960: Should We Legalize All Drugs?

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focusing on winning arguments, we're teaching the basic fundamentals of sales and marketing and how we can use them to win in the world of politics, teaching you how to meet people where they're at on the issues they care about. Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show.

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Well, hey there, folks, Brian Nichols here on another fun filled episode of The Brian Nichols Show, I am, as always, your humble host, joining you from our lovely cardio miracle Studios here in eastern Indiana today, The Brian Nichols Show yes is powered by our phenomenal studio sponsors, cardio miracle folks, you deserve the best heart health supplement in the world, so make sure you check out cardio miracle because it will leave you with a better blood pressure, a lower resting heart rate, plus improved pump at the gym. If you want to learn more, stick around. We're going to talk about that later in today's episode. But first we're heading south of the border talking all things gang violence, hells, angels and more. I can't do this conversation alone, so joining me today, from young voices, is is Joseph Bucha? Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show, Joseph, did I say it right? You did. Thanks so much for having me and for pronouncing my name right. I behind the curtain we I told the story about from 2018 and when I had a guest on the show, and I said his name incredibly incorrectly the entire show, and he was too kind, and he didn't say a word about it. And then I felt bad afterwards, and I had to fix it, but made sure, Joseph, we we made sure we got your name right today. Is it Joseph or Joe? Which one do you prefer? Joseph's Good, perfect. All right, Joseph. Well, we're gonna have some fun today talking all things, I guess, gang violence. What's happening down in Latin America? Hell's Angels. What the heck. But before we do that, Joseph, do as a favor, introduce yourself here to The Brian Nichols Show audience. And why are we talking about gang violence today? Sure. Well, first of all, you have such a slick intro, a great voice and all that, and then I'm gonna bore you to death with these, with these facts and data, by the way, great voice. This is my voice that's recovering two weeks now post, uh, losing it entirely at a work conference. So thank you. I appreciate great

Unknown Speaker  2:18  
so, so I'm originally from Canada, but I've spent the last three or so years in Latin America. I was working as a freelance journalist for a variety of outlets, including American outlets, mostly reporting on criminal gangs, security issues, elections, geopolitics. And I spent about three years in the region, and then headed back to school this fall to start my PhD in politics at the University of Virginia, and I'll keep focusing on these issues, though, from a more academic perspective, and that's what I'll spend my career doing. So why? Why is this the area that you're so passionate about? I mean, you're coming from Canada, you're north of the border. Why south of the border? That's right. Well, first of all, it's very interesting, but more importantly, it's really, if you want to know about Latin America, or even the Americas the Western Hemisphere, this is really the most important issue that plagues everything, similar to corruption, where you know illegal gangs, crime, insecurity. It really affects how people live, how people govern, what decisions people make, the economy, markets, it really traverses absolutely everything.

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And every election, you know, they do polling to test what issues are in front of people's minds. And almost unanimously, every single election, insecurity is the biggest issue leading the way in every country. Yep, and it's getting worse. I saw this when I first started. Homicide rate in most of these countries is going up. Gangs are expanding. Illegal markets are expanding. And I just figured this is a very important topic to cover, and a very interesting one of that. And you just keep traveling and figuring out what's happening, and you find out that, okay, this is much worse and much bigger than I thought, and I just kept going down the rabbit hole, you know? Well, let's, let's go down the rabbit hole today, Joseph, because this is an issue that most Americans are very aware of, but it doesn't. It doesn't become real until it becomes real, right? And you look at the the horrifying cases of families like Lake and Riley, for example, right? And that's when these, these issues become extremely real, or that the small child who ends up dying because they get a fentanyl overdose when they're at a kid's playground and there's like fentanyl residue on the slide, like stuff like that. It's starting to impact more and more your average American citizens every single day. And I think right now, most folks are not just aware of it. Now they're starting to actually.

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Feel the pain, but it's taken, like the actual pain, for people to start saying, okay, maybe we should stop talking about this, and instead, let's start doing something about it. So before we start, I guess doing something about it, you know, let's actually look at what the issue is. So I know you wrote an article over at Real Clear world talking about like Hells Angels heading down to Latin America. We have gang violence going crazy down there, drug cartels, and that's obviously fed into a lot of the issues that we face today. But let's set the stage here. Why is this an issue? Why do we have illegal immigrant immigration crossing, you know, the border en masse? Why do we have drugs like fentanyl crossing the border en masse? And let's talk about the actual root cause of these issues. It's a big question, but you can really trace it back to economics and people's living standards. So in Latin America, like in the US, you've had this issue where

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cost of living, job opportunities, career growth, social mobility, cost of housing, cost of food, income growth have sort of either stagnated or even decreased, and prices have gone up, and so you have a lot of economic insecurity, people

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not being able to feed their families or accomplish their goals.

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You know, you had the family wealth, not really transferring or growing through generations. And really these kinds of economic difficulties or challenges are such a fertile soil for for for criminal gangs to expand. So every recession, every economic crisis, you see the same thing. So we heard this in COVID when gangs were manufacturing masks, distributing food. You had the same thing in Latin America. How nice of that? Really? I know, right? Definitely not.

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There's no ulterior motive there whatsoever. But so you always have this thing where it's a cycle of economic crisis after economic crisis that really opens up opportunities for gangs. We have members joining these organizations because they pay a lot more

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for any job, whether it's farming, transportation or even joining the actual illegal side, which is, let's say, human trafficking, gun smuggling,

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things like that. And you also have markets where, oftentimes state capacity, so the government is unable to provide services for people like food and shelter and safety, and gangs step in and provide them, and they slowly, sort of build their presence into these markets, which then become more legal market. So you you might have,

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let's say, vaccine distribution, for example, you might have or food distribution. It might be that before the pandemic, all of it was done through prior enterprises that were legal or local governments. But because of contracting economic conditions, you have gangs stepping in to fill a gap and maybe even taking over as the majority provider of these services. And this is how it builds up over time. But not all markets are violent. I want to say that up front, where

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you've always had the illegal markets, and some are more violent than others, and it really depends on the level of competition,

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as well as how much people are willing to pay for it, and how much gangs are willing to really do to take over those markets. So it might be that, let's say market for

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let's say marijuana, might be competitive, but the cost is not worth. Gang war over. But when you have markets like cocaine or meth, which are equal or maybe even less competitive, but where the reward for market seizure is insanely high, and you have demand always growing,

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then gangs might be willing to do a lot more than which might lead to violence. So Joseph, is it the fact that a lot of these different, we'll call them the economic areas, I guess that the ones we're outlining here today tend to be more I mean, they're illegal by nature in many instances, so they're kind of into shadows. Is that what breeds the violence, and, in this case, the gang warfare? Because we don't really see this right in more traditional markets, like I don't go to Walmart and see a group of target employees coming in with AK 40 sevens ready to blow blow apart the Walmart, right? So is that the reality is that a lot of these markets are more behind the scenes, you know, hidden in the shadows, because it's more not so savory, not so nice, types of products or services. That's a good question. I actually haven't thought about that question that much, but I would assume yes, and it could be because of government regulation and intervention and.

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Could be that

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maybe in the future, you would have, let's say, a civil war, not the United States, but just generally, where basic services like water provision and electricity and internet could be so competitive and so scarce and so in such high demand that you do have,

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you know, these violent gangs or groups taking these industries over and actually imposing their their order with violence.

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But we're not there yet, and there's very few countries where that does happen. So for now, we we mostly focus on drugs.

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You know extortion, rackets, malware, you know these kinds of nefarious, ethically gray or even ethically reprehensive industries.

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But I'm not quite sure, what do you what do you think? If I can ask you, yeah, no, I think it's a I think it's a great question, and that's why I asked it. I'm just kidding. I think at the end of the day, like Joseph, there is no right or wrong answer. But when we do look at history, we see black markets come out of areas where there was a demand for a product or a service. We look at prohibition in the 20s here in the United States, and you see that if there is a big enough demand, there will be a market to fill that demand, right? So I always look at it not, I mean, I say not from strictly an economic standpoint, but rather understanding that economics is the very driver of human behavior, right? We think of Murray Rothbard here. That's one of the underlying principles he teaches. And when we look at the human behavior and understanding that our incentive structures, our motivating factors, are based more or less in some type of economic rooting in that world view, then it makes sense that we would not want to necessarily allow or incentivize governments to arbitrarily dictate this certain product being good and this certain product being bad. Now, here's where, you know, it starts to get a little sticky, right? And that is the the gray areas that we talked about earlier. Maybe it's not a a necessarily an overtly bad product or service, but maybe it's not overtly good, right? Like, prostitution, we can talk about prostitution. I don't want to necessarily talk about prostitution today, but like, that's an area where, yeah, we'll see. But like, that's an area where there is a demand for better, for worse, and is it the government's responsibility to say, hey, we're going to outlaw this particular activity, and that's going to stop that activity from happening. Now, on the right, the more conservative, argue that. Say, No, it's not going to stop it entirely, but now we know for a fact that it's not being readily available and then creating a culture of, you know, moral or ethical questions on the flip side, though, now it's, it's behind the scenes. Now it's in the black market right now. And again, I'm not in favor of regulations, but like now, we don't have federal regulators or state regulators who are paying attention to the action trying to dictate whether or not this is a good or a bad. But now it's, it's been deemed a bad but it's behind, it's behind the scenes, so it's not openly seen. It's still happening, right? And then it opens the door for enforcement, and it's not the government enforcing, it's the government's enforcing it from not happening openly in an open market, but it's still going to happen. So you're going to have now more of the battle behind the scenes for market share. So it almost feels like there is inevitable that there will be a demand for these morally bankrupt or ethically questionable services or products, regardless of whether or not the government deems, one way or another, that this is a good or a bad and we're going to keep it legal or illegal, which then leads to, okay, well, what's the role of government? Is the government actually doing good in determining when things are ethically or morally bankrupt or not and allowing something into the market? Or should that be the market to decide, and then people vote, not with using the strong arm of government, the monopoly of force, and with that, the monopoly on violence, but rather, vote with my dollars. Vote with my feet right. Move from state to state that that makes it easier or harder to do a certain good or a certain service, or vote for the company with your dollars, who's actually doing good versus doing bad. And I guess it really comes down to it's a question we don't have the answers to. If there was an answer that was an easy answer, well, you and I wouldn't be having a conversation today. I don't think that's right. And I really look at this on a case by case basis, or market by market basis, where you do have certain markets like you pointed out that there's always going to be a demand, and no matter how.

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Much government intervention or restriction or prohibition, even,

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no matter what, there will always be demand, and there's nothing they can do to stop it. And so restricting, restricting it actually just might just harm more people. But there are markets where that's not the case, where it might be, let's say, a luxury good and more of a want rather than a need,

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either physically, psychologically, psychologically, whatever you want to call it, and prohibition could actually lead to either mark a decrease or total elimination. And with drugs, it's really hard to know, like, do you really need fentanyl, but at the same time, it is a product of its own environment, whether that's economic conditions, mental health issues, homelessness, these kinds of issues,

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insecurity.

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And so it's hard to predict, but you can always look at certain case studies,

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certain cases where prohibition or legalization has been tried and figure out what works best in that industry, whether it's drugs, prostitution, extortion, protection,

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food, water, whatever it is. Well, it's funny, I work in the telecommunications industry for my day job. And back in the 90s, we had a mass, mass, or mass vast. That's the worst looking for vast deregulation of telecom, and that incentivized companies to invest, to differentiate, to to start to figure out different problems that they can start to solve. And you fast forward from the 90s to where we are in 2025, as we're recording today, like it has been 3035, years of just insane advancements in this technology. Going from where we had what we called a POTS line, right, which is literally the landline, that copper line that you would pick up at your grandma's house, right? You go from that. So now we have, you know, your voice, your voiceover Internet Protocol, VO, IP. You have your your AI tools, your AI virtual agents. You have, you know, all these, these CX, customer experience tools that now plug into your phone system that hooks into your email and your chat bots. Like, what this is all if you were to tell some folks back in the 90s, like, tell them about what we're going to have in less than 35 years, and they would be like, Dude, that's PFM, which folks playing along in the home game. PFM stands for pure effing magic. I'm not going to swear for the small children listening today in the car back seat of their parents. If you're a small child listening to The Brian Nichols Show on your own. God bless you. You're going to be way better off than your peers. But I digress. But this is, this is the problem, right? Joseph, like we we see that there is a good coming from deregulation. We see that in this instance. But then there are folks in government who, you know, whether they're elected politicians or they're entrenched bureaucrats. They think they know better than the rest of us. They think they know better. And as a matter of fact, this really does speak to the greater drug issue that we're seeing right now. And by the way, going back to your article, Hells Angels heading down to Latin America, okay, like, what's going on there? Because obviously there is a demand for something down in south or in Latin America that Hell's Angels sees. Why are they heading down there? That's right. Well, it's not like there's not enough competition with these big gangs in Latin America, multi billion dollar gangs, 1000s of members and chapters, but it's really an endless market. It's kind of a bottom, bottomless pit.

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You could say moral pit, where, you know, you have a lot of industries that are completely

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you could say unrestricted, where a lot of countries, including big countries with 10s of millions of people in Latin America have most of their economies either

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informal or completely illegal. There was a study last year into Venezuela's economy that found out that the majority of all revenues in Venezuela are from illegal markets at this point, whether that's drugs, mining, protection, yeah, where gangs have their hands in absolutely everything. And so I think the Hells Angels are seeing that North America, especially with the Trump administration, they're looking to crack down very hard on gangs, immigration, trade, borders, things that make their business maybe a little easier,

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especially if you're talking about a gang that is using international commerce, trade, borders,

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geopolitics, to do its business.

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They might be looking at that and thinking, we need to do something about this. We need to move somewhere else, somewhere.

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Might not have the same level of regulation, where there might be a sort of clientelism, where they can buy off who they need and have protection, and maybe even hook themselves into a bigger gang for protection, gangs that are not in Latin in North America in any big sense, gangs like 10, the Agua you've heard of, but they only have a few 100 members in the US, but they have 1000s in Venezuela and Latin America, gangs like the first capital command in Brazil, which does not have North American presence, at least not significantly up till now, but has 1000s and 1000s of members and controls all the prisons in Brazil. And so they might be thinking, we can just sort of join this, this movement, and get the profits. You know, the Hells Angels are much smaller gang than these, than these gangs. They work locally, mostly through motorcycle clubs.

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They only have 6000 or so members. They only have about a billion dollars annually in drug revenue, which sounds like a lot, but it's not.

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And you know, if you're talking about quantities of drugs, they're dealing hundreds of kilos, rather than tons.

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And so they they're looking at that and thinking, Okay, this, there's bigger fish here, and they might be willing to work with us, which so far they have been,

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and they've sort of been able to minimize risk while still being able to increase their profits. So Joseph, this is where the libertarian in me, I get get conflicted. Been happening more and more frequently because you outlined like, you know, why? Why would hell is angels want to go down to Latin America? Maybe it's the lack of regulation, you know, maybe, maybe it's all these things that libertarians would want, right? We don't want a strong central government. We want it to be more localized and embrace more of a Federalist approach to governance. Like, that's one approach. But on the flip side, you look at the United States, and we have a very strong central government, and yet gangs still exist, right? You go to Chicago or Philadelphia or Los Angeles like you're gonna see gang violence. You're gonna see that the gangs exist. So it really just seems like, you know, you're kind of between a rock and a hard place, no matter which way you want to go more in a libertarian ethic, or more in a central planning ethic that gang violence, gangs, you know, incentive structures, those are always going to exist. And then the question comes to, well, I guess, what's the best way to regulate it? Right? Like, and I'm saying the word regulate in the purest form, not necessarily a top down government, but rather the marketplace regulating it, you know, being able to help with, you know, incentive structures, supply and demand, I don't know. And this is where, you know, I think a lot of folks are, they are so open to hearing a president like Trump, in this case, be like, you know, hey, we're going to stop immigration across the border, just, we're going to end it right? And then, you know, folks say, okay, you know, it might not be my perfect solution, but is it? Is it utilitarian in the mindset? It's actually solving the problem. And this is where I I've had a lot of battles Joseph with my libertarian friends, because we are more often than not, intoxicated with not just like libertarianism, but like the principles, the values they're in, and that turns into almost a pursuit of the ISM versus the pursuit of an outcome. And like this is where, over the past year and a half, two years, really, you know, especially here in the show, I've been quite openly, uh, trying to, you know, walk and talk through my own libertarian journey, because I firmly embrace the ideas of libertarianism. I see the value in the principles. I live by the values of the principles. I know they work. But then you look at how government has has, you know, taken so much power and so much responsibility in certain areas, and then it's completely like, not saying neglected, it's just delegated other areas to the marketplace, which is, I think, good, but then you have this very real, like, I wouldn't even call it yin and yang. It's just like you have no real clear marching orders, right? Like, What? What? What is the role for government? What? Where is it not a good role, and is it actually accomplishing the things I want to see accomplished, like I've heard libertarians for years embrace this live and let live mentality, and I'm like, actually, no, I don't think we should have that. I think we should have a live and let live with a big asterisk saying, but I'm not prohibited from speaking out against lifestyles that I think are destructive. I'm not asking government to come in and like, try to use the big club of government to smack down people and tell them to stop living by their truth. But I'm saying, Hey, if you're a drag queen and you're trying to go to a public library to talk to a bunch of kids, I shouldn't be told, No, you.

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Can't speak out against that. Like, and this is where I've kind of, I won't say I'm struggling. Oh, maybe I am. Like, I'm trying to, like, get through the the ISM and the outcomes help me out. Joseph, like, how can someone like me, who is very much in the libertarian ethos? Like, how can we walk and chew gum at the same time here, when it comes to issues like this, where we see the value of government in certain areas, but also the problem with government in the other areas, but in the flip side, we see the value of the free market and like a true like government less type of conversation, but then saying, oh shit, maybe there are areas where regulation does play some role, like, help me as I'm walking through this myself. What do you see? So it's interesting, because it sort of boggles the mind that there could be a solution that is both libertarian and involves the state regulating, oh my gosh, Libertarians pop over there. I heard you say that. Yeah. So it's been tried in a few European countries, including Portugal and some Canadian provinces,

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and even from what I read, Colorado is doing this, where you have legalization of certain drugs, or all drugs, meaning that consumption won't be prosecuted in any fashion. But then when it comes to the sale and

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distribution of drugs. You have a sort of mixed approach, where you know, you businesses, private businesses, and maybe even the government are able to themselves, distribute and produce drugs, let's say marijuana, or you can even go as far as that's all if you want

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themselves into these markets. But the which means that it's, it's basically a free market for distribution and production of drugs, but they have to be approved like any normal business would in any market. So let's say the Sinaloa Cartel, and maybe you don't get a license, but maybe,

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maybe in Quebec, my my home province, you have, I

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believe they call it cannabis dispensers of Quebec, which is a state owned, but privately run business that distributes CBD and other cannabis products legally, where you can just go in and pay with your credit card or cash or crypto, whatever you want. And it's regulated, but it's still sort of a free market where basically anybody could enter this market and do it legally and get tax revenue and all this

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so, so you sort of have this mixed model that I think we've seen work at least there's some evidence that it has Portugal, you may have read they're running into some issues with their model, but that's mostly because they underfunded the clinics, and

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they sort of cut a lot of the programs, including like consumption reduction programs in the country that led to a lot of recidivism and higher drug consumption. But you you can. You can definitely have it both ways. You can. You can think that free market is working while also providing

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making sure that illegal gangs don't enter the market. It's, it's like you're playing it here, and this will be my final thoughts before we turn things over to you to bring us home, Joseph. But like, it's like you're playing your favorite game of sport, ball. I like football. So, you know, I have my Dallas Cowboys, I know I will take those things in arrows.

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No, I hear the folks judging across the airwaves, but probably well deserved. But you have my Dallas Cowboys, and we play the dreaded Philadelphia Eagles, right? I want to know, as a fan of the game, that both teams are playing by the same set of rules, right? And how do we do that? We have a referee. Did the referees always get it right? No, as a matter of fact, they get things wrong quite often. That's right. But the NFL, every year, they Tinker the rules. So like right now, the rule that just got tinkered with was the chain gang for folks playing along in the home game who aren't aware the chain gang is literally a group of people, like two or three folks who on on on NFL Sundays or Mondays. You'll see them on the sideline and they hold those big orange like, like, I don't know what to call like, a big orange pylon looking thing. And there's literally a chain from one to another one that's 10 yards the chain is 10 yards long. So when you get a first down, which is you get to a certain marker in the field, one guy will come over, put the little stake in the ground. The other guy will walk 10 yards until the chain is taught. He'll put his stake in the ground. And as a team on the field, I know I have to get to that next marker, right? But here's what's happening, and actually it's perfect, because I'll go back to the Dallas Cowboys. There was a game.

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Came back, oh, probably three, five years ago, somewhere in there, it was the Cowboys versus the Raiders. And in the game, the Cowboys needed a first down, and that's when they had to get towards that, that second pylon, right? And the Cowboys player, he leapt over, and he was like this, like this close to the line, it was so hard to tell. And they go to replay, and they're trying to spot the ball, and here's what they did, Joseph, they they were like, we can't tell if this is a first down. So they literally took, let me see if I got one here. This is close enough. They literally took a piece of paper, and they slid the piece of paper between the orange pylon and the football to see if the paper would actually slide through. It wouldn't. So they were like, oh, there we go. First down. He actually made it to this line. And RAIDERS FANS lost their their ever loving minds, rightfully so, because it's, it's, it's all kind of like we're guessing, we hope that the ball got to this certain point. Brian, why are you talking about football? What does this have to do with anything? Hear me out this year in 2025 the NFL, after a year of testing, decided that they were going to start bringing technology into the ball spotting game. I'm going to leave that for any clips that people want to rip out there the ball spotting game. Yeah, everybody's a winner. But no what they did was they put these little sensors in each end of the football, and now they can actually, in real time, see where that ball ended up on the field, to guarantee they know whether or not it's a first down or not. So the chain gang, they will still be there. They're the they're like the on the field, like as the game is happening. You know, if there's an obvious first down, they're not going to go to the eye in the sky and use the technology to figure it out. They're going to use the chain gang. But when it comes to the questions of like, Hey, who's going to the Super Bowl, the Cowboys or the Eagles? Right? I want to know that the NFL has done all they can do to remove doubt, and more or less Israel, I'll take it home. That's what most folks expect from government, right? We don't want more referees in the game. As a matter of fact, most folks don't like the referees, but they play an important role, and at the very minimum, the referees job is to make sure that both teams are playing by an equal set of rules. Now this is not to say that there are a very Die Hard group of fans who will embrace the idea that NFL refs are all bought and paid for. What

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was that they might even get violent, you know? Oh, absolutely. Like, and by the way, just for folks who aren't aware, these refs are not air quote professional reps, meaning they're not working for the NFL as their only job. These are guys who literally will do this on the weekends and then go, like, fly home and be a lawyer or be a doctor or be an accountant, like, that's what they do. So you see that there is, there is a role for someone to play referee. Now the question comes Joseph like, how much how much responsibility? How much authority will we give these referees, or, in this case, the government, to actually call balls and strikes? I would dare say that being able to have a government who maybe they're not always making the rules, but the very minimum, they're enforcing it, equally blindly, right? That's a world I think most people would get on board with looking at a role of government. Now that's at least my, you know, 30,000 foot perspective. I might be right. I might be wrong. I know I'm gonna have folks in the audience are gonna jump down to the comments and let me know exactly how wrong I am. But Joseph, that's kind of my final thoughts as we're talking through things today. I don't think there is a golden right or wrong answer. It just comes down to really, you know, understanding where government does well, which isn't many areas, and where government doesn't do too hot, which also is a lot of areas. But then trying to understand what can government actually do versus what we expect it should be able to do, and try to find some, I don't know, like fine line to walk down. I might be talking out out of turn here, but that's my final thoughts for today. Joseph, what do you have for us on your end as you bring us home today? No, I do agree with you. I do think it's sort of a compromise between liberty and security, and you have to make sure that it's a nuanced solution that brings out the best of both worlds. And you really know what you don't want as well. You look at, say, a junior football field where just everybody is just tackling everybody. There's no ball, there's no rules, there's nothing and you look at that and you think that makes no sense. I know at least that I would rather have the NFL with all his problems over this every Sunday. And it's sort of like this, where you know that you don't want the Sinaloa Cartel, the tinder agua. You don't want the first capital command, these, these giant gangs just running around doing whatever they want, killing who they want, with no repercussions. You know, like last month, killing a business person in an international.

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Report with no police around. You. Don't want this stuff, and you want government to at least try to do something. It might be imperfect, and you might run into some problems, but at least you're doing something.

Unknown Speaker  35:12  
Yeah, well, man, you set me up, which also then it does lead to a danger, Joseph, which I talked about here in the show, the danger of do something politics. And this is, again, it is a very fine line, right, the yin and the yang. And as I've gotten older, you know, I definitely see that there is as much a need for the Yang as there is for the Yin, like you need to be able to have folks from all different walks of life offer perspectives, because each person brings their own unique lived experience, which I know a bunch of conservatives listening just rolled their eyes to the back of the head. But it's real. My truth, yeah, my truth, like it does matter, though, like people do pay attention to that, so we have an obligation to at least hear out those different use cases, because for every goofball use case, there is the mom who's like, Listen, my kid was hurt by, you know, a big pharma drug. Or, hey, my kid was hurt by gang violence. Or, you know, they got a fentanyl overdose just by going to the park, like those people. And those, those experiences are very real. I talked to a bunch of parents back during COVID here on the show and talking about the very real damage that was received by certain so called therapeutics and treatments for COVID and like this is stuff that we should be able to talk about, because if you go in with like this, this cookie cutter, one size fits all approach, in the name of We're doing something like it inevitably will lead to negatives, right, like that. That is just going to happen. So we need to be able to take and, you know, ingest all these different perspectives, and I think, you know, create a a less intrusive government as possible, while at the same point in time saying, hey, government, if you're going to exist and you're going to have this, this monopoly on violence, just do these certain things that you say you're supposed to be doing, like protect life, protect liberty, protect property. Okay, I can get on board with that, but just actually do it. Right? Don't just say you're gonna do it, then delegate responsibility to certain like, non government entities, and then be like, Oh, why isn't it working? I have a guess, but Joseph, we're unfortunately hard pressed for time here, which means we are going to go ahead and put a pin in today's episode before we say goodbye, though, do us a favor. Where can folks go ahead, reach out to you if they want to go ahead, ask some more follow up questions. And also, where can they get more bangers like the one you had here at Real Clear world? Well, first of all, thank you for having me on and you can follow my work at on Twitter, or x at geo Paul wonk, or you can shoot me an email if you want. I can drop my email, and you can share it with folks if they want to reach out. Do it. Let's do it. Yeah, we'll put that in the show notes for sure. And Joseph and the rest of the audience, by the way, thank you for dealing with my voice. It's like 85% we're almost there. I have been going for two weeks now with my voice like slowly recovering, and I just I've never had my voice get shot for this long of a period. So the fact that we're finally on the upswing, I'm so thankful. But, uh, with that being said, No Joseph, thank you for joining the show. And folks, if you got some value from today's episode, you know the drill. Go ahead. Give it a share, and you do please tag yours truly at B Nichols liberty, you can find me on X, on Facebook, on Instagram. Joseph hit with hit us with those handles. Where can folks find you? At geo Paul wonk, on Twitter, please. Geo, geo Paul, Pol. Geo Paul, like politics, there you go. Geo Paul, okay, yeah. So link in the show notes. And by the way, folks for The Brian Nichols Show. We are as much a podcast as we are a video show. So if you like your show and you like to watch what's happening, head over to YouTube. Rumble. We are live streaming, by the way, on Monday nights and on Friday nights, at 9pm eastern we start the tape rolling, I think around 830 or so, to get like the folks in the studio. So if you want to go ahead and check out those live streams, they're over on X, on Facebook and on rumble, and then ask for The Brian Nichols Show podcast, wherever you hit your podcast, Apple podcast, Spotify, YouTube music. Just do me a favor. Hit that subscribe button, and, of course, hit that little notification bell. Zoom US a single time we go live with that being said, Brian Nichols, signing off. You're on The Brian Nichols Show for Joseph Bucha. I'll see you next time you.

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