 Howdy and welcome to the Reason Roundtable. I'm your host of the podcast of Free Minds and Free Markets, Katherine Mangy Ward. And I am joined today, per usual, by my colleague, Nick Gillespie, editor at large, as well as two special guests. We have reporter Eric Baim, and we have Reason Producer, and just asking questions, co-host Zach Weismiller. Say hi, gentlemen. Hello. Hey, guys. Hey, Katherine. I am normally the passenger princess of this podcast. I just show up. I am along for the ride, but today I will do my very best to do a Matt Welsh impression and carry us through the news of the week. We are going to start today as we so often must with Donald Trump. We'll talk about twists and turns in two of the legal cases he's managed to get involved in. The first, the election interference case in Georgia, which was guestwritten and produced last week by Shonda Rhimes. The case took a Shondaland-esque turn when one of Trump's co-defendants accused Fulton County District Attorney Fawney Willis, and yes, I will be trying to pronounce all of the names correctly in this podcast, unlike Matt Welsh, accused her of a conflict of interests. Specifically, it was alleged that her personal relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, whom she hired unsupervised, had resulted in personal gains for her, including what sounded like a really nice trip to Aruba. Both of the lovebirds took the stand and spilled just like a tremendous amount of tea. Like there was so many little details about their relationship, it was delicious. It got so emotional at one point that the judge actually had to call a five minute recess just for everyone to like chill out. Willis denied any conflict of interest, insisted the whole matter was a diversion from the very important case against those who had conspired to overturn the 2020 election. Of course, this case needs to be wrapped up quickly in order for the 2024 election to proceed in a timely manner. She also complained that she felt kind of uncomfortable and violated by the court scrutiny of her personal life, which is a little rich. Zach, let's start with you. What did you take away from this whole mess? My takeaway was that, first of all, I think there is a legitimate issue for the defense team to be raising just because it does seem to create an incentive at the very least for that, if she's in a romantic relationship to like drag things out to if he's picking up the bill in Aruba or whatever. So, none of this necessarily does anything to undermine the strength of the case against Trump or his team. But it's one of those situations where if you're gonna be the one who's going after the ex-president, if you're gonna take that on, you'd better be above reproach. She definitely failed on that dimension. But as to the merits of the case, I had a long conversation with Ilya Somen, the law professor at GMU and a writer at Volit Conspiracy back in September. And he believes this case is very sound. I recommend that for a deep dive into the legal details of Georgia. But like one of the really damning aspects for me that really stood out was the very first charge, which had to do with the speech Trump gave on election night when he first made the voter fraud accusations across various states, including Georgia. And the damning thing about it to me is that the prosecutors have evidence that that speech was drafted four days before the election. So that's like just one of many indicators that this was pre-planned. There are other moments from the testimony of one of his aides that he told his chief of staff that he doesn't want people to know that we lost because it's embarrassing or according to Mike Pence, he told him, you're too honest for saying that he didn't have the power to reject electors. So how much of any of that is convincing to a jury you never know, but I've got concerns with how far reaching the case is in terms of roping some of Trump's attorneys for their legal advice. I think we want to give attorney-client relationships a really wide berth in this country, but I'm skeptical of some of the legal particularities, but when you look at it from just observing this guy who's seeking reelection, the person at the center of the case, Donald Trump, I think it does paint a pretty damning portrait regardless of what Fannie Willis and her boyfriend are doing in Aruba. Nick, I think one thing about this case that sort of keeps striking me is that it seems like it's possible that the Trump team's strategy is just to create two sets of facts or two narratives. This is a pretty standard Trump thing. And maybe I've just played into it by giving this like salacious description of what's going on with Willis instead of focusing on the core facts of the case. Do you think that's what's happening here or do you think this is a legitimate issue where we need to hold prosecutors to account when they misbehave? Well, I'm a big fan of alternative facts and I hope that we, before the election, start talking about the Bowling Green massacre, which we really haven't spent a lot of time discussing. I wonder why. I mean, for me, the takeaway from all of this is how stupid and amateurish Trump's opponents are. He's a wreck, he's a horror show, he's a dumpster fire, whatever you wanna call him. And then how do you get to a point where you are prosecuting a case against him like this and then you don't just chum the waters. It's like you're taking the entire bait box and dumping it into a shark tank. It's so unbelievably incompetent and stupid to do that. And that happens again and again where Trump, there's an easy layup against Trump and people will just screw it up by being idiots about it or something like that. More broadly though, I find, if the idea is that Trump is a baby who could not admit that he lost the election and then started working the phones to find people in the state of Georgia who would say like, okay, yeah, yeah, I'll go along with you, I'll go along with you. That is awful behavior and I think it's disqualifying of him. It's among the many reasons I would never vote for him but I don't know that this is the type of thing that we wanna start saying is criminal behavior and you've gotta do time or you've gotta pay massive fines and things like that. It just seems to me, two things can be true at the same time that what Trump did and by writing a speech ahead of time, not acknowledging that he lost an election, which he has not even acknowledged that he actually won in 2016 yet. So why would we expect him to admit that he lost in 2020? But that is not necessarily criminal but it is incredibly awful and unseemly and in many profound ways, it should disqualify him in the voter's eyes from winning again, which I don't think he'll win but the idea that we are going to litigate all of this kind of stuff through the court strikes me as a really bad path to be going down and then it gets even worse when you start like icing the walkway by having idiot prosecutors who end up dragging in all kinds of useless things that get in the way like Defani Williams, Shonda Rhimes storyline. I'm gonna award you two successful metaphor uses in that answer but neither of which were mixed at all, straightforward, very good. Just trying, just trying. In the absence of Matt Welsh, we all get better I think is what we learned here today. Yes, yes. Eric, you are a fan of, I don't know, law and order maybe, are you? Sometimes. Sometimes. It depends. Justice. Not the show though. You're a fan of, yeah. Although, should we do the little like dun-dun? Yeah. What do you make of this case? And in particular, if you have any thoughts on the role of the use of cash money in this case, I don't know. Reasons own Jerry Tuchilli wrote about this a little bit. One of the details of this case is Fani Willis insisting that she paid back Wade for all of her portions of the various trips that they went on and that she did so from cash reserves that she kept around the house because that's what her daddy told her she should do. And that was her most likable moment for me but maybe you have other more. As a believer in keeping cash reserves around the house, I can respect that. Yeah, sure. I think Nick's basically right though that both things can be right. And I mean, to your earlier point, right, about are there kind of two parallel stories here? There really are. And I understand why this is probably difficult for the public to keep track of because honestly, it's been difficult for me to keep track of and I get paid money to pay attention to this stuff on a daily or weekly basis. But the acute question to the hearing that happened this past week is whether or not Fani Willis is whether she should be disqualified from the case. And I think it's pretty clear that I think she falls short of the standard of actually being disqualified. That's the outcome that seems right to me there. But at the same time, I think she should probably just step aside anyway. Like I think this does, it raises a significant enough question about her ability to do the job that the voters of the public in Georgia expects her to be able to do. I think that's been impugned at this point to where like the whole Trump case and any other prosecutions that she's involved in would just be better served if she was no longer a part of it. So that's, I think my first answer to the sort of the one question is like whether I think she would just make this whole situation a lot easier and smoother if she stepped aside, either recused herself from the case or maybe even stepped down entirely. I think that would be an appropriate outcome there. And then there is, I mean, I think Zach basically hit it on the Trump side of this thing that, yeah, I mean, it seems like he knew from the beginning that he had lost the election. There was reporting even at the time when you go back to like December of 2020, January of 2021, a lot of reporting about the extent to which people close to Trump tried to tell him, hey, Mr. President, like you lost. He was in public, maybe putting up a persona, but I think in private, he was aware of this. And then we've seen, and I'll just plug some of the reporting that I did last week too, some other like drips that came out of the situation in Georgia is that True the Vote, which is this conservative group that was behind a lot of these allegations about supposed widespread voter fraud in Georgia, certainly the type of thing that Trump and his legal team were trying to promote in the aftermath of the election, they were subpoenaed to try and get you from a state election board. This is somewhat separate from the state thing, but they're from the Trump legal case, but they were subpoenaed by the state election board to say, hey, you know, if you have evidence of this, all you've made all these claims that you have this explosive evidence, you have these whistleblowers who have come forward about ballot box stuffing, and they eventually answered that subpoena by just saying, oh, we don't actually have any evidence that we can give you. So it seems like it wasn't just Trump, it was like there was an entire kind of network on the right that was manufacturing this false narrative. And like that is really the problem here. Whether it's legally actionable or not, I don't know, I'm not entirely, I don't think I have a solid opinion on that, but the fact that there is this sort of cancer on the right that metastasized specifically in Georgia with these claims of election fraud, that's really problematic, and I think is going to be an issue for the next election, regardless of what the outcome of the Trump case is. Yeah, I mean, this is also the cover story for the upcoming issue of Reason Magazine is explores the question of what looks like, it's not necessarily a likely outcome, but it's also not an impossible outcome that we might end up with a situation where a president is behind bars or slated to be behind bars at the time that he is elected. Or is dead. Or is dead or is incapacitated. We actually explore all of those options in the cover story, but the Georgia case is particularly interesting because it is the one that is least subject to a kind of straightforward self-pardon or kind of a federal path in which the conviction would just be made to go away. It's a complicated process in Georgia. It's one that the president does not have control over. And so I think that that's one more reason why like so many eyes are on this case. I do recommend this cover story to you. It's by Keith Whittington, another Volick conspirator. And it's sort of a flowchart of a particular dystopia that we might find ourselves in come January of next year. Let's pivot to another Trump case that is also in the news. This one, a civil trial in which Trump was ordered by a New York judge to pay $355 million for repeatedly inflating asset values and statements of financial conditions submitted to lenders and insurers. When you add interest to that penalty, it gets very close to half a billion dollars. The judgment is against not only Trump, but also his children and the former CFO of the Trump Organization. And an interesting feature of the case, which reasons Jacob Sulem wrote about, is that there actually is no lender or insurer that has claimed to suffer losses. So these aren't damages, this judgment. It's a disgorgement of ill-gotten gains. That's the terminology that the judge used. It's not aimed at compensating anyone. It's gonna go to the state and instead is supposed to deter dishonesty that threatens the financial marketplace. Eric, does this dishonesty threaten the financial marketplace? This is, I was never aware that this was something that could happen in a lawsuit. Like I thought, I know there's two things, typically in an award at the end of a civil suit, there's damages and then maybe there's punitive awards too. This is just entirely punitive. There's no one here that the state says was actually wronged, as you said, by the anything that Trump did. I think the reaction to this case has really made clear one of the sort of awkward things about this, right? So like on one hand you've got the court issuing this penalty of like nearly a half billion dollars against Trump for doing something that is by my understanding somewhat actually a little bit common maybe within New York real estate. There's a lot of this, well, you know, how much is something worth? All value is subjective anyway, right? So how do you prove that anybody was actually wronged and certainly they don't prove that anybody was actually wronged here? So there's this question of like, okay, is this now a new legal standard that New York is gonna use? Are they gonna start going after people who aren't Donald Trump for doing this same thing? Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank actually was on like an interview with Fox. Mr. Wonderful this weekend in which he made this point and he said the quote, he says this award, I mean, just leaving the whole Trump thing out of it and seeing what occurred here and I'm no different than any other investor. I'm shocked at this. I can't even understand or fathom the decision at all. There's no rationale for it. And he suggested that like New York's business climate is already pretty hostile to investment and that this might just be another thing that drives people out of the state. In fact, the governor of New York, Kathy Hockle, has even had to come out and kind of play defense against this ruling and say that, oh, law abiding people have nothing to fear. We're only going after people that are breaking the law. But again, there's nobody actually harmed here. So it seems like one of two things, either New York is now signaling, we're going to be much more aggressive about enforcing this very vague law that could result in massive penalties against businesses that are kind of artificially and vaguely inflating the value of their assets. Or on the other hand, they just went after Donald Trump. They just singled him out for a massive penalty here for what would appear to be purely political reasons. And neither of those outcomes is really great. So I don't feel good about this, regardless of which way that is going. Nick, you're a law abiding citizen of New York, right? Yes, and in New York, yeah. Do you have nothing to fear? I even pick up litter when I see it on the street. I don't want to be a litter bug. I'm taking the initiative to be a good citizen. So proud to know you. So this is, I mean, this is, I think, Eric has hit it, right? If, you know, which outcome is actually worse overall? Like the witch hunt outcome or the more aggressive enforcement outcome? I think if this signals that New York is going to proactively screw up the business climate even more than it already is, to become more hostile to business practice that's pretty much business as usual, that insurers and banks don't care about, that's much worse than if it is merely a vendetta against Donald Trump. But it has the earmarks of the latter, but everything else in the state of New York has the earmarks of the former. New York is a terrible place to do business. And when you look at the big states, you know, like California and New York, in particular, that are both losing people and that are terrible places to do business, there's a mentality among regulators and sometimes they can be Republican or Democrat. I mean, in California and New York, Republicans don't matter, but, you know, there's just this idea that you can squeeze the cow, you know, the milk out of the cow even after it's long been dead and butchered. And I think we're going into Matt Welsh territory here. We're doing okay, we're still holding it together. It's in the slaughterhouse and it's showing up on the baseball field as mitts and gloves and things like that. But there is no stopping point for how stupid the regulatory apparatus in a place like New York can get. And I find that deeply troubling because New York, New York City is doing okay, but it's always kind of, you know, it can drop down pretty quickly and it has done that, you know, during COVID and things like that. And there's just no sense that, you know, this is not the type of thing that the state should be doing. When I heard about this case, it reminded me of all things of the Operation Varsity Blues, which was a federal investigation, the one that, you know, took out the entire parent cohort in what you might call it, God, the Olsen twins show. Thank you, please. Full house. I'm here for you. Full house, yeah. And Fuller house as well. Where it was about how, you know, like a bunch of B-list celebrities lied their kids' way into schools like USC by pretending to be, you know, coxsons on the crew team or fencers. And it was like, why is the federal government doing this? Like, why is the government proactively at any level going after crimes or misdeeds that the people who are most directly affected by don't give a shit? It's just, it's bad. And to, maybe this is the teachable moment coming out of this, which is that, you know what, like Letitia James, the person behind this Trump indictment, maybe she had better things to be doing in order to make New York a better and more livable place. Zach, isn't lying fraud and aren't libertarians against it? Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, it's, what's interesting to me about this case and some of the others, like the one Nick just mentioned, is that there's becoming a higher price for states to pay when these sorts of judgments come down or when they pass sort of anti-business type of laws. I mean, we saw Elon Musk's Delaware ruling where the judge is trying to claw back a bonus that he was paid because they're saying that it was unfairly negotiated. And now Elon Musk can go on his platform and blast out. You know, I'm moving from Delaware and, you know, sending up a sort of like bat signal like other corporations to do this too. We've seen like Jeff Bezos move out of Washington, I think because of a wealth tax that they put on that he would have been paying like 50% of whatever that tax was. And then so he just moved to Florida. Like there's like a level of mobility and like a kind of check on this kind of action that is meant to just target one person like that that there never has been before. And I find that sort of new power to dynamics be pretty interesting. Trump kind of like, I mean, avoids, it doesn't have the benefit of some of that though, right? Because his money is all tied up in commercial real estate which is like, it's literally in a place. It's in New York City by and large, although he's obviously got hotels in lots of places. I don't think he owns most of those. I think he actually just like contracts to put his name on them. Regardless, the point I was gonna make is that like he's kind of stuck with the political dynamics in New York, right? Which apparently are obviously quite against him. And I think the, yeah. So I think that dynamic is interesting. It just doesn't like, it doesn't help Trump in this case. And I think to your question before Catherine, like if somebody, if one of his, and he's reportedly stiffed lots of people that he had contracts with over the years, if it was some other business, some other individual, people who were coming forward and saying, hey, I've been harmed materially by doing business with Donald Trump, he has engaged in fraud with regard to contracts that he signed that I signed also. Then I think there's no libertarian problem at all with that. I think the issue here is entirely that the fact as Jacob Sollum points out in his piece from last week that like there's, who was wronged here? Who is harmed? Surely someone has been harmed. Like those people should come forward and be the, that should be the mechanism on which these types of things are decided, not just the state of New York deciding they're gonna go after one person because they don't like their politics. Yeah, you know, it might even have been interesting if he had, if the state came after him or the government because, you know, they pump up the value in order to get loans, you know, against the property and stuff like that. But then they undercut what they say the value is for tax assessment purposes. Like you could see the state saying, hey, you know what you're screwing us here. It's either the price that the value of the loan was made at or it's what we're saying here. You know, but they didn't even do that. Yeah, that's a good point. Trump's superpower remains, like he is an objectively terrible human being and his superpower is bringing that out in everyone around him, particularly his enemies. And, you know, it may just help him win reelection, you know, where he will become the second coming over Cleveland and not just because he's a fat load. Quick final question on this. Donald Trump will be making up some of the money that he needs to pay this penalty by selling shoes. They never surrender, high tops are now on sale. They are $399 a pair. They are gold lame. They have an American flag on them with the wrong number of stars. Just wanna do a quick lightning round. Who on the round table, either guest stars or regulars would be the most likely to wear these sneakers? I think it's Zach. What do you think? I could vote for Zach. I will vote for Zach. I could vote for Matt Welch. Matt Welch. You know what? I absolutely would not pay $400 for shoes. Well, we're gonna see if you were gifted. Would you wear that? You get expensive. If someone gifted it to me, yeah, sure. Okay, yeah, I'll wear the bleaches. I'm looking forward to the robust reimagined versions. We did a great video by Kevin Alexander about reimagined Nikes and other types of sneakers where the people who kind of do artistic knockoffs that don't pretend to be the shoe to actually get legal action against them by giant corporations. So I am hoping that Naughty Riles and BAPE two of the brands that are featured in that video go after this hard because those shoes are waiting to be knocked off. Yeah, I will definitely wear the knockoffs. You would wear the knockoffs. Okay, well, we'll take that as a win. Let's go to our listener letter which is from Henry in the UK. Henry says, reason frequently sheds light on bad loss. This is necessary work, but I'd like to flip it on its head and ask what in your estimation makes a good law? What criteria must a law meet in order to pass round table scrutiny and can you share some real world examples? Henry in the UK urges us to stay sane, which we will not be doing. Thank you, Henry. Go to hell, Henry. Nick, can you give Henry anything? Yeah, yeah, I've got a couple. And the first one is the pooper scooper law, which in cities, which entailed dog owners or dog renters, whoever, people walking dogs, have to clean up the dog shit that their animals left behind, their slaves, slave animals left behind. In New York, which passed the first one in the country as far as I know for a major city in 1978, Harvey Milk, the former New York City resident who then moved to San Francisco and was on the board, the equivalent of the city council. That was the one legislative thing he got done before being murdered. The pooper scooper law is a great step forward for civilization. And it proceeds from the basic idea that like you don't have a right to shit on people's property or on public streets. And we all can see like in a world where the sidewalks were privately owned. I think it would be hard to just get away with shitting on streets. It also holds for public things. So that's good. And it enforces a basic property right, right? That, you know, and so that's good. The other things I like are stuff like loser pay court rules which reduce frivolous lawsuits. The US is almost the only place in the world where you can bring lawsuits against people and win or lose, you don't have to pay their court dues. I was looking at a study that found that in the UK, and the loser pay rule is oftentimes called the English rule. So thank you, Henry, for that one. But about 20% of cases under these kinds of provisions in the UK win only about 10% in the US do which suggests that we have a lot of frivolous lawsuits because people don't feel worried about lodging a kind of, you know, mediocre or on the bubble or marginal lawsuit. You know, if they were gonna pay the costs of the person they sue, that would change things. So I think that's good. And that again, it kind of like internalizes the costs of something. And then the other one which has been sweeping the country really over the past 30 years for gun laws are shall issue gun permit laws rather than may issue. And what this did is it reduced the ability of local sheriffs or the law enforcement agency in charge of handing out concealed carried permits to say like, well, you meet all the criteria but we don't like you. So we're not gonna give you a concealed carry permit changing those laws to shall issue really, you know it enfranchises more people and it limits the government in a way that gives more power to individuals which for me in a lot of ways that's, you know that's the asset test unless you're giving an individual more ability to have their pet shit on your property. That's a bad one. Everything else is good. Nick provided laws for everyone but Zach, if you have any submissions, hop in. Yeah, I mean, I love the shall issue may issue thing because that like Hayek is my guidepost on this and like one of the things that one of the criteria that he always talks about is things being universal. And so it has to the law has to apply equally to everyone and if you're allowing, you know a sheriff to kind of selectively decide who gets the permit then that's a big problem along those lines. And then like the other, another aspect that he talks about is not prohibiting competition or experimentation because that's how you get monopolies or cartels or, you know, cronyism. So the example that comes to my mind along those two dimensions would be one that was passed here in Florida where I live last year creating a system where people can receive vouchers for their K-12 education. It doesn't abolish public school or anything but it says that the fair thing to do would be that if you have children who are legally required to go to school that we're gonna maximize the choices that you have of where to send them by creating this avenue for you to redirect the money that's already earmarked for education to whatever you think is best. So it applies equally to all Florida residents, it's universal, it doesn't unfairly privilege one educational institution over another. Is it a perfect law? No, but I would consider it a good law. Eric, what do you got? I think I wanna respect the question itself and the question here was in your estimation what makes a good law. So what makes a good law at basis is that it protects property rights, I think. Even the most basic things that we would all agree upon prohibitions on murder and stealing and things like that are all kind of rooted in the idea that you own yourself and you own your property. And then to make it, take it a little bit beyond just those basic things and put it into something that's kind of politically relevant at the moment. I think I would say laws that are lifting the mandatory single family zoning right now, that's a big fight in a lot of American cities. I think it's something that's going on in the UK too, although I'm not 100% sure about that. And this is ultimately rooted in property rights. It's ultimately about saying that individuals who own land can do what they want with that land and we're not going to force, we're not gonna monopolize to Zach's point the way in which land must be used. And I'll recommend Christian Britschke's new free rent newsletter at Reason, which he just engaged in this, I think it was like two weeks ago with a piece that I found really fascinating about whether Americans want sprawl or not. And in many cases, it's not that we want suburban sprawl, it's just that that's kind of been forced upon us by land choice, to say land use choices that have been made by governments and that in many ways like doing away with these rules or doing away with mandatory single family zoning is really a pro-property rights move. We should do more of that. We should just let people build whatever they want on their own land. That would be great, so that's a good law. And as the resident anarchist, I suppose I am bound to say there is no such thing as a good law, contracts only, et cetera, et cetera. We are going to talk about AI and also the death of Alexei Navalny, but first, it's time for an ad. How'd I do with the Matt Welsh impression? Pretty good. If there's a surefire way to wake up fresh after a night of drinking, it's with Zebiotics. Zebiotics is a pre-alcohol probiotic drink and is the world's first genetically modified probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's this byproduct and not dehydration that's to blame for your rough next day. Zebiotics produces an enzyme to break down this byproduct. I received a box of this product in the mail and thought someone was sending me a message, but then discovered that in fact, it was just one of our sponsors sending a product to try. I love that the bottle and the box tout their genetic modification. I think that that is the A plus. Always brag about your GMOs if possible. Just remember to make Zebiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you will feel your best tomorrow. Go to zebiotics.com slash roundtable to get 15% off your first order when you use roundtable at checkout. Zebiotics is backed by 100% money back guarantee. If you are unsatisfied for any reason, they will refund your money. No questions asked. Remember to head to zebiotics.com slash roundtable and use the code roundtable at checkout. Thank you to Zebiotics for sponsoring this episode and our good times. Check it out. You'll be glad you did. Can I get one of those before like our next reason happy hour? That'd be fantastic. Oh, look at that. I handed it right over. This week saw the unveiling of a new AI tool, SORA, which is an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions. The current model has some weaknesses according to its makers, including that it may struggle with accurately simulating the physics of a complex scene and may not understand specific instances of cause and effect. For example, they say a person might take a bite out of a cookie and afterward, the cookie might not have a bite mark. On the other hand, whoa, the videos they released really look real. What has man wrought? Cause and effect is tough anyway, right? David here. It's so true. You don't know it exists. I mean, the world will just go insane. Zach, you're a video producer. Are you being replaced by robots? And how do you feel about it? I don't think so. I think I'm being enhanced by robots and I feel great about it. I've already brainstorming ways once I get access to this incredible tool that I wanna use it, I think the big fight is gonna really play out in the intellectual property sphere, which I am on the side of intellectual property and I think it's getting way too overly broad and restrictive right now. In the early days of Reason TV, we fought these battles all the time because YouTube is all about remixing and using existing material under fair use, which is where you're commenting on a previously existent piece of media and that allows you to repurpose it and add new meaning to it. I think essentially this is the next level of that and so I'm interested to see how that all plays out and I'm also just very excited to be able to incorporate this into my work. I mean, one of the kind of genres of videos that we do at Reason TV are these video essays where we're trying to visualize abstract concepts and to be able to actually type in a prompt of like, can you visualize this philosophical concept or something would be just an amazing new tool to add to the toolbox, so I'm excited about it. I think one of the ways to think about this, particularly in the video front is this lowers, potentially lowers the barriers of entry to people who don't have expensive cameras or editing equipment or things like that and just as the typewriter or the word processor and the computer and the internet and all of this stuff, it definitely dislodges and discombobulates people who are in a particular industry, but that's one cost against the benefit which needs to be weighed, which is can more people participate in the process, in the creative process, in the remixing process and things like that and Zach, I mean, I know from us working together for over a decade now, we've already been plugging in stuff that speeds up the work, like none of this is new. It could get really good and like a friend of mine was painting a picture with Sora AI, I was saying like, okay, let's say you get to, you sit down with Martin Scorsese or whatever director you like and just have him talk about a movie he wants to make and as he's talking, you're making that movie and then he can look at it and say, no, make it like more like this or less like this. I mean, it's absolutely fascinating and wonderful and the real thing here I think is that we need to push back early and always against the people who are like, no, wait, we've got to stop. We need to pause because we got to make sure that the people who do the catering on big Hollywood shoots aren't displaced by this technology that is going to create cookies that get eaten but then they're not really eaten and like, oh my God, like the world will explode in a million different ways, it's very exciting. Yeah, and let me throw in just the one more way that it's already, to your point, Nick, the way it's disrupted. I think for the positive, the workflow internally for our staff, I think that AI has already opened up the medium of video to more word-centric people. Like before you had to be comfortable opening up Adobe Premiere, Final Cut or whatever. Now with AI, it can automatically translate footage to text and the other way around and that's allowed people who think more in a text-based format to have access to these tools. So it's opening up the kind of technical know-how is gonna become less relevant and it's gonna be more about just pure creativity and editorial vision, which is cool. Are the AIs discriminating against people who are images first people because the tools so far are not really going that way. I mean, surely there are people out here who would like to take the visuals in their minds and turn them into text, but I guess at least for now, words people win again. Yes, well, in the beginning words still triumph. I've heard that, yeah, I have heard that. I do know a number of, I mean, I know a lot of people who are really angry, who are invested in things like portrait photography, which of course, a hundred years ago, wiped out portrait art, portrait painting and things like that, but I understand totally why they're upset, like the world that they lived in and the economy that they lived in, the aesthetics that they lived in kind of disappeared, but most of them, what they do is they realize these are tools and they start moving into the next phase of things and there's no question. Like if you're a really good portrait photographer, you are going to be much, much better at image creation for a long period of time, if not forever, than me, like a shrub who comes along and starts typing stuff into Dolly or something. So that, you know, this is all, it's all technologies and it's all tools and it just augments creative expression. Nick, why won't you think of the people who have been working so hard to paint the portraits with the buggy whips? You're putting them out of work. That's right. The FTC recently moved to expand rules that ban impersonation of governments and businesses to include individuals. And in a Welshian metaphorical move, they said, quote, emerging technology, including AI-generated deep fakes, threatens to turbocharge this scourge. So let's all sit with that for a minute. It's put that scourge into fifth gear, right? Into overdrive. This is of course of a piece with Lena Kahn's FTC kind of overreaching into all areas of the economy, but I do think there is a genuine concern on the part of the public that we will be seeing the faces and voices, perhaps of one Joseph Robinette Biden, the 16th. There it is. And that will create uncertainty, perhaps, at the political level as well as at all other levels. Is that a legitimate fear? And can the FTC do anything about it, Eric? I think it is a somewhat legitimate fear. No, the government can't do anything about it. We're on this train and that's just where we're going. There have already been, there were robo-calls in New Hampshire right before the primary that were like deep faked robo-calls encouraging people. I've already forgotten whether it was like to vote for Nikki Haley or to not vote for Nikki Haley, something like that. We're going to see more and more of that. I think the result of it will be that it'll just further discount the value of that stuff in people's minds when they're making decisions about politics. I don't know how many people are really swayed by a robo-call to begin with. And what is the difference between a robo-call that you actually recorded with someone's real voice and then played back versus a fake one? I don't, these distinctions to me are kind of meaningless anyway. But I think all of that is just going to collapse. And I think you've talked about this before, Catherine, that it's actually the next presidential election when this is really gonna ramp up because we're kind of still, even as impressive as some of this AI stuff has been so far, we're still kind of in the Netscape era of AI, right? It's like you log on and the computer is very, very slow and you can maybe check real-time sports scores for the first time ever. And that's super cool. That's the thing that I loved when we got the internet, when I was eight years old in my parents' house. And that's kind of the phase that we're out with AI is like we're just at this very basic level. It's obviously going to go places that we can't predict. And it'll really be, I think, four years from now when that really takes off in the political arena. It's a legitimate fear, but I also think it will also, and this goes for outside of politics too, this goes for, this is kind of a cultural point that I think it will also reinforce people's desire to have authentic real-world experiences because if everything can be faked all the time and everything you see on your screen might be real or might not or you don't know, I hope as somebody who enjoys nature and enjoys live theater, I hope it will kind of give people more a desire to have those actually truly authentic experiences. Go look at an actual waterfall. Go watch an actual live stage performance because that's as real as it gets. And so that's my optimistic take is that we'll have more of a sense of the stuff that we actually know is real unless we live in a simulation, in which case all that stuff's faked. I wanna point out, Eric, that a beautiful waterfall like Niagara Falls is as man-made as anything you could imagine. There's too many people at Niagara Falls, but yeah. They change the water flows, they rebuild things. They do, that's true, yeah. It's all simulation all the way down. I think the really important thing here with the FTC rule is this is a bid to regulate absolutely political speech. And it's like you don't get to do that. And thankfully Lena Khan is leading the charge because that means it will fail and it will fail miserably, but we need to push back on this. And Catherine, I'm giving you public notice that I'm going to be pushing very hard on this in Reason's video platform to be doing a series of potentially libelous and slanderous deep fakes going into the election thing because we need to make a stand. And I think somebody like Zach Weismueller needs to be put in prison in order to prove the point that we need untrammeled access to AI, particularly in the political realm. Nick, that is a horrible, horrible segue into our final topic of the podcast, which is the death of Alexei Navalny, Alexei Navalny, Russia's most prominent opposition leader who died in prison on Friday at the age of 47, given that he was previously poisoned, likely by Vladimir Putin's henchmen. It seems likely that his death was ordered by Putin as well. He returned to Russia from Germany despite knowing he was likely to be arrested and imprisoned and killed and he was. What, you know, in the wake of his death, there's been a real, I mean, I would say, even though it was clearly going to be a big news event, there has been an outpouring in response to his death to use the cliche that has surprised even me. I wonder if we could just go around quickly and talk about one response to his death, either something that you've seen in the news or maybe just your own that really struck you. Nick, we can start with you. You too, which as a residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas, did a tribute to him. They led the crowd enchanting his name before doing a song that works well, you know, to kind of memorialize him in this moment. And it was deeply moving. One of the things that this all, the question that this raises for me is like, what is the type of pressure that will actually lead to change in Russia? And I suspect ultimately it's great to have as many people outside Russia calling for change, but ultimately the question is, how do you get that swelling up inside Russia? I don't know, but the you too tribute is deeply moving. Eric? I thought something that President Joe Biden said during his remarks on Friday was interesting and telling kind of to Nick's point about, exterior pressure on Russia versus interior. Biden had previously promised devastating consequences, quote unquote, to Russia if Navalny died in prison. And then so he comes out and he gives some remarks about the news of Navalny's death. And then the first question he got asked by a reporter was exactly this, hey, in the past you've promised devastating consequences. What are those consequences gonna be? And the answer was just, it was like a non-answer. It was a total back away from it. It was a, well, we're contemplating what else can be done. We're looking at a bunch of options. That sort of thing. And I think it really, it got to the, it really hit on the point that like, there's not much the United States can do. We have tremendous economic power, which we've brought to bear in the form of sanctions and other sorts of controls against Russia in response to the war in Ukraine. We have tremendous military power, all of that. But like the ability to actually change domestic politics in Russia is well beyond our ability to really influence. And that's like, it just kind of sucks that Russia is beholden to a authoritarian president who has at this point effectively crushed most internal dissent, it seems like. But ultimately, I think Nick's right. That's where change has to come from. It's just really difficult to see how anything changes there. So yeah, I don't know. The powerlessness of Biden's response there really struck me. Jack. This was something that I think a lot of us were expecting to happen eventually, but it did hit me more emotionally than I had expected. I've got a lot of admiration for Navalny, not least of all because his methods of trying to push forth social change and political change in Russia was using digital media, using YouTube, posting exposés on YouTube and also just directly communicating with an audience. And he purposely did that as a way to, he felt that if he were to raise his own profile that way, that it would somehow protect him. And to see that strategy ultimately end in his death, I'm not gonna say it's a failure because now he's becoming a symbol of something which may be even more powerful in death. But along those lines, I guess one of the more surprising or noteworthy things that I saw was the reaction from his widow, Yulia Navalny, she put out a video on his video channels and called Putin a coward for killing her husband this way and announced that they already have an investigation underway to find out exactly how and why it happened. And it was just striking and powerful to me because at some point you'd think the temptation would just be to shrink away from that kind of nightmare. But she says that it's shameful to be intimidated and she's not going down without a fight and it's just a rare and surprising kind of courage. I was also struck by the remarks of Ilya Yashin who's another opposition leader who's currently in prison, who basically said that we should not forget the hundreds of thousands of Russians who left their homes because they refused to become murderers on the orders of the government and that the world should extend a hand to those Russians for opposing the regime. So basically Russian draft Dodgers and others who refused to be a part of Putin's army and I think that's just incredibly true and is a thing that the US could be doing now letting in more Russians who want to leave because their country is waging an unjust war among other things. Let's go to our end of podcast, What We're Consuming. And I assume we will be sadly bereft of 1970s baseball books and also like weird stuff that people found on YouTube but let me not get ahead of myself. Let's start with Eric. This is an awkward transition from somebody who just died in prison. I'm gonna talk about something that was really awesome and fun. I went to the championship game of the Caribbean series in Miami a couple of weeks ago. The Caribbean series for people who may not be aware. This is totally Matt Welch's bag. It's a shame he's not here. It is the championship game of a sort of Champions League type tournament that is played every February between the winners of the seven or eight. It kind of changes year by year, largest domestic winter baseball leagues around the Caribbean. Yeah. This thing is awesome. You absolutely are hitting me with them at well. So I hate it. These are teams that play in places like the Dominican Republic in Venezuela and Panama and Puerto Rico. And sometimes Cuba gets invited. And anyway, they usually hold it in one of the countries where these leagues exist. This year for the first time since the early 90s it was held in Miami. I just happened to be there for work and so got to go to the championship game and it was seriously, it was so awesome. It was one of the loudest baseball games I've ever been at. The spirit and the fans that were in the stadium. It was over 36,000 people. Marlins Park was sold out or Lone Depot Park, whatever it's called now, was sold out for it. Seriously, the Miami Marlins have never played in front of a crowd as loud or as awesome as that one. And these teams that play in this league, it's sort of a combination of former major leagueers who are kind of washed up and young guys who are trying to make a name for themselves and get a contract. So it was players like Robinson Cano who played in the final for the Dominican Republic team, former New York Yankee, Yasiel Puig who a former Dodger and played for a couple other teams in his major league career was on the Venezuela team which ultimately won the championship. And then you also get to see a bunch of young stars like the shortstop for the Venezuela team really impressed me, this guy Ezekiel Jesus Tovar who is actually the Colorado Rockies starting shortstop this year. He's only like 22 years old, he's really great. The my team, the Philadelphia Phillies just signed the guy Ricardo Pinto who started the game for Venezuela. Anyway, the team for Venezuela one was the first time that a Venezuelan team had won the Caribbean series since I think like the mid 90s. And it was really great. And then if I just pull back from like the actual experience of the crowd and the game and how awesome that was, I was struck by the idea that on one hand we're told by like the cultural scolds on the left that like cultural appropriation is bad. But what you have here is a quintessential American sport invented whether you believe the myth or not, but like invented in upstate New York right in the late 1800s. And here you have a Caribbean culture, a Latin American culture that has really made the game its own. And then the mixing of that culture in Miami of course with the United States. And there's sort of an immigrant culture there that's really terrific and made that venue so good for this type of game. And so that was really great. So I think there's a great lesson here about like cultural appropriation being a wonderful thing. And then on the other hand, the political right wants to like stop immigration and tell us that like people coming here from other countries is bad or somehow watering down American culture. I'd like seriously guys, this game was so great. And it was great because I assume most of the people who were there in the crowd with me that night were not native-born Americans and they brought their culture with them and were there to cheer on their respective, the teams that represented their homelands. And so anyway, it was all really wonderful. And if you ever get a chance to see the Caribbean series in person, I highly recommend. You know, Eric, I'll add one of the reasons why Caribbean and Latin American countries embrace baseball so much was that they were rejecting Spanish, the conquistador or the colonial culture that pushed bullfighting as the big sport in places like Cuba and elsewhere. So they were like, fuck that, we're going with baseball because that's part of the new world. So, and to the point about immigration, had the Washington senators actually signed Fidel Castro when they had a chance, you know, maybe the Cuban- History would be so different, yeah. Castro to baseball, Hitler to art school, there's so many, so many places. He was pretty good pitcher. It could have gone better. By most accounts. I will jump in since my recommendation is basically the very opposite of Eric's in the sense that it was just an absolutely enormously long book that I sat perfectly still to read for a long time in Florida last weekend. It is A Day of Fallen Night, which is the sequel to The Priory of the Orange Tree, which I recommended on this podcast before. The author is Samantha Shannon. She also wrote the Bone Season series. These are just like gigantic, yes, there's a dragon and it's written by a lady, classic fantasy series. And really, really well done in terms of the fact that they are much of the series revolves around kind of succession drama or kind of the politics of these fantasy worlds and governance of these fantasy worlds. Readers do not know who is in the right most of the time, even though this one is actually a prequel to the previous book, where some of the which is good and which is evil has been sorted out. You still are kind of plunged back into this political scenario where there simply are not obvious good guys and bad guys. And I think that that is good to have in our literature. It's good to have stories where everyone believes that the stakes are incredibly high for their side and everyone believes that they are the good guy in a kind of plausible way because that's what real life is like. Sadly, not very many dragons. Happily, not very many quasi-dragon hell beasts that will kill us all with fire, but that is nonetheless kind of the realism hidden inside these fantasy books. These books are for people who get anxiety when they don't have a book waiting for them, right? When they don't have like a good series they're working on because they will take you so long to read. Like I am a fast reader and I still really had to invest in these books. So Samantha Shannon, A Day, A Fallen Night, from the Roots of Chaos series, strongly recommend if you have already, like me, overcome your aversion to books with dragons. I thought that I was only, I thought I was too good for books with dragons and that only books with robots were appropriate for me, but I was wrong. Dragon books are good as well. Zach, why don't you wrap us up here? I watched the Navalny documentary on HBO this weekend. It was the 2022 Academy Award winner, which in retrospect is even more well-deserved. And it follows Navalny when he is in his interim in Germany, well, I guess exile in Germany after he had been poisoned. He's recovering from that. And it's, they're embedded with him and they make a very, it's an interesting like sort of double documentary where they're making the documentary for if he's alive and then like this is also gonna hit different if you die and it does indeed hit differently. And I, it's very well done. It's, you're with him in this moments when he is literally talking with the, one of the assassins who attempted to poison him to death on the phone. He kind of tricks them into confessing an amazing moment caught on camera. And highly recommend it, it's available on HBO. Nick? I read the Charter Cities Atlas, which is a joint publication of the Adrian Opel Group and the Charter Cities Institute. They define Charter Cities very basically as self-governing cities. And what this beautiful kind of coffee table oversized book which is also a website does as it walks us through different aspects or different cities in history that are Charter Cities essentially self-governing cities. And it ranges from places like Lubeck which was part of the Hanseatic League to Kandahar which was part of the Silk Road to Tangier in North Africa, Coba the Mayan capital that was all of these cities eventually dissolve at some point because either the larger cultures they're part of disappear or they are overtaken by other types of things and that's worth thinking about. But the Charter Cities Atlas is really, I mean, it does the work of making or it made me think about Charter Cities which are becoming a thing. Zach has done a couple of documentaries about that and we'll be doing more reason is interested in this concept where you can kind of start over and have a regulatory or a social sandbox where you can do things anew where you're informed by the past but not bound by it. And it really kind of opens up the framework of like, okay, well, what is a Charter City? And even looking at, it's beautifully illustrated and it talks about the culture and the politics and the economics of everything and it just makes you think about, I mean, like right now I was looking at it living in New York City and I was like, God, this is making me think of a million different ways that New York City could be better even short of actually declaring independence and becoming an independent Charter City. So I highly recommend the Charter Cities Atlas. But Nick, I heard you guys got dumpsters now. They like reinvented trash cans for New York. Yeah, not quite. I mean, kind of. They're gonna stop putting garbage just on the street. First we're reinventing that. And that means it's, we're piling it up bigger and bigger. The Hanzi Attic League though. Shout out to the Hanzi Attic League. One of the more libertarian international organizations that ever existed. I don't know if it's fair to call it an international organization, but like it was like an economic alliance of a bunch of cities in North Germany. A non-national organization. Yeah, a bunch of places that went to war with each other for like a hundred years and then decided, hey, wouldn't it be better if we all traded with each other instead? And they became wildly prosperous for like a hundred years. It's a really great story. I'm very charmed by your enthusiasm for the Hanzi Attic League, but I'm mad that you stepped on my Welshy and Segway, which was going to be, speaking of garbage in New York, is there any advance coming up that you wanna tell us about, Nick? The best way to go to them, we have a couple that are oversubscribed, so I don't want to rub people's faces in that trash, but go to reason.com slash events and you can find out all that we're up to wherever we are up to it. Thank you to Eric and Zach for filling in. Thank you always to Nick and thank you to you listeners for joining us here on the Reason Roundtable podcast. If you like what we do, feel free to go to reason.com slash donate and support us. Thanks very much.