 We are live. We are live at Reason's first-ever televised web-a-thon, telethon in the style of the old Jerry Lewis telethons. I'm Nick Gillespie, at our large of Reason, and I'm joined by my estimable colleague, Zach Weismiller. In yet another live stream, we do this every Thursday at one o'clock. We have a special bonus session today, 1pm to 3pm, with a cast of some of Reason's greatest staffers, writers, contributors, video people. Zach, what is your exact title, if you don't mind me asking? I'm a senior producer at Reason and Reason TV. All right. And you're a father of two or three at this point? Three, Jesus. Are you done? I think so, yeah. Okay, good. Three is eight is enough, as the old TV show would have it. But three might be too many, to be quite honest, I'd say as a father of two. So this is Reason's web-a-thon, our one time during the year, where we ask our readers, our listeners, our viewers, like you, if you're watching this on YouTube, or Facebook, or Twitter, or God knows where else, you know, some kind of government-sponsored closed captioned TV, and the NSA darkroom, or something like that. But to give us tax-deductible donations to help support our journalism, and our commentary, and our work on, you know, in principle libertarian journalism. Zach, when did you, we're going to run through a bunch of different people today, starting with Catherine Mengel Ward, our editor-in-chief. She is the Queen the Empress, or the unelected leader of our entire journalism dominion of, you know, a print of web, of podcasting, of video. We're going to start with her. We're going to run through the Bragg Brothers, Austin and Meredith, who are super producers for Reason TV. We've got Billy Binion, a relatively new staffer who writes a lot about criminal justice. We've got Elizabeth Nolan Brown, a senior editor who writes a ton about all sorts of things, especially the war on sex. Robbie Suave, who has become his own god, a demigod, who hosts the rising show on the hill. We're going to be talking about him. Did I miss anybody? Did you mention Elizabeth Nolan Brown? I did mention Elizabeth Nolan Brown, who will be dialing in from southwestern Ohio of all places. While we're getting set up, and we're going to bring Catherine and Zach, one of the things that I was hoping to do with all of these people, and I'll start with you, when did you, you know, what do you see as the essence of reason? And when did you get involved with Reason magazine? I see the essence of reason as trying to have a fact-based conversation and starting our kind of our starting premise is that there's a presumption on the side of human liberty. And so we, any issue that we're approaching, we're saying, you know, the presumption is it's probably better if people are freely and voluntarily able to figure things out, able to figure out social problems, able to, you know, contract and transact with each other. And then we, you know, can look at any number of issues through that very like wide rubric, I guess. And then we try to, you know, always bring data to the conversation, always be able to bring, you know, bring forth a set of like facts that we can all agree upon and then, you know, have a conversation. And so I see this forum for discussing those ideas. How did you talk briefly about how you got involved with Reason? So back in, you know, 2009, I guess it was, I was living in LA. I moved out there just to, I was, I was interested in video production. I have been doing kind of just like grunt work, setting up lights for, you know, small productions. I was working at a talent agency at one point, but really my, this whole time I had been a reader of Reason, Reason.com. This was kind of like, you know, on the heels of a recent election where I'd really appreciated the coverage there. There'd been kind of like a resurgence of interest in libertarianism with the Ron Paul campaign, which I was supportive of. And Reason TV was just in its nascent stages. I mean, this was back at a time when, you know, YouTube existed, but it was not ubiquitous in the way it is now. And Reason TV was just kind of hosted on its own Flash Player on the Reason.com website. Drew Carey was kind of the on-screen host. And I saw, you know, an opportunity that they were looking to hire just kind of a one-year fellow or like paid intern. I was like, okay, this is like a perfect melding of my interests in journalism, video production, like new media, and libertarian politics. So I jumped on that opportunity, you know, got the position and have just stayed with it. He's hung on to it ever since. Like, you know, like a silent movie actor hanging on to a clock, you know, armband, an hour band or something like that. Do you remember what, you know, when you said you read Reason before, you know, you applied and everything, Drew, do you remember your first encounter with it? Was it the print magazine? Was it the website? Was it a shady man in an alley telling you to come closer? It was, I do know it was the website. I can't, I'm not sure I can recall the exact first article that I ever read on Reason. I remember one of the first ones I ever shared on social media. I was in college. One of these horrible, you know, mass shootings had happened. I think it was the, might have been the Virginia Tech one. And it was actually an article by you kind of breaking down the reality of gun violence. And it was just a nice kind of antidote to the kind of, you know, very heated rhetoric that always erupts after those. And I just appreciated kind of the, I don't know, like I said, fact-based, very rational tone of Reason and being able to, you know, put these really explosive and comfortable social conversations and topics in a wider or in a more digestible context, I guess. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you. That's flattering to hear. Obviously, you worked your way up from the fellowship as a video person to a senior producer who's become one of our most prolific video producers, but also one of our most viewed. And later in the show, we're going to look at a couple of the signature pieces that you've put out, your favorite video that you've released in the past year, as well as your favorite of all time. But right now, we're going to switch to our editor-in-chief, Katherine Mangu Ward. Let's introduce her. Hello, Katherine. Thanks for joining us. Hey, guys. Heather. It's good to hear from you and good to see you in the Wonderful Reason DC office. But first, Zach, can we play the clip we wanted to open with? This is like an AA drunkologue, but for capitalism. Let's roll this. I'm Katherine, and I like capitalism a lot. But in my... So, Katherine, that's the barest taste of your TED talk that you gave earlier this year. What was that like? What were you doing at TED and had the audience respond to your open embrace of capitalism? You know, it was an absolutely wild experience. It really is this kind of rarefied atmosphere, and people who are there are very excited to be there. They're very engaged. I was lucky enough to have quite an early speaking slot, and the whole session was themed around the future of capitalism, and everyone else thought maybe the future of capitalism was like not capitalism anymore so much. So, I was the guy that was like, I don't know, I think maybe we're onto something here with this stuff. And what really was striking to me is that a lot of people came up to me afterward and kind of secretly were like, I like capitalism, too. And it was like, I know you came here in your yacht. It's fine. But the sense of this kind of secret club or this underground or this kind of fellowship of the true believers surprised me a little bit because, of course, most Americans are capitalists. Most Americans do like capitalism, even those who think they don't like aspects of, say, their job or kind of day-to-day manifestations still benefit from it hugely. So, it was a really good experience. It was definitely a highlight. And a million people saw that thing, which was my goal. That's amazing. Very quickly, what do you like about capitalism the most? So, what I said in that talk, and I think that it's probably actually the second best thing about capitalism is that it lets weird people try weird stuff and then we all benefit. So, basically, what I like about capitalism is Elon Musk. Now, there's upsides and downsides to that approach. Actually, my favorite thing about capitalism is much sappier, which is that it is the system that's based on consent. It's a system where you are not forced into things. And I think that a big bummer for the branding of capitalism is that people do feel sort of forced to do their jobs in a way that I think misses the core tenant of making contracts and buying and selling, which is the kind of double thank you, this idea that everyone gets something they wanted in an exchange and how unique and different that is compared with basically every other system of allocating labor and goods. We are. I just wanted to very quickly tell people if you want to, you can look at the crawl on the bottom or go to reason.com slash donate or click on the donate button on YouTube's page. And you can make a tax deductible donation. If you go to reason.com slash donate, you'll see different giving levels and swag levels of things. My favorite currently is the for $50 you get a reason branded stress ball, which I think we're all going to need in 2023, Zach. Yeah, the one thing that struck me about that TED talk was at the beginning, you kind of set the stage of like what has capitalism as it actually exists kind of done in historic terms because people tend when whether they're talking about capitalism or if they're talking about socialism, people try to put these in like idealized terms like what would a completely free market do what would like a, you know, real communism has never been tried. But to some degree, you know, we can all agree that, you know, some degree of capitalism has actually been tried. Do you feel like there's not a broad enough cultural appreciation at this moment of like what the results of, you know, the capitalism have actually been in the real world? Yeah, I think that that part of my TED talk actually, there's a whole process when you do one of these TED talks. And one thing that happens is that you have kind of a coach, a curator who helps you put your talk together. And Corey, who was mine, we refer to the section where I did this kind of quick rehearsal of all the upsides of capitalism for the last 200 years as the Steven Pinker song, like I'm going to sing the Steven Pinker song, because of course that's captured in a lot of his work, especially Better Angels of Our Nature. And yeah, it's like capitalism done imperfectly, raised a billion people out of poverty in the last couple of decades. And communism done imperfectly resulted in, you know, horrific famines and, you know, mass murder. And I, it's not, that's not a coincidence, right? Like that's not like, well, it could have gone either way. Absolutely not. And so yeah, I do think that there is this lack of appreciation, especially on the part of people in the first world, right? I mean, it's very easy to say, okay, yeah, you know, I have cheaper stuff and, you know, maybe that's good. But for many, many people, what capitalism means, what globalization meant was, oh, now I'm not going to starve to death. Like, just very, very simple. You know, I had now my kids can read, because we have just a little bit of extra wealth in the system, something we can spend on education, birth control, etc. So yeah, I do think it's underappreciated. But I also find, you know, it's not very useful to say, actually, everything's good to people who feel like things are bad. And to me, that's kind of like the big challenge that reason is facing right now, and that a lot of people are facing right now is like, actually, everything's fine. We're winning is, is not a message people are primed here. And everything isn't fine. But, you know, there's a kind of baby bathwater problem. Why don't we talk about, we've asked everybody who's going to appear today, as people are scurrying around to go to reason.com slash donate or donating at the bottom of the YouTube page to help support our journalism. What their favorite piece from last year, the favorite thing that we're involved in from last year of end of all time. Catherine, you became editor in chief in of the magazine in was it 2018 or 2016? I don't know. And since I think 2018, you've been in charge of everything. What about this past year? What was your pick for the thing you were most jazzed that we did in this past year? So I love special issues of the print magazine. I love all the platforms of reason equally. They are all my my beloved children. Oh, you really don't. But also, a special issues of magazine always gets me very jazzed. And one of my first tastes of power at reason was when then editor in chief Matt Welsh asked me to put together a space issue. It was 10 years ago, give or take. And this last month, we did another one. I think every 10 years is about right. And reason has a long history of doing these issues that dates back to the Bob pool days, space enthusiast and author of one of the pieces in this issue. It's nice to be able kind of related to what we were talking about before to report some good news. And there is really good news on space for many, many years. Reason has been saying, pretty soon we think the private space sector might really come together and be a thing. Certainly 10 years ago, you know, the feature story that I wrote for that issue and the other pieces that we put together said that Nick, one of the very, very first pieces I wrote for reason before I came back full time was you were kind enough to send me to a conference of space nerds. And I wrote about the kind of increasing business savvy of the private space industry then. But it's actually happened now. SpaceX launches are so frequent that they are not even a big deal anymore. And it's sort of fully integrated into the private sector is fully integrated into all aspects of not just the American space race, but all around the world. And that's, you know, when we talk about what are some wins for libertarians, and sometimes they can feel very few and far between this is a big one. We really said we can compete with the government and do better. And people will will see that appreciated and and buy what the space entrepreneurs are selling. Can you talk about, well, let we'll talk about the case for space billionaires, your kind of lead essay in the space issue. But let's just look at that cover again. I love that image. It is so retellent of the late 60s reason was established, you know, it came into being in 1968. As space was dominating a lot of the news, you know, the whole earth, why haven't we seen a picture of the whole earth? Apollo the Apollo missions were underway were a year away from landing on the moon. Can you just talk a little bit about that image? That's just so beautiful. Absolutely. It is the creation of Joanna Andreessen, our art director. Thank God for her. She is a genius. I just kind of talk with her once a month about what's going to be an issue. And almost everything you see is just the product of her fever and little Swedish Irish brain. And and this this cover actually we tried a bunch of different iterations. And you can see some other covered candidates that we ended up using on the inside, including, you know, photos of astronauts walking on the moon. But we wanted something that felt kind of more cosmic and more forward looking. We also flirted with putting a headline on the cover. We were going back to the moon, something like that. But we just thought that this kind of beautiful, silent, wordless image did the work better than a shouty headline. It's really beautiful. Just the hand that is yearning, not really grass. That's just great. Talk about make briefly the case for space billionaires. And may I if I'm remembering correctly, Catherine, wasn't one of the first kind of space billionaires guys going back to that story you mentioned just a couple minutes ago was like the guy who owned Motel six or a budget motel chain who shows up in a different piece in this issue, which is the UFO piece. So that's a real that's a real arc. Robert, Robert Bigelow, who is a hotel entrepreneur. I actually visited for that other piece that I referred to the space conference that you sent me to right at the beginning of my relationship with reason, Nick. I went to his warehouse. I went to this like, you know, tens of thousands of square feet of warehouse space outside of Las Vegas surrounded by chain link where he was trying to build and actually did successfully launch a couple of sample modules of inflatable space habitats, space hotels, right? He was a main character in that piece. He has since diverted his interests to funding, being a part of kind of this community of UFO enthusiasts and searchers. But yes, he's you know, the the role of kind of eccentric wealthy dudes in trying to get off the planet. You know, they're they're all colorful characters. It's so odd, isn't it? They they have the run of earth and yet they're heaven and earth. Yeah. Yeah. So what is the case for space billionaires? People hate them so much. And so that's kind of the the original impetus for this piece was just like, why? Like, I get it if you're like, okay, you know, space isn't my thing. But the rage that was directed when a few months back, you know, a couple of these guys personally went up and, of course, musks vehicles are going up at an increasing rate. And I think there are a couple things going on. One is, to me, this kind of very troubling sense of entitlement that people have the money they spent on this somehow belongs to the people and that it should be taxed away and spent on whatever Joe Biden wants to spend it on. You know, to me, that case is so weak in part because we know what the government spends money on. And it's not some what I think people who are making this argument imagine when they say take take the money Bezos spent on Blue Origin and give it to poor people. That's not what the government does. They spend it on killing people in wars. And they spend it on law enforcement. And they spend it on, you know, all manner of things that there's always just a they there's always just this overestimation as to like how far the money will go. I always hear like, if only, you know, Elon Musk had spent $44 billion not on Twitter or whatever, we wouldn't have world hunger anymore. And it's like, if that's what it costs, but why is it why are people still hungry? Governments have that money already. They're spending it on other stuff. Yeah. And I think this is, you know, in general, we've talked about this on the reason roundtable podcast, which people might enjoy and therefore want to donate to support that, you know, even if you took, you know, one time sweep all the assets of America's billionaires, you know, they're still only covering kind of one congressional budget brain fart, and then we're back to zero. It's based on your offhanded comment about that. And I think a piece you wrote, we did a video and it's something like all of the billionaire wealth in America would fund the federal budget for like six months or something like that insane. What is what's your favorite all time thing that you've done as editor at reason? What what is that? So similarly, it's another it's another special issue, the burn after reading issue, which we did very much on a whim, just kind of had this idea wouldn't it be fun to do news you can use. I mean, Zach mentioned earlier, you know, kind of trying to be fact based and bring something to the conversation. And we thought, well, let's let's bring really bring something to the conversation. And so we have all these houses, you can see them here, you know, jury nullification, how to get, you know, how to hire an escort, how to build your own handgun, and a bunch of other stuff. Those are the how to get out of zip ties, how to how to break a zip tie, handcuff, your particular contribution, I believe was how to make alice be topless brownies, right? That's right. I am always trying to find ways to sneak recipes into reason probably because I am a woman. And we're just like that. We love the kitchen. Yeah. But let's do a crockpot recipe special issue. Okay, and that combines so many interests in this one as well, which could probably be done in a crockpot process. Yeah, I'm so glad that you picked this one. It's definitely one of my favorites, too. I just really love people who are just trying to like put put liberty into action, I guess, you know, trying to live freely, you know, freedom as a state of mind or something. Like, how do you think about that? That kind of lived liberty as it pertains to reason and what we do here. Yeah, I mean, I have always lived the phrase experiments and living. And so I think of that as one of our big beats, Brian Doherty has done incredible reporting on many, many variants of this, including your, you know, efforts in Honduras to create, you know, private contracts, private contract cities, and your your sea steadying and you're in all that. So I love that stuff. That's part of my interest in space, right? It's an opportunity to rethink how we organize society and the role of the state in that. So yeah, I do see the burn after reading issue as part of this, like what is what does it look like to live freely? And I think one thing it looks like is people, my neighbors or, you know, people in an adjacent city or adjacent state are going to do stuff that I think is absolutely bonkers. Like, I wouldn't do half the stuff in that issue. I'm not out here trying to build a gun. I mean, I'll shoot them, but I don't need to build them. The, you know, the beauty of the world as I imagine it, and I think as a lot of people at Reason Imagine it, isn't everything looks just like I want it to and everyone is at peace. It's like very noisy and concoffinous and weird. And there's, you know, just across the horizon, it's like a totally different way of being. That might be the difference really between libertarians and everyone else, right? Like you see cacophony or you see not chaos, but like a lot of different things. And you're like, hey, I like that. I don't want to go to a buffet restaurant where it's just meatloaf in every chafing tray. That's the darkest vision yet. Yeah, that really I wish I hadn't said that because I won't be able to get rid of. Do you remember, I mean, you have a long and varied history in journalism. How did you rehearse a little bit how you came to be involved with Reason? Sure. So I was an intern at Reason 22 years ago. And one of the most memorable parts of that internship was like a single phone call that I had with you, Nick, because I was here in DC working with Mike Lynch. All I can remember is that we talked about Medicare and Nietzsche, which like that basically still always talk about. So that feels right. The will to Medicare Advantage Plus accounts or something. Exactly. Had a couple of other jobs in between at the New York Times at the weekly standard, but always felt that Reason was kind of my home and had done some freelancing for you. And we met up for lunch. And I said, like, hey, I'm moving to Boston. Do you know anyone in Boston? And you're like, oh, just work for Reason. Yeah. And that was it. That was my job interview for Reason. I think I had to email you afterward and say, like, did you hire me? Like, do we agree that you're just tired? And at a rare misstep, I actually responded to an email. Yeah. That was your first mistake. And it's so the seeds of your own destruction. Yes. Do you remember when did you first encounter Reason as like a magazine or a publication or a thing? So in college, I edited an alternative paper that was part of the Collegiate Network system of papers that would that shared kind of a common funder and there were conferences and things like that. And at some point, Reason must have made a deal with Collegiate Network to distribute magazines because we had a mailbox like a box and the editor of the paper would get ceremonial to get the key to this box. And so I went down the post office and opened up the box and no one had cleared it out in like a year or whatever because that's how college papers are. So this enormous pile of things like fell on my head. And so I think my first encounter with Reason was probably like an impact to the head, which again, makes a lot of sense. And I started reading it and like everyone, I loved the brickbats. Like I wish I could tell you, like I saw some kind of sophisticated intellectual long form feature essay and I was like, these are my people. But instead it was absolutely the funny cartoons and the like proto blog that was brickbats in those days. Yeah. And that goes back to if not 1968 pretty soon after that. Originally, I said name something else. What do you have on tap for 2023? I mean, you mentioned before, you know, this is, you know, it's not the greatest moment for libertarianism. That would have been 2014, perhaps. The libertarian moment. Should we call it that back? What do you think? I would love to, but you know, minds disagree. But what, you know, this is, you know, looking forward, it's been rough with the pandemic, you know, a lot of economic issues. Obviously, you know, there's a land war going on in Europe. What are you looking forward to? What are your big, what are your big plans for 2023? So for the magazine and for reason, my big plans are mostly just to try to figure out some new ways to talk about the stuff that's always been important to us. We did a while back a debate issue that was really popular. And we want to do it again, because God knows there are some new debates within libertarianism right now. And they need addressing one thing that I've always loved about reason is that we are not, you know, we don't do what Bill Buckley supposedly did with National Review, which is, you know, who's in and who's out of the movement. You know, we're not king makers. We're a place for discussion. And, and so I think, you know, there are some, there are some newly hot topics, even, you know, between libertarians amongst libertarians that really need addressing. So we're going to work on that. I'm super excited about a reason TV and upcoming, you know, additions to our interest in what's going on in Latin America, and especially in Venezuela. We've got some longer form stuff coming out from Jim Epstein on that that I could not be more stoked about. And, you know, we're really experimenting with podcasts and hoping to add a few more to our stable. So I don't know, that's like stuff reason is doing. I don't know what I'm excited about in the world, besides more and more rocket launches. But maybe we can, we can be the, be the stuff too excited about that to be excited. Maybe, maybe that hand with the earth, you know, away from it, it's actually kind of waving goodbye. Are we migrating, transmigrating, happy to depart as long as we've got somewhere to go. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much, Catherine, for all you do. And thank you for coming in. You have a bad knee that was shattered by listening to a Justin Amash podcast of all things. While writing on an e-scooter, it's the most on brand stuff that you could imagine. That's kind of great. That's kind of the libertarian moment right there, right? You know what I was going to say, thank you to you too, but I take it back now. I'm not grateful to you at all. Thanks for everything that you've done and your long years of service. I'll just say the one piece I remember from your internship, which I still, I think I quote like probably two or three times a year, was about how Medicare Prescription Part D, which was the Medicare Part D, the prescription drugs plan, was needed because seniors were buying cat food rather than getting prescription drugs or whether they couldn't afford it all. And you found that it was something like 2% of seniors after tax income went to prescription drugs. Yeah. And in general, the argument of that piece was like, old people are rich, they're fine, please stop. And I don't know why like last week on the podcast, you're surprised when I'm still out here fighting the gerontocracy. Yeah. Well, maybe it's because 20 years have passed and now I'm rapidly waiting for my AARP and gerontocracy membership cards to arrive in the mail. But now that was a wonderful piece. And I think it's really emblematic of what we do, which as Zach was pointing out, you know, it's like, let's look at the facts and facts are messy and they're subject to redefinition and all of that. But like, if we start from that, we're going to have a better conversation and a better analysis of what is actually necessary and what you want to use the government to, you know, to accomplish. But thank you, Catherine, so much. We will see you next year. If not before, if the reason, Telethon, Webathon. Thanks so much. Sounds good. And while we are getting ready for our next guest, I will remind people to go to reason.com donate slash donate. There's a wide range of different giving levels. You can give whatever you want, however much or however little you don't have to give it all, of course, but there's a different swag associated at YouTube. There's the donate button. Zach, what can we also just, I want to encourage people to ask questions, both of us and the guests coming on. If you have a little queue of comments, I'll pull a few up. But one is Rick Neil Jr. I've recently been watching a bunch of hilarious reason TV content. And I think our next guests are going to be there. They're the brains behind a lot of that. I wish something like this had been more ubiquitous when I was raising my young kids. So yeah, I mean, that's what I pretty good segue into, I believe Meredith Bragg and Austin Bragg. The Bragg brothers are ready to talk. There's Meredith. Talk badly about your brother, your younger brother. Well, I'm assuming he can hear me. So anything just come right back. Where did he go? He'll be here in just a minute. Okay. But yeah, they, well, now we're kind of at a loss. Why are we talking to him? I like his VFX and style. Yes, Lex still works for reason. He does a lot of the graphic design for the website. And yeah, very, very talented guy. Here's Austin. Yeah. Hello. Hey, Austin. Hey, Austin Bragg, can you hear us? I can hear you. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Thanks so much. It's good to see Austin and Meredith Bragg who brothers, you are your two of three Bragg brothers, and you two are the least successful. Correct. Yeah. The one who isn't involved with reason is the one your parents actually still talk to. Right. We have a doctor for an older brother. So our parents sort of take their hands off and claim their successful son and let us be. But when they need a puppet video, they come to you, right? Where else would they go, Frank? Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's, you know, this is the reason.com slash donate webathon telethon. We're filling up the screen so you can't see the Jerry Lewis style backdrop, which Lex will be in Vienna, the Lena actually designed for us. But Austin and Meredith, why don't you start or Zach, why don't we start to we have a clip to run introducing them or how are we going to do this? Yeah, sure. I believe, you know, one of you had mentioned this as kind of the highlights from this year, and I totally agree. So let's just play it and then talk about it. It's a federal crime to attempt to change the weather without first informing the secretary of commerce. Yeah. That's great. The crime squad series who we were asking everybody what your favorite thing you've done in the past year end of all time. But which one of you picked crime squad? That was me. Yeah, we've that sort of idea has been brewing in the back of our heads for a long time. I think partially at least partially due to the Twitter feed crime a day, which posts a bunch of these just inane regulations. And we had these puppets sort of leftover from previous videos that we had done like the libertarian PBS or some of the other things. And it just seemed to be a natural fit that we could create these quick, just brutal interactions with police that are nonetheless rooted in ridiculous true laws. Do you feel like your puppetry skills have improved over time? No, it's a nightmare. It is much harder. We have a lot of respect now for puppeteers. Yeah, and I appreciate all the comments telling me not to flip the top or whatever it is. I don't know. I'm still learning. I'm sorry. Maybe reason can pay for a continuing education class in puppetry. Is mine next for you guys then? Are you like going through the things we hate the most and we're going to master them? Precisely. What is what what kind of response have you gotten to the puppet videos because I and you know and obviously it's I mean they're brilliant and it's great to take something so kind of childish or associated with that and make it so you know serious but what kind of what what's the response been? It's good. Quite good. There's been plenty of people you know in the comments highlighting you know the dumb laws that they're personally aware of around them that they want us to to push forward but yeah it's been quite good. It's it's short. It's you know it's very quick. Most of these videos are what a minute and a half two minutes but it's been pretty positive. But you've never feel so alive as when you have your hand up a puppet's butt right and you're holding it up for the green screen and things. I'm going to let that be your quote Nick not mine. Okay yeah I you know I think about it a lot. I haven't tried it yet. It shows. We did pass on Jeff Dunham you know we could have had Jeff Dunham here so you know give me a little bit more guys. I will say there are moments where we are throwing police puppets at another puppet which happens in every video that we do like to remind ourselves that this is our job. Yeah yeah I went to college for this. Yeah Meredith what was your what's your favorite video of the year? Of the year I chose Disney. Okay let's uh let's show that the conservative and amusement parks with hidden liberal agendas are you sick of woke progressives ruining your let me start that from the beginning we got a little are you tired of amusement parks with hidden liberal agendas are you sick of woke progressives ruining your family's vacation are you white well come on down to republican disney you don't have to be white that's just a that was a demographic survey question for marketing purposes i don't see color are you tired of amusement parks full of bigotry are you sick of uneducated rubes ruining your family's vacation do you crave fun and guilt well come on down to democratic disney we're the only amusement park in america exclusively dedicated to diversity equity inclusion real science true history and other morally unambiguous things that we can't debate anymore because of nazis republican that's great and i just i i think i liked it so much because it was the jokes per minute are pretty high especially um as you keep moving it's uh and there's probably stuff in there that every you know you will hate at least one thing and like about three more and i think that's probably a pretty good balance um but it was also uh they're these characters that austin and andrew heaton uh have sort of created during uh for the amazon hq video which i also adore and could have easily been on my my favorite list um you sort of republican sort of typical republican typical democrat uh politicians and this was a way to explore that um we're so used to doing or for a long time we've been doing these libertarian blank videos you know libertarian game of throwing libertarian star trek libertarian star wars and those are great um but this just gave us another angle into that sort of genre for us um so yeah i just find it very funny there are a lot of lines that just still make me chuckle what what are some of the like most valuable things that you see in political satire or political comedy you know as a tool to critique or reveal things about american politics um i do think you know that this is not anything novel on my end other people have said this before but i do think that sometimes um when you're making a joke people are laughing they may be a little bit less defensive than if you're just making a pure argument um and so it's a nice way to just sort of if not change people's minds at least um maybe open the door a little bit to understand where the other side is coming from and in so many you know i i was listening to you talk to kathryn before about um you know experiments and living and in so many ways i think that's sort of my worldview and that doesn't mean necessarily stopping other people or pushing other people into your camp it means allowing a lot of different experiments and so i think understanding how other people uh feel and maybe sometimes humor can do that it's just it's a it's a fun tool uh that's the other thing i think it's it's sort of a humor in a lot of ways even the gallows humor in some respects is pretty optimistic i think if you're making jokes about something and that's some you know i like i've always liked reasons optimism it's something that really drew me to reason as a magazine it's but it is balanced by some really great gallows humor oh it's dark death camp humor yeah and why don't we uh one of you picked uh the libertarian dad jokes as your favorite uh comedy video or a video that you are involved with of all time can we cue that one up because that is really uh kind of uh paradigmatic communists use to light their houses before candles electricity hold on let's cue this up i asked my north korean friend how things were going there he said i can't complain yeah uh why did the libertarian quit his job at the italian car factory because he hated fiat fiat how do you know arlington national cemetery is popular i don't know how because people are dying to get in there during the all the foreign wars without congressional authorization to die overseas then the body is shipped back home yeah no i i get the mechanics of it the families come visit the graves and it's uh it's pretty crowded i am not sure that joke works yeah well neither does nation building but people keep trying it okay that's wonderful stuff yeah i mean i think uh that was another one of those i think we had brought andrew heaton in for um another sketch one of these martini sketches and this was something we had come up with if not while he was on the ground just days before and so we quickly compiled it and we tried it out and what i love about it is that there's a narrative arc throughout it uh it's not just a gatling gun but there is a beginning middle and end so it feels more like a whole sketch but that the the jokes themselves are both terrible but also take a turn you wouldn't expect that just that's one of my favorite you guys do a great job of mocking or yeah mocking might be too strong a term but like i mean you make fun of libertarian stuff so when it's libertarian pbs or you know libertarian game of thrones which i believe we also have queued up yep um the injokes are fantastic so i mean you're reaching out to an audience but you're also speaking to a specifically libertarian audience uh austin i guess this was your favorite pet yeah it was yeah let's watch a clip of this and uh talk about it the crown is three million in debt actually it's 20 trillion how could he let this happen entitlement spending a bunch of wars that bullet trying to river run didn't help and then that fault is the social security trust fund where all of the money goes that will one day be paid out to retirees nothing yeah it's pretty much Ponzi scheme yeah we had a lot of fun with that one i think we are lucky enough to work at reason and uh you know reason gives us enough time to to really dive into these in pre-production and get things right and that was one of those scenarios where i think we had andrew in here a couple of times uh reworking some of those bits just to make them fit um you know obviously we had done these libertarian things before and i want to echo what you said but before i think it's important that we we do uh hit ourselves as well right we do if we need to uh look at libertarianism and what we're putting out into the world and um you know we we deserve some jokes too uh we are uh you know this is part of our reason telethon or uh you know our yearly annual webathon go to reason.com slash donate or hit the donate button at the bottom of the page on youtube and you can make a tax deductible donation and your money goes to support people like uh austin and meredith brag uh as well as andrew heaton who showed up first i guess and with reason through mostly weekly um the series that we did for a while he and sarah siskind wrote um can you uh i guess let's talk about how you first came to uh experience reason like you guys uh you grew up in northern virginia um but like do you remember was it the older brother wasn't it uh meredith who introduced you to reason i know that he um he was definitely interested i think we had watched a because we're very interesting people we had watched a libertarian we watched it on c span there um and he got interested in it for christmas that year i went to the libertarian party headquarters and bought him a couple books which at that time i think was in the watergate if i remember correctly and then that christmas i proceeded to read it and i got interested in it and um i i'm pretty sure that he had he was the first person to introduce me to reason and then when i came back um you know i went to work in journalism after school um went with was living in charlotte's fell first fell when my wife went to grad school there and then when i came back into town and austin's because sort of picked this up austin gave me a call or sent me an email and you want to pick up the story here because sure um i at the time had uh i was working at the kato institute in their video department um and um i remember sort of now that i'm firmly ensconced in the libertarian mafia here in dc hearing that reason had a job opening and at the same time you know kato wasn't doing the sort of things that reason was and uh i remember calling up meredith and saying i think i found something for you yeah and i mean i had assumed that i would go back into journalism i wanted to do video um the idea of doing comedy was appealing but never thought that that would be my job the idea of doing sort of lowercase libertarian comedy journalism was just out of i mean that didn't exist reason basically built that and um so i was very grateful to check boxes that i didn't even know i could check and um you know i came here almost a little over a decade ago and i've been here ever since and for a while you were the executive editor or editor in chief of reason uh tv as well yeah and you hired me so thank you yeah yeah there's a lot i got a lot to answer for but i'm pretty sure i came in with zack right like i was hired when you came in as well right zack i think he was a west coast you were east coast so right zack and i shared an office very briefly that's right yes that's a strange building on uh sepulveda oh yeah yeah um what uh what do you what do you have a plan for the coming year and i guess our we're at liberty to talk about you you before you came to reason you had produced a couple of uh like web programs for channel 101 a pioneering kind of web base series um and a documentary a full-length documentary um but you've got a feature film that you've done through the moving picture institute can you talk a little bit about that and what's up with that sure so um mpi original films who we worked with for a short film we had called a piece of cake that came out in 2020 um or were supposed to come out in 2020 uh it was supposed to premiere it try back up but it ended up with covid having a very nice virtual screening festival run um uh we made a feature film with them last year and it's just about two months ago started on the film festival circuit and premiered at the Hamptons it's called pinball the man who saved the game or saved the game and it is a biopic based on a true story of roger sharp the man who helped legalize pinball in 1976 in new york city by proving that it was a game of skill and that chance and um it's had a wonderful festival run um hamptons savannah newport beach heartland won a number of awards um been very well received thankfully i think we're also and i both relieved you never know when you do these things and that will be coming out on vod in the spring uh is the hope um and we're just sort of waiting to hear more at this point but um yeah it's been fantastic and as far as what we're planned to do at reason i could tell you the next year austin and i would like to especially now that covid's over and with the both the short and the feature um under our belt we want to take some of the lessons that we've learned doing that and create sort of marquee sketches for reason so taking some of what we've learned by working with others primarily austin and i work together just the two of us on the sketches for reason for the short and for the feature we had a crew and um we started to see the value in in some of what they were able to do so with that what we're able to do with a crew of that of a certain size and so we would like to take some of that knowledge and bring it to reason and that's our hope for the future um is marquee sketches in the vein of key and peel getting out outside the green screen more going into locations um and creating sort of big you're better more yeah just push push what we can do push is the uh you know the ones that we had talked about this a lot but never were able to pull it up what a reason snuff film is that uh yeah again um i think that's on you nick we'll let you okay yeah i really gotta learn how to work the camera yeah and let me just uh tell uh everyone watching that you should be very excited about this pinball movie that'll be uh you know available soon be i had the pleasure of meeting up with uh meredith and savannah to watch it at the festival there and um it was great uh the audience loved it uh i loved it it was uh like it's really funny and charming and and yeah it does have this weird like quirky um you know uh libertarian story at the center of it um about you know banning pinball which is just bizarre but i'm just i was just really impressed with how it came out and um yeah you guys are just always pushing the production values of reason tv up and up just like watching that game of thrones thing again it's amazing the way you're able to you know match the footage uh so yeah we're we're lucky to have you uh on the team can you talk oh sorry no true especially when you're talking about this film i know it's normal for journalists to take book leaves and you know and write their book but you know i think it's a little slightly odd for us to take film leave uh and jump you know come right back after a few months uh it's been it's been a great experience uh talk a little bit about remi um because remi joined started doing videos for reason around the time i guess meredith when you when you joined her he might have done one or two before i'm not sure but no he came in yeah he came in a couple years after yeah and i think it was a couple years after okay yeah but uh talk about that because you know remi's videos the musical parodies uh he was well known for doing you know kind of less certainly less libertarian oriented things but he was very popular on youtube but like he's you guys working with him have really created this sensibility that is unique yeah i mean i could just say that um you know at this stage we've probably worked with remi almost 10 years i think we're coming up to maybe i should count the number of videos it's got to be you know it's dozens and dozens and dozens maybe 50 or so videos that we've done where you have another one we're working with him on now um that we'll shoot next week um and can you uh give us a preview what is uh what hilarity will ensue it's a cryptocurrency that's all right current news let's just say that okay very good very good um he uh and i was you know remi is one of these wonderful people like andrew that not only do they bring us wonderful work and they're great on camera and they're wonderful to work with but they just become really good friends and we've i mean he's like we've created this bizarre comedy libertarian comedy voltron uh out of the four of us that we really like um we really like each other we like working together and so looking for any opportunity but uh yeah remi's fantastic and i'm you know we're what's always fun to jump on the phone and sort of try to come up with visuals for the songs that he's written and figure out how we can improve something make it a little bit more ambitious if i may uh you know one of the i would have picked for and you were both involved in it uh meredith i think you were the primary scripter but austin has a key role as the voice of john adams uh the attack at circa 1800 right video like austin i mean people go and watch that it's so fucking funny and it's timeless i mean it's 200 years old and it's timeless but austin how did you come up how did you envision john adams voice how did you get into the role what is your yeah like well how did you find that character well as an artist um i don't know i mean you just take a look at the words on the page and a couple of images and i mean the whole point is that it's timeless right the whole point is that all of these people have been sniping and saying terrible things at each other for ever and so um you know i don't even remember what that voice was other than slightly trollish that's about right yeah but it was great because it's you know like the only john adams that i had seen was like in 1776 where he's the hero and like the david mccullough book in miniseries where he's the hero and he's well yeah but even so gia matti is kind of trollish yeah yeah yeah so um that's it's uh really wonderful uh zach do you want to ask them a final question um yeah so um oh sorry let's see uh i mean you know talk a little bit uh about um like what i liked what you said about how you uh you'd allow everyone to laugh at themselves that that's what i like about um the kind of libertarian game of thrones parody um is people having a sense of humor about themselves usually enables conversation and dialogue and and and maybe you know breaking down some of the hostility that we have seen in in recent years between the different political tribes um do you ever think about that in um you know as as part of your project is is like facilitating um some sort of understanding between different sides awesome i'm gonna let you take that one i'm not a thinker uh truthfully i mean i go into these things 90 of the time thinking about comedy first right i mean obviously we have a mission you know we need to stay on brand which you know isn't difficult for either of us or any of us i should say uh when you're adding remi and andrew into the mix um mostly we just want to up the jokes for a minute and and get the comedy in there um everything else sort of falls into place really because i think when you're when you're coming from that ideological perspective and you're cracking jokes you're going to hit people differently comedy is so subjective everyone's going to take something different from it one of the reasons that i think we try to pack it in you know gatlin gun humor is that nobody's going to get them all right um you know i keep going back to the same example from the uh libertarian star wars which is um uh free to chubaca right it's a tiny little thing it's it's 20 seconds long it's one of my favorite bits i think 80 of the people who watch that have no idea what's going on they're just confused i think it's hysterical and the people who get it are hysterical right it's going to hit everybody in a different way and so for me it's just about maximizing that um potential but i would add much against the walls i can't and again it's been a while since i've looked at the youtube comments for that video and maybe after this i'll go check it out but i'm pretty sure that whenever we do something that's you know niche um people in the comments will ask i don't understand this and other people will explain it and it's in some ways it's a gateway if people want to learn more about it they're welcome to these comedy videos i promise you you are not going you know the you may learn a thing a you know one or two things but this is not a white paper there are people who make very good white papers and you should read them if you're interested in the subject um but it may spark someone to figure out what free to choose is maybe watch like who middle agreement is like it's it can be a gateway to a larger conversation but we don't pretend that we are solving all the world's problems in a two-minute puppet video or that we can explain it all in a two minute i mean i correct we've been pretty blatant about it too there have been a couple times where heat and literally turned to the camera and said eminent domain google it yeah free to chubaca in particular people have come up to me referencing that so i can't imagine uh how many times uh you know people have brought that up with you that that it hits some weird cord i'll tell you the aleppo joke from dad jokes is one of those things that has been repeated to me and i'm not sure they know that i am partly behind that joke which is great like when you you know these things are parroted back to you in such a way you know you're hitting hitting something right well you guys have uh i mean the hits keep coming uh so thank you so much for your contributions to what reason stands for and what our possibilities are you've really enlarged it and continued to so thanks very much thank you i could just say one more thing before because i do think it's important to say this um there are very very very few places if any that would allow us to do the sort of things that we're doing i mean truly the fact that we get to we get the autonomy uh to do this and to try and experiment and to create these on paper truly bizarre videos um and i cannot think of another place that would allow us to do this it's um reason is really special in that regard in many regards but i'm being selfish here in that regard they've given uh the fail which we have yeah i think i think i think that part of that well yeah i don't know i'm very good at helping i'm a good failure sherpa i'm the tensing nor gay of failure uh thank you austin brag meredith brag for what you've done in 2022 and what's coming out in 2023 including the feature film thanks thank you thank you and reminder if you dig what austin brag meredith brag what andrew heaton and what remi do as well as other people at reason tv whether it's comedy or tragedy or documentary or interviews go to reason.com slash donate and you can give a tax deductible gift that will help support our efforts in the coming year um thank you to some of the specific donors who've already thrown in a very generous gift from uh harry kataka lightest 406 dollars um right we had um another we've had some anonymous uh hundred dollar donations um there was lee lee mccroft when gave a hundred dollar donation so thank you for everyone who's uh throwing in to help this work uh i want to echo you know what uh meredith and austin just said you know that a reason gives me a lot of autonomy to um kind of explore the topics i'm interested in um and just kind of explore new forms as well uh you know forms of expression um that that was what initially attracted to me to reason tv is it was at the time you know on the leading edge of you know the new media uh digital video type revolution um and they we've continued to evolve and and learn new things in a really nimble way and it's like it's just the the culture here and uh it's uh i appreciate everyone who's allowing this platform to continue on uh with that evolution yeah and uh you know as we're getting ready for our next guest who is uh billy binion we'll get to him in just a second but one of the great things about reason tv if i may say so as the person who was the first editor-in-chief of that it was the brainchild of drew carry who basically came to reason in late 2006 early 2007 it launched eventually in late 2007 but he was like you know technology camera technology editing technology online video had become a cheap possibility like you could do it and we really ran with the kind of innovation that was born out of technological change uh jim ebsen who's the current executive editor of reason tv who oversees all of our video products uh wrote a fantastic piece uh for the magazine god i think was in 2014 about a particular sony camera that just changed the way that people could do high quality video work and kind of distribute it and um you know so reason tv in a lot of ways is not just the way of telling people you know what libertarian ideas are about and staging conversations debates documentaries investigations and things like that it's an enactment of of kind of the world that reason sees one that is comprised of free minds and free markets and of innovation experiments and living and you know trying to figure out what comes next and how can we use any whatever's out there to express ourselves and to actualize ourselves um before you bring on billy let me just throw out one more thank you we just got an anonymous $1,000 donation so thank you very much to whoever just threw that one in this is very exciting this is like a real uh telethon yeah the phone's ringing uh yeah so if only uh but let's bring in uh billy binion now who is a uh staffer who uh writes a lot about criminal justice and related issues billy thanks for joining us today thanks for having me can you uh what is your actual title at reason i'm an associate editor no and you join the staff uh when january 2019 i came on as an intern and debate for three months and then they asked me to stay all right well thank you for everything you're doing you've become a real traffic champ at reason.com in particular uh you write a lot about uh criminal justice uh issues criminal justice reform policing things like that what was your uh what was the story in 2022 that you were most proud of yeah so the story that i think i was most proud of from 2022 was a story about a woman named tracy mccarter which you probably have not heard of um or as a person you probably not heard of it didn't her story didn't gain much traction in the national press when it comes places like you know the washington post or the times that sort of thing but the reason this really kind of stuck out to me is one of the things that i love about reason um is that we're not really on a partisan team we're not wearing a jersey um and so this story kind of epitomized something i've always thought a lot about which is that principles don't mean anything if you don't apply them evenly so this district attorney who i think a lot of people are familiar with now he is the minhatten district attorney alvin bragg who campaigned no relation to meredith and austin bragg just want to make sure that's clear no definitely not um but he ran on a platform of quote unquote ending mass incarceration reforming free trial detention that sort of thing like a big criminal justice reformer and he actually specifically campaigned on this woman's case he said that you know if he were to win office he would drop the murder charges against her she was indicted for stabbing her highly abusive estranged husband who came into her apartment that he did not live there and threatened her all of there was plenty of evidence that was self-defense he had said on the record it was self-defense he had said i stand with tracy and then he gets into office and continues to prosecute her for murder and subjects her to very strict pre-trial bail policies because at the end of the day just attorneys are also political actors who are trying to please a base instead of fulfill their promises and so the point that i was trying to make with her piece or with the stories that i wrote on her piece was that if you really believe in what you say about things about ending mass incarceration and wanting a more fair and just system and that also has to apply to things like self-defense which is not as politically expedient but is very important you also saw that the post a alba who i covered for us quite a bit i wrote several pieces on him the 61-year-old bodega worker in new york city who essentially stabbed an irate customer in self-defense there was plenty of surveillance video corroborating it from different angles um their long altercation you know but yet the criminal justice reformer took them to rikers one of the most notorious jails in this country and initially sought five hundred thousand dollar bail to keep them there despite running on promises to reform free trial detention so these cases are really important to me because i feel like it is so vital for places like reason to continuously point out that if you only apply your principles when they're politically expedient and they don't mean anything and they're not principles hey billy uh first of all i just want to pull up this comment billy is one of my favorite reason writers his stories all get me always get me so fired up um another one here bill binion is good especially considering he's apparently 12 years old uh but billy you know these stories um it it what it raises for me is like the role of libertarians in the criminal justice like reform either you know movements or just like talking about criminal justice reform uh issues because you're talking about you know this is a coalition that involves libertarians progressives uh some conservatives um and they might each of these groups might have certain blind spots in certain areas so what do you think um is like the importance of libertarians staying really engaged with like criminal justice type issues yeah well i think libertarians i will never forget i i doubt my old roommate is watching us but one of my good friends who i used to live with when we were getting to know each other better said something like well i just thought libertarians were republicans with a conscience essentially like republicans who like believe in social issues um and that are believed in you know social like a marriage and that kind of thing um and i think that's probably because a lot of like the highest profile libertarians or libertarian leading people in congress do kind of lean more to the right but i think like i'm saying if you if you are if you kind of look at the world through libertarian lens and you apply those principles very consistently across the board that does mean that you're going to beat this like really weird heterodox mix views that will both you know please some people but also piss a lot of people off i have never been someone who has like a political litmus test for who i'm willing to like talk to or work with i think on if you look at my portfolio like i have a pro of nothing you might assume that i'm like on the left i'm honestly not on the left um but that's to me just another indication of the fact that if you do have these principles you know whether we're talking about free speech whether we're talking about criminal justice issues whatever you also have to apply apply those principles to people that you find really unsavory and i think that is something that both republicans and democrats can learn from us uh is that you know if you believe in criminal justice reform that also has to apply to the host albos and the tracer and carters of the world if you believe in free speech that also has to apply to people who are saying really gross offensive things that sort of you are you are jiminy cricket right wow i i'll take that as a compliment it is well you're a conscience right you're a conscience before the blue fair in the libertarian okay you know we will happily call you whatever disney character you prefer i identify as the blue fair from an okay how did you um how did you come by libertarian ideas and beliefs i mean we've talked at various points so i know a bit about your biography but uh do you remember how you first encountered uh reason or libertarian ideas i do um so i guess i was always one of those people in college who had like the very like oversimplified like i guess i'm a little socially liberal and physically conservative which now like makes me kind of cringe because it's so like doesn't exactly represent what we do here but um it didn't really come until i so i used to be a performer i majored in voice and like that was my first career we might get into that later but when i was disenchanted with that and was like okay i think i want to work in journalism i was looking uh online for journalism fellowships and i came across this fellowship that it kind of enumerated all the things like the principles they believed in and i was very young and i uh came away thinking it was a left-leaning fellowship that kind of corresponded to a lot of the things i agreed with and it was run by the Koch Institute which is not left-leaning as you might imagine um but having little familiarity with politics but in interest i was like oh this is really speaking to me um and i applied and got in and was like oh you know as someone who always kind of felt very politically homeless like this really fits you know uh adhering to these principles that they have laid out which like i said uh you know analyzed outside of a confirmation bias i thought leaned to the left which is kind of an interesting lesson and and how we perceive political actress these days but i did that fellowship which was libertarian fellowship and like i said it was like wow this is really speaking to me and reason was a part of it i didn't work at reason but i immediately became uh entrenched with you all and started freelancing with peter pseuderman who's our features editor and then the internship and down here that's great uh billy thank you so much for joining us and uh thanks for your work uh what are your uh do you have any big whales that you're going after in 2023 yeah well i just wrote a long uh feature on absolute immunity so one of the things i've written a lot about at reason is qualified immunity uh one of the yeah there we go um this is actually the first piece i wrote for reason i'm qualified immunity which is like gosh was that three and a half years ago so this was before it really like bust onto the political scene and i will say that this is kind of emblematic of one of the things that is so great about working at reason and i think the bragg brothers of this too is that we're able to tell stories that i think a lot of other media outlets either choose to ignore have to ignore because of time constraints when i was starting writing about qualified immunity there was no such thing as a qualified immunity beat it was like me and one other person at Forbes who was an unpaid contributor so um this has been something that has been you know very consequential to my time at reason and i'm kind of expanding that out and looking at how those sorts of accountability doctrines are applied to other people looking at the system or just government actors generally whether it is a prosecutor or you know immunity doctrines apply to corrupt college officials that violate free speech rights and that sort of thing so looking at how we hold our government accountable yeah you know when i really appreciate that you've been on this qualified immunity issue you know like a dog with a bone because it's really important um and uh you know uh cj is another person at reason who covers a lot of you know law enforcement and kind of like prison official accountability um and i know you've said elsewhere that you know qualified immunity uh by itself while it's an important issue it's definitely not like the whole it's one piece of the puzzle so i was wondering if you could talk about like what what is like your larger project when you think about um criminal justice reform like how do you want to change how people are thinking about like the relationship between citizens and you know state officials or law enforcement uh and criminal justice officials that's a good question and something i think about a lot in the context of a national debate that seems to have devolved into either back the blue no matter what and like abolish or defund the police i mean i i don't i actually very much don't believe that those two sides represent the median american voter i mean if you look at the data they definitely don't but those are the two sides we hear from most because they're interesting and the media is interested in covering points of view that are fascinating i think what i am most interested in is shining a light on how the people who enforce the laws are often above them and how convoluted and perverse that is especially if you believe in the constitution and you believe in responsible accountable government which is typically a stance taken up by libertarians as well as the right for some reason the right kind of suspends those principles when it comes to law enforcement because we are embroiled in never ending culture war um and so i think that is what i'm most trying to say to people you know i guess that message needs to be heard more by people who are right-leaning and are a little skeptical of government accountability when it comes to the police but i would say to people like that if you believe in responsible governance and that should be applied to you know like like i said a corrupt college administrator for instance then why shouldn't it be applied to people who have a monopoly on force and power it simply doesn't make sense and then i mean to the left i would say that you can apply these principles without necessarily have to burn like to burn everything down you know obviously there's room for discussion on like how much how many where resources go that sort of thing um but i also think that there will always be a need for law enforcement and you know the government does in some sense have to hold us accountable but if they do the people who hold us accountable can't be unaccountable in doing so that's another reason why i'm i'm interested in things like you know civil forfeiture civil forfeiture is essentially legalized larceny people who are not familiar with that term and it is a lever that is pulled by the government when they are trying to hold alleged lawbreakers accountable but it is a completely unaccountable process which is a paradox i can't ignore well thank you billy uh both for talking to us today but also joining a kind of legacy of people like jacob solemn like radley balko like cj serum c o remella mike rigs i'd reason in talking about criminal justice reform and putting it in a uniquely libertarian perspective which you know zack at the beginning of this telethon talked about how you know the libertarian lens allows for a different kind of brighter type of light to be shined on a lot of things that you know if you're embroiled in you know liberal or conservative progressive or right-wing politics you're not going to see so thanks so much for your time and for your work and we're looking forward to that big story that you're talking about i appreciate it it's a legacy i am honored to be a part of thanks for having me on thanks and uh while up next is uh robbie suave uh for reason we're going to get to him he's coming to us i think from our dc hq but do uh take the time to donate go to reason.com slash donate and make a tax deductible gift that supports billy binion's journalism as well as all of our efforts here at reason you can also donate at youtube on the bottom of the page yeah i'm able to uh emphasize that there's a button on youtube that you can use to donate and that is the method to do your tax deductible donation that'll go 100 percent to reason so thank you to everyone who's been using that all right let's uh go to robbie suave uh and uh robbie thanks for talking to reason on our live stream uh during our telethon web of thought hey guys thanks for having me okay uh let's start with uh what was your uh what did you feel was your best piece over the past year um i think i'm happiest with the interview i got to do with dr fauci uh for my show rising i host this youtube show for the hill and uh i feature lots of reason people on it actually zack was on just yesterday earlier this week talking about ftx and spf yeah that whole thing to uh really educating myself and my viewers about crypto and liz wolf has been on a lot elizabeth ellen brown etc but uh yeah i was able to interview dr fauci probably like it was a couple months ago i think it was in the summer and i was able to write uh you know write about that interview for reason and it was that was one of our most visited pieces right i think in the past year uh zack do you want to run that uh clip if we have it uh just a taste of this from rising which was put up by the hill stringent uh yep here it comes and there would have been much much more stringent uh restrictions in the sense of very very heavy encouraging people to wear masks physical distancing or what have you many experts i think have conceded that at least the cloth masks are not doing virtually anything to stop the spread i i think there's you know questions increasingly questions about whether these restrictions are making much of a difference and then some of them are you know quite uh quite difficult for for people with disabilities for children having to wear them um in schools what is your view of ongoing restrictions do you still think um they're necessary would you still recommend those types of things masks you know some social distancing some shutdowns given that you know we're going to be facing this this disease at this level of contagiousness for some time that was that's uh great tv i recommend people go to youtube to the rising's channel on youtube and watch the whole thing and read robby's piece of reason dot com about robby what's it like i mean you know anthony fouchy is you know one of the great villains of the current drama but he's also very powerful like what's it like to speak truth to power like that i think he really deserves frankly that lay label of villain you saw a little bit of it there if he could do it all over again i think most people many people say we could do it all over again a lot of things would have been different yeah schools would have stayed open um etc etc and so on but his takeaway is that no we needed to lock down harder we need to mask harder we need to do social distance harder it's clear he has some uh some admiration for what they've been able to do in china pursuing the zero covid policy something that now you know people languishing under much much greater tyranny than any of us have ever come close to facing they're rising up and demanding their freedoms and it's it's very admirable and i think it it says something that so many of our own government health advisor officials dream dream about what they could do with greater state capacity to use the kindest way of describing that sort of authoritarianism robby i mean i feel like you and i and several other people at reason were like met like years ago like starting to bang our heads against the wall with a lot of this stuff um whether it was kind of the persistence of various covid restrictions past any like sensible utility or like justification also kind of like the policing of discourse around questions like around the lab leak theory which you raised with fouchi as well in that interview like how do you view um you know reason's role in that conversation and i guess specifically like your role as a commentator at reason is being able to kind of question the that conventional wisdom uh while also you know the balancing act of um there's lots of like legitimately crazy people um out there speculating about things well look i think it's become very clear that a lot of critics on the right of of the the policing of the discourse on social media where so many of us live and we're so much important uh discussion of public policies taking place uh the the right and when some elements the left the contrarians were very right that the rules were being set in bad places to limit conversations but where where they aired was in concentrating on what the social media platforms have done that's wrong and and then their solutions have been terrible what if let's break them up let's put the government in more in charge of what they're going to do let's punish them we are just beginning to and i i think reason all of us have really been at the forefront of understanding how at the root of so many of these bad decisions was the federal government was the cdc was the department of justice was national security advisors if you're talking about the you know the russian misinformation etc at every turn and i'm working on uh actually big story for us right now it'll be in our magazine i'm just just putting the finishing touches on it really looking in deep and i got some original documentation that i'll be excited to share of how uh government officials were in constant contact with social media companies encouraging pushing terrible moderation decisions that limited all of our ability to discuss the pandemic and other subjects in in thoughtful nuance and true ways so that's something i think libertarians bring to the to the table that to to reset the conversation where it should be or the criticism toward what big government has done to big tech it's not just the platforms it's it's the government one of the uh one of the gifts that you can get if you donate if you make a tax deductible donation of reason go to reason dot com slash day night if you're on youtube smash that donate button at the bottom of our channel page is robbie's tech panic which is about the freak out i mean really a moral panic a technological panic over social media because people are pissed about other things and they're trying to break up facebook you know which is meta now and you know they'll get all of these companies in their crosshairs just as people have left them en masse it seems um robbie one of the things that's going on now you know with elan must taking over twitter and twitter just today announced uh or there were a bunch of stories about how it's not going to um you know enforce coveted misinformation policies and you can see people's heads exploding all over the place why is free speech in the tech space in the social media space so important oh it couldn't be more important this is where so many conversations about public policy are taking place this is where journalists live it is true and it's not true in the legal sense that like twitter is the new public square but i think it's basically true in a kind of philosophical sense and and look we should not limit these companies rights to to do moderation as they see fit and i think someone like elan musk has articulated uh some some good policies and wants to reverse some things i think we're really bad about how twitter was being run he's doing it in a very frenetic and chaotic way uh i that but i think we should give a time to see how this vision uh it turns out but if if we lose and i think and we've seen what happened i mean the pandemic is just such a clear example of the vast expansion of government ability to regulate speech of armies of bureaucrats behind the scenes having significant input about what you're allowed to say about true subjects you were not allowed to discuss to make reference to the lab leak for months on facebook now that's a theory that has enough mainstream credibility that we're allowed to address it that mainstream reporters are talking about it but journalists uh mainstream journalists in a very i think harmful and almost self sabotaging way have decided that misinformation is the great crisis of our time that was their explanation for why hillary clinton won over donald trump not that donald trump won rather than donald i was giving that what the mainstream media view of it is of course hillary won but misinformation you know stopped them and i that was i i think a really um unhealthy way of viewing it but they've become just obsessed with it and we go ahead i was gonna say uh the story that you're most proud of when we asked everybody you know what what's your favorite story the past year what's your favorite story with your time and reason you picked uh the piece you know this is a it was a massive signature piece for you and it's very much in in kind of reason tradition of kind of showing a larger story that people missed uh zach can we put up the uh however this has had to do with the covington catholic student uh nick sandman who was uh you know caught in a mouse room can you talk a little bit about what the story was and why did you get the pick why did you get the full picture while everybody else was kind of you know holding on to a different part of the elephant and kind of going nowhere with it yeah and i was trying to be completely honest i got lucky in part with this story i absolutely did i sat down to write about it so this was the uh the high school students the catholic high school students at the lincoln memorial who were there was a lot of reporting on a snippet of video footage that appeared to show this young man staring down this native american man in a malicious or racist way and they were they were condemned by every figure every celebrity they said these are the example this is an example of deplorable america obviously their trump supporters they're wearing the red hat they were there for a pro-life rally i sat down to write about it and at the time i was doing that a lot more video footage had become available had just appeared on social media the entire thing so i sat down and i watched it before i wrote before i wrote anything and as i was watching it it was like a holy crap moment like there was so much more going on here including the involvement of the black hebrou Israelites which is like a black supremacist anti-semitic khanye would probably be very familiar with their work at this point they were on the scene harassing actually the group of of of boys and then the native american man and his entourage come in in like a very confusing way and the scene becomes chaos but the the bottom line being that this was not at all it would not be fair to say that that kid in particular or really anyone else in his group was like engaged in racial harassment of that guy if anything they were kind of behaving as appropriately as you would expect high school boys to behave when confronted by as obnoxious a out and out hate group as the black hebrou Israelites so i was really happy to be able to set the record straight on that story a lot and again i got lucky i i saw it and then i wrote that story and then mine became the main part of like the the pushback from people saying oh wait did you take a second look at this see what robbie's saying about it so it was uh it felt good and yes has been a the defining story of my career by far you know go ahead when you when you put that out there there was also an immediate backlash and you essentially became part of the story i remember this happening at the time i mean what was that like like what was that experience like for you and how did it change you know how you view i guess like the media ecosystem if at all yeah i mean i've gotten really used to that by now and even at that point i'd had so many sort of antagonistic exchanges with people who are just very bought into their narratives in some in the mainstream media some in progressive media obviously i've tangled with conservative media as well in that case a lot of mainstream media admitted they got it wrong like jake tapper shared my article and said wow i missed this a lot of people changed course some didn't in the sort of like gawker space i think is where they really doubled down um you know as they did in sort of previous feuds i'd had with them but i i yeah look i have a pretty hostile antagonistic relationship i think with many other facets of the media and i think that's that's our job look they they both sides it's right and left and then mainstream too they have they they're just stuck in they're thinking about issues about trump about crime about uh foreign policy is the most you know consensus just totally at odds with that with what actual people think um and and what i love about reason and you know what all of us work toward is because we're not team loyal like if i see a story that's damaging to republicans there's a lot of conservative media people who'd be like oh let's skip over that one and then the it's the opposite phenomenon for for uh the mainstream and progressives i just don't have that i don't have that drive and neither do you guys right we're like okay if it's damaging to republicans that's fine good they deserve it probably you know this uh you know and uh to go back to how zack it started this live stream for people watching and if you're thinking about supporting reason you know we do journalism first and foremost from a libertarian perspective so it informs our starting point but we're not ideologues and i think that gives us a competitive advantage i mean robbie in the in the covington uh school kids story really came to the fore but like where you the rush to judgment isn't there it's like okay let's pan back a little bit and see what's going on we've done that i'm working on a post for our website to you know pimp the webathon tomorrow and one of the very first reason stories i remember reading was from 1981 about love canal which was a neighborhood in in uh niagara falls new york there was a media narrative about it that turned out to be completely wrong and reason was the one place that actually accounted for a larger context which radically altered you know what these stories mean and that's um it's just it's a real powerful super weapon so thank you very much for doing what you do you've really uh enriched the of the pages of reason uh you know online offline the work at the rising is great you're really uh growing the audience for a libertarian reason style commentary and journalism thanks so much we've got a comment here uh echoing that uh lucas love you on the hill robbie though not sure how you get along with your co-hosts sometimes with wild stuff brie says uh you know you you've got really good chemistry with her um that was a good uh i i thank you for having me on by the way she you both asked good questions um she um was asking some challenging questions about uh regulation financial regulation and uh the crypto space but yeah what could you talk just a little bit about that that specific dynamic and just you know kind of venturing out into the world of uh engaging in a really like pointed way with people who fundamentally disagree with you yeah it's uh every day is uh is a wild one brianna my co-host uh for most of the time i have a couple other co-hosts as well brianna joy gray is a former press secretary for bernie sanders so she's a democratic socialist so we have areas of agreement on foreign policy even some aspects of covet i would say uh for some for a lot of free speech stuff but we also disagree passionately about number of things student loans we fight we fight to the death on student loan forgiveness she's wildly in support of it i think you know this is a scandal and at the very least if we're going to do it we have to reform the entire higher education sector that's another conversation but uh it but but it's fun and we have actual debates and so much of mainstream media is just you know i don't mean to sound like a broken record and keep bashing them but you turn on cable news and it's just people who agree with each other telling the audience what they want to hear and we try not to do that i think and i think in the same way that reason tries not to do that obviously we have an audience that's interested in our perspective and i it helps to bring that perspective of skepticism of authority and skepticism of government regulation and that the government's always the solution but it's healthy to get to get pushback at all times so i'm able to deploy libertarian arguments against brianna she's able to deploy progressive or socialist arguments against me and i think it makes us better for it and hopefully leads to a more educated smarter of more fun viewing experience it's not it's not agreement you don't just watch and listen to everyone tell you exactly what you wanted to hear and i think that has value it certainly does thanks so much robbie thank you guys all right uh we uh i'm just looking at some comments we're going to bring on our final guest which who is elizabeth null and brown and just a second but keith night of the libertarian institute says we at the libertarian institute are very appreciative of the work you guys do uh tony palmantara on facebook says i will say weissmueller's pieces stick out in my memory the multi-part series on anarchy in detroit in particular thank you tony yeah we'll talk more about that after we talk to elizabeth lee mackracklin a hundred dollar donation thanks so much um let's bring is elizabeth i think she's we're about 10 minutes away from liz coming in but okay so uh apologies for that yeah let's talk about you zack weissmueller why not okay florida born and bred moved to la back in florida you've uh i mean you've contributed massively in the decade plus that you've been at reason what was your favorite video that you put out this past year uh there's a video that i put out um called forget the great reset uh embrace the great escape um and i this this is an example of what i was talking about earlier when i said that reason allows like a level of experimentation that is really useful we've kind of experimented with a new form of video that you know i mean it's it's it's native to the youtube platform kind of known as the video essay and you're just bringing in all sorts of archival media and uh text and so forth and making an argument and um in this case uh it ended up you know performing well beyond massively i mean it's yeah let's uh look at a clip okay the great reset in which sclerotic 20th century institutions accumulate even more power i think we're entering the great escape this is possible because technological progress is outpacing the ability of the state to control and regulate it governments will have no choice but to abandon their efforts to construct physical and metaphorical walls technology can be designed to facilitate decentralization in which the flow of money and information can't be controlled ideas emerge from the bottom up my hope is that after witnessing the colossal failure of governments in the face of a global crisis many more people will be looking for a different approach uh claus schwaab of course is the uh head of the world economic forum and a pretty much a villain from central casting whenever he opens his mouth about you know what kind of bugs we're gonna be like a quick click of him to remind people uh the coronavirus pandemic has no parallel in modern history this is our defining moment those are the words of claus schwaab head of the world economic forum in covid 19 the great reset people assume uh we are just going back uh to the good old world which we had um and everything will be normal again in how we are used to normal in the old fashion this is uh let's say fiction it will not happen at the latest war yeah it's like a boys from brazil cosplay or something like that it's just uh but you know what what's great about your video is that you take seriously the the arguments that are floating around you know schwaab is probably the best focal point for one of them but a large number of people and you know he at the world economic forum he was introducing zhizhen ping of china who was articulating a vision of a globally coordinated economy where you know we're speeding it up we're slowing it down we're a little to the right a little to the left i mean an insane lunatic fantasy of control by the globes you know the planet's leading authoritarian um you take their argument seriously and then offer an alternative um you know talk a little bit how you got there what's your intellectual heritage that you um you know you were able to marshal this kind of analysis and alternative yeah so i decided uh you know the this idea of claus schwaab as this kind of nefarious character which yes he plays into that with his mannerisms and sometimes very odd like stylistic choices the middle european accent and all of that the shaved head publishing a book called the great reset uh as we're in the midst of this uh pandemic um so it spurred you know lots of anxiety online and i decided to just read through the book and see what it was all about um and it's it's a fairly boring um book with like very like almost uh like corporate like uh hr speak type language but when you like dig down into it it's really about we need a more of a managed economy we need more things like um esg what they call you know stakeholder capitalism um and uh this is something elizabeth warren is a big uh advocate of and uh you know my i guess you to answer your question my like intellectual interests are in people like hayek um and so i thought let's cut just there's a real stark contrast here between these two visions let's just put them next to each other um schwaab's great reset versus kind of a hayekian inspired great escape um and it'll be kind of like this is the tone that i would like see set for you know the rest of the 21st century instead of the one that schwaab and the wef and jishun ping want to set what is amazing to me and because i'm a thousand years old you know we had this exact conversation 50 50 years ago 70 years ago 100 years ago you know and it was hayek versus kind of planners not necessarily totalitarian planners or or even fully centralized plannings but people like john kenneth gallbreath uh you know a popular economist in mid-century america who talked about how the only way forward the only way to be efficient and effective was to manage capitalism in a way where the best and the brightest you know coming out of a mid-century you know kennedy fantasy of control would you know we can we we don't you know we've beaten the market we've got enough smart people with enough adding machines we can figure it all out and that all fell apart as it was being articulated by you know kind of liberal progressive planners sometimes conservative planners because there's a right-wing variation on this lunatic fantasy control control fantasy um so it's it's great to see you articulating the rebuttal to that in um you know in real time in the language of the current moment um talk a little bit i mean we we i guess mentioned a little bit about how you shut up at reason but you know what what's from your childhood or you know life that i mean pointed you in a direction where you're like i my bullshit detector is going a little bit crazy right now um well i i think it's just uh you know the the i started uh we had this conversation with um camille a few weeks ago about how his libertarianism kind of started with like an interest in skepticism i kind of had that same journey i was interested in like the the skeptic movement um and then that kind of led me to libertarianism um and then hyac really is the ultimate skeptic in a lot of ways he's the skeptic of any sort of um central planning because he believes that you know once you get further and further away from like the primary source of information the less like legible it becomes and that's why i think his ideas have actually come become even more vital than when he was writing you know in the 30s and 40s and yeah we had that big disruption in the mid-century between the depression and world war two which created this you know modern like technocratic state that we all live under and schwaub's point is like okay pandemics is like the next the pandemic is like the next disruption and that is going to increase the power of the state but my thought and and my hope and and i think there's basis for this is that it's different this time because of the technological situation the way that uh technology whether it's um you know cryptocurrencies or in cryptic communication or cheap cameras embedded everybody is caring you know where we both carry a a monitoring device that you know the state knows where we are at every minute of our day because of phones but it also carries the camera that we use to you know to reveal what the government is doing to people um we're going to come back in a final episode after we talked to Liz Nolan Brown about some of your work uh from a couple years ago that you're particularly and rightly proud of going to Hong Kong and we'll talk more about this centralization decentralization issue but now let's welcome Elizabeth Nolan Brown hey hey how you doing Liz good to see you you are calling in from uh southwestern Ohio I'm calling you from Cincinnati and I need to stay up front that I just got a uh filling earlier today so my mouth is still sort of droopy so I I'm not like having a stroke or anything I just uh well it would be terrible if you did have a stroke now because we wouldn't know right and we wouldn't be able to call this true so uh Liz you are a senior editor at Reason is that right yes okay and you started uh and I feel bad for not having actually written all of this down ahead of time and I know that I was directly implicated in many of the hiring say when did you start at Reason I started in 2014 the same year as uh Robbie and Slade we were we were the 2014 cohort okay so that's like uh you know uh there's a famous uh graduating year of quarterbacks in the mid 1980s when they graduated from college that's kind of uh a good year for Reason then right um what uh what is the story in the past year that you are most proud of um I'm really happy with the story it's actually from our January uh 20 our upcoming January issue but it's out now online for subscribers already so you guys should subscribe yeah and also you should donate if you should also don't we're talking about go to reason.com slash don't I make a tax deductible donation hit the button on our youtube channel uh but Liz uh Nolan Brown you're in defense of algorithms what's that about algorithms are even more rotten than Klaus Schwab in the world. Yeah um that's that's what we hear from all sides so uh this was a really fun piece to write because um you know just a lot of what people say about algorithms there's there's so much you know that they're destroying our democracy they're making us um more polarized they're causing depression they're making teens commit suicide there's just this endless litany of things that get attributed to algorithms these days. They sound almost like witches don't they? Yes they are they're basically like tech spells cast by uh social media companies is is what you the impression you get um and if you if you look at research um a lot of you know not only does that not pan out and not turn out to be true a lot of times the opposite is true there's a lot of research about how algorithms actually um you know make people turn people away from radicalization on on sites like youtube that they social media consumers are better informed and you know less polarized than people who get most of their news from say tv or things like that so this is just sort of uh it goes through a bunch of the different myths about about social media and internet algorithms and sort of uh systematically debunks them I guess. I feel like um something that you and I have in common Liz is like a lot of our work a lot of our work focuses on like these tools that and tools inherently can be used uh to build something or to destroy something or just be destructive you know they're they're double edged uh why is that something um that you find yourself returning to? Yeah I mean that's exactly what I write in this like I mean in its essence an algorithm is just a tool it can be deployed in you know in good or bad ways um I think it's because you know we we see both sides of US politics just very opportunistically demonize new tools and new technologies because you know people don't know a lot about how they work and so it's very easy for them to latch on to I think especially when it comes to like new tech tools and say like oh like this thing that you don't like there are this thing that we say we can fix like if we just do this and people are like okay I don't really know what an algorithm is or or you know any of these these other sorts of things cryptocurrency is is another good example just and it's easy for people to demonize and I think that you know one of the things we're obviously very drawn to at reason across the board is poking holes in in conventional wisdom that is that is just wrong and overly politicized. Then there's been you know you've written a lot about the battles of our section 230 there's so much kind of anger from members of both the major political parties towards social media for kind of different reasons but you know what what do you think like libertarians bring to that debate that is is different than kind of what we hear over and over from you know the Ted Cruz's or Amy Klobuchar's of the world. Yeah I think we are we are unique in that we have pretty much the only principle perspective on this um this is why I'm really glad for the work that I'm allowed to do on tech policy at reason because it seems like at most other publications either they just sort of reflexively jump into tech panic or they only defend the rights of you know tech businesses and the people who run them if they agree with their side so like Democrats are like really happy with when Twitter is um you know banning COVID misinformation they're like yeah we're going to defend Twitter's rights and then when Twitter is like okay we're going to you know stand up for free speech they're like ah you know we weren't going to haul them before a congressional hearing and you have Republicans sort of doing that in the opposite way too and I think you know reason is one of the few outlets that just sort of takes a principle defense of free speech and free markets and private enterprise when it comes to tech companies even if they're making decisions we don't necessarily agree with. Could you talk a little bit about your journalism background because um yeah I mean you you've worked a lot of different places including you know health uh kind of health journalism companies AARP the magazine for the gerontocracy which I hopefully will be able to join if I can live a few more years but um yeah talk how did you get started in journalism and uh how did you end up at Breeza? Yeah I mean I was on my high school newspaper but then I was a theater major in college um I was a playwriting major I got out I was going to do that but I was like there's no money in that and I don't want to just work like a you know a waitressing job while trying to make it in theater so you know I maybe I can go back to journalism I was always pretty good at it so I I got a job at a legal and financial newspaper in Columbus Ohio and that was actually the most amazing education because like every day I had to write about different court cases that were happening in in the county or the state and I just read a ton of decisions and I mean now like so much of my work still is is very much informed by I cover a lot of you know legal cases and I think I got that sort of crash course in that working at this newspaper in Ohio um like you said I I went on I went to grad school in DC and I was a research assistant for this guy who was a baby boomer scholar so uh I was a baby boomer scholar like he was teaching a class to like millennials at the time about baby boomers and like he wrote a book called The Greater Generation which is like a really ballsy title and that's about how really the boomer the baby boom is the great generation and their parents were kind of pieces of garbage yeah that's that was his thesis um I somehow turned that into a job working for five years at the AARP which was very strange but um the AARP the magazine is one of the largest circulation publications on the planet though yes it is it is it was actually you know people really talked to you when you worked at the AARP magazine at least which was just sort of interesting they gave and I realized this has been off topic but fuck it uh you know I'm one of the hosts they had the best interview with Bob Dylan like about five or ten years ago where it was he released an album it was the only interview they gave and they were like you know um you know what do you think about love or something and he was like you know love is like water it just slips through your hand and then you wonder if it was ever there at all it's like the darkest bleakest interview with the greatest icon of you know the baby boom it was just wonderful stuff but what kinds of stuff did you cover for AARP and then how did you how did you end up at reason uh so I mean I wanted to work at reason back then I was I was in DC and I but there was never a job that was like entry level at that time and you know I was just getting started and and then I and so I switched and you know I covered a lot of health stuff for AARP and I ended up then going and working at some women's health bugs covering like nutrition and women's health issues for a few years um but I always wanted to work at reason uh and so in 2013 I uh job I saw it opened up as a staff editor and I applied and I got it um so I was very excited our good luck um how did you grow up libertarian or do you I mean do you consider yourself libertarian yes or how did how did that evolve uh well I mean it turns out my dad is very libertarian like he voted for a lot of libertarian candidates my parents are both very um you know they're midwesterners you know suburban Ohio but they they really are the quintessential sort of Ohio swing voters too but when you talk to them a lot of their opinions are very libertarian even though neither of them has ever necessarily identified that way um so much so that I didn't know it was a thing until after college and I was my very first job at a college was a very boring um administrative job and I was just like sitting there all day like applying for anything and anything I could find online that I thought might like get me somewhere else uh and I saw the institute free main studies summer summer seminars that they used to do for um college students and recent graduates and it was like I went to Washington DC it was like a week long crash course in libertarianism they gave me a subscription to reason magazine they gave me jacob song's book they gave me a bunch of a kato institute scholars books and um I was like it was just you know like wow this is what I've been this is what I've been all along I just didn't know this was a thing I used to just think like I don't fit anywhere in in politics and so it was it was eye opening wow um your favorite story uh uh from your time at reason is uh a cover story from a few years ago um the war on sex trafficking is the new war on drugs can you tell us a little bit about what what's that story about and how did you come to uh write it yeah um it was I came to write it because it was just like me and Catherine and Peter and the reason DC office discussing how I was like you know I cover I was covering a lot of the war on sex work and how it was you know um being sort of portrayed as a war on sex trafficking and how so many of the things that they were doing seemed like a lot of the things escalating in the same way that the war on drugs had escalated in terms of you know using on the prospect of sex trafficking as a as a reason to do catch all vice things as a reason to fund more federal money to local police squads and give them more equipment and do these like task forces as a reason to um you know make sentences much more draconian as a reason to pass new laws on asset forfeiture as an excuse to do more surveillance of people overall um it was just very much in the same way that you know this people they were using sex trafficking as a reason to expand the police state in the surveillance state essentially um and so a lot of my work I've done in the past eight or nine years now at reason has been on this same theme but this was the first big piece where we sort of laid it all out and you know uh talked about how this idea that we were in the middle of a human trafficking epidemic was overblown and how it was being used as a political excuse by a lot of people and where that came from and what the effects were and I think this this makes the first sort of comprehensive case for this and again just it's the kind of work that I could only do at reason I think now that there's a lot more acceptance for the idea that that you know a lot of what's called sex trafficking busts or human trafficking busts is actually just prostitution busts or generalized petty vice busts or excuses for surveillance but like back in 2014 2015 that was not an idea that was out there at all and people were really you know reacting sort of like very negatively to it a lot of people because they were just like what you're saying that like you know sex trafficking isn't a real problem which is not you know what we were saying um I think that we actually really helped turn the tide on this conversation um well two things uh and I was just talking about that story or your work with somebody the other night um one of the things you you have created heuristic for me anytime I read a story or see something about okay there's a big sex trafficking bust it's like book book market and then come back in a month or two months and see what's happened and inevitably the only arrests that have been made were of women for prostitution nothing ever gets higher beyond that um but then the other question I guess or the uh you know and that's just a great thing like people should do that all the time this book market and come back to it but what um where did the hysteria over sex trafficking come from in a united states context because we hear about this now all the time it is really driving it's driving a lot of internet uh you know policy it is driving all sorts of um you know kind of government policies etc and there is a cultural sense that we have we have never been in a situation like we are now a midst of massive sexual trafficking of minors of young boys of young girls of foreigners of this or that even though there's essentially no evidence uh you know that it is an epidemic it happens and it needs to be dealt with but why are we why are we stuck in this narrative loop yeah there is like you said there is absolutely no evidence that this is you know becoming more of a problem that it's more widespread than it ever was if anything it's it's less widespread um but it was it was actually a really concerted effort by uh the same people that brought us the porn wars in the 80s and 90s and they sort of realized that they were losing on that front they realized that you know if you look at polls back from the 90s more and more people said like yes prostitution should be legal as long as it's you know safe and regulated which is you know its own thing but uh you know there was there was not a bunch of an anti a puritanical anti prostitution attitude there was not as much about happening anymore and so the religious right and anti porn feminists got together and they were like we are going to specifically conflate all prostitution with sex trafficking or human trafficking and in the UK they tend to call it modern slavery they're like we are specifically going to you know conflate these things in order to get people to turn against this and they really there's like documents of them sort of planning to do this um they really were the ones that pushed the first federal anti sex trafficking law which was passed in 2000 and people often say like oh you know we didn't have that law until 2000 but like there were other laws that prevented that same thing it just wasn't we weren't calling it sex trafficking um but yeah they you know the the anti porn the coalition of anti porn feminists and uh religious right got together and really worked really hard for the past several decades to specifically frame it this way and make it seem like all prostitution is you know being done with children or being done through force and coercion sometimes the argument that you hear from decriminalization advocates is that you know taking the law taking law enforcement out of it would actually help with sex trafficking you know or coerced sex to the degree that it is a problem because then you know the the focus is is not so wide it's more narrow on this this this subsection of like real abuse do you buy that is that like part of your reason for advocating decriminalization or like what what are the main reasons that you think that would be you know the best way forward yeah i mean there's obviously just the first principles reason like you know adults should be able to do what they want in the privacy of their bedrooms with their own bodies etc um i think that that's very valid but there's also yeah the harm reduction element which is that yes it would free up police resources because pretty much now all of the you know anti sex trafficking resources are just going to prostitution stains so it free up police time and resources it would mean that people could go to police sex workers themselves their customers people in their midst could actually go to police and report you know crimes right now they're just afraid of being rusted themselves so they can't um and it would it would just make yes it would make everything safer overall it allow them to take more steps so that they could work together they could work in you know centralized businesses they could screen clients better they could do so many things that would make the industry safer for people no matter why they were there so it could make you know things better for yes people who are sex workers 100 by choice and people who are being coerced into it and everywhere in between would you talk a little bit about feminism and libertarianism you you're also one of the founders and heads of feminists for liberty a group that of libertarian feminists um you know it's a it's a strange movement in many ways uh arguably and there's a new book out about this by timothy sandifer but you know einrand rose wilder lane and isabel paterson are kind of the three figures who kind of start what became the modern libertarian movement obviously all women the movement is you know widely stereotyped and not necessarily and accurately as uh you know mostly male um i think that's changed a lot certainly even in my certainly nearly 30 years of reason and whatnot but um is you know what does it mean to be a libertarian feminist and um is there any contradiction there or does it make perfect sense in a way that critics and allies may not fully appreciate i think it makes perfect sense um you know i think both libertarianism and feminism are rooted in respect for the individual and treating people as individuals rather than you know uh collective sort of uh representatives of their you know among other things of their sex or gender but obviously there are different kinds of feminism there have always been different kinds of feminism there have always been what we might call libertarian feminists or individualist feminists and there've always been much more socialist and leftist feminists i mean there's a lot of different kinds of feminism um i think one of the things we really just want to do is point out that there have though i mean there have been libertarian oriented feminists all along this is a legitimate and important school of thought within feminism that just says you know like we have the same goals we want you know people to be treated you know equally under the law and in general based on you know not not be treated certain ways because they're women but we don't need the government to step in and give them special privileges and so you know i think libertarian and feminism plays an important role in sort of countering a lot of the what is now the mainstream feminism but it's it's been here all along especially in the 80s and 90s there was a big movement like the Association of Libertarian Feminists existed my favorite Jim Kennedy Taylor wrote a lot of good books on this um it's definitely fallen by the wayside the libertarian feminism movement in the past 20 years but that's kind of one of the things we're going to do is help bring more attention to it and revive it are you uh is this a good time to be either a libertarian or a feminist i mean it's kind of interesting yeah probably not no it does not seem like a particularly good time but i mean it wait it it's an exciting time the world needs us libertarians more than ever right now i think so you know you know i obviously i lived in achor ohio which is about 30 miles north of sincennady on and off for 20 years so i think a lot about ohio both you know it's kind of like a mental territory it's the heart of it all it used to say on its license plates it's you know columbus ohio is supposedly the most representative city every fast food company is either based there or tries out new food and clothing and everything there um ohio and it is a bellwether state it's you know it's pretty purple or it goes you know blue and red and all of that kind of stuff um it's you know it now has one of the most draconian abortion laws in the country you know as a woman and as a mother you know you're uh you have a son who is one like about a year old a little bit more than a year um i don't you know how to how does that make you feel like do you feel like now it's viscerally personal or you know or is it well you know what the government isn't actually very good at doing anything including restricting my sexual autonomy uh you know what's your sense from you know the heart of the heart of the country um i mean this isn't gonna sound good but it's sort of like not real to me that i'm in ohio and again like i grew up here but then i was away for about 20 years so and i moved back in in late 2020 so um you know it almost feels like oh ohio politics are like a thing that is that has suffered for me which i i need to get over because they're they're definitely not now um yeah so i i don't think i feel it particularly viscerally in any way but it is very disappointing and you know it makes me uh want to get more involved in politics at the local at the local level here well it could be worse you could be in indiana or kentucky right i love kentucky we can talk shit about indiana all you want but like i'm gonna defend i was also i did you know now and we mentioned generations of the past but you know you and sack uh millennials are you're just like uh you know fucking moving back home yeah we're also ancient which is hilarious like yes i love when people talking about millennials like we're young now you're like guys we're like 40 yeah yeah it's it's your best years are behind you i i'm sorry that i had to tell you in this forum but you know there it is well hey where you you seem to be talking up to gerontocracy so uh you know i go back and forth i what i what i really dislike i mean i hate the gerontocracy and i talk a lot about how you know growing up in the 80s and stuff you would look at these old soviet leaders and you were like god these fucking people are vampires they're a thousand years old and like they were in their 50s and now we're living in a place where you know people who are 80 are you know running the country and things like that it's disturbing as hell but the younger people are terrible too so it's like it's just bad people all the way down i suppose uh yeah no it feels weird there's people that i think are you know i think of as old when i see them like people in public figures and then i realize they're like my age now so it's it's a little disturbing but um do you uh do you what do you have on tap for 2023 what are your big uh hopes for uh in terms of reason journalism and breakthroughs and things like that uh the the big thing i'm working on right now my next big feature is about birth rates and how the panic over birth rates and uh how it's sort of leading to crazy policies uh on on both the left and the right and you know what a what a libertarian responses to that beyond just like don't worry about it because that's not very satisfying to people even though i i do think that there's some element of you know this represents people making their own individual choices and we need to respect that but also um how do we still take into account for you know possible issues that it brings without resorting to bigger government but that's in the very nascent stages so i don't have any answers to that yet okay i uh i got a couple of uh things i links i'll send you uh it's an interesting topic uh and again you know this also showcases kind of i think a lot of reason stuff ends up in a place where it's you know the right and the left are starting to kind of come to a consensus on similar policies maybe starting from very different places but you get this both the right and the left are like you know we really need to start using governments in order to increase birth rates yeah and it's kind of like yeah that's that doesn't end well historically or uh you know in any other way yeah in any other countries that have tried it it has not worked at all either so yeah but it doesn't mean they can't waste a lot of trouble and cause a lot of misery right correct correct yeah didn't they try to give out like free cars in Hungary or something like that to get people to have babies i don't know if it's Hungary but um it sounds like something they do in Hungary yeah i don't know maybe uh there's a very long history of that and yeah and clear i mean you know like half of the tax code is kind of impregnated with natalist assumptions and presumptions and things like that too so that looks uh that'll be something really wonderful and great to look forward to uh thank you liz for you know not just joining us today but being at reason and contributing yeah absolutely some of the most memorable stuff that we have ever published in our 50 plus year history thank you thank you for having me on today you bet so if you find uh Liz Nolan Brown's uh journalism compelling uh please help support it by going to reason.com slash donate uh or hitting the button if you're on our youtube channel hit the donate button your your donations are tax deductible because we're published by a 501c3 research and educational nonprofit so uh you can take a little bit of money from the tax man by giving us a gift and it all goes to promoting and producing more and more journalism um and um that you know that's what we're asking you to do we do it once a year uh and this is that time. Thank you to Wilhelm Billy for $20 donation um Heather Fezio says big thanks to reason for myself and my colleagues at Young Americans for Liberty we're so grateful for the fantastic work you all do thanks Heather. Yeah and uh Rajkowski says uh I love how the parallel live stream right now is Alex Jones hosting Nick Fuentes and Kanye West what a hilarious juxtaposition now there's some truth to that I I suppose so um Waldo online writes uh enjoy the reason round up keep up the great work Elizabeth uh which is nice to hear um big thanks to reason for myself this is Heather Fazio talking and my colleagues at Young Americans for Liberty we're so grateful for the fantastic work you all do thank you that's really nice to hear love you on the hill says Lucas love you on the hill Robbie though not sure how you get along with your co-hosts and uh Katherine Mangan Ward this is uh a little bit older but uh when Robbie was talking about a feature she was putting the finishing touches on that story A to Robbie so deadlines loom even during a webathon telethon Zach uh we're gonna close out in uh in about 13 minutes or so um and uh you know let's go back to this question about um you know Hong Kong protests the great reset and the great escape in 2019 you actually traveled to Hong Kong when protests were busting out in a big profound way um you know what was that experience like and what did you find and how does it help you make sense of what's going on now in Hong Kong where and throughout China actually more broadly where there are massive ongoing demonstrations against zero COVID policy there yeah um and I'll I'll just share uh the kind of intro to that video quick and then tell you some thoughts about it the protests that have consumed Hong Kong for more than three months started because of a proposed bill that would have made it easier for mainland China to extradite citizens from this semi-autonomous city violent clashes between protesters and police culminated in a confrontation at a subway station on august 31st when police appeared to beat demonstrators with batons possibly resulting in one fatality though authorities dispute that claim the activists politicians and academics we spoke with said that the protest movement has become about much more than the extradition bill which the government has since withdrawn it's a fight for the survival of an island of liberalism in the shadow of an increasingly authoritarian super state with ambitions of global dominance we are at the front line between the greatest dictatorship among human history which is ccp and the freedom world and Hong Kongers we shows that we stand with the freedom world and of course we hope the rest of the freedom world can support us in this battle in this war between dictatorship and freedom yeah so i mean that experience was you know life changing for me uh it's i i picked it as you know one of my favorite all-time projects just because going there and you know first of all i'd like everyone else been watching it from afar with some level of fascination and then the reason tv's managing editor jim eppstein was like well why don't you go and so that's again a wonderful thing about working at reason that these opportunities to just you know jump on a plane and go over and you know see for yourself what's happening and you know i made it my goal because i i knew that you know there was lots of footage out there of the conflict of the tear gas canisters i just wanted to sit down and talk with people about their values and like what what is it that motive is was motivating them to go up against behemoth like no chinese communist party um and which uh you know at the time uh of course had started to infiltrate hong kong but the you know part of the story for me and part of what you know changed me throughout this experience was going there kind of seeing hong kong on the precipice and then over the following few years seeing kind of the institutions entirely crumble and be be taken over and to see how quickly that can happen um was alarming to me um especially uh as you know we had this global cataclysm happened just you know a year later less than a year later um so i don't know it just shifted the way i saw a lot of things and um i'm i'm grateful for to reason for sending me there to allow me to document it the material all of those uh clips are in either the show notes or you can find that reason tv's youtube channel it's uh spectacular work i mean it's both deeply disturbing and deeply inspiring um what do you think when you look at the protests that we see in china you know there are similar similarly intense and widespread protests going on in iran for different reasons but um do you have a sense of like um you know how how do protests lead to change in china or do they um yeah it's it's so hard to say um you know what happened to hong kong which uh you know at least at the time had some uh liberal institutions the fact that uh that was kind of swamped was it makes me a little bit pessimistic i gotta say but um the the optimistic side of me is like well the reason this is happening in places like Hong Kong and i mean in china and uh iran is that the the communications technology allows this kind of coordination i mean that was crucial to the Hong Kong protests was the ability to use encrypted apps to use airdrop um to uh you know have this uh kind of flowing type thing that they they uh adopted the bruce lee you know be like water type mentality um in china it's a lot harder because everything is already locked down and unfortunately you know companies like apple have uh you know disabled some of the mechanisms like airdrop which were allowing people to get around to that um but uh i i do believe that you know technology does continue to outpace you know in the medium to long term the um kind of authoritarian impulses and means of control yeah it's uh interesting there's a great book from god i guess it's the earlier mid 90s by peter huber uh manhattan institute scholar who died a few years ago called uh orwell's revenge the 1984 palimpsest and um it uh you know one of the starting points was that orwell got it wrong and that you know by imagining surveillance is flowing from the you know the camera to the surveilled people and in fact historically that you know the relationship between technology and power is much more fraught and even with surveillance equipment and whatnot that oftentimes that equipment ends up getting turned around onto people you know in a banal but a meaningful way i've uh interviewed brian lamb over the years several times of the founder and former head of c-span and kind of talked with him about you know he took the surveillance camera and turned it on congress and like that changes things you know but people are doing reverse people's all the time and that changes uh you know it kind of changes the way things operate do you feel um uh you know as we wind down on this reason annual webathon telethon um with our flashing lights redolent reminiscent of the jerry lewis telethon are you optimistic um you know about the next five years i mean i think most libertarians i know are very optimistic about the next 15 years or the next 50 years but about the next five years what do you think um i'm optimistic in certain regards i mean i i i it was great that we started off with uh kathryn talking about you know the advent of um commercial space travel i mean we're we're seeing uh the thing i love about that is that it's so concrete you can just you can just see the rockets going up and these boosters landing themselves in a way that was never possible until um you know a company engineered it to be that way so i continue to be optimistic about technological uh steps forward in the way that's going to improve our lives um you know i just saw this thing with open ai and its chat bot and its ability to answer questions um with like incredible detail uh these things are just happening uh you just have left and right you just have to look for them um and also just the uh kind of increased ability of people to uh choose their own adventure in life and uh you know live where they want send their kids to school where they want watch the entertainment and like customize life to their liking i think all that is going in a positive direction and we'll continue to you know the macro trends like the economy and our like fiscal situation and just like the general state of our national electoral politics i think is pretty grim and uh in many ways can threaten all of that um so i think it's it's a real mixed picture yeah that's uh you know that's a kind of a great thought to uh you know kind of go out on um but reason started in 1968 throughout its history um you know it it's always recognized that uh you know kind of liberty or freedom or self-determination i guess in a less kind of uh ideological term it's never it's rare when it's happening it's all going in the same direction like there's always a mix and one of the things that's fascinating to me when i joined reason in the fall of 1993 in october of 93 and i moved to la and it was you know i was able to see the entire magazine run it wasn't online at the time and it was fascinating to see in the 70s we you know which the 70s were a terrible decade for many many things particularly kind of broad economic issues were not great uh you know there were a lot of problems in the united states etc urban life was decaying rapidly in the 1970s but there were also all of these massive increases culturally and in lifestyle and you know there was so much freedom so like on you know the one hand things were getting shittier on the other hand all of this other stuff was happening in a good way and then years later i mean we could recognize that things like the you know that the groundwork for the personal computer revolution which ultimately led to the internet and whatnot those tracks were being laid in the 70s even as people were thinking you know nothing good was being made anymore in america or elsewhere so it's kind of in reasons dna to always be recognizing that you know freedom doesn't advance you know in in one direction all at the same time and that there's many different types of sources of power sources of repression sources of innovation sources of liberation and it's good to always be kind of taking in a 360 degree view because there's a lot of awful things going on specifically from a libertarian perspective but there's also a lot of really fantastic things going on yeah and there's there's this shift that we're still going through where people are kind of trying to find their footing of like what institutions to trust which which ones are trustworthy a lot of that has been you know thrown massively into question because of the last couple years i think the ftx meltdown is like a kind of interesting example of that where this guy you know ensconced himself with kind of the old establishment but he was like rioting this the wave of like this new technology of cryptocurrency and unfortunately yeah there's going to be a lot of you know anytime there's disruption there's going to be some element of tragedy and i'm hoping that you know the the work that that reason does and that we do highlighting kind of like the exciting and hopefully trustworthy institutions that both have existed for a long time and that are emerging now and also you know trying to stick to bring a full circle to the facts and you know have a conversation where we can all you know look at some shared set of facts and then you know we might be coming from slightly just different perspectives but at least we're like committing to having a conversation based on that that understanding yeah i think that's a great way to talk about it and you know facts you know facts are arguments right that are kind of settled arguments so we're always going to be coming up with new facts because things change and things like that but rooting it in you know rooting our conversations and something concrete i always find it you know just and i and i don't mean this in a good way or in a way that always works to my advantage but you know when you're arguing with people about something like if you can agree to like are there a common set of facts that we will agree to and then go from there like it actually is very clarifying and sometimes there isn't because it's either about value judgments or reality is very murky if you like what you've seen today in this reason live stream please donate give us a tax deductible donation at reason.com slash donate you can go there there's a lot of different giving levels you can give once you can give monthly you can give a little you can give a lot you can hit the donate button at youtube we're published by a 501 cc three non-profit your money goes to support our journalism our commentary our podcasts or videos our print publication our website all of the expenses that we incur with that and what we give you in exchange our number of things one is that we do our best to produce top drawer journalism that is provocative challenging correct provisional but explores a world of free minds and free markets what are the possibilities of that what are the things holding us back well how do we need to redefine libertarian in you know in a world that is constantly changing we also act as your voice in public debates over politics culture and ideas we go on other shows we write for other publications we make the libertarian arguments and we try to bring that to a whole new generation of people particularly our youtube channel 41 of our viewers are under the age of 35 it's really important to win the next generation over to a world of free minds and free markets where individuals are encouraged and allowed to become who they want to be and to change who they want to be over time these are some of the things that your donations give us and before we wrap i would like to thank one more time the one thousand dollar anonymous donor who we mentioned earlier thank you so much for that and also harry catecholities and i apologize for butchering your name but you coughed up four hundred and six dollars which is incredibly generous and will help us as well all of your donation zach do you have any final thoughts i just want to echo that and say thank you to everybody who supports our work here i hope that the stream has given you a sense of you know what what that support goes towards the the vision that you are helping to put out there and the the journalism that the the serious journalism that that looks at liberty both here in america and you know across the world and tries to engage with you know the most important issues from you know a libertarian perspective thank you for enabling that all right well this concludes our first ever telethon webathon i want to thank all of our reason staffers who participated and all of you who watch and zack especially you for co-hosting it's uh always our thursdays are always a highlight of my week and i hope they are of yours too the same thanks nick