The Reason Roundtable

In the early 1970s, Michael Lacey and James Larkin helped reshape the media landscape by making Phoenix New Times one of the scrappiest alt-weeklies of all time. Along the way, they built an underground media empire based on their "desert libertarianism"; over time they came to control a slugger's row of legendary outlets, ranging from SF Weekly to Cleveland Scene to the granddaddy of all alternative papers, The Village Voice. In 2004, they founded Backpage, an online advertising site that quickly became Craigslist's main competitor. Earlier this year, the site was seized by the federal government, which claims it was a hub for prostitution and sex trafficking.

In a blockbuster new story, Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown says "the story of their arrest...is better understood as one of near-religious fervor, government greed, and political retribution, in which an escalating panic over commercial sex coincided with a booming online publishing platform."

In the latest Reason Podcast, I talk with Brown about the flimsiness of the federal case against Lacey and Larkin, the problems with conflating prostitution among consenting adults with the trafficking of children, and why the media seem incapable of telling the difference.

In the 1980s and '90s, novelist Bret Easton Ellis captured more fully than anyone the excitement and ennui of a wealthy and smug America that was stumbling without knowing it into a century filled with terror, disruption, and generalized hostility. In the book and movie versions of Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and American Psycho, Ellis dissected what happens to a society in which depth of feeling is synonymous with failure to thrive. In this century, Ellis is back in his hometown of Los Angeles writing and producing movies like The Canyons with the likes of Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen, whose shambled personal lives might as well have been scripted by Ellis in one of his most darkly comic moments.

He's also putting out one of the most engaging and insightful podcasts available on Patreon, in which he talks with guests like Kanye West, Rose McGowan, and veteran writer/director Walter Hill about the ways the entertainment industry is built on an unstable foundation of economic, sexual, and political hypocrisy.

Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with Ellis about the ways Hollywood is failing to come to terms with ever-changing methods of production and distribution, what Ellis sees as the excesses of the #MeToo movement, our rapidly changing and failing public discourse, and the enduring interest and relevance of his work in 2018.

Produced and edited by Paul Detrick.

"Shibuya" by Bad Snacks is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Is the new corporate-charter bill unveiled by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) last week a plot to "To Destroy Capitalism By Pretending To 'Save' It," as the Scott Shackford headline put it? Or is it another "clear" example (in the words of Vox's Matthew Yglesias) that "the people working on this subject so far don't actually know anything about it"?

We put that question to the test on today's editor-roundtable version of the Reason Podcast, first by running the details through Peter "Computerman" Suderman, then adding some hot sauce from Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch. Other issues coming under discussion: the Catholic abuse/coverup scandal, the "good and bad news" about John Brennan getting his security clearance revoked, the journalism profession's haughty self-regard, and Gary Johnson's shockingly competitive poll numbers in New Mexico.

What could go wrong with federalizing the corporate charter process and putting bureaucrats in charge of long-term business thinking?

Google's dominance in so many aspects of our digital lives is "creating a walled garden that's basically controlled by two nerds in Silicon Valley," says George Gilder, the author who more than anyone else predicted today's imperfect online utopia in books such as Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life and Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize Our World.

Of course it's not just Google (which owns YouTube), Gilder says in a Reason Podcast recorded at FreedomFest, the annual gathering of libertarian held every year in Las Vegas. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and a host of other online ecosystems are working to keep us all within their own specific spaces, the better to sell to us and capture all sorts of economic and demographic value out of us. "This model of creating economic success on the Internet by homogenizing a walled garden doesn't replicate," argues Gilder, who says that if Apple or whomever can have their own proprietary space that keeps people tethered to one service on the Internet, then so too will China, Iran, and despotic regimes. "In the end, the internet breaks into fragile fiefdoms and falls apart."

Long a prophet of transparency, mobility, and cryptocurrency, Gilder says that disruption is coming and, as with earlier shifts from mainframe to personal computers, it will be upon us long before the solons of Silicon Valley knows what hit them. In a wide-ranging conversation, Nick Gillespie also ask Gilder how his techno-optimism about the liberating effects of cyberspace and technological innovation square with his old preoccupations in books such as Sexual Suicide and Men and Marriage about preserving traditional gender roles. "I do think reproduction is a vital human function and if we botch that, we aren't going to have any future. I really do think maintaining the sexual constitution, as I called it in Sexual Suicide, is important for procreation and having new generations." Even in a world filled every sort of sex robot imaginable, he says, won't be able to reprogram that.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

In 2013, Whole Foods co-founder John Mackey co-authored a business history-cum-manifesto titled Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business. Drawing on his experiences with Whole Foods, Mackey outlined an unapologetically free market approach to commerce that also stressed far more than simply maximizing returns to shareholders.

"We believe that business is good because it creates value, it is ethical because it is based on voluntary exchange, it is noble because it can elevate our existence, and it is heroic because it lifts people out of poverty and creates prosperity. Free enterprise capitalism is the most powerful system for social cooperation and human progress ever conceived. It is one of the most compelling ideas we humans have ever had. But we can aspire to even more," reads the credo of Conscious Capitalism, a nonprofit Mackey created to help popularize his ideas and engage entrepreneurs and policymakers.

Nick Gillespie sat down with Mackey and Alexander McCobin, the CEO of Conscious Capitalism, to talk about the group's goals, activities, and reception on both the right and the left. The podcast was taped at FreedomFest, the annual gathering of libertarians held each July in Las Vegas, and we talked about everything from the Industrial Revolution to the human potential movement to McCobin's role in creating Students for Liberty, one of the largest libertarian organizations in the world.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Photo credit: Kris Tripplaar/Sipa USA/Newscom

"It's implausible," David Harsanyi recently wrote in this space, "to imagine a future in which liberal activists don't demand that Republican groups be de-platformed." Conservative activists, too, will happily whip out the ban-hammer, in the name either of fair play or righteous indignation/responding to market signals. So where does that leave libertarians?

Arguing amongst themselves, as usual. At least that was the case in today's editor-roundtable version of the Reason Podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch. Starting with the dud of a Unite the Right II rally, then proceeding to Antifa and Alex Jones, the quartet grapples with free-speech culture vs. law, the illiberal honkings of pols such as Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) and President Donald Trump, and the ongoing self-martyrdom of professional journalists. Along the way (spoiler alert!) we learn of Mangu-Ward's counter-protest infiltration, and the Silicon Valley PowerPoint presentation that knits together weed, Satanism, and cryptocurrency.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Should libertarians cheer, boo, or do a shrug-emoji when a private social media platform bans the likes of Alex Jones?

In 2009, Amanda Stott-Smith dropped her children off a bridge in Portland, Oregon. Her 7-year-old daughter lived, screaming until she was fished out of the freezing river by a good Samaritan. Her 4-year-old son drowned. Writer (and occasional Reason contributor) Nancy Rommelmann read about the story the next morning over a cup of coffee, and spent the next seven years chasing down every detail. The result is To The Bridge: A True Story of Motherhood and Murder, a reported work of non-fiction that is compelling and hard to read in equal measure.

Rommelmann and Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down in a sweltering NYC apartment in August to talk about true crime reporting, parenting, death, and the publishing industry. The conversation turned out to be one part interview, one part story assignment meeting for Rommelmann's next feature. So tune in to hear about the who, what, when, where, and why of reporting on child murder at book length, and stay for a sneak peek at a Reason editorial meeting.

"The demand that research funding be declined because of its origin poses a grave threat to academic freedom," wrote Daniele Struppa, the president of Chapman University, a private school about 90 minutes south of Los Angeles, earlier this year in The Wall Street Journal. "I am being asked to turn down donations from the dreaded Koch brothers, even when...the proposal for funding was inspired, developed and fully fleshed out by my faculty, in the most important exercise of their own academic freedom."

In the culture wars playing out on the nation’s campuses, Chapman University, a private university about 90 minutes south of Los Angeles, is one of the hottest combat zones. The university received $15 million to help fund The Smith Institute, which seeks to bring the study of economics and of the humanities together in a way that benefits both sides. The Smith Institute is named both for Adam Smith, widely considered the father of economics, and Vernon Smith, the 2002 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

Because some of the money to fund The Smith Institute came from the Charles Koch Foundation, some students and faculty are protesting the Institute and demanding that the university return the gift. Across the country, groups called “UnKoch MyCampus” are pushing for schools to return any money from libertarian philanthropists Charles and David Koch, arguing that the money comes with ideological strings. (Disclosures: Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this podcast, receives money from the Koch foundation and David Koch has been on our board of trustees for over 25 years.)

But do funders actually dictate university research and teaching? Or is this simply an attempt to quash ideological diversity? And in an age when the humanities—the study of history, literature, art, philosophy, and more—are rapidly declining at universities, what are the best ways to revive interest in the very activities that make us, well, human? Those are some of the questions Nick Gillespie put to Daniele Struppa in a conversation recorded at FreedomFest, the annual libertarian gathering held each July in Las Vegas).

Audio production by Ian Keyser.