The Reason Roundtable

"The two things you need to know about the Paris agreement are, one, it is not going to do very much to tackle climate [change]...and it is incredibly costly." So says Bjorn Lomborg, the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Make no mistake, the Danish scientist believes climate change is happening and that human activity is the main cause. But as Lomborg stressed during an interview with Reason's Nick Gillespie, the Kyoto-Paris approach is a terrible way to tackle the problem and the US was right to withdraw from the treaty.

Bill Barhydt, the founder and CEO of the Mountain View, California-based startup Abra, discusses his mission of making it possible to send money "between any two smartphones in the world with no bank in the middle," bitcoin as "regulatory arbitrage," and whether rising transaction fees on the bitcoin blockchain could undermine the company's mission.

The study of psychedelics is "bringing psychotherapy and medicine together," says David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London and a co-author of the first imaging study looking at the effects of LSD on the human brain. "Drug-assisted psychotherapy is going to be the great advance in the [field in the] next 20 years."

In 2009, Nutt was fired from his job as a drug adviser to the British government after he made comments about ecstasy and other illegal drugs being less dangerous than alcohol and even horseback riding.

Reason's Zach Weissmueller sat down with Nutt at the Psychedelic Science 2017 conference in Oakland to talk about the results of his groundbreaking imaging study, what he learned about drug policy while working as a science adviser for the English government, and what he sees for the future of psychedelics and mental health treatment.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller

Music by Sergey Cheremisinov.

Nick Gillespie joins fellow Reason editors Katherine Mangu-Ward and Matt Welch to discuss topics in the news, including Greg Gianforte's body-slamming of The Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs; Trump's big trip and what it says about the future of U.S. dominance in the world; the TSA's proposed laptop ban on foreign flights; and the growing possibility of some sort of rapprochement, if not active alliance, between progressives sick of the Democratic Party and libertarians alienated by Trump and the two-party system.

"[The] problem with the all-out libertarian argument of 'anything goes' is that we live in a world where everything you do affects someone else," says Nick Bilton, former New York Times columnist, Vanity Fair special correspondent, and author of American Kingpin:The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road.

Reason's Brian Doherty called the book "a lurid cops-and-crooks story" in his recent review.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

We've all heard of the "sharing economy" and the "gig economy," app-driven services such as Uber and Airbnb that have radically altered transportation, travel, and an infinite number of other business sectors.

But are you ready for the "intimacy economy"? That's economist and media-studies professor Glenn Platt's term for the ways in which the internet and connectivity are shrinking the distance between performer and audience, producer and consumer, and celebrity and fan.

"When I talk about the intimacy economy, I'm talking about this growing category of successful business models that are built on one-to-one relationships and experiences that are personal, authentic, and unscripted," explains Platt, the founder and director of the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies (AIMS) at Miami University of Ohio.

In a wide-ranging conversation about technology and disruption, Platt tells Reason's Nick Gillespie how the intimacy economy will revolutionize not only business but also political and cultural practices. In a world where mass personalization and individualization is the new normal, the intimacy economy provides a bold new way of thinking about the future of interactive media.

Cory Doctorow, author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Little Brother, and Makers, is a three-time Prometheus Award winner, an honor bestowed on the best works of libertarian science fiction. In his most recent book, Walkaway, the super rich engineer their own immortality, while everyone else walks away from the post-scarcity utopia to rebuild the dead cities they left behind.

Reason magazine Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward spoke with Doctorow about cyber warfare, Uber-style reputation economics, and that most overused and poorly understood of sci-fi themes: dystopia.

Edited by Todd Krainin.

"We've gone to a modern [broadcast] system that has a lot of places where stuff can happen without permission," says Thomas W. Hazlett, who's the FCC's former chief economist, a professor at Clemson University, and author of the new book The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone. "And we have seen that the smartphone revolution and some other great stuff in the wireless space has really burgeoned...That comes from deregulation."

So-called net neutrality rules are designed to solve a non-existent problem and threaten to restrict consumer choice, Hazlett tells Reason's Nick Gillespie. "The travesty is there's already a regulatory scheme [to address anti-competitive behavior]—it's called antitrust law."

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Justin Monticello. Music by RW Smith.

Speaking to a gathering of leaders of Middle-Eastern countries, President Donald Trump has declared that peace is only possible if "your nations drive out terrorists and extremists." In the same speech given over the weekend, Trump also called for foreign-policy realism and told the assembled leaders that he wasn't there "to lecture" them about how the govern their citizens just so long as they suppress terrorists.

Is Trump's rhetoric a shift in U.S. foreign policy or will it have no real impact on how war, diplomacy, and commerce is waged? That's one of the topics that Reason's Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, and Robby Soave discuss in the latest Reason Podcast.

Also on the docket: What is behind the jihad against "cultural appropriation," the idea that artists, writers, and individuals should never be allowed to imagine themselves as members of another racial, ethnic, or gender group? Why did Notre Dame students walk out during a commencement speech by Vice President Mike Pence—and did the peaceful protest actually signal a maturity when it comes to disagreement? Will Donald Trump's 10-year budget plan, to be released this week, be anything other than a fantasy map, or will it actually deliver on his promise to, in the words of his advisor Steve Bannon, "deconstruct the administrative state"?

"We want to say that campus racism is wherever 'the other' is," says Lawrence Ross, author of Blackballed: The Black and White Politics of Race on America's Campuses. "But no, [racism] happens at Missouri, Yale, Berkeley, Columbia, my alma mater, UCLA...whether it's a small college, or a private college, or a state college, it happens in every place."

In today's podcast, we've got the audio from a public debate between Ross and The Fifth Column's Kmele Foster over the following proposition: "America's colleges have fostered a racist environment that makes them a hostile space for African American students."

Audio production by Ian Keyser.