 So there's going to be eight more months of this, of general election, that's 34 more weeks, 239 more days of the rematch that nobody wanted and everybody voted for. It's basically a toss up at this point. Trump's leading by a little bit in polls, depending on how you ask the question. Usually when the terrible reality of the general election being set between the two major party candidates, like hits, people reach for a drink or some hemlock or any possibility of a green shoot somewhere, a window into an alternate reality, where there might be a third party candidate, search terms go through the roof, people start looking around. So let's do ourselves a little heat check on some of the other names that are more likely than not to appear on the ballot. Heat and I understand rumor has it on the internet that you moderated a panel, not just the Academy Awards, but you were in South by Southwest with a certain RFKJ. So do you want to tell us a little bit about what you found interesting about him or his candidacy or his voice from a small L Libertarian point of view? Yeah, I was at South by Southwest. I was going to moderate a panel. That ended up not happening, although it had nothing to do with me, I hasten to add. But I did go to the event with RFK that they ended up doing at the University of Austin. So I saw him speak along with, my mind's going blank, your former ACLU. Nadine Strossan. Thank you, yes. Nadine Strossan, former head of the ACLU. Right. I saw their speech and then I went to RFK Jr.'s campaign cocktail hour after that. And that was my first exposure to RFK Jr. I have not followed him. This is the first time I've seen anything other than headlines. I came in with pretty low expectations because I usually do when somebody's famous for being the son of somebody else. But I ended up liking the guy. He strikes me based on what I saw in that speech as somebody who is probably fairly progressive in his economic bearings, but a civil libertarian very strongly. He had a lot to say about freedom of speech. He was very much in the absolutist camp when it came to freedom of speech. And you could hear him going towards, maybe not a libertarian position, but at least a very cynical, in a good way, understanding of the nature of power. He brought up at one point how horrifying centralized digital banking is and talked ad nauseam about the system they have in China right now where your credit card is now your face. You get scanned in an app and that's the identification for your credit card. And if your social score drops, the Chinese government will then limit the types of transactions and the geography where you can do them. So you can go to a grocery store, but it'll only work at the grocery store near your house. You can no longer use public transit, things like that. And he had a line of, I'm pretty close to quoting this here, any power you give the government will ultimately be abused to the hilt by that government. He had an idea that, he didn't strike me as the kind of guy that thinks that government is just when we all come together to help each other. He had an idea of the corrosive influence of power. And then topped it off by saying that trust the experts is not a feature of science or democracy, it's a feature of totalitarianism. So he does strike me very much as a civil libertarian. The other thing I'll add is I think he's running a real campaign, which surprised me. We'll talk about third party candidates here in a minute. There's varying degrees of vanity and colorful characters that go into these things. I'm friendly with vermin supreme. I don't feel like he's running a real campaign. I don't think he's sitting at night going, who would I make ambassador to France? I don't think he's doing that. Is that how we know it's a real campaign? Because in that case, I absolutely have run a real campaign. It's the most and bits are all of the sentiment. Actually, can I give a complete side note? I used to live in Washington DC, Catherine or anybody that's been in DC regularly, have you ever come upon Elijah the nature boy? Do you know who I'm talking about? Oh. There is a guy that, I don't know how to describe him aesthetically other than black Moses. So imagine an African-American man with giant bushy white hair, giant bushy white beard who walks around in a loincloth with a stick. And he used to hang out. Oh, I've seen that too. Yeah. He used to hang out in Jackson Square, across from the White House when I was a Segway tour guide in this fair city. And so I became friendly with him. This paragraph is cursed, go on. Sorry. It's getting better and better. I wouldn't have lunch with him. And he would tell me that God told him he was going to be president. And I went, well, hey, if God's gonna make you president, I'd love to be an ambassador. And he literally went, Andrew, I really like you, but I can't just appoint my friends to positions in the State Department. It has to be based on competency. And I was really impressed with the quality control he was doing. He's not wrong. With Kennedy though, I did not get the impression at all from his campaign event that he is running a vanity project or he is running for Secretary of Agriculture or to sell a book or something like that. He had people that were very efficiently running the event. He had a lot of security guards. And it struck me as a thing where he's making an actual college try on this rather than just some board attempt for a spotlight. He has raised a level of money that we haven't seen in the third party candidacy. Certainly the third parties themselves don't really usually have much money at all, but you get independent candidates can get some money. But money can solve the ballot access problem to a great degree. Although one of the funny things that I didn't get into and I wrote about this about a month ago is that there is a third party ballot access signature gathering inflation because there's a lot of people out there. No labels out there getting signatures. The forward party. So they're bidding up the costs. I was talking with a Green Party, a really nice Green Party guys ahead of their ballot access. And he's like, yeah, all this competition is really driving up labor costs. Huh, that's fascinating. Can you, do the signatures have to be different for each party? I think they can be the same one on different parties. I think so. But I don't know. That's a good question, Mr. Gillespie. I suspect there is a lot of state-state. Dr. Gillespie. Other thing I'll say about RFKJ is that he is a championing self as a champion of free speech and absolutist in Dr. Heaton's terms. And that doesn't necessarily jibe with his long and storied career in free speech matters, which we've written about and talked with him about Nicted in the past where he was talking about the corporate death penalty for people who have wrong think on climate change. Well, and he also, it's a little bit slippery on the social media front. There's no question that his posts and things like that were suppressed or went through shadow banning, sometimes outright suspension over COVID stuff, but he talks a lot about social media sites as a new public forum that really needs to be restricted and regulated by government. And sites, various cases where either company towns or malls were limited in their ability to shut down speech, political speech. So he's a little bit cagey on that kind of thing. That was a clip from the latest Reason Roundtable. If you wanna see more clips, go here. If you want to see the whole episode, go here. Make sure to subscribe at Reason's YouTube channel or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening, watching or both.