 Welcome to the Reason Roundtable, your weekly libertarian podcast from the magazine that's been scaring you about government force. Since 1968, I am not well-joined by the golf-claping Nick Gillespie. Peter Suderman. Please, for today, I'm Nick Gulespie for one last play of the day. I think we can all call you Nick Interruptsy from now on. Today at Triumphantly Returning, Catherine Mangue ward Happy Halloween, everyone. Howdy Halloween. Happy Halloween. Hey, Matt. Catherine, before we start, how is your new robot leg? My robot leg is great. Thank you for asking, and I got to say the podcast listeners really, really came through with the recommendation, so thank you to everybody, but especially to the third Bragg brother who sent me an email, Austin and Meredith, the excellent Bragg brothers who work for Reason have a third brother. He sent me a recommendation. Many, many people sent them, and I'm grateful to you all, but frankly, the third Bragg brother was the- Who is like Alec Baldwin, you know, to Billy and Steve that we work with. He's the best. I refuse to rank Bragg brothers. I love them all equally, and I'm grateful to them all. Are you going to drop that recommendation later on in what you're consuming in the cultural sphere? I very well mind. Okay. So I won't tease it out of you. All right, let's talk about the news that Catherine has not been paying any attention to a lot. I'm going to do my best, guys. Can we go to her just to tell us what happened last week? Yeah, good idea. A lot has happened in the last 72 hours during her narcotic coma. We have Lefty, Populist, Luis Lula, Beat Out, Righty, Populist, Yair Bolsonaro. I pronounce both those names perfectly. For the presidency in Brazil, Iran's Revolutionary Guards have killed well over 100 protesters and ongoing demonstrations there. Bay Area, Wackaloon, got into the house of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, fractured her husband's skull with a hammer, and perhaps coloring our experience of all of those events. Elon Musk finally took over Twitter and immediately began acting just as erratically, maybe even more than pretty much everyone expected. Nick is trying so hard, he's like, I need to interrupt, I need to. Let's start with the latter bit of news since it's been the subject of feverish speculation for several months now, including on this podcast. And now it's finally here. Elon Musk fired most of Twitter's senior management, announced plans to lay off a quarter of staff, changed the homepage. Coming back, several accounts that had been suspended or banned, but not the big one yet. And trying to reassure advertisers that the social media platform won't become a free for all hellscape, his words, floated trial balloons about charging people to keep their verified blue checkmark accounts. And otherwise has just Elon Musked all over the place. Catherine, you have two choices that I'm going to offer you. One is to simply to comment on how your South African boy pal has acted now that he's finally gotten a charge. Or now that you are just waiting your broken knee back into it after not looking at Twitter for a while, is Twitter even less important than you ever thought? Yeah. I'm going to go with the latter, which is that I did take some time off of Twitter. My brain capacity was substantially reduced in the last week. And so Twitter was the first thing to go. And that was not at all the wrong choice. I do think that the absolutely insane series of events that have occurred as Musk has taken over might be clarifying. Obviously, everyone's just going to be screaming at the top of their voices for a few days here. But when things settle down, I do think the idea of the very, very murky concept of the shadow ban, which has preoccupied much of the American right, or at least the sort of punditocracy of the right, will have some clarity around that. Because I think that so much actually hinges on this idea that somehow people's content is being suppressed for ideological reasons. And Twitter won't tell us why or where for or how. And at some point with Elon in charge, it does seem like that case will be weakened. And when it is, will people just come up with new and more elaborate conspiracy theories? Definitely yes. But the audience for them will shrink. And so I am looking forward to that. I will not be paying for my blue check if it comes down to it. Will you be paying for reason staffers blue checks, Catherine? That's the question. I mean, yeah, honestly, never say never, I suppose. But yeah, I personally will not be selling out 20 bucks. Yeah, no, it's not going to happen. I thought I read it was 20 bucks. I think it's to be a recurring revenue stream. I mean, the Elon Musk has a good point, which is like Twitter doesn't make any sense as a business. I mean, this was always the best case for Elon buying Twitter was like, he actually isn't, you know, he's like not a crazy person when it comes to figuring out how to build businesses that eventually succeed. And Twitter is not was not being run in a reasonable way. And I think that was, you know, as a you as a clearly as a regular user of Twitter, I think he looked at it and was like, this could be done better. You know, I'm I'm always sympathetic to the the plight of the the ENTJ, which is that someone else is in charge and they're doing it wrong is like, that's hell. That's a hellscape. So I think he just said, like, what if what if I could do it better? Peter building on that. And I know I'm not supposed to talk about the reason Slack channels on the podcast, but I think he tried to coin a new ENT what I don't know what Catherine just said, it's too many letters in my long COVID brain. But you like some not in my social media backyard thing, talking about people's approach towards towards social media platforms. Can you elaborate please? Yeah, I think a lot of the griping by people who are mad about Elon Musk taking over Twitter is effectively equivalent to NIMBY's griping about people building stuff in their neighborhoods, right? It's it's not not in my backyard. It's not on my social network, right? It's not on my Internet. These people are NIMBYs who are mad that a developer came in and bought something and wants to build something there and they don't like what it is that they think that that person is going to build, even though that person has not yet undounced specific plans, much less started the dig out, right? Like to build this thing. And so they are going to try and get the government involved or try to get whatever other forces that the community is going to come together to save the lot that somebody bought and wants to put houses in. It's the same thing, except what does the what does the bulldozer what does the figure of bulldozer look like? I I think I think it looks like Elon Musk's boring machine, which is a literal like underground bulldozer thing. It's actually kind of awesome. Look, I just don't I cannot get worked up about this at all. I think it's fine. It's kind of funny. I can't really see a downside here. I do think it's clear that Elon Musk is going to lie on Twitter because he says he's going to prevent it from becoming a hellscape. It's already a hellscape. I mean, about the already part, Nick, I think I think often about one of your observations over time. And I think you're making this back when Microsoft is being challenged for antitrust that basically by the time people start to get excited and angry and wanting to get regulators on a business or and or when that business itself is out there trying to write those regulations, that's a good sign that it's already on its decline. There's a bunch of stories recently that like Twitter's super users, the people who drive most of its traffic and engagement have been fleeing the platform like droves. Is this yeah, they're going to Mammoth, right? Or something like that. Yeah, you and I won't know what the name of that is. We're too old for that. It's the cyber space of Canada. They're going to gas, which is the hot social media network, which if I it's I can't I think gas is the one where you have to give people a compliment every day, but it might be the one where you have to take a selfie each day, which I think is kind of like they're the opposite, right? Like that's the yin and the yang either way. It is obviously like the most sinister thing on the planet, right? Is this to you all just sort of an indication of that, especially now we're like, you know, Facebook and Meta has declined so precipitously that it's no longer like in, you know, it's not even fun to beat up anymore. Yeah, right. I think they're bringing back the mafia. But the avatars got the legs. They got legs. Yeah, they got legs. You know what, we got legs here, like most of us, maybe not you, Catherine. So like, why would we go somewhere else to have worse legs than we have? Now, Matt, to me, the best part of all of this was and you are kind of indicating this is that everybody hated Twitter before Elon Musk took it over. But now it's really bad, right? Yeah. You know, and just over the past 48 hours, it descended into such a cesspool, you know, a Le Brea tar pits of terribleness that people are like, I'm done. I'm done. I who knows? I mean, I think Catherine is right. Peter is right. Like we have no idea what this is going to shake out. But, you know, the idea that like, you know, you buy a company that for a decade has been floundering and that everybody hates and that recently had some minor growth in average daily users. But you come in and you fire the people who are running it. What a monster. You know, like why couldn't he work with the team there and he's going to fire a thousand useless engineers? And the reports I read from the Verge, which were attacking Elon Musk, it was all like it was people who hadn't had anything to do with anything related to the operation of Twitter for like the past six to nine months. So it's like, what? Oh, my God, like, you know, they, you know, are they going to get the news at like, you know, the massage parlors on site that they've been hanging out in for the past year? You know, this is all ridiculous. I suspect that the real fallout is going to be much more mundane than we think that it's going to Twitter is going to be roughly similar to what it always has been. And, you know, without getting too trite about it, it's because the problem ultimately, I mean, there are better and worse ways to run it. But the problem with Twitter is the people who use it, which is everybody in this conversation and other places. So until you either clarify, you know, what are the expectations and what are the limitations of expression in a transparent way, it's going to be basically the same old, same old. Speaking of the problem of Twitter is the people who use it. Elon Musk now, who is the king of Twitter over the weekend, tweeted and then later deleted a post linking to a fabulous conspiracy theory website, speculating that the real story behind the hammer attack last week on Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul, was some kind of weird, gay sex club hookup kind of thing. Here's what we know about the actual incident as of Monday morning. Forty two year old Bay Area sketcher named David Deepap or Deepape somehow entered the Pelosi compound late Friday, reportedly shouted, where is Nancy? Which was a refrain on January 6th, storming into Capitol and got into a struggle with Paul Pelosi, eventually striking him with a hammer and fracturing his skull. Pelosi is expected to have a full recovery. The paper will be charged probably on Tuesday. He appears to be quite delusional and mentally ill. He had a public blog of sorts ranting about evil fairies, which I mean, they are QAnon conspiracy. I mean, they are. Thanks, Arthur Conan Doyle. I mean, that one codes very right wing, right? It's that's that was a big part of Newt Gingrich's contract with America. If I recall, listen. The fairy problem is it's a pre Christian pre Iron Age situation. I don't want to get into it right now, but fairies have always been an issue. Anyways, are we now talking about the Bronze Age pervert or something? I have no idea. Tinkerbell, Tinkerbell. It's a it's pre Tinkerbell. Pretty that's pretty Tinkerbell. Anyways, as happens in these cases, I think a hundred percent of the time the attack was quickly and immediately blamed on a toxic culture and violent rhetoric coming specifically from pro-Trump conservatives, some of whom then promptly played down to their own stereotype by immediately concocting conspiracy theories or tying it with democratic crime policies or in the case of Larry Elder making bad jokes about Paul Pelosi. High five, Larry. Way to go. Anyways, Catherine David from the wrote a piece in which basically making the argument that both parties suffer political violence, but only one celebrates it. Is that a way of is that a takeaway from this case? I don't think so. It's certainly not my takeaway. I mean, I I have a major case of both sidesism and I I'm just going to own to that. Like, I really do think that there are very, very, very few pathologies that are owned by one party or the other. And, you know, when you look at polling, the sort of alarming number of people who increasingly say that the other party is so bad that they are justified in breaking norms or doing violence, if say an election doesn't come out their way. You do see that a little bit a little bit more among people who identify as Republicans, but both sides, there it is, both sidesism, both sides, there's been a real uptick in that. So I think, you know, the baseline of is one party getting crazy violent and the other party is just trying to keep order and be the good guys is a is a false picture of what's going on in our politics. That said, I also think stuff like a person breaking into someone's house and smashing someone's head with a hammer is not a political bellwether. It's a crazy person. It's a crazy person. And we say this when we talk about school shootings and we say this when we talk about other kind of outlier acts of violence. I do think they're outliers. You know, Jake Tapper was this is not an outlier. This is a trend. I continue to disagree. These are these are shocking, rare instances of violence. I do think there is a cultural climate that is changing, but I don't think that you can blame or should blame a broad ideology. I think you can say, for instance, about January 6th, that Donald Trump specifically increased the likelihood that that would happen with his rhetoric. I think that is that is a valid connection to make. But I think something like this attack on populacy, which was absolutely horrible. I just don't think connecting it to broader trends is generally fair. I think attention to it is happening because of broader trends. I think we are all very head up about it because of broader trends. But but I just don't I don't think it's fair to say in either direction. I also don't think it's fair to say, oh, but bad policing policy is something. I mean, that's like a crazy thing to say. I some months ago was out to dinner on the Georgetown waterfront. I think I mentioned it on this podcast. And there was a group of people protesting outside of Nancy Pelosi's house, you know, her her condo in Georgetown. They were lefty protesters, right? They were mad about Medicare for All and they were mad about Paul Pelosi's DUI and a few other things. They were like 10 of them. They shouted for a minute and they won away. That's still the norm in America. That's how we typically behave. And this is a tragic unusual not to be broadly extrapolated from outlier. Peter, is there a flip side of that maybe? OK, let's say that let's not blame the specific ideology on this. Attack, but is there something to be said about a culture that is just too angry about politics period that it like it creates a free floating energy source that a crazy person can tap into when every election is the most important of our life's lifetime and democracy itself might die in a week. Well, well, that's worrying. I'm concerned now. I do think that you can criticize the escalation of political rhetoric and sort of and some of the the apocalypticism of it. I think a lot of it is just doesn't fit the the facts. It's it's just wildly exaggerates the actual threats that are out there that are out there, which is not to say that there are no threats out there or nothing worth talking about or nothing to be scared about. I guess I don't entirely both sides this issue in the way that say Catherine does just because I think January 6th is legitimately different than other stuff, because it was a very clear act of kind of politically motivated mob violence rather than than an instance of, you know, a violence by someone who by a single person who is clearly somewhat unwell, which is what is true in this case. If you want to blame Republican ideology in this case or sort of conservative ideology, you know, right wing, you know, Internet political culture, then I think you also have to blame left wing Internet political culture for the guy who shot up the congressional baseball game aiming at, you know, at at a bunch of Republicans, right? That guy wrote stuff online like Trump is a traitor. Trump has destroyed our democracy. It's time to destroy Trump and and go, you know, above the his repost of a change.org petition, right? He was he belonged to a Facebook group called Terminate the Republican Party, another one called the road to hell is paved with Republicans, that sort of thing. Now, I don't think that the Democratic Party or liberal ideology is responsible for him shooting up that that baseball game. I want to be clear, that's not a position I hold. But I think it's very difficult to say that one is that in one case, you know, it's responsible and in the other case, it isn't. And so my my feeling on these sort of individual acts of violence is that they have individual idiosyncratic idiosyncratic causes that are deeply personal, often because the person is themselves quite unwell. And that seems to be pretty clear here. This person did not become unwell or deranged because of online conspiracy theories, even though he trafficked in in them and was and like posted a bunch of QAnon stuff that was crazy and is sort of coded to the right way. He was already deranged and because he was deranged, he glommed on to right wing conspiracy theories as well as the fairy stuff. And was he was also a pro nudity activist at one point. I mean, that's the talk about crazy. Nick, is there a media double standard in all of this? If so, is it important or how important? And also, what do we do with it? I think that there is there is a quickness and an interest in always teasing out the dark, you know, red roots of any kind of political violence done by an insane person, including like we know nothing about this guy. I think, you know, other than that he is certifiable, right? And that's from the people who know him and his previous writings and then these actions and things like that. There's no reason to believe that he is, you know, I've read one account by a highly regarded kind of progressive journalist who said there is a direct line, you know, between this action and Donald Trump and January 6th. And like, that's just crazy. I mean, that's stupid. And I think a lot, Matt, you let our coverage on was a Gerard or Jerome Lochner, the guy who shot Gabby Giffords, Jared. And, you know, that is kind of he is the archetypal, crazy person who commits heinous acts of political violence. And there's nothing that you can tease out of that that is going to comfort people who want to wrap all of this up in an ideological message to blame the other side. You know, it is craziness, pure and simple. And that's the best that you can do about that. And I think trying to look beyond that is terrible where there are. And so, like, to the kind of people in the media who reliably tip liberal and then are using this to explain this is why Donald Trump is bad and also all Republicans should lose in the midterms or moving in that direction. It's just stupid and risible on the same, you know, in the same way. Republicans are conservatives who find this funny and like are making a bunch of Paul Pelosi jokes and things like that. That is so fucked up and contemptible. That shows that this is why I've always hated politics because it brings this out in people in a way that is not even a general kind of punkified response to the insanity of the world in general. But like when it gets targeted and ideological, it's just creepy and despicable. So in that sense, there's blame to go around. But we shouldn't be looking at these things as indicators of much of anything else. When you get to that question of is political violence rising and both the head of the Republican National Committee said political violence was rising. A bunch of people on in the Democratic Party said it was. You know, it would be good to have discussions. I mean, because that is, you know, that is a difficult. I mean, if that's true, we should be dealing with it. How do we define that? What do we mean by that? And, you know, is it I've read accounts that attacks on Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics have been going up since the Dobbs decision. I've also read on the right that attacks on pregnancy centers and on anti-abortion protesters have increased. Hate crimes went up for the first half of this year, less than they did the year before. Hate crimes are subject to a lot of kind of social construction and contagion theory where they, you know, reports jack up less because of anything that's actually happening and more because of, you know, whatever is in the is is in the media. But those are serious questions. And I don't I don't really know how you you kind of, you know, take the temperature of that much less this much vaguer idea of political violence against actual politicians. Yeah, I think there's also, you know, when you think about the other, unfortunately, the other most prominent attack on an individual, it's it's the Salman Rushdie attack. And, you know, I think my even my brain that's already sort of resistant to thinking of everything as politics, you know, I want to try and fit that into a pattern, you know, if you're looking for a pattern where everything is political violence, where every individual attack, where every kind of prominent act of violence somehow is, you know, on one side or the other of a scale of whose fault it is, you can really you can really immediately just start layering on stuff that's, you know, the Rushdie thing is politics in the very, very broadest sense. But it's also, you know, wherever that came from and wherever this Paul Pelosi attack came from, strike me as very different places. And I or the Steve Scalise, you know, shooting, remember Rand Paul's Broken Ribs. I mean, you know, there's there's this which was a laugh riot for the trackers of Rand Paul. People love some joking about that. And he was really hurt by I mean, like physically damaged. But also, you know, I think our desire to put everything on one side or the other of a ledger and to somehow in the end say, look, the Republicans are worse, you know, that's that to me is like it's a terrible way to approach this question. And and it seems to be a very, very powerful one to judge by all the coverage of this attack. If I may, there are kind of adjacent issues, which are not, you know, necessarily about violence. But there's a recent poll out talking about, you know, Republicans believing that Biden did not win the election, you know, fairly, et cetera. And it's like two to one Republicans say that Biden did not win fair and square. And it's about reverse on the Democratic side. And the Democrats are actually saying that they believe in elections. And it's deeply troubling to me that so many Republicans self identified actually, you know, have to say to themselves that Joe Biden did not win the presidential election of 2020. And it's not violence, per se, but it is a kind of way station somewhere down the road to unreality that is very disturbing. And one of the things that I'm most worried about is that I, you know, and I think I've shared with a bunch of people this fundraising thing that Hillary Clinton is doing, where she's talking about how, you know, Republicans have a plan to steal the 2024 presidential election. She's part of raising money for a group called Indivisible, which is has a crush the coup campaign because they know that 2024 is going to be a coup. That's fine. Sounds normal. And it's kind of like this. Yeah, this is all like it's good. It's a good sign. If like most Democrats are like, no, that's obviously insane. Yeah. But that could be just a sign that they hold power right now. So they, they like elections until Stacey Abrams loses again. But there is something bizarre of, you know, like that two thirds of Republicans are like, no, Biden didn't win. And we don't trust the elections. It's like you're, you're going to win the midterm elections. And if you're not going to believe them, I don't, you know, what the hell is going on? That's that's deeply and it's not a both cider thing at this point. I think one thing to say about political violence, if I mean, you hear a lot of of what about it might not be the right word or might be the perfect word. But anyways, in moments like this, a lot of people on the right will say, what about Antifa? What about the guy who was just convicted of of murder by running through the parade in Wisconsin? That in a case that, you know, killed six people. Not many people talk about if you dis in if in moments like this, you were pointing those things out and that's perfectly fine and correct to point those things out. Please do not in the same breath make jokes about Paul Pelosi or about Ram Paul or about anything like that. The normalization of political violence is smoothed by laughing at the victims of political violence. Let let the comedians do it. They're good at it. But as a like a general individual comportment level, shit ain't funny. Sorry to cuss out there, Fred Young. OK, we're going to get to our listener email the week here in a moment. But first, a word from our sponsor, better help, friends. When you're weary, feeling small, depressed by the ever shrinking days overwhelmed by all that life is throwing at you, do you focus more on the problem or on the solution? Stressful situations often produce fight or flight reactions, but that's no way to get through every day in life. We need instead to train our brains into becoming problems, solving machines. That's where BetterHelp.com comes in. BetterHelp is customizable online therapy, super convenient and affordable and ready right now to set you up with a professional counselor to help organize your noggin to become an organ that assists rather than a system that overloads. Here's what you do. Go to betterhelp.com slash roundtable, fill out a brief questionnaire, match up with a licensed therapist, and you'll already get 10 percent off your first month. If you don't like your first match, you can get another and so on and so on. That's betterhelp.com slash roundtable. Go there today. You'll be glad you did. All right. Reminder to email your queries to roundtable at reason.com. This one comes from Jay Pinkerton, who writes, I was pretty horrified by the $2,500 fines that PayPal was handing out. They retracted them, sure, but it was no accident. They targeted a few of my favorite websites. I consider myself libertarian-leaning and agree with you guys on a host of issues, but I always get confused when you defend PayPal as not being a monopoly. I mean, forget about a dictionary definition and just think in terms of utility. What viable alternatives do I have in the digital marketplace right now? Let's say I'm horrified by what they're doing and want to vote with my dollars, because I really, really do. What service should I use instead? Venmo? I think they're also owned by PayPal. Catherine. I think that the question of what is a monopoly is so interesting because in law, it has become unmoored from any kind of like coherent definition, and so people's understanding has also gotten blurry around the edges. The case that I always think about that sort of comes to mind about this is the Whole Foods mergers many, many years ago. John Mackey, the now departed founder, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods, who is a friend of reason, spoke with us about this many times over the years. But there were repeatedly allegations that Whole Foods was somehow monopolizing some market and therefore shouldn't be allowed to acquire like other schmancy grocery store chains. And I always thought that was just like such a good example of how confused people's thinking is about monopolies, because of course, even if Whole Foods did somehow monopolize a sub category of grocery stores, you can always go to Safeway. You can always go to the farmers market. Like getting groceries is the category, not organic grocery stores or schmancy grocery stores or whatever, and the desire to kind of winnow down these categories until there is a monopoly I think is driven by a desire in general to enforce anti-monopoly law. So in the case of PayPal also think that it was very much the wrong decision for PayPal to impose these fines. They shouldn't have written them into the terms of service in the first place. Absolutely absurd all around. Venmo is owned by PayPal, but there are many alternatives when the category is paying people, which I think is the relevant category. Right. So that includes like the dumb thing that my bank is always trying to get me to use. Zell, which I don't understand at all. Cash app, actual cash, credit card payments. There's, you know, bartering. Like, I don't know, it just seems to me there are really it is almost always the correct move to look very, very broadly at the category before you declare a monopoly, not only because I want to stave off kind of legal action against perceived monopolies, but also because that reflects the reality. If I want to pay somebody and I think PayPal is behaving badly, I have other ways to pay people. And if I choose to use PayPal anyway, it's because I think the things they've done that are bad are outweighed by the convenience that it provides. And that's a legitimate consumer decision as well. Where do we like find what marketplace only accepts PayPal? So I have only used PayPal or at least almost exclusively used PayPal to buy things through eBay historically. But just like I'm looking at the most recent eBay auction that I won this weekend for an old printing of Stanley Klespie's historic cocktail book, New Orleans drinks at famous New Orleans drinks and how to mix them. I paid $15 and 95 cents plus shipping for it. And I'm just looking at the listing and not only do they accept PayPal, they also accept a bunch of major credit cards, but also Google Pay. And I didn't even use any of those things. I did this entirely on my phone and used Apple Pay, which is connected to to a credit card. And so I completely circumvented PayPal, not even because I had problems with PayPal, but just because the easiest way to pay for things on my phone is Apple Pay connected to a credit card that as far as I know is not owned by PayPal. And so it just doesn't seem to me like there's any major marketplace where the only payment option is PayPal. It might be that there are some marketplaces where PayPal is more convenient, but I'm not. I'm struggling to think of like where is it that you could like the only thing they accept is PayPal? Yeah, I just checked the one place that I used to use PayPal, which is obviously baseball reference to to do various things there. And and that to pay for the Dave Dravecchi at our show commemorative John Birch Society pages. You know, I think they don't even they don't even allow people to they don't do that to advertise on pages, but they allowed some of us grandfathered people. So I will say though that after the story came out about the fines, I moved my money out of Venmo that I just sort of like had some money kind of sitting in the Venmo accounts because I did not want to to be sort of to be involved in that service any more than is necessary. I before Peter interrupt me, I was going to say that the they used to only take PayPal for the advertising and things like that, which is the only reason why I started PayPal to begin with, I'm pretty sure. And now they accept, in fact, I've been paying with credit cards or debit cards ever since Nick. Do you have some thoughts about the monopolies? Well, you know, one is PayPal was co-founded by, you know, a certain sinister South African born refugee billionaire, right? So, you know, I think that's all we need to say about it. But to Catherine's point, it's really fascinating. The one one of the mergers between Whole Foods and I think it was Whole Oats, which was another, you know, kind of boutique organic food store. The FTC actually developed a new definition of a market. So it was literally not organic grocery stores. It was like fancy Schmanzi organic grocery stores because Walmart sells, you know, by a factor of like six trillion more organic produce than anybody else in the country. So it can't be organics because then Whole Foods wouldn't have a monopoly, et cetera. And, you know, there's a lot of a lot of wisdom in understanding that. And again, Matt, going to that idea of like when you start thinking about, you know, antitrust actions like PayPal has so many competitors. Now, I've always found it incredibly useful and very reliable payment processors. So there are I have I have it on my phone and various other places. And there's lots of times where for whatever reason credit card or another payment system doesn't work in the moment and I use PayPal. So it still has utility. I think another question like so you don't need antitrust to get around PayPal because as everybody's pointed out, that's already happening. And that's really great. There is an interesting question of when these kind of back end services start saying we are going to become moral middle men, as opposed to merely, you know, financial middle men. And we're going to start setting the terms of like whether or not it is legal for you to buy what might be sex work or this book or that thing. You know, it's within their right to do that. And it's within the right of customers increasingly to do two things. One is to exit and go elsewhere. And the other is to bitch and moan and get them to change their policy, which seem to have worked here. So I think it's all good actually. This is one of those rare instances where I think, you know, a lot of a lot of smoke, a lot of heat, and we're better off after this. It teaches us a lot of things about how markets. I do also think in the background is the threat of regulation. And I think that that's really something that it's it's important for us to keep pointing out like, yes, these are private companies. Yes, they're making decisions we may or may not like. But how many of these decisions are guided by a fear that they will eventually be forced to do something similar or that they will be held liable in new and creative ways for purchases that were made using their platform. There there's always always a background of kind of politicians or bureaucracies that want to that may potentially want to make this a thing. I think that that is a big piece of the major credit card companies getting literally gun shy. I think that there is. And so, you know, I always want to be careful to balance private companies can do what they want with our private companies doing what they want. Or are they scared of the government? Well, let's I do stuff because I'm scared of the government sometimes. That's not exactly what I want. And I believe they do you pay your taxes because you're scared of the government. I just finished my twenty twenty one taxes, guys. Please. Wow. Hold on. I would also, you know, want to stress that these companies can be coerced and coopted by government. One of the most chilling acts, I think, by any, you know, rich, free world government over the last several years was the government of Pierre Trudeau freezing peoples. I think it was Venmo on certainly all kinds of Justin, whatever. They're there. They're all named Pierre up there at the end. It's just come on. A little fop haired guy froze people's accounts to protesters effectively overnight. They leaned on them. They invoked an emergencies act. It became even people who were trading Bitcoin were were cracked down upon. And just because they decided that it was an emergency, that there was a bunch of truckers protesting covid policies. That's chilling. That's a blueprint for bad things to happen in the future. I think I hope that that couldn't happen in America because of Fourth Amendment protections, but those protections have been systematically eroded by the drug war and other things, especially when it comes to financial transactions for a long time. And we just goose the IRS by eighty seven billion dollars. So we live in a hellscape is what I'm trying to say. All right, speaking of maybe we can escape to Twitter. That's the problem. If this is a hellscape, let's go where the air is clean. It's Halloween, people. Let's do a little lightning round, Catherine. You have terrifying fingers even in your debased wheelchair bound condition that we've used those fingers to illustrate how we can slash governments before government slashes us. Let us go and talk about one thing about politics government that scares you the most, Catherine, you start. I am it's it's the hypocrisy for me, Matt. I just really, you know, I I've not been a hypocrisy gal in the past. You know, I think that's usually not the best catcher. The best catcher when politicians do something dumb, isn't you said the opposite thing before? The best catcher is that is bad for the Republic. Don't do it because it's bad. But of late, specifically with regard to the legitimacy, validity, whatever of our elections, I am looking ahead to no matter who wins. The other side is going to say that the elections were poorly conducted, rigged, whatever. And and both sides will be equally likely to do it. They will do it in a way that is equally poisonous. And I find the hypocrisy of that excruciating. That is the thing that makes me scared. The next election makes me scared not because of, you know, some particular mechanic that I think is going on, although there are individual developments in like state election boards and things like that that are bad, but because I don't I don't think any of that matters. I think what matters is whoever wins the other side is going to lose their shoes. I really believe that. And and I hate it. Peter, what scares you the most and you bonus points for using the congressional motion? Let's go. War. It's pretty scary. The the death. CBO report on nuclear war. Humans were even like 35 percent of them. That'd be pretty terrifying. I think the thing that is under discussed that is maybe not the thing that is that I'm actually most frightened of, but that I think people need to be a little bit more worried about is Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness plan is illegal. It's illegal. He illegally spent a half trillion dollars and that is very bad on its own. But that's going to set a precedent that is going to be used again, because it turns out to be quite difficult to mount a legal challenge against this since for under the legal definition of of harm, no one is harmed by this. No specific person can claim harm or it's very difficult to find somebody who can claim specific harms from this. And because of that, it's difficult to find somebody who has standing to sue. And so if Joe Biden gets away with this and there are reports as of this morning that the checks are good or that the you know, the I don't have its checks, but it's going to you know, the balance changes are going to clear within two weeks or something. If Joe Biden gets away with this, this sort of thing will be done again in some different way that we that I cannot predict this morning, but it will be bad and it will just sort of become the new normal in a way that I am just not excited about so long as we don't have nuclear war. In case we have nuclear war, I probably I'll be less worried at that point. Nick, what is scaring you about politics and government right now? You know, right now is gridlock or the idea that gridlock is good or is good enough, which comes up a lot. We're about to have a divided government because the Republicans are clearly going to win the House. They may take the Senate and there's a lot of people in this is a real reliable libertarian kind of go to say, well, you know, gridlock is good. It used to be more effective in actually restraining government spending, but so much of government spending is on autopilot now that more and more is going into what are considered mandatory outlays entitlement spending in particular interest on the debt, things like that. And it's gone now where it's starting to approach three quarters of government spending. And that is it terrifies me that we have gotten to a point now where most of our hardest foot budget battles or spending battles are really symbolic because the real spending is elsewhere and we are content to go along with that, to go along with a kind of symbolic activity. That's the equivalent of marching in a gay pride parade or a Fourth of July parade or something. We have to turn back to what is actually driving massive amounts of federal spending and waste fraud and abuse downstreet, waste fraud and abuse going to get it someday over the weekend. There was a well, I'm actually kind of glad that we've given up even talking about that, you know, because that's always a lie, you know, that we'll claw back the overspending of this stuff. There was a clip over the weekend that was widely shared and high fived by so many journalists and commentators. Bill Crystal was one of them, but it was mostly left of center types, although Bill in these days is certainly he's practically working for the commentator. But it was of Barack Obama giving a speech in Wisconsin, I believe it was just growling about how the Republicans are coming after your social security and everyone's like, yeah, hi, you know, we need more of this on the on the on the campaign stump. And this isn't necessarily my, you know, what scares me the most, but it's a it's a sign of how absolutely debased, not just politics, but the coverage and processing of politics. So many journalists, let alone the the crystal lights were were super excited about this when Obama 13 years ago, right before he became president, you know, told the Washington Post, we can't continue kicking the can down the road on social security. On my watch, we're going to have to fix this because everybody realizes that this is a slow motion disaster in the making. And to see a guy go from there to 13 years later, absolutely demagoguing in a way that's not even at all realistic about where the Republican Party is at when it comes to this issue. And then to see everyone just high fiving and themselves engaging in the forgetting of that. That's a that's a sign of where we are. I guess my big fear is that with all of the populisms on the left and the right, which gets worse and Stephanie Slade writes about it wonderfully for the magazine. Read everything she writes that at some point, someone's going to be clever enough to use the ability to conduct pretty much total surveillance and everything we do. That is a the the story that kind of like excited everybody in 2013 and 2014 with the Edward Snowden revelations, how much the NSA can do, how much there's just every digital thing, every phone conversation, it's the government has the ability to tap into and we've kind of just forgotten about it. It's still there. And it's still waiting to be actualized by someone who cares. And that's going to be a dark moment or a dark possibility lurking around as we get into a much more punitive idea about what politics is for, which is basically lock her up and lock him up and lock you people up. This is why we need an analog revolution, you know, and I don't just mean two banks, I do actually I mostly mean two banks, but also like Moleskine note books. No, you're not wrong. Pen and paper. No, well, own your own your media, but you're going to have to build some storage space. All right, let's get to our end of a podcast, what we have been consuming. Peter, I have rereading to William Gibson novels, the peripheral and agency. Those are his two most recent novels. They are set in near futures and in one case, sort of in a kind of alternate presence, as well as in a further future. After an event, he calls the jackpot. The jackpot is a really interesting concept. I'm going to spoil it just a little bit here, but it's basically that humanity had all the things happen. All the all the apocalypses just happened at once. So like climate change and nuclear war and like the meltdown of democracy and social order and like hunger and starvation and just like and so in some ways, it's sort of it's horrific and apocalyptic, but he also is like, well, you know, we sort of there's still people and there's still new technology after this. And it's kind of not great that like the world is run by like weird Russian kleptocratic family gangs. But on the other hand, things seem basically safe and stable and people learn from the jackpot. And then they go back in time or sort of back in time to offshoots of the timeline that are not actually in their past, but are like sort of branches of a of their past that no longer affect them directly and they mess with global affairs and technology. And it's it's just a the novels are both very like just very engaging to read in the way that Gibson's work always is. He's just super smart about how technology works, but he's really smart about how technology affects culture. And there's like in the peripheral, which is now an Amazon TV show in particular, he takes us into a near future world in which in which like today's sort of like high tech or tomorrow's high tech has kind of filtered down to the lower classes and there's like guys living in trailers who have like who are like all these sort of drones just like sitting around on their property and the way that like now people have their you know, motorcycles and their half built cars and that sort of thing. And it's it's just it's really fascinating and fun to read. And and I even though I like his politics are very left and he's like he's he's just much more interesting than any than almost anybody else who is speculating about, you know, the next 100 or couple of hundred years of human existence and and how it might turn out. So that's to William Gibson novels, the peripheral and agency. Nick, what have you been consuming? I've been reading David Hackett Fisher, the historian's latest book, African Founders that came out earlier this year. African Founders how enslaved people expanded American ideals. And this is a history of black Americans, essentially, from the moment that they showed up as slaves. And actually even, I guess, a little bit before that through about the Civil War, but before, you know, before they were freed. And he looks at the ways in which slavery developed in different sections of the country. You know, so there's the Deep South. There's the Mid-Atlantic region. There's New England, et cetera. And he traces basically the way that they acted and how that fit in with and changed or challenged kind of the way we think about America. It's a fantastic book. It is so rich and thick and deep in history that it just changes the way you would think about colonial America as well as early Republican America. And I, you know, it's kind of reading through it. It's kind of an answer to the 1619 project, which obviously had a bunch of historical questions, you know, about its interpretation. And it never turns its eye away from the idea that slavery was fundamentally sick and was both imposed and maintained by brutal physical violence against blacks, both free and enslaved. But it broadens the way that what it meant to be black in America from the very beginning. And it is exactly the type of history that we should be kind of celebrating and engaging in because it's just it's thick, it's rich, it's unexpected. It is filled with both triumph and undescribable like, you know, tragedy. So highly, highly recommend African founders, how enslaved people, expanded American ideals. David Hackett Fisher is just one of the best kind of generalist historians of the American experience. People probably know Albie Unseed or Washington's Crossing by him. This is this is just like the book everybody should be talking about in this particular moment. Catherine, what have you been concerned? Is that drugs? Definitely a bunch of drugs. But of the many, many recommendations, again, thank you from our listeners. The Alex Bragg recommendation of the show, this is going to hurt is the one that has stuck with me. I absolutely made the choice to watch a sort of chaotic medical drama immediately before going into surgery. And it was weirdly the right one. This is a it's sort of dark scrubs, I guess. But it's set in the NHS. It's a it's a BBC show. And it's about centers around a doctor who works in an obstetrics unit. Everything is a mess. Everything is bad all the time for this for this doctor in a way that feels very realistic. You know, there's sort of like not enough clean scrubs in the machine after he works a double shift type thing. There is no element of house in here, right? Like there's no like we have to figure it out and it's not lupus. It's a rare, you know, African parasite. It's just kind of the regular stuff of medicine and and the ways they can go wrong. The fact that it is set against the background of the NHS is really interesting because it it means that you don't have the easy crutch that a lot of American medical dramas take of, you know, the insurance company won't let the baby have a heart transplant, right? Like there's none of that. And it shows that actually kind of scarcity and and in particular, you know, the at least the way that it's filmed, the facilities that he is working in that they are working in are kind of like they're crappy. They're like government issue, linoleum crappy in a way that feels very feels very real. I really enjoyed watching a bunch of doctors panic and have blood spurred all over them right before going into surgery. I think because it provided a contrast to what I what I assumed my experience was like no one was like hung over and and full of despair while they were operating on my knee or at least it didn't show. So I recommend the show whether or not you are about to be cut open by a doctor. This is going to hurt. It's I guess it's an AMC show. I think that means you can get it on Hulu and some other places. I watched it on Amazon Prime. So your knee jerk reaction was that it was good. I hate you. And I hope you die on the operating table. Yeah, pretty specific. I speaking of people you hope to die on the operating table. I watched a five part documentary series on the Lincoln Project. It's called the Lincoln Project. Why did you do that? Well, because you know, it could be any number of people that I'm referring to here. This is a showtime documentary. The fifth and final episode airs this week on November 4th. I think it's this week. So you haven't seen the end of it yet. Thank you for questioning my integrity. But yes, I have Nick, because the miracle streaming services are such that you can watch it even before it's of last official broadcast time. I know I wasn't challenged. I was just so you know how it ends. And and that will make your heart, one's heart swell with even more hate than the rest of it does. So the Lincoln Project, for those of you who kind of like don't remember exactly. It was founded in 2019 by a bunch of kind of never Trump or Republican political hitmen and strategist Steve Schmidt, who was the campaign manager of the John McCain campaign in 2008. Rick Wilson, you might recognize. He's the guy who wrote, I think, everything Trump touches dies. And all these guys became these sort of Republican, pugnacious MSNBC commentators. There's also Jennifer Horne, who at some point was the Bill Weld campaign manager when he was running against Donald Trump, a bunch of other people besides. And so it was it's directed by Kareem Ammer and Fisher Stevens, who are like Hollywood lefties of done documentaries. Fisher Stevens is also an actor. And so they got access. They were fascinating being having hated Trump. And they came across these characters. Stuart Stevens is another one. Well, for the Lincoln Project, who like, oh, how are these Republicans like doing doing these great kind of like Trump tweaking ads that make Trump mad? They put up a billboard of Ivanka and and Jared Kushner on Times Square and to make them super angry. So they went and they got embedded with them as in the final months of the 2020 presidential election. Basically, Lincoln Project would run an ad in usually in Washington, D.C. on Fox on Hannity, knowing that Trump would see them to try to provoke a reaction. This would then go viral online and everyone would just mash the donate button. They would use that money to make more ads and also to attempt to influence the voting in Arizona and Georgia and some other places, including seven Senate races in which they lost all seven. You this will scare you straight from from the politics, from passion, from hating Trump, from loving Trump. They show a lot of of documentary footage of January 6 then like the worst excesses of Trumpism, which serve is kind of like a you wakes you up through the fog that you had had tried to put behind you if you sit and watch through the whole thing. But the great part about the documentary is that so they get this access. It's the last two months. They're all decamping to Park City, Utah to kind of all sit in the same office together and it goes through the drama of the election and everything like that. And then just before it the election itself happens, the organization itself just starts to implode so spectacularly and you have all these guys, the sympathetic cameras there to watch all of it happen. John Weaver, one of the co-founders is seen to have sexually groomed and harassed a whole series of interns and people knew about it and they lied about knowing about it. It is it is a disgusting documentary, really. It's well enough done that you can take away a bunch of different things. There's an interview with Fisher Stevens last week. I'm going to write about it pretty soon in which he says, yeah, you know, I'm just hoping that this really motivates people to vote in the midterms and presumably like against Maga candidates and it like motivates me to never pay attention to politics for the rest of my life, which would be hard given my job. It's just gross. It is absolutely grotesque people doing grotesque things and making themselves rich and then backbiting and turning on one another and freezing people out and talking crap. Steve Schmidt is a monster of a human being. I wish him all the worst possible that could happen to a person legally to happen. So check it out if you have a taste for such things. Again, it's well enough done that it can support your own conclusions, including being really, you know, psyched about these troglodytes getting themselves rich by tweaking Donald Trump, if that's what you like. But yeah, Nick, the final episode, the final five minutes of it to see how they go through all of these horrors and then can still raise money at a Beverly Hills fundraiser afterwards. It's it's it's special. It is a special. Did it make you want to go start your own firm that's called like something strategies? It's amazing. And it's actually like it. It shows how this economy works. And the guys will just basically admit I mean, they they had companies within the company. They raised $100 million for 2020. They kept calling themselves the most successful super pack in history that individuals within like Reed Galen has a company called I forget whatever strategies that spent $27 million of that and no one knows what it was on. That attitude. Did they have any measurable success in blunting Donald Trump? Because you mentioned like the seven Senate races that they all lost. And obviously, most of them are connected to major loser campaigns in the past. Like so they had the most sympathetic character in this as a guy. And I should say, I know a lot of the people who are profiling the documentary, which made it kind of weird to watch too. But Mike Madrid in California, a longtime Republican on California, he was part of a political team and they were focused on like microtargeted ads. It wasn't the trolling stuff. Some of it was a bit trolley, but in Arizona in Georgia and Arizona and Georgia went to Joe Biden. And so they can tell themselves the story that they helped make that happen. And also the main story that they tell themselves is that they distracted Trump so much that he didn't do the things necessary to win reelection. That's the big one they tell themselves. I think there's, you know, that that's a story. It's not something that people who've looked at it very closely tend to corroborate, but that's how they do it. But does it still exist? It does. Or did it disappear? It does. Steve Schmidt left it. I just saw yesterday in a tweet that in which Steve Schmidt was calling J.D. Vance a fascist that he's starting some new thing and pocketing all the money from, you know, getting a lefty money that hates J.D. Vance style fascism. But the Lincoln Project exists on. Rick Wilson and Reed Galen are still out there and still and they made the shift after January 6th to be and after all of their scandals and implosions and and and, you know, lawsuit settlements and things like that. They're now shifting to be pro-democracy. They're doing the pro-democracy work. It is. That's like turning the March of Times going where anti-birth defects. That one. It is. You got a permanent employment program. But anyway, sorry to to go on at length about it. But wow, people, politics is I had written a piece called why the something like why the political grift won't stop a month or so ago, and I kind of wish I'd seen this. It's it's the conversion of your political hatreds into bad people getting rich and not otherwise really impacting politics one way or the other. Is something that we should all learn from and maybe stop throwing money at your hatred. That's the end of the sermon. OK. Thanks for listening, everyone. Go to all of our podcasts, including interviews and interview with Nick Lesby. Nick, do you have something to advertise an upcoming show or something like that? Oh, yeah, this Thursday in New York City, if you go to Eventbrite and Google ReasonSpeakies here, just go to reason.com slash events. I'm going to be doing a live interview with Steven Heller, who is a fixture in art direction of alternative and mainstream publications for the past 50 years. It's he's a fascinating fighter for free speech in a time when punks like him would be thrown in jail for working on things like screw magazine, Al Goldstein's Mag, where alternative presses in the late 60s and early 70s, he has a great memoir out. Go to reason.com slash events and check it out. Boom, go to all of our podcasts, reason.com slash podcast. And if you like what we do as an organization, please consider giving a tax pre deductible, whatever donation. We are not Steve Schmidt, but go to reason.com slash donate. And we don't use that money to build a park city mansion. I swear to God. OK, see you next week. Goodbye.