Libertarian Optimism: Nick Gillespie Talks With Ben Kissel on Lincoln's Top Hat

If you're under 50 and worried about the 2016 election, automation, and your future, listen up!

Last week, I taped a conversation with Ben Kissel, who writes for Fox News' Red Eye with Tom Shillue and hosts a number of podcasts, including the thrilling, chilling, and wildly popular Last Podcast on the Left, which "covers all the horrors our world has to offer both imagined and real, from demons and slashers to cults and serial killers." Glad to say that I wasn't on that one (yet, at least).

The libertarianish millennial taped me for Abe Lincoln's Top Hat (that's an iTunes link), which is devoted to "Politics! We know you love them just as much as we do. Join comedian Ben Kissel and radio man Marcus Parks each week as they discus what's going on in politics and the world of social issues." In 45 minutes, we covered a lot of ground, including whether robots will take whatever jobs the Mexicans have left for Americans, why the Democrats and Republicans have rigged the presidential debates so nobody else gets on the stage with them, and if millennials really are getting screwed by ageing baby boomers. Throughout it all, I'm damned optimistic and try, mostly unsuccessfully, to cheer up Kissel and all listeners below the age of 60.

Here's a Soundcloud version. Just click to play.

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Comments

[Hamster of Doom]

If you're under 50 and worried about the 2016 election, automation, and your future, listen up!

Three out of four. Damn. Just under the You Must Be This Tall To Ride The Ride line. Story of my fucking life.

[Ayn Random Variation]

Sort of kind of on topic but not really but oh well......
I'm watching the Charlottesville police chief babbling on tv last night, and I say to the woman I'm watching it with,"blah blah blah good shoot blah blah blah totality of the circs", and the guy almost instantly literally says "based on the totality of the circumstances".
The woman is like Holy shit how did u know he would say that?

Thank you commenters

[Hamster of Doom]

That's fantastic. Sometimes the universe sets one up for you on a silver platter.

[DOOMco]

So how'd the rest of the date go?

[Ayn Random Variation]

Shots were fired.

[Chipper Morning Wood]

Into a tissue?

[DOOMco]

If that's what you want to call it, chipper.

[Tak Kak]

Wasn't it a stovepipe hat?

[Stilgar]

@Nick I hope you will be posting a "How Gary Johnson Can Win The Debate" to counter the recent flood of 'How Trump Can Win' *

* The bar has been set so low, as long as Trump does not puke on Hillary he will win.

[Tak Kak]

"The bar has been set so low, as long as Trump does not puke on Hillary he will win."

Can't Hillary win by just not falling down now?

[S1]

The bar has been set so low, as long as Trump does not puke on Hillary he will win.

I'm not sure I could manage that, so maybe it is a legitimate goal.

[Chipper Morning Wood]

OT, sort of: On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit

[Chipper Morning Wood]

In Study 1, at least some participants appeared to find meaning in a series of statements that contained a random collection of vague buzzwords organized in a sentence with syntactic structure. This tendency was significantly related to cognitive variables of conceptual interest in expected ways. In Study 2 we set out to replicate this pattern of results using real-world examples of bullshit. For this, we created an additional scale using particularly vague "tweets" from Deepak Chopra's "Twitter" account (see Table S2).

Lol.

[$park? is totally a Swifty]

Speaking of random collections of vague buzzwords...

[Rufus The Monocled]

You missing the neo-esoteric point of what we mean. If and only if the likeness of being - or not - is infiltrated, or injected if you prefer, into the national discourse, then we can't be open and honest about our inner-soul often conflicted by our own personal prejudices unbeknownst even to the most self-aware of organically educated people or, as I call them, super-pan-humanists.

[The Late P Brooks]

In Study 1, at least some participants appeared to find meaning in a series of statements that contained a random collection of vague buzzwords organized in a sentence with syntactic structure.

They used the NYT Opinion Page?