 Welcome to the Reason Roundtable, your weekly podcast from the magazine that loves freedom every bit as much as Flacco, the Eurasian Eagle Owl. I am Matt Welch, joined by Nikolas B. Peter Suderman and Catherine Mangu Ward. Hi, everyone. Howdy. Happy. I believe it's pronounced Flacco. Flacco? I mean, Flaco would also be kind of cool if it was named after, you know, former Arizona Senator Jeff... Happy whatever the heck that was Monday. There should be a Jeff Flake lookalike Eurasian Eagle Owl prowling the mean streets of Central Park. I think we can all agree on that at the outset of this podcast. Okay. Starting strong. Sorry. Starting strong. Yeah. What an edge to talk about. That was how we can't even stretch our arms out on the porch in the morning without inadvertently punching some politician who wants to crack down on TikTok right in the face. On Fox News this Sunday, it was Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner. How long has he been there, Nick? He said... Wasn't Mark Warner... Well, he's one of the original Warner Brothers, right? He's one of the original Warner Brothers. So, you know, 120 years, something like that. He wants a broad bipartisan bill, BBB, B-Cubed, to give the federal government leeway to ban Chinese technology, including the popular video sharing service. You have 100 million Americans on TikTok for 90 minutes every day, the Virginia Democrats said. They are taking data from Americans, not keeping it safe. But what worries me more with TikTok is that this can be a propaganda tool. If by propaganda, Mark Warner means spastic 12-second dance lip-syncing routines, then yes, I have witnessed this evil in my own house. The House Foreign Affairs Committee last week fast-tracked a similar bill that would give the executive branch authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. That sounds great. To ban TikTok, if the administration determines the company has knowingly transferred user data to any foreign person, I said user data. That's fine. Take her. I hate those people in Washington. Yeah. My long. Matt, maybe we should write a book together. No, we should not. We seem to be collaborating quite a bit right now. Anyways, yeah. If you're out of the influence, if they share the data with any person working for or out of the influence of the red Chinese government, then they could be banned. That just scratches the surface to proposed governmental remedies, including outright legislative bans suggested by the likes of surprise just Senator Josh Hawley. TikTok is prohibited already on government work phones in about half the country, plus many state university networks. Democratic Senator Michael Bennett is pushing Apple and Google to just remove TikTok from their app stores. That'll work. But it's not just concern about commies. There's widespread societal and social scientific anxiety popularized by the likes of Jonathan Haidt, no stranger to your earlobes. That the sharp uptick in teen mental health issues over the past decade or so, particularly among the girls, is attributable to smartphones and social networks. Handing TikTok to a teenage girl. The feeling goes is like asking them to play Russian roulette. Or do I mean red Chinese roulette, Catherine? No. Bravo. Yeah. All right. Give me a little extra time to prepare in the morning. It's terrible. Catherine, I want to get into the teen anxiety stuff a little bit later. But I think that you might have burst a blood vessel this morning reading some of the quotes from various politicians about this. Do you want to share the crazy with the whole class? Did you spill your coffee on your editor trousers? I did not do that. In fact, I was in kind of the opposite situation. For those who are close listeners to this podcast, you will recall that I busted up my knee. So as a result, I've been riding a fucking exercise bike every morning like a douchebag. Oh, that's great. I was on the bike just pedaling away full of resentment. And when I cracked open this wired article about a potential TikTok ban, and it is a good article full of bad things. It is just banger after banger. What does that mean? Just terrible, terrible quotes from idiots nicely arranged for my information. And this one was the one that broke me. It was somewhere around mile four. Can we just admit that the Chinese Communist Party is an adversary, and Silicon Valley is not an actual adversary, says Senator Kevin Kramer of North Dakota, a Republican. These are similar issues, but they're not the exact same issues. The Chinese Communist Party is an adversary. Silicon Valley is an unruly child. Screw you. Kevin Kramer of North Dakota sounds like an AI generated. Sounds like a real senator. I agree. I liked it. Did anybody check that? It is Kevin Kramer. The very notion, first of all, that we would talk about the powerhouse of innovation and cool stuff in this country as unruly children. The fact that we would talk about any American that a senator would talk about any American citizens as unruly children is just absolutely shocking. Wait, you're surprised by that? That seems like the least surprising thing I can imagine about a sitting elected official with a lot of power over people's lives. I know they believe that. I know they believe that, but it's really a kind of say the quiet part loud scenario to me. I don't know. But yeah, so as you say, there's kind of these dual justifications for why we got to make the TikTok go away forever. And one is the teen girls are sad, and we'll talk about that more. And then the other is China. The China thing is largely hypothetical, which I think is interesting. Like all of the discussions of this are not. We have a smoking gun of the ways in which the Chinese government is using TikTok either to gather data about Americans or to like Psyop mood manipulate our teens with the videos, which is absolutely a serious thesis that is being run around on Capitol Hill right now. You can't ban a product that millions of people use on a hypothetical, especially because this narrow ban won't even solve the problem. There is there's still plenty of opportunities for American companies to sell, share, share conclusions from data of the same type with other nations, including China. And we shouldn't ban that either. Or for China to just do it on the road. Like they don't need a dedicated feed going directly into, you know, Chinese government computers. Like all of this stuff is available on every social media. If you do have national security concerns that were serious and well substantiated, there would still be many ways to minimize those risks without just flatly banning a product that millions of people use and love. You know, the essential read on this, the pre-bottle to the current mania is the recent Reason article co-authored by Milton Mueller, who's been writing for Internet Freedom going back to the early 80s at Reason. But he's got a great piece recently in Reason with a co-author whose name is escaping me, and I apologize for that, but runs through all of the arguments why this is a classic Internet hysteria and should not be taken seriously and that the main policy prescription, which is, okay, let's ban it. So China is bad partly because of the Great Firewall of China, which we've been hearing about for decades now where they ban free access to their citizens on Internet stuff. We're going to fix them by doing something amazingly similar. It's like, great, you know, why don't we, you know, once Russia starts drafting people, why don't we start instituting a draft? Maybe, you know, you got to fight fire with fire. The co-author is, by the way, Georgia Tech's Karim Farhat. Thank you. Nick, that sounded dangerously close to a Washington Post editorial, at least a pitch there. Yeah, yeah, I have ironic quotes about it all. But no, it's amazing how like all you have to do to resurrect the shittiest arguments of the Cold War is sprinkle, you know, some kind of like Internet fairy dust on it or something like that or social media now. The Internet is too old. But, you know, once we're talking about social media, my favorite argument that is starting to emanate from this with the stink of, you know, like weak old socks on top of a laundry hamper is the idea that, you know, in China, TikTok exclusively is used to teach like, you know, third, you know, eighth year calculus to, you know, babies in utero in China. But here all we're doing is milk cry challenges and silly dances. So the real threat to this is that it's distracting children from learning higher level math so we can compete with China. I should mention how my teen now, teen girl, 14, has evolved in her TikTok usage. It used to be the aforementioned spastic dancing and lip singing and there's probably still some of that. But mostly now she and her cohort are using it to share clips of culture that they enjoy. And for her, that is two main sources these days, which probably tells you something about my parenting, if nothing else. One is videos from Breaking Bad or like a compilation videos from Breaking Bad. And the other is South Park. She's absolutely hysterically pro South Park and just is sending me TikTok clips of editing South Park day after day. Peter, I want you to react to your fellow Floridian. Senator Marco Rubio said the following about TikTok. It's kind of a long quote, but just bear with me here. Imagine him dancing to it, doing a TikTok dance. Oh my God, yeah, just the arm action would be like better than Michael Stipe. He has to stand on a table. Yeah, he has to stand on a table so we can see his whole body. That's me in the quote. If you're certainly willing to fly a balloon over your continental airspace and have people see it with a naked eye, what would make you not weaponize data? To have virtually all of the data on over 50 million American devices accessed daily by the Communist Party of China will pose an indescribable risk to America's national security, to our economy, to our competitiveness. Just think about the advantage China would have information on us. Their government would have information on us that no government in the history of the world has ever had on the citizens of another country. There's nothing to compare it to. Peter, is he right or just totally right? I think a lot of this is really hyperbolic. At the same time, I'm not sure I totally agree with Catherine that the concerns about Chinese government use of data and interaction with American media companies and sort of American entertainment is totally hypothetical because we in fact do know how China interacts with American media and entertainment companies because there are a lot of American companies that do business with China. The NBA and video game companies in Hollywood in particular and what China ends up doing is it prohibits criticism of an authoritarian regime. Even light, indirect and implied criticism. It makes American corporations toe the line. It makes American movie stars issue completely ridiculous apologies for having accidentally said like the wrong three-word phrase in the midst of an answer. Right? And implicitly... It doesn't make them. That's true. All right. It doesn't make them. It simply creates an environment. It's implicit. But what it does is it creates an environment where they want to do business in China. They feel like they have to do this. And so American movie companies are editing movies for the Chinese market. They sometimes get totally different scenes. Villains are removed because of the Chinese market because in order not to offend China. And in some ways this is small ball stuff. And this I think is actually sort of where I'm like less concerned about this is even is like in some ways like this is objectionable and I don't like it. And in other ways, I guess I'm not that. I don't feel like it's a giant national security threat that I don't know a former wrestler who's now a movie star has to issue an awkward apology for some of this stuff. I'm not like that bothered by all of this personally. I don't feel like it's that big a deal. At the same time, I don't think it's nothing. And I think that like as libertarians who are concerned about government power we should be concerned about the biggest most oppressive totalitarian regime on the planet and the ways that they exercise power not only over their own citizens but the ways that they will sort of use soft power to do you don't know what. And this is right to what? I agree with you Peter. This is the biggest flaw in this argument is everyone's like well China will have a lot of data and they will do and then it's like they'll that's it. There's a big blank after that and it's not obvious what they're going to do with all of our TikTok videos except suppress the ones that are like let me tell you why China is a very bad authoritarian totalitarian government. And in some ways that's bad but you know what there's always Facebook and there's always Twitter and there's always you know there's always sub-stack if you want to like share your anti-China like China is very bad just you know destroying like the freedom for you know a billion people arguments and like are we that worse off because you can't say that on TikTok and TikTok is very popular I don't know I in some ways I also just don't deeply don't care because five or ten years from now no one will be on TikTok no that's not true that's that's what that is also hyper hyperbole at the same time I just I view social media as like not a static arrangement and the fact that TikTok is the the social media site of the moment and the one that teens are currently obsessed with like the thing that we know from the last twenty years of social media is that ten years from now TikTok will no longer be the hot cool thing and to try to and to treat it as this giant threat even if you think there are legitimate concerns with like Chinese communists authoritarian governments you know who like in fact do demand a certain amount of a certain amount of sort of control from Chinese owned companies right like Chinese owned companies operate genuinely differently than American companies do with regards to the ways that they interact with their government at the same times like ten years from now ten years from now everybody's gonna be in the metaverse right you're arguing now with yourself again argue with you besides yourself I mean if I may just one one really important factor to this specific debate is that the versions of TikTok that are available outside of China do not censor as far as far as you know is known do not censor content and this is part of the Mueller article where he really talks about how you know criticism of the Chinese government and you know defenses of Falun Gong and and other things that are verboten to talk about in China is available there Peter I agree that there is something really disturbing about the way the US entertainment industry is cowtowing to China in all sorts of obvious ways and less obvious ways and that should be a absolute you know topic of conversation but again that's not what we're talking about here what we're talking about is a bipartisan bipartisan consensus brewing in the US of the government they're not going to restrict China you know they're going to restrict Americans ability to do what they want to say what they want and it has to be called out as you know a kind of internet fueled social media enabled hysteria that should stop and we should be having those arguments I mean it's you know it's still about the the US entertainment industry the way the NBA responded to mild criticisms of China the way that Blizzard Entertainment and other you know other actors have done we should be having a robust screaming match about that in America because that's fucked up and that's something we can control as consumers or we can affect us Catherine let's go to the giant height argument about this our tick-tock social media apps smartphones the whole lot like handing a loaded gun to adolescent girls and if so have you already handed that gun to yours because guns are awesome guns are awesome and I'm looking forward to my newly 12-year-old daughter going to learning to shoot rifles camp this summer which is which is it's three weeks it's three weeks in the woods that's the Lyle and Eric Menendez shooting it's like a it's like a 1920s like 1920s feminism camp so it's like all girls but it's like we gals got a dress for dinner and learn to shoot guns it's gonna be great anyway that's what I have given her I have not yet given her tick-tock because I think that a big part of this equation I'm old enough to remember when Libertarians and conservatives would say stuff about parental responsibility I don't know what happened to that that's fully gone well we still have parental responsibility it's just that the senators think that Americans are the children and they're the parents right there are the unruly children that's a good point that's an excellent point parental responsibility is now solely in the hands of a made-up senator from a Dakota but the you know I do think that's West Dakota you think that's a huge part of this equation is like my kids not on tick-tock yet she will be because it's pretty fun I love tick-tock I spend I am part of the Americans that spend many many minutes a day on tick-tock it's delightful I am annoyed at tick-tock for promoting for the kind of censorship it actually does do which is you know obscenity and kind of you know that that type of content because it means that all the people use dumb euphemisms for everything they're still talking about these topics but they just use like only pans is like what they say instead of only fans and it's like I don't think that's working I think this is just made everyone sound stupid so I'm there is some censorship shirt and tick-tock but as far as we can tell in American tick-tock as noted it is not it is not in the service of the the red Chinese so wait so it's like the big Lebowski when you watch it on television and and John Goodman is yelling this is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps except that's not what he's saying exactly the people edit their captions so they still verbally say the words but the captions don't have it on the theory that maybe the algorithm is searching the captions it's dumb anyway this is not an answer your question your question is what about the sad teen girls there's clearly something real going on and I am sympathetic to what seems to be a large cohort of like men in their fifties who are really really worried about this I am more be nice you know yeah they're called parents about it too Catherine but I think it is you know my bias here is that it is almost always a mistake to select for a monocausal technological explanation for a social phenomenon that's it well that's well putt and this is that right now that's where the discolors can I just point out and I realize this has nothing to do with what we're talking about but when you were talking about censorship on tiktok today you know well what you know Google the filthiest sex you can imagine no on Twitter on Twitter and there is there is hardcore pornography available on Twitter and all of the discussions of Twitter and censorship and content moderation like I've never heard anybody just point out you know there is hardcore porn there's a lot of hardcore porn on the internet like there's plenty no no no but what not not on not on Facebook not on Instagram not on Twitter you would expect not on Twitter but it's there and it's how would you define hardcore versus other types Google hardcore porn near Peter Google imagine something and enter it into Twitter and you will you'll get a mouth nope no lemon maybe near all right last week what is that did you just make that up Peter Suderman please what a lemon party don't just just please Matt Welch was he kind of hosted the original remembering don't don't do it if you do it while we're doing this this podcast it's gonna be bad this listener and participant alike let's pivot to Peter Suderman not about lemon parties yet but about the great piece the role last week that I want to talk about the headline and subhead are as follows decades of subsidies have made the essentials of middle-class life increasingly difficult to afford the basics of middle-class life are too expensive but more subsidies won't help Peter please explain to the class how government interventions to make things affordable have made things more expensive paradox yes there's been this this fascinating political movement over the the past couple of years where they were like it's mostly been on the center left and it has come I think in large part as a reaction to the kind of the conflagrations and the distractions of the Trump era right like since 2015 American politics has had a lot going on and it's been kind of crazy some of it's been serious some of it's been very silly but something has gotten lost in our political discourse and that has been what we used to call kitchen table issues which is like basic cost of living issues and those have come back to the fore in part because people are just experiencing them generally in part because of inflation and in part because some of the essentials of middle-class life or at least what people feel like are the essentials of middle-class life people have started to realize and in particular center left pundits have started to realize oh my god they're really really expensive and the three things that I focus on in this post are health care education particularly higher education and housing and so we have this movement now on the center left called the that is sort of loosely coalescing around the term the abundance agenda and their argument as well you know we've we've it's like it's focused I think more on housing than on anything else and they have like a totally non-insane argument which is one reason that housing is so expensive is we've made it really hard to build things and what we need to do is to let builders build things that will put more supply on the market and that will help us ease prices at the same time health care and higher education have kind of been talked about within this this constellation of issues of things that are really really expensive but there's been a lot less attention I think paid to the fact that those two that those two sectors of the economy have for the last 40 or 50 years just been incredibly subsidized starting in the 1960s 1970s 1980s we have just pumped billions and billions tens hundreds trillions of dollars into into subsidies for these things and what has that done well in higher education it's really very clear what trillions of dollars worth or over a trillion dollars worth of loans has done it's made it in some ways it's provided money for people to pay for college tuition but then the universities are just like well that also makes it easy for us to spend more money on administrators and swimming pools and also just to jack up tuition because we can because we know that you have the money because buyers have more money because they are being given it through subsidies that makes it more expensive inherently so then you have then you have this sort of trajectory where costs go up and subsidies go up in tandem and the underlying thing is actually becoming much more expensive and the same thing is true in health care I mean the United States government in some ways can be thought of as a kind of a health insurance also does defense and some other stuff and like we spend so much money so much public money on health care every single year and people like why does health care cost so much it's really really expensive maybe maybe what we need to do is add some more subsidies to make it less expensive and all that does is at best it temporarily shields people from prices right like it can make those prices invisible to people but making prices invisible to people means that the market is no longer responsible or responsive to price signals and that drives prices up that drives costs up and then we end up in a situation where we are now which is hey everything that is important education health care housing is really really expensive I wonder why that is and it's it's at least in part because we've spent the last four or five or six decades subsidizing the hell out of all of those things and I think that there has the abundance agenda center left has not spend enough time recognizing reckoning with the effects of those subsidies and certainly democratic politicians who seem very very keen even if they're sort of center lefty types very very keen to keep those subsidies flowing and keep expanding them certainly the democratic political class has not reckoned with that at all Catherine what's your favorite example of subsidies to make things more affordable not doing that it's just education it's just higher education I mean that's not a like a cute little surprise answer but it is the most important one I think because I don't care about buying a house but I really care about you know education this weekend my my guy venture capitalist Mark Andreessen and recent recent interview victim spoke at a conference and he said we are headed into a world where a flat screen TV that covers your entire wall cost a hundred dollars and a four-year degree cost a million dollars and that's right that's right and he said this you know he said this over and over he has this whole thing about like fast and slow parts of the economy which map neatly onto the regulated and the unregulated but also in our interview which you can listen to on the reason interview podcast with Nicholasby you know one thing that we talked about is that the place where you are allowed to innovate is when it doesn't matter so when it's something frivolous you can try something bold and new and awesome but if things are really important we can't let the market take care of it that's kind of like the place that we are and it's the worst possible place to be like this is why Silicon Valley is unruly children it's because we we have only given them the frivolous to act on and it's it's like just very very frustrating because the more important something is the more innovation you want in that space and we've created exactly opposite incentives with these subsidies but we've had huge innovation in the viral dance routines yeah we have that is true but Nick but also in the higher ed market what I was going to say is I generally I like the abundance agenda stuff coming out of the left I've hung out with people who are interested in that no but you're right in criticizing them they are directionally correct in a lot of ways in your piece you point out that you know they are now they haven't fully accounted for or to some degree they understand that if you subsidize demand without increasing supply you just get higher prices and the easy answer is to stop subsidizing demand and allowing supply to grow what I was going to say though is that they're I think that the market in housing markets and housing healthcare and higher education in particular are very distinct and they follow different kind of imperatives and part of what's going on in higher education is not simply that a lot of money is being pumped into the system if you break things down first up more and more people are second or third generation going to college and they are demanding a different type of product and this is more of a class based analysis than anything if you went to a directional state university you want your kid to go to the flagship state school and then those their kids want to go to a private school even if it's not academically as good as you know like a big ten university there that is driving huge increases in in higher education spending if you look at state school tuition and fees over the past decade it's been flat totally within the reach of almost anybody who qualifies as middle class because of financial aid or because your parents make enough that's not what people are talking about and you know tuition and fees at many places has been flat or even declining because it is sensitive to demand but the consumers of higher education are saying well I want the climbing wall I want the lazy river I want a different type of experience and you have to factor in like each each of these major you know kind of sub economies responds to different things you know there's no question that Medicare more than anything else is the major engine of price inflation but it's also true when you go to the doctor you are getting a radically different experience than what you know now than if you went in 1973 the pharmacopia is much more robust the machines the diagnostics etc and we need to account for that because in each of these industries something different is helping to drive the prices up and sometimes that's stupid consuming you know from my perspective I think a lot of people higher education which has become ubiquitous you know about two thirds of graduating high school seniors go on directly to some form of higher ed it's become a consumption good a luxury good and a status good and I think of people were more educated and more numerous you know to paraphrase size sims of the great off-brand shopping place a lot of this inflation would be would be undercut all right we're going to get to our listener email the week here in a moment but first self-reliance responsibility using your head there's just a few of the values we try to embrace here at the reason round table that's why it's so fitting for us tell you the air med care network and how it can take a financial worry right off your plate the air med care network is America's largest emergency air ambulance membership network their providers operate state-of-the-art helicopters and their specially trained medical personnel provide the highest level of pre-hospital emergency medical care you see even with a seemingly robust health insurance policies such flights can be fantastically expensive but when you're a member of the air med care network you won't see a bill for your flight when flown by a participating provider that's the kind of financial safety net a self-reliant person should think about having membership is amazingly affordable only $99 per year just $79 for seniors Nick and it covers your entire household what like you'd like you don't have a membership to the AARP I got my card like a little month ago I was merely suggesting I could hear you yeah listeners who act right now can get up to an $80 MasterCard or Amazon gift card when they join just visit airmedcarenetwork.com forward slash reason use the off code reason and start enjoying peace of mind today do it today you'll be glad you did all right reminder to send your terse queries to roundtable ad reason.com this one comes from Brenner Roth wonderful name who writes in part my question is related to journalism quality as the managing structure of news organizations and incentives have changed i.e. private equity buying newspapers subscription based models becoming more prevalent how has this affected reporting in our country a political affiliation of the writer has become a bigger issue but beyond that do mainstream writers just not care don't want to or cannot do deeper analysis because of competing priorities or maybe reader attention spans have gotten even shorter and they can get away with it seems like more and more journalists are only concerned with twitter battles i look at the analysis coming from major news outlets and it regularly seems to be only surface level or just taking things they hear at face value catherine can you reflect on how if at all structural changes in the news biz have changed coverage or if it's the audience or what yeah i think that i guess i'm just hyping interviews that i have done for reason in the past on this podcast today because one thing that really changed my thinking on this or crystallized my thinking on this i guess was the interview i did a while back with jimmy wales who founded wikipedia and who has a whole theory of the internet that is based on basically whether it is an ad based model or a subscription based model and how that subtly affects the type of content that gets produced in the ways that people experience content online one thing that's happened in recent years is that we're moving back toward a subscription based model that there's the substackification the sort of increasing willingness of people to pay for the content they want in addition to the kind of technological warfare of paywalls finally getting good enough that they actually keep people out of the content that they shouldn't see and let people in to get enough of a taste plus the rise of lots of different types of journalistic content including podcasting along with newsletters and other types not just let's put it all on a website or in a dead tree edition all of that is by way of saying when you are trying to get eyeballs for your ads it generates different types of content and i think that a lot of the weariness that people feel with the news is a secondary product of that that reader attention spans are not necessarily shorter so much as the way that you make money doesn't require readers to have attention spans one thing that's great about reason is because we are a non-profit we can prioritize stuff besides just the raw numbers of clicks and the raw numbers of eyeballs and the raw numbers of ad revenue though all those things are important to us so i think that rather than try to explain you know everything through the lens of i think people are tempted to this private equity explanation for instance i think it's much more about the ways that we as journalists adapt ourselves to the broader commercial model that we exist in and that the move towards subscription based models will actually be a good thing Nick how would you answer this question i agree with Catherine that what is going on is a return or a move towards more of a subscription based model and it's out of the broadcasting era you know which was a dominant mode where advertisers subsidized the cost of newspapers either each edition or a subscription but on tv and radio you paid nothing and the price what you had to put up with was ads what we're seeing now increasingly is a return to subscriptions and it's the small newspapers and the chains that are being bought by private equity firms that are struggling with this because do you really want to you know if you want to read the Indianapolis Star or something like that do you want to pay a hundred dollar subscription in order to read one article that comes across your feed probably not the New York Times following on the early and ongoing success of the Wall Street Journal we've finally been able to you know turn itself into a giant newsletter that is you know that is subscription base one of the things about that and this has nothing to do with kind of the quality of journalism or even the quantity but it does change it if you are doing effectively ideological service journalism for your subscribers and this is true of something like you on the fifth column Matt or the New York Times or whatever like you start playing to your paying customers I know I had an interesting conversation with Andrew Heaton who has you know a couple of popular podcasts and things like that you know worked at Reason and done a lot of stuff with videos but he will talk about you know he's got like a 3000 core subscriber base and when he does something that they dislike they let him know and he's he's not slavishly devoted to them and it's like you know you respond to that in a way that in an advertising model it's a little bit easier sometimes to bear the heat of intense disagreement from your paying fan base you know these are people with skin in the game and I worry about that at a place like the New York Times if it becomes too devoted to servicing what it thinks its readers wants it's going to become less interesting for a broader population which again in the long run doesn't matter but it does because you can either like it or not and this is a glorious time for great, bizarre, wonderful in-depth investigative reporting as well as all kinds of bullshit but it definitely changes the way it works I think there's a audience capture is a threat we saw this in the early days of blogging which participated in or like the secondary days the first were about tech blogs and then after 9-11 there was a bunch of current affairs, insta pundit style blogs and war blogs thank you Catherine I'm here for you editor pants and you saw that with a lot of people they got captured to just fantastical degrees I think the best example is Charles Johnson of little green footballs just to throw us all back you got warped into some pretty interesting places and then pulled himself back and kind of scrubbed his archives and whatnot but it's very difficult and is he now, is he a member of the reality based community or the unreality based community? the last time I paid attention to Charles who I know or I knew back in the day was probably about 10 years ago and he was a very pro Obama by then so I guess the whole pancake so you're skirting the question is that reality or unreality? I would say exactly right but Peter let's before I blather on too much you're a substacker I mean I think the answer is just that incentives matter so I will focus on a different set of incentives than we have talked about so far the old ad driven market had particular content incentives in terms of the type of content that newspapers and particular weekly news magazines were interested in running and so we've had this debate about objective journalism and both sides is over the past 20 years in part as the old ad driven model has collapsed right the idea of objective journalism and you know sort of oh we're just going to tell both sides of the story right and be neutral about it has been sneered at a lot recently and I think in some cases some of the critiques are totally spot on but that that that wasn't just a content model that was a business model and it was in part a product of the fact that advertisers back in the old days and let's say pre 2000 the advertisers were the most important market I mean in 1985 or 1995 even if you paid for a newspaper or magazine the publication often made little money off your subscription occasionally even lost money off your subscription the idea was just to show advertisers that you were invested enough to pay for it and they made all of their money basically off of advertising right and so that meant and it was a lot of money I'm going to interject that was 25% profit margins there was almost no sector that was as profitable as daily city newspapers between 1960 and and that was true in small markets like Cleveland and Cincinnati or medium size markets let's say like you know like Cleveland and Cincinnati as well as New York and Los Angeles it wasn't just you know it wasn't just a couple of big national papers which the market we are increasingly moving towards now right and and so they were responsive to advertiser concerns and advertisers historically were somewhat antsy about partisan political news and news that appeared to be slanted right they all or I won't say all but they by and large took the Michael Jordan line you know Republicans buy shoes too right it didn't pay to be political in the way that you want about selling shoes or whatever it was right that's a little less true today in 2023 I think they're more big corporations that are comfortable with somewhat more sort of politically charged marketing advertising salience to their products but even still I I think that that like the loss of advertisers there has had the loss of advertisers as an influence on content has changed the content right and the shift from you know from an ad supported model where the goal was to have a fat Sunday paper filled with expensive color circulars for your local grocery store and furniture store and electronic store I loved the the circuit city ads when I was a kid like just poured through them for like the latest the latest like receiver and television technology and like moving away from that that the loss of circuit city ads has changed what kind of content papers and magazines are willing to run I think that's not true for a publication like reason just because our revenue model right are is very different but it's certainly true for the New York Times it's certainly true for the remaining sort of mid-sized market papers it's certainly true I think for you know any of the kind of the news weekly business is no longer what it once was but magazines and publications that fill that space and so there's simply has been a shift and it has been a response to incentives I think that one underappreciated change in the subscription model is that the old subscription model which yes was like subsidizing the ad thing more than anything else but it was an eat your weedies model especially if you were a large institutional place like I have to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times to know what's going on to get those juicy circuit city ads you know it's my civic duty to subscribe I have to third rate Henry Kissinger op-eds that have been turned down by bigger papers yep right? no and I have to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal to know what's going on with business if I'm if I'm working in finance in Wall Street you just have to subscribe to this and that still works a little bit for specialized places like the Wall Street Journal maybe economists but less so probably than before you know you just sort of this is part of your civic duty is to do that well that subscription model has really really withered what has planted it is an affinity based subscription model I'm going to use my subscriptions as a consumption to express my affection for reason I mean we have a webathon every year that certainly brings in more money than it did 12 years ago and you know a lot of our readers and I can speak confidently for Catherine and Nick on this part of the greatest thing about being an editor of reason is that you meet people who have these long relationships that are older than many of us are almost to the institution and they care about it and so this is an expression of their affection and this is very true of Suderman on substack it's very true of other people too that's interesting and good there is the the problems or the potential threats of audience capture and then there is you know people always fret about the siloization but I think one of the great disastrous reactions to the modern age by those legacy institutions is on one hand they looked at these formerly 25% profit margins that they could see were not going to last and they said okay what can we do here on the business side they're like let's cut everything as much as possible and squeeze the last blood out of the stone and they cut really stupidly they did on the personnel side they had buyouts which just allowed the best people to walk out the door back when that that was still a thing and they cut coverage in such a way where you didn't you know even if they eat your Wheaties people like there wasn't enough Wheaties here like the LA Times sports section is like six pages now instead of this wonderful thing that it used to be so it's really kind of no use to it they did that and then on the now what Peter was talking about the sort of the anti both sides is a movement a lot of increasingly the journalistic personnel establishment are treating their institutions as these important places that they need to protect the platform they're bringing more ideology into the place and kind of policing that ideology thinking that is the value add here release that's the thing that they that they value the most about it personally I think that's going to be disastrous because the thing that they had an advantage of over everybody else is that they had deep pockets and they could do and they had a history of reporting and at least some kind of idea that they would approach things with a certain amount of fairness and when that goes away then there's really no there's the what are we doing here anymore it's it's really becomes more of an ideological organ and a lot of the the things that we've seen over the last few years the New York Times especially but another institution to NPR comes to mind the project Faritas a project for us the dancing all comes from that okay that's enough blather about that but thank you for the question let's go to a lightning round I wanted to get to this because it sort of has to do with everything that we have talked about thus far but really needs to be lightning over the weekend the former and would be future president Donald J. Trump released a kind of amazing video saying that in 2024 he wants to build new cities on currently undeveloped federal land in which there would be flying cars baby subsidies and really nice architecture Catherine surely you cannot be opposed to flying cars 2024 yeah it's I guess this is Donald Trump's answer to the abundance agenda like I guess that's where we are fucking great and I'm pro flying car I'm anti subsidy so you can see the bind that I am in here because I am sure that none well first of all I'm sure that this is what we see is what there is right like the details of this plan are like maybe one millimeter deeper than this video but it's odd right because on the one hand what a delight to see a politician be like hey maybe we should we should let people try stuff maybe we should you know let people build stuff like I love to hear it but then you get point point five beautification campaign get rid of ugly buildings right and that's like no not that I want Tucker Carlson to be on that committee for sure I do recommend to reason round table listeners if you are not familiar with just like the general CJ Ceremella rage about traditionalist conservatives having architecture opinions like go seek that out I don't actually even know if he's ever done a full length treatment for us and he should be tweets about it on the regular it just kind of creeps in in his general presence so look for it because even though I started out as a little baby objectivist iron rand gal architecture should not be political it is not political it doesn't make any sense to be like I am a conservative therefore I like exposed beams like please stop so Nick I do I hear you volunteering to be Trump's press secretary on the I would I would vote for Trump if this was his campaign and especially if he said like and I'll give you the land but no other subsidies but yeah this is fucking great are you kidding like and it is it's peak boomer dementia to because what he is basically you know channeling is like popular mechanics or boys life circa 1969 and but you know I like already that's better than anything Joe Biden's talking about you know Joe Biden is zipping around in a Corvette Donald Trump is talking about flying over some bizarre city on the prairie somewhere and it's not even clear has Donald Trump ever been to any state other than like New York New Jersey and Florida so he has no idea what country he's it but yeah more power to it I love this kind of stuff and you could see how a libertarian candidate somebody like Gary Johnson you know could have pulled this off with much more verb verb and knowledge of what it's like to live in a you know in a state that is completely owned by the federal government you said Gary Johnson and verb in the same sentence Peter do you want to give us a reality just hope the flying cars or EVs that could be subsidized yeah to create good manufacturing jobs I you know if electric cars are subsidized flying cars are going to be super subsidized I think that the best part about all of this is the idea of deregulating federal lands it's the thing that people just really don't appreciate much as much as they should of how much the federal government owns and controls land especially in the mountain west and the west in general military in particular but obviously the Bureau of Land Management and yeah open open that up don't open the libel laws open up the other BLM that's exactly alright let's get to our end of podcast what we have all been consuming Nick let's start with you so I watch the Chris Rock Netflix special outrage selective outrage sometimes it's called and it's very good I actually happen to see him on the tour that this was taken from playing Radio City Music Hall where he was workshopping some of this the main taping that he's done is from Baltimore and it even includes a kind of obvious mistake that he made that he corrects in real time but I highly recommend it Chris Rock this is a it's taken from a longer kind of a set of material it's very good and it opens with a really great defense of free speech where I've seen this being circulated widely you know he says anybody that has anybody who thinks that words hurt has never been punched in the face and it's a pretty good line and it goes from there it's good stuff it is also the amount of kind of ire he spills towards Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith which is extended from what I saw him live in concert is really good it's if you're into you know if you liked Betty Davis and Joan Crawford feuding this is way way up there and on black twitter it is you know it is on fire Chris Rock is seen as a black comic that white people like and they're backing Will and Jada on this but it's good stuff highly recommended the I'll just add that the two clips that I've watched the Robert Kardashian stuff and then the Will and Jada thing the my biggest takeaway was my god he's he really is turning into Gilbert Gottfried like he's just hunched over his eyes are getting even squintier he's just yelling all the time like that Catherine what have you been consuming so I've been on a little campaign to watch key episodes in shows that I am apparently never going to get around to so that I can be more culturally literate and nice a recommendation from the reason roundtables own Ian Kaiser our faithful audio producer is in deep space nine I watched the episode treachery faith and the great river which is basically Star Trek does I pencil and it's fantastic I can't recommend it enough I didn't know who any of the people in this episode were I didn't know what was going on in the background and it did not matter at all there is a plot that involves basically an elaborate series of barters done in a limited time in order to get a crucial repair for the ship done and a whole interesting plot about what it means to believe in gods and if you think they walk among you how that influences your behavior it was good y'all and I am officially taking recommendations for other again random standalone episodes that I can watch to kind of get some of the vibes of a show and also like extra points if it's some kind of great little libertarian takeaway I did this with the Darmak episode also of Star Trek to help me understand how that episode correctly predicted memes like as a form of communication and the Vincent van Gogh episode in doctor who so if you have other thoughts I'm open to them but treachery faith and the great river you can buy it for like a dollar on Amazon and just watch it and you should my recommendation Catherine is to watch the finale of Breaking Bad that was a great way to consume the show for me that's two episodes exactly that's that's correct the penultimate as well and also don't watch in case you think that it was so great the first time around that it's going to survive watching again and this is probably before you were born but nickel remember it the the moonlighting episode where they do the gaming of the shrew or some Shakespeare thing not good didn't hold up there was also a whole subgenre of shows in the late 80s and early 90s where the characters would somehow be cast back into a USO show during World War II I like that that's my that's my jam I want this the only thing that would have been great is if mash had done that or china beach so it's like you get into an even worse war but china beach deep cut yeah well Tom Sizemore pour one out yeah pour out a big fat line of coke and maybe heroin pit pit yeah I watched for Tom Sizemore surprisingly what a surprise yeah so the the first season three so the so you have nothing to learn well that's kind of what I want to talk about so it's Star Wars and it's fun if you like Star Wars right it's kind of it's you know a sort of Boba Fett Esk spin-off it's not Boba sorry Boba Fett I always want to say Boba and that's like and it just is I'm gonna get that right someday Boba Fett I think is the goober that Pete Townsend swallowed for a while that's right but I think it's even more fun if you like modern Star Wars because the Mandalorian which was created by John Favreau is really the product of the last 15 years or so of Star Wars stories overseen by Dave Filoni who is a top level producer here and is written in directed episodes and Filoni's stories have mostly come in cartoon form starting with the Clone Wars series then Star Wars Rebels currently the Bad Batch which is a kind of great show about a group of Clone Troopers who rebel against the Empire right they they're like even though they're clones they find their individuality right and the thing about Dave Filoni is he is a Star Wars super fan and and a good and smart one but still a fan so this plays like sort of fan fiction in that his project is basically to rescue modern Star Wars especially the prequels from the stilted weirdness of George Lucas and the course of doing so he's more or less built an entirely new Star Wars mythology with weird stuff like the Dark Saber and the different clans of Mandalore which like you don't need to really understand anything about and yet this season is going to deliver us a whole history of like the infighting and clans of amongst the clans of Mandalore and how the planet got like blown up and all that stuff and what it really amounts to is a wholesale gut job of the franchise while leaving the facade in place and so if you walk around DC you will see all of these row houses where like the front wall is the same but they've literally in some cases not just taken out all of the interior down to the studs they've also taken out the back wall of the roof and like there's no real house left it's just the front wall but it still sort of fits in you're like oh it's that house I've walked by this a million times Star Wars today under Dave Filoni he's just built a whole new mythological infrastructure out of what George Lucas created and in a lot of ways that's to George Lucas's credit because George Lucas has always said well look you know this is in some sense a group project even starting in the late 1980s or so he allowed the expanded universe to come and to be built out which has now been sort of omitted from the canon but he allowed the creation of a whole sort of universe of extra stories he allowed fans to make to make things like the great mockumentary mash-up of cops and Star Wars troops which was one of the first fan made movies to sort of go viral on the internet in the late 1990s and George Lucas always sort of had this lax attitude towards his work where yeah you know what if you're going to profit off of it then it needs to come through me but I will let you tell stories in this world and if you're not going to profit off of it you know go bonkers go bananas I feel like that actually is just going to like make people even happier with it it's going to make people love Star Wars more the fact that they get to play around in this and so Filoni I think combines those tendencies he is a fan and treating this in many ways like a fan although he's doing this of course under the official auspices of Lucasfilm and it's just been fascinating to watch the evolution of the series basically over the course of my entire life and I think the Mandalorian it's not I don't know it's not great but it's really fun it's expertly delivered the effects work is actually better than a lot of movies that I've been seeing recently if you like Star Wars if you like modern Star Wars if you like Star Wars cartoons the Mandalorian season three now on Disney plus it's pretty good it's enjoyable is baby Yoda toilet range yet I think he's still working on not eating the the like infant fetuses of the the frog lady it's hard for him I also before we get off Star Wars and I realized we haven't spent enough time on Star Wars but a couple of years ago I suggested that Jar Jar was a senator in the Star Wars universe and in fact he wasn't he was merely a representative of of like a denim clad future in which the survivors is Jar Jar like an Eleanor Holmes Norton situation? I think he's like the Eleanor Holmes Norton and that is so racist Catherine I don't even want to acknowledge it again I don't know but it's actually I think it's queen or pre-queen Amidula or you know amygdala I mean it's the actual senator alright this is the section of the podcast where Kevin Kramer Kevin Kramer is the senator from Nauvoo this is the section of the podcast where Nick stops talking yeah Nick stops talking I have the problem here good boy my my cultural recommendation is speaking of Boys Life 1969 cartoons it's Apollo 10 and a half which is a cartoon about a boys life in 1969 literally boy this is Richard Linklater he does the same kind of animation that they did he did in A Scanner Darkly so he filmed a live action against a green screen and then did the weird thing on it afterwards thank you for the word and it was introduced to me by my 8 year old daughter she's like hey dad I think you'll like this one and I was really kind of wonderful to watch her watch it with me because it is a anyone who grew up in the 1970s to any degree will have at least some affinity for it because it's largely it's a magical realist tale about a 10 year old kid who who grows up in Houston and dad works for NASA because everyone's dad works for NASA and they're in the new suburb and the magical part of the magical realism fable is that he as the 10 year old has a secret mission that predates the man landing on Mars because they built a spacecraft too small I'm not giving it away and they had to put a kid in it but the the the realism part is the rest of the movie which is just basically this is what life was like as a kid growing up in it's 69 but it's very 70s like here's the serials here's the TV shows here's the kind of stuff that we would play here's the back of the pickup truck that we would all sit on the edge of as we're flying down the highway and no one cared this is the station wagon I mean just so many things that are name checked anyone who I know who has seen it who's roughly my age just lists off all the things that they've recognized and identify with and then if you grew up as I did in in a very aerospace kind of region it's just it's not how much it hits almost the point where it's like it could be too much for people who are allergic to here's just all the way the culture was consumed back then but it was an interesting way to transmit the hey eight-year-old here's how my childhood was and then she had the great idea like let's watch it with grandma and grandpa so we watched with my mom my stepdad the next night after watching it which is really kind of a fun experience really really like it it's kind of it pairs well with a recent essay by freddy the boar and that's not a phrase that I use often in a recommendation thing where he talks about life in the 90s and how it was different to be like a teenager in the 90s then it is now sort of like listing the almost banal types of ways but it is really interesting how different the acquisition of culture was from the 70s to the 90s to the odds and the final thing I'll add to this or whatever we're living through the 20s the new roaring 20s I also had the the privilege of of watching this and thinking about these kind of different things with my mom is writing it working on her memoir right now and talks about her upbringing in the 1940s and the way that they kind of acquired culture and devil stuff just really like kind of a wonderful mash-up to see all of this and it's really hard to escape the conclusion that again my eight year old has like wow it's just so much better now isn't that great though I mean that's that's a great message that should be shouted from the rooftop yes it actually really is even though she enjoyed the movie and enjoyed imagining what it would be like to like watch Twilight Zone in 1972 she's very excited that she lives in the press as someone who grew up in the 1990s in a government engineer culture there were a lot of air force rocket scientists where I grew up and there were contractors for the most part but a lot of rocket scientists and like there were some similarities but I'll just say like you don't have to be exactly Matt's age to have enjoyed that movie it's really just delightful and it's like just nostalgic enough without being overly sentimental were rocket scientists in the 90s like was that a good time to be a rocket scientist or was it kind of like I think it was a pretty good time to be a rocket scientist where I lived in rocket science-central Matt is Alex Jones does he have a cameo in this as he does in most Richard Lankletter movies not that I'm aware of the main narration voice which I only saw in the credits was Jack Black and he's terrific has this really nice mild kind of Austin or not Austin but Houston drawl it's great we're running late thanks for listening if you like our stuff in the infinity subscription model go to reason.com or just subscribe to the damn magazine it's pretty good it's cheap to go for it and also if you like our podcast go to reason.com podcast to get the reason interview with Nick Gillespie and also the soho forum debate series with Dr. Gene Epstein Nick do you have any business coming up can I just point out two things one I was an Eagle Scat Matt so I didn't read Boys Life in 1969 but was subscribing to it a decade later and Gene Epstein only has a masters he's not a doctor he's not part of the professoriate or the doctorate have you not seen the man dance shaking my damn head I hope not that is a Chinese plot I think but in any case we've got a great version of our live stream with Vinay Prasad coming up on Wednesday and on Monday April 3rd in New York City we're going to have the authors of the individualists John Tomasi and Matt Smolinski doing a live interview in Midtown Manhattan go to reason.com and you'll be able to get information about that later today awesome alright thanks see you next week