 Welcome to the Reason Roundtable, your weekly podcast from the Libertarian Magazine that has no trouble at all avoiding dinner dates with actual Nazis. I am Matt Welch joined by Nikolas B. Peter Suderman and Catherine Mangu. Ward, happy Web-a-thon week, colleagues. Howdy. Hey Matt. Happy Cyber Monday. Oh, right. Right. Getting the cyber on. I want to remind everyone up top, please keep teeing up those, ask us anything. Emails for our special bonus episode that we're taping Wednesday for the Web-a-thon. Have you mentioned the Web-a-thon? It's happening. It's going to be happening anytime soon. It's our annual fundraising drive. And so send your stuff personal, broad, system-wide, whatever. Address is roundtableadreson.com. All right. Elizabeth Nolan-Browns morning roundup post today carries the headline, We Want Freedom. Chinese protests reflect frustration with countries continuing COVID restrictions. We are seeing here in November 2022 the biggest scenes of public protest and unrest in mainland China since the Tiananmen Square Massacre of June 1989 or the run-up thereof. This rare recent instance of public bravery was touched off by a fire in a reportedly sealed up apartment complex in Urumqi, and I apologize for nothing in that pronunciation, killed at least 10 people, injured a bunch more. It's kind of hard to imagine a more poignant and apt demonstration of zero COVID authoritarianism than literally locking people up to die in order to pursue a collective goal that is literally unachievable. Protesters throughout China have been chanting, we want freedom, they've been holding up empty signs to thwart attempts at censorship about what they can't put on signs. And occasionally, even calling for the resignation of Xi Jinping, though we'll see how long that particular plot line lasts. Suderman, let's start with you. What does this very unsettling and moving and kind of crazy conflict tell us about China's COVID policies? It tells us that even the most powerful, strictest, largest authoritarian governments in the world is unable to fully restrict its citizens' freedoms. At a certain point, they've had enough and they're going to start protesting. So I think it's worth just talking a little bit about what Chinese citizens have been going through for the last three years or so. They've been going through something that is often referred to lockdowns, but lockdowns that are just more or less unheard of in the Western world, certainly after the first couple of months of COVID here. The kinds of lockdowns that they are experiencing are just insane. So you mentioned that they are sealing off buildings. And that just happens sometimes basically without warning. Someone or some group of people will get sick. And there are videos out there you can see where you see public health authorities coming in and they're using the welding machines to seal off buildings. They're putting up barriers throughout cities so that people can't go places. And this will again just happen totally arbitrarily, totally without warning. There will be announcements in the morning that, oh wait, no one is allowed to go anywhere for four days. But there's also just a lot of little stuff, even in places that aren't under something like a really hardcore lockdown. Everyone has to test all the time. And there is an app that they have to log into where they have either a green, yellow or red rating after they're testing. But it's not even clear what would give them a yellow or a red rating. And sometimes if you get yellow, you have to quarantine. And sometimes you don't. And it's totally, it's totally mysterious how all of it works. And so the feeling in China from everything that I've read, there's some very good accounts in the New York Times that have informed my understanding of this. The feeling in China is one of total powerlessness because the citizens are not even being given sort of clear rules and a clear system that's basically, oh, here's how you do it. This is what we're going to expect and then it's stable. They're being told, you just have to comply with whatever we come up with on any given day, and we're not going to explain ourselves to you at all. And people are being left. It's so I mean, in this case, you know, we saw probably people die because the response was slow and because the building had been locked down. But people are being left without food in their apartments because they're suddenly being told, you cannot leave your apartment for three or four or seven days at a time. And then when they can't leave their apartment, they can't get food. Or because other people can't leave their apartments, food deliveries are not being able to be made to grocery stores. And so people are just living under a completely insane sort of public health authoritarian state right now. And they've been living that way for three years. And I think, you know, in some ways, the most poignant part of this to me, obviously, like the worst stuff is the people dying, the people not being allowed to move around, people being sort of totally trapped in their homes. But there's it's the little things that are that are in some ways less important, that are kind of poignant to me, not just the food and stuff, not just people not being able to meet with each other. But there were there were chants of people saying, you know, give us freedom. We want to see movies because they haven't been able to see movies. They haven't been able to go to theaters in some cases, you know, not quite for a full three years, but for much of the last three years. And people are just being denied the basic pleasures of daily life. In addition to being told that your lives are now just going to be completely structured and run by the Communist Party. Catherine, what are some thoughts that you've had in watching the protests unfold in between bouts of extreme physical therapy? There have been a couple of things that have caught my eye. The first is I really do have this kind of warm feeling toward the protesters, which I don't know what to do with. Right. I mean, you know, you see all this social media activism, you see people, you know, posting on their Instagram story from the safety of Brooklyn, and that feels like almost counterproductive to me somehow. I have this sort of very strong feeling of wanting to do something tangible to support those people. And there are some charities, there are some ways to donate, but I'm struck by how tertiary that is, how sort of removed that is. In the end, it's just like these people putting their bodies in the street in front of a literal or implied gun. And that's it. That's where the work is. That's the only place the work can be. And so I find myself really thinking about, you know, how what can I do besides go rah, rah from the safety of my physical therapy? And it's not it's not clear. It's not clear to me how. I mean, you know, they're like I say, there are links. I've looked at them, but they also don't look very effective. It's, you know, some third party charity that's going to spend all the money on on something other than directly supporting those protesters, because in the end, it's just their bodies versus the state. And I felt that way about the protest in Iran as well, the protest in Hong Kong a couple of years back. It's just that's really striking to me. The other tidbit is there was a point where the protesters were instructed to stop saying anti lockdown pro freedom slogans. And so they just started chanting and mass in favor of the lockdowns. But like, obviously, brutally, ironically, in a way that was almost more powerful. And that at least appeals to my, I don't know, I feel like that has big Gen X energy and I like it a lot like we demand to be locked down. They scream in the streets with the, you know, authoritarian police, you know, staring them down. Love that. Love the sass on it. But but yeah, I mean, this is this is the nightmare. This is the fever dream of of what an out of control authoritarian state does in the in a public health emergency. We don't have to we don't have to read dystopian fiction. It's just right there on the news. Catherine, it sounds like you're looking for a more effective altruism. I sure am that gosh, I wish someone could do some some like thinking about this and then maybe fund institutions and individuals to support effective altruism. Like, I want to know how to buy bed nets for the Chinese protesters, Matt. Nick, speaking of really lame attempts to make American domestic politics out of something that's happening abroad, people are obviously doing that right now in the kind of domestic covid war. So using China as an example, either as, you know, see this is what you people have been wanting, and that's why you're bad or that's a ridiculous comparison to make. Is there any? Is it appropriate to even bring up Chinese severe authoritarianism in the context of the American domestic argument over covid policies? Yeah, sure. I wouldn't say, you know, Zeneb Tufetzky said it wasn't because because no one is replicating that type of actual policy here in America and we're just sort of comparing a police state to try to bludgeon our enemies. Yeah, they maybe we should have an amnesty for the Chinese government when it comes to covid policy. I think it makes sense to talk about it and to publicize it and to also, you know, push our own government to do whatever it can to actually, you know, affect some kind of positive change if we believe in diplomacy, if we believe in trade, if we believe in all sorts of things, you know, one question that certainly came to the fore during the Trump years and it persists through the Biden years. And when you think about something like Ukraine and Russia, there is no sense among the American people and by that, I mean people in our class, political journalists. Do we have any idea? What if any kinds of diplomatic considerations are in play here? Plus trade, etc. I mean, we just have no idea under Trump, people assume nothing was happening. Wasn't always true when you look at something like the Abraham Accords. But there was a generalized understanding that he's incompetent and a buffoon under Biden at something else. But like, I don't know, you know, what are we doing? I watched over the weekend, Tony Fauci talked about how, you know, one of the problems why China isn't sharing information with us or with the who is because Trump was so anti China right out of the box and the host actually pushed back and said, you know, that hasn't seemed to change at all. China's actions under Biden, which is a good question. And, you know, what we're seeing here is an authoritarian repressive regime acting exactly the way that they have been doing for the past 15 or 20 years and certainly in the past decade or so. And she really emerged as the supreme leader. So, yeah, I think it makes total sense to be talking about China. I think it also makes sense to extrapolate from China to what America got right or wrong about this. And, you know, the situations aren't exactly analogous, but this it is a better response to covid to get good vaccines. Now, part of what's going on in China is that they're still pushing their shitty state vaccine that has like a 50 percent, you know, rate of like helping people as opposed to something much higher than that. But it's much better to have a bunch of vaccines out in circulation that allow individuals to set their own risk levels and go about their lives, how they see fit without endangering other people or being endangered. So, you know, that's good. And I think it's probably worth talking about. Yeah, there's the the difference between kind of a mitigation strategy and an eradication strategy is is going to become even more stark over the coming weeks as the pandemic undoubtedly is going to spread in China. And and you can't just make it the thing go away. And so it's kind of it's kind of crazy that that's still a way to do it. And this ton of unvaccinated people, including old people in China, that's just not going to be a very good recipe. Speaking of the Fauci interview and just that one specific narrow point about Trump calling it the China virus and everything, because Trump goes in a bunch of different directions and did certainly as president, people might have already forgotten. But his initial response to the China was nailing it. They were doing a great job in the first several weeks before he then pivoted to calling it the China virus. So I'm not sure, you know, if we can attribute Chinese policies to what what Trump said, Peter Fauci also said in a weekend interview. And when is he going to stop doing the interviews? Is he going to retire? Could have sworn he was like on the retirement. All I want for Christmas is Fauci to stop doing it. He's not old enough yet, Matt. The mandatory retirement age is now 95. But you say that's good, Nick, from last week. I don't want to bring that one up again. I think it's, you know what? I think we should be increasing the minimum age of participation to like 45 or 50. Just keep that one thing that he said, Suderman was that was asked like, hey, you know, it's a that's getting cold and flu season again. Are we going to think about maybe closing the schools? And he's like, I don't know, maybe we're going to need to. Sorry for that. Close the schools, which is a nightmare that I thought that we had like progressed from. But there was actually quite a few over the weekend reminders that COVID policies still can air on the restriction side or at least the Uga-Buga side, not just Fauci saying that. But Washington D.C. public schools required a positive or a negative COVID test before opening their doors to people just today, believe it or not. And then American Federation of Teachers Union President Randy Weingarden tweeted out that we're facing a quote, tridemic flu RSV and COVID. Bromper. Tridemic. So I mean, so I wonder if she has any English teachers like in her union that could help with that. Yeah. And like if, if, say, a high school junior turned in a paper two years ago, four years ago with the word tridemic in it, how would the high school English teacher have felt about that? It depends if you're talking about sexuality and on, I suppose. One, one question, just maybe in a lightning round way is so this is sort of it's like the umpteenth version of some slasher movie of this, these restrictions or threatened restrictions coming back in. But did anyone face in our blue coastal decadent enclaves any lingering examples of COVID restrictions? Peter, did you over the long holiday weekend? None. Catherine? I have just been like remarking on how it's like the end of like the beginning of this year, we had mask mandates in Washington, D.C. through, I think, the end of February. And it ends, you know, over the past six months or so, it's been basically gone. Catherine, did you face any in physical therapy? I did not. Well, I mean, I've been partaking of quite a lot of medical services since my e-scooter knee smashing incident. And I got to say masks at everything still. And mandatory masks and everything or not in health care settings, right? Like it's not, you know, I'm not, I don't know what the law is actually in D.C. at this point, but certainly the universal custom is to wear a mask full-time in any doctor's office. I mean, I took my kits for their annual checkups masks, like the pediatrician basically didn't see their faces for their annual checkups, right? And my physical therapy is all done in a mask. And there's, I don't think strong reasons to do that this year that didn't exist, say, four years ago during flu season. But here we are also definitely a lot of chatter in D.C. because the D.C. public schools required COVID tests to return after Thanksgiving. I exercised my right of school choice a while back and my kids are not in D.C. public schools anymore. I wish other people had those same rights of school choice, but instead they all scrambled around for dumb COVID tests, which they took, which didn't actually prove anything because it was easy to fake them or not do them or whatever. And no one was actually paying attention. I suppose I've had to wear a mask while taking my dogs to the vet a couple of times in the past few months, but that's about it. Like this is, that is for sure our new normal. And, and I can't, you know, it's, it's not insane on some level to be like, hey, the places where we keep the germs, maybe wear masks there. Like we store the germs in these, these hospitals. Doc Holm syndrome. On the other hand, it's absolutely annoying, infuriating, and I think produces lower levels of care. Do you have to mask Souterman's dogs? What about you, Matt? Matt, what about you? We never ask you the question. And this was especially a lightning round. Matt Welch, did you encounter any COVID restrictions? Matt is like the mom who's never in the holiday photos. I'm so sad. That's, that's a, that's a hashtag goals. It's like Hattie Carroll. Hattie Carroll. He doesn't even know himself. No, I mean, I, I traveled internationally recently and, and, and, you know, did things in public all over New York and. I mean, you had monkeypox. I did not have monkeypox. No, openly all over your face and nobody. It hasn't been a factor at all. And it's just been like people are masking discretionarily when, for instance, their seven-year-old kid is coughing a lot. Seems like a good idea. But no one's, no one's being banged up about it. We had COVID in the household a few weeks back. And so, you know, the pre-school or whatever, elementary school that kid goes to. College graduate. Master's candidate. It says, yeah, put on a mask for the first couple of days afterwards if you're close contact. But it was not a big deal. It's not everywhere. Not at the vet, not at the doctor's office, thankfully. And even though the few places left around that have like, oh, you got to put on a mask here. Actually, you know, the one, the only places, and this is other people I know have found the same thing, is that the most common site in New York City to say, oh, you know, masks are still required, and they'll hand them out to you. Bookstores, bookstores of all places. So that's... There's fair amount of them. Perfect sense for a cultural perspective. And yeah, not a lot from an epidemiological perspective. Thankfully, not the strand. America's greatest bookstore, except for... No, Norm McNally-Jackson on Prince Street, which I highlight, or Spring Street, which I highlight. Nick, have you experienced this in Bluestanier? Matt, I did. Yes, I went to the doctor for a mysterious follow-up visit. None of us was clear what it was a follow-up to. Maybe it was a prelude visit. I don't know, but like Katherine, they gave everybody in the waiting room masks that were not N95, but not your typical shitty fake mask or the Alyssa Milano crocheted mask that was making the rounds on Twitter after this weekend when she denounced Tesla because Elon Musk is a fascist. And she talked about how she got rid of her Tesla and bought a Volkswagen electric car instead because she doesn't want to be identified with somebody who's a fascist car maker. And she was wearing a crochet mask and a lot of people said, but they gave us these masks that it wasn't clear how to use them. And it was like they shrunk in the sun over the past year of non-use because everybody, like nobody could fit them over their faces. I mean, it was really like you could have one on your nose and maybe one on your chin. And then in the doctor's room, the nurses and doctors were like, yeah, don't bother. We don't need that. I don't know how many of you have been to Florida recently, maybe all of us, depending on families. But as per usual during the pandemic, the difference between Florida and everywhere else is pretty stark when it comes to that. Peter, do you think that being from Florida is the kind of landing point of our COVID policy just that in places like Washington, DC that vote 90% democratic, you're still gonna have in my mind ridiculous policies like mandatory COVID tests, Thanksgiving holidays, and the rest of America is like, what are you people even talking about? Yeah, I think that lingering COVID restrictions to the extent that they exist in the United States are mostly gonna express themselves as a political affectation. Yeah. Captain, there was a, Nick mentioned an amnesty earlier before which may have been a reference to your sexy American girlfriend, Emily Oster's controversial piece in I think the Atlantic three or four weeks ago in which she kind of sensibly in my mind said, hey, look, we need to offer an amnesty not to necessarily the public health officials. That's how everyone read it. But just as human beings who early on in the pandemic in when we didn't have a lot of knowledge advocated X that would be sort of in a restrictionist point of view and that, you know, if people come out and say, hey, look, as we learned more, we changed our views and we should be cool with that. She was immediately denounced as is her want for opening her mouth on this. But isn't part of that like the controversy over that because the those people who actually did have some power in this and actually did advocate things that weren't right. And maybe even they knew they weren't right but they're using it for their own narrow purposes like to try to keep masks from being raided early on in the pandemic that we haven't heard them say, hey, look, my bad, I'm sorry, we went too far. Is there an amnesty possible when people don't fess up their wrongdoing? Yeah, I'm not sure I would have chosen the word amnesty. Like I like this idea from Emily. And by the way, I want to say like the the polycule that you are building for me on this podcast is just like me and Emily Oster and like Jeff Flake like living happily together or whatever. It used to be Elon, but I'm not sure that he's really there anymore. It's, you know, it's a dynamic system. So, you know, I think that the trouble with the word amnesty is that a lot of people hate that word for good reasons, right? Like when it's applied to immigration, it's understandably controversial. And, you know, I think that the way that I read that post was that she was just saying like, can we, can we chill? Right? Like, can we like acknowledge that we are humans that people screwed up that in almost every case people were acting with the best of intentions and that just some people got it wrong. I think the idea of this is like, you know, some mumbo jumbo therapy nonsense, but like we can't control when the people who screwed up apologize enough. I'm not in charge of Fauci's tone for his apology. What I can't control is like, am I gonna just keep losing my mind about this forever and ever in like a recursive way that ruins my life or am I gonna chill? Am I just gonna say, we learned some lessons. I'll fight harder next time. You'll maybe think twice next time or vice versa, depending on which position you think you're in and we can move on. And I think, you know, to me, that is the biggest difference between what went wrong in the US and what is going on in China right now. It seems very, very, very clear to me in China that this is an authoritarian state taking advantage of a public health emergency to further expand its powers. Peter mentioned the red, orange or the red, yellow, green ratings. Those are also being used for political criminals. Like your COVID status changes when they find you at a protest. And that kind of thing, understandably makes people scared. It didn't, for the most part, really, really didn't happen here. Maybe it could happen here, but it mostly didn't, right? We talk and write and think a lot about the abuse of emergency powers. And I think it is totally right to call that out on the part of the state, but I agree that what Emily was trying to say was, hey, we gotta get along as a country. We gotta figure out how to keep talking to each other and living together or else things are gonna get worse, not better. And I think she's right. One of my perhaps biggest lamentation about the midterm elections that just happened is that the Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer won pretty decisively or at least did not lose, which I wanted her to do because she was one of the worst offenders when it came to issuing emergency proclamations in the face of COVID, just randomly declaring this aisle open and this one closed in big box stores was really one of the worst. It was like you couldn't buy shovels, but you could buy rakes. But only if the rakes were like a certain diameter, and it was just the craziest set of rules you've ever heard. Amazingly bad, but unfortunately, the Republican Party in the state of Michigan throughout the gubernatorial level at a lot of statewide levels had some of their very worst Trumpy candidates out there. Tudor Dixon ran against Whitmer. And so Michigan not only delivered Whitmer the state house, but went more democratic than it has in a really long time, almost like inching away from its normal status of being a swing state. It's almost as if the FBI wasn't content with trying to get a kidnapping plot against Whitmer, but they helped the idiot Republicans elect the most Trump-favorite candidates who couldn't win a real primary, much less a general role. If Whitmer would have lost, which she did not at all, or come close to it, we would have had a much cleaner, a more interesting story about the limited, but real role that lockdown or non-lockdown policies played in the election. Couple of the governors who won reelection by the most impressive margins were some of the more comparatively open governors Ron DeSantis, obviously, Brian Kemp, perhaps a little bit less obviously, and Jared Polis, too, in Colorado as a Democrat. He was probably the most kind of open Democrat and he thumped to reelection victory. And we had Joe Lombardo oust an incumbent in Nevada, Steve Sislak, who, and that was the number one issue by far, was Sislak's lockdown of the Las Vegas Strip. Kathy Hochul, that wasn't the number one issue here, it's probably the number three issue in New York, but New York went really Republican compared to where it was before. And that was at least a little bit part of it, but the Whitmer thing kind of screws that up as a storyline, all right. You know, if I may just to return to China where we started with this, one of the things that is good about publicizing the protests there, which are unbelievable. I mean, it's like, you know, the idea, when you look at protesters in places like Hong Kong and other parts of China, plus Iran, where they face absolute reprisals, prison, torture, death, it's amazing, but we should be promoting that as much as possible. We have a great video coming out tomorrow that Jim Epstein put together of the Human Rights Foundation's recent Oslo Freedom Forum meeting in New York where they're trying to promote the idea of activist dissidents in authoritarian countries speaking up and drawing attention to it. And one of the things that Thor Halvorsen had of Human Rights Foundation talks about is that in every successful revolt and they always ultimately come from within the country, you know, there's a point where the guys with the guns say, fuck it, I'm not doing this anymore. And that is a response to mass protests by their fellow citizens. We saw that happen throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union at the collapse of that. And hopefully, you know, all of these protests, including the protests in China right now, internally are pushing that country to a place where the people with the guns, you know, who are the ones who have to be there in order to enforce authoritarianism, I like, fuck it, I'm done. All right, we're gonna get to our listener email of the week here in a moment. But first, a word from our sponsor, BetterHelp Online Therapy. Friends, the holiday season, which we're already lumbering through, can be one logistical and emotional minefield after another, family travel, shopping, workplace booze fests, shorter days, colder nights. Sure, you could try blundering through the darkness once again, or maybe this year, get yourself and your brain a guide to help you navigate the tricky bits. That's where BetterHelp, the world's largest therapy service comes in. BetterHelp has matched three million people with professionally licensed and vetted therapists. 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It's great. Anyway, this week's, yeah. Can I tell people about some of the cool stuff they might get if they donate? Holy cow, yes. Catherine. Could I do that? Would that be okay with you? You can. I, I, I'm too bad, buddy. I am the script. So, the one good thing about the Webathon is that it starts on Giving Tuesday, which is tomorrow, reason is five, one, see three. So your donations are tax deductible. Always take money from the tax man. If you give us money, you get stuff at the smaller levels. You get a stress ball, which feels right. You get a reason calendar. You get Twitter, Facebook shout outs, that kind of thing. A little bit more money. You get an NPR style tote bag, and you can choose one that says taxation is theft if you're on team Catherine at the highest levels. So it's not really like an NPR bag then. It's exactly like NPR should be. And at the higher levels, you get lunch with an editor. It could be me. It could be any of these guys on this podcast. It could be a random other reason editor that you just are fangirling or buoying on. And at the highest levels, you get an invitation to come hang out with all of us at Reason Weekend if you are a first-timer. So there's a bunch of cool swag you should give for the joy of supporting an important publication that you love, but also for the cool stuff. Thank you, Catherine. This week's email comes from one of our beloved listeners, Norm Benson, AKA at Timberati on the Twitter machine who writes us in a way that's not uncommon with our ask us anything style questions, which tend to be a little bit more jocular depending. We're pointed also. Anyways, Norm Benson writes, I have found what is for me a paradox. I want to hear what y'all think of it, but I am primarily interested in hearing from Catherine since she is a woman and women account for some 51% of the population. I thought that there's gonna be no math. My personal paradox is this, how is it that women are 51% of the market and yet cannot find women's pants with pockets? Free minds, free markets, no Potemkin pockets. Thank you, Norm. I should say that I've been ordered to direct this question, not at Catherine, but at Peter Sutterman. Peter, why am I forwarding this to you? I mean, I have thoughts, but Peter's thoughts are actually better than mine on this, so he should go first at least. I do not think that my thoughts are better than Catherine's. However, I just want to introduce- Are they equally valid? I want to introduce an idea to this podcast. And that idea is Fanny Packs. Fanny Packs, do you guys remember Fanny Packs? Were you alive in the 1980s and the 1990s? Fanny Packs were like a belt, but with a little bag. It's kind of a belt bag situation. And you can wear them on your- You can wear them on your fanny and put stuff in them if you don't have pockets. People used to wear them to like theme parks. They thought they were safer, right? Like you wouldn't get your wallet stolen or you lose your watch on a roller coaster if you were wearing a fanny pack. And because people ultimately learn, I thought, by the end of the 1990s, people weren't wearing fanny packs anymore because they looked ridiculous. But now if you walk around Washington, D.C., you can see all of these young people, many of them women, wearing fanny packs, but not on their tushes, not on their fannies. They're just wearing them around their shoulders. Like it's like a belt. It's like, you know that thing that Chewbacca wears that's like his ceremonial, like around his, it's like that, but with a pocket. And if you add that to a dress, then it's like your dress has a pocket accessory. And so the market may not provide pockets in the way that our writer wants the market to provide, but the market has provided pockets that you can add on to a pocketless piece of clothing. Catherine, after or before we fire Peter, we're gonna need to fire you for thinking that. That was a good idea. I was gonna say, I'm sorry. I apologize for nothing. The word Peter was looking for was either sash or maybe bandolier, I think, but for Chewbacca. Right, so I will try to keep it short, but there's actually a super interesting history here. The fanny pack is a reversion to the medieval pocket mean, which is people used to wear a little pouch on the outside of their clothes because that's how people had pockets. That little pouch on the outside of your clothes became a hidden bag inside your skirts for women. And women actually used to have like really baller pockets. Like you could keep like a whole, you know, lunch in one and like all your worldly goods and the other because there was a lot of skirts, right? The trouble is then skirts got skinny and then there was no room for pockets. Then we got the little cute bag. Also, the patriarchy was like, a lady shouldn't do work or handle money. So that was for sure a problem. And sometimes the patriarchy does get in the way of markets. My man, Timberati, like that's a real thing. Markets don't do justice. They just do what people want. And sometimes what people want isn't what they say they want or what they think they want and things get real complicated. Anyway, all of this is by way of saying, we are now, I think, going backwards to the external pocket either in fanny pack form or of course the purse, right? Like the actual market answer to women wanna carry stuff but also want their pants to look nice is just the darn purse. I know that's not a very exciting answer but like there it is. And, you know, also there is now a valuable friend making social signaling mechanism which is that if a lady tells you that she likes your dress and then you can say it has pockets, then you become best friends. And so in a way, isn't the real free markets the friends we made along the way? Are you wearing pants, Catherine? I'm not gonna answer that question and I'm also calling HR. Do they have pockets? Actually, I'm wearing leggings with pockets because the market did provide. All right, there. I mean, this I wanna go to the root of the question because we're radicals for capital. I mean, for reals, I put into Amazon.com leggings with pockets because and then I got them. So it was great. Some of them have them. Some of them don't say with sweatpants but like women's, a lot of women's pants have pockets. And Matt, you would know that from your infrequent but regular Friday nights when you go out for a rest. Nick, I want you to enter. Wait, you're a Friday night guy? No, honestly, I was a 39 guy but that was a long, long time ago, Peter. Nick. I was just hoping we could coordinate. We cannot. I'm never gonna coordinate with someone who points to Washington, DC as the incubator of fashion. That's just a deal breaker before we even get started. Nick, I want you to, I'll give you some door options. Door number one just says Pop Tarts on it. Door number two. I'll take door number one. Is the ongoing Nick Gillespie thesis, one of your best, that so many issues, especially revolving pregnancy and childbirth are it's all big scam to try to keep women down and how does the pant pocket fit into that or the skirt pocket fit into that and then door number three is just make fun of Peter sooner. Yeah, I'm gonna go off the board, Matt and merely say, yeah, this Peter and I can discuss this for hours if we want but over the week, it's not my consumption because I actually saw something good and worth going to but I did in the past week, I saw Wakanda Forever and I left the theater thinking it only felt like forever. That, it's a terrible anxiety, massively long movie that should have been half as long and it might have been. So to bring this back to the question, you know who else doesn't have pockets? Superheroes, like Spider-Man doesn't have pockets in those under-roos, right? And that's why Batman has a utility belt which is basically just a superhero fanny pack. All right, let's just move on. I feel like we just did a new free-form adaptation of Deliverance for people on a journey to the heart of darkness and let's just not talk about this. That sounds right. Let's talk instead about Peter and Catherine's favorite topic, which is the World Cup Soccer Tournament, the quadrennial occasion for billions of people to yell and scream at their television sets and to drink and fraternal and contested manners. This one is being hosted in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, also Qatar, also whatever, however you want to pronounce it to make you happy, I'm all in favor of it. The Big Q. Yeah, yeah. They're trying that. You know, I say that a lot of poker seekers. I understand that not everyone is into the sports ball, but the world is and this is a big tableau. I don't know what that word means either. So let's do another lightning round. And yes, I will participate, Nikolas B, of any news bit related to the World Cup, related to the sporting spectacle that you find of interest. Suderman, why don't you start since it's going to obviously be about booze. Yeah, they banned beer in the stadiums, which is that's like, as far as I can tell, that's actually worse than banning soccer at a soccer game. Like the whole point of a soccer game or football or whatever we're supposed to call it, the whole point is to be in the stadiums drinking beer. Like the sports playing is somewhat incidental to the beer drinking. And so they banned the main thing. And that's really funny because one of the maybe the single biggest sponsor of FIFA is Budweiser, a beer company, which spends, depending on what numbers you look at, somewhere between 75 and 125, and $112 million to sponsor this. And they're kind of looking for a refund on this since you can't drink Budweiser at the Budweiser Sports Bowl game. And the thing I was really excited about were these social media posts in which they were showing photos of people like secreting in beer in Coca-Cola cans that they'd like wrapped in like special Coca-Cola things that make their pale ale look like a can of Coke. But apparently that's fake news. It's not real. Those photos were actually from some other thing where somebody needed to sneak beer into someplace. Still, I admire the, just like I like the idea of a fan sneaking beer. And I did see an actual video that appears to be real of a guy trying to sneak beer in in a pair of binoculars that was actually a flask. That's pretty cool, didn't work though. Pretty baller. Nick, you have a love-hate relationship with international quadrennial sporting events. Where do you land on with all of this soccer playing? Well, yeah, you know, I like soccer. I was playing soccer since 1969, back when it was really a minority sport in America and took a lot of abuse for that as a kid and as a young adult. I like soccer. I hate watching it. I will merely say in Cutter's defense that FIFA is the most corrupt major sports body on the planet, which is saying something. But Cutter is probably only the third worst host of a World Cup. Because back in 1934, Italy under Mussolini actually hosted the World Cup and Italy went on to win. They beat Czech of Slovakia, Matt. And that, so that was bad. And then even worse and more recently, Argentina hosted in 78 a couple of years after a murderous, brutal military junta took over and actually had used some of the stadiums that games were played in to round up and torture and kill political prisoners. So Cutter, which is merely a hotbed of completely corrupt plutocrats that has had something like 6,500 semi-slave workers die over the past decade since it was awarded this World Cup in 2010 by the amazingly corrupt former leader of FIFA, Sepp Blatter, who's not allowed at World Cup games because he is so fucking corrupt that even the World Cup is like, no, you can't come here anymore. So Cutter, relatively speaking, is actually kind of a good place for the World Cup to be. Katherine, what's your favorite tidbit from this sports ball tournament? I have become obsessed with FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who seems to be, I mean, I guess the former guy was even worse maybe, but like every single thing out of this man's face that I have had the occasion to witness is just horrific. The quote from the first day of the World Cup, today I feel Qutari, today I feel Arabic, today I feel African, today I feel gay, today I feel disabled. Okay, okay. Do you relate to any of that, Katherine? I mean, wow. But also him saying, don't criticize Qatar, criticize FIFA, if you think that this beer thing is bad. Criticize FIFA, criticize me if you want, I am responsible for everything. And then he went on to do a little speech about how since European colonialism was bad, it's fine that this soccer game is being held in an authoritarian country and everyone should shut up. But the total lack of like the very first thing you learn when you were a child is like two wrongs, don't make a right, my dude. Like I just don't know how to explain this more clearly. I just love how they're all named like absolute supervillains, the FIFA heads. Oh yeah, this is not, I mean, like I, the simulation, you know, Elon is busy elsewhere and so the simulation is getting sloppier and sloppier or whatever, but yes, just this idea of sort of, we have this instinct, right, that like these global sporting events, the Olympics are like this too, should somehow bring people together and reward fair play and reward what we perceive to be like good behavior on the part of countries. We need to let that idea go. That is not what is happening. It is not what is gonna happen. Unfortunately, all the more reason for me to pretend that none of this exists and go about my life. My favorite thing to watch so far in the tournament besides the continued great play of France, LA Les Bleus is the Japanese fans cleaning up after each game that they watch their team. They're just like in the stands with giant bags, just cleaning the hell out of the stadium and everyone's like, wow, look at all these Japanese people cleaning it up. It's just awesome. It's fun. Go check out the videos. The other thing of interest that's a little less lighthearted is what's happening with the Iranian national anthem, the very first game that Iran played against England, I think the players did not sing it. They sat stone faced and did not mount the words and silent protest of the just God awful slaughter that's going on there. I mean, hundreds of protesters have been killed over the last six weeks in Iran and it's awful. And then there was after this kind of well publicized protest the second game that they played, they very, very kind of half heartedly mouthed it and it became really obvious that a lot of pressure was brought to bear on them and the crowd was booing, including of Iranians who were there. They wanted them to not say it was just, it's all like this super fraught and highly tense moment that's gonna play out again on Tuesday when they play the United States in a make or break, go to the next round or not game. So it'll be interesting to watch. It's terrible that humans are put in such a position and it's really awful to see the ongoing crackdowns there and elsewhere we live in a very fraught time. That's it, that's the speech. Okay, let's go to our end of podcast what we're all watching, consuming, reading all this kind of stuff. Nick, I saw on social media on Instagram a pretty healthy review of a recent play. Do you want to talk about it? Sure, I went to see the new David Hare drama. He's a British playwright of note, one of the best known and most highly regarded post-war writers from England, but he wrote a play that started there is now in New York at the shed called Straight Line Crazy, which is about Robert Moses starting Ray Fiennes. And so I went into this like Voldemort as the power broker. This is going to be the story that has been told about Robert Caro, excuse me, not Robert Caro, Robert Moses, who since Robert Caro's 1974 biography, the power broker has been the villain in almost every story about urban planning. It's always Robert Moses, the evil power mad monster versus Jane Jacobs, the lovable kind of amateur journalist and housewife who saved Greenwich Village from a four lane highway in the 60s. The play is great, not because it is on Moses' side, but it does tell his side of the story and his role in creating not just a New York city, New York metro area in New York State that was filled with state parks and pretty thriving throughways and highways that actually helped things move before World War II, but especially after for a while, but also because it challenges some of Jane Jacobs' hagiography. And she's a character in it at one point, which I thought was deeply moving. She acknowledges that she left New York in the late 60s for Toronto because she didn't want her kids to be drafted. And she's portrayed wonderfully, all the acting is great, but she says that she got her way and the result was that Greenwich Village and Soho, the places she was trying to save became enclaves of the wealthy and the white. And she asked whether or not her vision of New York City led to a city that is whiter, less dynamic, and just for the rich, or at least Manhattan is, she might be as guilty as Robert Moses of the decline of New York in the 1970s and a chunk of the 80s. It's a fantastic play that is a great meditation on power, on the past, on commerce, on race, you name it, fantastic. And Ray Fiennes is really fantastic. The sad thing is, it's a limited run. The theater seats about 200 people. The tickets are fucking ridiculous. They cost like over 200 bucks. You can only get them on a secondary market and things like that, but it's a great story, extremely well told. And I recommend, I hope it gets made into a movie or a version of it is available for viewing because if you believe in mostly free cities with a little bit of planning, but not too much, this is a great way of kind of revisiting that conversation in a way that I think a lot of libertarians in particular have been very quick to say there should never be any kind of planning above what a local merchant or a family decides to do with their property. Very good stuff, so straight line crazy. I watched the first season of Star Wars Andor on Disney Plus. It's fantastic. Probably certainly my favorite Star Wars thing of the Disney era and probably the best Star Wars thing since Empire Strikes Back. So the showrunner is Tony Gilroy, who is one of the masterminds behind the Born series also was brought in to sort of fix up Rogue One in the post-production process. And it's a prequel to Rogue One, which of course was about the plot to steal the Death Star plans. But this is Star Wars by way of the Born series, by way of serial thriller fiction, by way of kind of cynical British political drama. And what's really interesting are the political themes and the way it brings out some of the kind of inherent libertarian sensibility of the Star Wars drama. So there's like a criminal justice angle in that there's a whole extended bit about unjust and arbitrary prison sentences and the empire using them to build sort of its machines of war. But what's really interesting about the show is that it recasts the Rebel Alliance first of all as an alliance, not just as a sort of singular rebellion with a clear central government, but just as a decentralized movement with a bunch of different groups with different in some ways different ideologies but certainly different pain tolerances and different willingness to act in different ways. So some of them are like, no, we have to protect citizens. Others are like, well, you know what? If there was a little bit of extra violence here that might not be so bad for our cause. Others are just like, well, actually I'm just in it for the money and for myself. And it really kind of gets at the ways that a rebellion against a tyrannical authoritarian government would in fact draw in a bunch of different types not just good upstanding and sort of freedom loving anti-authoritarians. At the same time, it really posits that the core of the rebellion is a bunch of good upstanding anti-government types. And what's really fascinating is without I think intending to it codes the rebellion which is of course, the good guys in maybe the single biggest IP in pop culture in modern pop culture history, right? It codes the good guys in Star Wars as essentially a right wing freedom loving anti-government types. And the through line throughout this 12 episode series turns out to be funding and how do they fund the rebellion? And this is a question we've never really like encountered in Star Wars before. We've never really thought about it. And it turns out it's a whole bunch of dark money nonprofits. Like run, it's a bunch of dark money nonprofits run through a little bit through Congress and a little bit through some bankers who are maybe not the most morally upstanding people but maybe also have some good interests as in addition to them being kind of selfish. And it's just like, oh yeah. Oh right, if there were like a system wide rebellion against a tyrannical government, there'd be some really good people who you'd root for. And there'd be some kind of shady characters and there'd be a lot of crazy money moving that was like, ah, man. The New York Times found out about that. They would be very dubious. It's so great. It's just the, it's the best Star Wars thing I've seen as an adult period. Can't recommend it enough if you like Star Wars if you think you have the capacity to like Star Wars. I look forward to now watching that, Peter. A Rogue One I appreciated as like the closest the Star Wars universe would come to making like a Guns of Navarone movie with a kill switch problem, obviously. I think Rogue One is the best feature film of the Disney era, but this is much better than Rogue One. And in fact, it makes Rogue One better. Katherine, what have you been consuming? Well, to be similarly on brand, I guess I've been watching the new adaptation of Interview with the Vampire because that's who I am as a person. The 1994 adaptation absolutely formed like a core part of my aesthetic and identity in ways that I have yet to fully unpack. And as a result, I have mixed feelings about the new version because when you love the original you have mixed feelings about the new version. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. But I say this as someone who watched it partially while like kind of messed up on Percocet shortly after injuring myself. I've continued to watch it. It's not, I think we've had seven of the eight episodes of the first series. It's already been renewed for a second. The most interesting tidbit which I will highlight is there's a lot more about the kind of commerce and life of New Orleans. It's in Anne Rice's books, which I of course also read at a far too young formative age. It wasn't really in the 1994 movie. It is in the series. There's just more about like how are they funding this existence? Is it just like they do mind control and people hand their cash? Not entirely. I like that stuff. I like the black markets and the gray markets because they have sort of played more with race in this series. You have some interesting kind of implications from that. The biggest change is that Claudia, the child vampire played by Kristin Dunst in the movie. She's 10 in the movie. She's five in the book. She's 14 in this series. An interesting reflection, I think of our increasing squeamishness with anything that remotely resembles pedophilia, maybe to our credit as a society, maybe not. There's certainly, it hits different, right? It just like really creates some very different dynamics both of the little explicitly gay family that the vampires create in this series and also how you're kind of reading that character as a loss of innocent story, et cetera. So the actors are very good. The series is very nicely made. I personally will never forgive it for not being the 1994 movie but your mileage may vary. So interview with the vampire. It's an AMC series. You can stream it and catch up in time for the last episode. So I saw along with my seven-year-old an exhibition here in New York City called Beyond King Tut, The Immersive Experience. It was great. Speaking of 1994, right? Like wasn't like that about when the King Tut thing was touring around the United States at the same time? No, dude, 1977, man. Or is this Funky Tut, Matt Wells? That answers all that. The Funky Tut. Let's start with the Steve Martin erasure, Catherine. That's not gonna stand out. So sorry. With a couple of olds on your podcast. No, it's, I really enjoyed it very much. And like it, I think Nick talked about going to at least one immersive experience type of exhibition in New York over the past months. And I'm kind of intrigued by this as a category. I think it's the first one that I went to that you could be described in that way. As a category of museum going. So it's basically it's on pure 36 in the East River, big, empty kind of warehouse that they divided up the rooms with various kind of like screens. And it's almost all screens. You walk in, you start with a sort of a newsreel footage of King Tut's tomb being discovered in 1922 by Sir, you know, Fuggly Puggly, whoever did that. And then at the end. He had like a name that would allow him to be the president of FIFA. Yeah, absolutely. It's not quite Leonard Pimpf Garnel. I think it was. Another SNL, sadly it's, the archeologist was Howard Carter. That was more like an MCU TV series. Anyways, so you watch a little black and white thing that explains the bit. And then at the end of this thing, suddenly there's a door that appears in the screen and you walk through it. And it's just a nice exhibition, a very sort of audio visual that tells you the history of finding the tomb, gives you the context of the discovery, how it was very interesting. It was one of the last and only completely sort of sealed the tombs that hadn't been ransacked. That's one of the reasons why it was so rich. And you're going to a series of sort of displays and screens and then you start getting into ever more elaborate rooms where you're surrounded on all sides, like in a simulation of the actual tomb room where the sarcophagus was and this kind of animated crazy stuff is going around you in the walls. And you realize after a while that this is an exhibition or an exhibit without really any artifacts. There's a couple of recreations of some famous chair. They use the board games that they used to play. But it kind of solves or addresses in an interesting way one of the squeamish making things about archeological exhibits, which is that they have to steal facts. The grave robbing. It's a little grave robbing aspect of it. Speaking of which, if you haven't, you should go see the Holy Land exhibition in Silver Lake, California. If it still exists, that's a crazy place. But table that for a moment. It ends up being exhibit with very little artifacts, and but it gives you this experience of it using an often times kind of animated hieroglyphics. They take the existing art from it. And I've noticed this will watch a lot in documentaries that I've been watching with my kid about ancient Egypt and ancient Greece and stuff like that. They use the existing art and they animate it in a useful way to portray scenes that we wouldn't otherwise be able to see. And it just becomes, it affects you in a whole body way that seeing stolen artifacts might not necessarily get you to. Really great. Takes about 60 minutes, 90 minutes, say a little virtual reality thing there. It's too expensive. And at the end, when you go to the gift store, because you haven't actually seen any artifacts, you suddenly feel like buying stuff, which is an interesting tidbit too. But anyways, what's up? What'd you pick up? What'd you pick up? It's a gift for my wife's aunt, look a cat. That doesn't sound true. Yeah, no, it sounds like some kind of weird sexual. Well, the exhibition get into the debate over the possibly secret hidden rooms that they haven't, that they have not uncovered yet, which may or may not exist. Or the curse of King Tut's true. There's no curse element, there's no secret room element. They do talk a little bit about a thing, which is the fascinating is that Tut exists in this, his kingdom was from age nine to 19, and then he croaked. And he restored polytheism, which is part of the kind of secret of, explanation for why he doesn't really appear in a lot of histories because his successor, and this wasn't in the exhibit, this is the other stuff that I've consumed recently, his successor really wanted to, there wasn't an obvious successor, so he wanted to seal the deal. They closed that tomb when the paint was still wet. And so he wanted to take power, but also seal the deal of restoring polytheism because Tut's dad had made this radical thing of like, okay, screw the rest of the gods. You know, all the snakes and stuff like that. We're just gonna have a sun god named Ra. And that's it. And we're gonna move the capital and it was a very big radical idea. So. Did they move the capital to Tel Aviv? They did not, but thank you for asking, no. And that's how we ended up with the great jazz composer, Sun Ra, and his orchestra. That is absolutely correct. All right. Matt, that seems like a good opening to talk about Roy Cooper, one of your favorite Southern California musicians, Coom critics of the LA Dodgers. And of US Cuba policy. But sadly, we don't have much more time for any of that, but we're gonna have a lot of more content for you this week. Gonna have a bonus podcast as referenced. Nick, what are we teeing up? Aren't we doing some kind of a live thing later this week? Yeah, we're gonna have a live Webathon Telethon, a live stream on Thursday from 1 p.m. Eastern time to 3 p.m. Eastern time. It's gonna be an immersive experience, Matt. You'll be watching on your computer, but you're gonna feel pretty dirty by the end of it. Are you gonna restore polytheism or at least a Catherine's polycule? You know, I don't know that it was ever gone. I guess we are going to bring back belief in some gods, but not all gods. Not all are all as gods, Nick. Yes, and we also have, if I may, a wonderful event in New York City, the greatest city in the world, or what remains of it after Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses teamed up to ruin it in the mid-60s. A reason to speak easy with Caitlin Bailey, who is the head of old prose, a sex worker right group that seeks to decriminalize and destigmatize sex work. That is happening in New York City, in Midtown at the Blue Building, a great venue for $10. You get beer, wine, soda, soft drinks, and more conversation than you'll ever wanna have. Go to reason.com.com slash events to get details and to show up and be edified and entertained. All right, thanks everyone for listening. Gonna be doing a lot of web-a-thonning with you, people for the rest of the week. Just get those last emails in. The deadline's coming up. Roundtable at reason.com. Do it. All right, goodbye.