 Hello, everybody, and welcome to a very special midweek version, videotaped God Help Us version, and above all, Webathon version of the Reason Roundtable podcast. I am Matt Welch, joined as always by, most always, by our super friends, Nicholas B. Peter Suderman and Catherine Mangue Ward. Hello, everyone. Howdy. Hey, Matt. Happy Wednesday. People are going to hear this on Thursday, Peter. So already you're wrong footing everything. I hope you had a happy Wednesday. Oh, OK. If you're listening to this. We are going to basically field your questions. Hopefully get to most of them. I cannot promise that we will get to all of them. The sooner we actually start asking them, the sooner we can get there. So first, before we start, I just wanted to see whether our editor in chief dress, Catherine Mangue Ward, has any kind of objectivist prayer you want to say at the beginning of our Webathon session here. If you're going to give me a suffix, I prefer editrix, although editor in chief will be just fine. No, I just wanted to kick off our Webathon podcast by saying that this is actually one of my favorite parts of the Webathon and actually of the year. Last year, we had such good questions that I actually had kind of a moment of like, oh my gosh, our readers and listeners and viewers are really great. So I guess I just want to start out by saying, if you've already donated, thank you very much. If you're thinking about donating, thank you very much. But also, even if you're just listening and sometimes like bothering someone at dinner about something you heard on this podcast, you're doing what we hope you will do with our content, which is share it around and spread the ideas that we hash out here and care deeply about. And so even if you don't have lots of bitcoins to throw our way today, we still really, really appreciate your support as listeners. But if you do happen to have a couple skipped spare bitcoins, maybe hit us up. You just said nice things about our listeners' years readers. I'm going to counteract that by reading our first question from Scott E. Wine. I'm sure I'm mispronouncing our good friend Scott's email. But he says, I will make my annual donation if everybody on the podcast, including Nick, refers to him as Dr. Gillespie. Love, Scott. We're reading this first just so we can all get our Dr. Gillespie's out of the way and hold you to that $10,000 pledge, Scott, that you were talking about. So Dr. Gillespie, are you happy that Dr. Jill Biden is going into the White House? I am looking forward, Matt, Peter and Catherine, to battling Dr. Jill Biden for the next four years, like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty for ever tumbling off of Reichenbach Falls. And I think that my doctorate will achieve ground impact first. So I'm looking forward to the next several years. All right, let's get into our actual questions. Andrew Belay, and I am sorry, not sorry, in advance for everybody's names who I massacre. It's part of the thing. He can't say my name, so don't take it personal. Andrew asks, Catherine, as the lady anarchist. Wow, why do you got to gender her? What's it like working with these awful statists? How do you not violate the non-aggression principle on their asses every time you see them? Some of my best friends are statists. It's fine. Dr. Gillespie and I have actually hashed this out in the pages of Reason Magazine. I think reasonable libertarians can disagree on whether anarchism should be your ultimate goal, but that we can certainly agree on a bunch of incremental steps before we have to decide about privatizing the roads and the personal security or whatever we ultimately come to. I think anarchism is a way of thinking about how the world could work better. And that's how I use it. I use it as a way of thinking about if there was no state, how would people do things? And that's a question all libertarians should ask themselves. And anarchists just answer it more thoroughly. And more annoyingly. I will let our listeners decide who is more annoying. And he didn't say single out Peter for that weirdly. What's it like working with the anarchist? How do you reconcile your differences? I'll go first just to say that I do it by always sending Catherine my I voted sticker right after I vote because that's really fun. Thanks for that. What's it like working with an anarchist? It's fantastic. She's a great boss, a great colleague. It's a great sort of creative inspiration. I mean, a lot of what we do is sort of think about how to what articles we should be running, how those articles should work, you know, how they should be structured, like what this particular sentence in a particular piece should say. And Catherine is always super great. And I think actually though, she's also like a thing. I will say that maybe that if you haven't worked with her, you might not see because it's not necessarily visible. Visible in the public work product is as an anarchist who uses the ideas of anarchy to think about how we can do things better, she ends up being really, really good at in the micro level of our little institution being really, really good at helping other people organize themselves in a private way to do things better. You were supposed to do smack talk there though. That was nice, but you were supposed to talk. I'm going to take care of this. Clean it up. Take it away, Nick. I, you know, I don't know. I see like a state. So it's hard to. Nick is the Leviathan. We are, you know, it is true that the kind of the institutional organization is very decentralized and dispersed, which I think goes a long way towards anarchy. And I like the way that Catherine devolves a lot of decision making down almost to the cellular level. So that's really good. Guys, are the two genders actually crisis and Leviathan? Oh, that's a very good question. But then there are 57 genders. There are 57 genders. I think one for every basket. Robert Dr. Jordan Peterson has taught us that it is only two and they are crisis and Leviathan. Anthony Andy Hawks. We appreciate the nickname in there, Andy Anthony. As a regular listener to the recent roundtable podcast, I can't help but have noticed good verb tense there. That Catherine is called Catherine. Matt is called Matt. Nick is called Nick. Peter is called Peter, et cetera. But Stephanie is almost always called Slade, even to her face. What's up with that, Catherine? That is Slade's preference. That is the name that she goes by. Her friends call her Slade and we are friends. Also, let's be real, it's incredibly cool. If my last name wasn't Mangue Ward, but was instead Slade, I would go by Slade. And we call Peter a Suderman. I do recall. Michael Moynihan used to occasionally call you Mango. Yeah, and I loved that. Yeah. My wife used to call Radley Balco Radlow, which I still use mostly behind his back. Matt, if you were going to take a name after a 70s glam rock band, though, would you go with Slade or would you go with somebody, I don't know, like Matt the Hoople or something? Obviously the Hoople. Yeah, just Half Nelson. I would do the glam rock band whose name I'm blanking on, but it's the best ever. It's Rick Springfield's Teenage Band in Australia, which does the single best version of Eleanor Rigby ever done. That includes the Beatles. All right, let's go. I should probably say I go by Suderman in our Slack channel. Yes, sure. Yeah, we call him Suderman quite a bit. I in fact, I don't on the round table as much as I would because my muscle memory is to call him Suderman, computer man, which is what we used to call him on the independence and he probably still gets called on Kennedy to this day. Paul Dobner asked a question. COVID has made me lose faith in humanity, which in turn has made me question if libertarianism could succeed. My question is, is this a valid concern? And how can you argue for libertarianism during a pandemic when almost half the population doesn't even believe in masks? Paul, I'm so sorry about losing your faith. Nick, do you want to restore his faith in humanity? Yeah, I mean, it's viruses I assume predate humanity. I mean, we can say they're socially constructed on some level, but I actually have found the past year to be a kind of reinvigoration of a lot of libertarian beliefs. Again, going to the decentralization of knowledge and as well as of power and authority, where we've seen the worst mistakes being made is at the periods where there is the most centralization of control. We saw that with the CDC and the FDA making grievous mistakes early on. And we saw the response at the state, local and even federal level was to loosen up a lot of laws and regulations that kept medicine from being practiced from bringing in different types of ideas about how to control and contain and beat the virus. And talking about masks, I think it's worked out pretty well. Forget about mask mandates. There's a lot of information about there. And most people are wearing masks because they believe that they help prevent the spread of infection. And mask compliance is good. I mean, like people are making decisions. So I understand his discord, his internal discord, but I actually think when you see governments waving certain types of drug authorization rules and things like that and opening up the process, when you see the TSA getting rid of certain limits on hand sanitizer and other things, you can bring on planes when you see states getting rid of medical licensing requirements that are bullshit to begin with. You know, this is a time where we should be talking about how dispersing knowledge, authority, and decision-making actually leads to better results. Catherine, anything to add just to inject faith in a time of coronavirus? Yeah, I mean, I guess I've always thought that libertarianism is the right response to a world where people are kind of crappy and fallible. I've always been a little bit confused actually by the critique of libertarianism, that like it presupposes that people are good or rational or something like that because it seems like giving one person or a small group of people power over a lot of their fellows puts an awful lot of faith in the idea that that person is good or will have good incentives even, which I don't have. So, yep, people are not great sometimes. Yep, that has been true in 2020. I think you're right that a pandemic is a challenge to where are the limits of government interference? It absolutely is. That is, and the question about vaccination is going to be a further challenge, but I don't think that people being kind of crappy and irresponsible a lot of the time is a new challenge or an insurmountable one. I think, you know, to just very briefly discuss it a little bit more, you are seeing people push back against authority that they see as illegitimate or wrong or not clear enough and things like that. And you also see in the whole idea of the federal government giving a prize for whoever comes up with a vaccine. Quickest, that's kind of a model for a libertarian, not an anarchist way of doing government, but where the government sets broad rules and possibly incentives and then kind of gets out of the way. We are in a moment where the crackdown is coming. We're literally and figuratively under lockdown. That's very troubling, but it's exactly looking to the libertarian response, I think, where you see the best hope for what things should look like during normal times as well as crisis. I would add that we ran a great piece about 10 years ago or so, maybe less about how the development of AIDS, HIV therapies through the FDA was a kind of revolutionary new process that should be followed in the future. And it's very prescient about how for this pandemic as well. If there's going to be an opportunity that comes out of all of this, hopefully it has to do with the rapid developments and kind of opening up of the process at the Food and Drug Administration. And that's the memo. I'm going to direct the next one to Peter since he didn't talk on that one. Scott Murray says, this is a pretty good norms question, Peter. Is Trump's refusal to accept election results more threatening than Biden's mask mandates? What say you? Well, I think Biden's mask mandates are going to end up being pretty toothless. It's not even clear that he is going to attempt a national mask mandate. He might attempt something like, say, requiring masks on all interstate commerce because Biden alone, the president alone, is not going to be able to implement a mask mandate that has to be done at the state or the local level. I think there's just a real deep issue that you have to be worried about when the president refuses to accept legitimate election results and instead clings to absolutely bonkers, completely unfounded, crazy theories that the election was stolen from him. The peaceful and mutually agreed upon transfer of power is the foundation for Democratic governance. You have to have that. And Trump isn't going to end that. Trump isn't going to throw our country into some sort of apocalypse of democracy where it's just all over and there's a new civil war. But what he's doing is just chipping away at the foundations. And every single day that he's out there saying, look, this election was stolen. It was fake. It's illegitimate. He's embarrassing himself. But he is also he is he is breaking or at least degrading the kind of institutional norms that successful liberty loving peaceful democracies need and rely on. Because yes, we are a nation of laws, but we are also a nation of of humans who have to agree jointly. We have to come to some kind of consensus about what we're going to do together. And and how we're all going to act, right? Like that's like the Constitution is a bunch of words. It is it has those they're important words. They matter an awful lot. But if people just all one day decided, we're not going to we're not going to agree to do that anymore, then it wouldn't work anymore. And so what Trump is doing is cracking away at some of the kind of foundations of mutual agreement about how we're going to run our society. And in particular, how we are going to handle elections and the transfer of presidential power. And the the other way of doing that the the non peaceful way is through crazy conspiracies and anger and guns. And I would much prefer I would much prefer the peaceful way, even if it's sometimes frustrating, sometimes irritating. Speaking of frustrations, Andrew Ford gets at one of mine. I'll send this as a question to Nick. The Biden administration may decide to revisit net neutrality. Have the last several years provided any new evidence to counter arguments of those in favor of net neutrality? And we will say this, Ajit Pai, Chairman of the FCC, just announced that he's stepping down. And Nick, I think you're going to interview him or we are at some point soon. And just it's amazing to see how we're still allowed to broadcast and do things on the Internet, despite the net neutrality going through. How do you answer this question, Nick? Yeah, I mean, the way net neutrality was implemented and discussed the removal of it in 2017, basically early 2018, it shows that it had no good effects. The level of investment connection speeds and the ubiquity of connections have only increased since then. And I did actually interview Ajit Pai about a week and a half ago. And in that he discussed how compared to Europe, which implemented essentially net neutrality style rules that people clamored for and got via agency order in the United States, they had trouble dealing with the crush of increases in Internet traffic due to the pandemic and whatnot. European regulators went to streaming services such as YouTube and Netflix, things like that, and asked them to throttle their speed so that they could handle the traffic. We did not see that in the U.S. The U.S. is also doing pretty well in terms of the rollout of 5G and things like that. So the evidence that you don't need net neutrality is the past several years after it was repealed. And that should close the case. But as the writer points out, it is likely, very likely that whoever Joe Biden puts in charge of the FCC is going to be much more of a heavy hand of regulation. And that's problematic, not just on that, but also in a broader sense. There is an attack from both the right and the left. Donald Trump hates Section 230, the Internet's First Amendment, the 26 words that created the Internet, the thing that allows a massive user-generated content universe. He hates that. Donald Trump hates that. But Joe Biden is going to be president for the next four years. So there's going to be a lot of battles over online speech. It's not just the evidence of the last couple of years. It's the evidence of the Internet up until the Obama administration. Net neutrality didn't exist before then. It was, in some ways, a kind of a norm in that just as a default, companies both at the edge and the center of the network. So that's both your providers like, say, Verizon or AT&T. And your companies like Facebook or Netflix or sort of operated the edge of the Internet. They all kind of worked on a roughly net neutral idea. But net neutrality was not enshrined in law. And it was just this bizarre thing where people said, look, without this, the Internet is going to completely melt down. And then they put it in place and repealed it just a couple of years later. And it never melted down. It was never a problem before. And so net neutrality is just sort of like the ultimate example in like we're scared something might happen. We can't even really tell you what, but we're going to preemptively regulate in a way that will definitely prevent people from doing good and useful things along the way. And then when it got repealed, none of the consequences came to pass that we were warned about. Like the Internet is fine. You can still tweet stuff, unfortunately. And as Pi memorally called it, he said it was a solution that won't work to a problem that doesn't exist. That's one of the better little, is that an epigram? I never understood these words to me. Catherine Andrew Ford has a second half of the question, which Nick had a look. Oh my God. Is this the Andrew Ford hour? He better be ponying up some money. This is a web-a-thon for God's sake. It continues the conversation that you started. Does libertarianism stand a chance if so many cannot see the wisdom of section 230? Or is it all a bluff like calls for civility and no change is likely, Catherine? I go back and forth in my optimism about the possible success for particularly wonky topics like this, but I will say that 2020 has given me a little bit of hope on that front. Because think about all the people who did not know the phrases civil asset forfeiture and qualified immunity before this year and now do. If, to some extent, reaching our policy goals means wonkifying the public or at least wonkifying the activist subset of the public, then there's some evidence that that can work. I mean, the fact that people were out in the streets screaming the words qualified immunity is really heartening to me. I think section 230 is tricky to understand. Even people who it's their day job to understand it, I think sometimes either through motivated reasoning or just a misunderstanding or a different understanding don't get where I would like them to get, but I would strongly recommend that you read Liz Nolan-Brown as a section 230 explainer and guide. I think if our traffic is any indication, lots of people are. And among them, at least for the last little while, the guy in charge of the FCC. So that all adds up to I think libertarianism in general, but especially the libertarian view. But what I see is the libertarian view of the free internet, which relies on keeping section 230, at least the spirit of section 230 intact. It hasn't made a lot of headway, and I don't think that will be entirely reversed, even if it does take some hits under a Biden administration. But again, to be clear, it's so bipartisan to want to censor the internet and censor speech on the internet that in some ways that I guess minimizes my concerns about the change of partisan power in Washington, because everybody's wrong in their own special way. But the people who at least comprehend the argument we're trying to put forth, they're out there and hopefully they retain some influence. Let's go to one more tech related question rather long before we get into a sort of a lightning round. This comes from Erwin Rosenbaum, and I am going to throw it at Nick first for reasons that probably will become clear. As technology and AI advance, we are becoming more and more susceptible to external influences. Tristan Harris, the ex-Google design ethicist has been ringing the bell loudly about how we're being influenced by the social media companies who are fighting for our attention in the new attention economy. The documentary, The Social Dilemma, paints a frightening picture of how these companies, using knowledge about how the brain works, obsess on and succeed at controlling our behavior. Yuval Noah Harari goes further talking about a future where AI has fully hacked humans such that we may willingly relinquish our choices, big choices, who to marry, what to do for a living, because the machines know us better than we know ourselves. If we accept for argument's sake that this is where we are headed, where does libertarianism fit within this future? Nick Gillespie. You know, the first thing that we have to do is not say if we accept this, then what do you do? Because the whole if you accept this, which is that a bunch of engineers at Google and various online places have figured out how the mind works and can circumscribe all of our choices, all of our thinking, all of everything that we do, how we conceive of the world. The Social Dilemma is a puff piece for the people who produced it. It has no real bearing on how people act, what the internet is about, or anything like that. It's a throwback to in the 1950s, Vance Packard wrote a book about the hidden persuaders about how psychologists and admin had finally teamed up to completely control our consumer choices in a new wealthy post-war economy. This is just that wrapped up in always, always in the most cutting edge pseudoscientific belief that we have figured out how to make people constrain their choices. It goes back to people like Descartes and when you read the Kajito, the idea of I think therefore I am, that's premised on the idea at the start of the Enlightenment that there may be an evil puppeteer who is actually deciding everything we do and we are just kind of puppets at the end of a string. How do we know that what we're doing is free will or is conscious and intentional? So you have to reject the premise of that because if you say, well AI has perfectly figured out how to control everything, there's no after that. And in fact, when you look at the ways in which individuals and people and technologies act, they are never as totalizing a force as we often want to believe. And it's interesting that sometimes it's the purveyors of that technology and sometimes it's the people who are afraid they're being controlled. Think about people in the social dilemma are not different than John Birch Society members who were talking about their precious body fluids being invaded by fluoride and them being controlled through the fillings in their teeth by communist puppets like George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower. What we need to be looking at is the world more or less responsive to human flourishing, human innovation and individual possibilities for life. And I think there, not only is Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter part of the solution, but it's a demonstration project that people around the globe are living better lives more fully. We have a lot of threats on the horizon, but actual AI dictating how we live is not one of them. Technology has always relieved us of choices and what that does is it allows us to think about different things and in some ways make more interesting choices. I don't really understand how light bulbs work, especially like the new ones that are different for some reason. I've got like actually like three or four different types of light bulbs surrounding me right now. And I don't feel like Edison took over the part of my brain that was that would have been devoted to making fire all the time and like robbed me of some essential part of myself. I like the fact that I don't have to know how light bulbs work at all. And I would actually, if you want sort of like a really wild extrapolation of this idea, go read E&M Banks' culture series, which is about a far future in which super powerful AIs do control everything and there's no resource limitations. And you know what humans do? They sit around and create other problems for themselves and like find different ways to get into trouble and to pleasure themselves and to enjoy things and to stay interested and to argue and like, yes, in fact, I'm going to leave the pleasure themselves like hanging out there because there is in fact a plot line. This isn't a New Yorker call Peter, please. There is a plot line about an individual who genetically engineers himself in a really spectacular way. I'm just going to say, and he writes a train like that goes around a planet just constantly. It's amazing. But this is the thing is that people are like terrified that technology is going to take away your choice and that you'll somehow become less than human. In fact, what happens is that technology relieves you of having to worry about boring day-to-day stuff. Like, am I going to light this candle and set my house on fire? Which I did once, but that's another story. Or am I just going to turn on a bunch of lights and not worry about this? And then I can go think about other things like how to make a great cocktail. Jan Golan asks, and I'll set this to Catherine, what do you think about the Free State Project? So I, as I think I've mentioned before on this podcast, went to Pork Fest some years ago, which is their kind of summer festival and gathering of free-staters and free-state friends. And I was grumpy about going because I do not like to be outdoors. I do not really like nature that much. I've like reconciled myself to it a little in the pandemic. But it was like kind of inconvenient to get there. And I got there and I thought it was so great. I just really enjoyed these weirdo-libertarians living their best weird lives together, dancing around a bonfire with like trench coats full of drugs. It was just what you imagine. And it really like, it was really a beautiful demonstration of like what might happen if you just let people kind of be weird in a loose conglomeration together. I would say sometimes that's what working at Reason is like too. It's bonfires and trench coats full of drugs here as well. But I think it's cool. I think it's cool that it's totally voluntary. I think the mechanism was cool. I have always been a little skeptical about it coming to full flowering. And indeed, it seems to be struggling. But wish those dudes the best. Yeah, just co-sign aggressively on all that, except maybe I like the outdoors better. She left out the guns. There's always the bonfire, drugs, guns, and kids. And gun, and kids. And the little commerce row is also super great. People like create their own stuff. It's really fun. I recommend, I cannot recommend highly enough, people to go to pork fest, regardless of what you think about being in the woods with a bunch of weirdo-libertarians or the wisdom of trying to get people of a certain philosophical bent to all move to the same state. Just throw that away. It's a very fun, warm, weird, great party. The other event that they do annually is in the winter, which is much tougher in New Hampshire than the summer Liberty Forum. And it's fantastic as well. Yeah, very good, very good people. OK, what is your, this is Joseph Hinshaw. What's your favorite Twitter account you follow? I'm going to go first, so Nick can't take mine. Super70sports, which is just this dude who like posts old light beer from Miller commercials and like pictures of Billy Martin smoking in the dugout and God knows what else. And it just hits all of my sweet spots. And none of those have to do with politics. Nick, what's your favorite, your second favorite? I'm going to butcher her name, but I think it's Marina Arral. She is a Brazilian artist who colorizes old photos and has and a wide variety of other things. And it's fantastic. It stands in for a whole wing of Twitter, which just shows different things that are fascinating. I mean, what I love about Twitter, I suppose is what I hate about it is that there's always something interesting and new in my Twitter stream. But the way she humanizes the past by colorizing it in really unpredictable and fascinating ways. I really like Eyes on Cinema and One Perfect Shot. One Perfect Shot just posts great stills from movies old and contemporary with credits to the director and the cinematographer, which is important. And then Eyes on Cinema posts images and videos from film history and often a lot of behind the scenes stuff, just little clips without a huge amount of context. They posted one the other day that was just a whole bunch of behind the scenes 1980s VHS video of the special effects and stunt work on RoboCop. And it was just delightful. It was like I got to spend 60 seconds watching Paul Verhoeven run around direct people on where to put their explosions and their broken glass and their smoke bombs. And it's kind of great. It's like a wonderful little cinema break in my feed every time it pops up. Mango? No. I was 50-50 on whether Peter's One Perfect Shot was going to be cocktails or movies, which is a great crossover Twitter account. Cocktails are for Instagram. I know. We don't have shots. Also, we don't do shots. But I'm actually going to go a little bit in-house and recommend the criminally underrated Twitter feed of Eric Bame. That dude is so good on Twitter and he gets not enough love. So if you are not following Eric, who you have heard on this here podcast in the past, who is a reasoned reporter of much renown, he covers trade stuff, but he is like good with the quick quip rather than the hot take, if you know what I mean. And that to me is like a really important thing on Twitter. I want quips, not hot takes, if at all possible. And Eric is your man. Quips, not hot takes. Sounds a little bit like a hot take. Ooh. Okay. Steven Schatz asks, and we'll go Nick first. Sorry, Suderman. Who is the most libertarian character in TV sitcom history? Can we all just say Ron Swanson in unison? I mean, you'd think. Is Nick still with us? Yeah, I'm here. I'm here. He's thinking. I'm trying to come up with a non-Ron Swanson. Yeah, that's the challenge. I think we just course it. Ron Swanson. Yeah, you know, I will put it this way. I think Dale Gribble on King of the Hill is the purest kind of excrescence of a libertarian parody. And I love Mike Judge's entire fictional cinematic universe. But Dale Gribble, I'm going to go with Dale Gribble of King of the Hill, which is one of the greatest shows on TV, or was one of the greatest shows in TV history. I don't watch TV comedy. Wow. Wow. Pretty weird. Catherine, do you have anything to add to Ron Swanson? I mean, I guess I could make the case for Ted Danson's character in The Good Place as a, I mean, this is, I guess, a spoiler, but the show is over. So as a renegade demon from hell who's trying to help humans be better on their own because the powerful forces that surround them haven't given them enough credit for what they can do as like individuals who grow and change. So I'll go with that, I guess. I will, you know, to bring it back to Ron Swanson, one of the great things. Always bring it back to Ron Swanson. Well, but one of the great things about that is, of course, that he works in the public sector. I mean, he's meant to be a parody. Like we should all be clear on that. Right. Like, well, but the reason I bring that up is because there is this sense that if you benefit from a system, you are not allowed to criticize it. And this is always used to kind of cudgel people and keep them down when they say yes, but. And so, you know, that adds to the texture of Ron Swanson along with all the other stuff. Brian Schwartz asks, why do reason and other libertarian organization, EGVLP, Cato, pay so little attention to alternative voting methods such as approval voting and ranked choice as a means for advancing libertarian policies? Brian, the assumption of your question is wrong. That's, that's how I'm answering that question. Go just to a search on ranked choice on our site. Been writing about it this very month. We had actually a weird blockbuster in the lead up to this election with a Scott Shackford post about ranked choice voting in Maine. That thing like got ungodly traffic. So in case you're, in case you feel like you're not seeing enough volume, at least maybe you can feel confident that people, people are coming to us to find stuff about this and they are, they are finding it and sharing it and being happy about it. Let's go to some individually directed questions around. I am scrolling down and filibustering until I get to question for KMW. Hold on. Yes, from Michael Murmack. Catherine has stated that one should not vote because among other reasons, a single vote will not make a difference in any given race. Doesn't this principle also call into question participating in any collective activity? For example, surveys, volunteering for large organizations, donating to reason dot, dot, dot. Catherine. The difference between those activities and voting is that those activities are not winner take all. They're not zero sum. Each dollar that you donate to reason is a dollar that we can use productively whereas each vote that you vote disappears into a great mass and you get only option A or option B. Also, you will, if you dive into the KMW, don't vote over. You will find me saying in many places that my one potential narrow exception to my don't vote rule is like, listen, if you just love it, like if it feels like a great expressive act to you or like you just really dig the experience, then do it, but just acknowledge that that is the spirit in which you were doing it. And I would say a bunch of other similar group activities people do because it gives them joy, in which case they should go ahead and do it, but they shouldn't be confused about the potential impact of any of those activities. But don't you tell me what to announce. In particular, Catherine. Yeah, Matt, Matt gets voting joy, which is like, okay, but why? Question for Nick from Brandon. You stated that your preferred electoral outcome this year would be a Trump presidency with a Democratic Senate because of Trump's lack of a regulatory agenda. I would argue that the reverse, a Biden presidency with a Republican Senate is better considering Trump's inconsistency on regulation and lack of genuine efforts towards actual deregulation doesn't the stability of a president who respects the integrity of American political institutions outweigh those concerns. Yeah, well, you know, that's the scenario that we're going to see. And I think a lot of us, and I know I was personally, I was kind of energized by the electoral results because there was a rejection of Trump, Trump as president, which I think overall is good, but there was also a rejection of kind of the extreme forms of populism and of kind of the Democratic socialist agenda when you look at the ways in which the Democrats lost seats in the House and did not pick up the Senate. So, you know, we'll see how it all plays out. I think the biggest problem for me with a Biden win and the situation we're going into now is that there's every reason to believe that the Republicans and the Democrats are going to compromise in a way that gives each of them what they want, which will mean, I think inevitably, bigger government spending, a lot of regulatory things we talked about, Section 230. Earlier, you have equal people in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party calling for the end of Section 230 and of some kind of overt regulation of speech and action on the Internet. So, I hope that he's right. Either way, you cut it. That's what we're going to be dealing with. Biden's early appointees already suggest that he is really going to make an effort to use the executive branch and executive orders to govern. And that is an opportunity that is going to be afforded to him by the expansions of executive branch power that have happened under Trump, Obama, and George W. Bush in particular. And so the last three presidencies have all just pushed executive power and executive authority. And that's going to mean that Biden, if he can't work with Congress, if he has Republicans in the Senate who have a majority in the Senate, which is likely but not certain, given the outcomes of the Georgia Senate runoffs, I think Biden is really going to end up doing a lot of governance through the executive branch in ways that are quite worrying and that are probably not things that Trump would have done, but that Trump helped and able just by basically deciding that he was going to work around Congress and use executive authority. Question for me from Zach Mayo. I recall it once being mentioned that the informal dress code policy at reason was dress like someone you really like is coming into the office today to see you. And if that's true, why has nothing been done about Welch's hair? The guy spends 20 years cosplaying as a 1950s era Pentagon suit only to do this baffling. Zach, I think you bring up a very important question. I'll just say that my French mother-in-law, it was reported to me recently said he looks like he looks like someone who has come back from Vietnam and is still working through some issues. Matt, I fear that you are, especially with the basement home office, that you're devolving into Milton from office space. Devolving. Hello. Hashtag aspirational. Yeah, there's no one coming to my office anyways at this point. And my wife likes to think that it's a cry from the heart because I'm unable otherwise to express my pain. And I think that sounds as good as anything. You are just surrounded by French people. I want to know that the reason dress code is actually just please wear clothes. Yes, and especially on... Which puts us as an outlier really at magazines these days, I guess. Yeah. Question for Suderman from John Lose. What is the most libertarian space-centric sci-fi TV series? Despite the failings of all governments in the series, I don't think it's Star Wars because Star Wars is always pushing a chosen one or a hero of the destiny to come and save everyone. A metaphor for the right government to come along and fix things. Stargate and Star Trek are all about agents of the government saving the day. So I discard them as contenders. What do you think? I mean, Star Wars is as much a movie series as a TV series, although there are some great TV shows that I would say are not super libertarian, but are surprisingly interested in governance. But they're not, they're not particularly libertarian. Obviously, the most libertarian sci-fi TV series is Firefly. Especially if you pair it with the movie Serenity, which served as a kind of capper to the shortened one season that ended up running before the show got canceled. The movie opens up with a little girl in a classroom who is being lectured by a teacher on, like, let's call it, you know, an inner ring planet that's effectively the capital of a big empire that spreads out in a kind of space sci-fi version of the American Old West, where there's sort of outer rim planets that are less developed and less governed, but the empire is kind of trying to keep them under their thumb and bring them in line. And it's just this little scene in which a little girl tells the teacher, like, look, people basically just want to be left alone to figure out how to live their lives. And to figure out what they want from them. And to not be told. And the teacher is just sort of smugly response, something like, we're not trying to teach people what to think, we're just trying to teach them how. And it is a surprisingly effective encapsulation of the kind of arrogance of technocratic overarching government that's not necessarily obviously super authoritarian or, you know, it's not the kind of government that is, that you look at on the surface and think, oh my God, this is big evil government. No, it's just a bunch of people who are trying to tell other people how to live. And that's what government, even the governments that are better, even the governments that work that we should probably try and improve and that we should support in certain ways, that's what government is. It is a bunch of people assuming that they know how you should live your life better than you do. I just want to note I've been holding out for years for a reason group Halloween costume where we dress as the characters in Firefly, even though at this point no one would be able to recognize us and also we're never going to see each other again in person. Also because we have all the Firefly ship personalities on staff. What was the terrible group costume that happened a few years ago, Catherine? First of all, none of them are terrible. So bite your tongue. Second, last year we were Princess Bride and it was amazing. Anywho, Aaron Yoshida asks a question that I will direct to Catherine. First, would you consider producing more content like the Reason Roundtable podcast? I'm imagining a fifth column type podcast where you partake of various substances and engage in long rants without consideration of any schedule. Bro, you do not want that. He also asks, would you consider publishing a podcast where you read aloud reason articles like the Intercepts Spoken Edition? Catherine, what's new on the podcast front? We would consider that. We are always looking to grow our podcast stables, so send us your suggestions. At the moment, we do not plan like Reason Late Night, which is what it sounds like you want, although the future is full of possibilities. And we actually did, at one point, have an audible edition of Reason where we had voice actors reading select articles. Unfortunately, didn't get quite enough uptake to be worth the effort, but we are always, as I said at the top of this podcast, like our mission, our goal is to find a new way to get our ideas into someone's head and hopefully back out into the world. So keep the suggestions coming. I, as a co-host of the fifth column, we get suggestions sporadically like, hey, you guys should do a stoned fifth column and like God, no, but just thinking out loud, with Nick's interesting like intellectual interest and perhaps personal interest in exploring the vast new world of psilocybin and just kind of legalizing drugs that are happening there. I would love to not necessarily hear Nick. But some staffers doing, you know, stoned reason would be pretty, it's a terrible idea, don't get me wrong. It's a terrible idea, I will say. But I would, as a consumer, not as someone- And a clinician. And a clinician. I think that would be fascinating. Yeah, I would like to hear smart people be stoned just to confirm the idea that whatever you think is really smart when you're stoned is just 99% of the time. When I was making pot-infused cocktails for an issue of the magazine at Catherine's Request, my wife and I ended up testing a pot-infused old-fashioned. And I'm not going to say it was entirely on purpose, but it wasn't exactly a mistake. Didn't tell her what the secret ingredient was in the cocktail. You drank your wife? We were just A-B testing a no-pot version and a pot version. And like an hour and a half later, we found ourselves, just like sort of came out of a trance, where we had been monologuing critiques of the leads in Milk Street, which is the sort of fancy cooking magazine that we subscribe to. And we just sort of realized that it was like 9.30, and we'd been doing that together at each other for like an hour. This is the strongest case against this podcast. If you're asking for a pot for a reason on weed, it's definitely possible that you'll get something like that. I am going to read and answer a question from James Jeneman. Is there any hope, just listen to this slowly, is there any hope for getting some young edgy voices in the vein of Jacob Sulem, JD to Chili, Nick Gillespie, etc. Before those guys start retiring, or is reasons trajectory towards, quote, respectable journalism, unquote, pretty much set? Are we doomed to a future of reason staff being firmly entrenched in the cocktail party set? Second part of the question, have you thought about poaching writers from AEIR or the Mises Institute, or hell just finding some smart Twitter terrians to bring on board? Catherine will ultimately answer this question. She's in charge of the decision-making process. I would just like to point out that the correlation between people like using the phrase cocktail party set in one half and Mises Institute on the other is just stunning to me. It like I should stop surprising me 12 years later, 15 years later, how long I've been around here. But like the imagination by people who are our fans of the Auburn, Alabama people and imagining our social drinking here. I mean, I would love to go to a cocktail party at Peter Suderman's house. Other than that, which I haven't ever done. Other than that, I don't live in the Beltway. The last time I had a cocktail party in my front yard, my 12 year old daughter was mixing them, just like Palomas giving to my friends. They're like a parent. I don't have cocktail parties. It's just teach them weird. Wow. Thing, yes, teach them well. Exact measurements of Peter. You'll be happy to know. Yeah. Which they quickly disregard it. But yeah, it's, you know, once you become a grown ass person, for the most part, you stop going to cocktail. You know who goes to cocktail parties in DC? Sorry to rant here. Yeah, really. You just went off, bro. The 26 year old khaki pants wearing interns at the Institute for Centrist bipartisan studies who are just looking for free stuff. That's the, I mean, it's not even cocktail parties. It's like receptions with bad plastic glass wine. And you're like, cool, I don't have to pay money for this because my rent and Adam's Morgan cost too much. It's just a very strange thing. But Catherine, do you want to address the substance of whether we're going to get some more young edgy voices like Nicolespia? Right. Like obviously, I love me some Jacob Solomon, some J.D.U. Chileans of Nicolespia. And if I could clone them and raise them myself to continue to produce glorious libertarian and diet tribes, I absolutely would. Brian Kaplan and I have this in common and it creeps people out when he says it too. But you know, that's okay. I stand by it. That said, I think, you know, there's always attention between being kind of fun and weird and interesting and having people take you seriously and listen to your suggestions and proposals. And sometimes you got to do both. And I think we do both, right? We have made arguments over our 50 years that people padded us on the head and said like, that's adorable, but insane. We have made arguments that have made people really mad. I commend you to Elizabeth Nolan-Brown's work on sex trafficking, for instance, which like, you know, the voting thing probably makes people a little more bad. But the idea of the war on sex trafficking actually being a war on a consensual adult selling sex is something that really, really annoys people. It is, I would say, edgy, if I used that word, which I usually don't. I think we do both and I think they serve each other. And I wish you to believe that when we ultimately send Jerry and Nick and Jacob off in a flaming canoe to their rest, that reason will still be in good hands. Totally appropriate for Tucheli. Let's have some molotov cocktail parties. Yes. We can do them via Zoom. Brian Schnapp. Nothing wrong with cocktail parties or respectable journalism, but also, like, I actually think it's a mistake to say that Nick and JD and Jacob Selam are not respectable journalists. They are. Well, I am not only am I a doctor, but I'm a two-time finalist for National Magazine Awards. Wow. About 150 years ago, that really meant something. Award-losing journalist Dr. Gillespie. Yes, absolutely. Brian Schnapp asked a bunch of great short questions, including one about the baseball hall of fame that I'm not even going to read or reference in any way. Heine is the answer is Heine Manouche. It's always Heine Manouche. You should read that question and answer it just so people can see what Catherine looks like when you do. I will not answer it. It says, great news. You have a vote for the baseball hall of fame. Catherine won't vote, but you can and will, but you can't and will. What's the most libertarian ticket you can punch? That's just like, you know, there's 10 votes. It's a nightmare. But the answer is Heine Manouche, as Nick points out. No, you know, with that, I would say it's Kurt Flood. That's not a real name. It is. It's Henry Emmett Manouche. Back in a time when Germans were not so totally ashamed as they should be. I've learned to stop questioning Nick and Matt when they say absolutely outlandish names from like some murky time before my birth. Matt, don't you think Kurt Flood deserves to be in the Hall of Fame? Even as a player, he has a pretty good case. He's great. Considering his early retirement and he was a hero of free agency of economic rights. Was his lawyer or the principal lawyer Marvin Mitchellson was it? Marvin Miller for free agent. That's what I look like. I don't know if he was the lawyer or the head of the Players Association by then, but certainly, yeah, whose memoir is. Right of contract. Is an absolutely great read. So go there and now, you know, other people, but I'm not going to make Catherine's eyes roll out of her head. Instead, I'm going to hit her with this snack question. We love Brian. Embrace your secret status. Ban one thing without regret. Explain, but no need to justify Catherine. Oh, so many options. But I mean, I think I'm just going to go with like discussion of baseball on the reason podcast. Sorry. Suderman. I would ban heartbreak, Matt. If I could ban one thing in this crazy world. Heartbreak. Now, my real answer actually is TV and airports, but I don't think that's necessarily anti-libertarian in a correctly structured world where airports are privately owned. Thank you. The end. Obviously, my answer is I would ban government, man. Just like enough. Suderman, what would you ban? Vodka martinis. He was ready. He was ready. You're still in that Russia gate thing, aren't you? Vodka martinis are terrible and aren't cocktails. I'm going to reverse engineer the baseball question so that Nick and I can nod off on this one from Leonard Goodnight. If the roundtablers were a D&D party, what class would you each be? Please include, and I don't think we have to, both regulars and guest stars like Slade, Suave, ENB, et cetera. I mean, obviously, as artsy writer types, you're all bards. So let's rule out bard as a choice. Catherine, what language is this person speaking? First of all, I love me some Lenny Goodnight. He's one of my faves on Twitter, so hi, Lenny. And second, we can't rule out bards because, among other things, Peter Suderman is a bard. Deep in his soul and also plays a bard in our real D&D games. So sorry, I think of myself as my original D&D character who was a rogue gnome. I will fight you about it if you want to talk about it. We can't do everybody, but there's a lot of bards. There's a lot of human fighters, which always surprises me. Because why would you be that? But actually, maybe if you're a libertarian individualist who has a lot of faith in human ingenuity, you're like, I'll be a human. That's changed, though, when the game started. I believe we had no all human characters. We had a couple of half human characters. That's true. We had some halfsies. But anyway, that's my answer and probably more D&D than anybody wanted. There is, of course, as we have discussed, a reason D&D game that has been going on for many years, but its contents are off the record. Okay, let's go to more individualized questions. For Catherine here from our good friend, Juliana J. in Queens, what is your favorite robot, fictitious or real? Like that question. So I have a weakness, although it's, I guess, a guilty pleasure for original Asmovian robots. I read Isaac Asimov in my formative years and loved the robot with the heart of gold, trope Asmov was a real kind of centralizing technocratic monster in many ways, a product of his centralizing technocratic time. So I do not necessarily want to move into the worlds he built, but maintain a soft spot for his robots. But I love all robots equally. Marvin the sad robot from the Hitchhiker's Guide. I think I am the only reason staffer who actually lived with a robot. My girlfriend, Sarah Siskin, who was one of the co-creators of Mostly Weekly, the late lamented web series that reason ran with Andrew Heaton as well, was one of the proprietors or operators of Sophia, the robot, which who is all over social media. But we lived in a kind of bizarre Philip K. Dick version of Three's company for a while during the pandemic, because one of the Sophia robots was in our tiny apartment that we were sharing. It was enough to make me really want to come back and kill all the robots. The way that you structured your answer there, it was like we were a long way into that sentence before it was clear that the robot itself wasn't your girlfriend. So just. Well, you know, it's the robot experience actually is what we were going for. I will now ask a question directed at Nick from Frank Alecno-Quiz, which is the greatest name I've ever heard. I did also live with Heidi Mnuch. That's why I kept bringing them up. Still not a real name. Speaking of which, Nora's Aussie Shrekengost, Peter Südermann. It says, Nick. What that means. I don't understand any of your cultural references. Has anything significant happened after 1995? One of us. Yeah. Shots fired. Virtually everything important in my life has happened after 1995. So I don't know what you're talking about is that, you know, I guess, you know, Matt, I'll throw you in on this too. But we're like, you know, Faulkner South, where the past, the past isn't over. It's not even past. We live in a world where we can freely travel through time and space. So what's wrong with remembering the past and kind of using it as an augmented reality to view the present, not unlike, you know, the best segments in underdog? Brandon asks me, and I'm just using this part of his question to Catherine, what is your favorite historical baseball team? And why is it not the Miracle Mets? It's not the Miracle Mets because they really sucked. That was like, that was, I totally loved them. Back recently, I've been getting into teams that obviously should never have won the World Series, but did because I find them to be particularly heroic. And that actually gets to the answer of the question. My team, the Anaheim Angels, as they were called then, won the 2002 World Series with about the least amount of star power. At least the Miracle Mets had Tom Siever at the top of his game. The Angels had like, I don't know, Darren Erstad. And the fact that they won was kind of beautiful. And they played great ball. The Mets had a bunch of people playing over their heads. The Angels did not. But you have to love the Miracle Mets also for, you know, what they did to the Baltimore Orioles who were really kind of like the Imperial Stormtroopers of that era of baseball. Who sure? They're the best team for three straight years and then only one World Series, which is. Right. And because Earl Weaver is by far and away the most overrated manager in baseball history. Let's go to a question for Suderman, a little bit more policy related. Being the only industrialized country without universal healthcare comma, it puts a greater burden on Americans to justify not accepting Medicare for all or something similar. American libertarians make convincing arguments attributing rising healthcare costs to government intervention. But often do so at the expense of addressing those who were convinced that single pair of works everywhere else. How would you begin to build the argument that removing government from healthcare is a preferred and practical alternative to Medicare for all? And I would just add, Peter, you have 30 seconds. Yeah. So it depends on who I'm talking to and in the environment, right? It's you want to, if you're going to make this case, you want to make it to people in a language that they understand starting from values that they hold and that they share. And so a big thing that I do when I talk to people who really think that single payer or completely socialized systems like the National Health Service exist, is I point out that those systems have flaws and limitations and that they often don't provide good health to the people who they are supposed to provide healthcare to. And one reason is that government systems inevitably end up with, if not explicit rationing, like you basically have in the National Healthcare System, a kind of implicit rationing. And it's because what you end up having are limited resources in which government's authorities decide who gets what and when. And so sometimes that rationing, as in Canada, happens through lines and through waiting. And it's different depending on your province. There's a bunch of issues. But you have these, I mean, like in some of the provinces in Canada, you've had issues where they'll decide that, oh, if you've got two cataracts in your eyes, we'll pay for surgery on one of them because that's what our budget allows. And you have to wait for months and weeks on many of these things. And so there are real problems with socialized medicine, not just in terms of the budget and not just in terms of the fact that it taxes people and spends their money, but in terms of if your goal is provide good health care to as many humans as possible, then I think the evidence is pretty clear that those socialized systems often fail. We don't have a whole lot of time left, so we want to get a couple, three more maybe in here. First one, I will answer. Andy Newland asks, what do you all think of the Tea Party 2.0? Oh, what Tea Party 2.0? He goes on, do you think attempting to infiltrate the GOP or the LP, trying to be a spoiler, has a better chance of getting libertarian policies enacted? Andy, there's this great book called The Declaration of Independence, How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America Written 10 Years Go by Matt Welch and Nikolas B. We make the argument, I don't know if it's true, but I still kind of believe it, that the future of politics is going to be less about team membership and more, I mean, by politics, I mean, applied policies, fixing stuff that's wrong. It's going to be case by case examples using whatever tools are out there. Some of them will be within government. Many most will be without or on the outside of government. Just working on ad hoc basis to do stuff like, I don't know, since we wrote the book 10 years ago, now we have legal marijuana in a whole bunch of places, even legal psilocybin mushrooms in a place or two. Gun rights have been recognized as an individual right, which wasn't the case 12, 15 years ago. Gay marriage is legal. A lot of things happen. At least there's public opinion and an outgoing president who also voices this public opinion that maybe having wars all the time is a bad idea. Some of these involve politics, many of them do not. I'm not here to tell you the way to go is by working within the GOP. I right now don't have a lot of faith in the GOP, or the way to go is to join the Libertarian Party. Maybe the way to go is to sit in a quarter and look at baseball statistics for a while or go to your local city council meeting and try to say, hey, look, stop over penalizing restaurants for opening up outdoor spaces or whatever it is. I don't think that there's one size fits all answer to that question. And I wish everyone the best of success in all of their experiments. And that's the memo. Adrienne Engelberth writes, what's a concise way? This is a really good French goodbye question. What's a concise way to define Libertarianism? And it goes on to add, how do you approach pollution in a Libertarian mindset? If you apply do no harm, pollution is something regulations should be in place to stop. This then drives government growth, which seemingly is a bad Libertarian thing to support. Catherine. There's a bunch of different elevator pitches for Libertarianism that I like. I have long been grooving on the idea that Libertarianism seeks to maximize choice and the free movement of people and goods across borders. Or maybe if you want to get fancy, the free movement of people, goods and ideas across borders. That to me really captures a lot of the spirit of what Libertarianism can and should be up to right now. So I recommend that one to you as your elevator pitch. Free minds and free markets. That's a good one too. Well, Nick, what's your latest version of Libertarianism 3.0 pitch? You know, I think it's individualism as the starting point of a system of interacting with people that's free, fun and fair. I believe I think we do need to re-up kind of how we talk about Libertarianism. And one of the ways I've been thinking about it more and more is as a system that really talks about autonomy and empathy. Because, you know, we, you do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And I would like to go to the policy question about pollution. Air pollution, water pollution, other forms of pollution are mostly commons problems. And I got 20 years ago or more, Lynn Scarlett, who had a long time figure in the free market environmentalism movement, put forth a kind of vision of how do you deal with something like air pollution, which is dicey. And you come up with ways to kind of identify what the costs are and then tax the appropriate people to help remediate the issues with that and to minimize things. It doesn't have to lead to bigger and bigger government. That's a policy choice if you're going to dictate particular technologies or prohibit certain types of behavior. But there are ways around that. And I would, you know, looking back, it's in the late 90s, Lynn's cover story about a new environmental vision is really worth looking at. And in many ways, it's been implemented. You know, and it helps reduce the amount of pollution and speed up the rate of innovation so that we're doing more stuff with less things in general. Prices and property rights, even if they are somewhat synthetic in nature, are always preferable to heavy-handed technocratic regulatory alternatives. Let's go to two final questions here. Mike Smith, what is one major topic, issue or policy that you strongly disagree with relative to your other co-hosts? Catherine? Wow, you're just going to throw that one in my lap, huh? Thanks, Matt. I think, I mean, at base, we'll go back to the very beginning of this podcast, which is the the anarchy question. I know that lots of libertarians would rather not be associated with anarchism. And I don't blame them. A lot of anarchists are kind of terrible, maybe even including me. But I think that, you know, it really, there is many people were attracted to reason or are attracted to libertarianism generally, because it's at least trying to answer all of the questions that you might have about politics, political economy and associated issues with a coherent system. And, you know, to me, when you really start to ask the question, well, how do you justify any government? How do you justify taking people's money from them and doing something they didn't want done with it? How do you justify restricting people's movement and speech, which is what government ultimately does if it exists at all? And I think the answer is you can't. And that you shouldn't you shouldn't be in that business. It's the wrong business to be in. So, you know, I am, as I say, I am always happy to not have that fight. I don't think having that fight is super useful. But I think all the all are, you know, ultimately wrong not to go there with me. Statist man, what is your what do you that's not going to catch. What's your area, bigger disagreement? Statist man? I don't know. I mean, you know, one thing I would sort of say is that when we disagree on this podcast, it sometimes might sound to casual viewers like we really are strongly disagreeing. But in fact, you know, we've all worked together for more than a decade now. And we actually agree on a huge amount, even if sometimes this what this podcast ends up doing is focusing on the places where we do disagree and on some of these relatively nuanced disagreements in part because that's what's interesting to talk about and interesting to sort of hash out. So I actually find myself just wildly more in agreement overall with my podcast co hosts and colleagues here than I do. And it's it's relatively small areas where we where we disagree, I would say probably the the the most common or sort of most frequently surface disagreement is is between me and Nick just over kind of how to think about Donald Trump as president and whether that is whether it's sort of a joke, whether it's kind of entertaining or whether it's kind of apocalyptic for for for for a good democratic, you know, free society. And I will admit, I go back and forth. And I think in some ways, it's all of those things. And I think Nick probably has a different idea about how to think about Trump and what he represents than I do. At the same time, I will also say that Nick has taught me a lot. And I I frequently I try to actually incorporate his ideas and I find them useful. And it's good for me, I think to sort of hash out some of those disagreements. I feel like I'm I'm better at thinking about those questions and about thinking about them holistically and thinking around them and and sort of how to how to apply them in my work and and sort of just my thinking about American politics because because of Nick and because of the of the smart and thorough ways in which he sometimes disagrees with me. Oh, thank you very much, Peter. That's very humbling. And I appreciate it because I've also learned a lot from you, particularly in the weekly podcast discussions, I would say, you know, just very quickly touching on the issue of Trump, I, you know, and I think this is kind of part of the root of the disagreement. I see Trump more as an effect than as a cause. And of course, there's always a feedback loop. And Trump is a particularly unique historical character. But I think the forces that produced him continue will continue. I mean, he doesn't exist anymore effectively. He's gone and he won't be spoken of much after January 20th. I'm fairly confident of that. But the forces already got a pack. He's getting ready for 2024. Trust me, this one. We'll see. We'll check back on that. But, you know, the loss of trust and confidence in institutions, public, private, third sector are what produced him. And those forces have not abated at all. What I would say, Matt, is that I think the biggest area of disagreement on a specifically specific policy question in 2020, for me has been the lockdown. I think the lockdowns were ill conceived as a policy response to the pandemic. And they are, you know, unprecedented and certainly in recent or in historical memory, we just haven't had this type of experience. And I think it was a dumb way to respond to the pandemic. And then on top of it, we see every day, we see that it is poorly implemented. And, you know, just I'm living in California for a few months. And when you see mayor after mayor governor after governor here, demanding that people shelter in place and then go out to restaurants or contradict their own rules that they're pushing on other people, you see how this is a combustible mix. And I think I am more bothered by that or or, you know, I don't want to give any quarter to the way that the lockdowns were conceived or or implemented. And I think that's a point of friction. I'm not sure there's a huge disagreement between the room and all that. I would add my it hasn't come up on the podcast at all. I don't think and I've certainly I don't think written about it at all. But my most anti libertarian thought, one of many is that intellectually, I have a hard time not supporting an increase in payroll taxes after the threshold removing the the the limit, whatever it is now up the cap after $135 or $150,000. If the argument about Social Security is that it we can't pay for it as we go in addition to taxation being theft. But is that you know, it's actually really unsound you de unsound it by lifting that cap. So that's I struggle without myself. I'm not inviting my co host to yell at me right now. But you ask the question of how we might disagree. You can make that argument. But one thing you have to reckon with is just that every time that gets put into political discussion, people want to take the pot of money that you raise by lifting the cap. And they want to spend it on like 15 different things, not just Social Security. So what ends up happening is is it's like, oh, I got a freelance check for whatever amount this month. And I'm going to go out to a bar tonight. And then also I'm going to go and buy it right. And you're just going to like you spend it six times. And it ends up being even if like, I mean, you can make the argument, yes, we should fund Social Security, according to its actual obligations using the tax that pays for Social Security. But that sounds like a good argument where it ends lock box. Let's go to our final question. And thank you all for submitting them and sorry to not get through all of them. But that's such as the nature of the beast. This comes from Kevin. This is a chance to to dream a little bit, which I think we all need, especially, but not only the four of us. And those of us whose names aren't mentioned, but who help bring this to you every week, who we thank very much. Namelessly, Kevin asks, when we finally get to the end of COVID, what is the big thing you plan on doing you haven't been able to really do during COVID? Catherine? Have people come to my house and eat dinner with me. I really like to have people come to my house and eat dinner. And it's not a thing that I've been able to do. And I'm looking forward to doing it, like just, you know, picking up the kids from school and being like, you want to come over for pizza? Like I'm not talking about fancy Georgetown dinner parties. I'm talking about seeing people in your house and hanging out. You know, we talked last week or we talked on Monday. My what was I consuming recommendation was about the importance of kind of dinners and community meetings and meetings in homes for the Jewish community in Williamsburg that was depicted in the show on Orthodox. But, you know, I was also obviously just substituting myself like I want to have people come into my house and eat the holo bread with me. Nick, what is a big thing the first big thing you plan on doing that you haven't been able to do? You know, I like live events include and I'll throw in movie theaters go to movie theaters and that that because I you know, spoiler alert, I've had gatherings, I've been to gatherings and things like that. Although it's it is awful, you know, but it's, you know, for me, the simple pleasures of going to movies here, going to live events, sporting events, things like that. At this point, I'll even say funerals. You know, that's the most looking forward to going to a funeral with lots of people. Suderman, I mean, cocktail bars and movie theaters are were a big part of my life and I haven't been to one in months. But I will also say, I have a bar here behind me. Right. You can see it. Oh, that's not a green screen. It was it was completed at the end of 2019. And I was I was able to have people over just a few times before the world shut down. And I have not been able to serve people a drink at the bar in my house. In my backyard. Yes, I've had a few people in small groups over. But I've not been able to serve people a drink at my house. And I really miss being able to do that. It's fun. It's a it's a it's fun to make the drinks. It's fun to prepare them. It's fun to think about them. But it's also really fun to have people over and to make something wonderful for them. And that's not something that I've been able to do. And I really miss it. And I would say that it would be accompanying my family to go visit the French side of our family. Not only is it just critical for kids to see their grandparents and extended family. In their case, it's also important for linguistic reasons for my wife's morale. And also for my I love and turns out kind of need to get physically out of my country and culture on a pretty regular basis or else I start becoming the Jack Nicholson character in The Shining. So yeah, looking forward to to to beating the cabin fever, breaking out and being surrounded by a language that I can't possibly comprehend and daydreaming about the 1969 Baltimore Orioles. And can I also throw in just to kind of be a little more on theme here. One of the very last things that we did in the before times was have a happy hour here at the Reason Office that was about the glories of global trade. It was in fact sponsored in part by Scott E. Wine, who asked our first question. And it was super fun. And we had French cheese and illegal soybeans and some nice little talks about trade and a bunch of booze. And I very much look forward to having people come back in the Reason Office to like have a little panel and talk about stuff and then have a good time together. That's one of the reasons that we have this office here in DC and that we we try to regularly throw parties here is because it's good to hear from our readers and hear from people who are fans and people who just heard about the event and want to come and meet us like that's that's good for us. Hopefully it's fun for y'all. So we promise to let you know listeners and viewers when the office is reopened and we can have you over again for a drink. Yeah, I miss the in-person Reason Community experience a lot. Amen. Thus wraps up our Reason Community experience a little bit more remotely, more zoomly. And this special edition of the Reason Roundtable podcast. Thank you for listening and watching. I can't imagine what it's like on your eyes. And thank you for donating. You donate by the way by going to reason.com slash donate. All right, Catherine, something like that. Yeah. And as you do, and there's lots of different levels of giving and it's fun and whatever, but please include feedback. And it doesn't have to be all about bad haircuts. But I know stuff you like stuff you don't like things you'd like to see in the podcast. Some of the questions that we didn't raise here were really good suggestions for the podcast. And thank you for them or like other podcast type of things that we could do. We respond and and think about them and take them to heart. This is a wonderful time of the year to kind of think about and put our fingers in the relationship that we have with the Reason Audience, which literally makes this possible. It's not just like, Oh, this makes it all possible. But like, it actually makes it all possible. You know, the this is coming out on Thursday, I'll have my first Webathon post, but sort of talks about the way that having a broad donor base of people allows us to have a little continuity where you have the last 20 editors or last 20 years worth of editing of Reason is on this podcast. Also the last 20 editors of Reason. No, 20 editors, that's for the New Republic. We've only had a few. But anyways, it allows us to have continuity and to maintain those relationships over time with with with all y'all. So thank you for that. Catherine, do you want to say any last words? Just thank you so much for your supportive Reason and for listening all the way to the end of this God forsaken thing and for listening all the way to the end so many weeks as we can tell that y'all do. And we'll be back on Monday. Bye. Bye, everyone. Thank you for great questions.