions that
they reach for are are anti libertarian or anti smart
(28:07):
or anti prosperous, like that, you reach for the stick
in that moment. So we're kind of in a reaching
for the stick moment. There are reasons to have some hope.
You know, I didn't vote for Donald Trump and was
not rooting for him to win. I do see some hope,
and kind of unexpectedly so with doge effects of Vivacronama
(28:31):
Swaman and Elon Musk, it's actually more thought out than
I would have expected from the way that those two
have been conducting themselves publicly up up until they started
implementing this at least as a concept. And then Javier
mela is just like he has shown a different international path,
has Trump's ear, has like success to point to. And
(28:52):
he's a crazy libertarian. I mean literally a crazy libertarian
who clones his dogs and names them after libertarian economists.
That's nuts, like doesn't wash his hair. He's the weirdest
libertarian you know, is half as weird as Hawvr Malaius.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
There are reasons well.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
After you know, some weird Yeah, we all do the
blue faced guy and stuff. Yeah, but there are reasons
to think that, you know, we might have some aspects
for hope, but the the broader term thing, and this
is also I mean you said the most libertarians are
not really institutions. This is why I didn't describe myself
(29:30):
as a libertarian necessarily as part of it. Like I saw.
I see to this day, at least looking in history,
that the creation of the institutional Cold War order was
a good thing. The creation of NATO was a good thing.
The the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the UH,
(29:53):
the the precursors of the EU, which you know, the
trading community between all those countries was an important, the
necessary thing and the long term global mutual reduction of
tariffs that went along with that. I see all of
that as essential at the time for what it was doing.
My criticism of that order is that people got lazy.
(30:16):
And then also after we won the Cold War, we
didn't push for a post Cold War settlement in which
we would stop being the major, the main player character
in everything Europe I mean, which is a very much
a Europe's own fault for that. Europe should have devised
its own security arrangements after the end of the Cold
War instead of like, I don't know, you do it.
(30:39):
And I think so much of our modern problems stem
from that. And then the people who I had otherwise
agreed with in the kind of institution building post World
War two became very arrogant and stopped paying attention to
the importance the necessity of having public input.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
You've got to you've got to have.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
Public and political legitimacy for what you're doing. You can't
just say like, no, this is how we do it.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Shut up.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
And they've been doing this is how we do it.
Shut up for a really long time. And I think
that is as much why we're in the moment that
we're in as anything else.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
What advice would you give your sixteen year old self,
sixteen year old Matt Welch, what do you say?
Speaker 3 (31:20):
Sure, there's a couple of ways of looking at that.
One is that, you know, the boys kind of are
a little they go through their crisis I think a
little bit later than girls, at least. It's my anecdotal
observation having I have a sixteen year old daughter and
the twelve to fifteen was not awesome, not all. But
(31:44):
she's pretty good now and has a job at McDonald's. So,
like you know, Donald Trump, just like Donald Trump, she
appreciates all that. And I don't know if it's like
Kamala Harris or not, don't have that confirmed, but you know,
on one level, well, it's like, develop a work ethic,
show up on time, and it'll all sort itself out.
(32:06):
Have faith in like ten years or twelve years when
you go through your crisis, if you're at least doing that,
This is the cat Temp recipe for success. She was
an absolute mess of a human being for a long time,
dear friend of ours, but she had an incredible work ethic,
showed up on time and did whatever it took. So
you can buy yourself time and habits by doing that.
(32:29):
But I would if I actually was talking to sixteen
year old Matt, I think he knew that what I
would tell him to do with a finger and a
fist probably is like, don't learn how to lie. Stop
learning how to lie. Like I think you know, me
from sixteen to twenty five was pretty like tumultuous, an
(32:52):
eventful and productive period of time in my life. But
like when you sort of procrastinate whatever and then and
like have to come up with an excuse of why
you didn't make it happen, you start inventing like these
fabulous ideas of any Everyone knows you're lying, dude, you're
(33:14):
bad at it because you're sixteed, but you kind of
do it anyways because you just need to get out
of the thing that's right in front of you. Once
you start lying, then you're screwed because you're building up
these edifices. If I look at at like the major
cockups that I was involved with from the age of
sixteen too, I don't know twenty five, but probably earlier.
(33:34):
It's just that it's just like I couldn't face the
thing in front of me, and then I tried to
wiggle it out, and the ramifications were bad and hurt
people and did wrong things. So don't learn how to lie.
It's a bad skill. It's better just to take your
lumps in the moment, tell people you didn't do the
thing that you needed to do or whatever, and then
(33:56):
move on from there.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
Like I when my.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
It's like, it's an unusual answer because people usually don't
acknowledge that they've ever lied.
Speaker 3 (34:05):
You know, everybody has has been a dick at some point.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
In their lives.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
That's more than others.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
You know, when my now sixteen year old was twelve
and I could see it coming, I was like, that
was what I told her. It was like, don't stop
it now, stop lying now, and you'll have a chance
to pull.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Out of the skit. And she's out of the skid now.
So that's helpful.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Well, I've loved this conversation. You're really one of my favorites.
I love reading all your stuff. You're just excellent. And
here with your best tip for my listeners on how
they can improve their lives. And maybe that's just don't
be a liar.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
Also, that's also helpful. I think everyone could use to
put the cap back on the toothpaste. And what I
mean by that is I remember again being a no good,
probably late twenties guy, and I was thinking of someone
a friend. I'm like, oh, he or she is the
type of person who always has their cap on their toothpaste.
And then I thought, for a second, why aren't I
(35:08):
the type of pay That's not hard, is it? But
like I was a slob, and so like, start doing
making tiny stupid little just have it change, because those
are the easiest ones to sustain. Okay, I'll just do
this every time. And once you start doing that every
time and you pocket that one build up from there
of the thing that you should be doing.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
I think about this even right now, Like.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
I read a piece of this week about a guy
who reads.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
One hundred pages a day. I'm not gonna do that.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
But I have the say that like a bunch of
us that like, because of the way that we consume media,
especially social media, that we've cut down our reading. Well,
ok for what's a little programmatic habitual change that I
can enact in order to do that? So it's like,
all right, late at night, that's when I'll do some reading.
(35:58):
Something stupid, So put the cap on the toothpase, make
an incremental habitual or change to your habits, and then
once you got that, move on to the next one
and you can continue doing that until.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Your data so good. Thank you so much, Matt. He
is Matt Welch. You could check him out at Reason
Magazine subscribe to his podcast, The Fifth Column. Thank you
so much, Matt. Thank you, Carol, thanks so much for
joining us on the Carol Marco which show. Subscribe wherever
you get your podcasts.
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show News
Hosts And Creators
Clay Travis
Buck Sexton
Show Links
WebsiteNewsletterPopular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.