Juliette Sellgren 

Hi, my name is Juliette Sellgren and this is my podcast, the Great Antidote. This podcast has been brought to you by Liberty Fund and AdamSmithWorks. To learn more, visit www.adamsmithworks.org.

Welcome back. Today, it is my pleasure to be speaking with Katherine Mangu Ward. She's the Badass Editor in Chief of Reason Magazine and she's a part of this super squad of people that records the Reason Roundtable every week with Peter Suderman and past guests Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. Sadly, I have to report that she used to have purple hair and now she does not. I remember a time in my life where I wanted to dye my hair so badly. I'd begged my mom. I was like, mom, mom, please. You know who has purple hair? You know who has purple hair? Katherine. Katherine has purple hair. She works at Reason. She's an adult. She has a job. Her hair is purple. Why can't I dye my hair? Come on. She never let me dye my whole head. But I'm glad to have you on purple hair, brown hair, whatever, color hair. So welcome to the podcast.

Katherine Mangu-Ward 

Thank you. I am delighted to be on and you should have called me in. I would've had a word with Vero. We could have sorted that out, man. But we may yet reintroduce some colors on the hair, but Covid was not kind to those of us who cannot. DIY home haircare.

Juliette Sellgren 

Understandable. So listeners, I know it's been a minute, but hopefully you all remember the first question, Katherine, what is the most important thing that people my age or in my generation should know that we don't?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (1.59)

I think it's probably the fact that it is not the apocalypse. Every generation has kind of airy and impulses the belief that the end times are upon them. Just in my own memory, we had Y2K, we had 9/11, not to mention Covid and climate change. And I think when you read the writings of any period, you actually find that absolutely everyone thought things were going to hell in a hand basket or the flip side, which is that the utopia is about to arrive. And I think both of those things are almost always wrong. In fact, we are going to muddle through humans are great at surviving. We are pretty wily. We tend to fix things just in time. And I think you could say our defining attribute as a species is that we invented duct tape. It's never the apocalypse. It's never heaven on earth. It's always something in between and we are going to make it through.

Juliette Sellgren (3.00)

That is a great response. I think. I mean, especially what Covid Part 10 is happening right now. People are freaking out all the time left and right, something is happening, but it's very important to remember that something is always happening, but humans have been a constant. If humans haven't gone away, I think we're going to keep fighting to make sure we don't go away.

Katherine Mangu-Ward (3.23)

And I think even if humans do go away, it won't be in the sense of global extermination. It's going to be in the sense of evolution. I am a big fan of the transhumanist movement, the futurist movement, people who are thinking about not just the ways things are, but the ways things could be. And I think there are certain strands of particularly conservative thought that are alarmed by the idea of a posthuman future. This is your Francis Fukuyamas. The notion of the new man is sometimes used, frequently used to justify horrible authoritarian interventions. And I of course oppose those. But I think that even if humans do end up changing radically, this is a thing that will persevere. This thing of just kind of changing, adapting, adjusting and keep going, that is the most human characteristic. And even when we are perhaps no longer identifiably human, we will still have that attribute.

Juliette Sellgren (4.30)

And we will still have originated from what we are now. So it's like we're gone, but we're not really gone. I don't know. I think worrying about that first, I mean life is too short, but it just seems too big of a fear to have. Okay. Jumping into the meat of the interview, I'm going to start with this softball question that I've asked Matt Welsh and Nick Gillespie, even though I kind of want to ask you about how you deal with them all the time.

Katherine Mangu-Ward (5.03)

It's a great joy in my life. They are a lot, but they are like the Stadler and Waldorf of Reason. They just kind of sit in the balcony and grump. And it's actually for those who don't know, Nick and Matt were both Editors in Chief of Reason before me, and it's not actually very common to be able to have your predecessors’ institutional memory right here with you. And at Reason, I think it's been good. I mean, one thing that people praise Reason for and that I think is important about Reason Magazine is that we really have not changed over our more than 50 years. And one reason that's true is because the people have stayed constant or people tend to have a very long tenure. So I love having those guys around, even though occasionally murder does cross my mind.

Juliette Sellgren 

Well, I'm glad they're around too. The Reason motto is Free Minds and Free Markets. What does that mean to you?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (6.04)

That is a softball question. I love it. I'm not very good at sports, but that one I can do. So this I think is the classic duality of libertarianism. I think in the American political spectrum, of course people tend to historically tend to associate freedom of thought, freedom of expression with the left and free economics, free markets with the right. One thing that's interesting is that now those values have been abandoned in large part by both of those polls. I think the left, all you have to do is look at the latest tweet from the ACLU to see that the left is really softened on the classical liberal values of free speech and free expression, free minds if you will. Also, free thought, freedom of religion, something that the left used to defend and no longer does. Similarly on the right, you used to have Republicans at least paying lip service to the idea of free trade and open markets. That's something that the right has really moved away from, not just under Trump, but before. And to me, those ideas are the core of what makes for a good and virtuous and successful and enduring polity. So I think that those attributes are not uniquely American, though I think the United States embodies them better than most nations. And I see the role of Reason as just to tell stories about why free minds and free markets are important, how they work, why they work, and to remind people what happens when they're absent.

Juliette Sellgren 

You mentioned that Reason has been around for a while and that it hasn't changed that much. How has the state of libertarianism evolved since, I don't know the beginning, the early days of Reason? I mean, you guys aren't typing articles in your basement. The audience is much wider, but what else?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (8.10)

Yeah, I mean definitely some people are still typing articles in their basement. So there is that continuity as well from Lanny Friedlander who you're referring to there, who was the founder of Reason in 1968 and he literally had a couple of typewriters and was just banging away on something that was then mimeographed and mailed out that became what is now Reason. So this is actually something I struggle with a lot because I think it's important to be consistent as I just said, but at the same time, it can be disheartening to discover an article that someone wrote in 1973 that is the same article that we are publishing now, right? Because it feels like, geez, what are we doing here? Are we ever going to win? And at the same time, I can imagine and have occasionally experienced that it's even more disheartening to discover an article arguing the opposite of where we are today because it suggests that maybe some kind of original energy or original mission has been lost.

That was more true in my previous job at the Weekly Standard, where the magazine had less of a robust sense of itself. It was more of an evolving project. But I think I actually in the issue that we just put to bed, so my editor's note will be out shortly accompanying that issue and we have a big cover story by Jacob Sullum about how if you oppose the war on drugs because you think it's racist or has bad outcomes, disparate outcomes for especially black Americans, you should oppose gun control for exactly the same reasons. I think this is a really powerful argument and Jacob makes it very well. I started to write my editor's note about how in addition to these bad consequences, you also really need to think about just the underlying rights argument for the right to bear arms and where that comes from the right to self-defense.

And as I was working on this editor's note, I found an article from Reason from 1985 that was about this exact thing. And I think you could argue that we have made minimal progress on gun control, but one reason that this argument hits different now is because we have made real progress in the war on drugs. There really has been a realization of what at the founding of reasons seemed like, seemed like maybe it wasn't anything more than a dream to have the population broadly accept the idea that maybe people can put what they want into their bodies as long as it doesn't hurt other people.

Juliette Sellgren (10.59)

I mean, it kind of goes along with the idea that ideas aren't really new anymore, they're just recycled, and people find different ways to either communicate them or the time is just right at different moments. And so now might be a better time than then because now that so many people are opposed to the war on drugs and see the issues with the war on drugs, maybe that can then lead them to question their stances on gun control. I mean, that's kind of the beauty of that, even though it kind of is repetitive if you look back and you're like, well, it's kind of the same thing, it's not the same thing because the context under which it's written is different. And I think that's kind of important.

Katherine Mangu-Ward (11.45)

I agree. And I think that also there is this phenomenon where you need a certain amount of amnesia, institutional amnesia or personal amnesia to bring real vigor to these tasks. It's a very rare person who can wake up every single morning of a long career and say, this is the day. I'm going to win the battle today. And that's one reason that we place a really high value at Reason on hiring younger people and always sort of keeping the interns and the junior writers a steady flow of those folks coming in because there is something powerful and vigorous and invigorating about the first time you write about a small victory, say a harm reduction clinic that opens and prevents overdoses or during the period that last summer when there suddenly seemed to be a lot of movement on policing reform in the wake of the George Floyd death, that there are people who have been writing about those issues for decades, that reason.

But there were also younger people who really did think this is going to be it. We are really going to make changes. And you know what? Some states did not as much as I would like and not as broad a scope as I would've liked to see, but still legitimate changes and to sort of bring a freshness to that requires you to forget in some ways, forget all the times that you failed before or to learn from those failures. I actually recently rewatched a video of all the times that a SpaceX vehicle exploded before they successfully launched and landed on the drone ship and recovered it. And there's something, it sort of becomes funny and then it's sad and then it's funny and then it's inspirational how many spaceships they blew up before they figured it out. And sometimes I think that's what we're doing at reason too. We're just launching and exploding arguments over and over and over until one finally lands.

Juliette Sellgren (14.06)

That's a good way to put it. Do you think there are issues where Libertarians have dropped the ball in the past few decades or missed an opportunity to make a better case for their positions? I recently read Tim Carney's book, Alienated America, where he shows that support for Donald Trump has been strongly connected to places in the US where communities and churches have disappeared. Do you think that Libertarians should have maybe spent more time talking about the importance of civil society and community or that we should have talked about individual responsibility alongside our conversations about the need for freedom?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (14.43)

I am always torn on that because my first instinct is to defensiveness, which is not helpful, but my first is to say like, oh my God, libertarians have been talking about that stuff all along. And to somehow suggest that Libertarians prior to Tim Carney were tragic, radical individualists who made it so that everyone had to bowl alone or whatever is a mis apprehension. I know that's not what Tim is saying, and I know that's not what you were actually saying, but I would say I think that it has been a good thing for the libertarian movement in the last say, decade or so, that there has been a reengagement on the, I actually sometimes think about it as the difference between Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments, right? So two Adam Smith books where one is about the sort of what it means to be part of an economy and one is about what it means to be a person.

I'm sure there are Adam Smith scholars who would hugely disagree with that characterization. And of course there's lots of overlap between the two, but I think there's really been a resurgence of Theory of Moral Sentiments, libertarians, and that the eighties and early nineties in particular had probably a surplus of wealth of nations libertarians. And so that led to a kind of homo economicus sense of atomized individualism that maybe was part of the problem in terms of the change in civil society that Tim Carney is describing. At the same time, I think that there is, even when conservatives or conservative libertarians like Carney try to resist it, I do think that there is a siren song of golden ageism. I think that people always have this idea that at some point before me, or maybe even at some point when I was a child, things were better, things were more harmonious or things were, and those stories almost always fall apart under closer scrutiny because it turns out that somebody or some group of somebodies was left out of that golden age.

And so I think the hard work of bringing everyone into these projects of giving people rights and giving people dignity and minimizing the harms that they face, especially from the state that project is going to be, I think we're doing well in that project. I think actually things are getting better in that way. And I also think that the golden ages tend to overlook new forms of community because they can't quite see them yet. They haven't quite sort of socially and culturally resolved into visibility. And I think it's a cliche to say this, but I still think it's true. People connect online and to pretend like all those connections are only for Russians to pass disinformation into our elections and to cause teen girls to become anorexic or whatever. Maybe both of those things did happen, but a lot of good things happened that for some reason no one quite wants to talk about or look at squarely or consider as potential substitutes to a bunch of people being forced marched into church on Sundays by their families.

Juliette Sellgren 

It's easier to look at the bad stuff, I would say. I do think it's a different problem, it's a new problem, but we're growing. And so the situation from long ago when there were different communities, you're right, they had different issues than the issues we have today and we can't quite see all the good parts of what we have now. I really like your explanation of the Adam Smith libertarians and the different facets of that. It's a good way to explain it.

Katherine Mangu-Ward (18.46)

Well, and the unifying thinker I believe is Hayek. You can find anything you ever need in Hayek to build the kind of libertarianism that you're looking for. And not to mention that many conservatives find what they're looking for in, he captures the kind of Ian respect for tradition and the sense that there is sort of knowledge built into institutions and habits that we shouldn't discount while also not being a conservative while also believing in kind of the power of unquote new forces or individualistic forces or market forces to promote human flourishing. And I think that's probably the tie that binds. One thing that old libertarians say is like the kids these days don't read the books anymore. I read the books and you read the books. I know that I raised my hand. I listen, I was listening a couple nights ago in preparation to your interview with Randy Barnett, where you started out saying, I've been reading your book and I believe you, but I think that even though reading books is good, and that's how I became a libertarian, that you don't have to read books always to understand the ideas that are in them and to have those ideas matter to you.

I think we might be asking the wrong question when we say, did you read Hayek? I think the right question is, do you understand Hayek's insights? Did you pick those up from some other vehicle? And if so, that's fine. Still, maybe read the book. I love me some books, but it's not the only way.

Juliette Sellgren 

I think the question that we can ask ourselves as two people that are fighting for the cause trying to spread the word of libertarianism of freedom and things is how are we bringing that the people, how are we communicating the ideas in a way that someone doesn't have to read a book? Are we going along with the new methods of communication that people use to gather this information to learn about this sort of stuff? I've been thinking about this a lot recently actually. So yeah…

Katherine Mangu-Ward 

What do you think is the answer? I know I'm not supposed to interview the interviewer, but I'm curious what your thoughts have yielded and then I'll share mine.

Juliette Sellgren (21.16)

I think, I don't know. I think that we have done a relatively good job, but markets and the way that people communicate, especially with the internet is still changing. And so podcasting, yes, should I get on TikTok to reach the younger kids maybe? And so I'm trying to figure out right now what is the best way, not only to reach the most people, but to communicate it in the most accessible way possible because that's my goal is to educate people and to give people the information so that they can make their choice. And I don't know, I mean I think a podcast is a good medium, but I think there are other things I can do, and I think that as a group of people trying to push forward this message, but also just anyone who wants to advance their cause, you kind of have to look at how people around you are intaking new information and use that to your advantage.

Katherine Mangu-Ward (22.22)

Yeah, I think that's right. A reason, one thing that we do is we try to put everything that we make out in as many forms as we can. So we have a print magazine on dead trees that comes out every month. We have the website, we have newsletters that come out every day or every week. We have our podcasts right now we have three of them, but we're actually going to be growing that podcast stable soon, adding a few. And we have our social media presence, so there's content that's made specifically for Instagram plus Facebook and Twitter as well as repurposed content for those platforms. So we are already sort of saying, Hey, anywhere you are, we're happy to be there and to show you what we made and see if it happens to strike a chord with you. We also, and this is something we talk about internally at reason, we do a few different styles of content and sometimes we wonder, does that confuse people about our brand? So we do Remy's music parodies where he just dresses up in silly costumes and sings songs about the Fed.

Juliette Sellgren 

I like those!

Katherine Mangu-Ward (23.28)

I like those. Everybody likes those. I love those. And I do highly recommend, we always love to have people come by our Reason DC office and visit if your listeners want to come knock on our door. But if you can hit a Remy taping day, it's particularly glorious because it's just in the library like drawing mustaches on himself all the time. But we're doing that and then in the same day we're also releasing, here's 8,000 words from an academic about housing policy or here's 400 words about some kind of regulatory issue, or here's a quick news brief about a rocket launch or whatever. We try to give people the content that they have the capacity to consume or that might kind of earworm them or brain warm them or otherwise just kind of infect them with one or more of the ideas that we are trying to bring into the conversation.

Juliette Sellgren (24.34)

You guys do a very good job of spreading the word in so many ways. Let's turn to college kids and the left. I'm a first year at the University of Virginia and to me I thought it was so bizarre that we don't have a libertarian club or anything like that in our undergraduate school, only in the law school and all these different places, but not undergrad. But there are so many left organizations, there are a few right organizations, but they're kind of being pushed under. How do you explain the successes on the left of college campuses and if you had had, or if you do have, let's say you're going to give a talk to a couple thousand college students, what would you pitch to them about libertarianism?

Katherine Mangu-Ward 

Yeah, so this is a longstanding question and the person who is incredible on this is Greg Lukianoff, who course will give you as many words as you like on the deep history of this question. 

Juliette Sellgren 

Go listen to that episode guys.

Katherine Mangu-Ward (25.48)

And I was going to say and has given those words to you, I believe so folks can listen and hear for themselves, but I think the story of what was once a conservative academy, a sort of bastion of WASPy privilege got taken over by lefty boomers and that originally the kind of fear or the meme about why campuses were more liberal was that the professors were liberal. And I think it's easy to forget that now because if anything, the professors tend to be while still identifying with the left and overwhelmingly with the left, we should say whenever they do these surveys of what percentage of professors identify as Democrats or Republicans or conservatives or liberals, it's always overwhelmingly liberal democrats on campus. But they are now, in many cases still to the right of their students who are much more on the kind of socialist and progressive end of the left spectrum. And that is creating a new kind of tension where instead of the professors gatekeeping what students are learning, we're now another generation deep and the students are gatekeeping what the professors can say, but again, always leftward never to the right.

I don't think there's anything special about academia per se. I think that it has more to do with where the American elite intellectual life is dwelling more broadly. There are just more people putting more kind of intellectual work into highfalutin lefty thought. Let's say I went to college at Yale, which Matt Welsh will tell you means that I am not to be trusted and he may well be right, but I was part of the Yale Political Union, and one thing that's always been clear to me is that debate is more fun than advocacy. I just think if you believe something deeply, you can just go out and try to lobby other people to share your beliefs. But if you can get people to fight with you about it, then all the better. It's going to be more fun for you. It's going to be more illuminating for any consumer.

And this is one reason that we try to publish a lot of debates and why we air a lot of interviews at Reason TV and on our podcast and in our magazine because better things always come out of discussion and discourse. So I was in a debating society where there was a sort of libertarian and anarchist faction, and then there was a traditionalist Catholic faction. I can't imagine better preparation for some of the ways that the debate has ended up going in 2021. I think college campuses still do have space for intra student debate. We may be sort of increasingly struggling with what it means for campuses or organizations to platform controversial speakers, but that students can still debate amongst themselves. And so I don't think it needs to be formalized. I don't think you need to libertarian club per se, but I will say I was drawn into campus activism or into campus debate by a fake front group for objective.

So on my first day of college, I went to the student activities fair and there was a table with some brochures and stuff for the Objectivist study group at Yale, and I was like, oh, I'm a fan of a Rand, I'm an objectivist. Sign me up for your study group. And it turned out to be just a way to recruit students into this debating society. There is no objectivist study group at Yale. They have a couple meetings at the beginning of the year, and then the point of those meetings is to basically say, have you thought about reading a philosopher besides Rand? And I was like, no, I haven't. She told me not to. And they were like, you should try. Here's some books. And it was like, that was it. That was the whole gambit. And it worked on me and it worked on many people and I think that's great. That's beautiful. I think it's like you got to meet people where they are and then you got to drag them a little in your direction.

Juliette Sellgren 

That's so interesting. Wow, that's so complex.

Katherine Mangu-Ward 

I know I just dumped a lot of Yale student organization lore on you from the late nineties, but there it is.

Juliette Sellgren (30.28)

So let's talk about voting. You consistently don't vote. I also interviewed Chris Freiman who I've had on this podcast. Wait, obviously listeners go check that out. And we talked about voting and the reasons why to vote, why not to vote, but you believe that your one vote is not the reason to vote. Your one vote doesn't decide an election. How many people have you convinced on this front so far?

Katherine Mangu-Ward 

Probably none. It's a real thankless task I have to say. I love Chris Freiman. I think his work on this stuff is incredible. We have published it in Reason, speaking of Adam Smith, he and I actually went to Adam Smith camp together many years ago.

Juliette Sellgren 

I go to Adam Smith camp?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (31.22)

Liberty Fund sponsors Adam Smith camp. You go for a week and you read everything, including his Lectures on Jurisprudence, which there's a reason people don't normally read those. It's great. But he I think does a really good job of explaining and probably did do a good job of explaining on your podcast, though I didn't listen to his episode, so don't tell him. He said to the entire podcast audience of explaining why politics can kind poison your brain, why the act of voting isn't really the main thing, and also why being super engaged in partisan politics seems to actually be bad for people who want to live happy and productive lives. My emphasis is a little bit different. Obviously, I'm a political journalist, so I believe that engaging on political matters can be good, and that actually maybe even is a civic duty in some cases.

I do think though I am always troubled when I see a shared piety, a shared belief that's just manifestly not true. And when you poke something like that and people get really angry, that makes me want to poke it again. And voting I think is like that. It's people want very, very much to believe that the act of going into the voting booth and pulling the lever, whether literally or metaphorically, is both a good thing to do and a consequential thing to do. And I think it is certainly not a consequential thing to do in the vast, vast, vast, vast, overwhelmingly vast majority of cases. That is to say your vote is not going to determine the outcome of an election just statistically that's mathematically true in large elections and even in relatively smaller elections. We just don't have a lot of elections that are actually decided by one vote.

But I also question the idea that the act of voting itself is a morally good act, and I think that is dependent on what you think about the morality of the broader system. And so for instance, I think that the sort of classic line don't vote, it only encourages the bastards. That's a joke. It's a bumper sticker. But it's also true that if you think you are being presented with two bad choices, it could be morally incumbent upon you not to ratify either of those choices. The best-of-a-bad-lot theory of voting, I think is quite flawed. You don't have to vote, and in fact, maybe you shouldn't vote. There's a philosophical example that takes this to an extreme, which says basically, if you think the system is corrupt and the candidates are not good, analogize that to you see a firing squad, there are a hundred people, they all have guns pointed at one man, you think that that man is innocent, so the system is broken.

This is not a good act that is about to occur. Should you knowing that you are unlikely to be the bullet that kills the man, still take up a gun and fire. No, our moral intuitions are cleared. Absolutely not. You should refuse to join the firing squad. And yet I think that that is what voting in many elections, certainly the last election looks like to me. So in that case, I think it's arguably good not to vote. And then I think there's the matter of opportunity cost, which is to say, okay, say it takes you two hours to vote. Is there anything you could be doing with those two hours to make America a better place? Do that instead probably up to and including one tweet that gets one like which would at least influence one person directly for real or take a nap and then be a better parent or friend in the afternoon because you're well rested. I really believe that the bar is very low for finding something else to do with that time.

Juliette Sellgren (35.35)

I do agree, and pretty all economists who have looked at the issue agree. I was tempted to vote in the last governor's election in Virginia. I didn't like either side. I didn't end up voting, but I really wanted to vote just because I did not like Covid rules. And I've heard this from a good amount of my friends that covid and this one set of rules, this hygiene theater that we've had to put up with at school, we still wear masks even though upwards of 97% of the student body is vaccinated. If you're not vaccinated, you are required to get tested at least weekly. I didn't end up voting, but there really was a strong poll of this issue. Is there any case or is there a set of issues where you would think you'd vote for something that you would vote for, do you think?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (36.29)

Yeah, I mean, I think the Covid case is interesting because it taps into what a lot of theorists about voting have described as expressive voting, right? So you know, knew that no matter how strongly you feel about a particular policy issue, your vote still isn't going to sway the outcome of the election. You have done that math, you understand it, but you want to express your strongly held views. And voting is one way of expressing them. And I actually think that if there is a defensible case for voting, it's probably expressive voting. If you just say, listen, I like to do it in the same way that I like to shout into the void in the same way that I like to sing in the shower, in the same way that I like to cheer for a sports ball team of my choosing, you can be expressive and understand that your expression has virtually no or no consequences in the real world and still just say, listen, I want to do that.

That's a good to me. And so I'm going to go be expressive in that way. I really don't think there is an issue that would get me to vote except for, again, on this expressive account, I suppose I could imagine a situation where one candidate is just absolutely spectacular and I am so excited about the high quality of that candidate that I want to vote for them just to get the warm fuzzies. And golly gee, I hope I'm in that situation sometime and I can violate my principles otherwise. And I always say this, I always carve out this exception when I talk about voting. If I do believe that my vote will influence the outcome of an election, of course I would vote. So if I happen to know that in fact this election is going to be so poorly attended that there will be but one voter and that could be me, I'll go vote. You bet. But that has not been the case to date, and so I have not made it to my local polling place. In fact, for a long time I evaded general state, I wasn't registered to vote and I did not have a car registered in my place of residence, and so I paid taxes. They could have found me if they wanted to, but I became weirdly invisible to the government and it was a good feeling.

Juliette Sellgren

I also think if they want people to vote, they need to make the website more accessible. It's so confusing and I don't care for it. I really don't.

Katherine Mangu-Ward (39.01)

I mean, there was actually, I think in 2016, I read a feature that was specifically about how millennials, because at the time the young people were still, the millennials were being stymied by mail-in voting, I want to vote, but I can't figure out where to buy stamps. It was like a whole feature in some major publication. And I remember thinking like, yeah, see, this seems to be making the case to me for why a low information, low skill electorate, maybe we don't need to be encouraging more. If you really can't crack the case of where am I going to buy a stamp? Why do you get to choose who is president? Though I should say here, tests on poll access have of course a hideously dark history. And so we always want to be careful even when we're joking about that we should not have literacy tests for voting, we should not have any kind of knowledge test for voting that those are always in the end used to discriminate in ways that have nothing to do with voter quality and everything to do with some other preexisting prejudice. So don't do that, but the vote or die, get out the vote, rock the vote, people on street corners filling out the ballot for you, and that's not improving our democracy.

Juliette Sellgren 

No, not at all. Thank you so much, Katherine, for your time and for your wisdom and all of this. I have one final question for you. What is one thing you believed at one time in your life that you later changed your position on and why?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (40.37)

So this actually gets to something we were talking about earlier. I definitely used to believe that I could change people's minds by saying the right argument at the right moment, strenuously enough. I used to believe more in wearing people down with my brutal correctness. And you know what? That doesn't actually work. I think that people do change their minds, not as often as we like to imagine. People are awfully inflexible, especially about their political views, but lots of other things as well as they get older, but they do change their minds when that happens though, it's because they want to change their minds. It's not because they were forced to. So what we can do, what is useful to do is to create the conditions under which mind changing can occur. So less like hammering home the rightness of your arguments. You should basically never be shouting like QED that none of that.

Instead, you want to kind of make information and frameworks for thinking about things available. You want to provide low conflict space for the exchange of ideas. You want to be a good and likable representation of your views and your tribe and your ideology, but you're not going to browbeat someone into changing their mind, right? It's like alcoholism. You have to want to change. And it's probably not nice to liken the political views of my opponents to substance abuse, but there it is. I think there is, I believe in debate. I believe in free exchange of ideas, but more than anything, I believe that everybody needs to just chill and give each other some credit and give each other some space. And if we're going to change mind, it's going to be slowly, it's going to be through the culture and that's a worthy project. It's a long project, but it's one that's worth pursuing and it's one that I hope I'm chipping away at a little bit every day.

Juliette Sellgren 

The only person who can change your mind is yourself. 

Katherine Mangu-Ward 

I learned that recently from Juliet.

Juliette Sellgren 

Well, that's all we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guests once again for their time and insight. I would also like to thank everyone who listens, subscribes, and shares the Great Antidote podcast. If you would like to be on the podcast, have a guest in mind or have a topic in mind, please feel free to reach out to me at greatantidote@libertyfund.org. Catch you next time. Bye.