The Reason Roundtable

Balaji Srinivasan is a modern-day polymath who venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has called the person with "the highest output per minute of new ideas of anybody I've ever met in my life." A Ph.D. in electrical engineering, a co-founder of the genetic testing firm Counsyl, and a Stanford computer science lecturer, Srinivasan was also on Donald Trump's short list to head up the Food and Drug Administration.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Srinivasan about his current ventures; how the FDA and other regulatory bodies should adapt to new technologies; the controversy over genetic testing and so-called "designer babies;" how the 1997 book The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age has influenced his thought; his intellectual heroes; and how he's contributing to "Silicon Valley's ultimate exit."

In today's Reason podcast, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Eric Boehm, and Robby Soave discuss Mona Charen getting booed at CPAC and the strange new respect she's now getting from the readers of The New York Times, plus why the National Front scion Marion LePen is not a "classical liberal." We take on Donald Trump's claim today that: "I really believe I'd run in there even if I didn't have a weapon" about the Parkland shooting site and much-criticized Parkland Sheriff Israel's belief that "lions don't care about the opinions of sheep." We dig into the Supreme Court hearing happening while we were taping, Janus v. ASFCME, that may determine the fate of public sector unions in the United States. Stay to the end for the moment when Eric Boehm, Reason's resident curler, describes the inevitable glorious movie adaptation of this year's Olympic curling Miracle on Ice and manages to get Soave to care a sport for a couple of minutes.

On February 12, 2018, Emily Horowitz debated Marci Hamilton about whether we should abolish the registry for convicted sex offenders. Horowitz is chair of the sociology and criminal justice department at St. Francis College, and Hamilton is the author of Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children.

The debate took place at the Soho Forum, which runs Oxford-style debates in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event. The side that gains more ground is victorious. ​In this case, Horowitz—who argued for abolition—won overwhelmingly by convincing 33 percent of the audience to switch over to her side.

The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, has a twofold mission: to provide an arena for intellectual adversaries to talk in paragraphs as opposed to 140 characters, and "to enhance social and professional ties within New York City's libertarian community." It's held at the Subculture Theater at 45 Bleecker Street in Manhattan, and after the debate wraps there's always free food and a cash bar. Doors open at 5:45, and the event convenes at 6:30—at which point the party has already begun.

Shot and edited by Micah Garen.

Mark Janus is a "child-support specialist" who works for the state of Illinois to ensure that minors are taken care of when it comes to divorce and guardianship. He's also at the center of a Supreme Court case that may end the ability of public-sector unions to collect dues even from workers who are not members and don't want to be represented in collective bargaining. Oral arguments in Janus v. AFSCME will be heard on Monday, February 23 and decided by the end of June.

In 22 states, public-sector unions can force non-members to pay for costs related to collective bargaining and workplace representation. Janus tells Reason's Nick Gillespie he was never told about that arrangement until he saw dues being deducted from his first paycheck. He argues that forcing him to pay for a service he doesn't want provided by a group to which he doesn't belong violates his First Amendment guarantees of voluntary association and free speech (his union explicitly supports candidates in elections). "The union voice is not my voice" he's written. "The union’s fight is not my fight."

The case, writes Eric Boehm at Reason, "is best thought of as a sequel to Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a 2016 Supreme Court case that raised the same question about whether public-sector unions can extract political dues from recalcitrant members. That case ended in a 4-4 draw after Justice Antonin Scalia's sudden death left the Court with an even number of conservative and liberal members. For obvious reasons, that means all eyes in this case will be fixed on the newest justice, Neil Gorsuch."

"The whole premise of the war on drugs is that if you focus on the supply side, you'll solve all of the U.S.'s problems with problematic drug use," says Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. But "no matter how much money you put into fighting organized crime, there are always going to be new leaders ready to step into the shoes of those who've been arrested."

The failure of that supply-side approach is an overarching theme in McFarland's new book, There Are No Dead Here: A Story of Murder and Denial in Colombia. It recounts the bloody aftermath of cocaine trafficker Pablo Escobar's death, when the Colombian military, surviving drug lords, left-wing terrorists, and paramilitary groups vied for power. Focusing on three individuals who helped expose the atrocities and win justice, the book examines the impact of U.S. intervention in Colombia's drug trade.

Before joining the Drug Policy Alliance last September, McFarland spent over a decade as a drug policy analyst at Human Rights Watch.

Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with McFarland recently in New York City

Edited by Mark McDaniel.

Music: Modem by Kai Engel. All music licensed under Creative Commons. (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US.)

"Life is poker, not chess," says Annie Duke, a former professional poker player and the author of a new book, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts. Chess is a game of skill with "very little luck involved," while in poker good decisions and good outcomes often don't go together.

Duke cites Seattle Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll's decision in the 2015 Super Bowl to call for a pass play that was intercepted. Since the interception rate in situation like this is about one or two percent, it was a good decision that didn't work out. In football, like life, humans are prone to draw the wrong conclusions from situations involving bad luck.

"We go around and we change our decision making because we've evaluated the quality of a decision based on one outcome," says Duke. "Try and cordon yourself off from the outcome [and] recognize the uncertainty of the future."

Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Duke to discuss life, chess, poker, football, and why we can all benefit from exposure to dissenting opinions.

Edited by Austin Bragg.

When mass shootings take place, libertarians at Reason and elsewhere usually respond by pointing out that gun violence is declining even as the number of weapons in circulation is climbing; that mass shootings are not increasing in number; and that most proposed solutions either won't work and raise serious civil-liberties concerns. These points are all true and important. But are they the limit of all meaningful response? In today's Reason Podcast, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Robby Soave, and Nick Gillespie discuss what if any policies might mitigate the frequency and casualties of mass shootings. They also talk about how Rush Limbaugh, of all people, has advanced the most progressive immigration policy heard in several months, whether the investigation of Russian influence into the 2016 election will undermine belief in American politics, and the deeper meanings of Black Panther, the latest Marvel superhero movie that is setting box-office records.

Students from all over the world will descend on Washington, DC on March 2nd to attend LibertyCon, the annual meeting for Students For Liberty. Active in 110 countries and hundreds of college campuses, the group is the leading organization working to educate, empower, and train the next generation of libertarian leaders who are in interested in maximizing individual autonomy and minimizing coercive policies that reduce free expression, lifestyle freedom, and economic rights.

Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with SFL leader Wolf von Laer about the upcoming conference, what his group hopes to achieve in the coming year, and the top issues for freedom-minded students both in the United States and abroad.

"You have two parties in a heterogeneous country where people have all kinds of views," says Morris Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. "It's simply not enough to represent diversity in this country."

In his latest book, Unstable Majorities: Polarization, Party Sorting, and Political Stalemate, Fiorina argues that Americans actually agree with each other on fundamental issues such as immigration, marriage equality, and pot legalization. The polarization we hear about is mostly restricted to political activists and media elites who mistake their own extreme views for those of the common people.

Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Fiorina to discuss ideological bubbles, why President Donald Trump is a fracture in the two-system, and whether more Americans are becoming true independents (short answer: yes).

Edited by Alexis Garcia. Cameras by Paul Detrick, Justin Monticello, and Zach Weissmueller.

Today's Reason Podcast, which features Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and yours truly talking news of the week, begins with an autopsy of sorts. Did we delude ourselves about the strength of the fiscal conservatism in the Tea Party? When and where did the message of limiting government overreach get diluted by tertiary concerns and culture-war bombthrowing?

Also discussed: the Nork Queen media outrages at the Winter Olympics, why certain libertarians are confused by nationalism and sports, and whether we should even be talking about the initial White House mismanagement of wife-beating accusations against the now-resigned Rob Porter.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.