 Welcome to the Reason Roundtable, your very favorite weekly libertarian news chat brought to you by the magazine Free Minds and Free Markets. I am Matt Welch, joined by Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Catherine Mangieu Ward. Merry week between Christmas and New Year's. Present. Howdy 2023, almost. Happy holidays. Yes. Oh, yes. Wow. It's been batching eggnogs over there. That really sounds like a disturbing euphemism, Matt. No, I think it sounds like a euphemism, but... A pornhub subvertical. Totally good things. To be batching eggnogs is to be in a good place. Perhaps. As you can already tell... A second eggnog. I've been batching some eggnogs. Okay. That sounded creepy. Yeah. Not as creepy as is Star Wars slanket or whatever he was talking about before we hit the record button. This is, as you can already tell, perhaps a very special year-end episode of The Reason Roundtable. We're going to put down that microscope, boy, and go big picture. Take a look at what were our biggest stories or news developments of the year that is fading as we speak. What we foresee as the biggest stories, potentially, of 2023 and what we got wrong and right last time we conducted this exercise one year ago. Nick Gillespie, you're a doctor. Let's start with you, since the story that you're choosing for... Yeah, I'm just not going to let you talk, so keep trying. Yeah. So my biggest story is, Madam, we, as you mentioned, we talked about this ad nauseam, and I think that we are... We witnessed the end of an era on the internet and the beginning of something new. I don't know if it's better, but it is going to be more dispersed, more fractured, more fragmented, and hopefully more liberated, including older platforms. But in the past year, Metta became the equivalent of Sears-Rowbuck, once a robust presence in American commerce and American culture to just becoming an empty store collapsing in on itself. Twitter was a hellscape before Elon Musk bought it. It remains that, but it seems like it's getting better because Musk is probably going to be gone by the time we even published this podcast, he might be gone. He's said that he's going to leave, but it invigorated a platform that had been dying. I think the biggest thing to look at is things like TikTok, their growth rate of TikTok declined massively over the past year, suggesting that it too is not growing in the way that it was. And instead, what I think we're going to be seeing are more service-oriented platforms like LinkedIn, which continues to grow, and you don't hear really anything bad about LinkedIn. What you hear about it is that it is phenomenally good at what it does, which is a targeted employment-based kind of showcase for people. There's news and things like that, and some people get very big on LinkedIn, but it doesn't have the content moderation issues because it's more focused. I think you are going to see people leaving not necessarily for Mastodon, which is a decentralized federation of many Twitters. Jack Dorsey has a new project, which is getting high marks from people like Mike Masnick at Tech Dirt and things like that. But I think what we witnessed in 2023 was the end of the old new media and the beginning of the new media. It's not going to be Web 3, and it is not necessarily going to be in the news that much, but the people who use the Internet, the people who buy the Internet or run the Internet and create the Internet are busy being born. I think that's the single biggest story of last year, and it's good that we closed out with the Twitter files, where there's a lot to talk about. There are a lot to critique the way it was done as well as also to go through the information, but by exposing how much the government interacts with major tech platforms, which were all born in a moment where we were finally escaping the clutches of terrestrial meat space and the hulking, rotting corporations and governments that John Perry Barlow talked about in his declaration of cyberspace in the mid-90s. That has been revealed, and that is going to be the next thing that we move into, an Internet that actually gets back to the kind of ideals of the mid-90s, when the web was being born. Catherine, I mean, it's weird, or it's striking, right? Our great colleague, Rob Rieswall, they had a book, Panic Attack, right? About tech that came out, I don't know, when, like a year ago or so? Tech Panic. Tech Panic. They all have the word panic in them, but they're different arrangements. At any rate, we began the year with widespread bipartisan sense of like, wow, we really need to do something about these monopolies, all of them. Yeah, all these monopolies in the same industry. We need to whittle it down to at least three or four. When do we get to spike the football and say, say, we're always right, people, listen to us. I mean, we never get to spike the football. I regret to inform you, like we are always Charlie Brown and never Lucy or something to mix my football metaphors. Sometimes we get to spike the eggnog. Yes, at best, we're spiking eggnog, but yeah, we were right. I'm a little bit torn because I think that there are people who say, with some justice, yeah, these large, powerful corporations, these dominant players in a certain industry, sure, they're going to go away eventually, but what harm have they done in the meantime? You libertarians are too utopian to think that they will go away in some way that correlates with the harm that they do, but then here we are having a national moment of actually, a bunch of these social media platforms are bad. We'll stop using them. This is exactly the dynamic that people who understand markets and understand particularly the ways that they work in contrast to governments, which is to say, it can all turn on a dime when the cost benefit no longer works, and that isn't true with the actions of the state. So yeah, people were like, oh no, is Twitter bad? And Elon was like, oh no, is Twitter bad? I'm going to buy it and see if I can fix it. And then he was like, no, actually, maybe it just is bad no matter what. And everyone was like, yeah, it could be bad no matter what. And then everyone just leapt off the side of the boat and swam off into the beautiful crystal seas. It's fine. It's going to be fine. And maybe Twitter emerges still alive, still somewhat intact from whatever is happening here. Always worth keeping in mind that Twitter was never real life and everyone was not on Twitter, just everyone we know. Therefore, again, making it not the public square and not a monopoly. Facebook has already, I can't even remember what Facebook looks like. I haven't seen it in so long. And other bad social media will go the same way. Peter, do you live in Washington? Do you ever foresee this sudden kind of loss of hold on everyone's consciousness? I mean, I shouldn't say that really, because people have been talking nonstop about Twitter or nothing else for the last month. It's very annoying, actually. But it's sort of like the loss of hold on America of these social media platforms doing anything to slow down what has been a race in Washington to regulate these people. That's a good question. I think that it may change some of the discussions in Congress. But first, we're going to have to get through something that I was going to preview a little later in this episode, a Supreme Court case dealing with Section 230. And that's going to come next year. And that's going to be a big deal. And we can talk a little bit more about that later. But I think that we're going to have to get through that first. And nine months from now, the discussion about social media and how to regulate it, whether to regulate it, what Section 230 is good for or not, that that discussion in Washington is just going to be very different because the Supreme Court will probably have heard the case and will probably have ruled. And because social media will look so different nine months from now. And in part, that's because we're going to see the sort of the maybe not the end stage of the Elon Musk vision of Twitter, but we are going to see the development of it, right? It's going to be it's going to be a fully grown, you know, or at least like an adolescent, right? It's not going to be this kind of nation already at the womb, right? Because we don't because Elon Musk has owned Twitter for such a short time right now that we really don't know what the sort of day to day operational vision he has for it is going to look like, unless his plan is simply to play Emperor of Twitter for the rest of his life, which I think even he will get bored by. And then we're also going to be looking at a world in which fewer and fewer people are on Facebook. And Facebook is very obviously not the not the monopoly that a lot of its critics have been claiming that it is for a long time. Now, we, of course, on this podcast have been saying Facebook is obviously not a monopoly for years. But it's now become a parent, I think, to to critics. At the same time, we're also going to be looking at a world in which TikTok is on the rise. And we're already seeing we're already seeing a lot of press interest in TikTok in its in the China connections in the in its, you know, whether or not the folks affiliated with bite dance, it's the TikToks parent company will disavow Chinese, you know, the Communist Party, you know, atrocities, right? Like whether they're going to say, Oh, actually, it's bad that they put Uyghurs in concentration camps, that sort of thing. And I think that that's going to be a very different sort of political conversation than we've had about Facebook, because ultimately Facebook is with people's complaint about Facebook is that it's crappy, right? Like it's it's annoying. Like that's just and it's big. But it's an American company, and it's not obviously, you know, it doesn't have any obvious direct connection to Chinese Communist Party human rights abuses. And that may be different when it comes to TikTok. Next up, go ahead. I just kind of follow up on the low, low standards. They're just so incredible. Like, Oh, there's no genocide in this social media platform. So it's okay, you know, there are already alternatives to TikTok. And as I mentioned, their growth rate dropped significantly from like 30% year over year to something like eight or 6%. I suspect if Congress or if the government and they will start, they've already started the attack. And this is happening in the media of saying that TikTok is a Chinese Communist Party government agency. And let's say they ban it, certain states and governments, the federal government doesn't want federal employees on it and things like that. Assume all of that happens that energy will go someplace else. And the Supreme Court case is interesting. But I think what we're going to see is a ruling on an internet that we have kind of moved out of mostly. And I'll also extend this a little bit because I'll and I'll talk about this later when we talk about what we thought was the most important thing we consumed in the past year. But even with Bitcoin, you know, Bitcoin, which is the ultimate kind of peer to peer decentralized, you know, kind of technology or currency and things like that. What I think we saw in 2023 was both, you know, in a very tight bear market, a terrible bear market, people still stuck with it. And we are starting to see the beginning of the end of the exchanges because the FTX scandal that closed out this year is also a scandal ultimately about centralization and of giving your keys, giving your giving your the thing you own most, whether it's your data or your money or your currency or whatever, to a centralized organization, that's going to speed up the adoption of people actually who use Bitcoin and other forms of crypto to hold their keys themselves, which is the point. So I think 2023 is going to be a fantastic year for re decentralization. All right, next. I guess I would just say that I think that the future of social media is fragmentation, even more than decentralization, you know, so we will probably see some social media protocols that are based on something, you know, decentralize where we already have with mastodon, but that it's just that instead of having a couple of social media platforms or, you know, the sites that that most people use, there are just going, they're going to be dozens and dozens of them. And especially for younger users, we're just going to see people sort of move out into into social media, like social media isn't going to go away. But but instead of everybody being on Facebook or everybody being on TikTok, it's going to be that some people are on Be Real and some people are on gas. And sometimes people are on Be Real for six months and then it goes away. And it's actually going to look a lot like the market for, say, gyms or bars or places that people go to associate with each other and engage in sort of in conversation and shared activities. And we will be going wherever a very different world. We will be going to wherever our mother doesn't know about yet. Well put, let's go next on our roulette wheel of stories of the year and the ball lands on me. I get to do that. Oh my God. Story of the year. What a wild ride. Is Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine. It's kind of back to front of mind conversations in Washington after President Zelensky's address to Congress and press conference with Joe Biden and whatnot. But it's kind of a big deal when a nuclear armed country launches a major land war in Europe against an overmatched but very plucky and at this point very well funded country sitting there. It's hard to pin down exact estimates on how much damage has been caused. But whatever the number is, it's like horrendous to horrendous to think about on both sides. There's right now they're kind of settling on a consensus number of 100,000 troops killed or wounded on each side at this point. It's such a higher number than what was produced, for instance, in the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan in the 80s, which had huge repercussions on the politics back in Moscow. So one can only imagine, especially as the very noticeable kind of resulting clampdown on civil society in Russia this year as part of the war, what kind of reverberations this might have. At least 20,000 civilians killed in Ukraine as we speak and as we are talking, Russia sending rockets into power stations and civilian infrastructure targets trying to turn off all the power and lights in a very cold country during winter, just appalling. There've been on the order of 15 million people displaced, made into refugees, about half of whom have crossed the border, mostly into Europe. The other half are sort of running around within Ukraine itself, destroyed at least 140,000 buildings. It's just a crazy number and it's changed the politics and security assumptions of Europe, Finland, and Sweden were never going to join NATO and now they're going to very soon. They've applied to part of that process. Certainly, the enthusiasm of countries along the periphery of Russia has increased about wanting to join. I think that would be a bad idea for NATO to do, but table that aside, it certainly has let people have a sense of the importance of having security guarantees from a defensive point of view. Also, it just has a huge potential of what is this going to mean for China's designs on Taiwan. Does it make it more likely or less likely? I think it's very probable that it makes it less likely after China sees how the world rallied to the defense of a country that is invaded by a big neighbor. It's just inherently sympathetic to root for the person who's invaded in that case. The principle of national sovereignty is not a small one. It's kind of a big one. There's been a lot of reasons given, particularly by the United States over the last 30 years to justify or attempt to justify, usually very badly and disastrously, intervention into another country. We intervened in Libya because we were trying to prevent a local atrocity, for example. This is a little bit different. This is right there on the order of when Iraq tried to gobble up Kuwait. The international community has a different set of taboos when it comes to, hey, I'm just going to annex my neighbor. It's going to have effects, the likes of which we don't really know. I presume that at some point in the next year, we're going to see Ukraine drive basically Russia out of everywhere except Crimea, and then that moment will be a very interesting one because the interests of the United States, which is the principle backer of Ukraine and Ukraine will maybe differ in trying to wind that to a close. But it's a huge story. It could be Vladimir Putin's last act, major act, and it's a big failing act as president of Russia. We don't know what the world looks like coming out of the other side of that. My hope reflected in the piece I wrote earlier this year right at the outside of the war was that this would be an occasion for a rethinking of the security status in Europe and basically the creation of a real post-Cold War settlement, which we never really had. Usually after long wars, there's a really big messy process of creating a new international structure of how things go. I have argued that there should be one like that and it should be led by Europeans, not the United States, and that the United States primary involvement in it helps to prolong and make things worse, not better. That hope so far has been dashed. The US has been even more primary in this, and I think that's a mistake and one that will continue to watch as Russia eventually loses, but on what terms we don't know. Suderman, are you still scared about us all dying in a nuclear conflagration as you were eight months ago? I mean, it depends on the hour, honestly. But I do think we just underrate the possibility that this becomes a nuclear war. And that Putin just decides he's tired of losing and he just wants to take out the enemy using the resources that he has. And I think the United States involvement in Ukraine, again, Ukraine's, I just have to keep repeating this, Ukraine's cause is just. Ukraine is absolutely the sympathetic country here. And I get why people root for them to beat back Russia, I get why people want to help. But the sort of joint activity that we have seen between the United States and Ukraine with Zelensky's appearance in Washington with Biden essentially promising unlimited resources make America, if not an active player, I mean, if not, you know, actively fighting in the war, we are a partner in this war. And that is a very dangerous position to be in globally, because that means that the two of the most well armed nuclear powers on the planet are effectively at war with each other. And I think you just have to be, you have to be at least somewhat concerned about that all the time, even if it hasn't gone badly yet, even if in some ways, aside from obviously the initial invasion itself, Ukraine has done surprisingly well. And we have beaten back Russian, you know, the Ukraine and using United States weapons has beaten back Russian forces and degraded the Russian military. You have to be concerned and a little bit worried that this thing, this thing could could become a much wider and much more deadly war. I worry, Matt, that, you know, American, you know, my main interest in Ukraine is the way that it affects American foreign policy in America and America. And I, well, I agree with Peter that Ukraine is, you know, incredibly sympathetic, is wholly sympathetic here and is fighting a good fight. It is not America's. And we have pivoted from completely disastrous foreign policy, not just in terms of military intervention, but in terms of large strategy of our role in the world. We've pivoted from Iraq and Afghanistan and 20 plus years of absolute disaster and failure where we've inflicted countless casualties and deaths and mayhem and chaos on the planet to this good war where we don't know what we're doing. We don't know what we've gotten into. And that deeply worries me because this is already a moral crusade. And as Peter suggested, it's an unlimited blank check as long as Joe Biden is around. And that should trouble everybody because we need to figure out how do we stop this and get back to something you were talking about, which is an actual post war settlement where Europe is taking care of Europe and kind of holding the order there. And it's not up to the US. The upside and this goes with my interest in kind of decentralization and whatnot is the act of Ukraine, a relatively small country with essentially no armed forces has done incredibly well against one of the very largest armies on the planet that will give pause to not hopefully to Russia. I mean, as the Russians figure out a way to depose Putin or to change his rhetoric so that he's ready to take whatever scrap is given him and get out. But it's going to affect China, I think, which is all to the good. And that's a sign of a different world when small countries can effectively stave off invasions by massively better armed nations in what should have been a walk over. But the other thing is that the longer this goes on, the more likely it is that Russia wins, even if it bleeds that country dry. Catherine, does this awaken your inner Romanian, your inner neocon or your inner anarchist? You know, it's all, Matt, I contain multitudes. So, yes, is the answer to your question. No, when I chat with or consume the content of my neocon pals, you know, I'm always struck by the sincerity of their belief in the justice of the cause of the Ukrainians and their belief that the justice of that cause creates a moral imperative for the United States. Like, it's a coherent system. It's a coherent ethical system. It just relies on some assumptions that in the end, I don't share. And it relies on, I think, and this is the anarchist bit, an erasure of the fact that us, you know, the US supporting that war is done at the expense of, you know, at the very, very least just a higher rate of taxation, whether on the current generation or future generations to pay off debt. And, you know, I think also at the, at some risk to the physical safety of Americans, as Suderman has highlighted, like when we, when we get nuked, the calculations all change. So, you know, I, I remain in the- Do you think taxes are bad now? Yeah, wait till after the apocalypse. So, my position kind of remains the same, which is very similar to Oliol's, I think, which is like, I'm sympathetic to those guys. And also, I don't, I don't think that they're, that we are required to help them, nor do I think as a matter of statecraft, that it is even praiseworthy to help them necessarily. Those are two different things and people love to conflate them. But, you know, I am not sure we are doing the world a favor or ourselves a favor in, you know, getting so heavily involved in this conflict. Not least because you end up with just this kind of, kind of shenanigans that we got in our budget process this week, right? Which is like, oh, we gave away all our weapons to the Ukrainians. We got, we need a lot of money for more weapons. And then we're going to have a lot more weapons. And then we're going to give them away to somebody else. And like, that's not a business that we should be in, I don't think. All right. Let's go next on our stories of the year. Roundtable, roulette wheel, roulette wheels. Suter, thank you. Suter, man, what do you have? My story of the year is Biden's student loan student debt cancellation. It is a flagrantly illegal $500 billion executive branch overreach at the behest of progressive activists and lawmakers. And I think it's really indicative of the Biden approach to governance and to politics. It is a policy that primarily benefits upper middle class, obviously educated or more educated than most people borrowers if they've been to college even for a couple of years. Folks who are either better off than on average than most people or upwardly mobile. It is just incredibly costly, four or $500 billion. And that's on top of the $200 billion or so that we've already incurred just from pausing repayment on student loans as part of pandemic policy. It's inflationary in a time of high inflation. And again, it is just blatantly, flagrantly, obviously illegal to the point where a year prior to Biden doing this, Nancy Pelosi was like, Oh, yeah, we can't do that. It would be illegal. And they justified it by an absurd, frankly, insulting reading of a post 9 11 statute that has been rejiggered to fit the facts of the pandemic, the heroes act, right, which is, you know, another lesson in whenever you have a cutesy acronym attached to your legislation. It's a bad idea. But that was the higher education relief opportunities for students act, which basically said that that first responder types after 9 11 that the president could could adjust or cancel some of their student loans. But it also just sort of had some vague leg language about emergency about times of emergency. And so the Biden administration went back and said, Oh, this is a time of emergency, because, you know, there's a pandemic. This was, of course, as the pandemic was winding down. So we're just going to use that to basic to it's not quite spending in the way that Congress spends money. But it but the cost to to Americans through the federal government is about four or $500 billion. And we're going to use that to pass a four or $500 billion program, a half trillion dollars here, just illegally. And and it's, again, this is just a giveaway to to progressive activists, and to to upper middle class, upwardly mobile Democrats, it's insulting, it's embarrassing. And I'm glad that the Supreme Court is actually going to take a look at this. I think it is likely at this point that this policy ends being struck down by the Supreme Court. You'd like to eat class war for breakfast. I also I had a total of about $10,000 out in student loans. Still? I know. But you know, when I finished, by the time I finished my doctoral program, did I mention that I have a PhD? Thank you for reminding us. So should I have repaid your student loans? Absolutely. Because you dropped out. So you lose. I stayed in. I went. That's clearly no. You know, Peter is right about it's a major story. I think it is revealing of a Biden, Biden-esque approach, a Biden-Ovian approach to politics. The one question I have for Peter is, do you think, did that program or the announcement of the relief, did it have any meaningful effect on the midterms? Because one of the things that was fascinating is that the polling seemed to be all over the place of whether or not, apart from all of the serious questions about it, like, was it going to help the Democrats in the midterms or not? And I read stuff that showed probably not, but maybe, I don't know. My read on that is that it may have had a small effect, but it probably wasn't a significant one that the midterms went better than expected for Democrats primarily because of Republican candidate quality issues, which is to say the Republicans just ran a bunch of morons. I like it that you said that in both languages. That was a great idea. That was actually convenient for our listeners. I think and moron is rapidly becoming a scientific or a political science category for Republican candidates. Catherine, briefly, if you will, what's the ideal anarchotopia version of the student loan process? We don't even have to be idealistic or anarchotopic about this. It's just the way that loans work for literally everything else where you need a loan. There's a market in them. The banks provide them or non-banks provide them. I would be delighted to loosen up some of those regulations, but when I was in college, I took out student loans as well. I had a patchwork of student loans. I had some that were subsidized, some that were private. We have all of these incredible tools to predict the likelihood that a loan will get paid back. Do those tools work every time? No, C2008. The likelihood that a loan will be paid back, which helps determine the size of an appropriate loan and the rate that people should pay on those loans, just do that. I don't understand. People would get so much more information about their educational spending choices if we let prices convey that information. This is not like wackadoodle utopianism. This is just how every other loan system works. You can't buy a Mercedes if you want to get a car loan and you don't have a job and you're just reading books about art history. You're not going to get the car loan. That's appropriate. The same should be true for education. I love me some liberal arts education. Catherine, what do you have against people who want an MFA in puppetry? Nick is going to be like, actually, Catherine, college is good. He's not wrong in many cases, but going into massive amounts of debt that you can't pay back is bad, is really, really bad for people. We have figured out how to make it worse. Joe Biden has figured out how to make it worse by generating an additional layer of catastrophic uncertainty around whether or not you will have to pay that back, which is the only thing worse than having huge student loan debt that you shouldn't have taken out in the first place. Catherine, let's double dip with you. What is your story of 2022? My big story of 2022 is the Dobbs ruling and its fallout. This is a big deal. This is something that I had I made a prediction on this matter a year prior. I would have been wrong. I did not think that abortion rights would fall in this country in this way. It was a shock to many people's systems. It was a shock to mine. I do think we are in an interesting quiet period right now on Dobbs politics. Everybody lost their minds when the ruling was first leaked and then formally issued. I believe that it is going to be quite a big deal in our national kind of political conversation and political economy. Candidates will be running on a wide variety of nuanced positions on abortion now. There's a world in which that's good that the stupid discourse of I'm pro-choice or I'm pro-life and it's all signaling because we're constrained by Roe anyway was not really good for anyone. However, that is like a small silver lining on a very, very dark cloud, which is that there are now just millions more women in this country who have incredibly diminished access to what I think should be something that is solely up to their discretion and the discretion of their medical providers. There's lots of different ways to quantify this, but one that I've seen around is that now something like a third of the women in the country of kind of childbearing age are more than an hour from an abortion provider. And that is because if you live in one of the states that either had a trigger law and so therefore as soon as Dobbs came down, abortion access was restricted or have subsequently passed laws to restrict access, those people either can't get an abortion or more relevantly have to travel. I do think it's an interesting experiment in federalism and from that perspective, I am intrigued to follow how it goes because it is true that I think there will be broader patterns where people who value having access to abortion will move to places that have it and vice versa. I think this is probably a bad thing for polarization in the country. If that is your primary concern, we're going to sort more red and more blue. But yeah, I guess I just like I think here we are, we're a libertarian podcast. Of course, there are libertarians who are pro-life and it's always important to acknowledge those because otherwise we get a bunch of annoyed emails. So here you go, annoyed emailers, some libertarians are pro-life. But I think on a libertarian podcast wrapping up 2022 to not talk about this big new prohibition, right? Like we are now entering like a new prohibition era in many, many states, which will have all of the predictable consequences that prohibitions have. I think that the word prohibition applies here in large part because people disagree about abortion. We don't say there's a prohibition on murder except for in the most technical sense because we all agree don't do murder. But this country is very, very divided about where abortion falls on those moral questions. And because of that, there will be people at odds with their police, there will be people at odds with their neighbors, there will be secrecy, there will be black markets and we know how all that goes and it's dark. So that's to me is the biggest thing that happened with respect to freedom in the United States at least in 2022. Hey, Catherine, you mentioned the quietness of the current political discourse. You called it a moment. But I wonder, do you think that quietness that currently is happening vindicates in some ways the anti-row argument that overturning row would cool the debate and deescalate the culture war surrounding abortion? That's an interesting question. No, because I genuinely do think that's like a gathering storm type situation. Like I think people are organizing their money and their campaigns and they are thinking about how to make the most impact both in terms of just regular elections. And also, I think a lot of this is going to end up happening on a kind of ballot initiative level. Those take time to organize. And there were already lots of activist groups that work on abortion rights. But frankly, I think a lot of them had gotten a little bit flabby and lazy. They kind of had this pretty good baseline and they were like knitting hats for people or whatever. And now they have to really fight. And I think a lot of those groups, if I had to guess, are kind of turning, they're turning their big slow ships. I think it's good that there's going to be where abortion was on the ballot, one way or the other. Pro-choice forces won, I think in every instance. I think we're going to see more of that in 2023 because, and this, I like Catherine, I agree with you Catherine, this should be essentially a fundamental right that should be, you know, on some level, there should be a minimum access to abortion through a certain point in pregnancy that is national. But I think we're going to start getting back to that because what's going to happen is that most people in America, an overwhelming majority, support some form of choice, particularly through, you know, quickening or viability or, you know, the first 20 to 25 weeks. And we will now have policies that are going to, I think, reflect that because even in the redest states, and we saw this with Kansas in particular, which was, you know, the headquarters of Operation Rescue, you know, a famously anti-abortion state absolutely smacking down, you know, the idea that abortion would be banned in the Jayhawk state. So I think we're going to see more of that in 2023. Yeah, there's also going to be a lot of second-order stuff. You know, I was just reading about in Texas, the ban on telehealth services is very tied up in the abortion debate because they don't want women getting drugs by mail and having them administered via telehealth early in their pregnancies. This is the kind of thing that you don't, the Dobs decision comes down, you're not necessarily going to see, oh, 10 years from now, Texas is way behind in telehealth. But that stuff is coming to. All right, let's get to everyone's predictions for big story, the biggest story perhaps even of 2023. Dr. Nicholas B. 1A, lead us on. Are we supposed to talk about our failed predictions from last year, Matt? You can maybe take the cues from the moderator of the podcast. Just ask you a question. So my prediction, yes, we are supposed to, you can put it in there too, if you want. Very quickly, the prediction I had last year, a year ago, was that the GOP would retake the House and Senate and definitively cut Trump loose, clearly not really right. The GOP did take the House, lost the Senate because of that candidate quality, morons. We should be happy that morons don't do that well in midterm elections. But I do think we're seeing the peeling away of Trump, his announcement that he's running didn't do much. I think there's a Trump core in the Republican Party that will ruin it for everybody else. They're not going anywhere. Trump won't win. Trump won't be the nominee, but he will likely destroy whoever the nominee is in 2024 or cost him a lot. My prediction for 2023 beyond increasing decentralization of everything is that generational warfare is going to be coming into more and more focus because it is something that cuts across all political ideologies and it's becoming more and more apparent that boomers and Gen X on the one hand and millennials and Gen Z have very different class interests and those are going to be coming to the fore, particularly as we start running out of money or prioritizing time in order to deal with this rather than that. Peter, what did you predict last year and what do you predict this time? I have no idea what I predicted last year. I'm going to be honest. Oh, so that link that I'll send to you is lackable. Yeah, you could look it up, Peter. Pointing to our predictions was that that wasn't preparation. It started at around 31 minutes of this episode last year. I need to actually take your hand and have you click on the link. Is that the kind of this is part of the generational conflict that I'm talking about because Gen X and boomers, we get things done, whereas these pasty millennials, Gen Z types. We're really wrapping up the year with harmony, friendship. All right, Peter, predict for next year. No, I remember now. I remember now. I remember now. I just had a flashback to this time last year where I said that NFTs would be both more hated and more useful, and that's half true. Okay, so we're 0.5 for two in predictions so far, but so what do you predict for 2023? I think that people are going to be talking an awful lot about Section 230 because of the Supreme Court case because this is because when this sort of thing goes to the Supreme Court and the court is going to have to make a ruling here, that is going to start a new era in discourse about online speech and liability. Section 230 is best understood as the First Amendment for the Internet, right? It protects both large companies and individual users from liability for things they didn't say themselves. So if you have a comment section on your sub-stack, you are not liable for something that somebody else says on that because of Section 230. That's also why Facebook isn't liable for something that somebody posts on Facebook. And the Supreme Court is going to rule about that this year. And I think that that is going to bring a new understanding of what Section 230 is and what it does into political discourse. A lot of people think that there is some sort of weird carve-out for big platforms or something like that. It's just wrong. There are an awful lot of bad legal takes about Section 230 out there. And I think that especially in the aftermath of Elon Musk buying Twitter and what we have seen there and in Facebook's decline as it is losing daily active users in North America, I think that that is really going to change the discussion about social media and online speech. Catherine, what did you get right last year and what do you predict for next? I'm right about everything, as you know. And I was right about my prediction, which was that it was going to be a big year of parental discontent with schools. And I think I used the word accelerating. We could quibble with that since it is true that there was just a like a, it's hard to actually imagine that people would have been more discontent with schools in 2022 than they were in 2021. But many of the ways in which people have broken away from or, you know, kind of refused to tolerate the shenanigans of traditional schooling have stuck around, even as other pandemic restrictions have kind of eased. The AP did a report where they looked at homeschooling data. They had 28 states in it. And all of those states, with the exception of South Dakota, which seems to be a data issue, but all of those states reported that homeschooling remains significantly wildly higher than it was pre-pandemic, even though it is down somewhat from the 2020-2021 peak. You know, this is Minnesota as an example, right? So they had 27,000 students being homeschooled this year, compared with 30,000 during the last school year. But before the pandemic, those numbers were less than 20,000. It's, you know, that's a lot of kids. And black families in particular are sticking with homeschooling at extremely high rates. I think this is really important. I was actually just talking with somebody yesterday who works in this space about what could have happened if education savings accounts had been in place in more states pre-pandemic. Because I think a lot of parents kind of realized that there were some costs associated with education choice in its various forms, but especially teaching kids at home and couldn't absorb those costs, especially in a year when maybe their income wasn't what it had previously been. So they ended up going back into the public system despite being pretty unhappy with it. I do think that's a very interesting kind of alternate history where there was just a little pile of your money, your taxpayer money set aside that you could kind of pull back into your home to buy books, computers, fund activities, that kind of thing. That is happening in an increasing number of states. And, you know, the triple DEMIC didn't really drive as much as some public health officials hoped it would. But we can't rule out this happening again. And I do have this kind of feeling of like, we should be ready. But I think broadly, my prediction was right that a lot of people were not going to go back to public schools. And there was going to be discontent with the schools. This, of course, doesn't even begin to address all of the culture, war, you know, public school, library, book, band battles, et cetera, trans stuff, all of which is also driving discontent with schools. Prediction for 2023? My prediction for 2023 is, I was actually going to say something a little similar to Peter. So I'll pivot a little bit and say, I think that it's going to be the year that this is too stupid to predict. Yeah, I'm going to do. Okay. I think 2023 crypto is going to redeem itself a little. I'm not actually going to say the world will suddenly understand that Bitcoin is the future or anything like that. But I think the San Benjamin Freed stuff and maybe associated Elan shenanigans to some extent have caused crypto to kind of hit a low point. I think it's going to come back up. I'm not speaking to the value of people's various crypto holdings, but instead just to kind of the public perception of the utility of cryptocurrency, specifically the blockchain more generally. I feel like this is the year somebody is going to figure out how to use it in a way that doesn't suck. It's going to be like QR codes. For so long, QR codes were like, what are these garbage things? We printed them in our magazine. No one ever used them. I used them four times a week now for practical purposes. So I think 2023 is the year that crypto makes a comeback. It might have been your idea. So board Apes, Nick, NFTs are going to have a big year in 2023. Yeah. Sorry, Matt. The kids were talking. What were you saying? It doesn't matter in the long run. So my prediction from last year, which is basically essentially what Catherine's was, it was verbatimly in fall of 2022, there will be yet another enrollment decline in K through 12. That indeed happened. It was small, but it was ongoing decline. The reason why that's significant in some fashion is that it was supposed to be a big bounce back year. People who've been red-shirting their kids were going to have them join varsity and it didn't happen, which has pretty profound implications moving forward. Right now, the prediction from the National Center for Education Statistics is that K through 12 total enrollment in the country, and this is a country whose population still grows less so than it used to, but still does, is going to go down from a high from a few years ago of 50 million down to by 2030 it'll go down to 46 million. People are fleeing. There was a Washington Post magazine article back when they had a magazine a month ago with a headline of why are Americans fleeing public schools? So they didn't rebound. There are lots of implications for cities, for policies, for government spending. 20% of state and local government spending is on K through 12 schools and at some point that becomes politically untenable when people aren't going there to the free school. So that was prediction. My one for 2023 kind of picks up where Nick left off on some level, which is I think it's going to be something like the great grass touch of 2023. I think people are going to not just stop obsessing so much over Twitter, not just kind of unplugged from Facebook. That's definitely part of it. And those things are ongoing and kind of had predated some of the tumult at the end of the year. But I think some of the passions that people have been pouring into politics doesn't malaise in this country, Nick Killespie. I'm getting, I got a sweater on. Sure. I'm wearing a cardigan sweater, Matt. You don't have to tell me that. It's not v-neck. There's no elbow patches, but it's implied. And a lot of the way that that has been channeled, and this is stuff like people's life expectancy has been going down, people dropping out of the workforce just kind of sitting around playing video games like Peter Suderman. And disengaging from civic life, I think there's going to be a sense of people's disillusionment with the side effects of that have been thrown into politics for reasons of Trump, for reasons of other types of things, just because we've had politics take up this disproportionate share of our minds. I think it's going to be kind of like when Forrest Gump decides to go running. It's like, enough of the 60s. I'm just going to go run for a while, and I'm going to do some me-decade stuff. I think people are going to get out from and buy flip phones. There was a great article of a trend that obviously doesn't really exist, but in the New York Times, a week ago, about 25 teenagers in Brooklyn have started the Luddite Society. That'll end well. So that must be sweeping the nation soon, but it was actually a very interesting and heartwarming story of kids who were just like, let's all get flip phones and not have smartphones, and we will meet once a week in a park, and we'll talk about books. And you read this, and you go like, I want to go to the park with the kids and read a book. I think people- Matt, that's why the police don't allow you near the park. No. What I'm saying is I want to go back. Screw the restraining order. No, I think that people are going to be looking for ways to re-engage with meat space. However, that is construed and just trying to consciously go back into community building and away from Zoom meetings. I think the next Zoom meeting that's going to be suggested is going to lead to- there's going to be a workplace Zoom meeting shooting, and I don't mean Jeffrey Tuben here. He shot himself, Matt. He shot himself. The people are going to go touch grass. I don't know exactly how it's going to be reflected in gigantic statistics, but I think it'll be more front of mind. I just want to very quickly point out an epiphenomenon of this forest gump moment is going to be a resurgence in the life and legacy of Mr. Bob Seeger, because that's who Forrest was singing, was running to. He was running against the wind. You damn right. You damn it, Nicholas. 2023 is looking pretty damn fine. I was- A lot of thunder, a lot of thunder in 2023. I was excited about Matt's vision until this moment, and now I'm not anymore. I'm excited for a meat- An impossible meat, impossible burger. Place, we can replace the malaise with grenades. Oh my God. How long have you been saving that one? Catherine, please, please fire everybody on this podcast. All right, let's go to our end of podcast. Usual, like what are we assuming, but what was the thing that we all consumed in the cultural sphere that had the most impact on us personally, Nick? So what drug would you say is the one? Oh yeah, I'm still on it, but I've forgotten what it was. It was so powerful, Matt. That's a real mystery. I'm hoping to solve that in a future episode, but my consumption of the year surprising to me when you asked this question, because I would have thought it, I could have thought of a couple of things, but think about it. I had mentioned Fred Louis, Frederick Louis Allen's The Big Change America Transforms Itself, 1900 to 1950, which was originally published in 1952. It's the story of how America went from being a rural, relatively poor country to an industrialized, relatively rich country that was also a global hegemon. That stuck with me because I am more convinced than ever, and I've been trying this out, workshopped this endlessly for the past 10 years, that we are in the long 20th century. We're in the grasp of that, and we are struggling to actually get to the next era in American life, and Allen's book helps me think about that, but I think we are at the end of an era, and that era might be the late 60s when Reason was founded, or when the era began, or it might be 1989 or 1991 when the Cold War ended, but whatever era we're in, and we see this in politics, this is the beginning point of the Declaration of Independence, the book that we wrote together, Matt, to remind people, including the other two people on this podcast, who seemingly have never heard of it, but I think that has stuck with me because I think we are finally getting to that next stage, and a lot of the themes that we're talking about here, we're in a new era where people are going to be focused on and consumed by new things, as opposed to the end of the... I mean, what's good about this is it's the end of the gerontocracy. Nancy Pelosi is already out of office, Biden will be out of office, Trump is gone. The gerontocracy is finally dying off, and a terrible beauty is born to paraphrase her to actually directly quote W.B. Yates. Catherine, what kind of terrible beauty have you been consuming? Have you been birthing? I looked back through the handy dandy page where we keep all of the Reason Roundtable recommendations. You can find it on our website or by googling fans of the Roundtable, and I mean, real talk, I did recommend e-scooters is like a cool thing in 2022. So it wasn't your prediction that went horribly wrong, it was your recommendation? Yeah, so obviously my broken kneecap begs to differ on that recommendation, and it is both literally and figuratively probably the most impactful consumption that I have done in 2022. Are you sharing a gag writer with Suderman now? Yeah, we're poor journalists. Is Bruce Fulatch writing for you guys or something? We have to go Dutch on a joke writer. But if you are looking for a recommendation or something to consume, The School for Good Mothers, which I recommended back at the beginning of the year, is definitely the book I read that haunts me the most. It is a kind of Scanesian dystopia about parenting in a surveillance state. And that book kind of messed me up. So that's a recommendation, I think. When something kind of pops back into your mind weeks and months after you read it, it was a good book. So The School for Good Mothers, which is a not very long novel by Josephine Chan. Read it if you want to be sad this Christmas. And who doesn't want to be sad? Suderman, what sad-making cocktail was your consumption of the year? This was a genuinely hard call because I saw a bunch of great movies. I saw a bunch of great concerts, came very close to recommending everything everywhere all at once, which is maybe not the best movie I've seen this year exactly, but probably the one that I enjoyed the most. But no, I'm actually going to go with the most obvious thing that I could recommend. Star Wars Andor, which is the best Star Wars thing I've seen since I was a little kid when I first watched Empire Strikes Back. It is the smartest, most satisfying, most consistent, and best looking Star Wars. And really one of the best looking and smartest big franchise productions of any kind. The MCU, the DC Comics universe, you know, the even the Game of Thrones expanded universe that we saw grow out this year. I don't think there was another show that I looked forward to as much as this one. So it's maybe not the best thing I watched, but it was the most satisfying, the most comforting. The thing that I that I really just wanted to sit down and watch every time there was a new episode. And the thing that I will probably be thinking about, or at least a thing that I will be thinking about for for quite a while, just because it's so well executed, and it really shows I think the promise of of big expanded universes and big franchises to tell intricate political stories that that go surprising places. Like I said, a couple weeks ago on this podcast, when I when I first talked about it, it's a it's a series that casts the rebellion against the Empire as effectively as a right wing anti government group funded by nonprofit dark money through through a senator who is who is sort of lying about her complicity and and doing dirty deals with, you know, with maybe skeezy bankers. And it's like, that's not the story I would have I would have expected from from a franchise that has mostly been, you know, Campbellesque heroes journey adventure stories. But it's really effective and really good. And I'm very much looking forward to the next season. By far the most impact any piece of anything has had on me this year was reading a post war by Tony Jutt. Jute, a history of Europe since 1945 is published in 2005 won a parcel of awards for historiography and book awards and whatnot. It is just a tremendous and comprehensive account of firstly just how broken everything was at the end of World War Two in Europe gives you a sense of perspective that is just always lacking when people start making claims about such and such thing being the the worst thing that's happened since World War Two. No, dude, the next six years were pretty rough, especially the next like two or three. That was first became interested in the history of post warness issues by being a ignoramus American in Central Europe in the early 1990s and learning about the Benish decrees. Eduardo Benish is exiled government in London from Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia, not the world's biggest country expelled three million people after the war. Some of them they expelled by executing them like 20,000 Germans because there had been a bunch of ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland. That was the Labensraum area. They had reason to be upset with some of their citizens but also Hungarians who had been living in those areas of Slovakia for centuries just expelled and it it gives you a sense the book does of the massive difficulties of settling a post war situation, figuring out population exchanges, border security guarantees, gives you I think respect for the institution building that happened afterwards. It was a frantic season of institution building in terms of the United Nations, the World Bank, a bunch of different things that cropped up immediately after Marshall Plan is part of that defending Berlin. All these things, it gives you a almost a a pang of thinking about how the current moment of populism is in many ways a revolt against those institutions or a desire to refresh them and they all need refreshing if not in some cases eradication but it was a pretty interesting season back then and thankfully when we don't have exactly right now there's so much more wealth and the main thrust of the book is actually about how the kind of miraculous revival of Western Europe and how that happened but also it was just a very difficult tricky time with usually so many crises happening simultaneously that it makes our you know current concerns seem pretty small in in comparison just a really great and thought-provoking piece of comprehensive history if you're interested in Europe and foreign relations and war and people and the indeed colonization or colonialization of the great colonial empires as well so anyways post-war Tony Jutt history of Europe since 1945 check it out all right let's go now and say our goodbye say farewell to 2022 and thank you for listening for all of it if you like our stuff think about giving a tax deductible year-end donation a reason dot com slash donate our podcasts live at a reason dot com slash podcasts and thank you we'll see you in 2023