Interview with Andrew Hastie

Becoming a millionaire, civil rights law, and the current political situation

Simon Laird: Okay. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you might be in the world, I am here with the one and only Andrew Hastie. Andrew, can you introduce yourself?

Andrew Hastie: Hey, I’m Andrew Hasty. You know, my connection with Simon is we’re both substackers. I write articles as a hobby. I’m currently casting out of my retirement location in Argentina, Buenos Aires. But I’ll be back in New York in a couple weeks. So, you know, if any of my followers or anyone’s out there who wants to grab a cup of coffee, let me know.

Simon Laird: Okay. So what made you want to retire in Argentina?

Andrew Hastie: So I was a sort of typical mid level Silicon Valley tech guy. So I started in cybersecurity for an accounting firm. I went into implementation, and then I’d say my big career claim to fame was I joined Twitter right before the Elon acquisition. And I was one of those guys who got rehired back in and I designed Twitter’s moderation system. So with the craziness and the money and the, you know, I think perfectly reasonable career accomplishment, I decided to retire. And I had met a woman from Argentina in San Francisco a couple years earlier, and we decided to start dating more seriously. So I’m in Argentina, halftime in New York, halftime, and we travel around and it was a great decision.

Simon Laird: Okay, that’s great. So your bio describes you are a million as a millionaire. Are you a millionaire?

Andrew Hastie: I am in fact, a millionaire. I could not be retired in New York or Argentina without at least a million dollars.

Simon Laird: Very nice. So getting into cyber security at an accounting firm, I would have thought that would be like a thing where you would be in the middle of nowhere in Iowa, going into a very boring corporate office. But it sounds like you were in San Francisco doing something more exciting.

Andrew Hastie: Well, so I was. I was based out of Chicago, but yes, most of my engagements, we flew to the craziest, out of the way places. I flew to a plastic manufacturing plant in, I believe it was Barry, Indiana. And the town is like 70% owned by the Koch brothers. So it’s got like privatized streets and crazy stuff. It’s a very interesting place, the plant. We got to see the, you know, the beads getting made and whatever. But, you know, we were there to look at their IT systems, to make sure the financial systems weren’t messed up, basically. So, yes, a lot of nowhere villages, but you’d be surprised how interesting it can be.

Simon Laird: So were you. I don’t know what cyber security involves. Are you writing code or are you doing other stuff?

Andrew Hastie: So I was Always on the functional side. And for people who aren’t in it, that means the best functional guys can code, but they shouldn’t. I have no computer science background. I have an economics degree in an accounting degree. So we tested functionality, right? For my cybersecurity, we would go in, we’d test something called a control that’s you need to have a password on your system or this can’t connect to a Russian IP to control. And we would make sure all the systems had those controls so that accountants who were trying to test finance stuff didn’t have to go through the whole system and make sure the math was like, correct on every transaction. So it’s basically, for us, was just a big money saver on more substantial testing. And then when I went into implementation, I was writing those features. So whether it was a process control or something automated that the system did, I would write down all of that. That’s how I got into the sort of design side for Twitter, ended up building systems there.

Simon Laird: How did you get started in that field? How did you get your first job?

Andrew Hastie: It was tough. You know, I graduated in 2011, so there was a financial crash. There were no jobs in economics, no jobs at Goldman Sachs left because I banking had disintegrated. And I realized I didn’t really want to go into academics. I thought I was academic in high school in Colorado. Turns out I wasn’t the most academically oriented guy once I met some real academics. And so I thought, maybe I’ll go into business. Business collapsed, and so I got a very practical master’s in accounting. And I said, I’m going to go into the most practical possible career, which in 2015 was cybersecurity for finance. Because we just had, you know, GDPR was just coming. Came down the pipe. We had a bunch of the European stuff, gdpr, so that’s the European privacy laws. So basically it’s the thing that says you have to, like, delete the data. When someone emails your company to delete their personal information, it established a bunch of new categories. Sometimes, you know, when you hear about this government DOGE stuff, you’ll hear about like, PII personal information or like FII financial information. All the stuff people don’t want Elon, like taking from the government to his server or something that’s all gdpr. And then sort of the California laws around that and a bunch of other laws basically made this very lucrative because there was a bunch of new compliance to do if you wanted to do international business or if you wanted to be A public company, Very practical, very boring.

Simon Laird: Do you think it’s still. So if someone is 20 years old today and they’re thinking about which path to take, do you think that’s still a good path, or has the landscape changed too much?

Andrew Hastie: I. I don’t know. So I got out of the job because it’s so thankless. Right. You know, you go in, these companies are required to be audited, and the, the government is your, you know, not your enemy, but your, Your, you know, career adversary. Right. They’re trying to get you on something that you missed, and there’s no one going, damn, I’m so glad we didn’t have a cyber attack this year. Right. You’ll. You’ll never know if you did your job well. You’ll. Only from the people who care, which are very few, hear criticism like, oh, you know, so when I talk about my accounting background or, you know, I work for Ernst and young, there are two or three bots or people who go to ChatGPT and figure out what the hell Ernst and Young does, and they go, oh, aren’t you the guys who let Equifax get hacked? And it’s like, well, they were our audit client when they got hacked. That is true. Why? Well, that’s classified. I don’t know. Right. Oh, weren’t you auditing target when they got hacked? They were one of our clients. We have 10. Right. The only people who know anything about this will be coming in to, you know, say, well, wasn’t this. Isn’t your company evil because this terrible thing happened to one of their clients? Or, you know, you know, I mean, so it’s thankless work. If you want a career that is very practical and will always be needed. Going into the functional side of cyber security. So not the coding, but just the guy who goes down the checklist and says, is this company structured in a reasonable way? I just don’t see a way AI is going to take over that very often because you have to physically go somewhere and look at their system. And even if the AI starts looking at their system, you have to look at the AI to make sure it’s following its controls. So as long as there’s any kind of feature that a human deals with, you’re going to be dealing with feature work. You’re going to be looking at a feature and whether or not it’s coded, whatever it is you say, is this working properly? Is this person doing what they’re supposed to? Is this AI doing what it’s supposed to do? So I think it’s always going to be around.

Simon Laird: All right, so you are recommending it, even with AI coming, you think this is one of the safer fields?

Andrew Hastie: Yes. Well, and I mean, AI work is all feature work too, right? If you’re prompting an AI to make a piece of art, you’re building something using the feature set of that AI. So the people who will succeed are the people who understand this agent has these features. And we have to put it in here at the point that we have some super intelligence or generalized AI where features aren’t relevant, we’re going to be living in such a different era that I couldn’t imagine what career you would even think about having.

Simon Laird: Yeah, yeah, that’s kind of my. My view, you know, if the. It doesn’t really make sense to worry about AI automating everyone’s jobs, because then we’re just in a totally different world where maybe you’re going to have, you know, a robot butler doing everything for you anyway.

Andrew Hastie: Yes, well, and I find the AI apocalypse stuff, it. It always goes into, like, there’s always some person or. Or use of force happening at the back end that isn’t acceptable. So, you know, at the point that everyone loses all their jobs to AI, let’s say it just wipes all the jobs out. Well, if you don’t need a person to do farming, then anyone who wants to farm, they don’t need to be a farmer. They can go talk to their little AI bot and say, hey, can you get me some eggs? And it’ll just do it. So the only way that you wouldn’t be able to get this stuff that the AI had taken responsibility for is if there was a completely imbalanced access to it. So there were five billionaires who had an AI and they really protected it. And you could never ask that AI to do work for you, but they could ask the AI to do work for them. You know, in that situation, you’re talking about robot armies marching through the cities or people rising up instantaneously and eating those five people. So there’s always at the back end. Kind of a law and order question. With all the AI scenarios, I don’t think there’s going to be like a normal, peaceful scenario where the AI just does everything, but not for you. You know, that doesn’t seem reasonable to me. So I worry more about like, yeah, like turning into Russia, you know, with five oligarchs who own all the oil.

Simon Laird: Right. And then tell everyone what to do. The oligarchs got to that position by being part of the mob. So there, there was definitely organized crime component with which set that up.

Andrew Hastie: It all comes to law and order. If you have equal laws, you. You really can’t get oligarchs. We have different problems with our billionaires.

Simon Laird: Well, I wanted to ask you another question.

Andrew Hastie: Yeah.

Simon Laird: You wrote a piece called the Right is Evil and the Left Is. Why do you. Why do you think those things?

Andrew Hastie: Right. Well, I mean, it is a clickbait title, but, you know, I stand by the general sentiment, which is that we have two mainstream political movements in the United States represented by the parties. And what used to be the case was we had two sort of institutionalist parties. You would just call these, like the Romney Republicans and the old Democrats, the Clintons and the Obamas. And the problem with them was they were pretty good at domestic policy. The US has consistently outperformed other countries economically. It’s probably because we have faster licensing that’s sort of going away now. But we had faster licensing, easier regulation, and smart government programs, especially in energy and agriculture, that kept our main industries running. And so everyone wanted to start a business in America. So as long as they kept that nice.

Simon Laird: What were the smart government programs in industry and agriculture?

Andrew Hastie: So, for example, you know, the Department of Energy has incredibly safe, clean programs to keep track of our nuclear material. So if you want to build a nuclear reactor in the United States, it’s just by far the best place to do it. Because, you know, if you’re a lab in University of Chicago, you can apply and get some plutonium and do some experiments on that and build that technology and then keep all the profit from, from that kind of experiment. If you want a grant for your little energy battery startup, there’s a Department of Energy program where you can go and you can say, I have this great idea. Can I get funding? And the DOE will fund your program. There’s a book by Michael Lewis, it’s very accessible, called the Fifth Risk. And it’s all about all of these good programs in agriculture. The one I’m thinking, I only think of one. It’s for example, Alaska. Most of rural Alaska would just not have running water if the Department of Agriculture didn’t have a kind of. I believe it’s sort of Office of Rural Development. They basically just make sure that there’s irrigation all over the United States. And people quibble about, you know, what percentage of.

Simon Laird: What percentage of the US Economy do you think is made up by nuclear energy and running water in Alaska?

Andrew Hastie: Oh, like very little. These are foundational programs. So these are if you want to do it. So the question is not like, yeah, I mean, obviously, like, finance healthcare. You know, these are the big services. These are the big things. And I wouldn’t say there’s direct government policies. You know, there shouldn’t be a government policy to support every barista in America. Right? That’s where the free market comes in. That’s where the good policy is, just free market. But if you want to build a fusion reactor, there’s only like two or three countries where that’s a good idea. Right? You can’t do it in any authoritarian place because they’ll just take it from you. And you can’t do it in half of Europe because they’ve got too many regulations about the chips you can bring into that country or they don’t have enough scientists. So what I’m talking about when I’m talking about, like, good domestic policy is the stuff that keeps the health care technology that we are. That we benefit from rolling, right? We want those pharmaceutical companies in the US or someone like me does. I mean, there’s debates, right? Maybe Britain should build all the pharmaceuticals. But to me, I think we want to encourage these businesses to be in the US because you get jobs out of it, you get productivity, and you have all of this stuff close to home, Right? It’s a huge national security advantage.

Simon Laird: I think that the. I think that America is strong economically because of the programs that we don’t have, rather than the ones that we do have. I think that America was founded with the libertarian ethos, which is still reflected in a lot of state governments, and that’s why we have easier licensing and less intervention and not so much of the stuff they have in Europe.

Andrew Hastie: Well, I totally agree. I think when you ask for examples of programs, I’m not going to give you examples of not programs. But yes. I mean, why do we have the biggest selection of alcohol on all of our shelves, even though, you know, maybe the best wine is made in France by some accounts? Well, you can still get it here. Why? Because we don’t have horrible import regulations. So, yes, your quality of life is broadly, of course, supported by your. Our freedoms. Right. But our ability to maintain those freedoms is. Is supported by our technological advantages and our oceans. Right. So I think good policies to make sure those oceans are clear of enemies. Right. So our international alliances and policies to make sure technology stays here do fundamentally underlie our ability to have those freedoms. Right. If we’re constantly worried about wars in the Pacific, those freedoms would go away pretty quickly. Or, you know, any speed is bad. And if we didn’t have programs that allowed businesses to start up, including just capital, liquidity and freedoms to start a business and not get your stuff taken away, we would, we would start looking like Europe or some Eastern European country pretty quickly, I think.

Simon Laird: Well, going back to, to why the right is evil and the left is. I think we.

Andrew Hastie: Oh, yes, yes.

Simon Laird: I don’t remember how we got into the tangent on, well, oh, the two

Andrew Hastie: original parties to these institutionalist parties. The. Then we started to see these extremists. So you have the left wing extremists who believe fundamentally that America is the source of all the problems in the world. If there’s a war, they believe the CIA is funding it. If there’s a famine, they believe it’s because of colonialism. If there’s any problem, they believe America and company caused it. You know, some of them are just, they go as far as to just say white people. Some of them have specific problems with the American government. Right. And then you have a right wing reaction to them. I think the nuts on the right before 1995 were mostly people in the woods with guns. They weren’t really a coherent political movement. They shot more people, but they weren’t interested in overthrowing the government except in the abstract.

Simon Laird: Did they. What were the political assassinations before the 90s?

Andrew Hastie: Well, I would be thinking about things like Waco, which wasn’t an assassination. It was just a big shootout by a guy keeping kids. Oh, no, no, no, no. I’m not saying there’s political violence after 95. I’m saying the crazy people on the right were people in the woods with, not with, without large political ambitions. They wanted to be left alone. And maybe some of them were crazies who wanted to blow up a post office. After the 90s, there, there was this rise of the irritating left, the kind of anti American left. And I think the current MAGA movement is a reaction to this irritating anti American, anti white left. If you read the book Identity Crisis, you see that, you know, the weird forest skinheads always voted Republican or didn’t vote. But the people who said phrases like I’m proud of my white heritage the way that a Mexican guy would say I’m proud of my Mexican heritage. There’s white people out there who have some connection to their, I don’t know, culture. Right. Whether it’s a guy who says, I’m proud to be an Irish guy and I celebrate on St. Patrick’s Day, or a guy who just generically Says, I’m proud of my, you know, rural white American roots. These people voted like 50, 50 Democrat, Republican during the 1990s, and then after that maybe in like 1998, right in the sort of end of the Clinton era, you see these guys run right over the Republicans. And so there is this, I think, somewhat reasonable, given the left idea that the Democrats had become this party through the Obama era of kind of scolding white identity. We call it woke now. And what came out of that movement, I think that it took a bad course. So this is who I’m calling evil. And we could suffice it, use the word bad. They’re doing bad things on purpose. That’s kind of what I mean by evil. There’s a group of people who say, I hate the left so much that we are just going to do as much shit to them as we can to annoy them, and I think more recently even attack them on purpose. So if you look at Donald Trump, the example I use in the article was his tweet just dancing on Rob Reiner’s grave. But we can look at more serious things like his politically motivated Department of Justice things, right. Finding James Comey’s meme recently, the 8647, interpreting it as a threat against the life of the president. And then, you know, you can set your standard wherever you want, but inconsistent with his standard against other people pursuing Comey for his Twitter meme as a threat against his life. These are things that I think are bad on purpose, which is what I would say I’m using the word evil to mean here. And the left’s response to the annoying left, which makes them kind of screwed, is that they’ve decided because Trump is totally opposed to the left, that there can be no bad ideas coming out of the left. And so you have this totally toxic interaction between the mainstream left, which is kind of the center left Democrats, and the mainstream right, which is this more to the right MAGA movement, where MAGA hates everything on the left and the Democrats can’t reject a single bad idea from their left flank, which is full of just the worst possible ideas. You know, communism, anti Americanism.

Simon Laird: Who’s an example of someone you would consider to be on the center left.

Andrew Hastie: So, oh, it’s becoming rough recently because I would have said someone like, you know, Ken Martin or Jon Favreau, you know, Obama speechwriters with his podcast, Pod Save America types, I would say a lot of these people in the last few months have come out for people like Hassan Piker who I would consider the, you know, the genesis of the, of the idiot left. But yeah, I’d say these institutionalists, right. The people saying believe science during COVID I, I think that would be a center left person.

Simon Laird: Believe science during COVID So like people rejecting people who say no, vaccines don’t cause autism, something like that.

Andrew Hastie: Yeah, right. I mean, of course, there’s plenty of Republicans in that category too. So that would just be moderate, right? So that would define moderate. Right. Someone who’s not, you know, we get into the definition of liberal, which is just a whole catastrophe. But really it’s people who would say we have American institutions, we should be listening to those American institutions and modifying those institutions. Some people call these reformists or liberals or moderates. I’m just calling them moderates. And then I would say the left is a group of people who are interested in the, an active role of government in a bunch of different areas. So people who believe that we should sacrifice personal retirement account value in order to have public health care. Right. People don’t think about it that way. But when you say the government spends money to give everyone health care, what you’re saying is you’re taking a point off market growth to give everyone health care. This would be a center left position. There are far left people who think we should erase everyone’s retirement in order to give everyone health care. Those people who want a total collapse of one system in order to build up another system that they’re very fixated on, those are the people I would call like far or extreme.

Simon Laird: Yeah, I’m definitely an extremist. What do you think about the, what do you think about the, the New York Times? I would say that the New York Times is a extremely far left institution.

Andrew Hastie: I think that, well, right now it, it is. It used to be, I think, yes, I would say right now, I mean, you’ve been following my notes. I’ve been very, I mean, they, I mean, of course they’ve now fallen into this Gaza thing, which is both a far left and Islamist, which I don’t even want to classify them on the American political spectrum thing. But no, I would say their whitewashing of Hasan Piker is just, you know, they’re sort of just a girl treatment of all of these crazy socialists. It’s very scary. The weird Jew hatred stuff. And I, I mean, hatred, right? Not, oh, I have some weird theory about them, but Jews are training dogs to rape their prisoners. Right. Physically impossible or improbable blood libel. You know, this is Jew hatred. It’s not even Jew conspiracy. It’s the type of thing you’d see in documentaries about the leaders of Hamas. Not on our, I suppose, formerly paper of record. Right. Something that was, I think, again, through the 90s. You would have said a little bit left. But they did factually report. Right. If something got blown up in Iraq, they weren’t just throwing around random names for the, for the people who did it. I think back in the 90s, maybe.

Simon Laird: I don’t, I don’t. I’m not sure how we would know. I don’t know how.

Andrew Hastie: Right.

Simon Laird: A few decades ago with the.

Andrew Hastie: I’m gonna, I’m gonna grab my cup of coffee. I realized I forgot it. I’ll be back in two. Yes. How would we know during the 90s if all of the institutions were lying? This is a reframe.

Simon Laird: Perfect.

Andrew Hastie: It seems to me like an ongoing question. Right, Right.

Simon Laird: It seems like the, the reason why a lot of the institutions are. Some of the lies are being exposed now is because we have social media and the Internet. So it’s much, much more possible for someone to start a new media organization, get their message out. Even something like the free press, which has a lot of establishment backing and is backed by very famous people. I struggle to see how that even could have started without the Internet. Some independent journalist like Michael Tracy would have gotten absolutely nowhere without the Internet. So if it’s the case that we get the means to find out if they’re telling the truth or not, and then it turns out that they’re not telling the truth about things, that makes me think maybe they weren’t telling the truth about things before the Internet as well.

Andrew Hastie: Yeah. So I, I have a. I have a sort of heuristic for this, which is the, which is the. If this, then that boundary set. So let’s say everything’s run by lizards. Right. We’ll just take a. Out there conspiracy. Right. If I believe that every organization in the world is run by lizards and they control through various undetectable means every media and political institution that I would ever encounter in any country, then I would not be able to ever ascertain this. Right. If the lizards were perfect, it wouldn’t matter because I would live my entire life whatever the lizards visited on me, never able to fully comprehend the lizards. So if this was the case, then I shouldn’t care. It’s like, you know, Kant’s universal imperative or whatever for. Or categorical imperative for, for your politics. If this was true, I couldn’t do anything about it. So I Don’t need to worry about the lizards. They might be there. Right. Saying that I’m not worried about them doesn’t mean that it’s not true. It just means that we can’t do anything about the lizards. So I take it off of my political menu. I just toss it out my Overton window, and I don’t worry about the lizard people very much. When we start to get into this, like, question of the 90s, right. We had these institutions, these, you know, CNN, let’s say CNN, Fox News, all of them were getting into a back room somewhere and they were colluding to some extent and they were lying, you know, fundamentally about everything.

Simon Laird: To be clear, I’m not alleging that they all gathered in a secret back room.

Andrew Hastie: Right, right. We’re just talking about if that, if

Simon Laird: you’re using it as an example, then go ahead.

Andrew Hastie: Well, no, no. So I’m saying if, then. Right. So if that were the case without a claim on truth, what would we, what, what would we look for and what would we do about it? Right. I find that the people who claim that this was the case that, that every institution is lying tend to have an all roads lead to Rome kind of philosophy about it. Right. If we didn’t know about it, it’s because they really were colluding so well. And if we do know about it, and if there was an independent organization that came in and said, look, CNN’s lying, you know, there aren’t weapons of mass destruction. Well, all of the evidence that they were lying at some point is evidence that they’re lying. And so the only way that I can suss these out today or in the 90s is if there are alternate organizations that have opposing goals. Right. This is kind of the free market competition thing. You know, if Russia and America and South Korea and Madagascar are all trying to get moderna vaccines. Right. I have to assume that these two, to me, opposed forces. The government of Russia, the government of Madagascar and the government of South Korea and the US all think that these vaccines are valuable for some reason. Now, could there be some crazy reason that I don’t know about that I could never imagine? Yeah. I’m sure there are lots of true things that I totally unaware of. But I have to use these competitive forces and I have to see what all of them are saying. If two very competitive enemy forces are saying the same thing, I usually give it a pretty high credibility rating.

Simon Laird: Yeah, I agree with all of that.

Andrew Hastie: Yeah.

Simon Laird: So my view is I, I don’t think that the news sources I Don’t think the news companies get in a back room and like deliberately plan to mislead the public.

Andrew Hastie: Right.

Simon Laird: I think that the, the establishment in America is more like the, the Church of Scientology. It’s just this cult that has some weird ideas and people are friends with other people in the cult, so they don’t really want to break with the sacred ideas. And it doesn’t have to be any nefarious person at the top pulling the strings. It just has to be this fairly common human dynamic where a bunch of ideological and ambitious people of low morals kind of get together and egg each other on into believing crazy things.

Andrew Hastie: Right. I would say that’s 100% what’s happening at the New York Times right now. Yeah, I would say, you know, I know these people, Right. I know people who work for the New York Times. I know people, a lot of people work for Twitter, right? Yes. I think usually when there’s a just a terrible idea professionally, it’s people egging each other on. And often it’s. Often what’s happening actually is a very well intentioned system is, is colliding with another very well intentioned system and both people think that they’re right and have good intention. So at Twitter then, as an example, I spent about half my time filling out compliance documentation. Now as a former compliance guy, I know that most of the people I worked with and all the people from Central Command who came to talk to me about cybersecurity compliance and everyone, the government, the institutions, they’re all extremely intelligent professionals who are very well meaning. But when you’re. And, but I knew even when I was applying the cybersecurity and of course confirmed it when I worked for companies outside of it, that when you have 50 different well meaning frameworks, some poor product manager at every company has to go through 50 well meaning compliance frameworks. And so, you know, with Twitter specifically, they had this consent order with the FCC, the FTC, the FCC, the Communications Commission, because they misused emails 15 years ago. Right. Right at the beginning of the company when this again, when my career started with the GDPR is coming out, they misused personal information, which was totally bad. And the government had this great idea to say, hey, we’re not going to find you. We don’t want to get, we could find you a billion dollars, but we don’t want to like destroy Twitter. That’s crazy. So we’re gonna have you sign a contract with us. It’s called a consent order and it says you’re going to fix Your systems based on our well meaning, you know, very well thought out privacy standards. They were good privacy standards 15 years ago. And we’re just going to have this piece of paper between us that either of us can go to a judge and ask to modify at any time, just for a few years. And you’re going to have to have a privacy council, right, that approves your products, make sure you’re not using people’s emails in some crazy way. It’s not just you. Facebook did it too.

Simon Laird: We’re going to get them, okay? So they’re undermining the rule of law. They have this giant legal penalty so that they can negotiate down to whatever they want.

Andrew Hastie: You and I looking from the future with now that there are thousands of these undermining public private ownership, you know, partnership documents. Yes, we know now, but you know, the 22 year old cyber security compliance analyst Andrew Hasty probably would have looked at this document and said, yeah, this is brilliant. This really incorporates all of our frameworks really well. We don’t have to put Twitter out of business. This is great. Right? And so 15 years down the line, of course, this is not a good privacy document. It has absolutely nothing to do with modern privacy problems. It’s 15 years is way too long to have this public private partnership. It fundamentally corrupts the government and the company that are undergoing this. No one who wrote this and was like, yeah, this is going to last for 20 years, right? We’re writing this privacy paper in 2007 or whatever and it’s going to be great in 2027. This is going to be awesome for. No, no, no one thought that, right? The compliance analyst said, this is going to solve it for three years and then Twitter’s going a different space and we’re going to stop doing it. But of course, regulators figured out every time Twitter misbehaved, they could hold up the paper and say, ah, you signed it. You pray I don’t change the deal. Those people might be malicious, but it only takes a couple high pressured, morally questionable compliance officers to create total chaos. So there was no evil emperor saying, I’m going to make every American corporation sign a blood contract with me so I can control the country. It’s just what you said. It’s, it’s just not even people of low morals. It’s, you know, highly professional people with very, very intelligent frameworks that run a lot of our cybersecurity structure very, very well saying, oh, I don’t want to, I want to just bend the rules a little bit here. So we don’t put this company out of business. That’s how the sausage is made.

Simon Laird: Yeah, well, yes, so I believe you for that particular kind of regulation. I think more about the, the culture wars and I think that the, I think that there are some pretty malicious people at the New York Times and in Hollywood and other places.

Andrew Hastie: I, I have this war in my mind about the New York Times because I mean, if you look at my tweets recently, they’ve been unhinged about the New York Times because I can’t imagine how a well meaning person would write some of the, I mean, you know, the dog rape is the most recent thing. But I don’t know how a diligent, well meaning reporter could watch Hassan Piker’s stuff. And I don’t watch him a lot. I just watched his calm discussion with the H3H3 guy, Ethan, where, you know, Ethan, there’s no out of context. He grills him for an hour and he says, do you believe in re education camps? And Hassan says, yeah, I think if we, you know, when my dream comes to fruition, we have to re educate most of the people who believe in free markets, which is half the country. And Ethan says, oh, so what happens if they don’t? And he says, we’ll remove them from society. I don’t care how charitably you take that. Right. That’s, that’s deranged. He, right, wants to eliminate half the people. And then he went on the trigonometry podcast, in case you think I’m clipping a whole hour interview out of context. And you know, they said, what’s your ideal model? And he said, the CCP in China, right, The, I would call them a fascist government at this point because of the racial hierarchies and questionable adherence to communist values. But I mean, they’re just horrible authoritarians. They have anything in the US healthcare system looks like perfection relative to organ harvesting, concentration camps for ethnic minorities. And you know, so I don’t understand how any reporter could look at his greatest hits and the things that he, you know, uses to promote his worldview. Right. These are not gotcha questions. What’s your best model? What’s your pitch? To me, China. That’s not a gotcha, that’s just what he believes. He’s doing propaganda tours for the CCP to the point that he had enough access that he started getting in trouble with their secret police where he went to Tiananmen Square and, and got into trouble for documenting Tiananmen Square because their secret police hadn’t been briefed on his propaganda tour. And yeah, I mean, it just goes back to like, I mean, certainly the New York Times is not doing journalism anymore. Right. The best case is they’re just so totally ignorant that the average layman knows more about this than the average New York Times reporter. Or they’re. But I don’t understand how that could be the case. You know, I’ve never met anyone in cyber security who was ignorant of what a computer was. And so I don’t know what’s going on. They seem evil. I agree.

Simon Laird: So why do you support normism rather than extremism?

Andrew Hastie: Well, I’ve got a big note on my notes here. What is normies? I wouldn’t call myself normal.

Simon Laird: Oh, you wouldn’t?

Andrew Hastie: No. I mean, I wrote an article called 1350 where I pick apart the entire left wing egalitarian view of race and crime. I mean, I have another one called Tenassee. Coates is a hate monger. I, I call people major civil rights, you know, believers would classify as heroes. I think that a lot of them are identitarian race war, race baiters. Oh, yeah, I totally agree on the race side. And then on the government side, I mean, I’m a. I believe the COVID Lab leak is probable or possible. I, you know, I’d say I’m more in what you call the Peter Boan, Sam Harris, you know, the people on the intellectual dark web who maintain some credence in academics and institutions, I suppose. Right. Some, some center, dark, intellectual dark web types. That’s where I would probably put my politics.

Simon Laird: Okay.

Andrew Hastie: Yeahan.

Simon Laird: Yeah, I didn’t read your civil rights piece. Which civil rights leaders did you talk about?

Andrew Hastie: So I talked about Tenisi Coates. I have a big hate boner right now for Ezra Klein’s interviewees from John Favreau to Denise Coast. You know, what I said about 10 is, you know, pulling up the article. So basically, I mean, the view of the left wing civil rights people today is totally antithetical to the spirit of MLK. So MLK’s perspective, if you can summarize it, is the Constitution declares all men equal, right? Or created equal. There’s a specific meaning for that. And MLK’s position was put up or shut up. Right? If you think we’re animals, then we’re going to make you kill us like animals. And if you think we’re men, then we’re going to make you treat us like men and give us equal rights. And so this is what the marching into dogs and police thing was about. And it’s why civil disobedience works in democracies, but not authoritarian countries. Because if you go walk into the dogs and police in Iran or Russia, they just kill you. So it’s only possible in a country with our constitution that says you can’t just kill people, or at least as long as the population votes not to. You can’t just murder 15% of the population. Right. This is our great protection. So MLK leveraged our own promises not to just kill everyone in order to get what we passed in the various civil rights acts. His view of equality. This is whatever you believe of the text of those laws, the correct way to engage in civil rights. You make people stick to their promises. If the government has a promise to not kill you, don’t jump at the police officers. They’ll just shoot you. Right. Has to happen in America. So tenancy Coates view is aesthetic. It is the aesthetic of King’s protests with none of the philosophy. He believes that black people are just a race born in blood and slavery that has fought tooth and claw for everything they have. There is no perspective that black people collected on the American promises to them. He thinks there’s just a race war. And he says this explicitly. He says, you know, I would probably say, let’s see. If you ask me what the truth of life was, the truth of his public life. He’s talking about King. I would have to tell you it’s hate. And I’d have to tell you that the usage of hate and the harnessing of hate towards political ends is good. Right.

Simon Laird: He’s not a very odious person.

Andrew Hastie: There’s so much. So I wrote about this and I said, look, this guy is not secretive. He believes that we need to kill the bad guys and that we need to harness as much hatred as we can to kill the people we don’t like in a race war. That is Tenacity Code’s basic philosophy. And it’s totally contrary to. To the. The genuine put up or shut up civil rights view.

Simon Laird: Well, I’m totally on your side being completely against Ta Nehisi Coates. I’m not sure that Martin Luther King has the. Had the philosophy that you’re describing, though. I think that King was living at a time where he had to say things like that in order to not be completely rejected by the white majority. But he was in favor of racial preferences and race quotas and affirmative action. And he was also a communist. He kind of pretended not to be, but his staff were communists. He so go Ahead.

Andrew Hastie: So, I mean, I might have quibbles on your psychoanalysis of. Of Kang, but I think putting it aside, because we could go in circles about whether, you know, he has some quotes where he says, well, I’m not really an economist, right? I’m not. I don’t know about economics, so I don’t know what the right economic system is, but I think we should redistribute. Right? So that’s a quote people use, but they often leave the I’m not an economist part, you know, off the front of that quote where he said he

Simon Laird: also had the people who. The people who worked for him and wrote his speeches for him. And I would say his handlers were either Communist Party members or very close fellow travelers of the Communist Party.

Andrew Hastie: And I. I think that’s probably true.

Simon Laird: I just think the King did not actually do the things that he is alleged to have done. You know, he did not organize the Montgomery bus boycott that was organized for years by another guy named Ed N. And then Rosa Parks. And King kind of came in at the last minute and took credit for it. He did not write the I have a Dream speech that was plagiarized from a speech that someone else had given a long time ago. He did not really support treating people as individuals rather than as members of a race because he supported racial quotas. And I think that the reason why he is celebrated is. Is because he was just made into the current thing by the media, and then he was assassinated, which made it so that he could not later be discredited. I think if King had not. Had not been assassinated, he would have gone on to. To just be another Al Sharpton, and he would have lost his credibility thereby.

Andrew Hastie: It’s quite possibly true. You know, whenever you look into any of these heroes, they’re always, you know, absolutely insane people, because I don’t.

Simon Laird: I don’t think so. I think there was something other. You know, it’s one thing to look into a heroic figure and find out that they were crazy. Like, I think Peter the Great in Russia, who’s this celebrated person who died by. Like, I think he died because he dove into a freezing river to rescue a peasant, but he also, I think, had his own son executed. He was a pretty crazy person. With King, it’s different, though, because King isn’t. He’s not just an eccentric historical figure. I think that he was. He’s kind of a sham historical figure. He was produced by this organized movement that wanted him as a figurehead, which is very different from, you know, Teddy Roosevelt or.

Andrew Hastie: Yes.

Simon Laird: Or any other political figure that kind of makes their own way.

Andrew Hastie: Right. And I mean, I’m not a historian and I believe King has been co opted in a number of directions. I mean, certainly the far left now has co opted him to try to make him more like a Malcolm X figure and, or just embrace Malcolm X who was in fact a violent criminals supported by, I suppose philosophers who were funded by communists. You can determine for yourself by reading them how much of the philosophy got into the writings of Stokely Carmichael. But I think the important part is that the reason King had to make all these compromises is those are the things that work. The things that work in a civil rights movement are the things that ascribed. You must work within the system of the country or you are, or you are damning yourself to a violent genocidal uprising. Right. You can either get along with the current people in the country or you can kill them. There isn’t a middle ground system where, you know, any political movement has just, you know, killed enough people to get their way. Right. That, that’s not how it works. As long as you have, you know, an enemy faction, killing members of that enemy faction will not make other portions of that enemy faction politically amenable to you. So there’s just no, there’s just no half murder political movement that’s ever worked. And you can see this especially in the communist uprisings. Most revolutions just don’t work. You know, the French Revolution, they just could not kill themselves to democracy. It just didn’t work. The only time this works is when there’s an occupying force and you have an independence war and the occupying force says, fuck it, it’s not worth sending more people over there across the ocean like the American Revolution. You never have an internal revolution where you can kill half of the people and go, I, I guess the other half are going to get along.

Simon Laird: So yeah, I certainly don’t want to kill half of the people. Yeah.

Andrew Hastie: But, but there’s people like Hasan Piker who, who use all, I would call it, Martin Bailey language to make you think this is possible. Right. So, right. There are people out there who are telling you we can just have a little communist revolution if we just kill your friends and family at this level, everyone will get along after we’ve killed your uncle who owns, who has a backyard, who has a horse. And it never works that way. Right. The successful revolutions are like North Korea where everyone’s ancestors are punished because their dad or their grandpa owned a horse. They become so extreme because you Must kill. It’s genocide or nothing. Right. So. Or it’s genocide or cooperation. There is no. With violence. It’s total violence or nothing. No Waco person has killed enough FBI agents that the FBI said, oh, well, we tried, you know.

Simon Laird: Well, they. The Waco people generously did not shoot back when the FBI ran out of ammo.

Andrew Hastie: That is true, but. Right. So I have. I don’t have a moral claim on Waco. I think. I think maybe they should have left him alone. I’m not. I don’t know about the. The pedophilia accusations make things a little bit complicated. There were certainly ways to avoid it if the documentaries are to be believed. But the point is that there is no amount of shooting Waco could have done to stop America from. From bringing someone to jail. Right. There’s no amount of murder you can commit against a police force coming after you to say where they’re going, to say, oh, well, I don’t want to lose another officer, so let’s just let this guy go home. Never gonna happen.

Simon Laird: That’s true. Although there are some. Although if. If no one is killed, there are some times when the police will stand down. There was a standoff in Oregon, rural Oregon, called the Bundy Standoff, where these ranchers, whose last name was Bundy, wanted to graze their cattle on Bureau of Land Management land, which they had been doing for a really long time. And then the Bureau of Land Management said that they couldn’t do that anymore. But then the Bundys just said, no, we’re gathering all our friends and we have guns, and if you want to take the land, you’re going to have to shoot us. And then the police did eventually retreat. And the Bundys, as far as I know, are still grazing on that land.

Andrew Hastie: Yes. And I. I would frame that in my civil rights in. I didn’t get. I expected a technical discussion of civil rights procedure, but I would put that into my category, where you’ve got a group of people, they have been abiding by an assumed contract for a long time, Right. There’s a. There’s an implicit promise. They have that taken away from them, and then this. Maybe it’s not in law, in writing, but they. They take that implicit promise and they hold it up and they say, here’s the deal. You’re gonna. We’re gonna collect on this promise or you’re gonna kill us. Right. It’s this. You’re gonna treat us like men or animals. And in America, fortunately, this is not Russia, where they would go on to the land and they would kill these people and torture their families and burn it to the ground just to make a point. You know, in America we don’t do that. We don’t take people who are demanding a reasonable promise and execute them as a general rule. I mean, you take your chances as a revolutionary. But yes, I would say they did it perfectly right. You don’t kill anyone. You just say you have to kill us or you have to tell us that’s not a promise we’re going to keep. And people wouldn’t stand for it. They’d vote their politicians up.

Simon Laird: Yeah, I don’t know if it was really, but I don’t, I don’t know if it’s that the activists are demanding that people keep a promise or if the activists are just making themselves so annoying that people kind of just let them do what they want. Like the, the just stop oil protesters in the uk I don’t think that there’s any reasonable expectation of a promise to, to stop using all fossil fuels. I guess that’s what they want. But the government likes the protesters and it would, they’re not going to like run them, run cars over them just because they’re sitting in the streets. So the protesters get the attention and, and some political concessions that they want.

Andrew Hastie: I mean, how much the just stop oil people are interesting. They are this. Well and I have, I have another article I’m writing about this called all, All Protests are George Floyd. Now, you know, there’s these sort of middle of the road protests and I have to look really carefully at the demands of specific protests and what they’re actually doing to make any kind of judgment on it. But there are a lot of protests that seem to make really crazy demands and they seem to be successful for a year or two. And then they, they, once people find out about them, they, they suffer huge defeats. So I think George Floyd is a really good example of a protest that I think at first appeared to have a reasonable request, even though I think some of their, their technicals, their statistics were wrong. Right. So, you know, when I was growing up in Chicago, the police really did annoy black people more than they annoyed white people. You know, every black student on my campus had some weird story about the police. And so my experience, black people do

Simon Laird: things that would cause the police to talk to them more than white people,

Andrew Hastie: not the University of Chicago students. Right. So these guys are Africans with a totally different culture. Right. These are people, I would say very, you know, by, by statistical isolation, very Provably don’t fall into the category of people who annoy the police as well. Right. So there’s this neighborhood of black people around the university and the police are making racial judgments about these, you know, educated African or educated, you know, upper class black people in the US who are going to my college and they’re annoying them. You know, there’s, there was a case where a guy presented his student ID and the librarian didn’t believe it was his student id so they, and the guy got agitated. Right. And they called the police. And you know, we just had enough of these weird experiences that when George Floyd came around, I, I believed him. Right. I said, yeah, I’ve seen police annoy my friends. So maybe police are really annoying these people or even shooting them. And then the videos of shootings come out. You say okay, but what happened with George Floyd very quickly was two things. The first is they made demands on things that didn’t hold up statistics. There just aren’t that many unarmed shootings in the United States at all. Much less of black people. It’s like in the tens. And so there’s no broad shooting black people problem. And when it comes to the annoyance goals, there’s more support that black people are stopped more frequently even when it isn’t appropriate. Right. And I mean we could get into an hour long discussion of those. There’s some evidence that this is the case,

Simon Laird: there’s evidence that shows that. But any, there are a few different issues here. But first let me ask you, do. So do you think that Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd?

Andrew Hastie: I think it’s ambiguous. Right. There’s two autopsies, there’s a pre autopsy and a, and a second autopsy. And the first autopsy says one thing and the second autopsy or the second report says something else. And it seems like he was killed by a combination of, of stress on its body and fentanyl. But I mean science isn’t as good as people think. Right. Being able to tell if compression of a specific artery in the body. Right. Kill the person is very difficult when the person is on drugs and fighting a cop or restrained. I mean, just having handcuffs can kill a guy. Right. I mean it happens all the time. Someone’s on drugs, they put him in handcuffs. That was the complaint. Right. I can’t breathe. He’s got his hand behind his back.

Simon Laird: Although he started saying that he couldn’t breathe before he had handcuffs, I believe.

Andrew Hastie: Right, right. I mean I, I’d say I put George Floyd into ambiguous. I’d say there are Other ones that are less like the guy who was kidnapping a child, right. And there’s just a video of him getting shot in the back. But I, I guess he had a kid in his car that he was kidnapping and the police officer was trying to stop him from, from fleeing with a child. Right. That’s less ambiguous. And then there’s stuff like, I mean just to use one will agree on the Vegas guy, Tim something, the white guy who got where the police officer had him on the ground begging for his life, crawling and then executed him in a Vegas hotel hallway. Right. I mean I’d say there’s a range of ambiguous, you know, totally unjustified to ambiguous to totally justified shootings. But the Floyd protests saved me the trouble of analyzing all of this because the leaders stole all of the money and called for the destruction of the US government and capitalism. So whatever any innocent college kid thought they were doing out on the street. There was no leadership representation for any kind of reasonable request, Right. There was no please keep your promise. And so with the Just Stop Oil protesters, I think it depends what their representation is asking for and I think what, depending where you find these idiots. They’re, they’re, they’re, they’re demands follow the same spectrum, right? Some of them want nuclear energy. Great. I’m a yimby. Awesome. Some of them want the shutdown of all petroleum industries. Great. Okay. I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think that’s stupid. You know,

Simon Laird: I haven’t even heard of Just Stop Oil protesters wanting nuclear energy. Have you seen some that do

Andrew Hastie: so I’ve not seen, I have not seen any of the traffic sitters demanded at the protests. But I, I believe if you go to the, the Just Stop Oil this would be the U.S. i don’t know about London. I believe you go to the Just Stop Oil website. They had, they had a section on nuclear.

Simon Laird: So okay, good for them.

Andrew Hastie: Someone in Just Stop Oil care. But these protests, you know, these movements, I’m associated with a, with a sort of center right libertarian ish environmentalist group called the ACC in Colorado. Yeah, they’re great. And you know they’re funded, right, by a bunch of nuclear energy companies. So they’re big nuclear people. But the, you know, the people in it all have their own little desires, right. So I’m a density and nuclear sort of, you know, optimistic free market future guy. There are other people who really are trying to get the last five Republicans who believe in climate change at all to come to the movement and, and look at petroleum reduction. But I think it’s very local. Right. The whole thing with ACC is it’s local action. So in a place with national parks, they mostly do national park care. In a place with coal plant, they’re trying to get it a nuclear plant there instead. In a place with a plastic factory, they’re looking at marginal sustainable practices for plastics manufacturing. Right. It’s going to be. Well, you hope you’re talking to the experts. Right. So figure out what’s useful.

Simon Laird: I think that the Trumpists have not taken over the Republican Party to as great an extent as you think. So when Trump got in in his second term, there was an election for Senate Majority leader because the Republicans had just taken the Senate and there were three Republican senators who put their names forward. John Thune, John Cornyn and Rick Scott. Rick Scott was the Trumpest one of the three. Yeah, he was actually endorsed but he, he put himself forward as the, the pro Trump option. So the senators vote, the Republican senators vote on who should be the leader, but it’s a secret ballot and Rick Scott got third place and it was not close.

Andrew Hastie: Yes.

Simon Laird: So it seems, it seems that unfortunately in my view the Trump movement has, has not taken control of the Senate and they, they seem to have not even a third of the senators on their side. Senators.

Andrew Hastie: Yes. And you know, I think one thing you know, in this left is screwed, the right is evil. This was an article about the problems both sides are facing. So in my opinion the, the blind punching of the Trump movement is not universal, even among Trumpists. I think there are probably some policy people. I still read stuff out of the Heritage Foundation. Right. I assume there’s some, the well meaning professionals that I have respect for in that think tank as well to some extent. But I think the, I think the blind flailing is what I’m targeting and I agree that it’s not as many as you’d think. Right. So the left wing has a similar schrodinger’s influence in that Bernie lovers seem to be everywhere. But when you meet a candidate in an election that Bernie Sanders is related to or endorses or you know, like an AOC type, they underperform by about five points. Right. When, when a, when a socialist or a socialist, a Zoron AOC type is running in a state election, the current Democratic advantage on the general ballot disappears for those people. And I believe the same is roughly true for Trump. Right. When you look at a Trump and I don’t have examples off the top, but I, Silver’s, you know Nate Silver’s pointed to a few where they run and Trump endorses them and it’s not because Trump endorsed them, but they just are in that category of underperformers. And I, yes, more broadly, because I’m not a, you know, a pollster. I. What I’ve observed about Trump is there are no Trump orphanages, schools, hospitals, there’s a few towers, but there are no political institutions with Trump’s real signature on them. He is a totally, I would call him a patrimonialist. He’s a guy who believes the government is like his checking account. And he’s his. And he said this openly, right? He said, his pitch, Dave Chappelle made a joke was, I’m corrupt and these people are all corrupt. And I know because I’ve paid them like the corrupt motherfucker I am. And I’m going to just throw you the scraps after I got this thing we call the U.S. government. Right. That’s I think, his philosophy. And so when he, if he dies. When he dies, right. I mean, he’s old, you know, there’s not going to be a Trump foundation, like there is a Heritage foundation or a Cato Institute pumping out Trump policies. There’s no ideology there. And so it’s going to be a matter of, I think exactly what you’re talking about, right. There’s going to be some stack rank of these hopefuls. Vance the Rubio, the. If he’s still relevant. The Florida guy starts with S. Santas. Yeah.

Simon Laird: Would have been a much better president than Trump. Unfortunately, we didn’t get him.

Andrew Hastie: But very likely his high heels destroyed him apparently. But yeah, he really, he. I know. I actually think he’s pretty smart because, you know, the reason he was wearing high heels, I actually give him a point for that because he knows that the tallest guy is the most likely guy to become president by a shocking margin.

Simon Laird: Right. He needs to wear the high heels, but in secret. He needs to make sure he’s always behind the podium where his feet are not visible and wear 12 inch high heels that just tower over.

Andrew Hastie: He should have screeners like Secret Service. He should hire really short Secret Service people to hide his boots.

Simon Laird: It reminds me of. I saw a paper, I can’t remember who it was by, but it, there was an experiment where they took pictures of political candidates and this was in either France or Switzerland. So they were these local, I think they were local elections in Switzerland. And they took the pictures of the two leading candidates and they showed the pairs of candidates to very young children and they said, who would you choose of these two people to be the captain of your boat as you’re going on a trip somewhere? And so that you saw which of the two faces the children chose? And the, the face that the children chose to be the captain of their boat was the winner of the election a shockingly large number of times.

Andrew Hastie: Yes. And it’s as, it’s as effective as the, the what? The seven Keys to Power guy. I think the kids have outperformed his political predictions a majority of the time. Yes, there’s a variety of studies, but.

Simon Laird: Yeah, but the, I thought the seven Keys to power was like, I’m not saying that I thought that was just a guy who was sort of throwing darts at a board and just getting a few things right by chance. The kids who were choosing the faces were right. Way more than chance.

Andrew Hastie: Oh, yes. Well, the, the seven Keys to power guy, the problem with him is he changes his keys every election. To explain the last election and he really fell off because he was wrong about Trump this time, the 2024. And I think he was wrong about 2020 as well. So. But I mean he’s, when he got famous, he couldn’t back it. He couldn’t back it out to be explanatory instead of predictive. He had to make predictions and then he, and then he immediately disappeared. Yeah, I mean I think, yeah, I think generally we’re going to see the Trump faction is always going to be there partly because it’s really the Bush religious faction with a few modifications and a little mask, a non religious mask up.

Simon Laird: I don’t think the Trump faction is like the Bush religious faction at all. Bush was think so? No, the Bushes were this, I believe they were from New England. There is this old powerful New England family and I guess they kind of appealed. They. I don’t know if George Bush’s accent is real, but he presented himself as a Texan in order to appeal to the middle Americans. With Trump, it’s much less religious. He’s basically shut the pro life people out of the Republican, out of Republican policy. He removed the pro life from the party platform. I think that Trump is a, In some ways almost like a resurgence of an old pre Christian pagan ethos where he’s, he loves having his name in gold and he says that, you know, big power, having power and money in this world is good. It’s the antithesis of the, of the ethics of someone like George Bush.

Andrew Hastie: He loves his golden statues. But no, no, I don’t mean his philosophy, his Philosophy is what it is. I mean that if you just look at the correlation between the people who really support Trump, if you ask someone, you say, what’s your support? And they say strong and you ask them, what’s your approval? The people who give them 100% on everything, regardless of whether they should philosophically, are the deep rural religious, the, you know, the Obama’s bitter clingers, I guess, you know, the Trump religious right. They are his core support.

Simon Laird: Whether or not the Republicans core support, though.

Andrew Hastie: Well, they are now.

Simon Laird: Yes, but they were, they were before Trump as well.

Andrew Hastie: Yes, well, we only had Bush and Trump, but I think they did not support Romney, for example. They, they were less excited about the institutional Republicans, which were defined, I guess by the HWS and the sort of Clinton era Republicans.

Simon Laird: Maybe. I think Romney being a Mormon counted against him as well, though.

Andrew Hastie: The Mormonism counted. Right.

Simon Laird: There would be a lot of evangelicals who have negative opinions about Mormons.

Andrew Hastie: Yes, well, the institutional Republicans were multiculturalists, Right. That is, that is tied into the American. They had different multicultural views. But oh, a Mormon can be president was their version of JFK as a Catholic. You know, they were trying to expand the tent across cultures. And I don’t think, I think the reason that the religious right is weirdly into Trump. Right. Our porn star, Golden Calf building, you know, idiot guy.

Simon Laird: Yeah, it is, it is an interesting culture class.

Andrew Hastie: You know, they are into him because he doesn’t view America as a multicultural institutional economic zone. Right. I think this is the thing that you would say makes me the normie, is that I’m in with the Boghossians and Sam Harris’s of this sort of institutional optimism that we are a country of. That has a people. Right. The people who are the left wing denying that is these are crazy people. But the people denying.

Simon Laird: Well, many of the Republicans deny that as well. I think, I mean, I think potato people and, and Marco Rubio would deny it as well.

Andrew Hastie: These are the institutionalists. Right. So. Right. I’d be a Rubio Republican if I ever swung that way. If Hassan piker runs for 2022.

Simon Laird: You just said that it’s crazy to deny that America has a people.

Andrew Hastie: No, no, it’s not crazy. It’s. Yes, it’s crazy to deny America has a people. I don’t think, I mean, Rubio doesn’t deny that they have a people completely. Not like a lefty does.

Simon Laird: Maybe not completely.

Andrew Hastie: Yeah, I think, I think America is a mix of its historical lineage. Right. We have these founding principles that I think are Very important. If you come to America, you should be beholden to certain founding principles. And then there is a citizenry. What I think the difference between me and a more heritage JD Vance type is that I put a huge, a very high priority on recent citizenry. So I think that someone who is like a second generation immigrant is just as American or for the purposes of institutions, just as an Amer, just as American as some, you know, founding father’s kid or whatever. And so, you know, when you have that perspective, what you’re really looking at is the cultural institutions of the last two or three generations. That, that’s where I would say America really sits. So a big difference.

Simon Laird: For example, what percentage of post 1965 immigrants do you think share your political views

Andrew Hastie: post 1965?

Simon Laird: Well, I’m choosing 1965 because that was when the Immigration act was passed.

Andrew Hastie: I, I have no idea, actually. I mean, I think only about 10% of Americans in general share my political views, so.

Simon Laird: But do you think that the percentage of Americans who share your political views is higher among the, the, what I would call the heritage Americans or higher among the recent arrivals in the last 50 years?

Andrew Hastie: I’m not trying to be evasive. I genuinely don’t know what the racial makeup of the YIMBY movement is. You know, I would, I’ll say this anecdotally, you know, when I go to tech companies, right, I’d say a significant amount of tech professionals share something around my political views, and half of them are Indians and they’re just as into the American dream and building trains and skyscrapers and you know, maybe moderate safety net systems, but nothing crazy like the Democrats want. I’d say tech is into that. And tech is pretty multicultural with a strong skew towards heritage Americans, Jewish people, and recent Asian arrivals of Eastern and Southern varieties. So those people tend to have my political views.

Simon Laird: There’s polling by the Cato Institute on support for free speech, and they typically find that among whites, about 75% support free speech. The question is something like, would you allow a controversial speaker to speak? Should a controversial Andrew Hastiee allowed to speak? Something like that.

Andrew Hastie: Yes.

Simon Laird: Among whites it’s about 75% support. Among blacks and Hispanics it’s about 25% support. And among Asians it’s about 25% support as well.

Andrew Hastie: Right. I mean, I’m not, like I said, I don’t know. I really don’t know what the demographics are because I’m not grilling my coworkers or people even in my own political movement about their Free speech beliefs. You know, my, you know.

Simon Laird: Well, let me ask a different question. Do you think that Zoran. I mean, Zoram Dani would not even have been in the country if not for recent immigration? But setting that aside, do you think that Zoran Mamdani would have been a viable candidate without recent immigrants voting in the New York election?

Andrew Hastie: Oh, I mean, that’s a practical question. I understand what you’re getting at. Let me. Let me think about my answer. I think the answer, Zoran, is probably technically, no, but it’s confounded by the fact that the. His main support. One of his main support groups was Heritage American Women.

Simon Laird: I’d like to see the polling on that. I mean, I believe that. I believe that there were a large number of Heritage American women who supported them. But as a like, as a percentage of all the heritage American women in New York, I’d like to see the numbers on that.

Andrew Hastie: Yes. I mean, I think here’s. Here’s where. Here’s where this conversation is. We’re gonna fly away. Here’s where this conversation is running into trouble. I think. I think that there are these groups you’re talking about. I believe they exist, and some. Some conservative people for them. That’s just enough. No one. No one even wants to talk about this, right? But these groups exist. But I think the mistake people are making, and this is the point I actually made against the left in my 1350 black crime article, is that the mistake people make is thinking about these groups racially. So when you. Let’s take 1350, right? When we talk about 1350, the idea that 13% of Americans commit 50% of violent crime, right? We say a, you know, the 13% of black people commit the crime. The problem with this statistic and what I lay out in my article is not the 50%. The. The left will argue to the ends of the earth that it’s 45% because of, I don’t know, conviction, false convictions or policing or something. But the real problem with this art, this statistic is the 13, right. It’s only like 0.05% of the population. No, 0.5%. About half a percent of the population that’s committing the crime we really want to worry about, right? The. The rapists, the murderers, the organized criminals and gangs, those people are. There’s just not a lot of those people. They’re not on every single block. Contrary to the narrative. They’re.

Simon Laird: That’s true. There was a post by. I think it was Inquisitive Bird on substack. Not that long ago that found something like 30% of black men are convicted of a crime at some point in their life.

Andrew Hastie: Well, let’s take, let’s take nonviolent crimes out because the article is about violent crime. So we take nonviolent crime out and we take people who’ve just committed one crime, let’s say, you know, whatever, out. I break it down in the article about what the percentages are likely to be and there was some talk back in the comments. So there’s a fuzzy range around my numbers. But the people who are the people you have to worry about walking up to you with a gun and taking your wallet or worse. Right. So armed robbery and up, Right. So a threat of violence or violence, anything assaulted up. The people you have to worry about is a relatively small number of people at any given time. So if you, if accounting for arrests and all these things, the number of people walking around a city who’s, who are going to fuck you up is like a couple thousand people. In a city of millions, there aren’t that many.

Simon Laird: I’m not sure it’s that low, but I guess we’ll proceed with this premise.

Andrew Hastie: Yeah. So if that’s the case, Right. So let’s put a pin, right? A change my mind pin, right? If you could show me that there are 50,000 violent criminals running around any given city, right? And I’m not talking about a homeless guy who shouts slurs at you. I’m talking about people actively looking for someone to push in front of the train or mug you. You show me there were 50,000 of those people running around the city. I think my views on crime and policing would change substantially on a number of categories. So. But my understanding is that it’s just a few thousand people. And the reason that policing is so effective is that when you arrest a few of these people and you’re most likely to get the worst offenders because they are out committing crimes, you can get these huge drops in crime. It’s why you see in San Francisco a DA who’s just willing to prosecute 5% more. And you see the crime just floor, you know, in San Francisco with, with the new da. The problem is that these thousand people, in my opinion are terrorizing. Especially say in Chicago, the other 13%, right? Black neighborhoods live under terror of these gangs and disastrous, you know, occurrences.

Simon Laird: Well, they do, but they don’t oppose the criminals. If it’s not like the, it’s not like the majority of black people are clamoring like, please, we want more police to Come deal with these, these violent mania. They actually will rally behind those people when they have confrontations with the police. There’s polling on like support for the death penalty. And black Americans are this huge outlier. They only support by about 50% rather than every other group which supports at a much higher percentage. And the reason presumably has something to do with, with not wanting to see one of their own be sent to the electric chair. So it seems like many, many people who are not themselves violent criminals have some kind of affinity and tribal loyalty to people who are violent criminals just because they’re members of their race.

Andrew Hastie: So I think, yes, I think tribalism, if you ask any educated black guy about black tribalism, that they’ll put it in the top five issues for sure because they experience it too. I think my point more. Yes, I think there are adjacent problems we could talk about. I think what I’m saying is when you try to define racial groups on statistics, you run into these problems that there’s so much individual variation and the number of problem causers in society is, is generally pretty low on any metric. Right? There’s a lot of rapes, but not a lot of rapists kind of thing. You know, you, you start to get into these things where you’re defining a group based on race and really what you’re saying is there is a group that is all of a certain race causing problems. So if you look at organized crime in America or organized, you know, blue collar crime, organized violent crime, gangs, you’re going to find like a crazy number of blacks and Hispanics. But if you look at the actual numbers, and again, I’m open to, you know, education on this topic. If you look at the number of blacks and Hispanics running around actually doing crime, it’s not that many. Right. The average black guy is not out committing crime, but the average criminal may not be white. Right. If you, if you lump them all in.

Simon Laird: Yeah, I agree, I agree that crime itself is not really the fundamental issue. It’s, it really is more the tribal dynamics. If people are going to vote as a tribe to steal things from the other tribes, that is a big problem. If people are going to side with criminals of their own group and not, not allow them to be brought to justice, then that is a problem. And we, you know, we currently have a system where it’s illegal to treat people as individuals. If you have a policy that, that disproportionately bars black people from your amusement park or whatever, then you’re going to be forced in court to drop that policy. And so the result is that not only it would actually be better if we just had explicit racial quotas, but you’re not allowed to do that either. So the result is that we just can’t have any kinds of standards of behavior at all. Because if there’s one group that has that standard enforced against them more than other groups, you’re not even allowed to just choose the members of that group who are behaving well. You’re not allowed to have a standard at all. And we have this, in my view, because of the somewhat inevitable tribal dynamics of having different groups having voting power in the same country. Because we just can’t have a conversation about reforming civil rights law without coming up against the black voter bloc. And it’s just a political non starter.

Andrew Hastie: So what, okay, let’s talk about civil rights law. What is, I, I, I know the general framework you’re talking about, right? This is the, this is the freedom of association thing. Right. You know, civil rights law infringes on a freedom of association because if you have a, if you have a business, you have to, you, you can, you can refrain from making a gay cake, but you can’t refrain from selling a cake to a gay person. Right. You can’t discriminate.

Simon Laird: Yes. Although the guy who refused to make the G Jake was dragged through the courts for decades and then even after he won in the Supreme Court, they started harassing him again. So it, he endured a very heavy cost for that decision, even though it was technically legal.

Andrew Hastie: Yes. And of course the practical reality is you can, people can fuck with you infinitely. Right. This is the whole problem of the Internet. Right? You know, building a moderation system for Twitter. You don’t have to convince me that if a group of people is dedicated to harassing another group of people, right, Annoying them or even infringing their rights, there is almost nothing you can do about it in the global sense. Right? A persistent enough actor who’s willing to go to death’s door to annoy you is going to be able to do it. They’ll, they’ll be able to sue you forever and, you know, so. But the practical matter of, of harassment aside, right, which, which I don’t have any good. Trust me, I’ve thought about it and I have no good solutions. The, the, the philosophical problem is that, you know, if someone doesn’t want to make a cake for a black guy or a gay guy, that choice is taken away from him as long as he is making cakes for anyone. Is that the, the concern that is the concern.

Simon Laird: That’s one of the concerns. But what I was talking about a minute ago is a bit different. So here’s a more concrete example. I, I wondered a couple months ago if it would be possible to have a state law that said you have to meet a physical fitness standard to graduate high school. Like, what if they said everyone in order to graduate high school in the state of Kansas, we’re going to say have a really minimal thing like everyone has to be able to finish a mile in 10 minutes.

Andrew Hastie: Sure. And assuming exemptions for ADA and all of the, all of the, well, nitpicky paperwork underneath it. Right.

Simon Laird: Well, I think the ada, I don’t even know if they would allow you to make exemptions, but. Well, there’s another problem. If you have this standard, more boys are going to be able to pass it than girls. Almost certainly.

Andrew Hastie: Sure.

Simon Laird: Now, of course, it’s a very easy thing that most girls would pass, but the rate of passage is going to be different for boys and girls. I mean, it would be nearly impossible for it to be exactly the same. And so that means that having the standard is considered discrimination because there’s a disparate impact. Now you might think, okay, well, this is simple. We’ll just have a say it’s 10 minutes for boys and 12 minutes for girls, and it’ll be about the same passage rate. But you are also not allowed to do that because having different standards is also discrimination. So you’re not allowed to have a single standard where the groups perform a different. Don’t pass the same rate. And you’re not allowed to have, you’re not allowed to have one standard where they pass it at different rates because that’s discrimination. And you’re not allowed to have different standards. So the result is that you just can’t have any standards. It is illegal under Title IX to have any kind of physical fitness test to graduate high school.

Andrew Hastie: So. Okay, I have, I have a factual doubt here. What are we saying about. We have women’s and men’s sports leagues. Right. So you could have, you know, men’s and women’s segment of your PE class. I mean, we did different activities for men and women in my middle school high school PE class. And I think the women were held to a different mile time standard.

Simon Laird: I wonder if that is still allowed.

Andrew Hastie: Oh, maybe that. Yeah, maybe. I haven’t been in school recently. I’m trying to think of any time I would have hit different. I mean, there’s intramurals, sports leagues. I’ve been and I think also like

Simon Laird: having, having men’s and women’s.

Andrew Hastie: Yeah.

Simon Laird: I wonder if it’s still allowed. But I also think that having a gym teacher say, the boys are going to do this and the girls are going to do this, that’s not relevant to whether you receive your diploma. And I was talking about some kind of standard you would have to meet. Like, you know, we’re not going to have childhood obesity, like enabled by the schools. We’re going to have some kind of minimum fitness test that you have to do to pass 12th grade. And I think when there’s a, where there’s a specific state consequence, like a diploma attached to it, my understanding is that it would not be legal to have any kind of fitness standard.

Andrew Hastie: Yeah. So I think I have factual credit because I mean, I think, I wonder if a high school could just say you have to pass your PE class to graduate. You need a PE credit if you don’t pass your PE class to graduate. And men have to make this standard to pass their PE class. You get a, you know, you get a pass fail based on your mile time and your capacity and you get a pass fail and then you’re just exempt. Right. So if, you know, someone has no legs, they’re not held to a mile running standard. My understanding is that this is legal. If this weren’t right, and I’m not a, I have no idea. I’m just giving you anecdotes from. Oh, I’ve seen this. Right. I think it’s fine. But if this, if obviously what you’re describing, if true is, is a catastrophe, that’s. That shouldn’t be the case. I don’t know, I don’t know what civil rights law this stems from.

Simon Laird: I mean, Title 9, it’s Title 9 of the Civil Rights Act.

Andrew Hastie: Okay. So this is so Title nine. I, you know, last year I knew a ton about Title IX because I was looking into the Biden Trans thing. I was writing about it, but I don’t remember about Title 9. So my understanding with Title IX is it’s about equal access. It’s like about equal funding. So if you have a college and you have a men’s football team, there needs to be. And I think it’s an opportunity thing. Right. You’d have to have an equal opportunity for women to have foot to be on a football team at the college. So I think the way they generally do this is when there’s enough women for a women’s league, there’s, there’s an explicit women’s league and it’s funded equally to the men’s. And then when there’s not, you have an open league. So the, the men’s, all the NBA, the NFL, whatever, are an open league. A woman could technically say, I want to be in the NFL, the men’s division, because it’s an open division. And they get, they get around it this way. I, I think they’re. I’m sure that there are crazy problems with Title nine, right?

Simon Laird: Yeah. And so there are some things that are reasonable. Like, I think I’ve heard of high schools having like a men’s basketball team and there weren’t enough women to form basketball teams. But so they have like a men’s basketball team and a women’s volleyball team. And so, yes, like similar sports, sort of, and they’re getting equal funding. But like with Title 9, there were feminist lawyers. So I think that like originally they said, well, we have women’s cheerleading team. We’ll give more money to that team. But, you know, cheerleading is a feminine activity. So feminist lawyers don’t like it. So the lawyers, you know, got the courts to rule that cheerleading doesn’t count as a sport because they need to explicitly get women to do less traditionally feminine things.

Andrew Hastie: Well, so you’re never going to have to. I mean, my hobby, my dead horse that I’m beating to even death or on substack is how much I hate those people. Right. I mean, the, the lawyers and the, the far left, right. And I think sometimes it’s opaque, right. Where it seems like I think you’re more on the right. So you tend to follow these, the, the nuances of the magas stack rank, you know, voting for these candidates. And on the left. I wouldn’t even consider myself on the left, but I had to deal with these idiots in college constantly. So I know all about the various variations of toxic idiots on, on the left. And so you don’t need to sell me on the horribleness of, you know, some lawyer who’s like, cheerleading isn’t a real sport because only manly sports are cheerleading. But women don’t need to go into manual labor careers. But the, you know, right. This whole stack of just horrible behavior and philosophy, you know, sort of hiding a horrible anti American, anti, you know, race war desire. Right. This is the current third world slop content. I, I will say one thing, that people, well, people know it now because people have popularized this idea. But what people haven’t realized until recently about a lot of these ideas is how much we’re talking to other countries without Realizing it. So people talk about like Nick Fuentes and like Hassan Piker. Right. And I think these are reasonably similar people, depending on how you judge their seriousness, their respect.

Simon Laird: Young extremist live streamers.

Andrew Hastie: Yeah, they’re young streamers. Live streamers. And they both fundamentally believe America is broken because it privileges certain groups over the others. And their solutions are very similar, which is take the offending group and either. And eliminate them from society. Right.

Simon Laird: I actually have not heard Fuentes call for, for explicit violence, unlike Piker.

Andrew Hastie: No, I don’t think. I’m not talking about the practical problem. I’m talking about their philosophy. So. So Piker believes the capitalists, and he means loyal white people should be re educated or removed from society. And Fuentes, I think, has just explicitly said we need to lock up all the blacks and the Jews and we need to make gays illegal again. Right.

Simon Laird: I don’t think he’s actually called for locking up all the blacks and the Jews.

Andrew Hastie: No, no, no. So there’s a quote and Piers Morgan grilled them on it.

Simon Laird: Yeah, I know. I’ve seen the quote. I, I used to watch his stream a few years ago and I think that he sometimes says things which really are taken out of context. Context. I did not hear any calls for locking up all black people other than that. And he’s even in that interview with, with Piers Morgan. He tried, he walked it back to saying like, okay, well, only black people who are committing crimes. I think that, I think that.

Andrew Hastie: Right.

Simon Laird: Is. Takes a cue from Trump and just never apologizes for anything. Which is why he, he, you know, doubles down on ridiculous statements on Piers Morgan. But I do think that Piker is much more supportive of actual violence.

Andrew Hastie: I agree on the violence thing. I’m not mean to make some total equivalence between. Actually, I’ve forgotten the, the what, what track were we on? I’ve gotten derailed.

Simon Laird: You started talking about how Fuentes and Piker are like two examples of young extremist live streamers who don’t like America because they say there’s. It’s fundamentally broken because there’s one group that they don’t like.

Andrew Hastie: Yes, but before that, I’ve lost my train of thought.

Simon Laird: But when we were talking about Title 9 and how these feminist lawyers who say that you can’t have that cheerleading doesn’t count as a sport.

Andrew Hastie: So I think, So I, I think there is, I’m trying to think. I don’t know exactly what point I was making. I think, I think there’s a general. I think there’s a general distinction to be made between people who are just truly anti American or. Or anti the current system in. In some general way. So there are people like Piker or Gia Tolentino, the steal from Walgreens, people who justify their behavior and their statements. Maybe they’re extreme, joking statements. Maybe they’re serious. There’s some psychoanalysis by saying we live in a totally corrupt system, and so really anything you do to fuck with the system is justified. Right. They might start with specific examples like this guy doesn’t have health care. But when they really get into their. Get him a few drinks and they get into their Luigi Mangioni speech, you find out they just think it’s fucking cool to kill people because they don’t like those people. Right. And I think that.

Simon Laird: I think that a large portion of the laughter are just people who are essentially criminals. I think that if you’re a malicious person and you live a thousand years ago and you’re like a bad person who wants to hurt people, you can become a highway robber or something like that. And if you were a bad person who wants to hurt people 100 years ago, maybe you’d be, I don’t know, part of the Mafia. And if it was 50 years ago, maybe you would join the fascist or the Communist party. And today, bad people want to hurt people. If they’re born into some situations, they just become petty criminals. But if they’re born into these very affluent situations, they can become, like, left wingers and they can steal things and hurt people and lie about people and indulge their preference for doing that, but they have a political cover for it. Yeah, I’m saying a lot of the far left, I don’t think they really believe in things, and that motivates their actions. I think they’re just habitual criminals who kind of have this ideological window dressing.

Andrew Hastie: Yes, this. This is the point. Right. And so we shouldn’t mistake these types of things that the feminist lawyers who want to delete cheerleading. It’s tempting to think, oh, we must have some philosophical problem in America because there’s these crazy people who want to delete cheerleading. But these people are just. Highway Rob are just bandits, right? They’re just outcasts. And I. I think my. The only reason I bring up Fuentes is I think whatever you believe about Fuentes personally, I mean, I’ve.

Simon Laird: You were talking about how we’re not talking to Americans.

Andrew Hastie: Oh, the other countries. Yes. So. Right. So these highway robbers, they. Their audiences are like 70% foreign, like Fuentes, whatever you believe about his actual beliefs. He’s I think 50% foreign traffic. And they’re not accounting for people using US VPNs to get around, say, their Chinese firewall. So there’s a good chance that people like Fuentes or people like Piker are not actually talking to Americans, right? There are very few, and maybe Fuentes himself even does not. There are very few Americans who want to lock up all the blacks. It’s, it’s just not a very common. It’s just not something Americans come up with, right? It’s like the Jewish dog rape thing that came out in the New York Times recently. You know, it reminds me of these documentaries you watch and it’s about like the plight of gays and trans people in Uganda. And there’s like, you know, you’ll see like a 30 minute news segment and they find some guy in Uganda to interview about his situation and he’ll say something like, you know, I was gay for a year. A witch cursed me and I was gay and my wife left me and I was beaten in my village and that witch made, made my life ruined until we burned her at the stake. And then I wasn’t gay anymore, right? And, and you’ll hear this guy say, right this, totally out of touch, but he believes this. And you, when you, when we talk to his friends in the interview, you find out they all kind of go along, right, with this crazy belief. I think that a lot of what I’m hearing from influencers with these foreign audiences sounds a lot like these sort of third world, you know, anecdotal excuse making religious suspicion, you know, superstitions that I go, oh, I know who this guy’s audience is. It’s not like your neighbors. It’s some guy in like Lebanon who thinks the Islamic revolution is coming and, and the communists are going to help him, right? He’s got this fantasy or the dogs are filthy rape animals or whatever. And so there is a. People do not realize that many of the things that just make you scratch your head on the Internet are coming from an IP address that explains everything because it is a whole. Right?

Simon Laird: But many of those people are coming here and those are the countries where the birth rates are high and the populations are growing. And the countries where people don’t believe those kinds of crazy things have populations that are shrinking.

Andrew Hastie: So I want to make it, I think we should put be really specific, right? These people were coming to the United states in the 2020, Biden administration specifically, right? When, when we look at Biden, the Estimates are go from 3 to 8 million depending on whether you count visa extensions. There was a massive influx of these very poor refugee populations. So people in the United States got a very good look at the most desperate poorest people in these countries and Greg Abbott was nice enough to send them to New York. So New Yorkers and, and intellectuals like us could interact with these fine people from around the world who really are coming from the most crazy situations. They are often were participating in these crazy situations and they often are the documentary guy from Uganda who thinks witches are real and that’s why he’s gay. And you know, to put it in perspective, the number under W. Bush, a relatively pro immigration president, was 50,000. During all these 50,000 asylum claims,

Simon Laird: mass third world immigration, that’s through the legal system and not through the, I mean through the non asylum parts of the legal immigration system since long before Biden.

Andrew Hastie: Yes, but I don’t think those people are largely the third worldists I’m talking about because one, there is pretty low Muslim immigration to the United States. Britain is a separate matter. And then you know, when we, if we, if we think India is the third world. Right. I mean the India guys.

Simon Laird: Wait a minute though. But isn’t aren’t Muslims like one and a half percent of the US population and in 1965 they were zero percent?

Andrew Hastie: Yeah. So that’s three million people, which is not no people. But that is not that it’s 93 million since 1965 is not what I would consider a flood. If you want to talk about a flood. Right. I mean.

Simon Laird: Well, that’s right. The Muslims are just one group.

Andrew Hastie: Right. So. So what I’m saying is maybe and US And U. S. Muslims tend to be pretty educated and, and peaceful as world Muslims go. We’re getting the cream of the Muslim crop if we’re, if we’re, if we’re counting. And I think the same is true for like the Indians. Right. You know, I know where all the Indians are going. They’re my technical architects, you know, at Twitter.

Simon Laird: Right.

Andrew Hastie: And they’re, they’re quite educated and you know, liberal by world standards. I didn’t interrogate their free speech beliefs. And so when we’re talking about Uganda man who’s liking a Nick Fuente’s video saying we need that the Jews control everything. We’re talking about a very different person than my admittedly very common in the US now technical architect who you know, maybe at, at worst is a little into the Indian caste system or, or something. You know, he has some Holdover habits that make him look culturally different. But he’s not. I mean, if you ask him if the earth goes around the sun and what statistics are, this guy is a college degree and is perfectly reasonable and knowledgeable within the Overton window.

Simon Laird: I think the nepotism involved in the caste system is a bigger deal than whether someone believes that the earth goes around the sun. I don’t know how someone being a geocentrist would negatively affect me.

Andrew Hastie: Oh, sorry. I’m, I’m, I’m making, I’m casting to a wide variety of beliefs, right. If, if you ask this guy whether witches can make you gay, he’s going to say no, right? He’s not. He’s not someone consuming dogs or filthy animals, despised by God propaganda or the jihad is coming propaganda. Yes. I think there are, you know, I’ve had Indian employees who had problems with women at the company because they really weren’t, you know, we had a guy, one of my companies, get fired because he was sexually harassing women. And, you know, he was a Pakistani guy. And I mean, you know, I knew exactly what happened because to me he’s just a totally nice, reasonable seeming guy. But he literally just didn’t believe he had to listen to women. Right? He just didn’t believe, you know, you have a female co worker and he just thought, I need to do, you know, I don’t, I didn’t get the details of exactly what he did, but he’s just thought it was okay to do that stuff. And so I’m not saying there aren’t cultural conflicts. I’m saying that even that guy is not the guy who’s, you know, dragging himself through the mud in Syria to get to the embassy to make his claim to get to the United States, even though he maybe should be going to a nearby country.

Simon Laird: So you’re saying that you think the immigrants that come to America are, are so unrepresentative of the countries they come from that we don’t really need to worry about demographic transformation?

Andrew Hastie: I think we should worry about it, right? I, I think if we import, you know, 10 million Indians next year, which is what I’m saying Biden kind of did, right? He really, in four years, imported an insane number of, you know, targetedly desperate, you know, unvetted people who didn’t even have an official vetting process. They just got let in on the, on the, to be vetted. This seems like a terrible idea. If we just took 10 million Indians, even high class Indians, and dragged them into the United States and Said, have fun if we made them citizens and they could vote. I think we would see huge chaos and conflict as people encounter their new neighbors, and we should try to avoid that. I don’t want to have a big racial conflict, partly because it makes future reasonable immigration more difficult. I don’t want everyone to have terrible experiences with, with people, with people from different countries. But I’m saying I don’t think even a million a year moves the needle that much. I think we should try to import as many, you know, high quality, especially professionally. High quality professionally, with some look at their cultural compatibility. So a Canadian immigrant should have priority over, you know, a Syrian immigrant. And if you could vet him down to the beliefs. Right. We want zero jihadis. We probably want. Not a ton of Muslims from countries that are at war specific, especially once they’re at war with the US we probably want, you know. Yeah, I think, I think you can rank these people based on their country. I’m just skeptical that it’s as much of a racial issue as people think. It’s much more of a third world issue. Like, I wouldn’t want to import a million or 10 million Georgians or Russians or, you know, Italians either. Right. I think. I don’t know about the Italians. They’re westernized enough. You might not be able to tell the difference. But yeah, I mean, if they didn’t speak English, 10 million Italians who don’t speak English would cause total chaos, especially if you were pushing them to get jobs. And. Yeah, you know, I just, I think race matters. It’s just not. It’s just. It’s as important as, like, you know, religion, which can be really important for certain religions. Right.

Simon Laird: I. I agree it’s not totally a racial issue, but the, the immigration that we have, it’s not a bunch of. It’s not a bunch of Hispanic and, and African babies that are coming here to be raised in, you know, American households with American values. People are bringing their race, but they’re bringing their culture, too. So that, yes, race and culture are totally intertwined when it comes to immigration.

Andrew Hastie: Well, there’s a trade off on age, so we don’t want. And, and this is just. There’s a really. There’s a. There’s a guy you should watch. I think he was on the Gojan show, and he argues for. He gives the best argument for totally open borders that I’ve heard. And he is, you know, I don’t think if you pinned him down, he would want open borders, but I think, I think it’s worth Listening to his argument. And the, and the argument is this, if someone provides positive economic value. So remember his name. Let’s see. I can tell you, you, if you Google Boan, open an open borders guy. This guy. Let’s see, it’s kind of, it’s gonna autoplay. Okay. It’s, it’s on Peter Bosian’s channel. There’s a video called an economist argues for open borders. The guy is named Brian Kaplan.

Simon Laird: He’s my advisor. Yeah, I know him well.

Andrew Hastie: Yeah. Okay. He’s your advisor.

Simon Laird: He’s my advisor. I’m in grad school now. Yes.

Andrew Hastie: Oh, yes. Okay. So Brian Kaplan goes on and he gives the best argument for open borders. And I, I think, you know, his argument is the standard econ argument, which is if there’s a marginal benefit, we should do it. And so, you know, I tend to start there. I tend to start with, okay, we’ve got a world full of talent and economic possibility. Let’s just start with everyone on the positive side of the list. Right? We should worry about our welfare payments. These people, we should, Europe is in real trouble with that. But once you’ve got a list of people who could benefit you, then we should start worrying about constraints. So if we say, well, even one or two jihadis is a constraint, then we knock all the JI hotties off the list. And then, and, and I would work our way up. And my contention is that list is still, you know, a hundred million people long at the most stringent, you know, totally English speaking compatible, nice people. We could import millions from Europe right now that have a physics degree and, or AI and love us and you know, we could just put them here. And then the question is just what your constraints are. Right? I mean, we can’t bring 100 million in. So, you know, what is, what is our supportable rate of productive immigration? I think that’s where the conversation should go. Both the left and the right have destroyed that conversation.

Simon Laird: Yeah, but I think that what Kaplan has in mind is an idealized immigration system. And that’s not what we’re talking about in the current immigration debate. No, there’s no way that’s going to bring in a list of very well vetted people. It’s whether we’re going to open the borders to people from Guatemala and Eritrea and a bunch of other places where the average immigrant is, is a net negative.

Andrew Hastie: Yes.

Simon Laird: Kaplan also doesn’t consider voting the, the effects of the immigrants and their descendants voting. And I think that’s because Kaplan is just extremely, I think Kaplan hates the Republicans almost as much as he hates the Democrats. I’m a pro Republican partisan, and Kaplan is just generally disgusted by politics. And so I think that’s probably why he, he doesn’t really consider the effects of what the immigrants will vote for. But I think the Republicans are just clearly more in favor of economic freedom. They’re not going to show up as that. They’re not. That’s not going to be reflected in the Cato reports, because the Cato reports are counting being pro immigration as part of economic freedom. But if, if we set the immigration issue to the side for a minute, Republicans are clearly more in favor of economic freedom. Republicans are more in favor of all of the policies that made the West a successful place that people want to move to in the first place. And the Democrats are the enemies of those policies. So I think if the Democrats can bring in millions and millions of legions of voters who are going to vote for them in racial blocks, and that’s something we should be worried about.

Andrew Hastie: Yes, I think the, I think the illegal immigrant or just immigrant section of the census has real problems. I think there, it’s so tricky because there are, there are fundamental practical matters that I think make you mostly correct here. So, for example, the fact that California has gained many electoral seats by letting in immigrants is just not an incentive we want to set up. Right. We, we should not be tying presidential cultural fights to importing people who have no interest in these cultural fights or shouldn’t. Right.

Simon Laird: But I would argue that’s, that’s almost the entire reason why the Democrats are pro immigration.

Andrew Hastie: Well, it’s kind of, it’s kind of like saying the Republicans are free market until you ask the individual Republicans. And the Democrats are unifiedly in favor of immigration until you talk to the individual Democrat. So, you know, if we’re talking about voters, I think, I think you’ll find that Democrat voters are quite reasonable on immigration and are horrified that, I mean, you know, they didn’t really come out for Biden in terms of. Or Kamala. I’d say you’ll find that Democrats are fairly horrified by their party’s immigration philosophy. And you’ll find that a lot of Republican voters are very anti free market. Right. I mean, many, many Republicans are voting for Trump because they think he’s going to reign in these ideological corporations with the power of the government or they

Simon Laird: have another article, tariffs or industrial policy or something like that.

Andrew Hastie: Yes. I have another article called, you know, the Socialist Revolution is here. And it’s talking about the ways Trump has Controlled the, has controlled businesses. And I mean, let’s see, what was my, what was my list of things Trump had done? I said things like converting government contracts into national ownership in major corporations. So instead of paying the companies, he pays for stock. Protecting worker wages at the expense of corporate profits, global trade and international resource extraction. That would be tariffs and a variety of kind of gimme policies for things, priority equity and worker ownership over tax, cash salaries. Part of the big beautiful bill was giving companies tax breaks for giving their workers equity in the company. That’s democratic socialism, basically using government power to, with law firms, hedge funds and tech monopolies. This is a huge priority of the left wing in this article. I basically argue, I mean, yeah, firing all the bureaucrats and putting in loyalists. Increasing subsidies to U.S. corporations. Oh, using government power to control prices. He tried to get gas prices down by putting out mandates by executive order. Now they were, weren’t legal. He’s stopped by the system. But you know, one of the things I argue about Trump is if the socialists thought he was their buddy, they would love him. He’s protecting Social Security, he’s expanding Medicare. He’s, you know, doing all this weird corporate. He talks about the evil billionaires and their Epstein Islands. I mean, he’s.

Simon Laird: Does Trump, Wait, does Trump talk about the evil billionaires?

Andrew Hastie: Yes. I mean, he talks about social media companies and the sort of elite control over institutions like Harvard and the New York Times. He may be to some extent. Right. I mean, I’m not saying there isn’t something weird going on at Harvard in the New York Times. There is. I just don’t think billionaires are doing it. But no, I mean, Trump has been very clear that he thinks that the consolidation of sort of corporate government partnerships

Simon Laird: are,

Andrew Hastie: you know, basically a tool of the corporate elite. This is, this is a big part of this populist message. You know, I, you can, don’t ask me to throw quotes around. Right. I don’t, you know, this is, we’re deep enough into the interview. I haven’t, this isn’t in my notes. But I, I think you’ll find Trump is very. Yeah, I mean. Oh, I got an example from the article. He, his, his alliance with the Longshoreman’s union where he’s banning automation. Right. He sees automation as a tool of corporate elites to over workers. I mean, he’s a politician, he’s representing an interest group and that interest group is, you know, anti elite. And so he does a lot of economic damage or he tries to do a lot of economic damage in service of those interest groups. And this is how every socialist would operate, right? I mean, when you got to the nuts and bolts of the Zoran Mamdani candidacy, right, you would start to see him pull in these interest groups to, to fight the elites and he, he would pull in interest groups that were consistent with his message. But you’d find this messy sausage of politics in. Inside of it.

Simon Laird: Yeah, you’re absolutely right that Trump does a lot of socialist things, unfortunately.

Andrew Hastie: But I think. Oh, but just back to your original point. I think, I think you’re broadly right that, that if I look at the rhetoric, the Republican Party is much better on, on free markets. But if I get into the individual interest groups that make up the Republican Party, I think it’s quite obvious why they don’t cut government spending in a meaningful way or attack things like Medicare and Social Security, which really would save money in the government and free up markets. Their interest groups and their voters are not interested in free markets. It’s people, it’s idiots like us who read the economics literature and complain about our parties. But there’s no one.

Simon Laird: There’s.

Andrew Hastie: You know, the Trump supporters you meet are not normal Trump supporters. Most of the Trump supporters are highly religious, highly anti free market rural people or suburban people who believe that the elites have abandoned them to a sort of corporate interest structure and a media structure that attacks them. And so they are totally happy to support a kind of socialist authoritarian miasma to push back against these things they view as attacking. Then

Simon Laird: we are coming up on the end of time. Is there any. Do you have any last thoughts you want to add?

Andrew Hastie: Yeah, I mean, I think what we’ve. What I always find when I talk to someone I wouldn’t even say across the aisle anymore because of how weird things have gotten politically, is that I think we mostly agree on the principles. Right. You want an economy that gives people the maximum amount of freedom while taking the rights of citizens and the current people who have to live here and have their stuff in America into account. That’s also.

Simon Laird: I would just describe my view as pro property rights.

Andrew Hastie: Pro property rights, I was about to say, driven by the views of experts in economics. Right. These. Yes, these fundamental philosophical rights and these fundamental expert truths, like you can’t make government grocery stores without up your grocery stores. Right. This is more or less my view as well. You know, when I hear Zoran talk about grocery stores, I want to vomit. And when I hear Trump talk about how the government should have a stake in intel because it’s our Important company. I also want to vomit.

Simon Laird: Yeah.

Andrew Hastie: So we come to the center on our, on our, on our, on our views, but somehow we can’t come to the center on our politics. And I don’t know why. I don’t know why there isn’t a big coalition of people who just want to be left alone and will vote the way I do tooth and nail. Just to be left alone. Right. To fund the minimum number of military bases to let in the normal amount of well vetted immigrants. I don’t know where those people are. And if someone could figure out an article or a movement toward those people, I feel like they can make real political headway. But I feel like our divide is over this political impracticality. Does that seem reasonable to you?

Simon Laird: You’re asking if someone can make a movement to just represent normal centrist interests.

Andrew Hastie: People have proposed it, right? Andrew Yang’s thing was, oh, you need tech enabled center politicians, but somehow These people get 2% of the vote. And I don’t know if they’re just not visible, maybe the lizards are stopping them. Right? I don’t know. But that’s the political movement America needs. It needs a movement where people like us can get together and say, yeah, we both vote for this guy because he’s not trying to cut gay kids dicks off and he’s not trying to own intel. So we can just vote for this guy and talk about the tax policy later. This person doesn’t exist. There is no primary candidate on the Democrat or Republican side who I would say represents this.

Simon Laird: You’re right. That, yeah. Why is there no candidate like that? That is a puzzle.

Andrew Hastie: I don’t know. This is the great mystery.

Simon Laird: I don’t know either. I mean, well, that’s a good, that’s a good point to stop. We’ll let people ponder that puzzle. Maybe you could, if you have any theories, put them in the comments and let us know.

Andrew Hastie: Send us some substack messages. Andrew Hasty on substack. There we go.

Simon Laird: Andrew Hasty, thanks for the interview.

Andrew Hastie: Cheers. Thanks, man. Bye.