five reasons why we enjoy or recommend wall throws and why they're so beneficial. So number one, hey, everybody, it's Eric Johnson from Airtate Throws Nation. In today's video, what we're going to do is go through five reasons why I think you should be incorporating wall throws into your training in the off season. As everybody knows, we have had a extremely odd year. COVID has really just obviously crushed the 2020 season and it's still having an impact as we go in to fall when we would normally start getting into thinking about what we're going to do gearing up for indoor or getting ready for the 2021 season and those things are still changing and seasons are adjusting. And when we get into that off season time, because we're having so many limitations, one of the core things that you need to do is get a wall and you need throwing balls. So what we have for the discus are throwing, you know, implement weight balls. We have one kilo, one six, two kilo. We can go overweight with two fives. And then we'll use typically indoor shots for walls. Now, if you're throwing closer to a wall, like you have limited space, we like the hard shell shots. They tend to be a little bit more durable. And generally, if you can get backed off of the wall a little bit more, just either soft shell or an indoor shot is going to work. And this way you're going to be able to get in a lot of reps. Now that being said, we're going to go what are five reasons why we enjoy or recommend wall throws and why they're so beneficial. So number one is that wall throws allow you to focus on technique and not distance. But when you put an athlete in front of a wall, you know, the ball's not going anywhere. It's a common thing that we talk about. It says no matter how hard I throw or what I do, it's going to go X distance to the wall. And so by default, it gets our athletes out of the mindset of wanting to see how far it is. The minute you put an athlete in the ring, they're immediately, you guys out there, they're watching that are throwers, you know, you can't help yourself. It's the nature of the sport. You want to see it go far. So one of the nice things about wall throws is it allows you to really break down technical positions and work. So like here's an example, we have an athlete and we would be working on his rewrap. And again, right here, we're going to want an athlete to be moving through the throw. So when we're throwing it to the wall, it's really easy to get this athlete to stop pulling around and start pushing in and different things like that. So without looking at distance, because you take an athlete out into the ring, and again, they want to see where it's going to land. And if it's not going far psychologically, they think maybe the throw is not good. Whereas when you're throwing into a wall, you're going to just be focusing on feeling and you're going to be really keyed on positions. And you can look on video, which you can see we film a lot. And so we're going to be breaking down those technical positions. And again, that's all they're focusing on. So number two, the big reason for wall throws is reps, reps, reps and more reps. It's easy. If you notice again, when we take an athlete here and we just throw into the wall, obviously we have a pretty close this situation here. You can see this is where the athlete kind of came out of position. We're working on the block foot. We're working on again trying to come through. So sometimes the block leg is moving. And the point is, is as he hits that throw, boom, shot, drops or discus ball drops.  You don't have to get into a fast rhythm. Of course, you still want to have some time and control so that you don't get, you know, just into this breakneck throwing pace. But the nice thing is it's very easy to get in 30 to 50 throws. And again, for coaches, for groups, you can space out enough, like we have in our facility, we have an exterior wall, we can throw about three guys at a time. We go five throws, switch out kids. We go through that and we're easily getting 30 to 50 quality reps up to, you know, 100 reps in within, you know, an hour. It's pretty easy to do. Wall throws are great for that. And it's a great thing to add. And what we do in our off season time is we'll spend the majority of our first few months into the wall. So we go right into throwing, but we're throwing into the wall. So we're putting the emphasis on technique. We're getting in a lot of reps and then we're out in the ring typically once a week. We're in a obviously great training weather year round minus the extreme heat in the summer. But that's going to be your second reason for wall throws. Third reason, safety, you know, just like anything else is a habit you want to get into as a thrower. We always, we can't emphasize enough. But one of the things is if you did get hit with a one kilo ball, it doesn't feel real great, but it's not going to mess you up like a discus would you get hit with an indoor shot. You've got some, you know, chance of not being completely screwed up because it's soft, but safety is still a major concern.   But generally it's much safer. Fourth reason we like wall throws is facility limitations like we're talking about and especially with what COVID is going to be doing to sports and the type of limitations we're going to have looks like certain states have already announced that they're going to be running football and some of the fall sports in the spring. So you're going to have fall and spring sports running concurrently on campuses and everybody knows, unfortunately, that means that football is going to take priority and sometimes that's going to limit throwing areas. So you're going to want to find those exterior brick gym walls. Sometimes you can find those walls inside weight rooms, somewhere of building on campus and you can be able to get in and set up a throwing area. You just need concrete in a wall.  So the fifth thing, why we really like wall throws is kind of ties into the first point. You focus on technique and not distance. But what it does is it helps our throwers avoid burnout. We're not in the ring just grinding, grinding, grinding, grinding year round. We're switching it up, we're going through our progressions and we're able to get those reps in when we're focusing in at the gym or wherever. So it keeps them hungry. So again, we'll get out and do live throws in a ring typically once a week for the first few months of fall, but they're still throwing four times to five times a week. So really important factor and those are our five reasons why you should be including wall throws. We get a lot of questions on where we get. Some of our throwing implements, we'll try to link that up for you in the description below. If you have any comments, be sure to throw them down below. If you like this video, comment what you thought was good. Be sure to hit that subscribe button, check out the Throwing Chain Reaction System, and we will see you on the next video.


Hey there friends, thanks for checking in today. We're looking at the beautiful car k9. This is The gun that started it all. Let's take a few shots There it is. I love the car k9 All steel frame. It's a bit heavier obviously then the Palmer frame guns, but it has the same characteristics very thin 0.9 inches wide with the slide same trigger pull That breaks between six and a half and seven pounds. It's a double action only But this is the gun that started it all it didn't look like this This has a beautiful matte finish on the stainless steel, but it's very tight extremely tight Check that out. There's no movement at all and that's something that car arms is known for that is very tight handguns in Also has a tight recoil spring But that keeps the muzzle rise to a minimum and I just hold this gun in high esteem I've had it for about three years now. It's got Trigicon three dot night sights a Beautiful look and finish with a rubber grip and this is part of the car premium series, which means that Every part on this is made from bar stock steel 3.5 inch polygonal rifle barrel Man, what a nice shooter. I love the car K9. This would be one of the more expensive models. It's You know over 700 bucks, but look what you're getting a steel frame Car handgun that is amazing now what I have here is an eight round magazine This came from the ST 9 which holds eight rounds, but all the car models Calibre consistent use the same magazine. So although this one You know sticks down a little bit doesn't have a spacer in there That's because I took it out of another one. Although this does come with two seven round and an eight round magazine, let's see how Huge fan Love it. It's a beautiful gun. Let's go ahead and load these up and we'll fire it some more One of the reasons why so many people love car handguns is because they are small thin and lightweight This with the all-steel model weighs with seven rounds loaded 28 and a half ounces So many people carry them I've done it for years But I want to fire it some more and see if I can roll through this a little quick All right One of the things that I like about this canine is some of that laser engraving I'm not sure if they'll be able to pick it up, but if we look at the dynamics of this handgun You may understand a little more why I love it now The one thing I may do I'm thinking about doing this is getting some G10 grips Just to give it a little bit more flavor I think it'll bring out that matte finish stainless steel a little bit more but it's a it's a high-end car model and I Just think it's pretty outstanding Developed in 1996 by the way, that's you know when it the whole company began I guess that's the way to say it and then they just celebrated last year their 25th year anniversary and they came out with a new Model of the K9 that is stunning. I mentioned that the heavy recoil spring keeps the muscle rise to a minimum Let's go ahead and check that out and you can see what I mean a very flat shooting pistol So there it is the car K9 I had to break this out of the safe and thought that you guys may enjoy Taking a closer look at it As well as how much I wanted to enjoy bringing this back to the range if you like videos like this Please subscribe and share. I always appreciate thumbs up button Thanks for watching and you guys be safe


Forty-four sailors and family members from NSA Naples just spent the day volunteering at the Pontifico Collegio Filipino in Rome. Okay, so now they're basically here to accompany us and also to help us with some work, cleaning the grounds, and some of them will be visiting the Rome, the Vatican, St. Peter especially, and also St. Paul's outside the walls. In addition to cleaning the grounds, the volunteers transported three pallets full of food for local families in need and for workers on overseas missions. And this is the second time that they give us some stop, and we are so blessed for this stop. And so many people are blessed also for this stop for these goods. The three pallets of food were donated by members all over the NSA Naples community. For more information on volunteering in your community, you can contact your base chaplain's office.


Test your English. Chat GPT. Step 1. Preview. You will hear a passage about an academic topic. Listen carefully and be prepared to take a short quiz afterward. Prepare yourself. Focus. What do you know about this topic already? Chat GPT. GPT stands for Generative Pre-Train Transformer. This topic is Chat GPT. Think about it for a moment. What do you know already? The passage. You can either read or listen to the passage or both. If you want to practice reading, turn off the sound. If you want to practice listening, minimize the screen. If you want to do both, leave everything as it is. Ready to begin? The passage. Chat GPT is a cutting-edge natural language model developed by OpenAI. It is a large-scale artificial intelligence tool trained on vast amounts of text data, which enables it to understand and respond to questions in a human-like manner. Chat GPT uses a generative language approach, which involves predicting sequences of words based on the preceding context, allowing it to give coherent and relevant responses to prompts. Its versatility and advanced processing capabilities make it a valuable resource for a variety of applications, including content generation and language translation. Step 3. Take the quiz. Answer these questions about the passage. 1. What is Chat GPT? A place for people to talk. A natural language model. A social media platform. Feel free to pause the video if you'd like more time. 2. What is Chat GPT trained on? Audio files, video files, text data. 3. What is the generative language approach used by Chat GPT? Predicting sequences of words, processing advanced capabilities, preceding the context. 4. What kind of applications can use Chat GPT? Content generation, language translation, both A and B. 5. What makes Chat GPT a valuable resource? Its versatility, its coherence, both A and B. Here are the answers. What is Chat GPT? A natural language model. 2. What is Chat GPT trained on? Text data. 3. What is the generative language approach used by Chat GPT? Predicting sequences of words. 4. What kind of applications can use Chat GPT? Both A and B. 5. What makes Chat GPT a valuable resource? Its versatility. Step 4. Check your vocabulary. What does the word sequence mean? A group of things that follow a particular order. Tiny decorative emblems woven into fabric. The negative results of a particular action. A group of things that follow a particular order. 7. What is the meaning of the word vast? A huge pot for brewing. Large and extensive. Political conspiracy. Large and extensive. 8. Which means the ability to adapt and perform in various situations? Versatility. Capability. Cutting edge. Versatility. 9. Which word describes a logical and consistent connection between ideas? Rationale. Relevant. Coherent. Coherent. 10. What is the meaning of generative? Producing or creating something. Group of people with a shared interest. Study of one's ancestors and heritage. Producing or creating something. Step 5. Review the passage. I will read the passage aloud. You can follow along by listening to it. Chat GPT is a cutting edge natural language model developed by OpenAI. It is a large-scale artificial intelligence tool trained on vast amounts of data, which enables it to understand and respond to questions in a human-like manner. Chat GPT uses a generative language approach, which involves predicting sequences of words based on the preceding context, allowing it to give coherent and relevant responses to prompts. Its versatility and advanced processing capabilities make it a valuable resource for a variety of applications, including content generation and language translation. Step 6. Summarize. Write about the topic in your own words, or summarize it by speaking with your friends or classmates. This is the knowledge and vocabulary that you learned from the passage. This is a good way to practice all your skills – listening, speaking, reading, writing, and vocabulary. Go ahead and pause the video so that you can summarize. Step 7. Discussion. Have a conversation with your friends or classmates about this topic. Pause whether you think Chat GPT is a good idea. It's your turn now. Go ahead. Talk. Again, feel free to pause the video and take as much time as you need. Here are some sample questions to help you get started. What are the pros and cons of Chat GPT? What types of cutting-edge technology have you tried? Thanks for watching. Don't forget to subscribe to our channel so that you can get regular updates when we publish new videos. To see more videos like this, click on the link above or check out our websites for more free English learning resources, ESLgold.com and FreeEnglishStudy.com.


Hi everyone, Joe for JaspeysCaseBreaks.com coming at you with 2020 Panini Score Football one pack, random team break number 43. Rusty Wallace's old number. All right, big, oh no, big thanks to nobody. That's false. Come on, Joe. Richard Petty, Bubba Wallace drives it now. King, Richard Petty. All right, there you go. Big thanks to these folks right here. Can't do breaks without you. That's the whole point. You guys keep Jaspeys running. Big thanks to everybody on that list right there for getting into the action. Big thanks to the 32 teams right here for keeping it going. All right, now let's roll it. We'll do the break first, right? And then we'll give away the final Panini black spots. All right, so four and a three, seven times for each list. One, two, three, four, and seven. What are some football 43s? What are some football number 43s here? All right, so after seven times, we've got Bob down to Darryl. What's 43s? Like a kind of number is out. Running back number? Seven times for the scrolls. Okay, there you go. One, two, three, and seven and final time. So after seven, we've got Vikings in this little pack break down to the Rams. All right, so for this little pack break, no trades, but here's the first half of the list. There's the next half of the list. Nick and BD saying Troy Palamalu is a 43. What are their football 43s? I don't know what a Mr. Shampoo is, Brad L. But is that a 43? All right, so let's print, let's rip, and then we'll re-randomize that list and see who gets the... Oh, that's right. Oh, I see, I see what you're saying now. Yeah, Mr. Shampoo. Right, Troy Palamalu does do that commercial. With Mahomes, I think was one of the commercials. That was a good one. Head and shoulders, great offense for your hair, or is it great defense against... Anyway, there's a pack 43. Thanks, everyone, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's the random team break that we're about to do. That's what we're giving away, spots in this little filler break. Always look out for these little filler breaks, folks. Some breaks may be sold out, but not really. They're kind of fake sold out. Look out for those mini breaks, the salopacks, the filler breaks, whatever you want to call them, even random number blocks, to help complete a break. Sometimes breaks need a little help to get over the finish line. And you can get into breaks for a fraction of the price, too, that's the other advantage, if you're lucky you have to win spots. All right, so those are all vet comments. Here's a no offent, scorecard, gray border, some of this here, some of... You know what, I'll randomize that, and these should be all Rook. I'll randomize that as a consolation to the left person. Any of the quarterbacks here, besides Cole McDonald? There's my guy, Brian Edwards. There's two at Tygo Viola, nice. That is for Miami. That is for Nick Stover and the Dolphinos. Nice, not too shabby. Right there, all right. Let's flip back to this list right here. So from Trey, down to Zach. Trey down to Zach.  Don't pay attention to that. Don't look at that screen. Just not, I was just so eager to get into the other break. Okay, there we go. There you go, Trey down to Zach. Once again, you saw that, Trey down to Zach. Trey down to Zach. Let's roll it and randomize it and give away 10 spots. It's gonna roll and randomize it 12 times. Top 10 after 12, good luck. One, two, 11 and there's 11 and 12th in final time. So you already see Adams won a spot, but from 11 down to 32, sorry, we'll get him next time. But congrats to Adam, Darryl, Darryl, Michael, Edwin, Matthew, Trey, Zach, Nick, and Adam. Congrats to the top 10 right there. You're in Panini Black NFL RT number two, coming up in a separate video after this. I'm Joe for jaskiescasebreaks.com. I'll see you next time, bye.


In this video, I want to talk about how I use the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K to record my YouTube videos and how I get great audio using two microphones, both inputs of the camera. I'm going to show you how to do it. So I don't have a lot of time to make these videos, but I really, really want to do it. So I have tried to find a way to make it as easy and as fast as possible, very little setup time so that I can have an idea, set everything up, go for it, start recording it, quick edit, and get them out. In effort to do this, I have taken some advice from a couple of other people on YouTube, including Caleb Pike over at DSLR Video Shooter. And I've tried to do a one-stand setup that can easily move out into the room whenever I'm ready to do a video or move away whenever I need to do something else. So part of this is good lighting. I have a decent soft light here and a good way for audio to be recorded. And so what I am doing here is I have a SM-7B fantastic microphone hooked onto a little boom arm like this. So get that back out of the frame. And I also have a lavalier microphone that is just plugged directly into the camera. It's not wireless or anything at this point, but I probably will go there at some point just for convenience. I have this, the SM-7B run into a box called a cloud lifter. And so what that does is it boosts the signal of this microphone. This microphone is great, has a great tone for voice, but it needs a little bit more juice behind it for most microphone preamps. So the good thing about the Blackmagic camera is that it has a mini XLR input and it can provide the phantom power for this microphone or actually for this cloud lifter box. So I have the SM-7B run into the cloud lifter box and then from there I have a short XLR to micro XLR cable plugged into the camera and then I have the phantom power for that input turned on. Then I have the lavalier microphone run through a cable and it is plugged into the other eighth inch jack on the side of the camera. And I believe it's a powered lapel mic, it's just a cheap one from Best Buy, I believe. The audio quality is not fantastic but it's great to have as a backup and just to kind of add to the sound. So now I'll give you an example of what they sound like, each one. So this is some audio with the SM-7 with the lavalier turned off. This is what that sounds like. This is the bulk of the sound. This is where it has most of the lower mid-range, the part that most people like about the vocal sound. And so I'll switch, this is the sound with just the lavalier mic, the SM-7 is turned off. So this is more of a backup microphone. I could move around a little bit, it doesn't matter so much if I am directly on this or not. So that's also good to have, especially since the camera has two inputs. It's nice to record that way. And they are panned out left and right. So as I am editing the audio, I can then just make it mono and I can choose how much of whichever one I want to go to both speakers at the same time. Or like in this demonstration, I can cut one out and just let the other one play. So as for recording the video, I actually used the HDMI out of the Blackmagic camera and I feed it through a FuelWorld Master M6 monitor. Maybe I'll put stuff in the description about all of this gear. I run it through that so that I can use the false color for my exposure. That's highly recommend that. Once I learned how to do that and what the colors meant, that was the best way to make sure that my skin tones were right and that I got the proper exposure while I was recording a video. So then I have the direct out of that monitor going out into a 4K HDMI USB3 input into my Mac mini recorder here so that all of my recording I can do directly with just quick time on the Mac. Saves me a lot of time as far as editing goes. Looks great, sounds great. It's exactly as it would be out of the camera. And so I can see my exposure. I'm recording here. I don't have to worry about transferring a memory card or running out of space. I can let it run as long as I want. Save the file, go back, chop it up, edit. Works fantastic. Alright, that's all I've got for this quick video. I hope this was helpful for someone. Certainly is helpful for me to get all of this set up in a quick way so that I can make these videos whenever I have an idea and try to build my channel and try to teach some people how to create some things. So if this is your first time here, make sure that you subscribe. I'd appreciate a like. It kind of shows me that people enjoy what I'm trying to do here. Leave me a comment if you have any questions about any of this. I'll make sure and put in the description the full list of all of my gear and the things that I use in case you want to look into any of that further. So I appreciate you watching. See you next time.


This study found that hyperbaric oxygen therapy, HBOT, can significantly improve pain, tender points, fatigue, multidimensional function, patient global and sleep disturbance in people with fibromyalgia, FM. Additionally, low pressure, less than 2.0 atmospheric absolute, HBOT appears to be safe and well tolerated, with no serious adverse events or complications being observed. This article was authored by Shinchin Chen, Hui Ma, Mai Jiu, and others.


This 2014 Ford Mustang GT Premium California Special is stock number 11884Z. We are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, near New and use sports car headquarters. This 2014 Mustang has the 5-liter V8 motor, pumps out 420 horsepower. This car has been fully-safetyed and inspected by our service shop for the state of Wisconsin inspection process, has a fresh oil and filter change, all the fluids have been checked and topped off, and this car is 100% ready to go. Sterling gray metallic is the color we shoot all of our videos in 1080p 60 frames per second, so if you have HD capabilities on your computer, tablet, smartphone, or television turn them on right now, because it is definitely your best way to check out the quality and condition of the vehicle before seeing it in person. If you want to subscribe to our YouTube channel to see videos like this that we do each and every day, and the lower right hand part of the screen is a gold subscribe button, click that, and then click the bell notifications to get updates each and every day that we do videos. This one comes with the 19-inch painted and polished aluminum rims. Those rims are in excellent shape, I didn't see any scuffs or scrapes on this one. It has Pirelli 24545ZR19 tires on it, and these tires have like 60% of the tread left on them. Front fender absolutely perfect, no dents or dings on there. It does come with the LED running lights, the HID headlamps, and the projector lamp fog lamps. Front bumper and lower valance are in excellent shape, I didn't see any scuffs, I didn't see any scrapes, dents, dings, cracks, nothing like that. Hood is in excellent condition as well, and it actually has some decals that fade to full black on the back there, real light in the front, pretty cool. Passenger side front fender is in excellent condition as well, no dents or dings on there. Passenger side front rim is in excellent shape, and you can see that metal flake in the paint there, really, really good looking paint on here, sterling gray metallic, one of my favorite colors on the Mustangs as you go down this side of the car. Take note of how clean the body is, how reflective and mirror like that paint is. We take these HD videos so if you are far away or even if you're close by, but you just can't make the trip down and you're still interested in purchasing the vehicle, you can see the car, hear the car, have confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at, so you can make a smart buying decision from the comfort of your own home. We ship vehicles all over the United States, so you can have confidence in the car and the people that you're working with. Back rim is in excellent shape too, and the back tires have just as much tread as the front tires. And around to the back of the vehicle, rear bumper is in excellent shape, no dense dings, scuffs, scrapes, cracks back here, has the sequential LED tail lamps, get that California special logo on the back there, comes with the raised spoiler, and that is in excellent shape as well. We'll take a look inside the trunk in just a second here, going down the driver's side, just as clean as that passenger's side, no dense or dings on the rear quarter, and for full disclosure, this back rim is in excellent shape too. This one does have the capitalist fuel fill, which is a really nice feature. Never get gas on your hands again, driver's side door, edges of the door, absolutely perfect, no chips or anything like that, and it does come with the power mirrors with the blind spot mirrors. Inside the California special package gives you the black leather and suede interior. You get the GTCS logo embossed in the backrest there, side-current airbags, power driver seat, factory floor mats, we'll take a quick look at the back seats and then we'll check out the trunk, get the latch child safety system back there, those seats fold down for extra storage, and very, very nice and clean. Take a look inside the trunk here, comes with an all-weather floor mat back here, which is a factory one, it's not a weather tech or anything, which is nice, and then you do get a spare tire, which is pretty cool. Very nice and clean back here, especially with that all-weather floor mat, and that shuts nice and solidly. You do get auto headlamps, power windows, power locks, power mirrors, the leather bolster on the doors there with the Mustang logo. We'll hop inside, turn the ignition on, check out the instrument cluster and radio. You can see that this vehicle has 11,351 miles, instrument cluster is super clean, comes with the leather wrap steering wheel, Bluetooth audio controls on the right, cruise controls and information center controls on the left, AM, FM and serious satellite radio capabilities, it does have the CD player, down here your climate controls and it does have sync where you can pair your Bluetooth cell phone to the vehicle, six-speed manual transmission, there's your stability control hazard lights and your trunk popper, passenger side floor mat and seat are in excellent condition, smells very clean inside this car, and I don't think it's ever been smoked in and the headliner is absolutely perfect, it does come with homelink buttons for your garage door security systems and lane systems, and you do get map lights right there. Lastly, this one does have the ambient lighting so you can change the color of your cup holders on the floor, you can change the color of the lighting underneath the floor and stuff, so really cool what you can do with this car, we'll start it up and we'll take a quick look under the hood, it does have the stock exhaust so it's not too loud, get those LED tail lamps and I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today and hopefully from this HD video you've been able to tell just how clean this car is all the way around inside and out so you can make a smart buying decision, or if you just checked it out for fun, hope you got to look at this sweet ride and enjoy the video. Under the hood we have the 5-liter 32-valve TI-VCT engine, 420 horsepower, runs very smooth, once again this car has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop, has a fresh oil and filter change, all the fluids have been checked and topped off, and this car is 100% ready to go, I always find it funny when these California special cars come in and they say not for sale in states with California emissions, so even though it's a California special, you can't drive it there. Anyways, HID headlamps, LED running lights, very, very nice car, I would highly recommend it from a quality and condition standpoint, and to see more pictures of this car or one of our other 450 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers, sports cars, Mustangs, Camaros, Challengers, Chargers, Corvettes, you name it, we got it, go to that website right there, www.summitauto.com, full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle from two locations, all at www.summitauto.com, and if you'd like to check out more HD videos, you can go to www.youtube.com.com. Remember to like, subscribe and share on this video and all the videos that you see there, in fact in a second you will see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel in the upper left, a link to more Mustang videos like this one in the upper right, a link to this vehicle on our website in the lower left, and a link to one of our latest YouTube videos in the lower right, click those, check us out, and we're super excited to help you with this Ultra Clean 2014 Ford Mustang GT California special in Sterling, Gray, Metallic. Thanks again, and remember to click those bell notifications, get updates on videos each and every day. Thanks again for checking out the video.


Welcome to the Reason Roundtable, your weekly pod and video cast brought to you by the magazine of free minds and free markets and unfree lunches. That is foreshadowing. I am Matt Welch, joined by Nick Gillespie-Peter Suderman and Catherine Mangue-Ward. Hi, everyone. Howdy. Hey, Matt. Happy Monday. So it's not. This is going to be an extremely disillusioning week in American politics and not just because it's going to be a week, but rather consider this gruesome headline in The Hill, which is a newspaper. This is from yesterday. Trump-Biden rematch hits overdrive with Super Tuesday's State of the Union. I think that should be in newscaster employees. Trump-Biden rematch hits overdrive with Super Tuesday's State of the Union. Nick Gillespie, well, the good news is that Nikki Haley won Washington, D.C., so thumbs up, America. And also, No Labels is going to finally make its secret decision on Friday of what to do with itself this year. Thank God. Well, they're not going to label themselves. That's what we know. Not quite yet. It's lent, so that means at least we all don't have to drink kerosene so far. It's times like this, Nick, that the two-thirds of Americans who hate this tend to go looking for the Hail Mary passes and the magic bullets and the other metaphorical terms that Catherine loves so much. Just looking for any alternative to the system that's puked up these results. So today's episode, we are going to go into the weeds of those potential reforms, open primaries, ranked choice voting, ballot access laws, stuff like that. But first, I want to talk about a little magic bullet that was just swatted down Superman style by the Supreme Court. I wonder if you've got it. It is the Supreme Court, so that's Supreme. I think that's what we've got to do. It's the Supreme Court 9-0. That's unanimous for those who are scoring at home. It started this happened just an hour before we started taping. The High Court told the state of Colorado to take a long walk off a short pier with its attempt to disqualify Donald Trump from the ballot because he's an insurrectionist. Catherine, why don't you lead us in a quick round of Insta reaction here on the Reason Roundtable podcast. My Insta reaction is this was for the best.  And in this case, the Supreme Court was not wrong to take this case quickly and rule definitively. If our ultimate goal is, as I think it should be, to get to a peaceful transfer of power rather than to get to a specific electoral outcome, this clearly maximized the chances of that. So good work, Supreme Court, I guess. Nick, I speak for you and me when I say our ultimate goal is to not stroke out between now and November. But how do you react to this news? I agree with Catherine that I'm glad the Supreme Court ruled that Trump can't be kicked off the ballot. But you know, the reality is over the weekend, I've rewatched the South Park episode giant douche versus turd sandwich. And I was like, wow, from 2004. And it's like, you know, God, those were better choices than we have. William Styron Sophie had a better choice than we have in 2024. Reporting for duty, Nicholas B. Peter, what's a I think this was basically the right decision by the Supreme Court. I was reasonably convinced by an op ed in the New York Times about two months ago by Kurt Lash, who just did a close reading of the relevant provision in the Constitution and argued that it is ambiguous. And so when you have a novel case of huge importance that would just radically change elections in the United States, and the provision is ambiguous and the history of how that provision has been read is ambiguous, you don't go and kick the likely presidential contender for the Republican Party off of a bunch of state ballots. Also doing that and allowing states to do that, I think this is one of the points that the Supreme Court makes that's interesting and relevant is that if you had, if you did this at the state level, it would cause chaos. If you had even 41 states where Trump was on the ballot nine where Trump was not or whatever the number would be, having different ballots across the different states would be incredibly chaotic. And therefore, just like from a process standpoint, it would be a bad process to allow some states to go ahead and do this. All right, let's proceed into our specific political. Matt, are you happy with it or are you livid with rage? I'm sorry, let's consult the moderator of this podcast. Moderator, what say you? Oh, I'm busy moderating the podcast. So I'm going to move the discussion along. No, I agree. You're just going to be a tragic happener. Really just increased here. And frankly, I'm maybe willing to accept the trade off of like one of you strokes out, but we get the peaceful transfer of power. Is that something I can have? I agree with all of you don't have anything meaningful to add to the discussion beyond the let's stop at some point doing the mini cannons, the mini toy cannons that were popular from like 2017.  No, I really thought you were talking about Jim Wynn of the gas race, Matt. Well, the toy cannon toy cannon for the T shirt gun of democracy. Aren't we glad we asked Matt? OK, Catherine, let's get into our specific ideas. But before we do that, that's not an ad read, but let's get to a more like a general proposition as a pallet cleanser, throat cleaner.  It's soon after Ayala's birthday. I don't know that it's too soon. Libertarians love to talk about faulty designs and incentives and such. To what extent do you reckon? Oh, perfectly haired editor-in-chief. Does our political and governance dysfunction derive from our kind of kind of architectural design flaws or bad rules? Yeah, I mean, I guess I want to start by being a little warm and fuzzy and saying that our political function to the extent that it is successful derives from our design. And so I want to like props to the founders for getting most of it right. So let's start there. But the partisan dysfunction that we are seeing now absolutely could be ameliorated. It could be at least it could be like less painful for all parties with some tweaks to the process. So yes, I do think the way that our election, the structures of our elections have evolved over time. They are not inevitable. We could be doing a lot of these things differently and that there are some places where we're doing it differently would produce outcomes that I mean, you could the trouble, of course, is that there are many different things you might be looking to maximize. So one might be like more democratic outcomes and one might be more orderly outcomes and one might be speedier results. And so the kind of part of the issue here is like no one even agrees what we're maximizing for, much less how to maximize it. That said, there are some of these proposals to kind of fix our elections as people often say that I do like. Nick, you surely fondly recall when we were touring around America, our book, The Declaration of Independence, How Libertarian. Well, it's a different country, Matt. It was, in fact, a different country, but a lot. That's the same John Kubermell in camp. Thank God. And Bob Seger. Yeah. But a lot of people at the question to answer, this was like the third most popular question was, don't you think that if we did fill in the blank, it would fix everything? What is your sense of that there is that that that X percentage of our problems are designed flaws? I am going to, I think, go against probably the consensus of the three of you and say very little it is this is not an architectural design. The house is built and it was standing for, you know, a couple of hundred years. The dysfunction and it may not be that, but the polarization and the issues we're seeing now isn't because we don't have representative government and elections that get us there. It's because we do have representative government and elections that get us there. There is no consensus on what the government should be doing and how we should be living as a country and our elections and our politics reflect that. There are tweaks that could make things better or worse. I for one, you know, I want to see more candidates from a broader range of, you know, positions, but they're going to be housed within the Republican Democratic parties or the whatever the two major parties happen to be. So I don't, you know, I think we're looking at a bug.  I don't even know why I said that. But, you know, we we disagree. We disagree, you know, what government should be doing? We have two parties that are as ossified and fossilized as the presidential candidates, running them and the former speaker of the house, Nancy Pelosi, who is like she will be mistaken if she ever goes to the Louvre.   We have a leadership that absolutely reflects bad politics, bad parties, and we are to blame. So I think Nick is right there to a degree. But let me push back just a little bit. I don't think that we have a design flaw in sort of the the fundamentals of our Constitution, but I do think that there was a misapprehension and incorrect expectation on the part of the founders about how American government would operate at the federal level. And so they designed a system, as we know, with three independent branches. And what they thought was that the competition in government would be between those independent branches. And instead, over the years in particular in the last 50 years, we have seen the competition develop so that it is a partisan competition rather than a rather than the branches trying to sort of check each other. And that has created some distorted incentives. And then, in addition, in the 1980s, the Supreme Court made a somewhat less not very well known ruling that is now actually going to be back at the Supreme Court this year that I think was very consequential in exacerbating that. And that was in a case versus Chevron. And they developed a doctrine known as Chevron deference. And what Chevron deference does is it basically says that when courts are ruling on administrative on the government agency interpretations of of the law, courts have to accept the government agency's interpretation if that interpretation is reasonable and reasonable is a very that casts a very wide net, right? There's a lot of things that are sort of like that seems reasonable enough. That doesn't seem completely bunkers crazy. And so what that does is it incentivizes the administrative branch, the executive branch and the agencies to create all of these to sort of to go far beyond the the the the text of the statutes that govern them and to do a bunch of stuff and then to present to courts. Well, here is a reasonable interpretation and then the courts hands are tied. And then in addition, because the executive branch has an incentive to do more and to sort of take on more, Congress has less of an incentive to solve those problems and to do the business of democracy and to actually sort of say what here's what we're going to, you know, here is what the law says and here's what we're going to do. What does that have to do with elections? And I'm not being obtuse. I mean, the administrative state is an issue, but it's like, you know, in terms of elections, you know, is this the reason why Gavin Newsom is governor of California and Ron DeSantis is governor of Florida or why Joe Biden ended up becoming the Democratic nominee, etc. I'm not really. This is not the only issue. This is not like I said, I think the system was basically designed right. And and the thing that it has to do with elections is it places more power in the executive branch places more importance on the presidency because the executive branch is in effect making law by interpreting law that then the courts cannot buy because of Chevron deference. The courts cannot say that's a completely ridiculous interpretation or that's just the wrong one. We are going to we're not going to accept that. And so by placing more importance on the executive branch, it disempowers the legislative branch. And so at the margins that reduces the competition between the branches and means that people that Congress has less incentive to do legislative work and much more incentive for, for example, backbenchers to just try to make a name for themselves and sort of act out, right, and just sort of use Congress as a media platform rather than as a place to go and write legislation that is going to be different. And that changes elections. It changes how people think about who they are going to vote for and which votes matter and how they sort of think about their incentives as voters, because everything ends up getting kicked up to the presidency. And Congress is just sort of sits there and doesn't even pass budgets. It raises the stakes for the executive catastrophically and lowers the stakes for Congress catastrophically. Yeah, I think I think to answer Nick's question further is that Peter is talking about the federal government. And this also points to a feature of American politics that I think doesn't get enough consideration, which is that when we talk about politics, generally when we chatter and write about it, it's usually federal and it's usually the gap between the president doing his stuff and the backbenchers being clowns. And and there's a big difference between that and what happens in the state and local level. And there's a big difference in the in, I think, the consequences of what happens when you have a Democratic or Republican governor or legislature on the state level, the gap between policy is much more striking. And but because we're so fixated on the president and that we tend to think about that when we go vote for a state and local, even though the consequences are all kind of different and scrambled.  But and also to Matt's point, it is not an accident that the best and that's not to say good, but the best governance, the best policy governance in the United States right now is almost entirely coming from governor's offices and state houses. I I will answer the question briefly by saying I mostly agree that I think we're getting the government we deserve good and hard on some level and its reflection of our choices. My interest, I guess, or suspicion or something is that it's the places precisely where the rules having to do with elections are written by the participants in the elections, the winners to do stuff like ballot access and, you know, the literal commission on presidential debates, districting its nose places where I think reform bits are most welcome and yet I don't have a magic answer besides appoint Walter Olson to everything. It's kind of hard to figure out how to do this without the political competition, but I think that's where a lot of the reform lies. All right, speaking of reform, let's get to it. Specific pluses and minuses of various tweaks. Katharine, I have increasingly heard and have been increasingly persuaded by kind of this year, maybe even more the notion that open primaries, allowing people who are not members of given political parties to nonetheless vote into that party's primary election to decide who is going to be then put forward to the general is a good idea. The idea being that if you allow some outside blood to get in there, it reduces the kind of in group, you know, contest of who can be the most sort of extreme or at least loudest inside the room. It's going to lead to overall moderation and so forth. We have open primaries more or less in about half the states. Now, what say you as that as an improvement on the existing status quo? Yeah, so I think if the thing you're trying to do is minimize tribalism in is minimalized, she's is minimize tribalism in politics that open primaries would help, right? This is just if you let the people who most strongly, personally and viscerally identify with the party, choose the party's nominee, you're going to get a certain type of nominee. And if you let people who are kind of interested in voting and stuff choose the party's nominees, you're going to get a very different person in many cases, I think. And I personally am guessing that I would prefer the latter category of candidate, but, you know, that said, I don't think we have enough evidence within the United States in recent memory about the differences in open versus closed primaries to say for sure, I could also imagine a scenario in which we get both parties nominating sort of mushy middle technocrats in a truly open primary system. And that might suck, too. So I don't want to I don't want to get out of ourselves in terms of candidate quality, but the theory of minimalizing the minimalizing. What's wrong with my brain? Yeah. Minimizing. Maybe it's the hair doc. It's the tribe. It's the word tribal and minimize that are joining together. And if that's not what we want to say, I don't know what is. The 2024 news cycle has been minimalizing all of our brains. My brain is minimalized on this one. I think the party should have more control over who they nominate. You know, if anything, maybe the problem isn't, you know, is an open or closed prize. But yeah, OK. It's that, you know, the parties actually have in many, many ways lost control of who they get to nominate and things like that. There are a lot of people who blame Citizens United for that, actually. Yeah, I know. And, you know, I think Citizens United was was right. We have a great video about it. Three reasons not to sweat Citizens United, which includes a great bit from Rachel Maddow as well as Keith Olbermann. I mean, it is like looking at the past through a dark glass. But, you know, the parties exist in order to do this kind of work and to put candidates up who reflect their constituents, their special interest groups, and in many ways, anything that takes us away from that, I actually think might make their offerings less sharp. So that might be part of the problem. It certainly would have gotten us or probably would have gotten us Mitt Romney instead of John McCain in 2008. And I must say, do we want moderate candidate or centrist candidates? I mean, that's what people who push for open primaries. So he's talking about this, it eliminates the extremes. I don't know, you know, maybe that's good. If in particular instances, and then it's bad and others, I don't want to. I don't want to moderate candidate for freedom. I want to I want to full-threaded one.  They shouldn't be. They shouldn't be. Well, interesting. OK. Peter, what do you think? I don't think that there is any voting reform that is going to fix America's democracy. I think there are some things, some good things to say, for example, about ranked choice voting. But as Nick said, one of the effects of ranked choice voting is that it tends to sort of sand off the rough edges of politics, because what it does is it sort of is it finds a more centrist consensus candidate rather than just picking the person who has the most votes and is often, in some ways, the most radical or most extreme from particularly in a primary. And so that may be good in some circumstances, but certainly it would have it would have consequences that no one would on this podcast would like, at least as far as policy goes in other cases, because it would push things towards sort of the median policy preferences for voters. And the the median the median voters policy preferences are not very libertarian in a lot of ways. Yeah, but isn't it I mean, isn't it kind of silly to judge something a proposed reform based on whether this little narrow group of us? Yeah, it feels like it's the best result. I don't think it's silly. I think it is worth noting. And like I said, there are many things to like about ranked choice voting. That's how I started.  The fact that we have a system that has that has selected for partisan extremness, right, for sort of the ex games of candidates, right, the just the most ridiculous, showy people, especially outside of leadership. That has that has brought on a lot of American politics as problems today. On the other hand, the policy outcomes that would that would result from more ranked choice voting would in many cases not to be to the liking of those of those of us on this podcast and many of our listeners. And we should understand that there are good things and there are bad things about all of these reforms and none of them are just going to fix democracy or solve America's governance problems. In part because of what Nick said earlier, there just isn't enough consensus right now about a whole lot of things. And until we find that consensus, until somebody sort of can say, here's how we're going to do it, whether that consensus is we're all going to do it the same way and we all more or less agree. Or actually, our consensus is going to be there's 50 different ways to do this. And we're just going to, you know, that's that's that's how it's going to be. Whatever that consensus is, we have not found it yet. As stipulated at the top, none of these are considered to be magic bullets. Want to consider them piece by piece, whether it's good or bad. And since Peter led us to our next one, let's talk about it, Catherine, a ranked choice or instant runoffs. The basic system is that if the four of us are running for presidents, voters will rank us in order of preference. I pledge to get the United States out of Rhode Island. And they're almost 200 over you over 200 years. And what have we accomplished? It's time to bring the boys home. And so whoever comes in fourth place will then after everyone, the voters rank. What's your name? Did you cover up with that cough? Nick comes in fourth place. I was I was I was so conflicted between Nick and Peter that it was that it was difficult. And that's purely a careerist move more than anything else. But wise, the you ranked voters rank them in order of their preference. And the person who comes in fourth place, all of the fourth place persons, voters, then their votes are redistributed to the second place person. You keep doing this until someone gets more than 50 percent. We have this in Maine and Alaska. Mostly it's also in New York City. Four dozen cities, including New York on Salt Lake City. Nick, as you know. Yeah. Well, it's kind of trending. It's growing. Sarah Palin is not in Congress because of it and other things. So, Catherine, how do you like ranked choice voting? I have grown to like it more over the years. I used to kind of just be like, listen, nerds, that sounds fine. And but not really give it a lot of thought. That is your modal response as an editor. Nerds, that sounds fine. I actually think the ranked choice bros of like 10 years ago really remind me of UBI people. Like it's the same energy of like they're maybe not wrong, but also there are so many different proposals and people really want to talk to you at great length about the details of the proposals. And it's not clear there's consensus or anything remotely approaching consensus around any of them, ironically. And so, OK, like, sounds fine, bro. It sounds fine. Nerds is sort of where I end up. But I have changed that view partially because I have seen it, actually, as you say, in action in the US to seemingly decent effect. And also because I actually think a little bit contrary to what Peter was saying, that the value for ranked choice voting for people with heterodox views is that you can you can see some of that in the numbers, right? So if you if you can kind of run single issue candidates that people can express support for within a ranked choice, you can see that preference. You can kind of make yourself visible. And I know we're going to I don't want to cheat us ahead, but people are using the none of the above option in Michigan last week to do that. They were trying to trying to be seen in the numbers using the choices that were available. And I think that that actually is a valuable tool. And I would like to I would like it to be available to more people. So ranked choice, bros, you have won me over. Let's do it, I guess. I think the you know, the results in Alaska with Sarah Palin and another, you know, Republicanoid candidate and a Democratic candidate who ended up winning actually shows like there's something wrong with that. The the voters of Alaska seem to have by, you know, their massive votes preferred somebody from the Republicanoid side of things. And they did not get that. You know, and while many people delighted because it means that Sarah Palin is going to go back to, you know, running a social media website or something like that.  I'm not sure the will of the people is necessarily a partisan preference. I think that the virtue of ranked choice voting in that case might be that actually whatever the appeal or lack of appeal of Sarah Palin is, it transcends Republicanoid or not Republicanoid and that gave people a chance to express those differences. And just like the preponderance of negative feeling towards a particular candidate, right? Like if if people are feeling incredibly polarized against someone, if they excite those types of emotions, doesn't it make sense to have a way to express that rather than voting for their single preference? What I what I do like about or what is always combined with ranked choice voting is the instant runoff, especially if unlike the city of New York, you can actually do it because you're not run by incompetence. You know, doing something that precludes the need to run a second election at great taxpayer expense as we saw in Georgia might be, you know, might be a good thing. Let's just kind of grab bag the rest since we can't spend the entire podcast talking about this. Catherine, you clearly want none of the above and uncommitted and other ways of saying hell, no on these assholes. What what's your what's your favorite otherwise reform sitting out there on the table that people talk about?  But I will say I was doing a little research for this for this topic. And I had forgotten and I fear our listeners may have forgotten that in the 2012 election, the sore loser provisions that that perhaps on perhaps which is so much hinged since Gary Johnson was three minutes late to withdraw from the 2012 Republican primary and therefore was denied access to the libertarian ballot. These are the sore loser rules or rules that prohibit you from from doing this cascade of cascading from major party to minor party.   Sometimes it's just a rule that you can't do it. And the LP tried to resolve this by finding another dude named Gary Johnson. That's true. Who is going to stand in for Gary Johnson? And it's I actually don't remember all the details of how the two Gary Johnson's were later going to be collapsed into a single Gary Johnson or something in like some kind of quantum mechanism. But I had forgotten that that glorious low key moment of procedural comedy and I wanted to remind everyone. This is like that guide from the state of Washington who changed his name to absolutely nobody and one seven percent of the vote for the Lieutenant Governor's Office in the early 1990s. This is my candidate. This is what I'm talking about. And might actually go to a ballot box to vote if she could vote for absolutely nobody. Nick, I do encourage people to write us all in on their ballots. That's a great joy of election season. Every year for me is like I get a couple of photos on my Twitter feed of people who wrote in one of us. And I love that. So loser laws are preventing the likely of preventing the long awaited marriage between no labels and Nikki Haley. She's of course ruled it out running on no labels, although she has said many times things like Americans really hate this rematch. And I'm going to fight for those Americans who hate the rematch, which sounds pretty no labels, but she's prohibited from running in eight states worth a combined one hundred and thirty one electoral college votes because she ran in this cycle as a Republican and you can't do it otherwise. And again, these are these are pretty recent. This is the exact thing where the Democrats and Republicans say, OK, I don't like that thing. So let's do a new rule that prevents that thing from happening for competition. Nick, I feel like you want to say something. Yeah, no, that's I think that's awful. It's I think what you wanted to say is that Gary BigHands Johnson from the San Diego Charters should be on everybody. So somewhere in a box, I have a sore loser man bumper sticker, which was the refrain that Al Gore and Joe Lieberman were referred to in the two thousand election. Back when Catherine and Peter were. And it's amazing because Joe Lieberman was like eight hundred then, but he's still around like we have this ferato class of politics.   He's still trying to ban Mortal Kombat, just mad that there's another one. I will add perhaps to top this off unless anyone else has a burning reform. I don't know how I wouldn't necessarily mandate any of these things. But I think when people talk about debate criteria, presidential or otherwise, but let's presidential specifically, if you get on enough ballots or your party gets on enough ballots where you could win a majority of electoral college votes, you get you get at least the first debate. That's that's that's Matt's reform here. I think I like that one.  RFK Junior might get close to that this year. Maybe they'll change it. They'll change it. They'll change it. But I don't know if Trump or Biden, but especially Biden, want to even think about having debates given everything else. All right.  I mean, I would love to see more rather than fewer or be able to read the transcripts. But, you know, whoever puts the debates together should be able to define the criteria and, you know, the candidate should be more willing to participate.  And there were no presidential debates, televised presidential debates between after 1960 until 1976. We have some good articles on why that happened. And did it mean that those elections in between were less representative of America? I don't know. One thing we didn't talk about was was germanting. And and I do think that there the gerrymandering has been a problem. It is not great that the vast majority of house seats are not competitive. And the reason why is because whoever's in charge every decade or so redraws the lines and ensures that they are not competitive. And Eric Baim did a great feature for Reason Magazine a few years ago about how actually we should just have those lines, the district lines drawn by computer, and we should just let the robots do it for us. And that would produce fairer, better drawn electoral districts and more competitive house races. And that would be good. Maybe we can have Gemini AI. Absolutely right. You know, so we're getting a lot of black Nazis in the Central Valley of California. We don't need AI to do it. We can use old fashioned computer technologies to do that. Slide rules. Slide rules for redistricting chair. Yes. You know, I agree with you completely, Peter, but also because I know Matt will appreciate this. When you see what happened to California at the state level, which the Republican Party there imploded after having a really good run and it is because they repulsed most of the voters in the state at the at the local and state level in the nineties. So there's no question that gerrymandering and redistricting and all of that matters, but it's also you can overcome that.  But I think we got to go back to the fact that the two parties suck at the local level of state level and the federal level.  More Walter Olson in charge of gerrymandering and everything else and more drag queen Republican volleyball players. All right, we're going to get to our listener email of the week here in a moment. But first reminder that this episode is sponsored by Better Health. Friends, what's the first thing you would do if you had an extra hour every day?  Would you sleep in? Would you study Mandarin? Would you work even harder on that overdue feature for Catherine Maggie Ward? Well, therapy can actually help you prioritize the things that are important to you. So time becomes less of an excuse for you to do the work. That's where Better Help Online Therapy comes in. Better Help is an easy to use, super flexible, entirely online therapy service that has helped many listeners of this podcast machete through the blah, blah and cut straight into life's big challenges. All you have to do is fill out a quick questionnaire, get matched with a therapist. If you don't like the first one, you can just swap them out for a second. Let therapy be your day organizer and your attention span declutterer with Better Help. Just visit betterhelp.com slash roundtable right now to get 10% off your first month. That's better help hlp.com slash roundtable. Do it today. You'll be glad you did. All right. Remember to please email your short queries to roundtable at reason.com. This one comes from Ricky Blackman, who writes, howdy, hey, Matt and happy Monday. It's good. What are your favorites? He writes with a you. So good, Ricky, short quotes from fiction that present libertarianism. Mine is from the end of Terry Pratchett's, which is a broad as follows. You can't go around making a better world for people. Only people can make a better world world for people. Otherwise, it's just a cage and quote. I'm still unsure. Ricky concludes whether that final sentence should be included or not. Catherine, you love this question too much. What's your answer to it? I do. Matt put this question in the chat to prepare for the podcast. And I was immediately like, oh, actually, it was a little embarrassing. Yeah, Terry Pratchett now and always is the source for excellent fictional you know, freedom quotes of various kinds, libertarian quotes of various kinds. But I will offer y'all some Octavia Butler, a newly somewhat trendy, but always beloved of a certain set of libertarian author. She there's an epigram at the beginning of the parable of the trickster where she says there is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns. And I think about that a lot. It's the perfect mix of like people are going to be people and they're going to kind of just make the same mistakes over and over. And you have to really accept that and internalize that. But they're like the world does change. There can be radical, exciting moments of change and we can pursue those. So Octavia Butler, honestly, all of her writing has just really, really cool, subtle themes that libertarians can appreciate and should foist on their friends. This is not the same as handing somebody out with shrugged. You're you're going to get away with this. Peter, how do you answer the question? The year was 2081 and everybody was finally equal. That is the first line to Kurt Vonnegut's great, incredibly libertarian, incredibly relevant short story, Harrison Bergeron. And it's not a libertarian epigram in the sense that it sort of declares the inherent, you know, all men desire freedom in the heart. So I think that's actually a line from Optimus Prime in the first Transformers, right, like all sentient creatures desire freedom or something like that. But it's so obviously ridiculous and so obviously absurd, especially coming at the beginning of the story, that it draws attention to the silliness and to the ridiculousness, the absurdity of that premise, of that idea that somehow or another, everybody is going to be equal in the most equal way. And then, of course, the rest of the story is great, too. But it's it's a great it is it is a great libertarian story and a great libertarian line because of the ironic way that it underlines highlights the the nonsensical goal of true equality of what we would now call equity. That that line, that story, along with the everyone going out to bounce the rubber ball once a bit from a wrinkle in time, just absolutely were the most terrifying totalitarian images of my childhood. And probably turned me into a weirdo. Nick, speaking of weirdos, what is your favorite? Thank you, libertarian. You were a weirdo already. You got the causality reversed. I will confess that I don't have a good choice here. But I've always loved this passage from the great Gatsby, where Nick is driving into the city with Gatsby. And what is funny, Matt, and you'll enjoy this. They're they're going over the Queensborough Bridge, the 59th Street Bridge, which is now named after Ed Koch. But the city scene from the Queensborough Bridge is always the city scene for the first time in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world, blah, blah, blah. And then Nick Caraway, who is the villain of the piece and my reading of the great Gatsby says, anything can happen now that we slid over this bridge. I thought anything at all, even Gatsby could happen without any particular wonder. And what I like about it is just the idea, you know, and I obviously have written about the great Gatsby for a reason, but it is a book about people creating the world they want to live in. And then many of and and it's an account from the people who are incapable of living in that world of increasing laissez-faire across every dimension of human activity. So I like that because it foregrounds the idea that you slide into a place where anything can happen. Anything can come together and be done. And, you know, people get worried about that. My answer is. Tenstafel, which, of course, is the acronym for their eight, no such thing as a free lunch as coined, at least the acronym by Robert A. Heinlein, who is my gateway drug to libertarianism as a as a teen. This comes from the Moon is a harsh mistress is 1966 novel about a lunar revolt against the colonizers of the United States or wherever the world. There's another line in there, one where another you get what you pay for. I like this thing for a couple of reasons. One is that it has that kind of similar thing of like, huh, makes you think it also makes you think about kind of economics and government provision of services. It immediately throws you into kind of econometric type of thinking, even if you're trade offs, trade offs, even if you're 12 years old. And I also like it because of the absurd acronymization of it is kind of what sticks to some people and definitely predates all of the baseball stat nerd, overly long acronyms that came out a lot of it from people who had read similar things when they were kids.  Is that acronym, that's not even the right word. No, abbreviations, abbreviations, whatever. You know, Matt, you mentioned the 1966 book. I would love to see you do a treatment of so that's the same year revolver came out. Right, like do a kind of glimpse of what were the major transformative things that came out in a given year. You've done that with songs for particular years. But what's the connection between the moon is the harsh mistress and revolver and maybe a couple of movies that came out that same. The moon is a harsh revolver. Yeah, two things I will remind everyone that that was my high school thesis paper is a stranger in a strange land in the summer of love and how it was a direct influence up till you drop. Never stop grokking. Never learn not to grok. But also also, I think that the song to do that, Nick, and I've been been cogitating on this for a while is painted black. That should really your nihilist soul. But that sure is such a incredibly galvanizing song with really, really interesting versions in various languages. And it just like touched off an entire future. And fun fact, by far the most downloaded or most number of whatever on Spotify. Yep. Wow. Can I just recommend very quickly that people check out the Eric Bird and the animals version of painted black, which has a scat stanza or five that goes on for what seems to be about 30 minutes, where a burden is like, hey, baby, I mean, he sounds like telecevolos. You know, like, baby, I'm not seeing any colors. Not yellow, not red, not orange, not green. And, you know, it's like, yeah, we get it. We get it. So Robert Heinlein had a voting drive. Would that be grok the vote? That would be great.  I like that. I understand grok in the original Martian. Yes, yes, indeed. If you're going to be talking about Eric Bird and you have to say point out that House of the Rising Sun was part of the lead up to painted black. It's very his version of that kind of introduced a new type of sound that Brian Jones thought interesting. Okay, Catherine, we're going to wake you up now. But first, let's wake up Peter Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader. Already mentioned on this podcast negatively by Nikolas B. Earlier announced last week that he is not going to be seeking re-election after November. Did he announce that, Matt? I don't know. It was the people around him. It was announced. It's something that's happened. We'll let TV's Andy Levy decided half time exactly how that came out. But Peter, you followed Mitch McConnell's career pretty closely. He is pretty much derided by everybody in American politics at this point. But with a lot of grudging and sometimes not so grudging respect among Republicans, especially those who are interested in things like judicial appointments. Can you give us a sense of what the post McConnell world looks like? What are we going to miss when he's gone? That's a good question. So I think to answer that, you have to go back and understand what Mitch McConnell was. And what Mitch McConnell was was a master of procedural politics for better and for worse. And that's in great contrast to the newer MAGA-E style of politics or even the squad style of politics, which is very media-centric, which is about grandstanding, which is about getting attention on social media or getting on cable news, but is not so much about using the internal levers of power to actually move legislation or block legislation to do stuff from inside the legislature. And I think there were things that were good about it, things that were bad about it and things that were quite mixed. And so one good thing is that is that McConnell recognized that a thing that he could do to advance his causes was to move the judicial appointments. And so he moved to judicial appointments, many of which folks listening to this podcast would approve of. And that has really changed American politics. And and Mitch McConnell is in many ways the architect of the Republican judicial strategy. A bad thing about Mitch McConnell was that I think that aside from the judges and maybe even maybe even you could fold the judges into this in some ways, in so many ways, his priority, his priorities were almost entirely partisan. He put the Republican Party and the fortunes of the Republican Party specifically the electoral fortunes. How many elections are you going to win? That was the thing that he that motivated him most was he was just going to try and put GOP butts in seats in Congress, right? And that was and if the number was was higher than that was better regardless of the policy outcomes. And and then there's a sort of a mixed view of him that is, you know, Justin Amash has often critiqued Republican leadership and yes, Amash was in the House and McConnell's in the Senate, but McConnell is part of this. Justin Amash has often critiqued Republican leadership correctly for over the past couple of decades, centralizing power where bills to the extent that they are passed are drawn up behind closed doors by just a small group of people without a huge amount of input from the backbenchers in the rank and file. And Mitch McConnell was definitely part of that. But I was at one of these sort of dinners you go to in D.C. where you meet people who are staffers on the hill or used to be leadership staffers. And this was a person who made the argument to me that in the absence of McConnell. We would have had a much less Reaganite, much more populist Republican Party much earlier and that Mitch McConnell, his centralization had the effect of holding the line on old style Republican Party politics, especially with regards to defense spending and tax cuts, but also to some extent with social spending that he tried to reject. And again, this was not like he was a champion for Medicare reform or Social Security reform or anything like that. But I do think that you can you can make a plausible. I'm not sure it's exactly the best case, but a plausible case that Mitch McConnell's efforts to centralize the legislative mechanics inside the Senate, what they did was they kept the Republican Party in that sort of Nikki Haley Reagan zone for a lot longer than the party would have stayed there naturally. And that probably had at least some positive policy effects from a libertarian perspective. I can see that Nick doesn't like this. So again, I'm trying to present a mixed a mixed portrait here. He did judges. That was good. I think his partisanship was quite bad. And I think his centralization had a bunch of effects, some of which were bad, some of which were good, but kept the Republican Party from going full MAGA and full Trump in policy terms as quickly as it might have in the absence of somebody like McConnell in the absence of centralization. Go Nick. I think that Mitch McConnell will go down as being one of the most powerful and negative influences on the Senate. He's in a John C. Calhoun class. He absolutely put partisanship and a single minded purpose of controlling things and controlling power, you know, front and center. And he was able to exert that over many parts of the federal government from a libertarian, a small L libertarian perspective. I would argue even counting the judge stuff, he did virtually nothing to increase and expand individual liberty and and and, you know, a libertarian world in his term in office. I am glad to see him go and I hope only that he's replaced by people like Rand Paul, who at least can make a gesture towards a more libertarian world where power is decentralized, not only at the local level and the state level and the individual level, but at the federal level. He was a plague on American politics. And I hope that his example is seen as the exact thing that we do not need from elected officials, particularly people controlling either the House or the Senate. Catherine, would you care to triangulate between your two colleagues? You know, I'm mostly with Nick on the so long sucker don't let the door hit you on the way out kind of approach. But I will in maybe the only time I will ever do this associate myself with Elizabeth Warren's remarks about Mitch McConnell, in which she said, I've disagreed with Mitch McConnell a whole lot more than I've agreed with him, but he mostly fought to keep the government functioning. And that I do think is true. And I think that that is the thing that we are not necessarily going to be able to take for granted going forward. And you know, I'm all for the government ceasing to function, of course, but I would like it to cease to function in an orderly and principled way and not in a chaotic and stupid way, which I fear instead of getting someone with more libertarian impulses in place of McConnell, we will get someone with more chaos monkey kind of energy and that that will be the thing we miss about him. It certainly will be the thing that Senator Elizabeth Warren misses about him, but maybe me too. The I'll just add without making grand proclamations that the about the only productive little season of national politics in recent memory for my point of view was between 2009 to 2014. Maybe 2011 is better to 2000 and late 13. Some were in there when the Tea Party kind of Yop barbaric Yop came to being and Republicans even when they didn't have a lot of power, but had at least some in the House of Representatives particularly were able to post the great bailout and and the stimulus afterwards were able to hold the line on spending, including defense spending, military spending for a couple of years there and all throughout that process up until it ended and it ended in November of 2014. The biggest Republican like object or to any of that type of behavior that led to those positive results was Mitch McConnell and as soon as the 2014 election came and Republicans now controlled the Senate and the House, Mitch McConnell first out of the gate saying no more shutdowns no more debt ceiling negotiations no more any of this kind of stuff and that's when spending started going through the roof. It predated Trump, but Trump boosted didn't care about it didn't run against it, but it croaked that politics, which I thought was a productive and interesting politics and once that politics was done that its champions in adherence including an especially Rand Paul who was running for president back then was now no longer the center of attention and in the middle of the most crucial debates in Congress it's a bad moment, Mitch McConnell was on the wrong side of that and the other thing I would say about him and this is plenty I can find plenty of self-described libertarians who vociferously disagreed what I'm going to say which is that his blocking of the Democrats Barack Obama's attempt to nominate Merrick Garland to Supreme Court and just rejecting it out of hand I think was on a process level regardless of the result, terrible for American politics. I think it says that we are going to put presidential elections as a functioning legislative branch body. We're going to put presidential political considerations first and just have a kind of will to power idea about how we go about our business and that was a bad precedent and it will be continued in the future forever, at least until there's a new politics in this country. The end to bring this back to what I said about Chevron Mitch McConnell played into that and in many ways made the made the made Congress sort of a body that is less competitive with the other branches and one that is less willing to do its do the basics of its job and legislative. All right, let's get into our end of podcast. What we have all been consuming in the cultural arena. Peter, I understand that you stood in a long line to the bathroom. Do you want to talk about it? No, I didn't. I don't want to talk about that at all. Okay, but you did go to the movie theater in which there were long lines of the bathroom from what I know. That's true. I saw Dune Part 2 twice actually once in IMAX and once not in IMAX and I'm going to see it again tomorrow with Catherine Meggy Ward because it's awesome. It is sounds like he's perfectly willing to consider that option. I took my wife and she enjoyed it and that was good enough. So I was really thinking about this movie in the context of its sci-fi lineage in a lot of ways. Dune the novel Frank Herbert's 1960s novel is a response and retort to Isaac Asimov's foundation series and then of course Star Wars borrows a lot of elements from Frank Herbert's Dune novel right the sandy planet of Tatooine the giant worm and the Empire Strikes Back right and George Lucas was absolutely using that as part of his kind of collage material along with like World War II fighter footage and Akira Kurosawa and all of that stuff. And then of course Star Wars gave way right has sort of become the like 50% 51% of pop culture over the last 40 years. I'm exaggerating a little bit for effect here but it's become this huge force and now the Dune movies that are out are kind of recommenting back on Star Wars. But if you go back to where all of this started with Foundation and Isaac Asimov what was foundation foundation was Isaac Asimov's science fiction retelling of Gibbons decline and fall of the Roman Empire and you think about how much mind space has been devoted to these science fiction stories over the past decades and it really turns out that the meme is true. Men cannot stop thinking about the Roman Empire. And so that's what I came away from Dune to with. All right. So you liked it. Yeah, it's really good. You know, from and freedom. I think we're going to need like a holiday to celebrate it. Dune teeth. Oh, Nick, what did you consume that you would like to talk about without getting into Gibbons? Well, I also want to point out that George Lucas stole from Dune the original or the 1984 David Lynch version, which featured Sting wearing a diaper at the end. Some of that shows up in Star Wars as well. And I will I'm forever Dune the David Lynch Dune, which is that but that's because I dislike the novel and everything that emanates from it, although I think Peter is absolutely right in his categorization and characterization of it. So I will talk. I had two things, but I'll limit it to one mat. Thank you. Yes. And that is Andrew Hickey's podcast, a history of rock music in 500 songs. He is up to almost up to episode 200. These are multi hour long kind of disquisitions about music going back to the late thirties up through, you know, he's up to various points in the early seventies with things. He just finished a four part arc that involves the birds and particularly Grand Parsons, which is probably a total of about eight hours. And this is like rock history if Dan Carlin of Hardcore History was doing it. These are phenomenal, weird, you know, meditations on how rock music, which is really pop music in the post war era came into being. Hickey is a strange British guy. He sounds like Alan Rickman on a tranquilizer. He is it is just a if you care at all about popular music and about how that intersects with all sorts of different creative, commercial, political and cultural happenings over the past 70 years. A history of rock music in 500 songs is unbeatable. It is truly amazing. And you know, I am the most the asset test of it is that I listen to episodes about songs and artists that I actively dislike and I come out seeing the world anew for the first time. It's really a triumph of the podcast form and I cannot recommend it enough. I think that the birds and Grand Parsons tell a story about the possibility, the technological, the cultural, the aesthetic possibilities of the late 60s that was going to fail in its inception. And so that particular for episode series is just an incredibly deep rendering of stuff. I know very well and I learned a ton on this and I think everybody would you know it regardless of whether you like the subject matter, you will be amazed that somebody pieced all of this together in a way that is a beautiful multi dimensional work of art. I highly, highly recommend a history of rock music in 500 songs by Andrew Hickey. I have had more people come up to me in the last two weeks and recommend that podcast that have probably recommended all podcasts in the history of the world up until that moment. Friends in LA who play music and have been in the industry one way or the other for 30 years will say the exact same thing that Nick just said of like, I know everything about X and I learned a whole bunch about X and I can't believe how right they got it and how interesting it was. So I can't wait to listen to it myself. Catherine and there is tons of it. So, you know, Catherine, what did you consider? I am going to re recommend something that Nick has recommended on this podcast in the past, maybe twice even. I'm doing this because I just read it and so it is fresh for me but also because maybe you like me blackout while Nick is talking at the end of the podcast and so you might have missed it and it would be a shame back of the line Catherine. You did. You did also blackout. You woke you woke me back up with the phrase Alan Rickman on tranquilizers. So I actually did. I did catch some of that this week. Julia. It is the retelling of George Orwell's 1984 by Sandra Newman. Oh, you guys, it's so good. It's just so good. Like speaking of like doing too good. It's doing too good, Peter. I haven't seen doing too yet. I'm sure I will enjoy it. But I love a retelling. I am I this is already a genre that I'm in for. I will, you know, retell me a Greek myth, retell me a fairy tale, retell me whatever. But because 1984 has attained this kind of mythological status, right, like all of us have it engraved in our brains at an early age. And so this is subject to that same that same power of the kind of like retelling of a myth, the retelling of a foundational story and and there is a twist, which I will not reveal. But it's it's fantastic. And if you, like me, are a lady, you might particularly enjoy it because one of the most powerful things about this about this retelling is that it it really captured for me the experience that I had, but wasn't able to articulate reading 1984, which is like, I'm not Winston Smith. I'm not I wouldn't be like this in this world. He is he is sort of too credulous and too uncynical in what I see as typically male ways. And Julia immediately busts through that and then does interesting things with it. So it's short. It's it felt short. Actually, I have no idea how long it was because I read it on Kindle, but it's it's really, really wonderful. Julia, a retelling of George Orwell's 1984. We get a retelling of this podcast from Catherine's perspective. Y'all just know I'm trying to do every day. I am going to be the odd man out in that my pick here is not something that I'm going to very enthusiastically recommend, but it has been recommended to me so many times over the years that I finally decided to watch it.  It's just not good. Wow. I went in there wanting to love it like I give me some Jeff Goldblum in his early phase and I'm you know you had me at John Lithgow Ellen Barkin who's totally sexiness fine. Wow. This is just like who's filmed for a dollar 75 in San Fernando and Southgate somewhere. It doesn't make any sense as a bunch of good one liners in the middle of a bunch of just stuff that it wow so bad. It just reminded me of how many things like if you were a part of alternative culture in the 1980s you had to put up with some really really crappy production values and I think a lot of people want to hold on to those things those those totems of it and and say that they're better than they actually were like Nick with David Lynch's Dune. Now I like David Lynch's Dune because it is terrible. Yes. It's it's the oral boros of nihilism or the Mobius strip of something or other. But anyways wait if the sandworm eats its own tail. Yes does it get high on its own supply of spice. Anyways it's it watches a cultural artifact maybe or if you're like me and they've all been telling you for 40 years that this one's really great and it's a damn shame they didn't make 75 of them Peter Weller is totally great in it and Peter Weller in general is always great as far as I'm concerned but I can only name two movies that he's been in but it's it's no good. He was in three Robocop films. Sorry what are three Robocop movies and he's in all of them though you only need to watch the first one. Watch the Rapture with him in Mimi Rogers the first Mrs. Tom Cruise. He's great. He's great as the voice of Batman in the Dark Night Returns adaptation the two parter that came out a couple years ago. Okay. See Matt if you want something that predates Buckaroo Banzai but is very funny in that same way watch George George Papard's Damn Nation Alley. Oh watch it. It's like the A team in a post apocalyptic world 10 years before the A team. I watched it three times in the same movie theater on the same day. It was playing in a double feature at the Paradise Theater two movies for 99 cents. I watched it with the no mobile here folks. Yeah the no mobile. So I was like Disney. I would peace out during the no mobile. I don't know what I would go do go punch a clown or something.  So good. Just cockroaches giant giant cockroaches have never been the same for me.  Watch that on a double feature with Death Race 2000 and you don't need anything else in life. You've already you've already won. All right. That's enough winning thinking of Catherine being mystified by people being wrong and stereotypically male ways. I think it would be good to do it as the second Damn Nation Alley is the second film in a short movie that starts festival that starts with breakfast at Tiffany's. Well that's interesting journey that George Park travels for breakfast at Tiffany's to Damn Nation Alley is like the voyage that the post apocalyptic world takes from a kind of fun and hip late 50s early 60s New York to a place where giant cockroaches are run in the show. That's all the murderer cockroaches that we have time for here on the Reason Roundtable podcast. Thank you for listening watching you know pelotonning people still peloton. I don't think so. But in case you were doing that thank you for your service listen to all our podcasts at reason dot com slash podcasts. If you like what we do as an organization please consider a tax deductible donation at reason dot com slash donate and Nick do you have anything to add about stuff that's happening in your world. Yeah and it should be up by the time this airs and if not shortly after go to reason dot com slash events on April 15th we're going to be doing a reason speak easy in New York City with Jonathan height. Talking about his new book the anxious generation so that's April 15. Are you going to place Robby Suave in the audience saying to say I dissent that critical it is just you know what bring your cell phone. That's all I'll say to the lady. Okay. Thanks again for listening. Catch you next week.