 Welcome to the Reason Roundtable, your weekly Fusion Research Breakthrough of a podcast from the magazine of free minds and free markets. I am Matt Welch, joined by Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Catherine Mangu. Ward, happy Edward G. Robinson birthday, friends. Howdy. Hey, Matt. Happy Monday. Let us talk about the news items. Last Thursday, the Biden administration announced that after nearly 300 days of incarceration in Russia, WNBA star Brittany Griner was finally back coming home to the US. The result of a negotiated prisoner exchange with the Ruskies. We got a lady athlete who can dunk but had run afoul of Russian marijuana laws. They received a supervillain sounding character named Victor Bout, aka the merchant of death who was halfway through a 25 year prison sentence for conspiracy to murder Americans. The swap was immediately criticized by Republicans and some others for overpaying and for potentially privileging Griner over 52 year old former Marine Paul Whelan, who has been in Russia since 2018 on espionage charges. Others have taken the case as an opportunity to talk about America's own sometimes harsh criminal justice system. Catherine, you are a lady who can no longer dunk and also no fan of the carceral state. Here does the- But a big fan of the WNBA. Yes, we know this. Can you name a single team in the WNBA? Absolutely not. No. Yeah. There's even one called the Liberty. Oh, that's nice. See? I like Liberty. So, where does the Griner swap get you? Does it get you two mangy cheers? By the way, the Russian arms dealer was leading the league in scoring, leading the WNBA in scoring match. As was pointed out by people funnier than you, that he can shoot better. Catherine, two cheers or three? I'm going to give it maybe only like one and a half cheers. I don't love just the whole prisoner swap concept in general. I know that this is a time honored, time tested way that nations interact and it just makes me want to get rid of nations, frankly, because it's garbage. But yeah, I mean, I think I am obviously happy to have Griner back. I think that the fact that the sort of window dressing of this arrest was a cannabis possession is, you know, it has definitely sharpened some of the, heightened some of the contradictions, immunitized our eschaton, whichever term you want to use. It's totally ridiculous that she had, was facing such a harsh sentence for such a minor crime. And of course, there are many, many people here in the United States similarly suffering. I think that's like a very reasonable and good thing to point out. I want to call a moratorium on calling people merchant of death. I feel like there's a new merchant of death every couple of years in the news and maybe it's just because there's a lot of death and a lot of people selling it out there. I guess that's a real possibility. But the desire to suddenly really, really care about how bad this dude is only when the exchange was imminent. Like I've never heard of this dude before. I read the news and so it makes me suspicious about whether this really was a, you know, tragic undermining of American national security. Nick, speaking of national security, you're old enough to remember the name Nick Daniloff. I'm old enough to both remember and forget Nick Daniloff until this morning when I read up on him again. He's still alive, lives in Paris. That's great, at least according to Wikipedia, which means it's true. How do you rate the Biden performance in a difficult presidential category? Yeah, I think it's great that Brittany Griner is back. And that's kind of the beginning and end of my interest in this. You know, whether or not a Russian merchant of death, as opposed to an American merchant of death or a Saudi merchant of death got swapped out, is less interesting to me than, you know, Griner was clearly a prop in a, you know, geopolitical battle. Whereas somebody like Paul Whalen, you know, who's also, you know, been in prison for a while, it's more complicated because he's accused of espionage and things like that, has a military background, et cetera. I'm not saying he should necessarily be there, but like Griner is an absolute innocent. And I think whatever we do to get her out is good. Peter, are American presidents in an inherently bad negotiating position with crappy countries because we place a higher value on the lives of our citizens? Or is that a bedtime story that we tell ourselves in order to... Well, it's not a great negotiating position. I mean, just on the face of it, right? Like, it's not the position you would wish to be in necessarily, like just from a kind of pure leverage-based, you know, calculus. On the other hand, it's the right position to be in because placing a higher value on life is the right thing to do. And so in some ways, you put yourself at a kind of a disadvantage, just on a sort of pure raw exercise of kind of foreign policy power, negotiating whatever. But in the end, you take care of your people and you value them and you do what you can, and that's what matters. What matters is that Griner is free and back in the United States, and it was worth it, and that was the right thing to do. I just want to say, though, that on the Merchant of Death question, like, is Catherine okay with the 1997 movie Merchant of Death starring Michael Parry? Basically, it's like a death wish of a remake sort of thing. No, almost certainly not. Merchant Princes by Charlie Strauss, the fantasy series. That I am looking for. If you're, like, literations like Lord of War, which starred Nicholas Cage as an international arms dealer who was understood to be a kind of a merchant of death in 2005. If we can bring it back to Michael Parry, who is probably best known of the title role in Eddie and the Cruisers. Back in my teen mag days, I interviewed Michael Parry, and one of the set questions we would always ask teen faves was, like, what's your best feature? Michael Parry is so epically kind of intellectually challenged, he said, my arms. Which is kind of great. The tagline for the movie version of Merchant of Death should appeal to Catherine because it's built by humans, programmed by computers, the ultimate killing machine. As long as we're going down a suitor tangent, I think that we can just conclude all of us that the movies that should be preemptively canceled are Merchant Ivory. No, what? I will fight you. No, they're done. There's no more Merchant or Ivory. One of them is dead. I assume you might have canceled, like, culture war canceled? Not canceled, like, not making any more of them, but maybe both. Yeah, I think just you think they're boring and snooty, Matt Welch. Am I correct? Thank you for interpreting my pain. My one contribution to hostage discourse is that it's hard. Michael Scott Moore is a friend of mine who was kidnapped by Somali pirates for two and a half years. His reaction to the news while people were making a big, big fuss a bit about it, and I can't believe that Brittany Griner has all this privilege, et cetera. He's like, hey, you know what? This stuff's pretty hard. It's pretty complicated. We should root for everyone to come home and maybe give each other a break on how this happens. I think there was a couple of years ago, during the, I think it was the Obama administration, when there was a prohibition on families trying to get in and to pay ransoms to either Somali pirates or the Iranian regime, because there's been a series of prisoners still is. Siamak Namazi, I think is still in Iran, held a captive there. And the prohibition on Americans being able to pay ransom, don't like that. We should be able to free to do what we want with our own private assistance. Especially when you're not dealing with state actors. Yeah. I mean, the idea that the government knows better about like, oh, you better not incentivize negotiating with terrorists, because we never do that except in absolutely every single administration. So yeah, it's complicated. We should give each other a break and maybe not choose each and every instance of things like this to play stupid two-party politics. But we do. And that's the way we go. We go through life. All right, let's move on to the subject that our stupid subcategory of humans continues to obsess. Is this the airbud movies, Matt? I feel like you're going to take you're just thrown at the playbook and you're going to talk about airbud. No. So Twitter files. Since the last time we gathered around this metaphorically circular table, there have been at least three agonizingly long and increasingly indecipherable Twitter threads showing internal documents at the social media company regarding how and when to limit the reach of or sometimes straight up ban various would-be users of the service. The first of those three from Barry Weiss showed such behind-the-scenes classification categories as, and these are verbatim quotes here, trends blacklist. They use the word blacklist and search blacklist and do not amplify the second tranche of Twitter files coming again from Matt Taiibi, got into the coordination between Twitter and the FBI in the run-up to permanently banning Donald Trump and the third by Michael Schellenberger detailed the various ad hoc censorship and rationales thereof, exercised after the January 6th riots on Capitol Hill. In the meantime, new Twitter CEO and former Katharine Gaward boyfriend Elon Musk has been busy making himself the main character of his own company through a series of edge-lordy, roof-o-tastic tweets like, the woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters, deep thoughts based, dude. In the spirit of TLDR, which for you fellow olds means too long, didn't read, I think. Let's go around the table and each pull one thing that we've learned of interest since last week via these Twitter files. Katharine, do you want to lead us off? Yeah, I think the Barry Weiss Twitter file was the best one in the sense that it had the kind of most substantive evidence of government interference here, which is something that I'm always looking out for. There really was a bunch back and forth between CDC and Twitter execs about what isn't allowed on Twitter. Don't love that, but I mostly think that the lesson here is just it's still management and not law for the most part. Like the Schellenberger Twitter files in particular, it's Twitter execs just making up stuff as they go along. They kind of want to project the aura of having a rule-based system while actually operating on an outcomes-based system, partially because one of the outcomes they wanted was to be perceived as having a rule-based system. It's like the Supreme Court. This is the same critique that I leveled at original lists last week, and some people did not enjoy that. I got some emails about it. This is a thing that happens in a lot of different areas. It's not surprising to see that it happened inside Twitter. It sure does seem chaotic and messy, and so the lesson for me was don't be like Twitter. But actually, the critique was not leveled against originalists specifically, nor am I leveling it against Twitter specifically. But humans, this is how people are, and one does not like to see it, but this is what is happening underneath the hood in almost every organization, institution, and ideology. Peter, you have characterized this in internal Slack channels. As a something, Berger, why? Well, I do think we have seen evidence that senior people at Twitter were conferring with law enforcement, with federal law enforcement officials, with the FBI and with DHS. It's a little bit unclear exactly what was going on, but there are references to weekly and monthly meetings with senior law enforcement officials. Now, that doesn't mean that the senior law enforcement officials were necessarily setting policy, but there's a very sort of funny and telling little exchange in which one Twitter staffer is sort of uncomfortable with describing their method for making determinations about how all of these judgments, which accounts are going to be sort of blocked or restricted or whatever. And he's like, well, do we really want to call DHS and the FBI experts? Do we really want to say that that's who we're talking to all the time? I'm paraphrasing here, but that's the gist of it. And they ended up just calling those folks partners. And so they're making these decisions in consultation with partners who are out there. The partners turn out to be senior law enforcement officials. I think that the bigger takeaway for me, the more general one is, well, first, just what I said last week, that threads are bad and articles are good because these things are just so hard to follow at this point, the threads keep breaking. It's just very difficult to quickly go through and see the information. But these guys were acting as editors. And they were making decisions based on kind of the information they had. They were in some ways kind of experts in the field of political discourse in the way that editors are. But they were also just googling stuff sometimes. I mean, there's a screenshot in which one of the senior folks is like, actually, that's true. And then just like posts an NPR link in the space of like a couple of minutes, because that's how we know stuff is true. And it is... There's not going to be a way for a company like this to definitively determine, oh, this is the truth and this isn't the truth. And we know this and we don't know that. And there's inevitably going to be editorial judgment exercised in the process of doing that. And that's not necessarily even a bad thing. It's also not necessarily a good thing. It's just an inevitability, I mean, in the same way that like any news organization that makes choices about how to present information, right? You're selecting a little bit from a press release or from a speech or you're printing the whole thing. Either way, you're making a choice and you're acting as an editor. And that's what these folks were doing in real time with arguably the most influential platform for kind of journalistic and political speech, at least in the United States and maybe in the Western world. Nick, you're a fan of transparency and also terrified of... Transgenderism. But transgender boredom is your sweet spot. The true trans boredom is, of course, the Neil Young album called Trans, featuring his 13 minute self plagiarism like an Inka, which is essentially quick as the killer set in a different murderous Native American or Meso American empire. Can't believe how much I hate you guys sometimes. Yeah. Would you call anyone involved in that a merchant of death? You know, I think they were giving it away for free in the Inka Empire, so it's not really merchant. On the topic, Nick. Which is? It's just, I'm going to make you think of it. No, I know what you mean. How loud? Yeah, about Twitter and the Twitter files, which is rapidly, I think there have been as many Twitter file threads as there are seasons of Doctor Who, or certainly by the time this comes out in a couple of hours. I love seeing the internal decision making apparatus, because it, as both Peter and Catherine have said in different ways, it's clearly results based, it's results oriented. The big question in a lot of ways, and I guess we'll still see some of this, of like, why did Trump get a lifetime ban? And that's still to come out. And why did the post story get banned the way that it did? Because I think the New York post Hunter Biden story, because a lot of people, you know, and I retweeted Robbie Suave's, I thought an excellent roundup on the Twitter files number two, which was Barry Weiss is talking about the blacklist and things like that. A lot of people were like, look, you know, Twitter said they were doing this all along. So shut the fuck up. Like, why should you be surprised that Twitter was deemphasizing people and clamping down and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, when you look at the specific examples, and I think the, you know, the material including are related to Jay Bhattacharya, the Stanford medical faculty member and economist, public health guy, it's really interesting because like, you don't, there was no way of knowing whether or not you were being put on a blacklist or not. And looking at the specifics of that decision making or that it got done is really interesting. And the one thing, and this is something we should hold Elon Musk to, because we need to be reading all of these through the fact that Elon Musk is leaking documents about a company that he owns, but before he took over. So he, you know, is, all of this is interested material. And we have to be very critical in reading it in that way. It doesn't mean it's wrong. It doesn't mean it's not important or interesting. But, you know, we have to keep that on. Musk over the weekend said that he was working on generating a Twitter tool that will allow people to know if they are being de-amplified or whatever you want to call it, and to appeal those decisions. And that's the tool, I think that would be great. And I would love to see happen. The thing that I would like to see here that we haven't seen is totalizing data, comprehensive data, that, you know, not necessarily sort of what we've seen everything, everything we have seen so far is essentially an anecdote, right? We have seen a bunch of screenshots, stories about this, you know, this meeting happening or this decision happening with this account. But what we haven't seen is anything like, oh, here's just a chart of how many people are being blocked in this way and for what reasons over for what amount of time. We don't have any sort of sense of the scale of it or the, you know, how comprehensive, how frequent this sort of thing was. And I think that that's notable. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're trying to hide that information from us, but it would put what we are seeing in context in a way that we're just not able to right now. In fact, Peter, building on what you and Nick both just said, Jay Battacheria, over the weekend, stop it. Just stop scoffing in the middle of me pronouncing people's names. Jay Battacheria, you know. Jay Battacheria went into Twitter. Just call him, he's the real Dr. Jeff. Went into the Twitter headquarters and had a look at his own history and concluded at the behest of Elon Musk came on in and concluded that he was at least throttled, blacklisted from the outset of him joining Twitter. And his theory was that it was because his pinned Twitter information was linked to the Great Barrington Declaration, the famous in some circles, I guess notorious circles of Dr. Anthony Fauci continues to be resigning notorious declaration by a bunch of public health types who simply said way back when that, hey, maybe we should try to protect the olds and let the non-olds and non-six get on with their lives. And that to be a reason if it was indeed the reason for him to be blacklisted is terrible. And it says something bad about the censorious instinct that we've seen not just on Twitter, but again, to Catherine's point, after all, it's you and me problem, which is that people have this censorious instinct and used it not just in governments, not just in social media, but even in kind of professional research. John Tierney, Catherine's former boss and friend of the podcast and reason wrote a pretty great piece a couple of years ago just documenting all the different ways that research was stifled. And researchers who came up with different ideas about the prevailing wisdom about COVID were punished like they were sanctioned. And they had a hard time getting their research published. That's all a dark chapter in where in a dark glimpse in where we are kind of intellectually in this country. Anyways, Catherine, I'm interested in a thing that Elon Musk has said, but also Glenn Greenwald has said, Matt Taibbi has said, Tom Fettin has said so it must be true, which is that the Twitter files show that there has been, quote, election interference, unquote, in the 2020 election. I am a literalist at heart and this makes me mad. Can you talk me down from that? Or is that as awful as I imagine it to be? No, let's be mad. I think that the idea that contributing to and in some cases, you know, squelching and distorting discourse around topics that have political relevance is not the same thing as election interference. And that maintaining those distinctions is important, not least because we don't want to empower sitting officials to call election interference on their political foes. That's a really, really dangerous precedent. And so we don't want slippage with that terminology. It's not a question of like, well, actually, elections are really complicated things in the modern era. And so maybe everything is election interference. No, absolutely not. We need to keep that category clear because the powerful will exploit uncertainty around that terminology to make elections less free to actually interfere with elections. I don't think Twitter did the right thing to throttle. I don't think Twitter did the right thing to throttle the New York Post story. But I also don't think that is the same thing as stuffing a ballot box or, you know, sending out a fly or telling people the wrong election day and preserving the distinction between those two types of behaviors is really important. Peter, one question that all of this, and I know you can't say begs because of other literalists, but a question that it suggests raises. Raises, thank you, is does Twitter actually matter, man? Which is to say everyone's talking about it, et cetera, et cetera. But is that we have seen in the past, people don't win elections by catering to Twitter. Twitter is an elite discourse sandbox where people act like three year olds. For the most part, what is your sense of the actual heft and comparative importance of Twitter in this modern world of ours? I think it's exactly what you said. It's an elite discourse sandbox. And on the one hand, that makes it quite important because for when it comes to politics, when it comes to big business, when it comes to the decisions that shape a lot of people's lives, they are often made by people who we would consider very broadly speaking elites. And in particular, journalists and people who deal in knowledge for their business all day long, you just go into any newsroom, whether it's a small nonprofit like Reason, whether it's a big, you know, for-profit newsroom like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. And you will see a huge, huge number of screens in which Twitter is open, either in the background or as the main thing. It is, it's not true of every journalist, but it is simply true that many, many journalists live on Twitter, which explains some of the other dynamics here. Like it's sort of a place and a polity. It's also like a bar and a club and a hangout space. And so that's why people are mad that Elon took over, right? Like Elon basically bought the bar that all the journalists hang out at all day and then made himself king of it. And it's just like, no, no, the Jamison special. We're not doing that anymore. Now it's only, it's only limoncello shots. And people are mad because they like the Jamison, they like the Jamison special. So obviously it's important where journalists, where, you know, government officials hang out, right? And so this is a big thing in the White House. The Biden White House has on the one hand decided to pay less attention to Twitter than the Trump White House did. On the other hand, Ron Klain, the chief of staff to President Biden appears to spend all day on Twitter. Just follow his feed and you will see just tweets constantly, constantly, constantly throughout the day. And he's the chief of staff to the president of the United States. And so it matters in that way. But Twitter is not a force for mass culture outside of the fact that it influences the people who create mass culture and the discourse. It's not something that most people spend a lot of time on. It has a much smaller footprint than other social media companies, even something like Facebook, which is in decline. And so on the one hand, yes, it obviously matters because journalists and political actors and information workers matter a lot to our discourse. And on the other hand, it's just go if you just asked 100 random people in any city that wasn't DC, New York, L.A. or San Francisco, what did you think about what happened on Twitter today? They would be like, what? Whereas if you went to my dog park in my middle class DC neighborhood and asked people, what did you think about what happened on Twitter today? Well, you wouldn't even need to ask them because when I go to the dog park, they're all sit around, watch their dogs play, talking about Twitter. I'm not making this up. That's what it's like to live here. Catherine, did I just hear a great story assignment for Reason TV? Maybe, yeah. I'm still hung up on the idea of what it would be like if the entire political and journalistic class just started drinking like a ton of limoncello. I think it would be good for the nation. I want to see one of those paintings where the old Democratic presidents or Republican presidents are playing pool or horseshoes, but it's the bar that Peter imagined. Yeah. No, I mean, this is, and in fact, even sometimes I have this phenomenon where I will like come home at the end of the day and talk to my husband who is not in journalism and is not in government. He's not part of those worlds. I will start to relate to him what happened on Twitter today. About half the time, I'm like, yeah, this is interesting and important. About half the time, I get a quarter of the way in and I'm like, actually, you know what? Never mind. I think that's about right. So where did Bean Dad fall on the nevermind versus actually really? Bean Dad started a national conversation. Bean Dad got the full detail treatment, but that is because we're in the phase of life where we're still trying to decide whether or not to be Bean Dad, so that was more practical application. I'll tell you this. If we lived in a world without cans, Bean Dad wouldn't need to exist, you know, or if they were all poll tops. I think one of the more interesting questions and this will go to whether or not Elon Musk is just a self-serving sack of shit or a really, you know, tough and interesting boss who might bring Twitter into the next iteration of transparency is seeing, you know, whether or not he releases more information about how the Trump administration pressured Twitter because there's some mentions of that and some kind of, you know, ruminations about that or premonitions of that and some of the stuff that's been released. But it's not just, you know, it wasn't just Obama and it wasn't just Biden who is trying to work the refs at Twitter. And we know that everybody knows this, that Donald Trump and the people around him are the biggest fucking crybabies in the world. Every time anything gets said that is 150 percent, you know, uncritically positive about Trump, you would get an earful. And I would like to see that. I would like to see, and what kind of agencies, what kind of deep state people were working the refs during the Trump years and things like that. But I think that would be really helpful. All right, let's leave our limoncello bar slash sandbox and get here quickly to our listener email of the week in a moment. But first, I wanted to let you know that the FTC apparently requires me to read before continuing on with an advertisement, the phrase, this episode is brought to you by better help. Ain't compliance grand, friends. We all know probably too well that the holiday season can be one logistical and emotional minefield after another. Family travel, shopping, COVID anxiety, shorter days, colder nights, broken kneecaps. Sure, you could try blundering through the darkness like I do every day or maybe this year get yourself and your brain a guide to help you navigate the tricky bits. That's where BetterHelp, the world's largest therapy service, comes in. BetterHelp has matched three million people with professionally licensed and vetted therapists. It's an affordable service 100% online like Peter and super flexible. If you don't like your first match, swap them out for another until you find the right fit. Listeners who act now can get 10% off their first month. Just go to betterhelp.com slash roundtable, fill out a brief questionnaire and find your guide through the looming darkness. That's better. HLP like prayer. Go there today. You'll be glad you did. All right, reminder to send your out loud readable queries to roundtable at reason.com, this one which if I read the whole thing would double the length of this podcast comes from Jay Linton who after detailing the razor thin electoral margins of various contests, writes should libertarian, that was a capitalized L, candidates throw the election one way or the other in exchange for a public pledge by one or two large party candidates for example adopting an official public policy and or naming them to a cabinet position. Obviously the candidate couldn't force voters to cooperate but with the large number of libertarians in excess of the number needed suggests that enough would go along with the scheme to make it work. And of course no one could prove that it didn't. What do you think Nick you've been covering the machinations of the libertarian party this year? What say you? I like what Chase Oliver the libertarian candidate for Senate in Georgia did after a runoff after he forced a runoff by more than covering the spread between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker keeping them from getting a clear majority. He tried to have a conversation with each of them publicly and then he would make a decision of which you know who he would suggest or advise his voters to go for in the runoff election. I think that makes sense. I think if you do it in a very kind of clear cut way with real hardcore specifics and promises from a candidate that makes a certain amount of sense. I think what Mark Victor the Senate candidate the LP Senate candidate in Arizona did where he threw in the towel well before the general election and endorsed Blake Masters was doubly wrong. If you I mean if you're a candidate and you throw in the towel before the election you are really undermining the whole legitimacy or the reason for a party to exist. So that was bad and then the discussion he had with Blake Masters was essentially Blake Masters said you know for a while in high school I used human action to keep up one leg of the table in my lab in high school. So Victor was like yeah you ought to vote for a guy who like a couple of weeks before had said libertarianism doesn't work who is against immigration who is against free trade agreements among many other things and talks about using the state as a tool of moral instruction and correction. So there's a good way to do this and a bad way to do this. Catherine is having trying to extract a pledge from a major party candidate if you are a libertarian or some other minor party candidate even less useful than voting. Yeah that was absolutely what I focused on in this question so I appreciate that you know me so well. Why in the world would you trust the promises of major party politicians? They are stinky liars who will betray you and that's what's gonna happen here. Hey Biden delivered most of what he's promised he's certainly working at it promises man. I think that there is in fact political science research that suggests that politicians do feel in some sense bound by their promises and try to deliver on them even if they don't necessarily always. I think that of all the promises that politicians might in fact feel bound by one made to an LP candidate who then does or doesn't deliver perhaps as many as 60% of the LP vote since as we know from other social scientific literature the libertarian vote does not always swing one way. Those people tend to be divided. I would also just guess that when LP candidates throw their support behind a major party candidate that more so even than other political minorities libertarians are like screw you you're not my real dad and you can't tell me what to do so I don't know how many votes they have to command. I just don't think this is the way like I understand why this is a question that someone would ask and it's a reasonable enough question to ask. I think it is what it betrays is sort of a wishing a dream that our system was more like so many other systems where there are more than two parties and that then the parties can form coalitions unfortunately that is not what our system is like and so now and always I think that it makes much more sense to focus on policy and not electoral politics. Peter you live in a libertarian dog park what say you? Yeah I mean it depends it depends on the candidate it depends on the pledge does it depend and the circumstances the candidate's a libertarian party he's talking about he's not talking about like you he's talking about like someone who got the ballot the LP the candidate the LP candidate would be making a deal with and what they would be promising but in the main I think the answer is no this is not a deal that is obviously worth making at least most of the time if only because I think there's a real risk of undermining what is in some ways the main point or at least a main point of running as a capital L libertarian isn't isn't the point of running as a as an LP candidate to carve out space for something that is truly different something that is not really even compatible with two party you know sort of binary politics orthodoxy as we know it I think the like if you're going to run as a third party then you should have you should have a sense of yourself as being distinct enough that well you know that the other parties aren't the the reason you're a third parties the other parties aren't good enough and what you say is well if they just did this one thing they would be then doesn't that mean that in some sense you're okay enough with that with that party and with its platform if like in and I the LP has many many problems these days but in an ideal world it is truly distinct from from republican party and the democratic party and this this method of sort of trading I think undermines that distinctness which is part of the sort of at least theoretical value of having a third party I think that's true but then you do have the runoff example that I gave as well as in a state like California where only the top two people in an open primary go on to the final election and if you had an election where it's within spitting distance and the libertarian party candidate has done well they I think they should absolutely apply themselves and and try to stage a discussion about a couple of issues that are very important and force the major parties to kind of reckon with you know the idea that there is a libertarian vote out there and that's why I said it depends on the candidate and on the pledge and if you could get something substantial out of it and actually get that thing rather than just get a campaign trail promise that didn't pay off and was almost certainly not going to pay off and was you know small to begin with then maybe I could see a circumstance in which I would think that's not a bad idea I just think in the main it's not going to work out very well. Do you think about stuff like the you know the tax pledges right which like they weren't irrelevant but when it came time to check those over the side of the boat for political expediency people did so without a blink of an eye and so I think you know I think concessions to get an appointment somewhere are probably the most promising in some ways you know make me your secretary of transportation or whatever I don't see at least at the moment in our political landscape any LP candidates that are in a place to wield enough power to get a really substantial concession like that. My answer to the question is similar to Nick's which is to say never do this if you're on the ballot and should there be a circumstance that the design of the election makes it so that you're not on the ballot through otherwise no fault of your own then maybe if you can like try to foreground the issue that you were running on and you can get some discussion of it that that could be a worthwhile exercise with the strong caveat of a phrase that OG political blogger and occasional and culture Armcandy Mickey Kouse used to use cheap dates which is to say there are people who are just looking for a reason to throw their support behind someone because they just kind of like them so if he or she mentioned the one author that they might have read or whatever you know there was we had a piece and I've been blanking on who wrote it for us not long after Obama got elected he was supposed to be you know the most transparent administration in history and it was amazing how many transparency type of organizations were total cheap dates when it came to Obama he just said those words and they thought they won and they started giving him all the awards for being like sunshine dude of the year and stuff that were all like aspirational preemptive or congratulating themselves for extracting that really important pledge that he then did nothing and I mean the opposite of something to do anything about so don't be a cheap date if if you're in that unusual position the George runoff position is an unusual law and the California top two thing is terrible past in the name of of helping third parties which it obviously has helped quash so it's a rare case I think third parties should run elections and candidates and that there's way more libertarian voters to Catherine's point than there are members of the party and don't don't assume that you that you have those people in the palm of your hand and they can be deployed however you decide to at the last minute of a two-party election and that's the memo do we have time for a lightning round let's do a quick lightning round last week Catherine's sexy Arizona girlfriend Kirsten Sinema senator announced that she and her sartorial splendor would be leaving the democratic party to become an independent this will not have any huge implications on the democrats slim majority in the world's allegedly greatest deliberative body as she will continue to caucus on team dem but it did make a lot of people really big mad so Catherine does she still retain your affections I mean she's amplified them she made me big happy obviously I I read some years back a book that was pretty good about this this trend of kind of the growth of people identifying as independents and so it's really interesting to see that play out here I also really really enjoyed the irony of Bernie Sanders's reaction to her announcement which was basically like get her ass like he was furious at her and and was like I would strongly consider backing a challenger to her I mean it's like Bernie baby like do you not can you not see the letter next to your name like I you know I get it like there's it he's being philosophically consistent to say I back progressive candidates but it you know give a girl a break like sometimes you've got to be an independent because your party goes one way and you go the other and Bernie of all people should appreciate that I you know I continue to have only optimism about Arizona just general I mean that kind of the little square states out there generally seem to produce some of America's better politics and and I'm delighted that that my sexy Arizonian girlfriend is now an independent uh Nick you've been invoked what's a uh well I do think that uh we were right mad in the Declaration of Independence how libertarian politics can fix what's wrong with America that it's just independence everywhere I mean I don't know about you everywhere I look I just see a growth in independence but it's always great uh whenever a you know whenever a politician disaffiliates with a major party I would prefer that they become libertarians even though I'm not a member of the party but putting that eye there you know that's a pronoun I can get behind man a political you mean your pronoun isn't prosecute fouchy I'm so ready for the pronoun discourse to be I don't think that's a that's a gerund maybe or something I don't know an adverb peter how does uh cinema split your infinitive I'm just glad that there will be more opportunities to reference one of the greatest books I've ever read the declaration of independence I know I actually had a real question for you which is uh point out though the the real problem with cinema is is it Kristen or Kirsten yeah I think it's you know I mean I'm not already that's even worse that's like oh yeah I I mean just all hard C names should just be Kathy all right Catherine Kathy you know uh to me the question is uh is is whether it's cinema or film uh cinema or movies we're just gonna start calling her Kristen film Kristen film uh no but Peter does this not um uh does she then suck some of the hate from your sexy West Virginia boyfriend Joe Manchin uh or how does this uh no thank you for that phrasing what what nothing carry on yeah uh something something Joe Manchin Peter go it depends on how she ends up using her vote but um I think it's quite possible she is someone who has already courted the hate of the partisans uh in the Democratic Party uh just by refusing to sort of automatically sign on to things that Joe Biden wants her to sign on to and this suggests that she is going to continue doing that if so then I assume that the people who's sort of driving theory of politics is Democrats should do stuff that Democrats want to do determined by top Democrats cinema film movie lady she doesn't want to she doesn't seem particularly inclined to uh to approach politics that way and uh you know while I'm certain that I will disagree with many of her votes and many of her sort of policy preferences I I think a less partisan less party politics driven way of of approaching American politics is good and I'm glad to see it um gaining prominence if we may it's also worth pointing out that you know every a lot of the discourse around this was that this was a fantastic strategic move by her to kind of stave off a Democratic primary challenge um but which may or may not be true but you know the Republican Party in Arizona is batshit crazy I mean they are you know they are still behind Carrie Lake who is nuts um and is you know has little to no reality testing so it remains to be seen how this affects the Republican Party in Arizona which could have could have nominated Doug Ducey one of the most popular and successful two-term governors anywhere but in Arizona history he would have won against Markelle you know easily and instead they're stuck with this now and the Republican Party may go nuts after cinema or film or whatever we want to call her the big K and that could shake things up in a way that uh is unpredictable and kind of interesting. All right let's go to our end of podcast what we have been consuming in the cultural arena Catherine do you want to lead us off? Yeah I am reading Wolf Hall which is the first of a trilogy by Hilary Mantell I don't know why I'm so late to these books which are pretty clearly um on brand for me um there is a they came out I think in 2010 or the first one did um there's a television adaptation that is relatively recent maybe actually 2009 there's a television adaptation that's pretty recent so it kind of popped back up into the cultural discourse a couple people recommended them to me um in my uh still also Mantell recently died quite unexpectedly yeah so there's there's kind of been a little bit of a convergence they they came up as suggestions for my COVID uh me uh recommendations but um they're they're um you know they're the story of kind of court intrigue Thomas Cromwell um really really gorgeously written I am like the 10 000th person to note this but uh English is kind of a cool language and these books are doing something very interesting with English uh and um and just like really really delightful and immersive to read recommend them for your Christmas break if you have not already consumed them I have not yet watched the series so I can't speak to that but it also got good reviews. I will just note for the record uh that when Catherine came over and saw Wolf Hall on my shelf like on my reading stack shelf she was like really dude are you gonna you're actually gonna do that this was about three months ago I just I had the wrong I had the wrong impression of it you know sometimes you just get like I think I must have seen one advertisement for the series and I just thought I thought the wrong thing about these books and I guess that's a a lesson to not always um you know judged by first appearances. What are the stakes for liberty in the court intrigue or is that a uh is that a uh a theme is somebody more pro-liberty or anti-liberty and I would not say that uh the at least the first in the series lends itself to reading through much of a uh a libertarian lens except for in so far as it is a is a portrait of a person grasping for power um and not a uh an entirely flattering one. Nick you're a doctor of English literature what did you consume? Yes yes I actually American literature. Whatever it's written in English. I feel English literature is best understood as a footnote to American literature. Yeah so uh I answer the question. Yeah so I uh I finished uh season two of White Lotus which I highly recommend and may come back to but I'm going to talk about Ozzy Wynn's Inner Circle which is a magic uh show that is currently in New York City and it's reasonably priced which is a strange thing to say about anything in New York City but Ozzy Wynn is an Israeli-born magician who has worked with people like Penn and Teller and David Blaine and he's a master of kind of close-up card magic which I'm not that big a magician fan I mean I like Jiffy Pop and The Amazing Blackstone or whoever did that ad but this is a phenomenal show and it's a great experience which is one of the things that I've been into post COVID and in terms of art in general there's a real turn to immersive art or experiential art and the way that Wynn does this they created this tiny theater that's really craft apparently they had to uh that's on the NYU campus and they had to get special uh kind of variances to build a theater in this way because you're really close up on each other because you want to see the hands and what he's doing and it's just magical I went with two people who are true magic aficionados and they know all of the card tricks and they couldn't figure this a couple of the things that he did out it's really magical and fascinating and it's an intense experience to you know just have your mind blown close up so I highly recommend Ozzy Wynn's inner circle scour the internet for and YouTube and whatnot for video of him he's a phenomenal performer and it's really delightful all right peter what have you been consuming I watched the menu a smart mean funny satire of class and high-end cuisine so it's it's set at a super fancy restaurant on a secluded island that serves only a handful of very wealthy guests each night it's a it's 1250 ahead we are told in the opening sequence so you could imagine how things go with a bunch of rich people and a famous chef played by a very sort of funny and dour refines and a whole lot of knives and other cutting implements and like stuff that makes fire and meat right and it's the sort of movie that like you know is driven by class politics in a way that could have been really irritating and really annoying but in fact turns out to be quite clever I just really really amusing and well executed because the argument it makes the main idea is not necessarily that it's bad to be rich or that great food is bad in fact the movie is very loving about the way it presents the food aspects but instead it's it's sort of an argument that snobs and estates and people who are not in into food for the thing itself kind of ruin the art and make it and that making it perfect and elevated to the point of joylessness is is something that sort of takes the soul of it away both for the people who should be enjoying these creations and for the creators themselves and so it's a really smart funny meditation on class and you know and food and art and like what it means to be an artist and also what it means to be a consumer of art and it's just a much better movie I think than I expected watching the trailers which made it look like it was going to be this very sort of blunt and obvious you know class food satire and it's it's a lot it's a lot better movie than that a lot smarter film so long-suffering listeners will recall that I am engaged constantly never ending quest to do a couple of things one is to find an appropriate movie for family night not easy to do in a household such as mine and and also to check the boxes off classics that everyone else has seen and it's ridiculous that I haven't seen it so far so in that in mind and we take a moment to guess we know because that's mine I was going to I was going to say we can take a moment to guess Nick but since you interrupted me and since Catherine confessed the answer I'm just going to go straight into it so the Christmas movie that I finally got to check the box off on with the whole family except for the teenager come on but she would have loved it was Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas it's great people really more of a halloween mood yeah I mean that's there's a there's an argument to be made you can start watching it in October and watch it straight through the new year if for instance it comes out when you are 13 and it becomes your entire personality for a minute just hypothetically oh my god were you you were the little so many tumblers locked into place were you batting your big eyelashes at a metaphorical jack I mean I had a goth moment wow that lasted 30 years I envy you having being able to see that in a form at a moment it was it was definitely and it's like Tim Burton it's peak Tim Burton it's good stuff and you know I don't know that I perceived it as primarily an eyelash batting activity so much is just like a whole a whole aesthetic if you like that movie I strongly recommend Guillermo del Toro's new Pinocchio which is also stop motion and which is like a total like dad heart like heart wrenching kind of situation with Gepetto and his his you know his the boy that he carves but it's like he's reimagined it as being set during the first part of the 1900 of the 20th century sort of as like at the dawn of fascism because it's del Toro and it's a movie about how about how being a parent is good and fascism is bad and it's beautiful I will watch it but that sounds like a terrible Matt how did your daughter enjoy the nightmare before the the seven-year-old loved it the 14-year-old again would have loved it because she's starting to get into a Tim Burton phase and I loved it too for I know that there are people who haven't seen that movie because when I tweeted about it Bill Schultz America's sweetheart said that he also has never seen it because I mean I get why you wouldn't like it's a Tim Burton when that movie came out was kind of he was he was uh oversaturating the culture a little bit um actually fun fact not directed by Tim Burton directed by Henry Selnick that's right there's some controversy about how much Tim Burton deserves credit for that um it is his uh Henry Selnick or Selnick is a really good director in his own there uh Burton apparently had like conceived of this when he was like Catherine's age when she watched it or something like that um so this is a definitely a a flowering of his uh of his artistic genre but it is also for Danny Elfman um that was my big takeaway in addition it's just gorgeous and it's fun to look at it doesn't make any sense and it doesn't matter um but that uh the music is like almost heartfelt tiddly uh Elfman ask he wrote all the songs he sings the songs that Jack sings um and as a someone who grew up in Southern California in the 80s where Oingo Boingo reigned supreme especially playing their Halloween shows that they would play in Orange County um you could tell like he put he put all of his heart and soul in the nightmare before Christmas I haven't seen every Elfman movie because I don't watch Peter Suderman's movies for the most part but uh it's it's really great so uh treat yourself if you haven't done it before not even before Christmas you'll be glad you did do it today etc um okay uh this is nothing Elfman has ever done will beat his theme for the first Burton Batman which plays in my head every time I hear the word Batman do do do do do stop okay thanks for listening to the Reason Roundtable podcast Matt uh you want to split a case of lemon cello now you think I haven't been hitting it already I got I got the full compliment right next to me right next to the baseball cards and the keyboard um okay uh listen to all of our podcast at reason.com slash podcasts including the reason interview with Nikolas B which sometimes is held in speakeasy like fashion uh Nick do you want to uh pimp your next speakeasy of all I could have pimp the last one which was about decriminalizing and destigmatizing sex work Matt which is up online at reason.com and our YouTube channel but the next one is January 4th in New York and it's with Andrew Tatarski a psychologist and therapist and Maya Salavis a journalist and author talking about harm reduction as it applies to drug policy addiction counseling and actual use of currently illegal substances it's going to be fantastic go to reason.com slash events and you can get information on the reason speakeasy on January 4th I won't tell you as is my costume usually to go mash the donate button because you did so so vigorously before I just want to thank you for your participation in the webathon which was marvelous results and thank you for all this it helps us do our work which is really fun and great all right we'll catch you next week thank you and good luck and good night