Reason Podcasts: Recent Episodes
Reason Podcasts
Founded in 1968, Reason is the planet's leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Our podcast offerings include:
The Reason Roundtable Every Monday, the libertarian editors of the magazine of “Free Minds and Free Markets”—Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Peter Suderman—discuss and debate the week’s biggest stories and what fresh hell awaits us all.
The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie Want to know what comes next in politics, culture, and libertarian ideas? Reason’s Nick Gillespie hosts relentlessly interesting interviews with the activists, artists, authors, entrepreneurs, newsmakers, and politicians who are defining the 21st century.
The Soho Forum Debates Reason presents a libertarian-themed debate series recorded monthly before a live audience in New York City. Moderated by former Barron's Economics Editor Gene Epstein, the Soho Forum features Nobel prize winners, radical thinkers, and other public intellectuals facing off over the future of bitcoin, veganism, sex work, illegal drugs, electric vehicles, abortion, robotics, government debt, and other controversial topics.
15:19—Conservatives debate the cost of burritos28:49—Trump's birthright citizenship order33:12—Listener question on capitalism46:08—Arday scandal and resignation55:54—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Before Evan Barker split with the Democratic Party in 2024, she says she raised $50 million for its candidates, especially those on the progressive fringe. In her new memoir Nothing Left, the 35-year-old political operative who was raised working-class in the Midwest says she got so tired of the classism and identity politics of party elites that she ended up voting for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris.Barker, who suffers from serious congenital medical conditions, talks about being activated into politics by Barack Obama and the Affordable Care Act, staging the first event where Bernie Sanders met Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and walking out of the 2024 Democratic National Convention feeling politically homeless. She tells Nick Gillespie about the insatiable, bipartisan grind for more and more money at every level of politics, the lack of interest in and understanding of working-class people, and where she thinks left- and right-wing populism is headed next.0:00—What was the appeal of Bernie Sanders?4:14—What's wrong with the Democratic establishment?8:39—The realities of political fundraising13:40—Campaign finance reform18:36—Did Bernie Sanders fold to the Democratic establishment?22:06—Elizabeth Warren23:37—Why did Democrats lose the working-class voter?28:42—Trump's 2024 campaign messaging31:01—Has Trump delivered?35:17—How much of today's political battles are generational?36:43—Will populism vs. libertarianism become the next political battle?Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch are joined by Associate Editor Liz Wolfe to discuss whether democratic socialism is gaining ground beyond the coasts and what the rise of candidates like Francesca Hong and Abdul El-Sayed means for the future of the Democratic Party.Next, the editors discuss President Donald Trump's decision to restart talks with Iran and the continuing political fallout from the conflict. They then debate the proposed Warner Bros.-Paramount merger and whether the government should intervene to block it. Finally, the panel revisits the COVID-19 response in the wake of Anthony Fauci's appearance before Congress and asks what lessons, if any, America has learned from the pandemic.0:00—Democratic socialism goes national26:57—Trump restarts talks with Iran34:28—Listener question on Warner Bros.-Paramount merger53:07—Fauci's appearance before Congress1:04:39—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, guest host Billy Binion is joined by Pamela Colloff, a reporter at ProPublica and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, as well as the author of the new book Catch the Devil. The book tells the story of Paul Skalnik, a prolific jailhouse informant whose testimony helped send dozens of men to prison, including one man who remains on death row despite serious questions about his conviction.Colloff explains how Skalnik repeatedly traded supposed jailhouse confessions for leniency, why police and prosecutors continued to rely on him despite his long history of deception, and how the incentives built into the criminal justice system can reward unreliable testimony. She and Binion also discuss why wrongful convictions are so difficult to overturn, how courts can compound errors long after new evidence emerges, and what Skalnik's extraordinary story reveals about the dangers of trusting the state to correct its own mistakes.0:00—How a con artist became a star witness10:56—A 1985 Florida murder case20:29—Procedural hurdles to overturning convictions27:21—Colloff's meetings with Skalnik32:21—Colloff's experience with Skalnik's victims37:51—Why did law enforcement trust Skalnik?43:05—Media coverage46:18—Research for Catch the Devil50:21—How did Colloff start her career?53:45—The evolution of magazine journalism1:00:25—The true crime genreSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss whether the Democratic Socialists of America's (DSA) growing influence reflects a serious governing vision or a political movement driven more by symbolism than workable policy. They discuss the DSA's platform, the future of Medicare for All, and what the rise of democratic socialism could mean for the Democratic Party ahead of the midterms.They also examine President Donald Trump's decision to hit pause on military action against Iran, discuss former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan's return to politics, and make the case for deregulating peptides. Finally, they answer a listener question about what The Odyssey says about liberalism.0:00—Do Democrats have a socialism problem?12:53—The DSA's policy agenda25:31—Trump pauses Iran strikes32:10—Listener question on The Odyssey43:56—Deregulating peptides50:22—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
She has gone from protesting nuclear power plants to aggressively campaigning for their expansion as a way of helping the global poor raise their living standards.Raised in Great Britain by working-class immigrants from rural Punjab, her new book is Energy Is Life: Why Environmentalism Went Nuclear. She talks with Nick Gillespie about how she came to reject the ubiquitous arguments against nuclear energy she encountered as a child, how guilt-ridden countries such as Germany are increasing pollution by shutting down nuclear power, and why oil-rich Gulf States are betting on renewable and clean energy sources.0:00—The significance of a saucepan5:15—Thesis of Energy is Life9:07—Prosperity and guilt17:38—Extinction Rebellion21:36—Hostility toward nuclear energy27:35—The safety of nuclear energy31:10—France and Germany36:56—Zion's revelation on nuclear energy43:57—The nuclear energy industry50:50—China and the United Arab Emirates53:16—Energy policy56:42—Taking technology for grantedSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss the escalating war with Iran and whether President Donald Trump has any way to bring the conflict under control. The panel examines the deaths of American service members, rising gas prices, attacks on civilian infrastructure, and the lack of a clear objective for a war that has continued despite repeated attempts at ceasefires.Next, the editors discuss Trump's new tariffs on Brazil and the increasingly incoherent use of trade policy to pursue unrelated political goals. They then examine Trump's primetime address on election security and whether his efforts to change election rules ahead of the midterms should be taken seriously. The panel also considers the growing popularity of democratic socialism, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's political appeal, and why voters who support free markets may still embrace socialist politicians. Finally, a listener asks whether fears about artificial intelligence amount to a moral panic.0:00—Iran war intensifies12:53—Brazil tariffs and trade war escalation27:56—Trump's primetime address38:34—Listener question on AI moral panic47:44—Mamdani's rising popularity55:08—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
technique45:21—Is stoicism on the rise?48:14—Are there political implications to self-improvement?50:49—How to detect frauds in the self-help genreSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) and his political legacy as one of Washington's most persistent advocates for an interventionist foreign policy. The panel examines Graham's evolution from John McCain ally and Trump critic to one of the president's most loyal supporters, his role in pushing Trump toward a more hawkish foreign policy, and what his career reveals about the transformation of the Republican Party.Next, the editors check in on Trump's escalating war with Iran and debate whether there is any plausible case that the conflict has left the United States better off. They also discuss the bipartisan housing bill passed by Congress, whether its permitting and regulatory reforms could meaningfully reduce housing costs, and Trump's refusal to sign it. The panel then examines the collapse of Graham Platner's Senate campaign and what it reveals about Democratic candidate recruitment and populist politics. Finally, a listener asks whether the SAVE America Act's voting requirements could inadvertently produce a more informed electorate and create the conditions for a libertarian moment.0:00—Lindsey Graham's legacy10:13—New military strikes on Iran22:55—21st Century ROAD to Housing Act30:45—Listener question on the SAVE America Act39:47—Graham Platner ends Senate campaign50:24—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is Clark Neily, a constitutional litigator, civil liberties advocate, and senior vice president for legal studies at the Cato Institute. He previously served as co-counsel in the landmark Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller, one of the most consequential gun rights decisions in modern history.Neily speaks with Nick Gillespie about the Supreme Court's latest term, the constitutional limits on executive power, and whether Congress has ceded too much authority to the presidency and the administrative state. Neily explains why he believes the Court has become an essential check on government overreach and discusses recent rulings involving birthright citizenship and gun rights.They also discuss the rise of plea bargaining, why federal prosecutors wield extraordinary leverage over criminal defendants, and whether America's constitutional system is strong enough to withstand growing political polarization and executive power.0:00—The Supreme Court's birthright citizenship ruling4:01—Humphrey's Executor and agency independence9:02—President Donald Trump and executive power16:05—Gun rights and expanding gun ownership25:33—Is the Supreme Court defending liberty?29:38—How the justice system forces guilty pleas36:24—Neily's least favorite Supreme Court Justice38:51—The worst presidents in American history44:15—Neily's origin story49:35—Is Neily optimistic about America's future?Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
47:07—Europe's resistance to air conditioning1:00:11—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
As, charts, alerts, and more. subscribe.reason.com/wrong-number0:00—Why did Brown write Wrong Number?3:42—Examining the claim the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) saved 90 million lives7:45—Climate alarmism and problematic data16:16—Marijuana and cardiac risk19:04—Data collection and deceptive framing22:55—The Lancet and scientific gatekeepers25:31—Why should scientists preregister their hypotheses?32:29—Chinatown buses41:40—Brown's origin story45:35—Gambling and prediction marketsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss the growing influence of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and whether socialism is becoming a mainstream force within the Democratic Party. The panel examines what's driving the DSA's recent gains, whether President Donald Trump has accelerated the movement's rise, and what a more openly socialist Democratic Party could mean for American politics.Next, the editors discuss the DSA's policy agenda, including proposals on housing, labor, and public spending. They then examine Trump's strategy toward Iran and debate whether the latest round of military escalation has become a recurring cycle of weekend conflicts followed by uneasy ceasefires. The panel also reflects on America's 250th birthday and what the country's founding ideals still mean in an era of political polarization. Finally, a listener asks how low-budget filmmakers should balance fair pay for crew members with the financial realities of independent production.0:00—Is this the socialist moment?15:45—DSA policy analysis28:55—Iran war and the Strait of Hormuz31:30—Listener question on films and unions44:00—America's 250th birthday50:05—Weekly cultural recommendationSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Natalie DowzickyAudio Mixer: Ian KeyserSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, guest host Eric Boehm is joined by Financial Times columnist and economist Soumaya Keynes to discuss her new book, How to Win a Trade War.They examine Donald Trump's tariff policies, whether trade wars can ever be won, and why Keynes believes that simply saying no one wins a trade war is no longer enough. She explains how China's economic model challenged the old rules-based trading system and why many policymakers now see Beijing as a unique economic rival.They also discuss the collapse of the World Trade Organization's dispute-settlement system, the growing role of national security in trade policy, and the difficulties of coordinating with allies in an increasingly fragmented global economy. Finally, Keynes explains why trade wars require restraint, how economic conflicts can spiral into broader geopolitical tensions, and what a future trading system might look like.0:00—Can trade wars be won?5:03—Differences in the second Trump administration8:15—The analogy of pirates for global trade16:44—The collapse of the rules-based trading system20:13—How China changed the global economy24:36—Trade policy and national security31:52—The future of the global trading system39:38—How should the next president handle trade?40:46—Soumaya Keynes musical performanceProducer: Paul AlexanderAudio Mixer: Ian KeyserSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
or the ability to build itself without human input.They also talk about libertarian and market-based regulatory systems for the internet and tech sector and whether those would yield better outcomes than the ones we've seen so far from the European Union and other conventional governing bodies.0:00—The promise of artificial intelligence3:50—Overcoming AI hallucinations and sycophancy5:08—Military applications of AI9:38—Anthropic's red lines on mass surveillance and fully automated weapons14:23—Lessons from the 1990s16:12—Oversight and regulation of AI technology23:07—Navigating politics through policy ambiguity33:31—How does U.S. governance affect global AI policy?36:42—What is recursive self-improvement?43:35—How does Clark's literature and journalism background inform his views on AI?45:43—The liberating aspects of technology51:15—The effects of AI on employmentProducer: Paul AlexanderAudio Mixer: Ian KeyserSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Andy Burnham, and whether the U.K.'s growing embrace of big government policies offers a warning for the United States.Next, the editors discuss the growing influence of Democratic Socialists in major American cities, including New York, Washington, and Los Angeles. They then examine Trump's negotiations with Iran and debate whether the administration's deal represents a diplomatic success or a strategic retreat. The panel also discusses Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) decision to abandon plans for new migrant detention centers and what it reveals about the future of immigration enforcement. Finally, a listener asks whether Cuba's latest market reforms signal a genuine shift away from socialism or just another false start.0:00—Starmer resigns14:05—Democratic Socialists of America ascendant in blue cities31:29—Iran negotiations and the Strait of Hormuz39:12—Listener question on Cuba45:09—ICE to sell off warehouses55:03—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is Matt Welch, editor at large at Reason and co-host of The Fifth Column podcast.Welch joins Nick Gillespie for a look back at the summer of 1976 and what it can tell us about America nearly 50 years later. They discuss the surprising reality of the bicentennial, why many observers expected it to be a failure, and how local celebrations ultimately made it a success.They also examine the cultural impact of Roots, the enduring appeal of The Bad News Bears, and what both works revealed about race, identity, family, and American life in the 1970s. Along the way, they revisit the 1976 Montreal Olympics, the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the uniquely messy spirit of the era.Finally, Welch and Gillespie discuss what the bicentennial got right about patriotism, why America works best as a creedal nation, and whether the country's strength lies in its ability to embrace multiple stories rather than a single national narrative.0:00—The realities of the bicentennial11:25—America 25019:15—The Bad News Bears35:28—The cultural impact of Roots53:10—The 1976 Montreal Olympics57:53—Bruce Jenner1:03:42—Does America need a single narrative?Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
of everyday life, from movie theaters to fast-food restaurants.0:00—Elon Musk becomes a trillionaire17:50—The Supreme Court's pending decisions31:33—Will Democrats pack the Supreme Court?38:41—Listener question on free market and quality decline48:57—Iran ceasefire agreement and economic impact53:37—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
—lives worth living—in a world that offers us more and more choice across virtually all areas of activity. Drawing deeply on the philosophical roots of individualism and liberalism, Goldstein offers a moral psychology of freedom, a way to think about individual dignity, pluralism, and self-authorship without devolving into either nihilism or top-down moralism.0:00—What is the mattering instinct?4:30—Age, class, and the crisis of meaning8:46—How do history and technology affect mattering?10:59—Secularism and mattering15:00—The four archetypes27:14—Pursuit of flourishing32:43—Psychology of freedom35:43—Frank Meeink42:50—Lou Xiaoying51:29—Existential angstSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Plus: What California's election results tell us, the economic costs of war with Iran, and the push to nationalize AIThis week, editors Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch are joined by Associate Editor Liz Wolfe to discuss New York City's falling crime rates and whether Democrats have really solved their big-city crime problem. The panel looks at the recent Penn Station stabbings, subway disorder, fare evasion, and why many New Yorkers still feel uneasy even as murders and shootings decline.Next, the editors discuss California's recent elections, including Spencer Pratt's bid for Los Angeles mayor, and what these results reveal about voter attitudes toward political leadership and governance. They then examine the political and economic fallout from President Donald Trump's war with Iran. The panel also discusses proposals from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Trump to give the federal government a stake in artificial intelligence companies. Finally, a listener asks whether AI-powered surveillance threatens individual liberty.0:00—New York City's declining murder rate18:50—California election results29:05—The economic fallout of the Iran war39:30—Listener question on AI threats to liberty51:00—The push to nationalize artificial intelligence57:00—Weekly cultural recommendations
At the start of his presidency in 1861, Abraham Lincoln supported a constitutional amendment that would have kept the federal government from banning slavery in states where it already existed. In just a few short years, he helped secure passage of the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery throughout the United States and all its territories.Today's guest is Senior Editor Damon Root, whose new book Emancipation War delves into one of the most fascinating chapters of American history. Root and host Nick Gillespie also discuss the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, Root's previous book on Frederick Douglass, and how the Supreme Court is likely to rule in Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case that will be decided in the next few weeks.Root writes a twice-weekly newsletter for Reason on legal issues, called Injustice System.0:00–Lincoln wanted to preserve slavery in 18618:38–The Northwest Ordinance and precedents for banning slavery11:27–Frederick Douglas and slavery in the U.S. Constitution14:07–Salmon Chase18:40–Lincoln's generals who emancipated slaves23:37–How Lincoln evolved on slavery29:47–The Civil Rights Act of 186637:13–The 13th Amendment, citizenship, and national identity39:30–Reconstruction45:00–The Supreme Court49:57–Birthright citizenship Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
and examine the Democratic Party's continuing attraction to polarizing candidates, from Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner to California's unsettled gubernatorial race. The panel then checks in on the endlessly unresolved Iran conflict, before debating a proposal to eliminate property taxes for senior citizens and what it reveals about the growing trend toward narrowly targeted tax breaks. Finally, the editors answer a listener's question about whether late Sen. John McCain's (R–Ariz.) opposition to mixed martial arts helped shape the cultural forces that eventually brought the UFC to the White House lawn.0:00—The Commission on Government Efficiency14:04—Mike Pence's comments on Democratic Party22:21—Graham Platner and Democratic candidate quality30:19—Iran war update33:01—Listener question on the White House UFC event42:30—Should seniors pay property tax?50:05—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
and why even some Republicans see it as an unprecedented abuse of executive power.0:00—What have we learned from this war with Iran?9:38—Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo clashes with the Trump administration14:19—Spencer Pratt and the Los Angeles mayoral race27:11—Listener question on Project 202537:28—The Anti-Weaponization Fund47:29—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin E. Roth, the author of Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work.He talks with Nick Gillespie about why some voluntary transactions provoke moral outrage even when no one is being directly harmed. Roth explains why black markets often emerge when governments try to ban activities with persistent demand, why both markets and prohibitions require social support to function, and how unintended consequences can make moralistic policies backfire. They discuss the war on drugs, prostitution, surrogacy, same-sex marriage, price gouging, and why Iran remains the only country in the world with a legal market for kidney donors.They also explore Roth's work designing kidney exchange networks and school choice systems, how digital technology and private transactions make certain bans harder to enforce, and why harm reduction may work better than prohibition in areas ranging from drug policy to sex work.0:00—Repugnant transactions and organ sales9:30—Blood plasma, coercion, and class bias16:46—School choice reform22:59—Same-sex marriage, abortion, and contraception29:59—The war on drugs and moral economics38:55—Roth's theoretical origin story43:45—Uber, AI, and technological efficiencies51:26—Price gouging and consumer resentment54:27—Pornography, prostitution, and privacy1:05:21—Has America become more economically moral?1:12:15—Biden's economic agenda and Trump's tariffs1:17:04—Winning a Nobel PrizeSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is Johan Norberg, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of Peak Human: What We Can Learn From the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages.He talks with Nick Gillespie about the historical patterns behind flourishing civilizations, from the Roman Republic to modern America. Norberg argues that societies thrive when they remain open to trade, immigration, experimentation, and new ideas, but begin to decay when fear and nostalgia push them toward protectionism, centralization, and tribal politics.They also discuss the resurgence of populism in the United States and Europe, why tariffs and anti-globalization politics keep returning throughout history, and whether America is becoming more risk-averse and nativist. Norberg explains why he believes optimism and innovation can still win, explores the promise of artificial intelligence, and reflects on whether China is entering a new golden age or repeating the mistakes that led past civilizations into decline.0:00—Why open societies thrive3:07—The Roman Republic10:05—America as a creedal nation11:57—The rise of nativism16:15—The dangers of nostalgia20:31—What sparks renaissance?26:40—Are older societies more risk averse?28:33—Populism and Viktor Orbán's defeat32:04—Left-wing populism34:10—Javier Milei35:42—Tariffs and free trade40:28—Is China in a golden age?Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch are joined by Reason Senior Editor Robby Soave to discuss Rep. Thomas Massie's (R–Ky.) competitive Republican primary challenge and why President Donald Trump has made him one of his top political targets. The panel examines Massie's opposition to the Iran war, his push to release the Epstein files, his longstanding focus on spending, and why his brand of libertarian-style politics has become increasingly rare inside today's Republican Party.Next, the panel turns to the economy, where inflation continues to rise, the U.S. debt has surpassed gross domestic product (GDP), and working-class voters appear increasingly frustrated with Trump's economic agenda. The editors then examine New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's claim that he closed the city's massive budget gap without cutting services and whether the plan relies more on gimmicks than serious fiscal reform. Finally, a listener asks how to develop political confidence without losing intellectual humility.0:00—Massie's primary challenge20:57—Inflation and the national debt40:31—Listener question on intellectual humility51:15—Mamdani's $12 billion budget gap57:41—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this episode, Mchangama and Kosseff talk with Nick Gillespie about why democracies are increasingly embracing speech restrictions once associated with authoritarian regimes, how fears about misinformation and child safety are reshaping internet policy, and why both the political left and right have grown more skeptical of free expression. They discuss the rise of government pressure on social media companies, the future of anonymous speech and Section 230 protections, and why they believe counter-speech, transparency, and decentralized online platforms offer a better alternative to censorship.This interview was taped in front of a live audience at an event in New York City.0:00—What is the free speech recession?7:36—Speech after the collapse of communism15:06—How important is technology for escaping censorship?22:38—EU hate speech laws27:55—Sullivan v. Times decision30:19—Afroman's legal victory34:53—Is there a crackdown on political speech in America?39:22—Jawboning42:44—Social media censorship51:40—Solutions to reverse the free speech recessionSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
and praises capitalism as the one system that has consistently improved living standards. He defends expansive military action against Iran and in defense of Ukraine, praises Israel for being the one functioning democracy in the Middle East, and calls for legalizing marijuana and psychedelics.0:00–Are Democrats catering to the fringe?4:32–Why did Fetterman support Bernie Sanders in 2016?7:53–Immigration policy16:15–Would Fetterman support a path to citizenship?17:22–Drug legalization20:12–Where has President Trump failed?21:57–Israel and Iran26:04–Does Fetterman trust the Trump Administration on Iran?30:10–Democratic support for Israel32:19–The limits of military intervention38:36–The national debt41:20–Entitlement reform43:25–Braddock, Pennsylvania45:50–Fetterman is a proud capitalistSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
program13:04—Pratt's mayoral campaign17:30—AOC attacks billionaires28:40—Has America lost in Iran?38:51—Listener question on ticket prices46:00—Redistricting battles escalate nationwide53:23—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
36:35—Listener question on voter behavior45:34—King Charles visits the U.S.53:03—Gillespie's interview with Justice Neil Gorsuch57:08—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Natalie DowzickyDirector of Photography: Kevin AlexanderAudio Mixer: Ian KeyserSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is the legendary actor and director Andy Serkis, who has played everyone from Gollum to proto-punk icon Ian Dury to King Kong to Marvel villain Ulysses Klaue. His latest project is a controversial animated adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm, which he directed and is out on May 1 from Angel Studios.He talks with Nick Gillespie about the new movie; what, if anything, ties together some of his signature roles; and whether technology advances or undermines art.0:00—Why Serkis wanted to direct Animal Farm4:30—The corrupting nature of power7:35—Are we in a better place than we were 100 years ago?10:34—Serkis' signature acting roles18:31—The legacy of Ian Dury25:42—Does technology enhance creativity31:12—The fragility of democracySubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss the attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and the media coverage that followed. They examine the shooter's manifesto, why it struck some observers as uncomfortably normal, and what that says about the mainstreaming of extreme political rhetoric. The panel also considers President Donald Trump's renewed push to build his new White House ballroom in the aftermath of the attack.Next, the editors turn to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's plan for city-run grocery stores, whether government-backed supermarkets can fairly compete with private businesses, and why critics may have helped turn a campaign talking point into actual policy. Then, the panel discusses reports that the Trump administration is considering a bailout that could leave the federal government owning most of Spirit Airlines. The panel then turns to Iran, where uncertain diplomacy and mixed signals over the Strait of Hormuz suggest the conflict remains far from resolved. Finally, a listener asks what the libertarian view of redistricting should be and whether fair maps are ever truly possible.0:00—The White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting18:49—Mamdani's city-run grocery store plan27:42—Spirit Airlines bailout37:06—Listener question on redistricting43:23—What is the endgame in Iran?48:58—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
movement47:58—Why economics is a useful framework for criminal justice55:42—Should prisons be made more comfortable?1:01:38—Doleac's political and economic viewsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
14:46—Afroman's court win as a victory for free speech17:15—Presidential aspirations21:37—Patriotism and the American identity24:23—Does Afroman feel pressured to be high?25:02—Who would be Afroman's running mate?27:11—The effects of the trial on Afroman's music careerSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
highlighted by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's Tax Day message. They examine whether America's tax system is already highly progressive, why wealth taxes and similar proposals have repeatedly disappointed abroad and in blue states, and whether New York risks copying California's mistakes. The panel also asks a broader question: With some of the nation's highest tax burdens, what are taxpayers actually getting in return?Next, the editors mark 4/20 with a conversation about marijuana legalization, the libertarian case for drug freedom, and whether concerns about public disorder are being wrongly blamed on legalization itself. They also discuss President Donald Trump's executive order expanding psychedelic drug research. The conversation then shifts to Palantir's call for national service and why so many tech leaders suddenly have grand plans for remaking public policy, before returning to Iran, where mixed signals over the Strait of Hormuz and uncertain negotiations raise fears of another drifting conflict. Finally, a listener asks whether today's political divide is best understood as two wings of a broader progressive movement rather than a clash between left and right.0:00—Do wealth taxes ever work?19:18—Drug legalization and psychedelics research31:25—Palantir calls for national service42:38—Listener question on progressivism48:46—Is the Strait of Hormuz open?53:24—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
June 24, 20250:00—What is the U.S. objective for war in Iran?5:32—Is Vice President J.D. Vance an anti-interventionist?7:21—Trump's foreign policy rhetoric and history13:26—Is there a continuity in post–Cold War foreign policy?19:56—Was President Joe Biden an outlier on foreign policy?22:16—U.S. involvement in Ukraine24:13—Are we sending messages to China and Russia through Iran?30:05—Does Trump have a de-escalation strategy in Iran?Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
can still be embraced as a patriotic song. 0:00—Has the U.S. won anything from the war with Iran?14:49—Orbán loses reelection27:41—Democrats have a candidate quality issue33:45—Listener question on patriotic content39:05—Anthropic's Claude Mythos50: 04—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
approach27:26—War and technocracies37:32—Limitations of information control50:41—Russiagate1:02:39—Alternative media1:12:18—Mitigating the effects of information stateSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss President Donald Trump's escalating rhetoric around the war in Iran, including a profanity-laced Easter weekend Truth Social post. They examine what it reveals about a conflict with shifting timelines, unclear objectives, and little public support, along with the domestic consequences of the war, including rising gas prices surging above $4 per gallon. The panel also weighs Trump's proposal for a $1.5 trillion defense budget, the largest in modern history, and what it says about the administration's priorities.Next, the panel turns to the broader federal budget, where rising spending continues without any serious attempt to address the deficit. The editors then check in on NASA's Artemis program, weighing the excitement of returning to the moon against persistent delays, cost overruns, and the growing role of private space companies. They also answer a listener's question about what libertarian alternatives to Medicare for All might look like, focusing on deregulation, catastrophic coverage, and restoring price signals in the health care system.Reason is hiring! Check out the two open roles on the video team now:https://reason.org/jobs/associate-producer/https://reason.org/jobs/producer/0:00—Trump's Truth Social Easter rant14:57—The $1.5 trillion defense budget22:36—The New York Times student debt story28:55—Listener question on Medicare for All43:41—Analyzing Artemis51:58—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
who represents such major Silicon Valley cities as San Jose, Santa Clara, and Cupertino in Congress but who also supported the independent Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders for president. He has shown an increasingly rare willingness to work across the aisle, cosponsored with the libertarian-leaning Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) a war powers resolution aimed at President Donald Trump's bombing of Iran. He also joined forces with the Massie last fall to push disclosure of the Epstein files.In this interview, Nick Gillespie talks with the five-term congressman about the need for Congress to reassert its control over the initiation of military force. They also discuss whether high taxes and regulations are why California was one of just five states to lose population last year. They argue the merits of California's proposed wealth tax that some say pushed Steven Spielberg, Mark Zuckerberg, the founders of Google, and other ultra-wealthy people to leave the Golden State.They also discuss the role of government in spurring and regulating AI and other technologies, the meaning of the Epstein files, and whether the United States can redefine itself in a way that reduces polarization without reducing pluralism.0:00–What is the biggest problem with the Iran War?3:00–Did Trump start the Iran War to distract from domestic policy?4:36–What should Congress do about the Iran War?6:59–What is progressive capitalism?9:10–Does Khanna support the proposed California wealth tax?12:23–Are taxes and regulations causing California's population loss?19:21–The role of environmental policy in California housing21:03–Do billionaires weaken democracy?24:19–The track record of wealth taxes25:50–Will federal spending ever be reduced?27:47–Artificial intelligence and impacts on the labor force33:09–Assessing the New Deal40:54–Is there a need for a national purpose?46:24–The next attorney general and the Epstein files51:19–What defines us as Americans?Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is the Niskanen Center's Brink Lindsey, whose connection to Reason magazine goes back decades and who for years worked at the Cato Institute.His new book is called The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing, and it raises important questions about life in the 21st century. Thanks to capitalism, he argues, we've essentially conquered poverty, but are progress and growth slowing down? People in advanced economies are increasingly pessimistic about the future, populism is on the rise, and many social indicators are trending in a negative direction.Nick Gillespie talks with him about how to restore economic and cultural dynamism, his intellectual journey, and what a brighter future might look like.0:00—Introduction0:56—Mass abundance and prosperity6:20—The effects of globalization12:05—Mass affluence and pessimism15:01—Slowing rates of innovation24:10—Capitalism and its cultural contradictions31:06—Fears of conformism and elites39:42—Declining fertility rates48:52—Religion and community59:08—Does Lindsey consider himself a libertarian?Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss the recent verdicts against Meta and the growing legal and cultural push to treat social media like a harmful, addictive product. Multiple juries decided that platforms such as Instagram and YouTube were negligently designed and that they contributed to mental health harms among young users, raising comparisons to Big Tobacco and intensifying the debate over which online activities are protected speech. The panel considers whether the real issue is design features such as infinite scroll and algorithmic feeds or simply content itself.The panel then examines the latest developments in the Iran conflict, where the White House has suggested that the war may be nearing its end even as the Pentagon prepares plans that could include ground troops and the seizure of Iran's nuclear stockpile. They also take up a listener question about how libertarians can make the case for community and human connection without relying on government. Finally, they discuss the deployment of ICE agents to airports during the DHS shutdown. Are those agents helping ease delays, or are they making an already strained system worse?Reason is hiring! Check out the two open roles on the video team now:https://reason.org/jobs/associate-producer/https://reason.org/jobs/producer/0:00–Is social media addictive?25:29–Conflicting narratives on Iran war38:40–Divisions on the right over Iran41:54–Listener question on collectivism49:06–ICE agents at airports54:05–Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
February 26, 20200:00—Observations from the trial1:56—The plaintiff's mental health and history of abuse6:34—Mark Zuckerberg's testimony7:04—Is social media becoming the cultural scapegoat?10:19—The impact of this verdict on setting legal precedents13:15—KOSA14:47—How sexual content drives regulation efforts16:33—Are companies liable for not enforcing age verification?17:56—What are the privacy threats with age verification?19:05—Why more regulation stifles competition21:48—Do younger generations value free speech?Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
and the status quo at the center of every policy decision.They also discuss the rise of independent journalism and podcasting—a field Carolla helped pioneer in the late aughts—and why, compared with President Joe Biden in 2024, President Donald Trump successfully appealed to people who wanted to build homes, businesses, and a future in the United States.0:00—Softball interviews4:41—Legacy media monocultures9:53—Why Carolla started his own podcast network11:35—Why are people leaving California?16:24—Overregulation in California25:33—The importance of meritocracy28:39—How Carolla developed his work ethic38:15—Why Carolla likes Trump41:40—California high-speed rail44:09—Is Carolla optimistic about the future?Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss whether it's finally time to abolish the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The panel examines the growing chaos at American airports as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents begin replacing TSA officials amid the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding standoff in Washington. They explore how airport security became entangled in broader immigration debates, whether agencies like TSA and DHS serve a necessary function, and what it says about a system where basic travel operations can break down over unrelated political fights.Next, the panel considers the real legacy of labor leader Cesar Chavez and what it reveals about the influence of unions in modern Democratic politics, before turning to new evidence that blue state tax policies are driving out wealth and high earners. They also discuss a jury's decision to clear Afroman in a defamation case tied to music videos mocking police officers who raided his home. Finally, a listener asks what a libertarian, constitutional approach to U.S. action in Cuba might look like.Reason is hiring! Check out the two open roles on the video team now:https://reason.org/jobs/associate-producer/https://reason.org/jobs/producer/0:00—Abolish the TSA15:51—The real legacy of Cesar Chavez28:21—Blue state wealth taxes34:41—Listener question on Cuba40:52—Justice for Afroman46:27—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
March 31, 20210:00—Introduction1:19—Maintenance as the hidden foundation7:09—Mastery of tools and understanding systems12:00—Interchangeable parts and individualism20:54—The importance of manuals27:04—Environmentalism and techno-pessimism32:45—Government efficiency and the political system42:54—How Brand is maintaining his legacySubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss the legacy of Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, and the enduring impact of the overpopulation panic he helped popularize. They examine how dire predictions of mass famine and societal collapse dominated headlines for decades, why those forecasts failed to materialize, and how elite institutions and media outlets often continue promoting similar narratives with little reflection on past errors.Next, the panel discusses the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) threat to revoke broadcast licenses over war coverage the White House dislikes, before analyzing Vice President J.D. Vance's effort to position himself as an Iran war skeptic inside the White House. Then, the editors answer a listener's question about whether the Department of Homeland Security still serves a useful purpose as a centralized hub for intelligence sharing. Finally, the panel remembers Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty by reflecting on his enormous influence as a historian of the libertarian movement.Reason is hiring! Check out the two open roles on the video team now:https://reason.org/jobs/associate-producer/https://reason.org/jobs/producer/0:00—The myth of overpopulation panic19:22—The FCC threatens broadcasters over war coverage24:05—Vance positions himself as an Iran war skeptic31:46—Listener question on Department of Homeland Security38:55—Remembering Brian Doherty46:59—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
a policy that required judges to defer to federal agencies' interpretations of vague or ambiguous statutes.In this episode, Chenoweth talks with Reason's Nick Gillespie about his group's ongoing litigation in Powell v. SEC, a case challenging that agency's notorious gag-rule order, which silences people settling with the agency from publicly denying allegations against them, even if they never admitted guilt. He also makes the case that Chief Justice John Roberts—often criticized by libertarian legal critics for accommodating too much to government power—has taken the lead over the past several decades in reducing the power of the administrative state.This interview was taped in front of a live audience at an event in New York City.0:00—Civil liberties and the administrative state5:33—Congressional failures in limiting administrative power10:12—Social media platforms and censorship13:07—Is the administrative state growing under Donald Trump?20:57—The SEC gag rule26:59—The NCLA's fight to repeal the gag rule35:17—Elon Musk and Mark Cuban SEC cases43:44—Powell v. SEC50:11—Chief Justice John RobertsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss the escalating war with Iran and its growing economic consequences. With oil prices surging past $100 a barrel, the panel examines the risks to global energy markets and the broader economy. They also debate the war's trajectory after Iran elevates a new hardline supreme leader and launches wider counterattacks, raising fears of global escalation, nuclear proliferation, and the White House signaling that Cuba could be the next target.They also discuss the removal of Kristi Noem as secretary of Homeland Security and what her turbulent tenure says about the popularity of hardline immigration tactics. Then, the editors look at new polling showing that Americans dislike artificial intelligence more than Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), continue to view government as the country's biggest problem, and report collapsing levels of social trust. They also answer a listener's question about drug use in libertarian circles.0:00—Economic fallout of war with Iran10:12—China and the risk of global escalation25:04—Noem removed as secretary of Homeland Security35:36—Listener question on libertarian drug use44:27—New polling on AI, social trust, and government approval57:30—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
0:00—Jonah Goldberg introduction3:32—Congressional authorization for Iran war11:34—MAGA and policy coherence22:36—The political calculations of J.D. Vance31:58—The postliberal right and power over principle35:24—The evolution of Tucker Carlson39:31—Religion in politics and Christian nationalism52:49—The state of the Democratic Party57:50—Generational attitudes toward institutions1:08:36—Political realignments for 2026 and 2028Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss the U.S. military strikes against Iran, and why the United States repeatedly finds itself pulled into wars in the Middle East. The panel examines the White House's original narrative around the 2025 bombings of Iran's nuclear facilities and what evidence supports claims that Tehran posed an imminent threat to U.S. national security. They debate whether President Donald Trump's approach reflects a coherent strategy or a slide toward another open-ended conflict. The editors also consider Congress' reluctance to assert its war powers, the limited public support for the operation, fractures within Trump's coalition, and the risk of escalation.They also unpack the Pentagon's clash with Anthropic after the AI company was labeled a supply chain risk when it refused to drop safety guardrails on its technology, a move that will shut the firm out of federal contracts. The editors discuss what that authority means in practice, how it shapes the relationship between Silicon Valley and the military, and what it signals about AI's growing role in national defense. They also respond to a listener's question about whether regime change wars are morally distinct from other conflicts and whether preemptive self-defense fits within libertarian principles.0:00—How does the White House justify bombing Iran?9:11—Do the strikes on Iran need congressional authorization?16:21—Trump's mixed messaging on Iran29:49—Conservative influencers divided over Iran38:18—Listener question on regime change48:13—Anthropic gets blacklisted by the Pentagon1:00:02—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Gillespie and Buttigieg debate the role of government, federal spending, subsidizing high-speed rail, and the rate of social progress, and they explore possible areas of overlap between Democrats and libertarians.0:00–ICE accountability and immigration policy8:40–What can Democrats offer libertarian voters?11:05–The national debt and federal spending15:50–Automation and government efficiency21:23–The private sector versus public benefit26:31–Tariffs and free trade34:20–Democratic Party failures in 202441:35–Identity politics43:40–Responding to Kamala Harris' comments46:25–Perceptions of Millennial and Gen Z voters49:00–Republican messaging around trans people52:23–National service and shared identitySubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
tariffs. They examine the major questions doctrine, Justice Neil Gorsuch's concurring opinion, and whether the ruling meaningfully restrains executive power or just invites years of new litigation. The panel also considers what the decision means for businesses and foreign governments that rushed to cut deals, and they talk about what Trump's irritated response reveals about his next moves.They then turn to the Middle East, where a rapid buildup of U.S. military forces has raised fresh fears of a possible war with Iran and renewed debate over how to respond to hostile regimes pursuing nuclear weapons. A listener asks whether a libertarian dream matchup of Rand Paul versus Jared Polis could ever happen and what it would take to convince reluctant candidates to run. The editors also discuss AI, surveillance, and privacy in light of new reporting on how tech companies handle user data.0:00–Supreme Court ruling on Trump's tariffs10:33–Congressional authority over tariff policy24:22–Are we going to war with Iran?36:52–The Winter Olympics46:45–Listener question on Rand Paul vs. Jared Polis54:22–AI surveillance and privacy concerns1:05:22–Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of the new book Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters.Shermer explains how the release of the Epstein files has fueled conspiracy thinking, particularly through guilt by association and pattern seeking. He explains why ambiguous evidence invites overinterpretation, how skepticism differs from cynicism, and why the demand for total certainty often leads people away from truth rather than toward it.The conversation also explores the broader collapse of trust in institutions after COVID-19, the role of influencers in amplifying conspiratorial narratives, and why scientific and historical denialism have found new audiences online.The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, and scholars who are making the world a more libertarian—or at least a more interesting—place by championing free minds and free markets.0:00—Introduction0:54—How Shermer appeared in the Epstein files3:04—Epstein conspiracy theories6:35—Minnesota ICE shooting10:14—The difference between truth and objective facts15:43—Do science and religion conflict?22:55—The rise of science denialism26:45—Government intervention in transgender medical treatment for minors29:59—The importance of historical truths and the Holocaust36:36—COVID-19 and the collapse of institutional trust42:19—Defending liberal democracySubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman and Katherine Mangu-Ward are joined by Senior Editor Robby Soave and reporter Reem Ibrahim to discuss the rapidly expanding global fight over free speech. The conversation begins with reporting that the Department of Homeland Security is seeking identifying information on Americans who criticize Immigration and Customs Enforcement online. They also examine President Donald Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC and the broader international trend toward regulating social media and criminalizing online speech.The panel then turns to the Federal Communications Commission chair's pressure campaign against Disney and Comcast and calls from Republican officials to investigate Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show, and what those moves say about the state of free expression in the United States. They also unpack the latest developments in the Jeffrey Epstein saga, including new reporting on UCLA professor Mark Tramo, the widening circle of consequences for Epstein's associates, and whether the moment resembles a belated reckoning similar to #MeToo. A listener asks how libertarians should think about free speech in the age of AI-generated deepfakes, before the panel examines Trump's failing tariff strategy and the growing rift between the U.S. and key allies.0:00—DHS wants to identify online critics05:37—The global attacks on free speech14:00—The FCC's soft censorship25:51—Is the Epstein saga a nothingburger?42:03—Listener question on AI-generated deepfake nudes51:10—Trump tariffs fail, cause global rifts1:02:44—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.). He joins Zach Weissmueller to discuss why he coauthored the Epstein Files Transparency Act, what motivated him to put his political career at risk, and why he believes the Justice Department (DOJ) has engaged in a long-running cover-up to protect powerful figures connected to Jeffrey Epstein.Massie walks through what he saw while reviewing the unredacted files at the DOJ, including disputed redactions, internal FBI documents, and evidence suggesting that senior officials misrepresented whether Epstein had coconspirators. Massie also makes the case for why Attorney General Pam Bondi may be guilty of criminal negligence in her handling of this investigation. The interview explores internal Republican divisions over the case, why Massie has called for the resignation of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and how the Epstein case has reshaped his understanding of power in Washington, D.C. Massie argues that this scandal is larger than Watergate, spans four administrations, and raises a defining moral test for politicians, media figures, and voters alike.The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, and politicians who are defining the 21st century in terms of individual freedom and autonomy.0:00—Why Massie is risking his political career over Epstein files3:53—Discoveries from the unredacted files8:22—Are DOJ redactions in compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act?12:32—Examining the evidence of an Epstein client list15:13—Why Howard Lutnick should resign17:57—The risk in releasing names and guilt by association21:49—Why the Epstein conspiracy is bigger than Watergate23:30—The future of the Republican PartySubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Obama meme34:44—Listener question on libertarian lightbulb moments44:34—Trump continues funding the Department of Education52:14—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
From there, the editors discuss Washington, D.C., itself, and the state of city governance, before analyzing the Super Bowl and the culture-war expectations around the halftime show.0:00—Trump wants to nationalize elections6:10—Reviewing the first year of Trump's second term14:47—How much did that cost?18:54—Governance in Washington, D.C.27:24—Culture wars and the Super Bowl36:44—Cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, guest host Billy Binion is joined by Jeff Asher, a nationally recognized crime data analyst and former CIA employee who leads the analytics firm AH Datalytics. He also publishes independent crime statistics and analysis through his Substack, Jeff-alytics.Binion and Asher discuss the sharp decline in murders over the past several years and why 2025 may have recorded the lowest murder rate in modern American history. They examine how crime statistics are collected, why the public often distrusts official data, and how media coverage and political incentives shape the national conversation about crime.The conversation also explores what might be driving the drop in violence, the limits of what policymakers can claim credit for, and why perception continues to lag behind reality even as crime falls.The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, and scholars who are making the world a more libertarian—or at least a more interesting—place by championing free minds and free markets.0:00—Introduction0:51—Misconceptions about crime3:15—Crime rate trends6:19—Washington, D.C., crime data14:39—Impact of trauma care on crime rates20:58—Do smaller cities deserve more attention?25:12—Crime in the 1990s34:20—Mass deportations and crime data40:03—Spending and crime data44:40—Clearance rates48:51—The disconnect between data and public perception51:14—Media coverage of crime58:35—Asher's experience in the CIASubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss the political fallout from a shocking Texas special election, in which a Democrat flipped a district that President Donald Trump had won by 17 points in 2024, amid growing backlash to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tactics and hardline immigration enforcement. They discuss what the result says about independent voters, the unraveling of the GOP's 2024 coalition, and why immigration politics now appear to be driving everything from a partial government shutdown to open conflict within the Republican Party over Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller's influence in the administration.The conversation then turns to Trump's decision to tap Kevin Warsh to lead the Federal Reserve and what his record suggests about central bank independence. The editors also scrutinize the administration's broader economic messaging, including Trump's Wall Street Journal op-ed defending his tariff policy and claims that inflation has been brought under control, and how those arguments hold up against the data. They then touch on former CNN journalist Don Lemon's arrest and the White House response before turning to a listener question about whether the rhetoric coming out of AI companies points toward a libertarian utopia or a threat to liberty itself. Finally, the editors discuss Moltbook, an emerging platform built around AI systems meant to govern themselves, and why it's stirring so much debate. 0:00—Democrats win special election in Texas08:30—Partial government shutdown over DHS funding23:13—Kevin Warsh to lead the Federal Reserve35:13—Don Lemon indicted by the DOJ43:10—Listener question on AI and liberty51:54—Moltbook and self-governing AI57:59—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
of stadium subsidies.Boehm and Bradbury discuss why stadiums rarely deliver on the economic benefits touted by team owners and local politicians, and how public officials, media outlets, and hired consultants help create the illusion that these projects pay for themselves. Bradbury explains why these deals often amount to a reallocation of existing local spending rather than genuine economic growth, and why taxpayers end up footing the bill for facilities that primarily benefit private sports franchises.The conversation also touches on the Super Bowl, the Olympics, and the surge of new stadium proposals across the country. Bradbury makes the case that America is on the verge of another stadium building boom, driven by political incentives and public enthusiasm rather than sound economics, and argues that cities would be better stewards of tax dollars if they resisted the pressure to subsidize major sports projects.The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, and scholars who are making the world a more libertarian—or at least a more interesting—place by championing free minds and free markets.0:00—Introduction0:56—Loving sports without loving subsidies6:01—Marketing taxpayer-funded stadium projects16:15—Civic pride and measuring ROI21:20—What makes sports stadiums unique?24:18—The upcoming stadium building boom35:01—Truist Park development43:03—Examples of fiscal restraint46:04—The Super Bowl and Olympic Games51:18—Bradbury's career trajectorySubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch are joined by special guest Emily Jashinsky, host of After Party, to examine the killing of Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis and the Trump administration's shifting narrative about the shooting. The group discusses the Second Amendment and free-speech implications of statements being made by Trump administration officials and the Republican Party's sudden embrace of gun-control talking points, as well as the broader politics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as the administration pushes for escalation while losing public support on immigration.The panel also discusses the upcoming Academy Awards and how political themes are shaping expectations for the awards season. A listener asks how to show up and protest against state violence while navigating the ideological baggage of left-wing protest spaces.0:00—ICE kills Alex Pretti in Minnesota20:00—Public support for Trump administration policy39:07—Listener question on protesting state violence45:23—The influence of politics at the Oscars53:01—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
0:00—Introduction1:09—Guevara's arrest in Venezuela8:34—The mechanics of oppression12:27—The capture of Maduro15:31—Delcy Rodríguez20:38—Venezuelan oil and national sovereignty27:19—The Trump administration's transition strategy29:47—U.S. media coverage of Venezuelan politics32:22—María Corina Machado36:45—Marco Rubio's three-phase strategy41:12—Maduro indictment47:20—The consequences of socialism50:45—What will progress look like for Venezuela?Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman and Matt Welch are joined by novelist and Reason contributor Kat Rosenfield and head of media for the Institute of Economic Affairs Reem Ibrahim to assess the mounting confrontation between the United States and its European allies over Greenland. Trump's tariff threats, talk of national security emergencies, exchanges between world leaders, and speculation about military force have pushed an unusual territorial dispute into the center of trans-Atlantic politics. The group considers what the confrontation means for NATO and trade policy with Europe.The conversation then turns to Minnesota, where masked federal agents continue detaining and harassing people in the aftermath of the Renee Good killing, prompting legal battles, disputes with state officials, and concerns about civil liberties. They also examine Trump's newly announced health care plan and what it signals about his domestic policy priorities. A listener then asks whether libertarians have any reason to want Greenland as part of the United States.0:00—U.S. maneuvering to acquire Greenland08:22—Trump's relationships with Russia and Europe24:09—ICE confrontations spark unrest in Minnesota40:32—Listener question on libertarian desires for Greenland45:51—Trump's health care proposal55:47—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
17:17—The importance of keeping history nonpartisan22:47—Celebrating the lesser-known U.S. presidents28:13—Wall Street Journal's criticism of Shogan37:27—Getting removed by President Donald Trump40:11—The importance of presidential records44:51—Politicizing nonpartisan institutions50:43—President Joe Biden and the Equal Rights Amendment56:16—Shogan's Washington murder mystery novelsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch are joined by Reason senior editor Robby Soave to discuss the Justice Department's (DOJ) investigation of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and whether this latest tactic is just a form of political retaliation. They discuss whether there is a coherent case for the probe, how much influence presidents should have over monetary policy, and where the line is between oversight and using legal machinery against perceived adversaries.The conversation then turns to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shootings in Minneapolis and Portland, where federal agents killed Renee Good during an immigration enforcement operation and shot two people outside a federal building days later, even as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem brands the Minneapolis victim a domestic terrorist and local officials accuse Washington of lying about what transpired. The panel talks about accountability for law enforcement, and how Americans can watch the same videos yet reach completely different conclusions. The editors then look at the uprising in Iran and the contrast between President Donald Trump's support for protesters there and his deployment of federal force at home, before examining California's proposed wealth tax and how it might impact the state economy.0:00—the DOJ investigates the Federal Reserve7:54—Trump's proposal to cap credit card interest rates12:42—ICE shootings divide the country37:35—Iran protests intensify43:14—Listener question on Democrats holding Trump accountable52:28—California wealth tax1:01:33—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, guest host Billy Binion is joined by Scott Jennings, a political analyst best known for his viral debates on CNN, where he is often the lone conservative voice. Jennings is also the author of A Revolution of Common Sense, a new book arguing that President Donald Trump's political comeback is rooted in what Jennings calls a common-sense governing platform.Jennings and Binion discuss whether Trump's policies on such issues as tariffs, deportations, and foreign affairs live up to that description a year into Trump's second term. They also talk about Jennings' experience working at CNN, his criticisms of the legacy media, and why he feels Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump are more similar than they appear.The conversation also turns to the growing civil war on the right, including recent public infighting among conservative factions and influencers. Jennings explains where he draws lines within the conservative movement, his views on free speech versus free association, and why he believes some figures are doing lasting damage to conservatism's ability to articulate a coherent set of values and priorities.The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, and scholars who are making the world a more libertarian—or at least more interesting—place by championing free minds and free markets.0:00–Introduction0:59–Being a conservative at CNN6:53–The future of media17:01–Going from Trump critic to Trump supporter19:53–The influence of Mitch McConnell24:00–Limited government and the One Big Beautiful Bill30:25–The Trump administration and free speech39:31–Trump's immigration and tariff policies56:45–The shortcomings of DOGE1:01:24–Antisemitism and conspiracy theorists on the right1:09:08–Alignment between the GOP and libertariansSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
33:46—Listener question on immigrant assimilation44:30—Walz not seeking reelection52:22—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
0:00—Introduction1:17—What is radical moderation?6:24—Third parties in America9:19—Polarization and elitism15:13—Evolutionary biology and tribalism27:24—Hall's path to political science35:06—Culture of Rochester, New York41:39—Expectations for the second Trump administration47:19—Radical moderate advice for Democrats51:03—Lessons from Edmund BurkeSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch are joined by Reason senior editor Robby Soave to share the stories they believe didn't receive sufficient media attention in 2025. Each panelist selected a story from 2025 in the categories of politics, private industry, global affairs, and culture that deserves a closer look as we head into 2026.0:00—Political stories that deserved more attention11:14—The year's underreported economic stories25:56—Global stories the media overlooked in 202537:19—Cultural moments that flew under the radarSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
0:00–Introduction1:23–Behemoth3:21–Andor in the Star Wars timeline5:04–Cassian Andor's character development12:04–The moral compass of Andor18:31–Constructing the authoritarian regime22:05–The reality of bureaucratic institutions25:04–Mass media representation in Andor31:43–Exploiting loneliness and vulnerability37:40–Would Gilroy return to Star Wars?39:21–Gilroy's contributions to Rogue One42:25–The Bourne movies and whistleblowers46:10–What is the libertarian view of Andor?53:48–Gilroy's origin story57:08–Themes in Gilroy's workSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
of family and community and what that says about capitalism, socialism, and human nature.0:00—Debating marijuana at Turning Point USA4:10—J.D. Vance is the MAGA heir apparent14:47—Massie and Khanna react to Epstein file release25:14—U.S. foreign policy in Venezuela and Syria38:09—Listener question on socialism and Christmas47:59—Minnesota welfare fraud scandal1:01:28—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
0:00—Introduction0:39—What is Samourai Wallet?3:31—Bitcoin and financial privacy9:51—Money transmission and noncustodial wallets13:15—Justice Department communication with FinCEN16:27—Responding to the indictment22:50—Why Rodriguez pled guilty29:41—Money laundering accusations34:59—Was Samourai's advertising evidence of guilt?43:01—Canadian trucker protests and bitcoin50:37—Trump comments on Rodriguez's case55:08—Ross Ulbricht's advice to RodriguezSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
0:00—Introduction1:42—Dee's relationship with the internet7:16—The early days of the internet13:48—Has the internet changed us?18:21—Mythological analogies23:00—Benefits of logging off27:15—Falling in love with AI chatbots33:39—Smartphones and anxiety42:11—Defending pseudonymity50:46—The death of reading55:52—Internet nihilism and violence1:01:20—Embracing internet realismSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch are joined by associate editor Liz Wolfe to discuss President Donald Trump's executive order blocking states from enforcing their own artificial intelligence regulations. The panel debates whether a single national framework for AI is necessary to keep American tech companies competitive or whether it represents a serious blow to federalism. They also examine the White House potentially reclassifying marijuana as a Schedule III drug and what that change could mean for the cannabis industry, tax policy, and federal drug enforcement.The editors then turn to mass shootings in Australia and at Brown University, including the actions of a bystander credited with saving lives at Bondi Beach, and what these incidents suggest about gun control debates. They discuss the U.S. seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker and threats of land strikes against the Nicolás Maduro regime, and cover the conviction of Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai under China's national security law and what it signals for press freedom and U.S.-China relations. A listener asks whether modern socialism reflects moral aspirations that could be redirected toward liberty rather than centralized power.0:00—Trump blocks states from regulating AI10:31—Reclassifying marijuana as a Schedule III drug18:39—Mass shootings in the U.S. and Australia26:59—U.S. seizes Venezuelan oil tanker36:48—Listener question on optimism for socialism46:08—Jimmy Lai found guilty by Hong Kong court57:12—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie, goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, and scholars who are making the world a more libertarian—or at least a more interesting—place by championing free minds and free markets.Today's guest is Sarah McLaughlin, a senior scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and author of Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech.She explains how governments in places like China and the United Arab Emirates restrict academic freedom and expression not just in their own countries but also at colleges and universities in America by exploiting speech codes and threatening to end lucrative satellite campus arrangements.McLaughlin and Gillespie also talk about whether it was a good idea for American comedians to censor their material at Saudi Arabia's Riyadh Comedy Festival and what to make of President Donald Trump's repeated minimization of the murder of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi operatives.0:00—Introduction1:14—Trump's response to Khashoggi's murder7:26—The Riyadh Comedy Festival11:29—Foreign influence on U.S. college campuses23:55—The NBA and the Chinese government28:39—Sensitivity exploitation34:36—Changes to campus culture39:46—Satellite campuses43:50—Matthew Hedges and the UAE50:03—McLaughlin's path to FIRE51:55—Solutions to campus censorship58:12—Climate of free speech under TrumpSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch are joined by associate editor Liz Wolfe to sort through the political free-for-all surrounding the Warner Bros. and Netflix merger. They look at why Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) is urging regulators to block the deal, why President Donald Trump says he plans to get personally involved, and how Jared Kushner's role in a rival Paramount bid is reshaping the fight. The panel digs into whether this moment signals a real return to trustbusting or another round of theatrics from both sides.The editors then turn to the economy, where Trump's tariff strategy is colliding with rising layoffs and growing unease within his own party. They assess the administration's new national security posture as Congress advances a defense bill that exceeds White House requests, and discuss the uproar over Kalshi's push to turn opinion into a tradable market. Also, a listener asks whether a renewed turn toward religious faith could help the country lower its political temperature.It's that time of year when we ask you to open your wallets, dear listener, and make a tax-deductible donation to Reason's annual webathon: https://reason.pub/4pzsSOE.0:00—Antitrust and the Netflix-Warner Bros. acquisition19:17—Tariff failures and rising unemployment27:43—National security strategy memo36:50—Listener question on polarization and faith48:13—Kalshi's controversial online gambling vision58:33—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
It's that time of year when we ask you to open your wallets, dear listener, and make a tax-deductible donation to Reason's annual webathon: https://reason.pub/4pzsSOE.In this special episode of The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Robby Soave, and Peter Suderman respond to all of your burning questions. Nothing is off limits!Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, and visionaries who are making the world a more libertarian—or at least a more interesting—place.Please donate to Reason's annual webathon, the one time a year when we ask our online audience to support our principled libertarian journalism with tax-deductible donations. Click here for details, swag, and more information.Today's guest is the science writer Matt Ridley, author of best-selling books such as The Red Queen, The Rational Optimist, and, with Alina Chan, Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. At a live event filmed in New York City, Ridley tells Nick Gillespie that political and cultural elites had already turned science, our best tool for understanding and improving the world, into a centralized, hyperpoliticized priesthood even before COVID.He walks through the collapse of public trust in 2020 as experts flipped on masks and transmission, declared Black Lives Matter protests safe but religious services dangerous, and insisted on certainty where none existed. Ridley also explains how the lab leak hypothesis went from being a forbidden conspiracy theory to the most plausible explanation for the pandemic.He shares his thoughts on why climate alarmism is finally waning, the future of innovation in an age of overregulation, why he's bullish on the future of nuclear power and AI, and how America can spark a new technological renaissance—even when leaders seem determined to smother dissent.0:00—Introduction1:59—Bill Gates' climate change reversal6:15—How COVID diminished public trust14:27—Centralization and confirmation bias17:53—Vaccine skepticism21:29—Sex and evolutionary theory29:47—Politicization of science31:34—COVID lab leak theory37:50—Human progress46:10—The role of storytellingSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
in the subject line.Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaOOdtJqzmY0:00—Economic anxiety and standards of living18:45—War crime allegations against Hegseth32:09—Federal hemp ban threatens industry37:35—Listener question on ICE constitutionality46:45—The legacy of Tom Stoppard56:31—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie goes deep on the thinkers, doers, and artists who are making the 21st century a more libertarian—or at least more interesting place—by challenging outmoded ideas and orthodoxies.Today's guest is Ken Burns, the filmmaker who has massively reshaped national conversations about everything from the Civil War to baseball to jazz to immigration to national parks with epic documentary series that have aired on public television.His latest work is The American Revolution, a 12-hour series about the nation's founding that he codirected with Sarah Botstein and David P. Schmidt. As the nation prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary next year, the American Revolution foregrounds the bloodiness of the war for independence from the British and the high levels of disunity among the colonists before and after the conflict, themes especially noteworthy in a society that is increasingly concerned about political violence and polarization. The series can also be seen as a rebuke to recent, overtly ideological attempts to recast the American experiment as morally irredeemable from its origins (The 1619 Project) or as a Disneyfied morality tale (The 1776 Project).Burns talks with Gillespie about the role of truth in documentaries and why we should embrace contradictions in historical storytelling. They also debate whether PBS, defunded earlier this year by the Trump administration, should continue to receive tax dollars.0:00—The American Revolution was a global war7:52—Slavery in the Revolution and competing narratives21:48—The logic of the Declaration of Independence29:14—The impact of Native Americans32:41—Why the Revolution leaves Burns feeling optimistic39:09—The importance of New York in the Revolution46:15—Funding for public broadcasting53:16—What's next for Ken Burns?56:26—Why understanding history is important for unitySubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
They examine what this moment suggests about Trump's shifting political instincts, how it fits with his recent comments on tariffs and the state of the economy, and what the disbanding of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) signals about his governing approach.The group then looks at Trump's attempt to influence the pending Warner Bros. merger and the broader media landscape, including worries about misinformation and new reporting that major MAGA influencer accounts on X are operating from overseas. The panel also considers the implications of six Democrats telling service members they do not have to obey illegal orders and the ensuing backlash. A listener asks how to reconcile consumer benefits from intense market competition with the need to preserve incentives for long-term innovation and investment.0:00—DOGE disbands4:02—Trump meets Mamdani in the oval office14:50—White House seeks influence over Warner Bros. merger27:58—Red Scare, Oliva Nuzzi, and cancel culture38:46—Listener question on preserving incentives in a market economy51:29—Democrats encourage military not to follow illegal orders57:49—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Arguing for the affirmative is Frymer, a professor of politics at Princeton. He's the author of Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America and Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party.Arguing against the resolution is Riley, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He's also the author of several relevant titles, including The Affirmative Action Myth: Why Blacks Don't Need Racial Preferences To Succeed and Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed, False Black Power.The debate is moderated by Soho Forum director Gene Epstein.
, also talks with Gillespie about his plans for a 2028 presidential run, the enduring anti-war legacy of his father Ron Paul, and why he believes that he and Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) are the only members of Congress who have stayed true to the Tea Party's commitment to lower spending and smaller government. 0:00—Releasing the Epstein files2:32—Tariffs and protectionist propaganda6:29—The economic policies of the GOP11:32—Military strikes on Venezuela13:27—Foreign intervention15:16—Military aid and arms deals19:38—Congressional spending and the debt22:04—Federal hemp ban23:30—What's happened to the Tea Party?26:00—Will Paul run for president again?
O'Neal talks about the challenges in bringing a classical liberal sensibility to mostly left-of-center readers, how growing up in California informs his thinking, what he thinks of Pope Francis' and his American successor Pope Leo's attitudes toward capitalism, and why newspapers shouldn't endorse candidates.0:00—Introduction1:39—Writing in defense of free markets and personal liberties7:40—Government threats to free speech14:01—The Washington Post's editorial decisions18:59—The state of free markets in America21:52—Is the opinion section becoming libertarian?34:09—O'Neal's origin story40:46—Pope Francis and capitalism45:17—Experiences at The Dispatch and The Economist52:59—The culture of The Washington Post's opinions team55:38—Generational change in politics and culture59:04—The Washington Post ends candidate endorsementsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie are joined by Reason reporter Eric Boehm to unpack President Donald Trump's sudden shift on the Jeffrey Epstein files after trying to block the vote, the GOP pressure campaign behind it, and what the episode suggests about his grip on the party. They also examine Trump's mixed signals on tariffs, including his move to roll back duties he imposed in the first place, and whether this moment reinforces the basic economic arguments critics have made for years. The group also digs into whether Trump's proposed tariff dividend makes any economic sense.The conversation then turns to rising tensions with Venezuela as unauthorized strikes continue and Trump signals interest in direct talks with Nicolás Maduro. A listener then asks what would need to change in order to push American health care away from government-run insurance and toward a system shaped by private plans.https://reason.com/podcast/2025/11/17/how-the-epstein-files-turned-maga-against-trump/
Reported podcast in 2020, whether we've passed peak woke, and if conservatives are now simply presiding over their own version of cancel culture.Previous appearance: Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal on Left-Wing Cancel Culture, June 17, 2020.0:00—Introduction1:34—What is the Sinclair Method?6:59—Herzog's experience with alcoholism15:50—Sexuality, self-identity, and self-loathing22:22—Recognizing addiction and the myths of willpower27:43—Alternatives to Alcoholics Anonymous35:03—Herzog on differences in weed and alcohol use38:44—Beta-blockers for overcoming anxiety43:51—Transgenderism in media and cancel culture58:29—Tolerance vs. agreementSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
46:14—Listener question on health insurance57:07—Difference between liberalism and libertarianism1:13:11—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Nick Gillespie speaks with Dr. Wolf von Laer of Students for Liberty, and Sean Themea of Young Americans for Liberty about how campus activism may change after the murder of Charlie Kirk. They discuss how the tragedy has affected their organizations, what it means for the future of student organizing, and how libertarian ideas about free expression and individual rights fit in today's campus climates.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
They also discuss why the Trump administration and an unlikely bipartisan group of legislators may well help usher in an era of legalized psychedelics. 0:00—Introduction1:40—The reality of war10:34—Documenting war for film21:05—The psychological toll of the Afghanistan War31:23—Health care for veterans and ibogaine treatment36:14—Amber Capone and the importance of veteran spouses40:15—The psychedelic experience of ibogaine44:16—Stanford University study on ibogaine51:49—Visualizing the psychedelic experience55:37—Legislative progress for psychedelic-assisted therapy1:05:52—The work of VETS and TARA MindSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss the upcoming New York City mayoral election and what a Zohran Mamdani victory could mean for both the city and national politics. They weigh the best-case/worst-case scenarios of a leftward turn in New York, asking whether Mamdani represents a lasting anti-AI socialist movement or simply the newest iteration of the Democratic big tent.The editors then turn to the governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey, where Democratic wins would signal continued strength for the party's centrist wing. They examine a federal judge's order requiring the government to keep SNAP funded during the ongoing shutdown, and then analyze Trump's tariff case as it heads to the Supreme Court and what a ruling could mean for presidential trade powers. Finally, a listener asks whether libertarians who work in the defense industry are violating their principles or simply operating within the system as it exists.0:00–The best-case scenario and worst-case scenario for a Mayor Mamdani8:09–Gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia20:04–SNAP benefits and shutdown politics29:32–Does the GOP have an Obamacare alternative?34:57–Listener question on ethical contradictions44:37–Tariffs case reaches the Supreme Court55:05–Weekly cultural recommendationSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
The Reason Interview goes deep with the artists, activists, entrepreneurs, and policymakers who are making the world a more libertarian—or at least more interesting—place by challenging worn-out orthodoxies and ideas.Today's guest is Jake Tapper, the host of The Lead on CNN and author of the new book, Race Against Terror: Chasing an Al Qaeda Killer at the Dawn of the Forever War.He tells Nick Gillespie why it matters that Donald Trump is following Barack Obama's lead in trying terrorists in criminal courts rather than military tribunals, why he believes the Trump administration is unleashing an all-out offensive against journalists critical of the president, and what the legacy media got way wrong with Joe Biden and COVID.They also discuss the future of journalism in an age of media consolidation, where Free Press upstart Bari Weiss is heading up CBS News—and possibly CNN, too.Previous appearance:Jake Tapper on The Hellfire Club, Donald Trump's Big Lies, and D.C.'s 'Bullshit Waterfall', May 11, 20180:00–Introduction1:34–Race Against Terror5:25–The Bush administration and the war on terror8:39–The legality and effectiveness of torture17:06–President Trump's approach to foreign policy22:19–Media censorship and the FCC29:43–CBS News, CNN, and the challenges facing legacy media40:14–The rise of independent media52:07–Joe Biden's decline and its impact on the Democratic Party58:37–What is being underreported in the second Trump administration?1:06:05–Generational shifts in political viewsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
rallies accomplish anything.0:00–Milei's party wins landslide election in Argentina16:08–Trump escalates trade war with Canada over advertisement23:51–Are we headed into an unauthorized war with Venezuela?34:40–The Paramount-Warner Bros. merger39:47–Listener question on the power of protest53:57–What does the rise of Zohran Mamdani mean for the country?61:58–Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
under Donald Trump and MAGA.A lifelong conservative, Flake built his career on defending free markets, free trade, limited government, and pro-immigration policies—positions that put him at odds with a Republican Party drifting toward populism and protectionism. We talk about why he chose principle over power (and how he feels about that now), his time representing the U.S. in Turkey as Russia invaded Ukraine, his push for reforming America's broken political system, and why he believes the fever of grievance politics must—and eventually will—break.0:00—Introduction1:29—The state of the GOP under President Donald Trump8:41—Did Flake's conservative principles irritate Trump?12:14—The case for more immigration21:27—The connection between immigration and trade26:25—Globalism in the era of nationalism34:26—Ambassador to Turkey38:05—The importance of Ukraine's independence40:51—The Trump foreign policy philosophy44:02—Reacting to political violence47:57—How to reform the political system58:33—Arizona State Institute of PoliticsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
protests and Trump's response32:54—Growing executive power during the government shutdown41:45—Listener question on checks and balances48:56—Bombing of alleged Venezuelan drug boats57:05—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
cases.Gillespie and Wizner put Trump's actions in the context of past presidents and discuss whether the ACLU has strayed from the days of defending the free speech rights of American Nazis in Skokie, Illinois, Unite the Right protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the National Rifle Association (NRA) in New York.They also discuss the legacy of Edward Snowden, with whom Wizner worked, and whether government spying on citizens has gotten better since the whistleblower revealed illegal mass surveillance of Americans during the Obama administration.0:00—Introduction1:04—Free speech under Trump5:33—Comparing Trump to Biden on free speech9:42—Have Americans become more comfortable with censorship?16:21—The Federal Communications Commission and Jimmy Kimmel25:43—What are Trump's standards for protected speech?28:46—ACLU cases protecting the speech of immigrants40:12—Why the ACLU defended the NRA45:02—Has the ACLU remained committed to its mission?53:52—Protecting the rights of students on college campuses55:46—Snowden and the state of mass surveillanceSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch celebrate the release of over 2,000 hostages, political prisoners, and detainees, while considering whether President Donald Trump's Israel–Gaza deal represents a genuine step toward lasting peace in the Middle East. They discuss whether Trump's foreign policy approach is consistent, examining his recent strikes in Venezuela, and whether his record abroad compares favorably to his chaotic record at home.The conversation then turns to Trump's new China tariffs, which rattled markets and underscored his erratic approach to trade policy, followed by yet another round of bailouts for struggling farmers. The editors also examine Congress' indifference amid another government shutdown and the growing sense that lawmakers have ceded their role entirely to the executive branch. They discuss a federal judge's weekend ruling that limits Trump's ability to deploy National Guard troops into U.S. cities, and what it signals about the courts' willingness to check his power. Finally, they assess the Democrats' persistent candidate-quality problem, from Virginia to California, and how it reveals a party struggling to find competent leadership. A listener asks whether a libertarian could offer a meaningful alternative in New York City's next mayoral race.0:00—Trump brokers peace in the Middle East13:32—Is Trump's foreign policy more successful than his domestic record?18:03—Tariff threats escalate trade war with China25:04—Government shutdown leads to federal layoffs34:44—Is the judiciary the only check on Trump's authority?43:02—Listener question on Libertarian Party in NYC47:27—The Democratic Party's candidate-quality problems55:36—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Reason and the Cato Institute go head-to-head with our friends at the National Review and the Center for Immigration Studies in a thought-provoking debate on one of America's most divisive issues: immigration.Resolution: Mass Immigration Is Good for AmericaAffirmative: Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward and Cato's Alex NowrastehNegative: National Review's Rich Lowry and Center for Immigration Studies' Steven CamarotaModerator: Peter SudermanReason Versus is a debate series where Reason journalists and policy experts face off against pundits and strategists who challenge their ideas—no talking points, no shouting, just sharp arguments and real discussion.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie is a libertarian podcast that goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, politicians, and visionaries who are defining the 21st century.Today's guest is Lionel Shriver, the provocative writer best known for novels like We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Mandibles, and, most recently, Mania.We talked a few days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, an event whose lasting significance she cautioned against overinterpreting. "We want tragedies to mean something," she said. "And maybe they don't." Shriver offered cutting critiques of Gen Z socialists, Tucker Carlson, Kamala Harris, and President Donald Trump, whom she said is devoid of "any firm principles."In a New York Times op-ed a decade ago, she thanked Rand Paul for "nominally refurbishing libertarianism so that it is halfway respectable," but now says the term has become tarnished as "far right." She told me that she is one of "those sad people who occasionally still says they would like a smaller government" and isn't "interested in massive social control." Yet she seems to be growing more conservative, making dismissive comments about "the trans thing" and arguing against large-scale immigration, which is also the topic of her next novel, A Better Life, that is set to be released early next year.This interview was recorded live at an event in New York City.0:00—Introduction1:44—Lionel Shriver's health battles4:06—The danger of overinterpreting events11:02—Weaponizing identity for conflict19:06—Shriver's views on libertarianism22:54—Donald Trump and Kamala Harris27:51—Shriver's novelist inspirations32:27—Gen Z's problematic relationship with history41:59—Concerns about mass immigrationSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie are joined by Reason reporter Eric Boehm to discuss Paramount's $150 million acquisition of The Free Press and Bari Weiss' promotion to editor in chief at CBS News. They examine whether this represents a backlash to "woke" media, and debate if the success of outlets on Substack and YouTube shows that journalism may be entering a period of entrepreneurship and renewal rather than decline.The panel then turns to President Donald Trump's controversial National Guard deployments to cities like Portland and Chicago, weighing its constitutional limits and political consequences. They also cover the leaked texts from Virginia's Democratic attorney general nominee Jay Jones about shooting his Republican rival, and the fallout for Democrats in a critical election year. A listener asks the editors to reflect on whether libertarians should focus more on defending freedom as an end in itself or on steering society toward specific outcomes. Finally, the conversation touches on Argentina's economic crisis and what it means for libertarians.0:00—Bari Weiss named editor in chief at CBS News13:32—Consolidation and the changing media landscape20:58—Federal troops deployed to Chicago and Portland38:17—Democrat attorney general candidate fanatisizes about political violence48:07—Listener question on prioritizing process over purpose56:37—What Argentina's bailout means for libertarianism1:00:35—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week's guest host on The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie is Billy Binion, who talks with Jenin Younes, a civil liberties attorney who first gained national attention when she sued the Biden administration for pressuring social media companies to censor content it didn't like. That case, Murthy v. Missouri, ultimately reached the Supreme Court.A former New York City public defender, Younes is now national legal director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, where she is preparing to sue the Trump administration. She and Binion discuss her path to civil liberties advocacy, the threats to free speech coming from both the left and the right, and why defending the First Amendment should be a universal cause—even when that speech is offensive.0:00—Introduction1:00—Younes' commitment to civil liberties3:38—The state of free speech in America7:34—Opposing COVID restrictions12:33—Jimmy Kimmel, the FCC, and Murthy v. Missouri27:39—Donald Trump's record on free speech39:41—Noncitizens and constitutional rights42:23—Censorship in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's assassination48:33—Pam Bondi and "hate speech"57:52—How can we protect free speech?Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss whether the impending government shutdown will actually rein in the federal bureaucracy. They consider whether there is anything to gain from a shutdown, how past shutdowns have played out, and whether the risk of growing executive power outweighs the risk of uncontrolled spending.They also examine the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey and whether it's about retribution or substance, President Donald Trump's deployment of federal troops to Portland, and New York Mayor Eric Adams' decision to exit the mayoral race. A listener question prompts a conversation about cyclical theories of history and whether frameworks like The Fourth Turning help explain our current moment or merely provide the illusion of clarity.0:00—Shutdown showdown and shrinking the government9:24—Russell Vought and the growth of executive power25:34—James Comey faces an indictment31:38—Eric Adams drops out of NYC mayoral race40:42—Listener question on cyclical frameworks in history48:06—Trump sends federal police to Portland56:30—Weekly cultural recommendationsToday's Sponsor:You believe in limited government and support organizations that champion the ideals of a free society. But have you ensured that your charitable giving will leave a lasting legacy of liberty? Without a plan in place, your charitable legacy could fade—or worse, be redirected to causes that don't align with your values. At DonorsTrust, they help you secure your philanthropic vision for the long term. With a donor-advised fund, you can ensure that the groups you care about continue to receive support, even beyond your lifetime. And unlike other donor-advised funds, DonorsTrust respects your libertarian principles and ensures your charitable capital remains committed to advancing individual liberty. Your giving should reflect your values—not just today, but for years to come. Your Vision. Your Values. Your Impact. Go to http://DonorsTrust.org/Reason to ensure your philanthropy continues to champion liberty for generations to come.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Lasting 20 years, the war in Afghanistan was not only the longest conflict in American history—it was a near total failure.Today's guest is Dan Krauss, whose documentary Bodyguard of Lies is an unflinching look at the Afghan war and the lessons the public desperately needs to learn from it. Krauss shows how officials such as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admitted they weren't going to be honest with the American people. He reminds us that within six months of the 9/11 attacks, the United States had essentially destroyed Al Qaeda's capacity to attack us—but instead of leaving, Washington chose two more decades of occupation, nation-building, strategic confusion, and widespread corruption. And he tells how Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama kept doubling down, how trillions of dollars and thousands of lives were wasted, and how a compliant press and Congress let it all happen.0:00—Introduction1:14—Donald Rumsfeld and the "bodyguard of lies"4:59—The Afghanistan War in 20027:35—The shifting objectives of the war18:20—Government corruption in Afghanistan21:08—Vietnam parallels29:57—Obama and the Afghanistan War33:42—The military-industrial complex and tracking the money36:53—Gen. David McKiernan43:47—What lessons have Americans learned?50:30—Did the Afghanistan War make us safer?1:01:28—What is the message of Bodyguard of Lies?Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch examine President Donald Trump's claim that overwhelmingly negative coverage of him is "no longer free speech," suggesting that criticism of the president could be treated as illegal. They explore how this rhetoric fits into his broader war on the press, from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) pressure that pushed ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel to new speech restrictions floated by senior officials, and why these moves strike at the core of the First Amendment.The editors then turn to disclosures about a closed bribery investigation involving Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, and what it signals about corruption risks around immigration policy. They assess the implications of U.S. strikes on Venezuelan drug boats and the danger of rapid escalation of tensions, along with Trump's hints about reentering Afghanistan. A listener question then prompts each editor to name the view their colleagues would likely consider least libertarian.0:00—Does free speech cover criticism?23:09—Holman's bribery scandal39:09—Listener question on least libertarian views49:28—Venezuela and Afghanistan foreign policy news57:43—Weekly cultural recommendationsToday's Sponsor:Therapy can feel like a big investment, but the state of your mind is just as important as your physical health. Let's talk numbers. Traditional in-person therapy can cost anywhere from $100 to $250 per session, which adds up fast, but with BetterHelp online therapy, you can save, on average, up to 50 percent per session. With BetterHelp, you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions, saving you big on cost and time. Therapy should feel accessible, not like a luxury. With online therapy, you get quality care at a price that makes sense and can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress. Your mental health is worth it—and now, it's within reach. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. It's convenient, too. You can join a session with the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp connects you with mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise—so you can find the right fit. Plus, switch therapists at any time. Your well-being is worth it. Visit http://betterhelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Writer Freddie deBoer discusses the assassination of Charlie Kirk and his theory of "spectacular acts of public violence" on the final episode of 'Just Asking Questions.'Why must all good things come to an end? Just asking questions. This will be the final episode of the Just Asking Questions podcast. This discussion with Freddie deBoer about the assassination of Charlie Kirk and its aftermath felt like the kind of sincere, analytical, deeply meaningful conversation across an ideological divide that would be appropriate to call our last. Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller offer their final thoughts and reflections on the series at the end of the episode, so if you've been with us on this journey, please stay after the final question to hear our closing statements. You can continue to read Liz's work every weekday by subscribing to the Reason Roundup. Zach will continue to produce documentaries, video essays, and interviews for Reason TV. You can also follow Liz and Zach on X for updates on their work, and the full Just Asking Questions archive will remain available here, on YouTube, and podcatchers.Freddie deBoer joins us in today's episode to unpack the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk. On his Substack, he wrote a remarkable piece attempting to make sense of what he calls "spectacular acts of public violence."The motive of Kirk's alleged killer has become clearer as text messages and family statements released by law enforcement reveal a young man in a relationship with a transgender partner, enraged by Kirk's supposed "hatred." But from deBoer's perspective, it's not ideology primarily spurring these public acts of political violence. A profound lack of meaning and wallowing in nihilistic online irony continually leads young men—often egged on by internet friends they barely know in real life—to desperately graft a semi-coherent grievance onto their final violent act in a doomed attempt to make it meaningful. DeBoer is a proud man of the left, and we ask him whether the pathology that led to Kirk's assassination is particularly characteristic of the left in an era where unapologetic celebrations of this murder and the murder of United Healthcare executive Brian Thompson late last year have appeared on social media with disturbing frequency. It's a conversation that we hope inspires you as it did us to reflect on what it is that's meaningful to you, what the effect of an increasingly digital and disembodied world has on that meaning, and how to avoid pushing our culture any further in the direction of one that produces rampant celebration and dehumanization of a father and husband who was killed for the words he spoke.
The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, politicians, and visionaries who are making the 21st century more libertarian—or at least more interesting—by challenging worn-out ideas and orthodoxies.Today's guest is Joe Dolce, whose new book is Modern Psychedelics: The Handbook for Mindful Exploration.Dolce argues that psychedelics aren't just the province of hippies or tech bros anymore. They are powerful and increasingly popular—and legal—tools for therapy, self-discovery, and play.He talks with Gillespie about everything from the misunderstood role of ketamine in Friends star Matthew Perry's death to why ibogaine may be the only substance on Earth that can stop addiction cold, to how we went from "Just Say No!" campaigns to mail-order magic mushrooms in just a few short decades.How can we make The Reason Interview better? Take our listener survey for a chance to win a $300 gift card: http://reason.com/podsurvey0:00—Intro1:25—What do psychedelics teach?7:02—Psychedelic safety and ketamine myths13:01—How psychedelics work and ibogaine effects19:12—Microdosing23:00—Psychedelics and altered states28:10—Generational perceptions of psychedelics30:59—Cultural acceptance of psychedelics42:22—The future of psychedelics48:34—Drug legalization and accessSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this episode of The Reason Interview, Nick Gillespie is joined by Senior Editor Jacob Sullum, author of the new book Beyond Control, to discuss the evolution of gun and drug laws in America. They examine how decades of prohibitionist policies have backfired, undermining liberty and justice without delivering safety.This was originally recorded live on September 4, 2025.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this special live episode of The Reason Interview, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch reflect on the shocking murder of Charlie Kirk and the broader implications it carries for American politics. They discuss how his killing fits into rising concerns about political violence and what it signals about the nation's increasingly volatile climate.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Journalist Michael Tracey discusses problems with what he call the "Epstein mythology."https://reason.com/podcast/2025/09/11/michael-tracey-cutting-through-the-jeffrey-epstein-fogWhat is the Jeffrey Epstein story, and what does it mean? Just asking questions.Today's conversation is with journalist Michael Tracey, who has been picking apart what he calls the "Epstein mythology" for the past several weeks over at his Substack. In short, he thinks 90 percent of what most people believe about this case is false, and that this is mostly the fault of credulous establishment journalists who chose to uncritically publish alleged victims' narratives and ignore inconvenient facts, as well as opportunistic alternative media figures who spun the story into a sprawling conspiracy for political and personal gain. Tracey has been attacked and on the attack, and you'll hear him air his many grievances with other journalists, lawyers, and politicians in this conversation, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.), whom he calls out as his "enemy" because she instructed police to remove him from an Epstein-related press conference after he asked a question about an accusers' credibility in Washington D.C. this week. The goal of this episode was to move beyond the personality clashes and egos and wild speculation and drill down into what it is we actually know and don't know about Jeffrey Epstein. But as we talked, it became clear that this kind of detached analysis just wasn't going to be possible, that the egos and the clashes and the agendas remain intricately tied up with how this story has unfolded. The incentives faced by establishment journalists, podcasters, accusers, and politicians have shaped this story and our understanding of it, mostly for the worse. But in the marketplace of ideas, there is also a countervailing incentive to move against the herd and correct the record. And maybe a turbulent and confrontational personality like Michael Tracey–who admits in this interview that he's "wired differently"–was exactly what was needed to break taboos, ask uncomfortable questions, and push for real disclosure about the nature of the story that has loomed over American politics for at least a decade.Regardless of how one feels about Tracey's tone or the soundness of his analysis, anyone who purports to care about this story should at least engage with the questions he's asking and start asking their own questions about what the Epstein story really means.This conversation has been edited for time and clarity.
The Reason Interview goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, politicians, and visionaries who are making the 21st century more libertarian—or at least more interesting—by challenging old, worn-out ideas and orthodoxies.Today's guest is Lenore Skenazy, a journalist and activist dubbed "the world's worst mom" for letting her nine-year-old son ride the New York subway alone back in 2008. Since then, she's become a regular contributor to Reason and the co-founder, with psychologists Peter Gray and Jonathan Haidt, of Let Grow, which pushes for laws and school programs [ok? - a nonprofit can't "change laws"] to restore independence to kids.She talks with Nick Gillespie about why kids today are more anxious and less free than they used to be, how fear and over-parenting took over American childhood, and why the free-range parenting movement is finally on the rise.How can we make The Reason Interview better? Take our listener survey for a chance to win a $300 gift card: http://reason.com/podsurvey0:00–Intro1:14–Spend less time with your kids4:57–Childhood safety myths10:50–Parental fears of failure17:05–Generational divides on parenting20:18–Criminalizing childhood26:16–Politics and parenting29:09–Let Grow and local legislation41:14–What do children actually want?45:17–How Skenazy became the "World's Worst Mom"48:12–Childhood autonomy in pop cultureSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch dig into Sen. Josh Hawley's (R–Mo.) speech at the National Conservatism Conference, where he denounced artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies as threats to liberty. They debate why MAGA populists are embracing anti-tech rhetoric, how this mirrors parts of the labor left, and what it means for President Donald Trump's simultaneous push for AI investment and closer ties with Silicon Valley.Our editors also break down the latest jobs report, analyzing labor force participation, manufacturing losses, and whether tariffs and immigration limits are holding back growth. They then turn to New College of Florida's talk of privatization following its clash with Gov. Ron DeSantis, and what that would mean for university governance. A listener question prompts each editor to explain how they came to identify as libertarian and why the label matters to their work. Finally, the panel examines the Justice Department's move to ban transgender Americans from gun ownership.How can we make The Reason Roundtable better? Take our listener survey and get a chance to win $300: http://reason.com/podsurvey0:00—Does AI threaten liberty?11:53—AI social anxieties20:01—Abundance agenda embraces AI23:40—Trump jobs report raises alarms32:37—New College of Florida talks privatization44:31—Listener question on becoming libertarian52:15—Gun ban for transgender Americans1:04:33—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Curtis Sliwa became famous by stepping in where the government was falling short. As the New York mayoral candidate told Reason's Jesse Walker, the Guardian Angels—the anti-crime patrols that Sliwa launched in New York City in 1979—were born because "the government completely failed us….We filled the gap."In the years since then, Sliwa has expanded the Guardian Angels to cities around the world, launched a multidecade career in talk radio, confessed that some of his organization's early crime-fighting exploits were hoaxes, and survived a very real assassination attempt allegedly ordered by the Gotti family. Now he's aiming to be mayor, running both as a Republican and on an independent Protect Animals ballot line against the self-described socialist Zohran Mamdani, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and the scandal-plagued incumbent, Eric Adams.Sliwa's thoughts don't always follow predictable lines. On immigration, he cheers crackdowns on "the bad hombres, the drug dealers, [and] the gangbangers" but warns that "everybody should be afforded due process….You don't just pick them up, put them on Air Con, and take them to that gulag in El Salvador. That's not the American way." He shrugs at market solutions for housing—"I don't trust the developers, I don't trust the realtors"—while blasting the city for mothballing thousands of public apartments. He thinks marijuana should be legal and fast food should be more tightly regulated. He's fine with President Donald Trump sending the National Guard to police D.C., but "if he would've tried to do it in New York City, I'd say, 'Whoa.'"Walker interviewed Sliwa twice in August for a Reason profile—once while Sliwa was campaigning on the subway and in East Harlem, and once in the Manhattan building that houses the candidate's campaign HQ. This is the second of those conversations.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, and oddballs who are making the 21st century more libertarian—or at least more interesting—by challenging old, worn-out ideas and orthodoxies.Today's guest is Pablos Holman, a legendary hacker and cypherpunk who holds over 100 patents and has worked with Bill Gates to cure malaria and with Jeff Bezos to get Blue Origin off the ground.Pablos also runs a venture fund called Deep Future, which is committed to "creating technology that matters." In his new book—also called Deep Future—he exhorts the reader to "boycott dystopia" and describes companies that are saving bee colonies by using mushroom spores to inoculate bees against pests; recovering ancient Roman secrets to make concrete that lasts for thousands of years; and launching solar panels into space to deliver a constant, uninterruptible supply of clean energy.He and Nick Gillespie talk about the need to move faster with AI, why hardware ultimately matters more than software, and why decentralization will eventually triumph over the Facebooks, Apples, and Googles of the world.How can we make The Reason Interview better? Take our listener survey for a chance to win a $300 gift card: http://reason.com/podsurvey0:00–Intro1:53–Evaluating our technology3:55–Deep tech and Holman's innovation investments7:36–Energy demand, consumption, and production15:09–Nuclear energy adoption20:05–AI and creating better hardware27:31–Holman's introduction to computers and hacking33:06–Who were the cypherpunks?37:30–BitTorrent, Bitcoin, and decentralization43:41–Can RSS feeds solve tech pessimism?49:28–The origin of Holman's eyewearSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Katherine Mangu-Ward and Matt Welch are joined by Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller and Senior Editor Robby Soave to unpack RFK Jr.'s tumultuous week at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), from leadership shake-ups and changes to COVID-19 vaccine access to mounting backlash from employees and former agency directors. They examine what this chaos says about the politicization of public health and the risks of concentrating so much authority in a single agency.The conversation then shifts into the brewing fight over deploying the National Guard in Chicago, weighing the constitutional questions and the practical realities of federal intervention in local crime. A listener question prompts a discussion around strategies for holding your ground when you're outnumbered in a debate. The panel then weighs in on a federal court ruling on Trump's tariffs, what it could mean for trade policy, and how it intersects with the broader libertarian legal movement.How can we make The Reason Roundtable better? Take our listener survey and get a chance to win $300: http://reason.com/podsurvey0:00—Chaos at the CDC11:50—RFK Jr.'s Health and Human Services report card29:56—Trump and the Chicago crime crackdown40:35—Listener question on debating when outnumbered49:12—Liberation Day tariffs ruled unconstitutional54:25—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Economist Bob Murphy discusses the mounting pressure on the Federal Reserve, the implications of the government taking Intel equity, and capitalism under siege.SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcast/2025/08/28/bob-murphy-are-we-flirting-with-fascism/What do you call it when the state takes partial ownership of a private company? Just asking questions.Ten percent of Intel now belongs to the U.S. government. Today's guest says it's time to start using the "F word."Economist Bob Murphy is no anti–Donald Trump #resistance fighter quick to shriek "fascism." In fact, he says he was relieved when Trump won the last election. But the Austrian school economist and host of the Human Action Podcast and The Bob Murphy Show tells us he's alarmed by the Intel news and the hints from Trump's chief economist that more companies are next.This didn't start with Trump. Remember the bank bailouts? Ever heard of Fannie Mae? What about the G.M. takeover? This moment has been a longtime coming, and Murphy says one surprising culprit is another institution the president is now trying to exert control over: the Federal Reserve.Watch or listen above as we discuss America's troubling lurch toward China-style "state capitalism," the bipartisan enthusiasm for consolidating state power over private industry, and why it's finally time to end the Federal Reserve and how to actually do it.00:00 Intro monologue00:01:30 Government ownership and capitalism00:05:17 Historical context of government intervention00:09:24 Sovereign wealth funds: pros and cons00:13:20 The role of AI in government policy00:17:13 Concerns over nationalization and corporate influence00:21:09 The future of corporate partnerships with government00:36:13 Trump's war on the Federal Reserve00:39:25 The Federal Reserve's independence and accountability00:46:05 Critique of the Federal Reserve's effectiveness00:55:20 The case against the Federal Reserve01:06:14 Navigating the current economic landscape
The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, and politicians who are making the 21st century more libertarian—or at least more interesting—by challenging old, worn-out ideas and orthodoxies.Today's guest is best known by his pro wrestling name: Kane.But Glenn Jacobs isn't just a member of the WWE Hall of Fame. Since 2018, he's served as the mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, where he has beat down tax increases and mask and vaccine mandates while pushing school choice and private sector solutions to social problems such as addiction.Jacobs tells Nick Gillespie how Ron Paul inspired him, why he believes President Donald Trump is disrupting the administrative state, and why live-and-let-live is the best life philosophy.How can we make The Reason Interview better? Take our listener survey for a chance to win a $300 gift card: http://reason.com/podsurvey0:00—Intro0:50—Paul's influence on Jacobs3:52—The appeal of Ronald Reagan6:26—Trump and the administrative state9:45—Responsibilities as mayor of Knox County11:45—Taxes and public services18:32—Pushing back on COVID-19 mandates25:35—LGBTQ issues29:26—Vocational training32:57—Libertarianism inside the GOP34:38—Which pro wrestlers embody these politicians?36:00—What's next for Jacobs?Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch are joined by Reason reporter Eric Boehm to break down Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell's signals of an upcoming interest rate cut and President Donald Trump's very public pressure campaign on the Fed. They discuss what a rate cut could mean for jobs, inflation, and investment, how tariffs are distorting basic economic signals, and why the Fed's growing politicization should worry anyone who values a functional economy.The conversation then turns to the administration's new trade deal with the European Union (E.U.), what it signals for tariffs, reciprocity, and the costs of everyday goods. They also field a question from a libertarian listener about former Rep. Rahm Emanuel's (D–Ill.) appeal as a presidential candidate before examining the FBI's raid on former National Security Adviser John Bolton's home, weighing whether it's a legitimate investigation into mishandled classified documents, or a case of political retribution.How can we make The Reason Roundtable better? Take our listener survey for a chance to win a $300 gift card: http://reason.com/podsurvey0:00—The impact of the Fed rate cuts12:21—E.U. trade deal, tariffs, and their revenue21:04—Cracker Barrel and the state of conservative commentary33:07—Listener question on a Rahm Emanuel for president42:19—FBI raids the home of John Bolton51:21—Trump's order on burning the U.S. flag52:39—Weekly cultural recommendationsToday's Sponsor:Therapy can feel like a big investment, but the state of your mind is just as important as your physical health. Let's talk numbers. Traditional in-person therapy can cost anywhere from $100 to $250 per session, which adds up fast, but with BetterHelp online therapy, you can save, on average, up to 50 percent per session. With BetterHelp, you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions, saving you big on cost and time. Therapy should feel accessible, not like a luxury. With online therapy, you get quality care at a price that makes sense and can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress. Your mental health is worth it—and now, it's within reach. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. It's convenient, too. You can join a session with the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp connects you with mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise—so you can find the right fit. Plus, switch therapists at any time. Your well-being is worth it. Visit betterhelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
How bad is crime and disorder in Washington, D.C.? Just asking questions.Local crime became a national issue following the assault of Edward Coristine—a former staffer at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) who is also known as "Big Balls"—during an alleged carjacking. Trump reacted on Truth Social, saying, "Crime in Washington, D.C., is totally out of control" and promised to "exert my powers, and FEDERALIZE this City" following the assault. The capital is now occupied by members of the National Guard, and Trump has said that although they are starting with D.C., "this will go further" and named other cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Baltimore.Some Democrats, like Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D–Md.), have said Trump is exaggerating.Megan McArdle, a D.C. resident and Washington Post columnist, says Democrats are wrong to downplay the city's crime problem and general public disorder. She thinks the failures of Democratic governance and the police pullback following the 2020 George Floyd protests have created an atmosphere of public support for Trump's actions, and she fears that the appetite for more federal intervention that pushes the limits of the Constitution will only grow stronger if politicians fail to confront these problems in their cities.It's a challenging conversation between three people who care about civil liberties and rule of law, as well as safety and the protection of property. We don't want to demonize police, nor do we want to let them abuse their power. We don't want criminals to wreck our cities, nor do we want to lock up delinquent teens—like the ones who allegedly assaulted Big Balls—and throw away the key. We don't want lawlessness, nor militarized police operating under permanent emergency powers.How to properly balance all of these concerns is, perhaps, the political question of our time. And we hope this discussion is a step toward providing some answers to it.0:00—Introduction1:31—Martial law in D.C.01:52—The assault that sparked a national conversation02:33—Crime trends in Washington, D.C.06:50—The impact of crime on quality of life10:04—Comparative crime rates: D.C. vs. other cities13:56—The role of disorder in urban crime17:41—The complexities of policing and community trust22:00—Federal intervention in local policing27:59—The challenges of D.C.'s criminal justice system36:17—Gun ownership and legal barriers40:10—The disconnect in gun legislation and crime rates43:18—Federal law enforcement and military policing47:05—The governance structure of D.C. and its implications51:07—Public perception of crime and political responses56:59—The need for a balanced approach to crime01:11:18—Cognitive biases and self-reflectionMentioned in the podcast:Trump's post on Truth Social: "Crime in Washington, D.C., is totally out of control""D.C. Has a Real Crime Problem. Federal Control Won't Solve It," by Meghan McArdleViolent crime in D.C. Hits 30 Year Low, by the U.S. Attorney's OfficeDepartment of Homeland Security memo, obtained by The New RepublicThe Injustice of Policing in America, by Christoper Lewis and Adaner Usmani"What everyone is getting wrong about crime in DC," by Charles Fain Lehman
Today's guest is Rep. Chip Roy (R–Texas), a fiscal hawk whose commitment to balancing the budget has led President Donald Trump to call for primary challenges against him.Nick Gillespie sits down with Roy to talk about why he ultimately voted for the president's budget-busting One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), whether the controversial redistricting plan going on in Texas is legit, the expansion of the federal government under both major parties, and where libertarians and conservatives can work together to reduce the size, scope, and spending of the state.0:00—Intro0:41—Why we must control government spending4:20—The OBBBA and the national debt6:30—Facing off with Trump9:25—The Federal Reserve's existence and independence11:00—Reforming the health care system14:21—Victories from the OBBBA19:16—The influence of Ron Paul24:51—Immigration, labor, and assimilation35:17—Is there a new GOP consensus on foreign policy?41:50—Texas redistricting44:28—Cultural identity of TexasSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch dig into the Trump administration's increased meddling in the tech sector, from profit-sharing deals to a possible government stake in Intel. They discuss the recent spike in the consumer price index, the president's controversial pick to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and what the latest data signal for the economy.The conversation then shifts to Washington, D.C., where President Donald Trump has declared a state of emergency, put the local police under federal control, and deployed National Guard troops from multiple states as part of a sweeping crime crackdown. Despite over 1,700 officers and agents on the streets last week, the arrests were no higher than an average day, raising questions about whether the operation is more about politics than public safety. Later, the hosts turn to Trump's meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, where threats of "severe consequences" gave way to softer rhetoric and even the adoption of some of Putin's language. A listener question lightens the mood by imagining the Roundtable as a band, with Peter on sousaphone.0:00—Has Trump created a banana republic economy?15:42—Consumer price index, jobs report, and the new BLS nominee20:54—D.C. police department now under federal control38:48—Listener question on a Roundtable musical group45:14—Trump's meetings with Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy55:34—Weekly cultural recommendationsToday's Sponsor:Therapy can feel like a big investment, but the state of your mind is just as important as your physical health. Let's talk numbers. Traditional in-person therapy can cost anywhere from $100 to $250 per session, which adds up fast, but with BetterHelp online therapy, you can save, on average, up to 50 percent per session. With BetterHelp, you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions, saving you big on cost and time. Therapy should feel accessible, not like a luxury. With online therapy, you get quality care at a price that makes sense and can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress. Your mental health is worth it—and now, it's within reach. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. It's convenient, too. You can join a session with the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp connects you with mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise—so you can find the right fit. Plus, switch therapists at any time. Your well-being is worth it. Visit betterhelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Education writer and entrepreneur Deb Fillman joins Just Asking Questions to discuss the tenuous relationship between school and education. https://reason.com/podcast/2025/08/14/deb-fillman-why-do-we-send-kids-to-school/
In 2008, Rep. Ron Paul (R–Texas) ran for the Republican presidential nomination and did surprisingly well with a campaign focused on stopping the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, ending the Federal Reserve, and reducing the size and spending of the federal government. Two years later, the Tea Party movement burst onto the scene, bringing people like Paul's son Rand to the Senate and one of today's guests, Justin Amash, to the House of Representatives. In 2012, Ron Paul again ran for the GOP nod, finishing behind the eventual nominee Mitt Romney, and helping to usher in what The New York Times called "the libertarian moment."What happened to the Ron Paul Revolution and Tea Party's promise to shrink government, especially once Donald Trump and the MAGA movement emerged in 2015? Did the broad-based alliance that rose to cut spending and limit power transmogrify into one that prizes wielding the state instead of restraining it?Today's episode was recorded live on Saturday, August 9, at Ron Paul's 90th birthday BBQ in Lake Jackson, Texas. The guests are Amash and Fox News personality Kennedy. They talk with Nick Gillespie about how the MAGA movement grew out of the Ron Paul Revolution and the Tea Party and redirected the right's anti-establishment energy toward expanding government power rather than limiting it. They also discuss why Congress refuses to legislate, whether social media has expanded freedom or increased anxiety, and if Gen Z is libertarian or conformist.0:00—Ron Paul's impact on the libertarian movement6:33—The Tea Party wave12:45—Did Trump end the libertarian moment?18:41—Social media and bigger government25:26—Optimism for young libertarians33:42—Why has everything become political?36:33—Will Amash run for office again?44:38—Concerns for the next generationSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie are joined by special guest Reem Ibrahim, head of media for the Institute of Economic Affairs. They begin with Jim Acosta's AI-generated interview featuring a deceased child urging gun control, using it as a springboard to discuss nationwide declines in violent crime and the political tendency to focus on banning specific tools. The conversation then shifts to the White House's decision to deploy the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and the dangerous precedent this could set for using federal forces to address local crime.The panel then turns to President Donald Trump's meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska to discuss Ukraine, weighing whether it could lead to peace or embolden authoritarian demands, as well as the role of European nations. From there, they examine the decision by Texas Democrats to flee the state amid redistricting battles and the FBI's efforts to locate them. A listener question from the United Kingdom prompts a conversation about free speech restrictions and the growing use of psychological studies to justify censorship, leading into a discussion of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression's (FIRE) lawsuit against the Trump administration over immigrant First Amendment rights.0:00—Media exploitation of children for gun control11:02—National Guard deployed to D.C. amid falling crime rates15:02—Trump meeting with Putin in Alaska25:51—Texas Democrats flee state over GOP redistricting map35:35—Listener question on free speech rights in the U.K.47:00—FIRE lawsuit against Trump administration over protected speech54:55—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Is Brooklyn-style socialism a "luxury belief"? Just asking questions. Today's guest coined that memorable phrase, and we're eager to talk with him today about how it applies to the triumph of socialist Zohran Mamdani in the New York Democratic mayoral primary and to discuss the odd, enduring allure of socialism for America's most highly educated class despite a history of repeated bloody and catastrophic 20th century communist experiments. I also want to ask him if any of my political beliefs are a luxury for which others are bearing the cost. Rob Henderson is the author of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, which is a must-read account of life on the bottom rungs of the social ladder in the late '90s and a frankly inspiring tale of his improbable ascent of that ladder. His Substack commenting on current events and culture through a social psych lens is Rob Henderson's Newsletter. He's also a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and you can also often catch his work in City Journal, where he's a contributing editor.Chapters:0:00—Introduction3:02—Zoran Mamdani: The luxury belief politician?6:01—Intra-elite conflict and class dynamics8:58—Cultural expectations vs. economic realities12:00—The role of marriage in economic success15:12—Education, class, and economic outcomes18:00—Expectations vs. reality in elite aspirations20:47—Demystifying elite institutions and talent identification29:17—The value of education and elite institutions35:34—Ignorance of historical lessons on communism40:28—The rise of socialism in modern politics44:21—Normalization of radical rhetoric48:15—Luxury beliefs and their societal impact52:26—Drug decriminalization: a complex debate59:21—The intersection of personal beliefs and public policy01:04:53—Cultural shifts in family structures01:11:41—The consequences of discarding traditional norms01:20:24—Birth rates and societal concerns01:24:50—Political polarization and relationship dynamics01:27:50—Final question: questioning our beliefsMentioned in the podcast:"When Progressive Ideals Become a Luxury," by Rob Henderson"Zohran Mamdani's Luxury Beliefs," by Rob Henderson"In Defense of 'Luxury Beliefs,'" by Katherine Mangu-WardThe Most Detailed Map of the N.Y.C. Mayoral Primary
What if one of the sharpest critics of centralized power, bureaucratic surveillance, and top-down social control wasn't a libertarian economist but a French postmodernist? And what if one of the economists most vilified by the left wasn't a cold-hearted market fundamentalist but a thinker obsessed with the limits of knowledge and the dangers of planning?Today's guest is King's College London political economist Mark Pennington, author of the new book Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge and Freedom. A self-declared postmodernist libertarian, Pennington explores the common ground between Michel Foucault and Friedrich Hayek. He talks with Nick Gillespie about how Foucault's critiques of expert rule, scientism, and the construction of subjectivity can bolster the classical liberal fight for freedom—and how Hayek's warnings about the pretense of knowledge might offer the left a way to resist domination without defaulting to centralized authority.If you're a libertarian who thinks Foucault is just woke nonsense—or a progressive who sees Hayek as a neoliberal villain—this conversation will blow your mind in the best way possible.0:00 – Intro1:20 – What is a postmodern Austrian political economist?5:07 – Scientism and Hayek10:45 – The limits of postmodernism17:46 – The intersection of Foucault and Hayek30:12 – Systems of control and surveillance37:39 – Foucault's warnings on government authority49:57 – Creating a postmodern liberal political economy1:01:29 – Foucault and the Iranian Revolution1:08:21 – Have we learned anything from Foucault and Hayek?Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman and Matt Welch are joined by Reason reporter Eric Boehm and special guest Emily Jashinsky, host of After Party. They begin with the media's growing fixation on men and masculinity, from a wave of New York Times essays to broader questions about dating, education, and work. What does this coverage reveal about how the media sees men, and about younger male voters drifting from the Democratic Party?The panel then examines President Donald Trump's escalating tariff policy, its economic consequences, and how it fits into the administration's broader approach to trade and inflation. A listener question prompts a discussion of the National Collegiate Athletic Association's shift toward deregulation, and the growing calls to reverse course. The panel also looks at Trump's overseas business activity and the ethical questions it raises about the use of public office for personal gain.0:00–How men are characterized in the media13:00–The publishing industry's struggles with men19:15–The tradeoffs of Trump's tariff policies42:52–Listener question on NCAA deregulation50:56–The ethics of personal profits as president1:00:14–Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
The former CIA analyst and Cato scholar discusses Palantir, Trump's new national database, and the sordid history of federal law enforcement on Just Asking Questions.https://reason.com/podcast/2025/07/31/patrick-eddington-how-to-tyranny-proof-america/
Science journalist Gary Taubes discusses the MAHA Report, new dietary guidelines, and bad nutrition science on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions.https://reason.com/podcast/2025/07/24/gary-taubes-maha-ultra-processed-foods-and-bad-science/
Today's guest is Richard E. Farley, author of Drop Dead, a history of how the richest city in America got addicted to spending, saturated in debt, and crashed the municipal bond market—and then managed to get a federal bailout in the nick of time.In 1975, New York City almost went bankrupt. Farley argues that the same conditions are reemerging today: runaway budgets, gimmicky accounting, overpromised entitlements, and politicians more interested in ideology than arithmetic. He wrote all this before the rise of mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who promises to blow spending through the roof, enact new taxes, and create masses of new regulations.If you want to understand what it takes to bankrupt a city, listen up. New York might be sleepwalking into another fiscal disaster, and this time, there might not be a bailout waiting.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch are joined by Reason Senior Editor Robby Soave to discuss the $1.5 billion renewal of South Park and why the show remains one of the most important libertarian pop culture creations of the past 30 years. They reflect on its enduring relevance, its crude but effective political metaphors, and its broad appeal across ideological lines. The panel also revisits the fall of Gawker and what it revealed about public trust in media, then turns to President Donald Trump's new AI executive order and the growing tendency to frame tech policy as part of the culture war. A listener question sparks discussion of Trump's deregulation record and how it connects to the One Big Beautiful Bill, followed by a look at the latest developments around a potential government shutdown.00:59—South Park's renewal and the political implications08:19—Late night TV, the Paramount merger, and cord cutting17:20—The legacy of Gawker's collapse28:15—Trump's anti-woke AI executive order36:05—Listener question on Trump's deregulation track record42:24—Are we heading toward another government shutdown?50:52—Weekly cultural recommendationsToday's Sponsor:If you're still tossing and turning all night and feeling edgy during the day, let me tell you about CBD from CB Distillery. Millions are turning to their CBD for relief because…IT WORKS! In fact, over 90 percent of customers report better sleep with CBD. And it's not just sleep. CB Distillery offers targeted formulations for just about everything—sleep, stress, mood, focus, pain after exercise—they even have CBD for pets! And it's all made with the highest-quality, clean ingredients. No fillers, just premium CBD. And with over 2 million satisfied customers and a 100 percent money-back guarantee, CB Distillery is the source to trust. If you're struggling with sleep, stress, or other health concerns and haven't found relief, make the change, like millions are, to CBD from CB Distillery. And for a limited time, you can save 25 percent off your entire purchase. Visit CB Distillery (cbdistillery.com) and use promo code REASON. Specific product availability depends on individual state regulations.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is David Lowery, the legendary frontman of the bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, digital copyright crusader, and longtime Reason reader.He dives deep into his sprawling, deeply personal new record Fathers, Sons and Brothers and the postwar California dream, talks about how the music industry broke, and suggests ways to maybe, just maybe, fix it.He's sued Spotify and other streaming services, teaches business at the University of Georgia, and he's dropped what might be the best one-liner about selling out since The Who.If you care about music, creative freedom, and getting paid for your work, this one is for you.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch examine what, if anything, the Jeffrey Epstein saga reveals about the MAGA movement and its ties to conspiracy culture. They debate whether the scandal could derail President Donald Trump's agenda or simply reinforce the need for more government transparency. The editors also weigh in on Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's explosive allegations that former President Barack Obama and his administration engaged in a "treasonous conspiracy" to discredit Trump's 2016 victory. Then they turn to the GOP's $9 billion Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) rescission bill and its impact on public broadcasting. Plus, a listener question prompts reflections on how the Roundtable crew really gets along behind the scenes.00:26—Epstein conspiracies come full circle06:13—The Epstein files and government transparency16:52—Trump's made-for-TV administration showing cracks21:42—Gabbard and the treasonous conspiracy accusations38:03—Listener question on panelist relationships45:27—DOGE rescissions and public broadcasting cuts56:08—The declining influence of institutional media1:00:28—Weekly cultural recommendationsToday's Sponsors:Therapy can feel like a big investment, but the state of your mind is just as important as your physical health. Let's talk numbers. Traditional in-person therapy can cost anywhere from $100 to $250 per session, which adds up fast, but with BetterHelp online therapy, you can save, on average, up to 50% per session. With BetterHelp, you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions, saving you big on cost and time. Therapy should feel accessible, not like a luxury. With online therapy, you get quality care at a price that makes sense and can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress. Your mental health is worth it—and now, it's within reach. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. It's convenient, too. You can join a session with the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp connects you with mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise - so you can find the right fit. Plus, switch therapists at any time. Your well-being is worth it. Visit betterhelp.com/roundtable today to get 10% off your first month.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
What is the relationship between Trump's tariffs and the rest of the economy? To help us figure out what tariffs might do to the U.S. economy, analyze how Trump is using trade as a foreign policy tool, and discuss the ultimate political aims of economic nationalism is Scott Lincicome. He's vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute and writes the Capitolism newsletter at The Dispatch.https://reason.com/podcast/2025/07/18/scott-lincicome-how-much-will-you-pay-to-buy-american/
The executive director of The American Conservative discusses Trump's meeting with Netanyahu, support for Ukraine, MAGA schisms, and the president's "grand strategy" on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions.https://reason.com/podcast/2025/07/11/curt-mills-is-trump-still-america-first/
Join us on July 15 at 6:20 E.T. to hear from Reason's Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch for a live episode of The Reason Roundtable from New York City.It will be a night of unscripted, uncensored, and unhinged conversation about whatever the hell is happening in America this week—including the bizarre reality that President Donald Trump and New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani each represent a kind of populism. What does it mean when a word applies to both a billionaire president and a leftist intellectual? Chaos, apparently. You don't want to miss this.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is University of Texas historian John Lisle, author of the chilling and brilliantly researched Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA.Despite official attempts to destroy records of the CIA's LSD-fueled search for mind control in the 1950s and '60s, the truth has been dribbling out, especially in recent books and documentaries such as Steven Kinzer's Poisoner in Chief and Errol Morris' Wormwood.Lisle's work draws on previously unknown depositions and documents to deliver the most definitive—and disturbing—account yet. He discusses the twisted logic of Cold War secrecy, the bizarre figures behind and victims of America's darkest experiments, and what MKUltra reveals about the dangers of unchecked power in a democracy.And this might be the most important thing: He and Nick Gillespie talk about why conspiracy theories thrive in the absence of transparency—and how to preserve skepticism without surrendering to paranoia.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is University of Pennsylvania historian Sophia Rosenfeld, the author of The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life.Her book explores why we've come to basically equate having more personal choices with having more freedom. She stresses it wasn't always this way—in the past, freedom was often defined as the ability to act in the way God wanted you to act, or to overcome base urges, to be more angel than beast.Rosenfeld talks about how the Reformation, which enshrined a right to choose among faiths, and the rise of shopping, which allowed us to choose among many products, worked to change all that, even up to our current day, where rhetoric about choice still dominates many political and economic arguments.0:00—Intro1:15—Main arguments from The Age of Choice4:03—Earlier conceptions of freedom7:37—The Reformation and religious freedom10:32—Capitalism and market freedom15:37—Consumer choice and femininity20:00—Choice as freedom in the 20th century26:07—Abortion rights and the choice debate31:26—Choices vs. mandates36:50—Overwhelmed by choiceSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Reason reporter Eric Boehm unpack the passage of President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill, focusing on its tax carve-outs, special-interest subsidies, and what happens when key provisions expire in 2028. They also examine the potential fallout from Trump's looming trade deadline with the European Union, answer a listener question about the legality of masked federal law enforcement, and discuss the viability of Elon Musk launching a new political party.0:00—America is still the greatest country on earth6:18—The One Big Beautiful Bill becomes law12:39—Medicaid cuts and what they mean20:51—Sunset clauses will cause more instability33:33—Listener question on masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents42:16—Elon Musk announces new third party49:47—Weekly cultural recommendationsToday's Sponsors:Future of Freedom: If you're tired of cable news debates and Twitter shouting matches, and you're looking for serious, good-faith conversations between people who actually care about liberty then it's time to check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Each episode dives deep into a single topic—tariffs, campus speech, the Department of Government Efficiency—and brings together two guests who disagree on the best path forward. But here's the twist: This isn't a debate show. No interrupting. No dunking. If you believe the future of freedom depends on more than just winning arguments and you're ready for something deeper than the usual echo chambers, check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Real disagreement. Real ideas. Real conversations. Subscribe to Future of Freedom wherever you get your podcasts.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is Elizabeth Nolan Brown, whose recent Reason cover story looks into the politics of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement spearheaded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Just a decade or so ago, it was Democrats, liberals, and progressives who were pushing healthy eating initiatives and it was common to see Republicans and conservatives such as Sarah Palin brandish Big Gulps like AR-15s and Fox News anchors such as Sean Hannity declare their loyalty to Kentucky Fried Chicken.But now the Trumpian right is embracing wellness and food purity like nobody's business—and is using the state to enforce its preferences.Nick Gillespie talks with Brown about how we got here, where the MAHA movement is headed—and whether you've eaten your last red M&M.This episode was recorded live in front of an audience in New York City. Go here to get information about upcoming events, including The Reason Roundtable live in New York on July 15!Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, Reason editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch are joined by Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson to analyze Zohran Mamdani's primary win over Andrew Cuomo in New York City's mayoral race and what it signals about the future of Democratic politics. They also discuss the Senate GOP's version of President Donald Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" and how Republican views on gay marriage have shifted since the Obergefell decision in 2015. Finally, a listener question prompts a discussion on Modern Monetary Theory and the risks it poses from a libertarian perspective.0:00—What does it mean to be a party pollster?2:53—Socialist Mamdani wins NYC Democratic primary11:59—The politics of the housing crisis15:18—The abundance agenda and Mamdani21:15—Mamdani as the Trump of the left27:07—Listener question on Modern Monetary Theory37:15—Senate GOP version of Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill"42:45—Republican voters shift on gay marriage48:28—Is the GOP more libertarian under Trump?50:28—Chances Trump might prove us wrong on Iran strategy54:22—Weekly cultural recommendationsToday's Sponsors:Future of Freedom: If you're tired of cable news debates and Twitter shouting matches, and you're looking for serious, good-faith conversations between people who actually care about liberty, then it's time to check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Each episode dives deep into a single topic—tariffs, campus speech, the Department of Government Efficiency—and brings together two guests who disagree on the best path forward. But here's the twist: This isn't a debate show. No interrupting. No dunking. If you believe the future of freedom depends on more than just winning arguments and you're ready for something deeper than the usual echo chambers, check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Real disagreement. Real ideas. Real conversations. Subscribe to Future of Freedom wherever you get your podcasts.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) discusses the War Powers Resolution he co-sponsored with Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), the Israel-Iran conflict, and why the antiestablishment left and right must work together.SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcast/2025/06/25/ro-khanna-congress-must-take-back-its-war-powers/Who's allowed to launch an attack on another country? Just asking questions.Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) joined Reason's Just Asking Questions podcast to discuss the War Powers Resolution he's co-sponsored with Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), which would require President Donald Trump to seek congressional approval before continuing to drop bombs in Iran. He also discussed Trump's remarks that the governments of Israel and Iran "don't know what the fuck they are doing" after they ignored his call for a ceasefire, whether or not the administration likely destroyed Iran's nuclear program, and why he's eager to work with the antiestablishment right to rein in war powers and get corrupt money out of Congress.
A veteran CIA analyst says Israel's attack on Iran was unjustified and that America should not support its war.SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcast/2025/06/19/paul-pillar-america-should-not-fight-israels-war/What's America's role in Israel's war with Iran? Just asking questions.U.S. forces aren't directly involved in the war with Iran…yet. But those of us who remember the 2003 Iraq invasion can't help but be struck by some of the unsettling similarities: A terrorist attack acting as an inciting event a year and a half earlier, sensational but unverified claims of weapons of mass destruction imminently falling into the wrong hands, the promise of a swift and decisive victory over a cruel and corrupt regime.There are hugely important differences between then and now, but today's guest will offer the long view. He's someone who understands first-hand how military intelligence is used and abused to justify war. Paul Pillar was a CIA analyst for 28 years, serving as the executive assistant to the CIA director from 1989 to 1991 amid the Gulf War and later rising to become the chief analyst and deputy director of the agency's Counterterrorist Center. Today he's a nonresident senior fellow at Georgetown's Center for Security Studies and a nonresident senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. We discuss what the Trump administration knew and when about the Israeli strike on Iran, why Pillar urged President Donald Trump to "condemn" the strike, whether or not regime change is the primary goal of this war, what Trump's likely next steps are, and how the dissent of Trump supporters like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon is likely to affect the outcome.
Today's guest is Susannah Cahalan, whose new book is The Acid Queen, a biography of Rosemary Woodruff Leary—muse, fugitive, and heavily indicted co-conspirator of Timothy Leary's psychedelic revolution.She talks with Reason's Nick Gillespie about hippie communes, outlaw drug smuggling, the war on drugs--and how the '60s counterculture in its best moments ran experiments in radical individualism, where personal freedoms were used to build voluntary communities founded on altered consciousness and aesthetic liberation. The Acid Queen helps explain how the personal became the political, why libertarians should care about the messy legacy of the counterculture, and what comes next in drug policy, especially regarding psychedelics.This conversation was recorded at a live event in New York City. Go here to find out about upcoming events. And go here to sign up for Reason's NYC events newsletter.0:00 – Introduction1:15 – Who is Rosemary Woodruff Leary?7:02 – How did Rosemary meet Timothy Leary?9:57 – Why America was ready to experiment with psychedelics15:12 – Rosemary's connection to John Lennon and Yoko Ono16:11 – How Rosemary and Timothy Leary became outlaws21:07 – The jailbreak of Timothy Leary28:45 – The political speech of Timothy Leary31:45 – Why Rosemary and Timothy split up35:31 – The final years of Rosemary Woodruff Leary40:08 – The reconciliation of Rosemary and Timothy Leary42:54 – The common thread between Cahalan's books46:18 – Labeling in mental health48:34 – Cahalan's experience with psychedelicsToday's Sponsors:Reliance College: What if one day could change how you think—how you lead—and how you shape your future? Join Reliance College for Reliance Day—Saturday, June 28 in Los Angeles! This one-day, high-impact experience is designed for students, professionals, and lifelong learners ready to level up their thinking in an AI-driven world. At Reliance Day, you'll dive into collaborative Socratic discussions and sharpen the critical thinking and leadership skills that drive success in college, business, and life. It's a full day of intellectual challenge and creative exploration—rooted in the Great Books and Montessori-inspired methods that have transformed over 400 lives. Go to RelianceCollege.org/reliancedays to register today.Future of Freedom: If you're tired of cable news debates and Twitter shouting matches and you're looking for serious, good-faith conversations between people who actually care about liberty, then it's time to check out the Future of Freedom Each episode dives deep into a single topic—tariffs, campus speech, the Department of Government Efficiency—and brings together two guests who disagree on the best path forward. But here's the twist: This isn't a debate show. No interrupting. No dunking. If you believe the future of freedom depends on more than just winning arguments and you're ready for something deeper than the usual echo chambers, check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Real disagreement. Real ideas. Real conversations. Subscribe to Future of Freedom wherever you get your podcasts.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Nick Gillespie chats with Stimson Center Senior Fellow Emma Ashford and Ideas Beyond Borders founder Faisal Saeed Al Mutar to discuss President Donald Trump's decision to bomb Iran—and what might come next.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch examine the latest U.S. military strike on Iran, unpacking the bipartisan pattern of anti-war campaign rhetoric followed by hawkish foreign policy once in office. They debate whether intervention is ever justified, what escalation might look like, and why Congress keeps abdicating its war powers. The hosts also tackle a listener question about public land sales and libertarian principles. Finally, they survey the baffling state of big city governance and the New York City mayoral primary battle between former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani.00:22—President Donald Trump abandons "no new wars" promise9:11—Vice President J.D. Vance kisses the ring13:28—Are there any good arguments for war with Iran?19:57—Israel set off a ticking clock23:22—Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard contradicts Trump's narrative26:27—What Congress should do now36:24—Listener questions: public lands selloff43:41—Big city governance and the NYC mayoral primary55:32—Weekly cultural recommendationsToday's Sponsors:Future of Freedom: If you're tired of cable news debates and Twitter shouting matches, and you're looking for serious, good-faith conversations between people who actually care about liberty then it's time to check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Each episode dives deep into a single topic—tariffs, campus speech, the Department of Government Efficiency—and brings together two guests who disagree on the best path forward. But here's the twist: This isn't a debate show. No interrupting. No dunking. If you believe the future of freedom depends on more than just winning arguments and you're ready for something deeper than the usual echo chambers, check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Real disagreement. Real ideas. Real conversations. Subscribe to Future of Freedom wherever you get your podcasts.Therapy can feel like a big investment, but the state of your mind is just as important as your physical health. Let's talk numbers. Traditional in-person therapy can cost anywhere from $100 to $250 per session, which adds up fast, but with BetterHelp online therapy, you can save, on average, up to 50% per session. With BetterHelp, you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions, saving you big on cost and time. Therapy should feel accessible, not like a luxury. With online therapy, you get quality care at a price that makes sense and can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress. Your mental health is worth it—and now, it's within reach. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. It's convenient, too. You can join a session with the click of a button.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Psychologist and author Scott Barry Kaufman joins Reason's Nick Gillespie to discuss his new book Rise Above, which challenges the growing embrace of victimhood as identity. They explore how traits such as neuroticism and vulnerable narcissism are shaping modern culture, why social media rewards grievance over growth, and what it really takes to develop a more flexible, empowered sense of self. Kaufman reflects on his own journey from special education to Carnegie Mellon and beyond, explains why tough love and radical honesty are essential tools for transformation, and offers a humanistic vision of how individuals and societies can move beyond resentment and reclaim purpose.0:00—Introduction1:30—Limiting beliefs come from our past.6:00—The victim mindset10:49—What is vulnerable narcissism?12:12—Kaufman's experience in special education17:35—Childhood trauma from summer camp21:49—Narcissism is a defensive posture.26:24—Kaufman's unconventional path to Carnegie Mellon31:09—Group victimhood and empowerment37:40—Why coddling and tough love are both wrong41:55—Embracing optimism in the face of darkness48:00—Developing a flexible identityToday's sponsors:Reliance College: What if one day could change how you think—how you lead—and how you shape your future? Join Reliance College for Reliance Day—Saturday, June 28 in Los Angeles! This one-day, high-impact experience is designed for students, professionals, and lifelong learners ready to level up their thinking in an AI-driven world. At Reliance Day, you'll dive into collaborative Socratic discussions and sharpen the critical thinking and leadership skills that drive success in college, business, and life. It's a full day of intellectual challenge and creative exploration—rooted in the Great Books and Montessori-inspired methods that have transformed over 400 lives. Go to RelianceCollege.org/reliancedays to register today.Future of Freedom: If you're tired of cable news debates and Twitter shouting matches and you're looking for serious, good-faith conversations between people who actually care about liberty, then it's time to check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Each episode dives deep into a single topic—tariffs, campus speech, the Department of Government Efficiency—and brings together two guests who disagree on the best path forward. But here's the twist: This isn't a debate show. No interrupting. No dunking. If you believe the future of freedom depends on more than just winning arguments and you're ready for something deeper than the usual echo chambers, check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Real disagreement. Real ideas. Real conversations. Subscribe to Future of Freedom wherever you get your podcasts.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie are joined by Reason reporter Eric Boehm to discuss the political fallout from President Donald Trump's immigration raids and deployment of the National Guard to riots in Los Angeles. They also cover last week's feud between Trump and Elon Musk over the GOP's mega spending bill. Finally, they examine the evolving role of drone warfare, particularly in Ukraine, while expressing concerns about technological militarization.0:00—Protests over illegal immigration in L.A.6:08—Trump and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are "too happy" about the protests in L.A.9:03—U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is rounding up immigrants who are working in jobs and contributing to society.11:04—The importance of "rule of law"18:24—Is it OK to call in the National Guard to handle protests in L.A.?21:12—The big, beautiful breakup between Musk and Trump27:00—An important moment for debts and deficits34:19—Markets for the win38:07—Listener question: Should we sunset older laws to stop lawmakers from using obscure laws today?44:18—Drone strikes increase in the war between Russia and Ukraine55:08—Weekly cultural recommendationsToday's sponsors:Join the 2025 Great Connections Seminar in Chicago from July 26 through August 2. Designed for students ages 16 to 24, this weeklong experience builds the core skills of entrepreneurship: critical thinking, persuasive communication, and intellectual independence. This year's theme, "Reason and Free Will," explores great minds like Aristotle, Ayn Rand, and Thomas Jefferson—not through lectures but in dynamic, small-group discussions that train students to lead and innovate. Outside the classroom, they'll tour Chicago's museums, try improv, and connect with ambitious peers. In a world of AI and automation, original thinking is your competitive edge. Tuition is just $800, including room and board. Scholarships are available. Apply today at www.reliancecollege.org/reason.If you're still tossing and turning all night and feeling edgy during the day, let me tell you about CBD from CB Distillery. Millions are turning to their CBD for relief because…IT WORKS! In fact, over 90 percent of customers report better sleep with CBD. And it's not just sleep. CB Distillery offers targeted formulations for just about everything—sleep, stress, mood, focus, pain after exercise—they even have CBD for pets! And it's all made with the highest-quality, clean ingredients. No fillers, just premium CBD. And with over 2 million satisfied customers and a 100 percent money-back guarantee, CB Distillery is the source to trust. If you're struggling with sleep, stress, or other health concerns and haven't found relief, make the change, like millions are, to CBD from CB Distillery. And for a limited time, you can save 25 percent off your entire purchase. Visit CB Distillery (cbdistillery.com) and use promo code REASON. Specific product availability depends on individual state regulations.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch are joined by Reason reporter Matthew Petti to break down the fallout from Israel's strike on Iran, the likelihood of escalation, and what role the U.S. is already playing in the conflict.They also cover the Minnesota assassinations and the growing fears of political violence, and offer a firsthand account from one of the nationwide No Kings protests. Finally, they answer a listener's question about libertarian reactions to anti-ICE demonstrations and examine the broader implications of President Donald Trump's shifting immigration enforcement policies.0:00 - Political violence in America8:17 - What role does America play in the Israel and Iran conflict?17:56 - The risk of escalation and expansion in the Middle East25:26 - How Trump differs from Bush on foreign policy28:41 - What have we learned from this Middle East conflict?33:09 - Listener question: Why are libertarians critical of the anti-ICE protests?38:59 - Observations on the No Kings protests46:29 - Trump's shifting stance on the ICE raids51:27 - Is Trump policy driven by personal enrichment?54:31 - Weekly cultural recommendationsToday's sponsors:Reliance College: What if one day could change how you think—how you lead—and how you shape your future? Join Reliance College for Reliance Day—Saturday, June 28th in Los Angeles! This one-day, high-impact experience is designed for students, professionals, and lifelong learners ready to level up their thinking in an AI-driven world. At Reliance Day, you'll dive into collaborative Socratic discussions and sharpen the critical thinking and leadership skills that drive success in college, business, and life. It's a full day of intellectual challenge and creative exploration—rooted in the Great Books and Montessori-inspired methods that have transformed over 400 lives. Go to RelianceCollege.org/reliancedays to register todayFuture of Freedom: If you're tired of cable news debates and Twitter shouting matches, and you're looking for serious, good-faith conversations between people who actually care about liberty then it's time to check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Each episode dives deep into a single topic—tariffs, campus speech, the Department of Government Efficiency—and brings together two guests who disagree on the best path forward. But here's the twist: This isn't a debate show. No interrupting. No dunking. If you believe the future of freedom depends on more than just winning arguments and you're ready for something deeper than the usual echo chambers, check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Real disagreement. Real ideas. Real conversations. Subscribe to Future of Freedom wherever you get your podcasts.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Former leftwing public defender Laura Powell unpacks the political chaos behind LA’s immigration riots, criticizing both federal overreach, and California’s state dysfunction.SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcast/2025/06/10/laura-powell-whos-most-to-blame-for-the-latest-l-a-riotsProtests and unrest erupted in Los Angeles following federal immigration raids of a Home Depot parking lot and a clothing manufacturer. President Donald Trump ordered National Guard troops, and later U.S. Marines, into Los Angeles against the wishes of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. Downtown Los Angeles and the communities of Paramount and Compton have been wracked by riots, looting, and the burning of autonomous Waymo vehicles.Today's guest is a self-described "former leftist…politically homeless" Californian who says that California's political establishment has enabled the violence and destruction we're currently seeing in response to the immigration raids. Laura Powell is an attorney and founder of Californians for Good Governance, which was founded to fight government overreach during the COVID-19 era. We discuss Newsom's war of words with Trump, the claim that these riots are an "insurrection," why Democrats have such a problem denouncing violent riots, whether the use of the military is federal overreach, and the role government-funded nonprofits and unions may have played in escalating the the situation in L.A.00:00 Introduction and ICE raid timeline03:38 National Guard response: Provocation or necessity?07:09 Is Newsom abdicating responsibility?10:01 Who are the protesters and what motivates them?16:28 How California law enforcement lost control19:42 Federal overreach, civil liberties, and states’ rights26:28 Has California learned anything from past unrest?30:09 Political theatre: Newsom vs. Trump46:50 Union power and the David Huerta arrest55:42 What if large-scale deportations actually happened?59:34 How to fix California governance
How should the government treat in vitro fertilization (IVF)? Should they regulate it more? Should they subsidize it? Just asking questions. The above are all questions that the Trump administration is actively considering in the wake of an executive order seeking to expand access to IVF. President Donald Trump previously declared himself "the fertilization president" while speaking at a women's conference.Today's guests have thought about a lot about reproductive technology, birth rates, and family policy, each arriving at some very different conclusions at times. Ruxandra Teslo is a genomics Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge and writes often about fertility and technology at Ruxandra's Substack. Emma Waters is a reproductive technology and bioethics policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation. In this discussion, they debate the ethics of in vitro fertilization, discuss recent scientific advancements such as the ability to create eggs from other types of cells and three-parent embryos, and the emerging market in "embryo selection" that allows parents to choose between embryos with different genetic traits. SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcast/2025/06/06/debating-the-science-and-ethics-of-ivf-emma-waters-vs-ruxandra-teslo/
Today's guest is Helen Lewis, a British journalist and podcaster who is a staff writer for The Atlantic. Her new book is The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, and it explores how the definition of what it means to be a genius has changed radically over the centuries, how it became linked to all sorts of weird biological theories, and how Elon Musk has come to personify genius in our time (and whether his failure at the Department of Government Efficiency spells the end of his genius moment). Lewis and Reason's Nick Gillespie also talk about The Beatles; William Shockley, who turned to racial science after winning a Nobel Prize for helping to invent the transistor; and her notorious 2018 interview with Jordan Peterson for British GQ, which has racked up over 70 million views.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch explore how artificial intelligence (AI) is already reshaping jobs, education, politics, and personal identity—sharing examples from scam calls and students cheating to Darth Vader swearing in Fortnite. The panel also discusses how Democrats are failing to attract young men, no matter how much money they spend. Finally, they examine President Donald Trump's latest trade policy contradictions from the past week.0:32—What is one way AI has made life weird?3:08—Writing with AI is about to get a lot weirder9:12—Excitement and fear about AI11:13—How to make entry-level workers more productive16:12—Has AI created any cultural problems?22:49—Is AI helping students "cheat" in college?26:27—How is AI affecting grade school students?29:18—The AI race with China36:20—Do Democrats have a problem with men?44:42—Listener question: Is White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller correct in saying that the 'big beautiful bill' will actually reduce the deficit?49:28—What is going on with Trump's tariffs in the courts?53:19—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
How will we ever get the national debt under control? Just asking questions.The U.S. national debt stands at a staggering $36 trillion. And while President Donald Trump assures us he's a "fiscal hawk," the GOP's latest fiscal plan, dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is a fiscal time bomb, says today's guest. David Stockman, the director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, joins the show to dissect the Trump administration's budget priorities and explain why tax cuts without spending reductions are a recipe for disaster. With a career spanning decades in Washington, including his role as a key architect of Reagan's economic policies, Stockman brings unmatched insight into the mechanics of federal budgeting and the political roadblocks to fiscal sanity.SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcasts/just-asking-questions/Chapters00:29 Introduction and national debt overview06:01 Analyzing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act10:23 Tax cuts and deficit spending challenges18:28 Supply-side economics and Reagan's legacy27:33 The Federal Reserve's role in debt monetization40:03 Consequences of a potential debt crisis49:41 Political dynamics and opposition to Trump56:45 Strategies for fiscal reform and recommendations by the Department of Government Efficiency01:02:30 Lessons from past budget surpluses01:07:43 Closing thoughts and the free lunch myth
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch critique President Donald Trump's proposed tax legislation and its fiscal irresponsibility, discuss the national deficit and credit rating downgrade, examine the media and political cover-up of former President Joe Biden's cognitive decline, and highlight the broader consequences of institutional failure and partisan denial.0:00—"Big beautiful bill" breakdown2:21—The MAGA (Money Account for Growth and Advancement) baby account boondoggle13:54—SALT cap debate and wealthy blue state subsidies19:12—Proposed Medicaid cuts and "fiscal illusions"23:02—Moody's Ratings downgraded the U.S. credit rating system. Does this matter?27:09—The Supreme Court takes up birthright citizenship and nationwide injunctions34:41—Who pays tariffs? Trump vs. Walmart40:24—Listener question: Is the economic inequality data bad?46:09—What did we know about Biden's health and when did we know it?48:24—How the media didn't responsibly report on Biden's health1:01:04—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is the legendary journalist and New Yorker staffer Lawrence Wright. He is the author of Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief; The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11; and The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid.Wright talks with Reason's Nick Gillespie about The Human Scale, his new novel set in the war-torn Middle East, and why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict keeps burning even as most of the 20th century's conflicts have cooled. They also go deep on Wright's exposés on the war on terror, satanic panics, and how our craving for belief can lead us to madness. Then they turn to Texas, Wright's home state and the place he says is the future of America. What exactly does it mean that we're all becoming more like Lone Star State?This discussion took place at a live event in New York City.0:00— Introduction1:20— Texas: the future of American politics3:17— 'The Human Scale'5:38— Why the Israel-Palestine conflict endures12:12— 'Thirteen Days In September' and the Camp David Accords23:37— America as both egocentric bully and colony for the rest of the world26:17— 'Remembering Satan' and the 'recovered memories' panic33:29— How abortion anxiety may have fueled a moral panic37:07— Insurance companies ended the panic by denying quack psychiatric treatments39:15— The will to believe often overrides logic and evidence40:55— Wright's teenage religious fervor led to interest in Scientology42:19— How Scientology seduced Hollywood47:26— 'Going clear' and Scientology backlash50:03— Getting Paul Haggis on the record about Scientology52:55— Texas in American mythologySubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch are joined by The Gist's Mike Pesca to discuss the Trump administration's escalating campaign against Harvard. The conversation explores how government overreach in education threatens civil liberties and stable institutional governance. They also discuss corruption concerns they have over Donald Trump's memecoin.0:00—Introduction2:53—Trump continues to attack Harvard7:10—Trump is using the power of the state to punish his enemies13:35—Are taxes on endowments a good idea?17:23—Trump wants to give Harvard's money to trade schools instead.23:41—Trump's memecoin dinner corruption32:02—Listener question: If someone magically waved a wand and got rid of all federal discretionary spending, would it actually feel like government only got a 25 percent to 30 percent haircut?37:49—The U.S. Mint has made its last order of pennies.38:47—Should we eliminate the Institute for Peace?40:08—Should we eliminate the Saturday service of USPS?41:31—Should we get rid of everything that is free for congressmen at the U.S. Capitol?43:34—Should we eliminate the Selective Service?49:11—Weekly cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Did mainstream conservatives and libertarians lose a generation of young men to the post-liberal, reactionary right?Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with C. Bradley Thompson, author of the Substack newsletter The Redneck Intellectual, and Jeremiah Johnson of the Center for New Liberalism, who wrote the article "Weak Men Create Hard Times: And Weak Men Love a Strongman."This conversation was recorded live on Wednesday May 21.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Dave Smith and Alex Nowrasteh debate the resolution, "Government restrictions on the immigration of peaceful and healthy people make sense from a libertarian standpoint, especially in present-day America."Comedian and host of the podcast, Part of the Problem, Dave Smith defends the resolution. Taking the negative is Alex Nowrasteh, the Vice President for Economic and Social Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. He's the coauthor (with Benjamin Powell) of Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions.The debate is moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein.https://reason.com/podcast/2025/05/21/dave-smith-and-alex-nowrasteh-debate-immigration/
Middlebury professor Gary Winslett argues the South—not China—poached the Rust Belt’s manufacturing base by out-competing it on policy.SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcasts/2025-05-22/gary-winslett-the-american-dream-has-migrated-south/Why did the Rust Belt really lose its manufacturing base? Middlebury College political scientist Gary Winslett has a provocative answer: It wasn't China or robots. It was Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, and Florida. In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Winslett argued that the South's pro-growth policies—not foreign competition or automation—were the real drivers behind the industrial shift. That makes for an uncomfortable narrative in a political environment where both parties have a stake in telling more convenient stories about trade and globalization.Winslett explains how factors like Right to Work laws, housing construction, regulatory efficiency, and immigration made the South more attractive to manufacturers. The conversation moves beyond nostalgia for lost factories and asks whether the American dream now lies in places like Nashville and Raleigh—and whether we're too busy looking backward to notice.Chapters:00:00 What really happened to Rust Belt jobs?05:11 The politics of manufacturing decline10:22 Nostalgia and the rise of southern manufacturing15:20 Unionization, right to work, and labor policy20:43 How immigration and housing fueled Southern growth26:02 Why the Rust Belt didn't adapt32:21 Permitting, regulation, and business friendliness38:36 Trade deficits and service exports44:05 The myth of manufacturing as America's future50:01 Remote work and the class divide56:26 Upward mobility and bipartisan economic failure
"You don't get conned because you're stupid—you get conned because you're human."That's the message of this week's guest, Brian Brushwood. He's an Austin-based magician, podcaster, and professional skeptic. With shows like Scam Nation and The Modern Rogue, he's taught millions of us how to upgrade our B.S. detectors in a world where truth is more up for grabs than ever before.Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with him about World's Greatest Con, Brushwood's mind-blowing podcast where he reveals grifts like Disney World's authoritarian Epcot theme park, the psychic-soldier panic of the Cold War, and the myth that the French used magic tricks to subdue colonial Algeria.Along the way, they look at how media monocultures used to gatekeep truth—and how the chaotic pluralism of the internet is both a blessing and a curse (mostly a blessing!). Brushwood is a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian who celebrates decentralization, transparency, and personal agency—even when it's messy. He discusses the influence of performers like the Amazing Randi and Penn & Teller, why teaching magic online pissed off the old guard, and why skepticism has to evolve or die in a world full of customized realities.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Are you part of the growing stoicism movement? Built on virtue, reason, and self-control, the ancient Roman philosophy is gaining popularity in a world that just seems to get crazier and crazier.Today's guest is a self-described stoic. Robert Rosenkranz is the author of The Stoic Capitalist: Advice for the Exceptionally Ambitious, which takes a deep dive into how stoic principles can lead to personal, financial, and social success. Rosenkranz charts his path from a small, cramped family apartment in 1950s New York City to becoming a billionaire deal-maker and founder of Open To Debate, a nonprofit that hosts nationally broadcasted debates about the toughest issues of the day.The Stoic Capitalist is an emotional memoir with snippets of philosophy from the likes of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. It illustrates the power of rational thinking and purposeful action in all parts of life. Reason's Nick Gillespie and Rosenkranz talk about the political journey from a New Frontier liberal to more of a libertarian-leaning Reagan Republican to a philanthropist deeply committed to promoting intense but civil debate. They also talk about how the creative destruction that undergirds capitalism displaces people not just economically but culturally—and how to make it easier for people to adapt to the unending change that is necessary for improvements in living standards.This interview was recorded at a live event in New York City.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
The econ blogger explains why libertarians might have been (kind of) right all along—and why our ideas are more necessary than he thought in the age of Trump.https://reason.com/podcast/2025/05/15/noah-smith-i-owe-libertarians-an-apology/Noah Smith, an economic commentator and Substack writer, once dismissed libertarianism as a relic of the past. But in a political climate increasingly defined by populist protectionism and authoritarian rhetoric, he's reconsidering. "There are worse monsters than the market," Smith recently wrote.With Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe, Smith explores the evolution of his thinking—from criticizing "thin libertarianism" focused solely on state coercion, to advocating for a more expansive, "thick" conception of liberty that accounts for institutional and corporate constraints as well. He also discusses how libertarians might shape political discourse despite being exiled from both major parties.
Three libertarians—Dave Smith, J.D. Tuccille, and Liz Wolfe—revisit their reluctant votes for Trump, weighing the promises, chaos, and consequences of his second term so far.https://reason.com/podcast/2025/05/09/do-these-libertarians-regret-voting-for-donald-trump/During the 2024 presidential election, a contingent of libertarians cast strategic, often reluctant votes for Donald Trump, arguing he was the lesser of two evils. Among them: Reason's own Liz Wolfe and J.D. Tuccille, alongside comedian and Part of the Problem host Dave Smith. Each thinks a Kamala Harris administration would have been more troubling, citing concerns about censorship, economic illiteracy, and cultural authoritarianism. More than 100 days into Trump's second presidency it's time to start asking: do you regret your vote?Reason's Zach Weissmueller, a non-voter, moderates a conversation on Trump's second term thus far. From the erosion of due process in immigration enforcement and the failure of the much-hyped Department of Government Efficiency initiative, to aggressive tariffs and erratic foreign policy gambits, Smith, Wolfe, and Tuccille dissect the trade-offs they anticipated versus what's actually happened.This episode was recorded on May 8, 2025.
Today's guest is evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins, whom Reason's Nick Gillespie interviewed last fall in Milwaukee as part of his "Final Bow" tour. Gillespie and Dawkins talked about why he believes science can't thrive without freedom, why gender ideology is starting to look a lot like Soviet Lysenkoism, and why some truths—like the binary nature of biological sex—shouldn't be up for political negotiation.Dawkins discusses his new book, The Genetic Book of the Dead, what it means to live in a "colony of cooperating viruses," and why he thinks both religious dogma and postmodern relativism are enemies of progress (as an unapologetic postmodern libertarian, Gillespie argues about that last point).They also explore how moral progress happens, whether atheism needs a replacement as a social and intellectual movement, and how cultural Christianity still casts a long shadow in an increasingly secular world.This is a conversation for anyone who believes that science, skepticism, and freedom belong together—and who refuses to kowtow to ideological orthodoxy, wherever it comes from.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch critique the apparent wind down of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, highlighting its lack of transparency and failure to achieve meaningful spending cuts. They also analyze the GOP's new tax plan, which contradicts promises of fiscal responsibility by significantly increasing the deficit. Finally, the hosts defend classical liberalism against critics like C. Bradley Thompson, arguing that libertarians do fight cultural and policy battles—just not by wielding state power.0:00—Introduction2:11—Musk exits DOGE11:47—Why we need to start paying for government spending14:57—Extending President Donald Trump's tax cuts19:08—Is classical liberalism losing?35:09—Listener question: What domestic policy changes would entice manufacturing to come back to the U.S.?43:22—Is Trump getting a free plane from Qatar?46:13—Prescription drug price controls49:47—Weekly cultural recommendationsToday's sponsors:Join the 2025 Great Connections Seminar in Chicago, July 26–Aug 2. Designed for students 16–24, this week-long experience builds the core skills of entrepreneurship: critical thinking, persuasive communication, and intellectual independence. This year's theme, "Reason and Free Will," explores great minds like Aristotle, Ayn Rand, and Jefferson—not through lectures, but in dynamic, small-group discussions that train students to lead and innovate. Outside the classroom, they'll tour Chicago's museums, try improv, and connect with ambitious peers. In a world of AI and automation, original thinking is your competitive edge. Tuition is just $800, including room and board. Scholarships available. Apply today at www.reliancecollege.org/reasonTherapy can feel like a big investment, but the state of your mind is just as important as your physical health. Let's talk numbers. Traditional in-person therapy can cost anywhere from $100 to $250 per session, which adds up fast, but with BetterHelp online therapy, you can save, on average, up to 50% per session. With BetterHelp, you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions, saving you big on cost and time. Therapy should feel accessible, not like a luxury. With online therapy, you get quality care at a price that makes sense and can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress. Your mental health is worth it—and now, it's within reach. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. It's convenient, too. You can join a session with the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life. Plus, switch therapists at any time. Your well-being is worth it. Visit betterhelp.com/roundtable today to get 10% off your first month.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
"I feel fear… because they're somewhat vindictive people. I don't care who you are, having this set of people mad at you is not comfortable." That's today's guest, Cliff Asness, talking about President Donald Trump, his administration, and his supporters. Asness is the outspoken billionaire co-founder of AQR Capital Management. He is also a pioneer in quantitative finance, University of Chicago Ph.D., and self-described "part-time Republican and full-time libertarian." He talks bluntly about why Trump is spectacularly wrong on tariffs and trade, his concerns about the authoritarian tendencies of the president and his supporters, and how capitalism may actually be getting less efficient due to social media.Asness tells Reason's Nick Gillespie how he came to his libertarian beliefs, where right-wing populism overlaps with its left-wing version, and why he thinks free minds and free markets will eventually win—but only after a long slog. This conversation was recorded live at an event in New York City.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker and Reason's Nick Gillespie discuss recent shifts at Harvard toward greater institutional neutrality and free speech, while warning that threats to academic freedom now come from both internal ideologies and external political forces—including pressure from the federal government under President Donald Trump.Pinker defends the role of federal science funding but cautions against political micromanagement of academia, emphasizing the need for independent scholarly governance. The conversation also touches on Pinker's admiration for Richard Dawkins, the impact of declining religiosity on moral progress, and the concept of "common knowledge" as explored in Pinker's forthcoming book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows. 0:00— Introduction1:27— The state of Harvard4:42— Harvard is circumventing SCOTUS affirmative action ruling6:02— How to foster true ideological diversity7:25— Why does Harvard rank so highly?10:16— Threats to academic freedom under Trump18:58— Do universities really need federal funding?23:14— History of government interference in higher education27:20— Is the Trump administration uniquely anti-intellectual?30:47— Is academia historically unpopular now?36:55— How universities can regain trust40:25— Richard Dawkins' influence on Pinker49:51— Societal progress was propelled by secularism52:50— Why are public intellectuals pushing for religious revival?54:23— Pinker's new book: When Everyone Knows That Everyone KnowsSubscribe to the new YouTube channel for The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie!Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch are joined by Reason reporter Christian Britschgi to discuss President Donald Trump's proposal for a 100 percent tariff on foreign-made films and his broader attacks on cheap consumer goods, arguing that it represents a bipartisan slide into anti-consumer, anti-capitalist populism. They also criticize the federal government's creeping surveillance and bureaucratic overreach, especially when it comes to Real ID and public broadcasting.0:00—Introduction1:46—Trump's attack on families and foreign films7:20—Why cheap consumer goods are great12:05—Political movements won't solve spiritual yearning16:28—How do tariffs affect local zoning?18:35—Trump's new proposed budget22:15—Why we need to cut the Department of Homeland Security budget28:25—Listener question: Are we finally defunding NPR and PBS?37:28—Every American citizen now needs a Real I.D.51:07—Weekly cultural recommendationsToday's sponsors:Join the 2025 Great Connections Seminar in Chicago, July 26–Aug 2. Designed for students 16–24, this week-long experience builds the core skills of entrepreneurship: critical thinking, persuasive communication, and intellectual independence. This year's theme, "Reason and Free Will," explores great minds like Aristotle, Ayn Rand, and Jefferson—not through lectures, but in dynamic, small-group discussions that train students to lead and innovate. Outside the classroom, they'll tour Chicago's museums, try improv, and connect with ambitious peers. In a world of AI and automation, original thinking is your competitive edge. Tuition is just $800, including room and board. Scholarships available. Apply today at www.reliancecollege.org/reasonTherapy can feel like a big investment, but the state of your mind is just as important as your physical health. Let's talk numbers. Traditional in-person therapy can cost anywhere from $100 to $250 per session, which adds up fast, but with BetterHelp online therapy, you can save, on average, up to 50% per session. With BetterHelp, you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions, saving you big on cost and time. Therapy should feel accessible, not like a luxury. With online therapy, you get quality care at a price that makes sense and can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress. Your mental health is worth it—and now, it's within reach. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. It's convenient, too. You can join a session with the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life. Plus, switch therapists at any time. Your well-being is worth it. Visit betterhelp.com/roundtable today to get 10% off your first month.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Eric Brakey and Andrew Heaton debate whether libertarians should prioritize building local liberty-focused societies like the Free State Project or focus on reforming the federal government.https://reason.com/podcast/2025/05/02/should-libertarians-prioritize-their-own-communities/Eric Brakey and Andrew Heaton debate the resolution, "Libertarians should focus on building liberty-for-real societies like the Free State Project, rather than reforming an ever-expanding, uncontrollable federal government."Eric Brakey, executive director of the Free State Project and former Maine state senator, argued in favor of the resolution. Andrew Heaton, comedian, author, and host of The Political Orphanage podcast, argued against it.The debate was moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein.Because of major technical problems during the recording of this event, the audio quality is well below Reason's standards.
New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat warns that digital life may be eroding the cultural foundations needed to sustain meaning, family, and community.SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcast/2025/05/01/ross-douthat-why-digital-life-threatens-freedom-and-family/In this episode of Just Asking Questions, we're joined by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat to discuss the cultural, political, and demographic pressures reshaping the modern world. His recent essay, "An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here's How to Survive," explores how digital life—from AI companions to algorithmic distraction—is accelerating trends toward social atomization, institutional collapse, and even plummeting birth rates. We talk with Douthat about how libertarians should respond to these changes, whether neo-traditionalism offers a credible path forward, and what it means to maintain meaning and community in the 21st century.Chapters00:00 Coming up…00:37 Introducing Ross Douthat and the age of cultural bottlenecks04:57 Are digital technologies disrupting cultural transmission?09:57 How the internet reshapes politics and encourages radicalism15:22 Digital media and the decline of institutional trust and localism18:42 Demographic decline and the fading urgency to preserve culture26:52 Free choice or social breakdown? The libertarian tension34:27 Suburbs, adaptation, and the future of normie culture41:12 Risk aversion, parenting, and the erosion of community life47:17 Fertility, tradition, and the rise of large families as subculture54:07 Neo-traditionalism in a bespoke age: coping or coping well?58:32 Can we rebuild meaningful culture in a post-traditional world?
Today's guest is John Arnold—the former Enron wunderkind turned billionaire philanthropist who's determined to hack America's most expensive and least accountable public sector systems in areas such as criminal justice, education, and pensions. (Fun fact: He was once called "the most hated man in pensionland" by Governing magazine due to his reform efforts.)Reason's Nick Gillespie and Arnold talk about why public pensions are so out of control and how to fix them; how Medicare squeezes billions of unnecessary dollars out of taxpayers; and how Enron scammed its investors not despite regulations but in full view of them. And they discuss why, despite all the country's problems, Arnold is still betting on America to get better, not worse.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss how many current political frustrations— with tariffs, executive overreach, and economic stagnation—are vindicating longstanding libertarian critiques, even as the public resists identifying as libertarian. They also explore Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Make America Healthy Again" agenda.1:34—Libertarians were right10:06—The best case for libertarianism in the Trump era16:52—Are the Democrats pushing a libertarian-ish agenda?24:40—Tech leaders regret supporting President Donald Trump?39:47—Weekly listener question: What books should libertarian ladies suggest to their book club?47:39— What is RFK Jr. doing to "Make America Healthy Again"?59:03— Weekly cultural recommendationsToday's sponsors:Join the 2025 Great Connections Seminar in Chicago, July 26–Aug 2. Designed for students 16–24, this week-long experience builds the core skills of entrepreneurship: critical thinking, persuasive communication, and intellectual independence. This year's theme, "Reason and Free Will," explores great minds like Aristotle, Ayn Rand, and Jefferson—not through lectures, but in dynamic, small-group discussions that train students to lead and innovate. Outside the classroom, they'll tour Chicago's museums, try improv, and connect with ambitious peers. In a world of AI and automation, original thinking is your competitive edge. Tuition is just $800, including room and board. Scholarships available. Apply today at www.reliancecollege.org/reasonTherapy can feel like a big investment, but the state of your mind is just as important as your physical health. Let's talk numbers. Traditional in-person therapy can cost anywhere from $100 to $250 per session, which adds up fast, but with BetterHelp online therapy, you can save, on average, up to 50% per session. With BetterHelp, you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions, saving you big on cost and time. Therapy should feel accessible, not like a luxury. With online therapy, you get quality care at a price that makes sense and can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress. Your mental health is worth it—and now, it's within reach. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. It's convenient, too. You can join a session with the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life. Plus, switch therapists at any time. Your well-being is worth it. Visit betterhelp.com/roundtable today to get 10% off your first month.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Journalist Glenn Greenwald joins the show to discuss due process, immigration enforcement, and the growing tensions between the courts and executive power.SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcast/2025/04/24/glenn-greenwald-americans-liberties-are-in-danger/Why is a man who was legally protected from deportation sitting in one of the world's most notorious prisons in El Salvador? This week on Just Asking Questions, Pultizer Prize-winning Glenn Greenwald returns to discuss a case that cuts to the heart of American constitutionalism and due process. Greenwald, known for his reporting on the NSA and his founding role at The Intercept, has become one of the most consistent civil libertarian voices across political eras. He joins Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller to break down how and why the Trump administration ignored a court order to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and why this defiance should concern everyone, regardless of their politics.But this episode goes beyond one case. It's about the creeping normalization of lawless executive power—from the misuse of anti-terror labels, to the fast-growing deportation dragnet sweeping up even lawful residents, to proposed federal overhauls of speech and campus expression.This episode was recorded on April 23, 2025.Chapters00:00 Coming up…00:21 Introduction and setup01:13 The Abrego Garcia case and due process violations11:00 Trump's legal defiance and the Supreme Court's unanimous rebuke17:15 Parallels to the War on Terror and the misuse of "terrorist"23:30 The threat to American citizens and executive overreach30:00 The limits of Supreme Court enforcement and implications for democracy37:20 Civil liberties, citizenship, and the universal reach of the Constitution42:00 Is this a constitutional emergency? Parsing Ezra Klein's warning48:00 Free speech crackdown: protests, deportations, and political enemies56:00 Activist surveillance groups and foreign influence in U.S. policy01:06:30 Rufo, ideological capture, and the right's new institutional strategy01:13:45 Institutional cowardice vs. backlash: What happens next?01:20:00 Can civil institutions resist authoritarian pressure?01:24:00 Pardoning Snowden, and the unpredictable nature of Trump
Jeffrey Singer, a Cato Institute fellow and longtime surgeon, argues that government overreach in health care undermines patient autonomy, which should be the guiding principle in medical decision making. Drawing from historical examples and personal experience, he critiques licensing laws, the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) drug approval monopoly, and Certificate of Need (CON) regulations as protectionist measures that limit competition and innovation. Singer contends that private institutions—like insurers, hospitals, and certification boards—already create strong incentives for safety and quality, making many government controls unnecessary.Reason's Nick Gillespie and Singer also explore complex topics like end-of-life choice, trans youth health care, and antibiotic regulation, emphasizing the balance between personal freedom and legitimate public health concerns.This interview was recorded at The Reason Speakeasy, a monthly event in New York City that doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview. Go here for more information on upcoming Reason events.Subscribe to the new YouTube channel for The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie here.0:00 — Introduction0:50 — Singer's medical career3:55 — Your Body, Your Health Care8:40 — Government interference in your health care14:23 — CON laws20:00 — Licensing and credentialing rackets29:48 — The FDA's drug approval monopoly31:30 — The thalidomide scandal34:11 — Off-label drug prescriptions37:00 — FDA approval for naloxone and Plan B40:20 — The American Medical Association's push for licensing43:00 — RFK Jr.: reformer or madman?45:05 — The food pyramid and other government follies45:57 — Intersex infants and trans health care50:09 — Right to die and patient autonomySubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss how President Donald Trump is de-prioritizing due process by not adhering to a ruling from the Supreme Court. They also talk about how Harvard University's tax status could be in jeopardy and reflect on the legacy of Pope Francis.0:00—Introduction0:12—The Pope's legacy5:56—Is the democracy emergency here?15:27—Deportations without due process29:19—Harvard funding pause41:25—Weekly listener question48:11—Lightning round: What's happening at the Pentagon? What's going on with tariffs now? And what's next for AI?54:33—Weekly cultural recommendationsToday's sponsors:Join the 2025 Great Connections Seminar in Chicago, July 26–Aug 2. Designed for students 16–24, this week-long experience builds the core skills of entrepreneurship: critical thinking, persuasive communication, and intellectual independence. This year's theme, "Reason and Free Will," explores great minds like Aristotle, Ayn Rand, and Jefferson—not through lectures, but in dynamic, small-group discussions that train students to lead and innovate. Outside the classroom, they'll tour Chicago's museums, try improv, and connect with ambitious peers. In a world of AI and automation, original thinking is your competitive edge. Tuition is just $800, including room and board. Scholarships available. Apply today at www.reliancecollege.org/reasonTherapy can feel like a big investment, but the state of your mind is just as important as your physical health. Let's talk numbers. Traditional in-person therapy can cost anywhere from $100 to $250 per session, which adds up fast, but with BetterHelp online therapy, you can save, on average, up to 50% per session. With BetterHelp, you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions, saving you big on cost and time. Therapy should feel accessible, not like a luxury. With online therapy, you get quality care at a price that makes sense and can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress. Your mental health is worth it—and now, it's within reach. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. It's convenient, too. You can join a session with the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life. Plus, switch therapists at any time. Your well-being is worth it. Visit betterhelp.com/roundtable today to get 10% off your first month.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
AEI's Michael Beckley joins the show to discuss China's peaking power, and why that actually makes them more dangerous.SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcast/2025/04/17/michael-beckley-china-is-dangerously-weakWhat if the new Cold War with China turns hot? Just asking questions.China's rise, decline, or potential for conflict is often clouded by propaganda and oversimplification. This episode of Just Asking Questions examines China's real economic, military, and geopolitical trajectory—focusing on Taiwan tensions, trade wars, and demographic challenges.Joining us is Michael Beckley, a Tufts University political science professor and co-author of Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China. His research argues that China's peaking power makes it a unique threat, blending insights on its economy, military, and ambitions.Chapters00:00 Coming up: China's economic challenges and rising aggression01:13 What if China invaded Taiwan tomorrow?05:17 Military capabilities and invasion scenarios for Taiwan10:28 America's interests and the strategic importance of Taiwan15:13 The Trump administration's trade war with China20:47 Economic rivalry and the new Cold War26:03 China's military modernization and hypersonic threats31:10 Assessing China's actual military strength36:14 Lessons from Hong Kong and implications for Taiwan41:23 Demographic decline and economic stagnation46:30 One-child policy and irreversible population trends51:39 Xi Jinping's vision and the roots of Chinese authoritarianism57:05 The nature of China's political and economic system01:02:15 Rising assertiveness and wolf warrior diplomacy01:07:28 Avoiding war and imagining a path to peace01:13:09 Strategic missteps and the importance of deterrence01:16:18 Appreciating global order and what's at stake
Today's guest is Harvard economist Jason Furman, who was one of former President Barack Obama's chief economic advisers and an architect of the Affordable Care Act. These days, he's in the news for his withering critique of former President Joe Biden's dismal economic record and two-fisted attacks on President Donald Trump's trade policy. We talk about Furman's defense of global markets, Obamacare's unfulfilled promises, and why he now thinks the national debt and AI are bigger deals than he used to believe.0:48— Failure of Bidenomics & the 'neoliberal delusion'6:00— The neoliberal coalition breakdown9:37— Trump's post-neoliberal economics13:08— Biden's biggest economic failures16:25— Why 'free money' is a bad thing18:28— The Age of No Accountability20:19— Why tariffs make no sense23:52— How Furman 'zigzagged' on debt29:42— How to get politicians to take the debt seriously36:32— How to fix social security and Medicare39:58— Has Furman changed his mind about Keynesian economics?43:10— Furman's background and the future of Economics46:50— Furman's outlook on AI50:16— The Luddite impulse towards technological advancementSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, and special guest Mary Katharine Ham discuss President Donald Trump's trade war with China. They also talk about the taxes they hate the most—just in time to celebrate Tax Day.4:30—Trump's trade war with China15:36—How will Trump's tariffs affect the U.S. manufacturing industry?23:06—Is the U.S. middle class hollowed out?34:52—Tax Day is upon us, once again43:31—Listener question about Thomas Jefferson's list of grievances50:21—The Department of Government Efficiency's cost savings update59:59—Cultural recommendationsToday's sponsors:Join the 2025 Great Connections Seminar in Chicago, July 26–Aug 2. Designed for students 16–24, this week-long experience builds the core skills of entrepreneurship: critical thinking, persuasive communication, and intellectual independence. This year's theme, "Reason and Free Will," explores great minds like Aristotle, Ayn Rand, and Jefferson—not through lectures, but in dynamic, small-group discussions that train students to lead and innovate. Outside the classroom, they'll tour Chicago's museums, try improv, and connect with ambitious peers. In a world of AI and automation, original thinking is your competitive edge. Tuition is just $800, including room and board. Scholarships available. Apply today at www.reliancecollege.org/reason.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Derek Thompson of The Atlantic urges Democrats to embrace pro-growth policies in his new book.SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcast/2025/04/11/derek-thompson-democrats-must-change/Is the Democratic Party ready to embrace growth, innovation, and building? In this episode of Just Asking Questions, Reason’s Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller sit down with Atlantic writer and Abundance co-author Derek Thompson to talk about why the left needs a course correction. Thompson makes the case that Democrats must move beyond redistribution and regulation, and instead champion policies that increase housing, clean energy, infrastructure, and scientific progress.We dive into why liberal states like California struggle to build, how union politics and environmental red tape stall progress, and whether it’s possible for Democrats to become the party of abundance. Thompson explains how Donald Trump’s populism has ironically made free trade more popular—and why liberalism must rebrand itself around growth, not scarcity.Chapters00:00 Coming up...00:17 Introduction and framing the abundance agenda05:00 Free trade, Trump, and economic polarization10:00 Elevator pitch for the book Abundance15:00 California's failure to deliver liberal abundance20:00 The housing crisis and how liberals should fix it25:00 Suburbanization, urban decline, and market logic30:00 California High-Speed Rail: what went wrong?35:00 Is high-speed rail a true public good?40:00 Clean energy progress in Texas vs California45:00 Solar, wind, and battery breakthroughs50:00 Carbon externalities and the path to clean energy55:00 Can abundance work within the Democratic Party?01:00:00 Elon Musk, Doge, and ideological contradictions01:05:00 Should Operation Warp Speed should be a model for other stuff?
Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) has been speaking out against President Donald Trump's tariffs. He supported a bill to repeal the emergency powers that allowed him to levy tariffs on Canada and recently co-sponsored a joint resolution with Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) to immediately terminate the national emergency that Trump declared in order to impose the worldwide tariffs. Paul joins the show today to explain his opposition to tariffs, defend free trade, warn about the dangers of expansive emergency powers, and discuss his own bill to end unilateral tariffs for good: the No Taxation Without Representation Act of 2025.This interview was recorded on April 8, 2025.Shownotes: https://reason.com/podcast/2025/04/09/rand-paul-why-i-oppose-trumps-tariffs/Chapters:00:00 Coming up…00:22 Introduction01:04 Can the president start a trade war alone?04:25 Congress vs. emergency powers on tariffs06:11 Paul reacts to Trump's market and trade comments09:09 Is the middle class really hollowed out?13:59 Tariffs, class warfare, and the MAGA Left16:33 Debunking the Rust Belt narrative and the future of jobs20:46 Paul on the Taxation Without Representation Act
Today's guest is Mark Clifford, former editor in chief of the South China Morning Post whose recent book, The Troublemaker, chronicles the life of Jimmy Lai, a man who escaped mainland Communist China to Hong Kong as a child and went on to become a self-made billionaire. But now at age 77, Lai is a political prisoner, currently on trial in China for his unwavering criticism of the government, particularly as it relates to a pro-democracy publication he founded called Apply Daily. Clifford and Reason's Billy Binion talked about Lai's humble beginnings; his cinematic escape to freedom; his fearless pro-democracy activism; his life in prison, where he's held in solitary confinement; and the importance of safeguarding free expression around the world.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss the economic and political fallout from President Donald Trump's new tariffs. They debate the role Congress, the courts, and billionaire influencers like Elon Musk could play in reversing these policies.2:00—What goods could be most affected by Trump's tariffs?8:10—Can Congress stop Trump's tariffs?18:00—Can the courts challenge Trump's tariffs?22:00—Will Musk stop Trump's tariffs?27:14—Who is defending Trump's tariffs?35:35—RFK Jr. cut 10,000 jobs from the Health and Human Services—maybe?50:08—Should journalists keep steelmanning Trump's policies?1:01:25—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsor:Do you know a student looking for a transformative opportunity that supports the foundations of a free society? Reliance College invites students aged 16 to 24 to the 2025 Great Connections Seminar in Chicago, from July 26th to August 2nd. This year's theme, "Reason and Free Will," dives into timeless ideas from writers such as Thomas Jefferson, Ayn Rand, and Aristotle. Students sharpen critical thinking in small, dynamic groups, developing the intellectual tools needed to thrive in a free society. Outside the classroom, they'll explore Chicago's vibrant culture—touring museums, trying improv comedy, and building lifelong connections. Parents, this program equips students to think, reason, and act independently. Go to reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply. Registration is just $800, including room and board for the full week, with scholarships available. Don't miss out! Visit www.reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply.You believe in limited government and support organizations that champion the ideals of a free society. But have you ensured that your charitable giving will leave a lasting legacy of liberty? Without a plan in place, your charitable legacy could fade—or worse, be redirected to causes that don't align with your values. At DonorsTrust, they help you secure your philanthropic vision for the long term. With a donor-advised fund, you can ensure that the groups you care about continue to receive support, even beyond your lifetime. And unlike other donor-advised funds, DonorsTrust respects your libertarian principles and ensures your charitable capital remains committed to advancing individual liberty. Your giving should reflect your values—not just today, but for years to come. Your Vision. Your Values. Your Impact. Go to DonorsTrust.org/Reason to ensure your philanthropy continues to champion liberty for generations to come. That's DonorsTrust.org/Reason.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Author Batya Ungar-Sargon joins the show to discuss immigration, deportations, and being a 'MAGA Leftist.'SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcasts/just-asking-questions/Do people want Trump's deportation crackdown? And is the MAGA agenda actually a leftist one? Just asking questions.Batya Ungar-Sargon, a columnist at The Free Press, joins the show today to address these questions and spar with us on immigration, tariffs, and wealth inequality. She's a self-described MAGA leftist and the author most recently of 'Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.'Batya Ungar-Sargon: The MAGA Left, Immigration, Free Speech, and the Future of the Working ClassJournalist and author Batya Ungar-Sargon joins Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller to dive deep into immigration policy, free speech controversies on campus, and what it means to be a “MAGA leftist” in America today. This fiery and thought-provoking conversation covers everything from deportations and gang violence to economic populism, Trump’s appeal to the working class, and the cultural divide in modern politics.📌 Topics Covered:➡️ Why are pro-Palestine student protesters being deported?➡️ Is supporting Hamas grounds for U.S. deportation?➡️ What are the limits of free speech for visa holders and immigrants?➡️ Are campus protests legally protected or a national security threat?➡️ What’s the legal difference between writing an op-ed and supporting terrorism?➡️ Did the Trump administration partner with cartels at the border?➡️ Who is responsible for the fentanyl crisis in America?➡️ Is Tren de Aragua a real threat to U.S. national security?➡️ Can immigration policy raise working-class wages?➡️ Are illegal immigrants really taking American jobs?➡️ Is America still the land of opportunity for the working class?➡️ What does it mean to be a MAGA leftist?➡️ Is the American dream dead—or just evolving?➡️ Do Trump’s tariffs help or hurt the middle class?➡️ How does immigration affect housing costs and healthcare access?➡️ Why does Wall Street hate Trump’s economic agenda?➡️ Is it time to redefine the American dream?Chapters: 00:00:00 Coming up...00:00:30 Introducing Batya Ungar-Sargon.00:03:50 Are campus protesters being unfairly targeted for deportation?00:10:01 The legal versus moral case for deporting pro-Palestine students.00:17:19 Immigration, assimilation, and the limits of free speech.00:24:00 JD Vance's deportation agenda versus Trump's actual policy.00:30:33 Are asylum seekers being unjustly deported?00:35:23 How immigration policy affects the working class.00:41:10 Do Americans really need multiple jobs to survive?00:44:18 Expanding state power and due process concerns.00:48:32 Trump, Bukele, and deportation to El Salvador's prisons.00:54:08 Should Trump defy judges? Constitutional limits and Supreme Court battles.01:00:19 What is the MAGA left economic agenda?01:06:22 Are tariffs and immigration really to blame for middle-class decline?01:14:01 Is the American dream still achievable?01:16:46 What question should more people be asking?
Satire is a powerful force for political and cultural change. But is it even possible in a world that outstrips our imagination on a daily—or even hourly—basis?Today's guests are two young novelists who are redefining satire in the 21st century. Leigh Stein is the author of Self Care, which is set at a women's wellness startup where things go very wrong. Her next novel, If You're Seeing This, It's Meant for You, takes place at a social media hype house and comes out in August. Julius Taranto is the author of How I Won a Nobel Prize, which is set at a secretive university funded by a reclusive billionaire and staffed exclusively by faculty who have been canceled elsewhere. His reviews and essays have been published in The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere.Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with them about the widely pronounced post-election vibe shift by which artists feel emboldened once again to slay sacred cows with impunity. And they explore whether contemporary markets for books, movies, plays, music, and other forms of creative expression are actually capable of supporting a new era of satire, parody, and self-examination.This interview was recorded at The Reason Speakeasy, a live monthly event in New York City that doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview.1:30—What is the purpose of a novel?4:49—What is the function of satire?9:03—Philip Roth declared satire impossible in 196112:30—How culture has fractured15:17—Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and figures beyond satire18:31—Class dimensions of satire22:52—How Stein's feminist activism inspired Self Care23:58—Tom Wolfe and satirical realism31:25—Is the world becoming post-literate?32:54—Has the novel been feminized?34:25—Joe Rogan as the successor to Marcel Proust?35:28—How women dominate the publishing industry47:43—Stein's cultural criticism and poetrySubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch recorded a live episode in Austin, Texas, at Reason Weekend and covered a wide range of topics: the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tariffs, deportations without due process, and President Donald Trump on free speech.02:18—What does the audience think about Trump?04:28—A DOGE dance party?15:56—Trump announces new tariffs22:11—Deportations without due process29:28—Is Trump good for free speech?38:27—What is the funniest thing about Trump 2.0?44:09—Democrats and the abundance agenda50:37—Manny Klausner, RIP57:24—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:Do you know a student looking for a transformative opportunity that supports the foundations of a free society? Reliance College invites students aged 16 to 24 to the 2025 Great Connections Seminar in Chicago, from July 26th to August 2nd. This year's theme, "Reason and Free Will," dives into timeless ideas from writers such as Thomas Jefferson, Ayn Rand, and Aristotle. Students sharpen critical thinking in small, dynamic groups, developing the intellectual tools needed to thrive in a free society. Outside the classroom, they'll explore Chicago's vibrant culture—touring museums, trying improv comedy, and building lifelong connections. Parents, this program equips students to think, reason, and act independently. Go to reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply. Registration is just $800, including room and board for the full week, with scholarships available. Don't miss out! Visit www.reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply.Therapy can feel like a big investment, but the state of your mind is just as important as your physical health. Let's talk numbers. Traditional in-person therapy can cost anywhere from $100 to $250 per session, which adds up fast, but with BetterHelp online therapy, you can save, on average, up to 50% per session. With BetterHelp, you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions, saving you big on cost and time. Therapy should feel accessible, not like a luxury. With online therapy, you get quality care at a price that makes sense and can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress. Your mental health is worth it—and now, it's within reach. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. It's convenient, too. You can join a session with the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life. Plus, switch therapists at any time. Your well-being is worth it. Visit betterhelp.com/roundtable today to get 10% off your first month.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Economic historian Phil Magness on the real history of tariffs and why Trump is so wrong about them.SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcasts/just-asking-questions/What would a Mar-a-Lago accord look like? Just asking questions.Phil Magness is an economic historian with the Independent Institute who has deeply studied the history of tariffs and trade. We invited him on the show to talk about the "global economic reordering" described by Donald Trump's Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the president's escalating tariffs, the looming threat of a trade war, the shaky stock market, and the so-called "Mar-a-Lago Accord" that may shed more light on what the Trump administration's economic agenda really is.Other episodes mentioned:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-Kpyg2mFU8&list=PLBuns9Evn1w9K02WT8x-gzSI-UdeeXFG9&index=12 with Tyler Cowenhttps://youtu.be/-ED2Dy2aRKM?list=PLBuns9Evn1w9K02WT8x-gzSI-UdeeXFG9 with Phil Magnesshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh_F4F1CjrE&list=PLBuns9Evn1w9K02WT8x-gzSI-UdeeXFG9&index=1 with Kelsey PiperSEO: Tariffs, Trade Wars & the Mar-A-Lago Accord | Phil Magness on Economic History & Trump’s AgendaIn this episode of Just Asking Questions, economist and historian Phil Magness joins us to break down the Trump administration's evolving economic strategy, including its obsession with tariffs, the controversial Mar-A-Lago Accord, and the potential return of protectionism. We dive deep into trade history, from Smoot-Hawley to semiconductors, and challenge the narrative being pushed by Trump’s inner circle.Phil lays out how tariffs act as both revenue generators and protectionist tools, and why the current push may be economically disastrous. We also explore the idea of using tariffs as a foreign policy weapon, Trump's weak-dollar plan, and even the government's unexpected Bitcoin play.Topics Covered👉 What is the Mar-A-Lago Accord?👉 Do tariffs really help the American economy?👉 What caused the Great Depression—was it tariffs?👉 Why is Trump obsessed with tariffs?👉 What is the dual purpose of tariffs?👉 Is the US bringing back manufacturing jobs?👉 Are tariffs good for national security?👉 How do tariffs affect inflation?👉 What are the dangers of a strong US dollar?👉 What’s the future of free trade in America?👉 Can the US government use Bitcoin as a reserve asset?👉 Who is Phil Magness and what are his views on tariffs?👉 What are the long-term effects of protectionist policies?Chapters:00:00:00 Coming up...00:00:27 Trump's Confused Tariff History00:06:39 The Dual Purpose of Tariffs00:09:44 Tariffs as Foreign Policy Tools00:11:26 Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression00:15:38 The Great Forgetting of Trade History00:20:54 National Security Justifications for Tariffs00:25:32 Debating Strategic Industries Like Semiconductors00:30:06 JD Vance, Industrial Decline, and Economic Nostalgia00:37:31 Auto Industry, Union Labor, and Protectionism00:40:34 The Mar-A-Lago Accord Explained00:45:58 Should Other Countries Pay for US Security?00:49:33 Can Tariffs Be Effective Negotiation Tools?00:53:37 Will Weakening the Dollar Backfire?00:57:08 Do Tariffs Cause Inflation?01:00:41 The US Government's Bitcoin Sovereign Wealth Fund01:06:59 Final Thoughts and What We Should Be Asking
You've probably heard about microdosing, which involves taking a small, "sub-perceptual" dose of psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin on a regular basis to ward off depression, anxiety, and chronic pain—or to optimize focus and boost energy.Today's guests are James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber, authors of the new book Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance. Fadiman, a Stanford-trained research psychologist who has been working with psychedelics since the early 1960s, popularized the concept of microdosing over a decade ago. They talk with Reason's Nick Gillespie about the mechanics of and theory behind microdosing, its promise and limits, and how it fits into the larger psychedelic renaissance that has been flowering for most of the 21st century. And they discuss the prospects for legalization and cultural normalization of psychedelics under the Trump administration.1:19 — New book: Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance5:12 — How Fadiman discovered microdosing8:10 — How Gruber began microdosing8:57 — Microdosing is similar to a vitamin protocol11:17 — MDMA, ketamine, and cannabis work differently12:50 — Microdosing for depression16:02 — Other conditions microdosing could help alleviate19:09 — Is microdosing for life?21:17 — How to quantify the efficacy of microdosing30:14 — Psychedelics and drug law37:30 — Psychedelic-assisted therapy39:40 — Psychedelics and their benefits are nonideological46:15 — Fadiman and Gruber's 2020 book: Your Symphony of Selves53:45 — Drug legalization under Donald TrumpSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie welcome a very special guest, Andrew Sullivan, to discuss President Donald Trump's defiance of court orders on deportations, his antagonism toward Canada, and the COVID-19-era lies told by Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.11:55—Trump deportations ignore due process and defy court order38:19—Canada as the 51st state?50:38—Weekly listener question58:09—The five-year anniversary of COVID-19 and Fauci's lies1:07:30—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:Do you know a student looking for a transformative opportunity that supports the foundations of a free society? Reliance College invites students aged 16 to 24 to the 2025 Great Connections Seminar in Chicago, from July 26th to August 2nd. This year's theme, "Reason and Free Will," dives into timeless ideas from writers such as Thomas Jefferson, Ayn Rand, and Aristotle. Students sharpen critical thinking in small, dynamic groups, developing the intellectual tools needed to thrive in a free society. Outside the classroom, they'll explore Chicago's vibrant culture—touring museums, trying improv comedy, and building lifelong connections. Parents, this program equips students to think, reason, and act independently. Go to reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply. Registration is just $800, including room and board for the full week, with scholarships available. Don't miss out! Visit www.reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply.Therapy can feel like a big investment, but the state of your mind is just as important as your physical health. Let's talk numbers. Traditional in-person therapy can cost anywhere from $100 to $250 per session, which adds up fast, but with BetterHelp online therapy, you can save, on average, up to 50% per session. With BetterHelp, you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions, saving you big on cost and time. Therapy should feel accessible, not like a luxury. With online therapy, you get quality care at a price that makes sense and can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress. Your mental health is worth it—and now, it's within reach. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. It's convenient, too. You can join a session with the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life. Plus, switch therapists at any time. Your well-being is worth it. Visit betterhelp.com/roundtable today to get 10% off your first month.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Where's artificial intelligence headed in Trump's America? Just asking questions.In February 2025, Vice President J.D. Vance delivered a keynote speech at the AI Action Summit in Paris. He advocated for "AI opportunity" rather than "AI safety," promoting a deregulatory vision for AI that emphasized U.S. leadership and free speech while criticizing Europe's "excessive" regulations like the Digital Markets Act. In contrast, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking at the AI Safety Summit in London in November 2023, advocated for pretty much the exact opposite. Where Harris sought guardrails, Vance's speech marked a sharp pivot toward deregulation and unilateral dominance, highlighting a stark shift in U.S. policy under the Trump administration. So what does this all mean politically, culturally, and for everyday humans? Will AI take our computer jobs?Joining Just Asking Questions to discuss all of this and more is Kelsey Piper, a senior writer at Vox's effective altruism-inspired Future Perfect. We wanted to talk with her about the current politics and possible societal ramifications of AI because she has proven herself to be both knowledgeable and imminently reasonable.Note: This interview was recorded on February 13, 2025. While most of this interview is about long-term trends and predictions, some specific claims about the then-current power of various AI models have been superseded but remain relevant in a journalistic and historical context, so we've run the original episode with no edits.SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tl
Today's guest is Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty, who has just published Modern Libertarianism: A Brief History of Classical Liberalism in the United States. His previous books include Radicals for Capitalism, the indispensable history of the libertarian movement, and titles covering the Ron Paul revolution, gun rights, Burning Man, and underground comics.Modern Libertarianism analyzes the political and cultural legacies of figures such as Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, and Barry Goldwater. Doherty talks with Reason's Nick Gillespie about Ayn Rand and the other two women who helped conceptualize libertarian thought—Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson. Doherty and Gillespie also discuss how libertarians have played leading, if often underappreciated, roles in battles over free speech, international trade, immigration, deregulation, drug legalization, and lifestyle liberation.This interview was recorded at The Reason Speakeasy, a live monthly event in New York City that doubles as a live taping of this podcast.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch explain why eliminating the Department of Education entirely is long overdue.02:52—Trump administration cuts to the Department of Education25:55—Mahmoud Khalil detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement37:13—Weekly listener question45:22—Lightning round: Congress passes a continuing resolution budget deal53:41—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsor:Do you know a student looking for a transformative opportunity that supports the foundations of a free society? Reliance College invites students aged 16 to 24 to the 2025 Great Connections Seminar in Chicago, from July 26th to August 2nd. This year's theme, "Reason and Free Will," dives into timeless ideas from writers such as Thomas Jefferson, Ayn Rand, and Aristotle. Students sharpen critical thinking in small, dynamic groups, developing the intellectual tools needed to thrive in a free society. Outside the classroom, they'll explore Chicago's vibrant culture—touring museums, trying improv comedy, and building lifelong connections. Parents, this program equips students to think, reason, and act independently. Go to reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply. Registration is just $800, including room and board for the full week, with scholarships available. Don't miss out! Visit www.reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Five years to the day after President Donald Trump declared a national emergency, what are the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic? Just asking questions.Tom Woods joins us today. He's a historian, host of The Tom Woods Show, and author of many books, including Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania, which has a foreword written by the new National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya. Because he so painstakingly documented his experience of "COVID mania" as it unfolded day-to-day, we asked him to reflect on the lockdowns, social distancing, masks, and vaccines, as well as how all these measures ultimately affected liberty and what COVID accountability should look like.SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcasts/just-asking-questions/Chapters:00:00 Introduction: What have we learned from COVID?04:30 The early days: Panic, lockdowns, and initial reactions10:15 Florida vs. California: The great COVID policy divide16:45 The unseen costs: Lockdowns, economy, and mental health23:30 The vaccine debate: Mandates, coercion, and public trust30:20 The science debate: Experts, models, and misleading predictions37:15 Masks, symbolism, and political messaging44:00 Australia, New Zealand, and the global COVID response50:45 Federalism & freedom: Why some states resisted COVID rules57:30 What comes next? Preparing for the next health crisis1:04:00 Final thoughts: The lessons we must remember
To celebrate the growth of our new YouTube channel, the Just Asking Questions team livestreamed an Ask Me Anything episode, hosted by their producer, John Osterhoudt. It was a chance for our listeners to share their reactions to guests and topics, suggest ideas for future episodes, and pose some hard questions.SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcasts/just-asking-questions/
This week's guest is Rachel Barkow, a professor of law at New York University and the author of the book Justice Abandoned: How the Supreme Court Ignored the Constitution and Enabled Mass Incarceration, which was just released this month.Barkow and Reason's Billy Binion talked about the importance of the presidential pardon power—which is a controversial topic these days, after former President Joe Biden used it to preemptively pardon Anthony Fauci and members of his own family, and President Donald Trump used it to pardon January 6 defendants, some of whom were convicted of assaulting law enforcement. They also discussed Barkow's view that certain Supreme Court precedents around criminal justice are alarming for anyone who cares about the Constitution and individual liberty. Finally, they chatted about what it was like for her to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia—as a Democrat.0:00 — Introduction1:03 — Presidential pardon power under Biden and Trump9:35 — Biden's "clumsy" end-of-term pardons13:03 — Trump's January 6 pardons18:55 — Historical context for pardon power24:20 — Philip Esformes' pardon limbo30:07 — Ford's commission on Vietnam War draft dodgers33:15 — Pardon power and the death penalty37:57 — Barlow's new book, Justice Abandoned41:45 — Coercive plea bargaining57:17 — "Repeat offenders" in the news1:05:18 — Barkow's clerkship with Scalia1:15:42 — The biggest misconception about the Supreme CourtSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss the frantic uncertainty in the economy due to President Donald Trump's various tariff policies and trade war antics.03:22—Trump's tariff uncertainty26:15—Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) check-in38:35—Weekly listener question49:01—Five years since COVID-1956:12—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:Let's talk about March Madness! No, not NCAA March Madness that kicks off with selections next week. We're talking about March TAX madness! Digging through your records and files, realizing that you never received acknowledgment of a donation you made and now have to track it down. Did you know that DonorsTrust can help alleviate your tax season headaches? With a donor-advised fund from DonorsTrust, you can simplify your giving and maximize your tax savings. It's private, secure, and managed by a team that shares your belief in limited government. Not all donor-advised funds respect your libertarian principles. DonorsTrust is proudly dedicated to advancing a free society, protecting your charitable intent, and championing individual liberty and free markets. You can focus on making a difference, not on managing paperwork. With DonorsTrust, it's your vision, your values, your impact. Go to DonorsTrust.org/Reason to discover a better way to give.Do you know a student looking for a transformative opportunity that supports the foundations of a free society? Reliance College invites students aged 16 to 24 to the 2025 Great Connections Seminar in Chicago, from July 26th to August 2nd. This year's theme, "Reason and Free Will," dives into timeless ideas from writers such as Thomas Jefferson, Ayn Rand, and Aristotle. Students sharpen critical thinking in small, dynamic groups, developing the intellectual tools needed to thrive in a free society. Outside the classroom, they'll explore Chicago's vibrant culture—touring museums, trying improv comedy, and building lifelong connections. Parents, this program equips students to think, reason, and act independently. Go to reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply. Registration is just $800, including room and board for the full week, with scholarships available. Don't miss out! Visit www.reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Vanity Fair reporter James Pogue dives into the dissident right, his personal experiences with MAGA, and how Ukraine policy is unfolding.SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcasts/just-asking-questions/What does the dramatic collapse of talks between Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump and JD Vance reveal about Trump's foreign policy, Vance's ideology, and the future trajectory of MAGA? Just asking questions.James Pogue, who has written extensively about the American "New Right" and who predicted in 2022 that Vance would be "hugely influential in our politics in the coming years," joined the show to dissect the doomed televised negotiations between Zelenskyy and Trump, offer his insight about Vance's aggressive interjection, and discuss why he thinks the rise of the online "dissident right" is poised to either fall apart or lead America into a "a dark night of totalitarianism."
Our guest today is Alton Brown, who for years hosted Good Eats on the Food Network and brought his interest in science to the making of dinner. He's currently touring the country, and he has also just published Food for Thought, a great collection of essays about food, culture, and his life on and off the screen. In this episode, Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with Brown about how food transcends politics, why fusion cooking isn't cultural appropriation, and why there's always room for Jell-O salad on his menu.Today's sponsor:The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of intellectual conformity and groupthink. It doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. Go here to buy tickets and go here to sign up for Reason's NYC Events newsletter.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch react to last week's dramatic exchange in the White House over the war in Ukraine between President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.04:08—Trump and Zelenskyy clash in the Oval Office27:30—House Republicans agree to increase federal budget deficit40:32—Weekly listener question47:18—Lightning round: National Security Agency sex chats, measles in Texas, and the Epstein files55:29—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:Do you know a student looking for a transformative opportunity that supports the foundations of a free society? Reliance College invites students aged 16 to 24 to the 2025 Great Connections Seminar in Chicago, from July 26th to August 2nd. This year's theme, "Reason and Free Will," dives into timeless ideas from writers such as Thomas Jefferson, Ayn Rand, and Aristotle. Students sharpen critical thinking in small, dynamic groups, developing the intellectual tools needed to thrive in a free society. Outside the classroom, they'll explore Chicago's vibrant culture—touring museums, trying improv comedy, and building lifelong connections. Parents, this program equips students to think, reason, and act independently. Go to reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply. Registration is just $800, including room and board for the full week, with scholarships available. Don't miss out! Visit www.reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply.Are you being lied to? They tell you to max out your 401(k) and IRA, and then make you beg for permission to use your own money! It's time to get the truth and discover a better way to grow and protect your money! Bank On Yourself is the proven retirement plan alternative banks and Wall Street desperately hope you never hear about. You're in control. You get access to your money for emergencies and opportunities with no questions asked! There are no government penalties or restrictions on how much or when you can take it. And when you use your money, it keeps growing like you never touched it! Try doing that with a 401(k) or IRA…you can't! You can get a free report that reveals how you can Bank On Yourself and enjoy tax-free retirement income, guaranteed growth, and control of your money. Just go to https://www.bankonyourself.com/roundtable.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Are the online speech wars over? Just asking questions. Award-winning journalist Matt Taibbi joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on Just Asking Questions today to help analyze Vice President J.D. Vance's blistering speech at the Munich Security Conference, where Vance called on Europe's leaders to stop suppressing speech, banning populist political parties, and annulling elections. Taibbi predicts Vance's speech will be "remembered as a moment of grave importance," as it signals the "collapse of the post–World War II order." They also discuss a nonconfrontational 60 Minutes segment about German speech laws, Tulsi Gabbard's confirmation as director of national intelligence, the crumbling legitimacy of legacy media, and why Taibbi is glad Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election. You can find Taibbi's work these days at racket.news and on the America This Week podcast with Walter Kirn.Chapters:00:00 Coming up…00:25 Introducing Matt Taibbi00:54 Analyzing J.D. Vance's Munich speech24:17 The history of free speech in Europe32:09 Back to Vance: the end of the post–World War II American and European alliance?35:58 Fear of populism fuels censorship45:13 Is U.S. intelligence using the European Union to route around the First Amendment?50:32 Tulsi Gabbard as the new director of national intelligence53:53 Who did Matt Taibbi vote for?58:05 Reacting to 60 Minutes' praise of German censors01:16:40 Will the Democrats do any real post-election reflection? (No)01:19:48 What is a question that you think more people should be asking?
Today's guest is Columbia University linguist and New York Times columnist John McWhorter. In 2021, he published Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, which argued that politically correct "antiracism" was not only a new religion but a dangerous form of illiberalism that quashed free expression, individual liberty, and social progress.McWhorter talks with Reason's Nick Gillespie about how far we've come since 2021—and whether we are entering a new era of open debate and cultural possibilities. They also discuss the apparent end of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, McWhorter's own experience with affirmative action over his decades in academia, and his forthcoming book Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words, which comes out in April.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss democratic messaging and policy in the age of Trump, before turning to President Donald Trump's shifting stance on the war in Ukraine and its implications for global politics.02:11—Democrats losing the plot on messaging and policy20:28—Trump and Ukraine41:39—Weekly listener question43:43—Lightning round: Argentine President Javier Milei's memecoin, Department of Government Efficiency dividends, and Elon Musk's email to federal workers.51:45 - This week's cultural recommendationsToday's sponsors:Are you a student looking for a transformative opportunity that supports the foundations of a free society? Reliance College invites students aged 16 to 24 to the 2025 Great Connections Seminar in Chicago, from July 26th to August 2nd. This year's theme, "Reason and Free Will," dives into timeless ideas from writers such as Thomas Jefferson, Ayn Rand, and Aristotle. Students sharpen critical thinking in small, dynamic groups, developing the intellectual tools needed to thrive in a free society. Outside the classroom, they'll explore Chicago's vibrant culture—touring museums, trying improv comedy, and building lifelong connections. Parents, this program equips students to think, reason, and act independently. Go to reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply. Early registration is just $400 before March 1st, including room and board, with scholarships available. Don't miss out! Visit www.reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply.We often hear about the "red flags" we should avoid. But what if we focused more on looking for green flags in friends and partners? If you're not sure what they look like, therapy can help you identify green flags, actively practice them in your relationships, and embody the green flag energy, yourself. Whether you're dating, married, building a friendship, or just working on yourself, it's time to form relationships that love you back. BetterHelp is fully online, making therapy affordable and convenient, serving over 5 million people worldwide. Access a diverse network of more than 30,000 credentialed therapists with a wide range of specialties. Easily switch therapists anytime at no extra cost. Discover your relationship "green flags," with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
How legal is Trump's governing agenda? Just asking questions.Today's guest is Randy Barnett, a Georgetown constitutional law professor who has argued before the Supreme Court, was part of a legal team that challenged the constitutionality of Obamacare, is a contributor to The Volokh Conspiracy blog hosted at Reason, and is the author of several books, most recently the memoir A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist. In this week's episode, Barnett discusses the legality of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the various federal injunctions and restraining orders issued against the Trump administration, and whether libertarians should celebrate or be concerned about President Donald Truamp and Elon Musk's methods for slashing government. He also explains why he thinks Trump's executive order rescinding birthright citizenship for the children of unauthorized immigrants might triumph before the Supreme Court.
Jim O'Shaughnessy is a superstar investor and venture capitalist who heads up O'Shaughnessy Ventures and hosts the popular Infinite Loops podcast. He's also the coauthor of the excellent new collection Two Thoughts, which pulls together provocative quotes from figures ranging from Sam Adams to Ludwig Von Mises to Frank Zappa.O'Shaughnessy chats with Reason's Nick Gillespie about the power of free minds and free markets to improve the world, why societies thrive or perish, and how to build a better "bullshit detector" in an age of information overload. And they discuss what went wrong during Joe Biden's presidency, especially related to COVID and AI policy, and what might go right under Donald Trump's second term, especially if special interests are kept at bay.1:17— Two Thoughts: A Timeless Collection of Infinite Wisdom6:30— We're living through 'The great reshuffle'8:53— Thinkers vs. Provers: Don't reach conclusions too quickly13:43— Big plans fail better25:58— Live your life, not just perform it32:22— Using AI to stress test arguments40:00— Bernays' rebranding of propaganda as identity41:25— Free markets deliver through persuasion44:59— Regulatory capture and crony capitalism54:36— O'Shaughnessy's podcast Infinite Loops1:12:12— Biden's economic legacy1:17:35— Trump could possibly be better for innovation1:20:24— How to curb rent-seeking from billionairesToday's sponsor:The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of intellectual conformity and groupthink. It doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast. The next one takes place on Thursday, February 27 and features Brian Doherty talking about his new book, Modern Libertarianism: A Brief History of Classical Liberalism in the United States.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie welcome special guest Justin Amash to weigh in on President Donald Trump vs. the rule of law, Congress' inability to budget, and Vice President J.D. Vance's big trip to Europe.04:04 - Trump quotes Napoleon19:36 - DOGE wants to cut, Congress still wants to spend big29:05 - Defunding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau38:37 - Weekly listener question47:21 - Vance goes to Europe56:58 - This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsor:Are you a student looking for a transformative opportunity that supports the foundations of a free society? Reliance College invites students aged 16 to 24 to the 2025 Great Connections Seminar in Chicago, from July 26 to August 2. This year's theme, "Reason and Free Will," dives into timeless ideas from writers such as Thomas Jefferson, Ayn Rand, and Aristotle. Students sharpen critical thinking in small, dynamic groups, developing the intellectual tools needed to thrive in a free society. Outside the classroom, they'll explore Chicago's vibrant culture—touring museums, trying improv comedy, and building lifelong connections. Parents, this program equips students to think, reason, and act independently. Go to reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply. Early registration is just $400 before March 1, including room and board, with scholarships available. Don't miss out! Visit www.reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
The Washington Free Beacon's Aaron Sibarium discusses the various slashes the Trump administration has made to DEI projects and USAID.Is the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement over? Just asking questions. Aaron Sibarium is a good, old-fashioned muckraking journalist over at the Washington Free Beacon who exposes things the left would probably rather hide. He joins the show today to discuss President Donald Trump's executive orders relating to DEI programs.Chapters:00:00 Coming up…00:36 Trump clip from inauguration speech05:08 1965 Lindon B. Johnson executive order07:33 Why was President Joe Biden so radical on this stuff?20:54 Firing Health and Human Services DEI employees25:06 Should Trump be messing with the private sector?48:31 Even Trump is constrained here in certain ways.53:17 Ridding USAID of DEI01:00:34 Is there a legitimate role for USAID?01:06:40 Will Elon Musk reform government like he did X?01:12:34 Calling an Oregon bias hotline01:17:04 What is the question you think more people should be asking?
The Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991, taking down with it the threat of international communism, right? Today's guest says no, writing that, "Far from dead, Communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started." Sean McMeekin is a historian at Bard College and the author of the mesmerizing book To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with him about the history of communism, how its focus on forced equality is inherently violent, and how Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and others each brought particular flourishes and horrors to its practice.Gillespie and McMeekin talk about why communism has enduring and resurgent appeal in the West despite its history of violence and economic disaster. "We dodged a certain bullet" with the election of Trump, McMeekin says, but he argues that "whatever party is in power in Washington, I think we always have to jealously guard our civil liberties and we have to just constantly remind ourselves of what our values are and are supposed to be."1:41 — The enduring appeal of communism3:55 — The "whitewashing" of Karl Marx's appetite for violence7:02 — How Vladimir Lenin changed communism16:38 — American attitudes toward communism23:44 — Leon Trotsky's idea of "permanent revolution" and Lenin's legacy28:35 — Violence didn't deter communism's appeal to many33:33 — The left's flip-flopping on interventionism in World War II36:54 — Mao, Khmer Rouge, and communism in Asia45:22 — Western radicals and Maoism50:27 — Black intellectuals' engagement with communism57:51 — Is communism making a comeback?1:06:20 — Does communism still appeal to the young?1:11:19 — How does Donald Trump map onto all this?1:16:43 — The politicization of the means of communicationSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and special guest Christian Britschgi assess the first steps taken by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut government spending and slash federal agencies.01:52—DOGE vs. the Deep State39:50—Weekly listener question46:50—Lightning round: Gaza takeover, RFK Jr. confirmation, President Donald Trump sues CBS55:28—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:Are you a student looking for a transformative opportunity that supports the foundations of a free society? Reliance College invites students aged 16 to 24 to the 2025 Great Connections Seminar in Chicago, from July 26th to August 2nd. This year's theme, "Reason and Free Will," dives into timeless ideas from writers such as Thomas Jefferson, Ayn Rand, and Aristotle. Students sharpen critical thinking in small, dynamic groups, developing the intellectual tools needed to thrive in a free society. Outside the classroom, they'll explore Chicago's vibrant culture—touring museums, trying improv comedy, and building lifelong connections. Parents, this program equips students to think, reason, and act independently. Go to reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply. Early registration is just $400 before March 1st, including room and board, with scholarships available. Don't miss out! Visit www.reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply.What impact will you make with your charitable giving this year? Giving can feel complicated—lots of receipts, juggling different organizations, and trying to keep all the details straight. DonorsTrust simplifies all of that. With a donor-advised fund from DonorsTrust, you can streamline your giving and even maximize your tax savings. Unlike some donor-advised funds that don't respect your libertarian principles, DonorsTrust is proudly dedicated to advancing a free society, protecting your charitable intent, and championing individual liberty and free markets. And here's what's great: DonorsTrust takes care of the details. It's private, secure, and managed by a team that shares your principles. You can focus on making a difference, not on managing paperwork. With DonorsTrust, it's Your Vision. Your Values. Your Impact. Discover a better way to give. Visit DonorsTrust.org/Reason to get started today.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Scott Horton of The Libertarian Institute and Eli Lake of The Free Press debate the resolution, "The United States started the new Cold War with Russia and provoked Russia's invasion of Ukraine."Taking the affirmative is Horton, the director of The Libertarian Institute and the editorial director of antiwar.com. He recently published a book on the debate subject called Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine.Arguing for the negative is Lake, a columnist for The Free Press and contributing editor for Commentary magazine, whose longtime beat has been foreign affairs and national security.The debate was hosted at Dartmouth University by the Dartmouth Political Union and moderated by Soho Forum director Gene Epstein.
Will President Donald Trump and Elon Musk actually cut the government down to size and pull us back from the fiscal cliff? Just asking questions.John Cochrane is joining Just Asking Questions today to talk about what it would actually take to get government spending under control permanently and discuss a few of the staggering number of government reforms either underway or being floated. He is an economist at the Hoover Institution and a professor of economics and finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He publishes his thoughts at The Grumpy Economist. Chapters:00:00 Coming up…00:30 DOGE is buying out bureaucrats5:37 Government spending disrespects taxpayers7:23 Trump is winning the culture war11:09 Hypocritical support for DOGE?15:08 Should we give up on Congress?19:40 Reacting to Musk's opinion of regulations36:55 Trump thinks outside of the box39:04 The emperor has no clothes41:03 The election was cultural, and not about the economy43:52 The government needs to get out of the way45:55 Some pessimism about DOGE53:34 Trump wants to end the income tax?57:58 Can tax reform be made a populist issue?1:02:24 How bad are tariffs in reality?1:09:02 How can we keep growth going?
Today's guest is Nico Perrino, executive vice president at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), director of the 2020 documentary Mighty Ira, which profiles the longtime head of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the author of a forthcoming book on the triumph of civil libertarians.He's also the host of the popular podcast So to Speak, which takes an "uncensored look at the world of free expression through the law, philosophy, and stories that define your right to free speech." Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with him about the Biden administration's rotten record on speech issues, his hopes and fears for President Donald Trump's second term, and why he worries that, when it comes to speech, Elon Musk is "suffering from the curse of power, which is censorship."0:00- Introduction1:29- Biden administration's record on free speech8:22- Internal and external pressures on tech platforms to censor11:00- Double standards on free speech12:19- Will speech be freer under Trump than Biden?18:49- The TikTok 'ban' & DeepSeek AI28:23- Elon Musk: friend or foe to free speech? 31:10- Free speech culture36:00- What was 'cancel culture'?39:22- Institutional neutrality and campus speech post-Oct 746:43- Generational attitude shifts on free speechToday's sponsor:The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of intellectual conformity and groupthink. It doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast. The next one takes place on Thursday, February 27, and features Brian Doherty talking about his new book, Modern Libertarianism: A Brief History of Classical Liberalism in the United StateSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and special guest Eric Boehm lament the beginning of what could become a terrible trade war between the United States and its three largest trading partners—Canada, Mexico, and China.01:51—President Donald Trump signs orders imposing tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China24:18—The Trump administration attempts to freeze federal aid and offers federal workers buyouts43:20—Weekly listener question52:08—Quick news lightning round: DCA plane crash, Elon Musk and government payment systems, China's Deepseek AI58:26—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:Are you being lied to? They tell you to max out your 401(k) and IRA, and then make you beg for permission to use your own money! It's time to get the truth and discover a better way to grow and protect your money! Bank On Yourself is the proven retirement plan alternative banks and Wall Street desperately hope you never hear about. You're in control. You get access to your money for emergencies and opportunities with no questions asked! There are no government penalties or restrictions on how much or when you can take it. And when you use your money, it keeps growing like you never touched it! Try doing that with a 401(k) or IRA…you can't! You can get a free report that reveals how you can Bank On Yourself and enjoy tax-free retirement income, guaranteed growth, and control of your money. Just go to https://www.bankonyourself.com/roundtable.Are you a student looking for a transformative opportunity that supports the foundations of a free society? Reliance College invites students aged 16 to 24 to the 2025 Great Connections Seminar in Chicago, from July 26th to August 2nd. This year's theme, "Reason and Free Will," dives into timeless ideas from writers such as Thomas Jefferson, Ayn Rand, and Aristotle. Students sharpen critical thinking in small, dynamic groups, developing the intellectual tools needed to thrive in a free society. Outside the classroom, they'll explore Chicago's vibrant culture—touring museums, trying improv comedy, and building lifelong connections. Parents, this program equips students to think, reason, and act independently. Go to reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply. Early registration is just $400 before March 1st, including room and board, with scholarships available. Don't miss out! Visit www.reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Peter Gietl of Blaze Media and Salvadoran journalist Ricardo Avelar debate the resolution, "President Nayib Bukele's crime-fighting policies in El Salvador provide a model for reducing violence in other Latin American countries."Arguing in favor is Gietl, the managing editor for Return and Frontier magazine for Blaze Media. In November of last year, Gietl published a lengthy photojournalistic essay chronicling his travels to El Salvador, titled "J'Adore El Salvador," which he concludes by asking: "Can we bottle [El Salvador's transformation] up and ship it back to America?"Taking the negative is Avelar, a senior journalist and presenter for the Central American news outlet Revista Factum. In 2021, he co-directed a docuseries called 9F: The Return of Rifles, which is about the "El Bukelazo" events of February 9, 2020.The debate is moderated by Soho Forum director Gene Epstein.
One of the very first things that Donald Trump did after being sworn in as president was to make good on promises to reduce both legal and illegal immigration. He even issued an executive order ending birthright citizenship, a right guaranteed by the Constitution's 14th Amendment. That order has already been blocked by a federal judge, and its fate may well end up being decided by the Supreme Court. But calls for less immigration are super popular, with 55 percent of Americans saying current levels should be decreased, the highest since 2001. Reason's Nick Gillespie disagrees with that—he believes that immigration is a good thing and that we should have more of it, done in an orderly, peaceful, efficient fashion.So on January 21, the day after Trump's inauguration, Gillespie asked George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan and Cato Institute analyst Alex Nowrasteh to make the libertarian case for more immigration at a live event in New York City. They've written extensively on the topic and answer every question and concern you might have about immigration. The goal here is to steel-man critics of immigration and explain why more newcomers are good for our culture, economy, and country.1:55—Trump's "Day 1" promises and actions6:13—Was there a migrant "invasion"?7:35—What does "open borders" mean?11:03—What's the real story of chaos on the border?22:06—The case for more immigration24:30—Immigrant welfare use31:11—H-1B visa debate38:11—The Laken Riley Act and immigrant crime42:00—Cultural arguments for more immigration45:47—Assimilation in America52:29—How many immigrants could the U.S. take in?53:53—The most worrisome anti-immigration policies proposedSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie attempt to describe the ongoing cultural shifts occurring in the wake of President Donald Trump's re-election.01:53—Donald Trump and cultural "vibe shift"30:40—Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)41:00—Weekly listener question45:50—Trump outrage lightning round53:55—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsor:ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Go to zbiotics.com/ROUNDTABLE to get 15 percent off your first order when you use ROUNDTABLE at checkout. ZBiotics is backed with a 100 percent money-back guarantee so if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked.Are you a student looking for a transformative opportunity that supports the foundations of a free society? Reliance College invites students aged 16 to 24 to the 2025 Great Connections Seminar in Chicago, from July 26th to August 2nd. This year's theme, "Reason and Free Will," dives into timeless ideas from writers such as Thomas Jefferson, Ayn Rand, and Aristotle. Students sharpen critical thinking in small, dynamic groups, developing the intellectual tools needed to thrive in a free society. Outside the classroom, they'll explore Chicago's vibrant culture—touring museums, trying improv comedy, and building lifelong connections. Parents, this program equips students to think, reason, and act independently. Go to reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply. Early registration is just $400 before March 1st, including room and board, with scholarships available. Don't miss out! Visit www.reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
How will the second Donald Trump presidential term transform America? Just asking questions.It's officially the Trump 2.0 era. One New York Times columnist called his inaugural address "American Carnage 2," while Trump promised a new American "golden age" in his speech.So how excited, hopeful, or anxious should we be as we enter these next four years?Journalist Mike Pesca, host of the popular daily news podcast The Gist, joined Reason Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller and Associate Editor Liz Wolfe to reflect on Trump's inaugural address. They also discussed Elon Musk's appearance at the inauguration and Trump's slate of Day 1 executive orders.
The Libertarian Party national chair talks about the role the party played in securing a presidential pardon for Ulbricht.This interview was recorded on Dec. 13, 2024Why Trump made a deal to free Ross Ulbricht: https://youtu.be/yhDKYYdD2vYSubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcast/2025/01/22/angela-mcardle-what-role-did-the-libertarian-party-play-in-freeing-ross-ulbrichtToday's bonus episode of Just Asking Questions is a conversation with Libertarian Party National Chair Angela McArdle about the role the party played in securing a presidential pardon for Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the dark web marketplace Silk Road. Ulbricht, who entered prison at age 29 and walked out at age 40, had served 11 years of a double life sentence with no possibility of parole.Ulbricht started Silk Road as an idealistic libertarian experiment, describing on his LinkedIn profile his ambition to create "an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force." The site was only accessible through the anonymizing network known as Tor, and transactions for all sorts of illegal drugs were made in bitcoin. For all these reasons, Ulbricht became a kind of libertarian icon.The Free Ross movement was tirelessly spearheaded by Ulbricht's mother, Lyn, and championed by the libertarian movement and its many institutions and publications, including Reason magazine, for the past decade. This decade-long effort culminated in a dramatic turn of events during the Libertarian National Convention last year, where Trump appeared and gave a speech in which he promised to free Ulbricht. Reason produced a 15-minute video essay describing Ulbricht's case in detail and how this deal came to be, which we'll also link in the description. During the production of that, I interviewed McArdle, who had met with Trump and told him that freeing Ulbricht was a major priority for libertarians.For those of you who don't follow third-party political drama, McArdle has been a polarizing chair who led the so-called "takeover" of the Libertarian Party by a faction called the Mises Caucus. Her unorthodox strategy, aggressive messaging, and leadership style have generated constant controversy within the broader libertarian movement. Reason has produced several documentaries and interviews on those developments as well.This is the full conversation that Reason conducted with McArdle before the inauguration about what her conversation with Trump was like, how the meeting came about in the first place, and what the terms of the deal actually were. It also includes some discussion about the state of the Libertarian Party and McArdle's future within it.Other relevant links:Reason's archive of "Free Ross" content: https://reason.com/search/ross%20ulbricht/Trump's appearance at the LP convention: https://reason.com/video/2024/05/27/watch-libertarians-react-to-donald-trumps-speech-at-their-convention/Zach's video essay: https://reason.com/video/2025/01/17/trump-promised-to-free-ross-ulbricht-heres-why-he-should/Inside the Mises Caucus Takeover of the Libertarian Party https://youtu.be/NsgFdPqOAhkA Power Struggle Consumes the Libertarian Party https://youtu.be/Ky63JKjIBzEHow’s the new Libertarian Party doing? Live with Angela McArdle (Nov 10, 2022) https://youtu.be/jz5EOwkfBQA
"Even paranoids have real enemies," said the poet Delmore Schwartz, who was both clinically paranoid and definitely on to something, according to today's guest: Michael Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine, Substack superstar, and author of many best-selling books about rationalism, the evolution of morality, and pseudoscience.He quotes Schwartz in his latest book, Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, to drive home the point that big, world-changing secret plots happen all the time, but there are reliable ways for us to decide whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, 9/11 was an inside job, or vaccines cause autism. For the record, Shermer says yes, no, and no on those counts.Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with Shermer about whether conspiracy thinking is on the rise, whether it's coded left or right, how wokeness poisons science, and whether the reelection of Donald Trump means free thought is ascendant. This interview was recorded at a live event in New York City in January.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie react to the second inauguration of President Donald Trump. The gang parses some of his contradictory ideas before touching on the saga of banning TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media application, in the United States.01:46 - Donald Trump's second inauguration14:20 - Trump's Day 1 executive actions28:34 - Joe Biden's farewell address42:25 - Weekly listener question48:04 - TikTok ban57:10 - This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:Are you a student looking for a transformative opportunity that supports the foundations of a free society? Reliance College invites students aged 16 to 24 to the 2025 Great Connections Seminar in Chicago, from July 26 to August 2. This year's theme, "Reason and Free Will," dives into timeless ideas from writers such as Thomas Jefferson, Ayn Rand, and Aristotle. Students sharpen critical thinking in small, dynamic groups, developing the intellectual tools needed to thrive in a free society. Outside the classroom, they'll explore Chicago's vibrant culture—touring museums, trying improv comedy, and building lifelong connections. Parents, this program equips students to think, reason, and act independently. Go to reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply. Early registration is just $400 before March 1, including room and board, with scholarships available. Don't miss out! Visit www.reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply.Are you being lied to? They tell you to max out your 401(k) and IRA, and then make you beg for permission to use your own money! It's time to get the truth and discover a better way to grow and protect your money! Bank On Yourself is the proven retirement plan alternative banks and Wall Street desperately hope you never hear about. You're in control. You get access to your money for emergencies and opportunities with no questions asked! There are no government penalties or restrictions on how much or when you can take it. And when you use your money, it keeps growing like you never touched it! Try doing that with a 401(k) or IRA…you can't! You can get a free report that reveals how you can Bank On Yourself and enjoy tax-free retirement income, guaranteed growth, and control of your money. Just go to https://www.bankonyourself.com/roundtable.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
What have the wildfires done to southern California and the people who live there? And could any of this destruction have been prevented? Just asking questions.The wildfires breaking out across Greater Los Angeles have so far killed at least 25 people and damaged or destroyed over 12,000 structures, according to the Los Angeles Times. Today's guest lost her home in a fire that started in the Eaton Valley of the San Gabriel Mountains. "This is what's left of my house," she wrote on X. "Every house on the block is burned to the ground."Meghan Daum is a writer and author of five books including The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through The New Culture Wars and The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, a PEN Center USA Award winner for creative nonfiction. She also hosts the podcast The Unspeakable with Meghan Daum.
How do we escape stagnation and accelerate progress? What if bubbles are actually good? Just asking questions. "They promised us flying cars. All we got was one hundred forty characters." Those were the words of Peter Thiel over a decade ago, lamenting technological stagnation. The character limit has since increased, but his point remains the same: Innovation in the software world of "bits" has accelerated, but progress in the material world of "atoms" has been stubbornly slow, at least in his telling.Economist Tyler Cowen, who popularized the term "Great Stagnation," argued that we picked all the low-hanging fruit in the early-to-mid 20th century thanks to cheap cultivation of unused land, mass education of a previously uneducated population, and revolutions in transportation, energy, and synthetic materials that could since be only marginally improved at increasingly greater expense and effort. The result has been stagnant wage growth when accounting for price inflation and a failure to realize any revolutionary breakthroughs in energy, transportation, or materials science for decades.But today's guest says there's another underlying reason for the stagnation: a self-defeating cultural and spiritual malaise and pessimism about the future. It manifests itself in the dystopian movies and shows that dominate Hollywood, as well as in the falling prevalence of words associated with progress and the future, and a rise of words associated with caution, worry, and risk found in contemporary literature. Byrne Hobart is the co-author of Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation, which offers a surprising way out of stagnation: embracing the dynamic and chaotic power of bubbles—investment bubbles, big social bubbles, and filter bubbles. Examples range from big, ambitious public investments like the Apollo missions and the Manhattan Project to the rise of bitcoin.
Is it time for the nuclear option? Just asking questions.A nuclear renaissance may be afoot. The partial reactor meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island plant in 1979 invigorated an anti-nuclear movement that forced the industry to a grinding halt for decades. But in 2023, the first reactor built from scratch since 1974 began operating. Big investments are being made in so-called "advanced nuclear," which promises to deliver smaller, less costly, and less risky reactors. And the AI boom has caused such an energy hunger that tech companies are talking about funding their own nuclear reactors. In fact, Microsoft wants to reopen Three Mile Island! We are so back, at least that's what today's guest tells us. Isabelle Boemeke is a nuclear influencer. What is that? Well, she'll tell us more in a minute, but what I can tell you for now is that she kissed a cask and she liked it. Boemeke is a Brazilian fashion model who developed an interest in nuclear power's potential to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Why are we forgetting history's lessons?We're told in school that we study history so as not to repeat its mistakes. But what if those lessons aren't sticking? Today's guest regularly invokes what he calls The Great Forgetting. The striking thing about this collective amnesia is that it doesn't apply only to distant, ancient history, but hard lessons learned only a few decades ago—lessons about inflation, price controls, and crime.Tyler Cowen is the Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Director of the Mercatus Center, and host of the podcast Conversations with Tyler. He and his colleague Alex Tabbarok founded the popular and influential economics blog Marginal Revolution and recently launched their joint show, the Marginal Revolution Podcast, which has released a limited series on the unlearned economic and cultural lessons of the 1970s.
This week's guest is Christina Dent, whose organization, End It For Good, seeks to change the approach to addiction from a criminal justice issue to a health-centered one. But Dent is not your typical anti–drug war activist. She's an evangelical Christian who believes legalizing drugs is the conservative thing to do—a position she adopted after an encounter she had as a foster mom.Reason's Billy Binion and Dent talked about her conservative religious upbringing, the surprising history of the war on drugs, how the current approach to substance abuse fuels crime, misconceptions about people struggling with addiction, and why prohibition is actually a progressive response. She has also offered to send a copy of her recent memoir, Curious, free of charge to anyone interested in learning more, which you can request at curious@enditforgood.com.0:00—Introduction4:45—The foster experience that changed Dent11:43—What causes addiction?16:55—Addiction and recovery are not one-size-fits-all.25:57—Drug criminalization is anti-Christian conservative values33:14—Helping families struggling with addiction41:34—Decriminalization efforts in the U.S.46:52—The costs and tradeoffs of legalization59:43—Is Dent conservative or Republican?1:02:15—Dent's law enforcement outreach1:17:26—Effective treatment is not cold turkey or zero-sum.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman reflect on the failed policy decisions that have exacerbated the L.A. wildfire crisis, as well as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's announcement that the company is ditching third-party fact checking on Facebook.01:54—L.A. wildfires and failed policy28:06—Weekly listener question37:36—Zuckerberg announces the company nixes third-party fact checking47:06—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Go to zbiotics.com/ROUNDTABLE to get 15 percent off your first order when you use ROUNDTABLE at checkout. ZBiotics is backed with a 100 percent money-back guarantee so if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked.Are you a student looking for a transformative opportunity that supports the foundations of a free society? Reliance College invites students aged 16 to 24 to the 2025 Great Connections Seminar in Chicago, from July 26th to August 2nd. This year's theme, "Reason and Free Will," dives into timeless ideas from writers such as Thomas Jefferson, Ayn Rand, and Aristotle. Students sharpen critical thinking in small, dynamic groups, developing the intellectual tools needed to thrive in a free society. Outside the classroom, they'll explore Chicago's vibrant culture—touring museums, trying improv comedy, and building lifelong connections. Parents, this program equips students to think, reason, and act independently. Go to reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply. Early registration is just $400 before March 1st, including room and board, with scholarships available. Don't miss out! Visit www.reliancecollege.org/reason to learn more and apply.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
"Tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary," says Donald Trump, who made many promises throughout the 2024 presidential race to raise the cost of imports from China, Mexico, and Canada—America's three biggest trading partners. But are Trump's tariffs a good idea or a terrible one? And is the era of free trade coming to a close?That's the topic of today's Reason Interview. Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with Dartmouth economist Douglas Irwin, author of Trade Policy Disaster: Lessons from the 1930s and Free Trade under Fire, now in its fifth edition. They talk about the negative impacts of the tariffs that Trump levied in his first term; why Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden also trafficked in protectionism; and why free trade is always under attack despite its overall benefits.0:00—Introduction1:13—The fight for free trade3:06—Donald Trump: "Tariff Man"5:44—How tariffs affect consumers9:03—Trump's political motivations behind tariffs12:33—U.S. steel industry15:15—The effect of protectionism on jobs18:39—Automation, industry, and agriculture25:40—China's protectionist policies26:58—Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act33:59—Free trade debates of the Ronald Regan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton eras38:41—China's impact on markets40:24—Populist arguments against free trade44:49—The narrative about the baby formula shortage is wrong.51:29—"Made in China" vs. "assembled in China"52:41—The "Buy American" fallacyToday's sponsor:The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a taping of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. The next one takes place on January 21 with two of the nation's most notable proponents of immigration liberalization, David Bier and Bryan Caplan, who will join Nick for a timely discussion about the state of U.S. immigration policy in 2025. They will discuss the implications of the incoming Trump administration's immigration proposals and make the libertarian case for why more immigration will make America great again.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman chime in on the ongoing online debate over a federal visa program for high-skilled workers and look back at the legacy of former President Jimmy Carter.04:04—H-1B visa debate21:07—Biden blocks sale of U.S. Steel to Japan's Nippon Steel30:49—Weekly listener question41:13—Former President Jimmy Carter dead at 10057:59—This week's cultural recommendationsToday's sponsor:ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Go to zbiotics.com/ROUNDTABLE to get 15 percent off your first order when you use ROUNDTABLE at checkout. ZBiotics is backed with a 100 percent money-back guarantee so if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is Sister Helen Prejean, a Catholic nun famous for her activism against the death penalty. In the early 1980s, Prejean met a prisoner on death row—Elmo Patrick Sonnier—after an activist asked her to write him a letter. She served as Sonnier's spiritual adviser and accompanied him to his death, which inspired her work against capital punishment. Her 1993 book, Dead Man Walking, was made into a movie starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Prejean. Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally also created a highly regarded opera of the same name.Reason's Billy Binion spoke with Prejean about growing up in the segregated South, her opposition to the death penalty, how she connects with crime victims, and her response to Christians who believe the death penalty is just.0:00—Introduction1:15—Dead Man Walking and being a spiritual adviser4:40—Sister Prejean's death row counseling11:52—Robert Lee Willie and Faith Hathaway18:45—Advocating for "unpopular" people29:20—Marcellus Williams33:09—Would Prejean support the death penalty even if absolute certainty was possible?34:48—Faith-based activism and "loving your enemy"40:07—Being truly "pro-life"42:29—Navigating tribalism44:29—Calling on the church to embrace feminism and LGBTQ inclusivity47:07—Prejean's personal history and Vatican II reforms51:40—Falling in love with a priest despite a vow of celibacy56:42—The biggest threat in the world nowSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In the last episode of The Reason Roundtable in 2024, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman select undercovered stories from the past year across three categories: politics, global affairs, and private industry. Au revoir, 2024!00:14—Undercovered stories in politics18:07—Undercovered stories in global affairs33:14—Undercovered stories in private industry/commerce48:24—2024 under the radar cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Few figures have literally and figuratively electrified American culture the way Bob Dylan has. He released his first album in 1962, won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, and continues to perform about 100 concerts a year at the ripe age of 83. His life is chronicled in the new movie A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet.But what's the meaning—or meanings—of Bob Dylan, who sang at Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington, became a born-again Christian in the 1970s, and wrote a book called The Philosophy of Modern Song?Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with Jeffrey Edward Green, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the new book Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God. Green argues that Dylan's work embodies a uniquely American tension between commitments to individual self-expression, the pursuit of political and social justice, and being right with one's version of God. In this, he is akin to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other figures who refused to subjugate their lives completely to a particular cause. Dylan's willingness to openly struggle with these conflicting demands—and his abiding interest in adapting past musical forms—helps explain why he remains so important to understanding where we've been as a country and where we might be headin'.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Peter Suderman welcome special guest Tim Carney to the show. The panelists discuss Joe Biden's commutations of 37 out of 40 federal death row sentences, before unpacking the latest on the traditional end-of-year struggle in Congress to pass a spending deal.00:39 - Joe Biden commutes federal death row sentences06:41 - Congress scrambles to pass spending deal29:32 - Weekly listener question36:12 - Will Trump administration policies be more family friendly?48:59 - This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsor:ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Go to zbiotics.com/ROUNDTABLE to get 15 percent off your first order when you use ROUNDTABLE at checkout. ZBiotics is backed with a 100 percent money-back guarantee so if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
For the very first Reason Versus debate this week, Reason was joined by The Bulwark for a lively, thought-provoking discussion. The resolution: "You Don't Have To Pick a Side in Politics." Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch argued for the affirmative, while The Bulwark's Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell argued for the negative. The debate was moderated by Reason's Peter Suderman.Whether you've made up your mind about the necessity of choosing sides or are questioning the whole premise, this debate will challenge your assumptions and broaden your perspective. The discussion was recorded in front of a live audience at the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is Penny Lane, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker whose previous works include Listening to Kenny G and Hail Satan?, both of which formed the basis of previous Reason interviews linked in the show notes.Her exceptional new film is Confessions of a Good Samaritan. It's currently streaming on Netflix and follows her experience as an "altruistic" kidney donor, or one who gives an organ away to an anonymous stranger. Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with Lane about how she came to make her decision; its effects on her body, mind, and finances; and the ethics of current policy, which prevents donors from being paid for giving away life-saving organs. "My instinct as more or less a libertarian is, yeah, pay people," Lane tells Reason. "It seems like a really obvious thing." But it's not a simple one, she explains, both because of current laws and medical history. They also talk about the state of documentary film making, if we're in a golden age for the genre, and whether audiences are becoming smarter consumers of media.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Based Beff Jezos, co-founder of Extropic, discusses AI safety, decentralization, and going analog.SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcasts/just-asking-questions/Must we accelerate AI innovation?You've probably heard of "effective altruism," but how about "effective accelerationism," or e/acc? "You claim to be building an artificial god in the human image. We're building the conduit for the thermodynamic god that created us. We are not the same." Those are the words of Based Beff Jezos, a pseudonymous X account devoted to spreading the e/acc message far and wide, once described by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen as a "patron saint of techno-optimism" and by its detractors as "unhinged" and "absolutely toxic for the AI discourse." The man behind Based Beff Jezos was unmasked in Forbes magazine last December as Guillaume Verdon, a Google quantum computing engineer-turned-co-founder of the AI startup Extropic, which has received about $14 million in seed funding to develop a new kind of chip for running AI models. He joins us today to talk about effective accelerationism, the politics of AI, and what his company is doing to make sure that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) arrives quickly and remains beyond the control of a single corporation or government. Sources Referenced:→"Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite's 'E/Acc' Movement?" by Emily Baker-White in Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/12/01/who-is-basedbeffjezos-the-leader-of-effective-accelerationism-eacc/?sh=6bbbdb8d7a13→what the f* is e/acc, the e/acc newsletter https://effectiveaccelerationism.substack.com/p/what-the-f-is-eacc→"SITUATIONAL AWARENESS: The Decade Ahead," by Leopold Aschenbrenner https://situational-awareness.ai/→Gavin Newsom's veto of California's AI bill https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/SB-1047-Veto-Message.pdf→"What is Moore's Law?" by Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/moores-law→"Microsoft, Google and Amazon turn to nuclear energy to fuel the AI boom," by Mehek Mazhar in CBC Radio https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/generative-ai-and-nuclear-energy-1.7362127→Extropic: Ushering in the Thermodynamic Future https://www.extropic.ai/future→Just Asking Questions with Bryan Johnson https://youtu.be/ovQC97kRA-EChapters00:00 Coming up…00:28 Introductions02:13 What is effective accelerationism?04:33 Building a conduit for the thermodynamic god that created us?09:54 Is AGI inevitable?17:01 Why open source AI doesn't need regulation29:18 A Second Amendment for AI?31:58 Philosophical foundations of e/acc37:16 An AI arms race between the U.S. and China?55:27 Criticism of OpenAI01:01:08 AI under the second Trump administration01:07:22 Designing a biologically inspired chip01:15:46 How the American chip industry will be impacted by China and Taiwan01:18:44 Will AI make humans irrelevant?01:23:53 How do we reimagine governance?
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie welcome special guest Jacob Sullum to discuss President Joe Biden's latest batch of pardons and clemency grants, as well as President-elect Donald Trump's plans to pardon January 6 Capitol rioters.01:01—Biden's clemency grants and pardons14:13—Trump intends to pardon January 6 rioters37:57—Weekly listener question50:36—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsor:In an election year, getting overwhelmed by the constant buzz of news and opinions is easy. Understanding the true impact of political events can be a challenge. Not Another Politics Podcast, from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, provides clear, research-driven perspectives on the biggest issues. Get the insights you need to truly understand the political landscape—no spin, just facts. Subscribe today at harris.uchicago.edu/napp or look for Not Another Politics Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Brianna Wu and TafTaj discuss the role of transgender issues in the 2024 election, 'centrist' trans politics, and their own personal stories.SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcasts/just-asking-questions/About 0.5% of US adults identify as transgender as of a 2022 UCLA study. Among 13-17 year olds, it's grown to about 1.5%. That uptick in the youth might help explain why trans issues have played an increasingly large role in American politics. Registered voters told Gallup pollsters it was among the least important political issues they considered when weighing their presidential vote–just below climate change. And yet, the Trump campaign spent $65 million running ads in swing states attacking Harris' transgender policy stances in the final stretch of the campaign, according to the New York Times. The top Harris super PAC found that one such ad shifted voters who viewed it almost 3 points towards Trump and that it resonated particularly well among demographics that shifted significantly in Trump's direction. In a relatively close election, is it possible this actually was a deciding factor? And how should trans advocates and Democrats adjust their their approach to this issue. Joining us today to talk about it are Brianna Wu and TafTaj. They are two of the co-hosts of the new show Dollcast, a show about transgender issues and politics acting as a corrective to what they see as the excesses or errors of the trans and gender critical movements. Taftaj is a streamer and commentator. Wu is a programmer, political activist and commentator perhaps best known for her involvement in Gamergate. She now runs the progressive Rebellion PAC.Recorded on: November 19, 2024Chapters:00:00 Coming up…00:29 Introduction03:24 Brianna Wu's political evolution06:03 "the progressive purity spiral"07:25 Taf's political evolution09:58 "The centrist case for trans rights"15:42 The "President Trump is for you" ad23:10 "Non-binary" identity and science29:17 Wu and Taf's personal stories40:53 Youth gender dysphoria science and the Cass Review48:46 Should insurance companies not be involved?54:26 A libertarian approach?01:05:05 Technological changes01:07:48 Questions more people should be asking
In late 2017, in the name of "zero tolerance," President Donald Trump introduced a policy of separating parents and children who crossed the Southern border and requested asylum in the United States. In all, an estimated 5,500 children were taken from their parents and many were held in detention facilities, some of which had been constructed by the Obama administration. Over 1,000 children are still unaccounted for by the federal government. The policy ended in 2018 after massive public outcry. The zero tolerance policy is the subject of Separated, a new documentary by Academy Award–winning filmmaker Errol Morris. It has aired on MSNBC and will be available for streaming on December 17.Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with Morris and journalist Jacob Soboroff, whose book on the controversy inspired the film. They discuss how family separation became policy and whether it acted as a deterrent, America's long and ambivalent relationship with legal and illegal immigration, and what Trump's second term will mean for immigration policy.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman assess the situation in Syria after Bashar al-Assad flees the country and dig into the health care policy debate in the wake of the recent assassination of United Healthcare's CEO, Brian Thompson.02:58 - Bashsar al-Assad ousted in Syria15:36 - Murdered United Healthcare CEO's death stirs debate34:42 - Weekly listener question48:56 - This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:Lumen. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. You just breathe into the device and it measures your metabolism through your breath. The phone-based app lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs, and it gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workouts, sleep, and even stress management. Your metabolism is your body's engine—it's how your body turns the food you eat into fuel that keeps you going. Because your metabolism is at the center of everything your body does, optimal metabolic health translates to a bunch of benefits, including easier weight management, improved energy levels, better fitness results, and better sleep. It can help women track their cycles and the onset of menopause, and adjust recommendations to keep your metabolism healthy through hormonal shifts. So, if you want to stay on track with your health this holiday season, go to lumen.me/ROUNDTABLE to get 15% off your Lumen.ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Go to zbiotics.com/ROUNDTABLE to get 15 percent off your first order when you use ROUNDTABLE at checkout. ZBiotics is backed with a 100 percent money-back guarantee so if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this special live episode of The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman will respond to your burning questions.
Today's guest is Brendan O'Neill, chief political writer for Spiked and the author of the bracing new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation.O'Neill and Reason's Nick Gillespie talk about the response in the United Kingdom and the United States to Hamas' attacks last year, Israel's ongoing military actions, and what's likely to come next in a postwoke world. "On October 7," says O'Neill, "the progressive left went from 'believe women' to 'believe fascists.' They took Hamas at its word over the testimonies of raped women."They also discuss whether O'Neill's politics have changed over the years. At the start of his career a quarter-century ago, he was an unapologetic man of the left—a self-declared Trotskyist, in fact. But these days he seems to make more common cause with conservatives and libertarians. "My rallying cry remains the same," O'Neill insists. "Increase the power of man over nature and decrease the power of man over man."Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Crypto podcaster, writer, and infrastructure investor Nic Carter discusses the role digital assets played in Trump's election, the persecution of Polymarket, and the "enormous spiritual chasm between the right and the left."-----Reason's Webathon fundraiser is happening now. If you like what we do here, it'll go a long way if you click this link, make a donation, and let them know JAQ sent you: https://reason.pub/4f2SC0lTHANK YOU!-----SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlShow Archive: https://reason.com/podcasts/just-asking-questions/Was bitcoin the winner of the 2024 election? Just asking questions. Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to protect bitcoin and the entire crypto economy. Major endorsements from the industry followed, including from the Winklevoss twins, who each made a $1 million bitcoin donation to a pro-Trump PAC. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong called Trump's win the "dawn of a new crypto era." Bitcoin has hit new all-time highs, since the election.Today's guest has been writing and speaking on these topics for a long time, and was also celebrating after the election, going so far as to call Trump's win a victory in a "spiritual war."Nic Carter is a writer and general partner at Castle Island Ventures, which invests in crypto-financial infrastructure.Let's start with crypto and bitcoin before we zoom all the way out to spiritual warfare. Nick begins by telling us why he's optimistic about Trump's second term in regard to making America a better place for people to buy, sell, and hold bitcoin and other crypto assets.This conversation was recorded on Nov. 20, 2024. Between now and then, some important and relevant news has come to light, especially regarding debanking. There is a new intro to this episode detailing why this matters.Sources referenced:Get all the links here: https://reason.com/podcast/2024/12/05/nic-carter-did-bitcoin-win-the-electionChapters:00:00:00 Coming up…00:00:35 New context regarding Operation Chokepoint 2.000:06:10 Did bitcoin win the 2024 election?00:08:07 Nic is optimistic about Trump 2.000:10:26 Why has the GOP embraced crypto?00:14:19 OCP 2.0 and Silvergate00:18:44 How do you make normal people care about this?00:21:45 The role of the FDIC00:23:36 What will Trump do about all of this?00:28:10 Central bank digital currencies, and why they matter00:30:15 What can Nic tell us about his trip to congress?00:31:08 What are stablecoins and why are they important?00:37:29 The persecution of Polymarket00:44:32 The election and spiritual warfare00:57:30 Nic's wish list for Trump 2.001:07:58 Nic's No. 1 question: Where did COVID come from?
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman react to President Joe Biden's blanket pardon of his son Hunter Biden and President-elect Donald Trump's nomination of Kash Patel for the role of FBI Director.04:47—President Joe Biden pardons Hunter Biden23:14—Kash Patel nominated to lead the FBI38:13—Weekly listener question47:33—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:In an election year, getting overwhelmed by the constant buzz of news and opinions is easy. Understanding the true impact of political events can be a challenge. Not Another Politics Podcast, from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, provides clear, research-driven perspectives on the biggest issues. Get the insights you need to truly understand the political landscape—no spin, just facts. Subscribe today at harris.uchicago.edu/napp or look for Not Another Politics Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst who is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center and a columnist for The Free Press. A decade ago, in the wake of the Arab Spring and various "color" revolutions around the world, Gurri published The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, which analyzed how social media empowered ordinary people to resist control from above and anticipated the rise of Donald Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Brexit.Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Gurri shortly after the 2024 election at The Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of intellectual conformity and groupthink. (Go here for information on Reason events.) They talked about why Gurri voted for Trump and why he's cautiously optimistic about the next four years.Today's Sponsor:Reason Versus: "You Don't Have To Pick a Side in Politics": On Wednesday, December 18, you are invited to join Reason and our friends at The Bulwark for this new thought-provoking debate series in Washington D.C. at the Howard Theatre. Whether you've made up your mind about the necessity of choosing sides or are questioning the whole premise, this debate will challenge your assumptions and broaden your perspective.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman chime in on the latest developments in Donald Trump's cabinet appointments and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).00:28 - Fred Smith tribute04:58 - Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) takes shape18:58 - Trump's FCC pick and free speech31:38 - Weekly listener question38:54 - Tulsi Gabbard vs. the Deep State49:31 - This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Go to zbiotics.com/ROUNDTABLE to get 15 percent off your first order when you use ROUNDTABLE at checkout. ZBiotics is backed with a 100 percent money-back guarantee so if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
AEI's Yuval Levin discusses Trump's mandate (or lack thereof), building coalitions, and how the classic divide between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine remains relevant.SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcasts/just-asking-questions/__________Is Trumpism America's new governing ideology? Just asking questions.Trump won decisively by modern standards, meaning for the first time in several cycles nobody is seriously disputing the results, but did he really win bigly? Does he have a governing mandate?Today's guest says, not really. Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of National Affairs. He co-authored a paper published just before the election called "Politics Without Winners" about the inability of either Democrats or the GOP to build a lasting governing coalition in the 21st century.He recently published some of his thoughts on the election in The Dispatch under the headline, What Trump's Win Doesn't Mean, writing "The 2024 election was very much of a piece with our 21st-century politics: It was a relatively narrow win owed almost entirely to negative polarization." We dig into that negative polarization, whether Trump was given a "mandate" by voters, and how Edmund Burke vs. Thomas Paine is still a relevant divide in contemporary politics.Chapters:00:00 Coming up00:20 Is Trumpism America's governing ideology?00:33 Subscribe to the channel!!!00:54 Introducing Yuval Levin02:22 What is the significance of Trump winning a fairly slim majority?04:04 Given the sweep of all swing states, and the wins in the House and Senate, are you SURE this isn't a mandate?07:25 Do the parties retain any internal coherence?09:01 Which faction in the GOP is ascendant?13:14 Why did people who called Trump untrustworthy still vote for him? What does that mean?16:38 Comparing Trump and Grover Cleveland24:40 Are we now are we coming out of this electoral results legitimacy crisis?26:09 The history of populism in the Democratic party29:53 The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left42:51 Is the left going to be insanely statist forever?48:04 Why does America consistently produce two major parties?52:16 Is Yuval bullish on Elon and Vivek's D.O.G.E.?55:39 Would it take for the Democrats to build a lasting coalition?58:40 The Final Question: What does our political system lack?
Today's guest is Amanda Knox, an activist, writer, and host of the podcast Labyrinths. In 2007, while studying abroad in Italy, Knox was accused of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in what the lead prosecutor claimed was a bizarre sex game gone wrong. Despite mishandled DNA, a coerced confession, and a lack of credible evidence, Knox was convicted and spent nearly four years in an Italian prison before being exonerated in 2015. Her case was a media spectacle that sensationalized every aspect of her life.Reason's Billy Binion talks with Knox about her views on true crime after her story became one of the biggest examples of the modern era. They also discuss the psychological impact of being imprisoned for something she didn't do; what Knox thinks the U.S. criminal justice system gets right and wrong; and how she reacts to people who still believe she's lying. What's more, she shares a fascinating tidbit about her relationship with the lead prosecutor on her case—something that will be featured more in her new book Free, which is available for preorder.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman assess the current shape of President-elect Donald Trump's cabinet picks and policy priorities.00:27 - New Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)14:48 - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz nominated for Trump cabinet positions31:37 - Weekly listener question41:46 - Trump's foreign policy cabinet picks48:22 - This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:In an election year, getting overwhelmed by the constant buzz of news and opinions is easy. Understanding the true impact of political events can be a challenge. Not Another Politics Podcast, from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, provides clear, research-driven perspectives on the biggest issues. Get the insights you need to truly understand the political landscape—no spin, just facts. Subscribe today at harris.uchicago.edu/napp or look for Not Another Politics Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Independent journalist Lee Fang discusses why the Democrats lost so badly and whether or not the party has the ability to course correct anytime soon.SubscribeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@reasonJustAskingQuestions/featuredApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcasts/just-asking-questions/Donald Trump won the presidential election decisively, taking every single battleground state, and as we discussed last week with Patrick Ruffini, winning over new voters across all sorts of racial, age, and gender demographics. He's, once again, remade the electoral map, with Republicans capturing the Senate and the House. What should Democrats learn from this loss? Lee Fang is an independent journalist and political commentator who runs a Substack at leefang.com. One of his most recent posts comments on the complete lack of self-reflection coming from many of the highly-paid Democratic consultants who seem to have whiffed so badly with the Harris campaign messaging.Chapters:00:00 Coming up…00:27 Intro Theme00:53 Subscribe to the new channel02:41 What should Democrats learn from this loss?03:18 Democratic consultants lash out at voters as racist and sexist06:34 White progressives vs pretty much everyone else?10:06 Party insiders are burying their heads in the sand12:28 Will a reckoning come?19:36 What issues on the left are most ripe for rethinking?21:16 Border security25:40 Bernie Sanders' post-election criticism of the Democrats30:00 Jared Polis Democrats?33:28 Elon Musk's Republicanism36:04 The MeToo Culture and rightwing young men50:07 Even California is shifting red01:06:41 Is there any Democrat out there who you're bullish on?01:09:33 This could all backfire on the GOP01:13:43 Is censorship behind us?01:17:19 What's one question that you think more people should be asking?
In the wake of massive victories by Donald Trump and Republicans, here's a question worth asking: What does today's GOP really stand for? Longstanding support for free trade and overseas wars seems to have been replaced with tariffs and non-interventionism.Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis are the authors of The Myth of Left and Right. They argue that the way we talk about the political spectrum misleads and confuses us because it reduces complex special-interest coalitions to one or two issues that really aren't representative of what the parties actually stand for. As a result, they say that the next four years will be as fractious within the GOP (and the Democratic Party too) as the last four.Today's Sponsor:ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Get 15 percent off by going to ZBiotics/TRI and using the code TRI at checkout.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman react to last week's presidential election and forecast what might come next.01:55—"Big picture" election reaction27:02—"Little picture" election reaction38:27—Weekly listener question48:58—Trump's ideas on anti-censorship52:59—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:From Greek philosophers, who are the wellspring of democratic ideals, to America's founding fathers to contemporary critics who question everything: each is welcome at St. John's College—where students encounter Adam Smith and Karl Marx; St. Augustine and Friedrich Nietzsche; James Baldwin and Virginia Woolf. Here, there are no secondary sources, no experts, and no one telling you what to believe. Rather, there are original sources and a community devoted to collaborative inquiry, intellectual humility, and the discomfort that comes from diverse opinions. Explore 3,000 years of human thought on campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Annapolis, Maryland. For Master's degree candidates, we also offer studies in the great texts of the East, in-person or online. Learn more at SJC.edu/reason.In an election year, getting overwhelmed by the constant buzz of news and opinions is easy. Understanding the true impact of political events can be a challenge. Not Another Politics Podcast, from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, provides clear, research-driven perspectives on the biggest issues. Get the insights you need to truly understand the political landscape—no spin, just facts. Subscribe today at harris.uchicago.edu/napp or look for Not Another Politics Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Why did Donald Trump win?Trump is back. Back again. He's secured the Electoral College majority needed to become America's 47th president and looks on track for a popular vote majority—the first Republican to pull that off in more than 20 years. A New York Times breakdown shows that across just about every type of county—urban, suburban, older population, younger, white, black, Latino—Trump improved his numbers. Surprising to many was Trump's large improvement among Latinos of all kinds, despite—or maybe in some cases because of—his hardline immigration stances and insult comic Tony Hinchcliffe calling Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage" at his Madison Square Garden rally shortly before the election. Yet seven percent more Puerto Rican Americans appear to have voted for Trump this year than in 2020.One person who is less surprised than many is today's guest, Patrick Ruffini, who wrote a book predicting much of this called Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP. He's a Republican Party strategist, a pollster for Echelon Insights, and writes at The Intersection.
Will history be made? Will it end? Joining Gillespie are The Fifth Column's Kmele Foster, Bloomberg economics columnist Allison Schrager, and many more special guests, who will break down the weirdest—and possibly the most consequential—election season in any of our lifetimes.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Will Election 2024 result in an orderly transfer of power—or will the results unleash controversy and chaos that threatens the foundations of our democracy? Before America goes to the polls on November 5, you're invited to join the four hosts of The Reason Roundtable—Reason Magazine's own Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch—live from New York City for a no-holds-barred discussion of what this election means for the future of America.The Reason Roundtable is a rollicking contretemps between these four opinionated journalists as they put their personal "free minds and free markets" filter on the biggest stories of today. During this hour-long live taping of the popular weekly podcast, expect lively roasting and incisive analysis.This was filmed live in front of a live audience in New York City.
Dave Smith is for Trump. Jacob Grier is for Harris. David Stockman says we're screwed either way.SubscribeYouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcast/2024-10/31/dave-smith-david-stockman-and-jacob-grier-who-should-win-the-electionIs this the most important election ever? And who should win? Just asking questions.Next week, America decides: elect the 78-year-old criminally indicted, twice-impeached ex-president who's pledged to impose a universal tariff of 20 percent and embark on the largest mass deportation in American history; or his opponent, the vice president, swapped in for a malfunctioning Joe Biden, whose first major policy proposal was to cap grocery store prices to fight inflation, and who has trouble explaining how she'd govern any differently than her increasingly unpopular predecessor. It's a close race.Independents, including libertarians, will likely decide it.So we've invited three of them on today with three different perspectives to explain their votes. The first is David Stockman. He's the former director of the Office of Budget Management under Ronald Reagan. He served as a U.S. representative, and he says whoever wins we're basically screwed because neither candidate is addressing the most important policy issues facing America today.Then we'll talk to Dave Smith, a repeat guest on the show, host of the popular Part of the Problem podcast. He says he's reluctantly and probably voting for Trump because of the threat that Kamala Harris—and the political machine that she represents—poses to liberty in America.And lastly, we'll talk with Jacob Grier, a writer and Reason contributor who says that from a libertarian and small government perspective, the choice is obvious. Donald Trump is an authoritarian threat and Kamala Harris is a far superior choice.Let's just ask each of them some questions.Sources Referenced:David Stockman at The Soho Forum: Are the Two Parties Any Different? https://reason.com/podcast/2024/09/20/are-the-two-parties-any-different/Dave Smith: I'm Voting For Trump | Part Of The Problem https://youtu.be/yyUsJnbUlxQJust Asking Questions with Ford Fischer: What's the Untold Story Behind 'Stop the Steal'? https://youtu.be/ynq-EHI2NdsJust Asking Questions with Vivek Ramaswamy: Is There a Libertarian-Nationalist Alliance? https://youtu.be/NonvV2Hc7h0Jacob Grier: To My Fellow Libertarians: It's Time to Embrace the Harris-Walz Ticket https://www.liberalcurrents.com/to-my-fellow-libertarians-its-time-to-embrace-the-harris-walz-ticket/How Are Reason Staffers Voting in 2024? https://reason.com/2024/10/17/how-are-reason-staffers-voting-in-2024/Chapters:00:00 Coming up…00:39 Introduction02:50 David Stockman: Harris and Trump are both intolerable35:15 Dave Smith: Voting against Harris01:19:28 Jacob Grier: Voting against Trump
Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist at Stony Brook University and the author of the new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Al-Gharbi argues that academics, journalists, and other elite professionals that he calls "symbolic capitalists" are disconnected from the marginalized and disadvantaged communities they claim to speak for—and that, by using the rhetoric of class solidarity drawn from the Occupy movement (which pitted the "99 percent versus the 1 percent"), progressive symbolic capitalists actually exploit those communities to maintain a relatively lush lifestyle.Born and raised in a mixed-race military family in Arizona, al-Gharbi spoke with Reason's Nick Gillespie about wokeness transforming the college experience, his conversion from Catholicism to atheism to Islam, why black and Latino voters appear to be embracing former President Donald Trump in record numbers, and his highly public cancellation in 2014 after he was attacked by Fox News for criticizing U.S. foreign policy.Today's sponsor:The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a taping of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. The next one takes place on November 18 and features Mercatus Center visiting fellow and former CIA analyst Martin Gurri, whose decade-old The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium remains one of the most important guides to the 21st century. Go to reason.com/events for information and tickets.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman convene one week ahead of the election to highlight a few issues where the major-party presidential candidates have significant differences.01:53—The presidential candidates on tariffs, debt, foreign policy, and education35:01—Weekly listener question43:38—Election integrity ahead of next week's election52:43—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:From Greek philosophers, who are the wellspring of democratic ideals, to America's founding fathers to contemporary critics who question everything: each is welcome at St. John's College—where students encounter Adam Smith and Karl Marx; St. Augustine and Friedrich Nietzsche; James Baldwin and Virginia Woolf. Here, there are no secondary sources, no experts, and no one telling you what to believe. Rather, there are original sources and a community devoted to collaborative inquiry, intellectual humility, and the discomfort that comes from diverse opinions. Explore 3,000 years of human thought on campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Annapolis, Maryland. For Master's degree candidates, we also offer studies in the great texts of the East, in-person or online. Learn more at SJC.edu/reason.In an election year, getting overwhelmed by the constant buzz of news and opinions is easy. Understanding the true impact of political events can be a challenge. Not Another Politics Podcast, from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, provides clear, research-driven perspectives on the biggest issues. Get the insights you need to truly understand the political landscape—no spin, just facts. Subscribe today at harris.uchicago.edu/napp or look for Not Another Politics Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
Klaus Schwab's co-author Thierry Malleret discusses stakeholder capitalism, libertarianism, and his new book satirizing the World Economic Forum.SubscribeYouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcasts/just-asking-questions/What's the agenda of the World Economic Forum? And what was The Great Reset? Just asking questions. Every year, there's a big gathering of global elites in Davos, Switzerland: world leaders, titans of industry, Hollywood celebrities. It all started in 1971, thanks to Klaus Schwab—a German economist and business professor who launched what was then called the European Economic Forum as a place to discuss best business practices and promote a theory he'd developed called "stakeholder capitalism," the tenets of which Schwab laid out in the original "The Davos Manifesto." It insists that a company's CEO must serve not only shareholders but entire "societies" and "assume the role of a trustee of the material universe for future generations." While critics have for years lampooned Davos for its brigade of private jets dropping billionaires in an idyllic Swiss mountain town to lecture us about climate change, the WEF and Schwab himself attracted unprecedented attention amid the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic following the July 2020 publication of his ominously titled book The Great Reset. Countless articles, podcasts, and videos theorizing on the real meaning of the Great Reset followed, including one produced by the co-host of this podcast. But you might notice there's another name underneath Schwab's. Thierry Malleret was his co-author on The Great Reset, and again on the follow-up The Great Narrative, and he joins us on the show today. Malleret is an economist who's worked as an adviser for major investment banks and governments. He conceived of—and planned—the program at Davos for several years before parting ways with Klaus Schwab. And he's also an author, most recently of a very interesting book we're going to discuss at length called Deaths at Davos, a dark satire of what's going on within the WEF.Sources referenced:Text and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcasts/just-asking-questions/Zach's video on the Great Reset: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd0OeC6Syd4Just Asking Questions w/ Johan Norberg: https://youtu.be/wC5AG7JDUfY?list=PLBuns9Evn1w9K02WT8x-gzSI-UdeeXFG9 Chapters:00:00 "coming up…"00:58 Introduction03:27 The point of Deaths at Davos04:50 What did Klaus Schwab think?05:40 Others are meant to continue the story07:46 What's the future of WEF-like organizations?12:10 Is the WEF vision of the West dying?13:51 Debating "Stakeholder Capitalism"30:16 Malleret's critique of libertarianism45:40 Will stakeholder capitalism lead to corporatism?51:26 A disagreement about Sweden and COVID54:16 Reacting to "Great Reset" conspiracies01:01:26 The final question
Today's guest is Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, the co-founder of Ideas Beyond Borders (IBB), a nonprofit that translates books and articles about limited government, freedom of thought, and market economics into Arabic and other languages, and distributes them for free in the Middle East and other parts of the world. (Full disclosure: Reason's Nick Gillespie is on the board of IBB.)Gillespie talked with Al Mutar about IBB's new book, Untold Stories of the Middle East, which celebrates entrepreneurs in Kurdistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere whom IBB has given startup grants; how the October 7 attacks on Israel and fighting in Gaza and Lebanon will affect the region for decades; and what it was like to grow up in Baghdad under Saddam Hussein, various Islamic terrorist groups, and the U.S. occupation. This conversation was taped in front of a live audience in New York.Today's sponsor:The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. Go to reason.com/events for information and tickets to the next one.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman welcome back special guest Stephanie Slade to chat about the latest in polling results and the shape of the electorate two weeks ahead of the presidential election.02:16—Latest in polling data two weeks out from the presidential election33:04—Weekly listener question44:15—Takeaways from Vice President Kamala Harris' interview with Fox News' Bret Baier.51:23—This week's cultural recommendationsToday's sponsors:Qualia Senolytic: Have you heard about senolytics yet? It's a class of ingredients discovered less than 10 years ago, and it's being called the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging and enhancing your physical prime. Your goals in your career and beyond require productivity. But let's be honest: The aging process is not our friend when it comes to endless energy and productivity. As we age, everyone accumulates "senescent" cells in their body. Senescent cells cause symptoms of aging, such as aches and discomfort, slow workout recoveries, and sluggish mental and physical energy associated with that "middle age" feeling. Also known as "Zombie Cells," they are old and worn out and not serving a useful function for our health anymore, but they are taking up space and nutrients from our healthy cells. Much like pruning the yellowing and dead leaves off a plant, Qualia Senolytic removes those worn-out senescent cells to allow for the rest of your cells to thrive in the body. Take it just two days a month. The formula is non-GMO, vegan, and gluten-free, and the ingredients are meant to complement one another, factoring in the combined effect of all ingredients together. Resist aging at the cellular level and try Qualia Senolytic. Go to Qualialife.com/ROUNDTABLE for up to 50 percent off and use code ROUNDTABLE at checkout for an additional 15 percent off. For your convenience, Qualia Senolytic is also available at select GNC locations near you.ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Go to zbiotics.com/ROUNDTABLE to get 15 percent off your first order when you use ROUNDTABLE at checkout. ZBiotics is backed with a 100 percent money-back guarantee so if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
The Vice President of the United Cajun Navy, Brian Trascher, discusses effective disaster response and the problems with FEMA.SubscribeYouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/just-asking-questions/id1719355507Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5SpySKAH3LuVyxXk0MF7tlText and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcasts/just-asking-questions/What should the federal government do in a disaster?Two major hurricanes made landfall within two weeks, devastating the southeast. Hurricane Helene has killed more than 200 people, and more than 90 are still missing in North Carolina, where overflowing rivers and tributaries flooded the western part of the state. More than 9,000 remain without power.Hurricane Milton grew to Category 5 status in the Gulf before hitting Florida's west coast just south of Tampa Bay as a Category 3. It caused at least 23 deaths, and both storms are likely to cause over $100 billion in economic damage.Today's guest is part of an organization that's been on the ground in both places helping with disaster relief. Brian Trascher is the vice president of the United Cajun Navy, a volunteer organization that started in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina.Trascher discusses the origins of the Cajun Navy after Hurricane Katrina, conditions on the ground in North Carolina and Florida, the federal government's response, growing distrust of FEMA, and how to better prepare for disaster.Chapters00:00 Coming up…00:10 Introduction01:28 Documentary clip about the United Cajun Navy02:25 What's the status of North Carolina?05:29 United Cajun Navy's origin story10:36 Comparing Hurricanes Helene and Milton15:12 How are resources allocated properly?18:25 When to evacuate and why some people don't23:08 What's it like to deal with FEMA on the ground?29:23 Did a national guard helicopter purposefully sabotage volunteer efforts?38:23 Do government workers get defensive about volunteer help?43:04 Why do people distrust FEMA?57:38 FEMA's budgeting problems1:02:42 The Stafford Act1:08:26 How should people prepare for disaster?1:10:24 What question should people be asking?Photo credit: Travis Long/TNS/Newscom
Today's guest is Meghan McCain, political commentator, former co-host of ABC's The View, and host of the podcast Citizen McCain.Reason's Billy Binion talks with her about the changing GOP, bias in corporate media, the 2024 election, and what it's like to be a non-MAGA, nonpopulist member of today's Republican Party.Today's sponsors:St. John's College. Explore 3,000 years of human thought on campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in Annapolis, Maryland. From the Greek philosophers who are the wellspring of democratic ideals to America's Founding Fathers to contemporary critics who question everything: Each is welcome at St. John's College. In-person and online master's degree courses are offered, too.The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly unscripted discussion in midtown New York City that doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. The next one is on Thursday, October 24, and features the Stony Brook sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, whose new book is We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Tickets are $15 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and light food.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman parse the presidential candidates' latest batch of confounding ideas on tax policy before lamenting their various cringe media appearances over the past week.05:21—Tax policy proposals31:44—Weekly listener question43:38—Candidate cringe media hits54:18—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:From Greek philosophers, who are the wellspring of democratic ideals, to America's founding fathers to contemporary critics who question everything: each is welcome at St. John's College—where students encounter Adam Smith and Karl Marx; St. Augustine and Friedrich Nietzsche; James Baldwin and Virginia Woolf. Here, there are no secondary sources, no experts, and no one telling you what to believe. Rather, there are original sources and a community devoted to collaborative inquiry, intellectual humility, and the discomfort that comes from diverse opinions. Explore 3,000 years of human thought on campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Annapolis, Maryland. For Master's degree candidates, we also offer studies in the great texts of the East, in-person or online. Learn more at SJC.edu/reason.In an election year, getting overwhelmed by the constant buzz of news and opinions is easy. Understanding the true impact of political events can be a challenge. Not Another Politics Podcast, from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, provides clear, research-driven perspectives on the biggest issues. Get the insights you need to truly understand the political landscape—no spin, just facts. Subscribe today at harris.uchicago.edu/napp or look for Not Another Politics Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
How do immigrants change American culture? Just asking questions.While the economy ranks as voters' top concern as of a Wednesday Gallup poll, immigration remains "extremely" or "very" important to 72 percent of registered U.S. voters. As with most issues, there's a large partisan divide, with 63 percent of Republicans responding that immigration is an "extremely" important election year issue, and only 23 percent of Democrats answering the same. Gallup found this summer that more than 55 percent of Americans believed immigration should be decreased, a number higher than it's been for more than 20 years. Although there, too, there's a large partisan divide. In the long view, Gallup finds a fairly stable consensus that immigration is a good thing for the country today, with 68 percent of respondents answering as such in the summer of 2023. This is all in the context of Border Patrol reporting 2.7 million border encounters so far in fiscal year 2024.So what we see is a picture of an American electorate that likes immigration in theory but is increasingly concerned about it in practice. Today's guest predicted that immigration would become the "defining issue of the 21st century" in an article published in an August 2015 opinion piece for The Week, where he wrote that, "just as the building of trade routes and maintenance of empires defined the mercantile age, then the construction of a political economy (capitalist or socialist) became the major problem of the industrial age, the mass movement of people may be the defining issue of whatever we're calling the information age."Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer for National Review, the William F. Buckley Senior Scholar at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and a critic of the kind of libertarian unfettered movement of peaceful people across borders that I favor. We begin by asking why the digital world has brought the issue of immigration to the fore.Chapters:00:00 Coming up…00:32 Introduction03:06 How the information age makes immigration more a pressing issue07:19 What's Dougherty's preferred system?15:56 Immigration's effects on native political power21:20 The history of American nativism is largely Anti-Catholic31:59 The doctrine of first effective settlement39:55 Assimilating into a toxic education environment47:44 Debating "the new economic case against immigration"56:31 A low-trust society?59:31 Immigrants upward mobility01:12:02 Does immigration create a caste system?01:19:00 Zach's ideal system01:27:18 What is a question more people should be asking?Photo credit: Qian Weizhong/VCG/Newscom
Today's guests are Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, author of Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, and American Enterprise Institute fellow Ruy Teixeira, coauthor most recently of Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes.Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with them about the presidential election, how the working class has become the most important—yet most neglected—part of the electorate, and whether libertarians have anyone to root for in national politics.Today's sponsors:St. John's College. Explore 3,000 years of human thought on campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in Annapolis, Maryland. From the Greek philosophers who are the wellspring of democratic ideals to America's founding fathers to contemporary critics who question everything: Each is welcome at St. John's College. In-person and online Master's degree courses are offered, too.ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Get 15 percent off by going to ZBiotics/TRI and using the code TRI at checkout.The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly unscripted discussion in midtown New York City that doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. The next one is on Thursday, October 24, and features the Stony Brook sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, whose new book is We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Tickets are $15 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and light food.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman reflect on last year's October 7 terrorist attack in Israel and the destruction left in the wake of Hurricane Helene across the southeastern United States.02:27—October 7, one year on20:07—Hurricane Helene aftermath35:41—Weekly listener question43:25—Last week's vice presidential debate53:08—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:Qualia Senolytic: Have you heard about senolytics yet? It's a class of ingredients discovered less than 10 years ago, and it's being called the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging and enhancing your physical prime. Your goals in your career and beyond require productivity. But let's be honest: The aging process is not our friend when it comes to endless energy and productivity. As we age, everyone accumulates "senescent" cells in their body. Senescent cells cause symptoms of aging, such as aches and discomfort, slow workout recoveries, and sluggish mental and physical energy associated with that "middle age" feeling. Also known as "Zombie Cells," they are old and worn out and not serving a useful function for our health anymore, but they are taking up space and nutrients from our healthy cells. Much like pruning the yellowing and dead leaves off a plant, Qualia Senolytic removes those worn-out senescent cells to allow for the rest of your cells to thrive in the body. Take it just two days a month. The formula is non-GMO, vegan, and gluten-free, and the ingredients are meant to complement one another, factoring in the combined effect of all ingredients together. Resist aging at the cellular level and try Qualia Senolytic. Go to Qualialife.com/ROUNDTABLE for up to 50 percent off and use code ROUNDTABLE at checkout for an additional 15 percent off. For your convenience, Qualia Senolytic is also available at select GNC locations near you.In an election year, getting overwhelmed by the constant buzz of news and opinions is easy. Understanding the true impact of political events can be a challenge. Not Another Politics Podcast, from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, provides clear, research-driven perspectives on the biggest issues. Get the insights you need to truly understand the political landscape—no spin, just facts. Subscribe today at harris.uchicago.edu/napp or look for Not Another Politics Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is Billy Binion, who joined Reason's staff in 2019 after stints at an opera company (!) and as a contractor for NATO (!!). He has written blockbuster stories about the abuse of power by cops and courts, and he just produced an incredible documentary about a citizen journalist in Laredo, Texas, who sued the city after they arrested her for reporting on a couple of controversial local stories. It's a case that could have major First Amendment implications for independent reporters.Nick Gillespie talks with Binion about what drives his interests in such topics as civil asset forfeiture, SWAT teams run amok, and people who get arrested after using unlicensed guns to ward off would-be killers. They discuss how, contrary to most news accounts, today's Supreme Court is less polarized than the country it serves. And they also talk about how Binion's time living in California and Texas back to back gives him a distinct perspective on blue and red America—and insight into what sort of government governs better, if not quite best.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Who's most to blame for the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021? How much does it matter for the election in November 2024? We all remember the events of January 6, which resulted in unforgettable images, an evacuation of the Capitol, several deaths, $2.7 billion in costs, more than 1,200 criminal charges, an impeachment, and decades in prison for many involved. Today's guest was there during the lead-up to January 6—not as a participant, but as a chronicler. Ford Fischer is a documentary filmmaker and editor in chief of News2Share, which is on the scene for seemingly every major act of political unrest. Ford was also once upon a time an intern at Reason. Most recently, he was a co-writer and cinematographer on a new documentary about January 6 called Fight Like Hell, directed by Jon Long, which is now available for free on YouTube.There are several documentaries about this event out there, but this one contains some footage that Fischer captured in the months and days leading up to the capitol riot, helping the viewer better understand the mechanics of the movement. We focus largely on Fischer's firsthand experience of covering months of "Steal the Steal" protests.Text and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcasts/just-asking-questions/Chapters:00:00 Introduction02:31 The broad context of the "Stop the Steal" movement05:08 Who is Ali Alexander?15:04 Why were some leaders prosecuted and others not?19:46 Insurrection, riot, or something else?26:53 How was even more violence avoided?38:56 Were the police welcoming people inside the Capitol?41:27 Trump's speech: Incitement?51:29 January 5th and the turn against police57:59 Massie: What was the role of federal informants?1:10:54 Will this sort of thing happen again after this upcoming election?1:15:15 The media should present more information and less narrative
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman gawk at the amusing circumstances surrounding the federal indictment of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, before discussing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's recent in-person visits with both presidential candidates.02:25—New York City Mayor Eric Adams indicted in a federal corruption investigation21:58—Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy meets with both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump35:46—Weekly listener question49:27—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:Qualia Senolytic: Have you heard about senolytics yet? It's a class of ingredients discovered less than 10 years ago, and it's being called the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging and enhancing your physical prime. Your goals in your career and beyond require productivity. But let's be honest: The aging process is not our friend when it comes to endless energy and productivity. As we age, everyone accumulates "senescent" cells in their body. Senescent cells cause symptoms of aging, such as aches and discomfort, slow workout recoveries, and sluggish mental and physical energy associated with that "middle age" feeling. Also known as "Zombie Cells," they are old and worn out and not serving a useful function for our health anymore, but they are taking up space and nutrients from our healthy cells. Much like pruning the yellowing and dead leaves off a plant, Qualia Senolytic removes those worn-out senescent cells to allow for the rest of your cells to thrive in the body. Take it just two days a month. The formula is non-GMO, vegan, and gluten-free, and the ingredients are meant to complement one another, factoring in the combined effect of all ingredients together. Resist aging at the cellular level and try Qualia Senolytic. Go to Qualialife.com/ROUNDTABLE for up to 50 percent off and use code ROUNDTABLE at checkout for an additional 15 percent off. For your convenience, Qualia Senolytic is also available at select GNC locations near you.In an election year, getting overwhelmed by the constant buzz of news and opinions is easy. Understanding the true impact of political events can be a challenge. Not Another Politics Podcast, from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, provides clear, research-driven perspectives on the biggest issues. Get the insights you need to truly understand the political landscape—no spin, just facts. Subscribe today at harris.uchicago.edu/napp or look for Not Another Politics Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
How well-protected is Donald Trump?On July 13, Trump became the first U.S. president to be shot in more than 40 years, and the first to be shot during a campaign since 1912. Then, incredibly, the Secret Service stopped a second would-be assassin who was stationed with a rifle on the perimeter of Trump's golf course as the former president was one hole away: two unnervingly close calls in about two months. What's going on? Some Republican lawmakers say Trump is under-protected and accuse the Biden administration of politicizing the Secret Service to intentionally put the president in danger. Media reports say that Trump has made the Secret Service's job too difficult by insisting on golfing on short notice at unsecured locations. The Secret Service says it's understaffed.Today's guest will give us an insider's view of how the Secret Service works and what might have gone wrong. Richard Staropoli served as a special agent in the Secret Service for 25 years, served briefly as the chief information officer for the Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration, and is now the senior managing director for Rivada, a telecommunications and satellite internet company.https://reason.com/podcast/2024/09/26/richard-staropoli-whats-wrong-with-the-secret-service/Chapters:00:00 Introduction01:51 A veteran of the Secret Service reacts to the first assassination attempt06:38 The lack of direct answers12:35 How politicized is the DHS?20:33 Why are these lapses happening right now?25:57 The unique challenges of protecting Trump29:51 Who decides how to allocate Secret Service resources?39:17 The Secret Service is a bloated government agency43:48 Incompetence, malice, or both?54:07 The second attempt on Trump's life01:03:07 DeSantis's state-level investigation01:07:41 Alleged shooter Ryan Routh's background and connections01:12:08 What are the needed reforms?01:14:48 Final Question
You've probably heard some variation of the notion that Millennials and Gen Z are going to be the first generations of Americans to have lower standards of living than their parents. It's too expensive to go to college, to buy a house, to have kids—you name it, goes this line of thinking. Today's guest has good news: Younger Americans are actually doing better than Gen X was at the same stage, and they are in the same ballpark as Baby Boomers when you adjust for inflation and population."Millennials and Gen Z have dramatically more wealth than Gen X had at the same age, and it's growing fast!," writes Jeremy Horpedahl, a libertarian economist trained at George Mason University who teaches at the University of Central Arkansas. His work, which draws on the Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other non-controversial sources, shows that young Americans are doing well and that economic mobility is the rule rather than the exception.Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with Horpedahl about why politicians and media sources get basic economics wrong, why it's vital to always adjust for inflation and population growth, and how growing up in the Dakotas gives him a different, more optimistic perspective on things than many in the academy. Horpedahl also analyzes the economic plans of former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. His answers are provocative, to say the least, just like his research.Today's sponsors:St. John's College. Explore 3,000 years of human thought on campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Annapolis, Maryland. From Greek philosophers who are the wellspring of democratic ideals to America's founding fathers to contemporary critics who question everything: Each is welcome at St. John's College. In-person and online Master's degree courses too.Lumen. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. You just breathe into the device and it measures your metabolism through your breath. The phone-based app lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs, and it gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workouts, sleep, and even stress management. Your metabolism is your body's engine—it's how your body turns the food you eat into fuel that keeps you going. Because your metabolism is at the center of everything your body does, optimal metabolic health translates to a bunch of benefits, including easier weight management, improved energy levels, better fitness results, and better sleep. It can help women track their cycles and the onset of menopause, and adjust recommendations to keep your metabolism healthy through hormonal shifts. Take the next step in improving your health: Go to lumen.me/INTERVIEW to get 15 percent off your purchase.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and special guest Elizabeth Nolan Brown unpack the charges and implications of the federal sex trafficking case against Sean "Diddy" Combs.01:45—Sean "Diddy" Combs faces federal sex trafficking and racketeering charges17:13—CNN unearths North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson's lurid posts on a porn message board29:49—Weekly listener question38:09—Government shutdown looms yet again41:12—Oprah Winfrey interviews Vice President Kamala Harris56:12—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:From Greek philosophers, who are the wellspring of democratic ideals, to America's founding fathers to contemporary critics who question everything: each is welcome at St. John's College—where students encounter Adam Smith and Karl Marx; St. Augustine and Friedrich Nietzsche; James Baldwin and Virginia Woolf. Here, there are no secondary sources, no experts, and no one telling you what to believe. Rather, there are original sources and a community devoted to collaborative inquiry, intellectual humility, and the discomfort that comes from diverse opinions. Explore 3,000 years of human thought on campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Annapolis, Maryland. For Master's degree candidates, we also offer studies in the great texts of the East, in-person or online. Learn more at SJC.edu/reason.In an election year, getting overwhelmed by the constant buzz of news and opinions is easy. Understanding the true impact of political events can be a challenge. Not Another Politics Podcast, from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, provides clear, research-driven perspectives on the biggest issues. Get the insights you need to truly understand the political landscape—no spin, just facts. Subscribe today at harris.uchicago.edu/napp or look for Not Another Politics Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Former budget director under Ronald Reagan, David Stockman, and Stephen Moore, Donald Trump's former senior economic advisor, debate the resolution, "In the current presidential election, both Democrats and Republicans consist of a UniParty that will lead us to the bottom of the national 'policy dumpster.'"Arguing for the affirmative is David Stockman, former budget director under President Reagan. He is the author of six books, the most recent being his 2024 Trump's War on Capitalism. He blogs on his website Contra Corner. The resolution's mention of a "policy dumpster" comes from a three-part blog Stockman authored in August.Taking the negative is Stephen Moore, Trump's former senior economic advisor and the research director of President Reagan's Privatization Commission. He is now a Senior Visiting Fellow in Economics at The Heritage Foundation. He is also the co-founder of Unleash Prosperity, which aims to educate policy makers in supply-side economics. He's the author of the 2012 book Who's the Fairest of Them All?: The Truth about Opportunity, Taxes, and Wealth in America.The debate was moderated by Soho Forum director Gene Epstein.
What are the schools really teaching our kids?It's back-to-school season, which means the curriculum wars are back on the agenda. The right has accused activist infiltrators of "indoctrinating" the next generation with woke struggle sessions, confusing kids about their gender and sexuality, and turning K-12 campuses into war zones by replacing discipline with pseudoscientific therapy. The left has accused the right of authoritarian book bans, whitewashing history, and discriminating against LGBT students and teachers. What's actually happening on campus?Joining us to talk about it today is Erika Sanzi. She's the Director of Outreach for Parents Defending Education, a nonprofit with a stated mission of fighting "indoctrination in schools" and "promoting the restoration of a healthy, nonpolitical education for our kids." She's also serves on the board of the Boys Initiative and is a mother of three teenage sons.Parents Defending Education falls clearly on the side of believing that schools are in danger of becoming full-on "indoctrination centers." In fact, their website features an "IndoctriNation Map" which lists examples from around the country. The conversation opens by defining the difference between indoctrination and education.Sources referenced in the conversation:IndoctriNation Map - Parents Defending EducationNew York City Public Schools introduces mandatory Black Studies curriculum for PreK-12th grades exploring oppression and activism - Parents Defending EducationParents Defending Education vs. Wellesly School DistrictGender Triangle Education Guide | GLSEN used in Jefferson County, Colorado.Report on Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2023 - Institute of Education SciencesUse of Restorative Justice and Restorative Practices at School: A Systematic Literature Review (mdpi.com)Consultant Report Card - Parents Defending Education PEN America: 2023 "Banned" Books UpdateJust Asking Questions: Ruth Whippman: How Is Masculinity Changing?Chapters:00:00 Coming up…00:20 Introduction01:52 Indoctrination vs education04:41 How bad is NYC?06:40 What is the actual purpose of school?10:16 NYC mandates "black studies" for K-1223:46 America's literacy rates are terrible30:19 Minority families vs. gender curriculum41:26 What's the deal with these "consultants"?46:59 Consultants and "social-emotional learning"51:09 Discussing book "bans"57:15 These are sexually explicit books1:05:21 "Bans" skew the debate1:11:10 Schools are deceiving parents on gender identity01:20:06 Why are boys failing so badly?
Today's guest is Kat Timpf, whose new book is I Used To Like You Until…:(How Binary Thinking Divides Us). In a totally insane election season, this just might be the most important book of the year. A sequel of sorts to 2023's You Can't Joke About That: Why Everything Is Funny, Nothing Is Sacred, and We're All in This Together, it seeks to show how politics overwhelms common decency and basic logic.Timpf, who co-hosts the super-popular Gutfeld! late-night show, explains to Reason's Nick Gillespie why she tells some people she works in porn instead of at Fox News, what it's like being libertarian at a conservative network, and how she gets people to engage with each other rather than vilify one another. This podcast was taped in front of a live audience in New York City.Today's sponsors:ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Get 15 percent off by going to ZBiotics/TRI and using the code TRI at checkout.The Reason Roundtable live in New York!, Monday, November 4. Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch will conduct a live taping of The Reason Roundtable at The Village Underground the night before the election. Tickets are $25, doors open at 6:00 P.M., Ticket includes admission to an afterparty. Details here.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman puzzle over the second assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump, and the recent nonsensical claims that Haitians are eating cats in Ohio.03:15—Second assassination attempt on Trump13:30—Claims of Haitians eating cats in Ohio36:40—Weekly listener question45:51—Last week's presidential debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris52:15—This week's cultural recommendationsToday's sponsors:In an election year, getting overwhelmed by the constant buzz of news and opinions is easy. Understanding the true impact of political events can be a challenge. Not Another Politics Podcast, from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, provides clear, research-driven perspectives on the biggest issues. Get the insights you need to truly understand the political landscape—no spin, just facts. Subscribe today at harris.uchicago.edu/napp or look for Not Another Politics Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Go to zbiotics.com/ROUNDTABLE to get 15 percent off your first order when you use ROUNDTABLE at checkout. ZBiotics is backed with a 100 percent money-back guarantee so if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Why is the Brazilian government afraid of X?Judge Alexandre de Moraes has blocked the site formerly known as Twitter in Brazil, where an estimated 40 million people access the site each month. Circumventing the ban on X with a VPN could get you fined about $9,000 a day, around the average per capita income in Brazil. It happened after Musk reinstated accounts that the Brazilian state had accused of being part of "digital militias" undermining Brazil's democracy.X's owner Elon Musk has accused the judge of "repeatedly and brazenly" betraying Brazil's constitution, called for his impeachment, and described him as "Brazil's Darth Vader."The judge has accused Musk of "criminal instrumentalization" of the X platform and frozen the assets of Musk's satellite internet company Starlink in the country.Joining us today from Brazil to talk about all this, and the intensifying global crackdown on online speech, is Glenn Greenwald. His show System Update airs every weeknight at 7 p.m. ET on Rumble. An archive of all his latest work is available on his Substack. Sources referenced in the conversation:Elon Musk on X casting shame on Judge de Moraes2022 Brazilian election results - Resultados – TSEJudge de Moraes' social media order - https://t.co/YjD9gK3ck0Encryption in France - ATICA European Association of Trade + Investment Controls and Compliance AttorneysThierry Breton letter to Elon Musk ahead of of Aug. 2024 X livestream with Trump: https://x.com/ThierryBreton/status/1823033048109367549"What Really Happened in Venezuela's Election?" Just Asking Questions Chapters:00:00 Introduction01:50 How Brazil's 2022 election shapes things today11:48 Does Brazil have any separation of powers?16:50 Is Glenn Greenwald fleeing Brazil?19:54 de Moraes is breaking Brazilian law26:34 Brazil is persecuting Starlink, too31:09 Brazil's restrictions on VPNs34:27 Venezuela's Maduro, leftists, and free speech37:45 How should democracy's handle fraud?42:45 The EU mimics Brazil's speech restrictions47:40 France's arrest of Telegram CEO, Pavel Durov52:26 Defending Section 230 and encryption1:02:14 What is motivating these global crackdowns?
Today's guest is Mike Pesca, who publishes The Gist podcast every weekday. The Gist, which launched in 2014, is a tight 30 minutes of news, interviews, and opinions on the biggest issues of the day. Pesca is a veteran of NPR and Slate—experiences that have made him an outspoken critic of legacy media, especially its willingness to overthrow longstanding commitments to objectivity and fairness in pursuit of progressive versions of "moral clarity."Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with him about his controversial 2021 separation from Slate after he defended a New York Times reporter's use of a racial slur, why once-vaunted newspapers such as The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are rightly losing readers and money, and whether the old world of three broadcast TV networks and heavily gate-kept media had any value.Today's sponsors:Lumen. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. You just breathe into the device and it measures your metabolism through your breath. The phone-based app lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs, and it gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workouts, sleep, and even stress management. Your metabolism is your body's engine—it's how your body turns the food you eat into fuel that keeps you going. Because your metabolism is at the center of everything your body does, optimal metabolic health translates to a bunch of benefits, including easier weight management, improved energy levels, better fitness results, and better sleep. It can help women track their cycles and the onset of menopause, and adjust recommendations to keep your metabolism healthy through hormonal shifts. Take the next step in improving your health: Go to lumen.me/INTERVIEW to get 15 percent of your purchase.The Reason Speakeasy: The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. The next event is scheduled for Wednesday, September 11, and features Fox News' Kat Timpf, whose new book is I Used To Like You Until…(How Binary Thinking Divides Us). Tickets are $15 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and food.An Evening with Richard Dawkins, hosted by Nick Gillespie. Nick Gillespie interviews the legendary scientist in Milwaukee on September 20 as part of his "final bow" tour.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman discuss the Justice Department's press release on Russian "government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns" and reveal which questions they would ask Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in tomorrow's presidential debate.02:34—Russian "government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns"22:19—What would the editors ask candidates at the presidential debate?40:06—Weekly Listener Question45:58—Hunter Biden pleads guilty48:10—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:Qualia Senolytic: Have you heard about senolytics yet? It's a class of ingredients discovered less than 10 years ago, and it's being called the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging and enhancing your physical prime. Your goals in your career and beyond require productivity. But let's be honest: The aging process is not our friend when it comes to endless energy and productivity. As we age, everyone accumulates "senescent" cells in their body. Senescent cells cause symptoms of aging, such as aches and discomfort, slow workout recoveries, and sluggish mental and physical energy associated with that "middle age" feeling. Also known as "Zombie Cells," they are old and worn out and not serving a useful function for our health anymore, but they are taking up space and nutrients from our healthy cells. Much like pruning the yellowing and dead leaves off a plant, Qualia Senolytic removes those worn-out senescent cells to allow for the rest of your cells to thrive in the body. Take it just two days a month. The formula is non-GMO, vegan, and gluten-free, and the ingredients are meant to complement one another, factoring in the combined effect of all ingredients together. Resist aging at the cellular level and try Qualia Senolytic. Go to Qualialife.com/ROUNDTABLE for up to 50 percent off and use code ROUNDTABLE at checkout for an additional 15 percent off. For your convenience, Qualia Senolytic is also available at select GNC locations near you.In an election year, getting overwhelmed by the constant buzz of news and opinions is easy. Understanding the true impact of political events can be a challenge. Not Another Politics Podcast, from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, provides clear, research-driven perspectives on the biggest issues. Get the insights you need to truly understand the political landscape—no spin, just facts. Subscribe today at harris.uchicago.edu/napp or look for Not Another Politics Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
How bad is the national debt? Just asking questions.Our national debt—measured as federal debt held by the public—is over $27 trillion. That's approaching 100 percent of annual gross domestic product, which is higher than it's been since the end of World War II. So, are we screwed? Or are those of us who worry about numbers like this totally misunderstanding the nature of government debt? There's a school of thought called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) that says economists should stop worrying and learn to love the debt because, when you think about it, the government's deficit is a private sector surplus. This is what MMTers believe.Joining us to talk about the debt, the rising influence of MMT, and the likely trajectory of an increasingly debt-burdened country is Bob Murphy. He's an economist and author, senior fellow at the Mises Institute, and host of The Bob Murphy Show and The Human Action Podcast.Sources referenced in this episode:Federal Debt Held by the Public | St. Louis FedFederal Debt Held by the Public as Percent of Gross Domestic Product | St. Louis FedReal Gross Domestic Product | St. Louis FedFederal government current expenditures: Interest payments | St. Louis FedFederal spending | U.S. Treasury Fiscal DataJust Asking Questions with Ted NordhausJust Asking Questions with Kyla ScanlonReason TV: "Does National Debt Still Matter? America's Gamble"Stephanie Kelton: "The big myth of government deficits" | TEDMurphy hosts Reason's Nick Gillespie on The Human Action PodcastChapters:00:00 Introduction01:34 What economic story does the debt tell?05:28 How is this much debt politically feasible?09:38 Murphy responds to Jason Furman and Keynesianism14:31 The interest paid on the debt17:41 Analogizing alarmism: debt vs. climate26:03 Simple lesson on Social Security and entitlements32:40 Responding to MMT and Kelton's TED talk57:41 Why do MMTers seem so fashionable?01:00:36 Libertarianism: pessimism vs. optimism01:11:16 Final question
Why are prescription drugs so expensive in the United States?"Drug prices in this country are so high because there is zero transparency in the system, and when there's zero transparency in a market, there is no way for it to be efficient," says Mark Cuban, the serial entrepreneur, investor on Shark Tank, and guest on the first episode of the second season of Why We Can't Have Nice Things. When a market is inefficient, adds Cuban, "people learn very quickly how to take advantage of those inefficiencies to their own profit, and that's exactly what's happened in the health care and pharmacy side."Cuban is trying to do something about the lack of transparency in the prescription drug market. In 2022, he launched CostPlusDrugs.com, a website that offers low prices and direct shipping for hundreds of pharmaceuticals and generics. By showing their markup—a standard 15 percent on everything—and encouraging consumers to make their purchases without going through insurance plans, Cuban's project is attempting to inject a bit of capitalism into a health care market that sorely needs it.It's the perfect story to kick off the new season of Why We Can't Have Nice Things, which focuses on how bad regulations and anticompetitive rules are making Americans poorer and sicker. Over the next six weeks, this limited-run Reason podcast series will dive into some of the acute problems with the American health care system, examining how poor policy making is keeping doctors from treating patients and blocking patients from getting needed treatment.The lack of transparency in drug pricing is one of those problems. Price signals are essential to a functioning market—but the prescription drug market seems designed to hide those signals as much as possible.The result is higher prices for everyone. For a lot of Americans, those prices are a source of economic hardship. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 21 percent of adults say they have not filled a prescription because of the cost. Meanwhile, about one in 10 adults say they have cut pills in half or skipped doses of medicine in the last year because of the cost.Cuban's newest venture could be part of the solution. A Vanderbilt University Medical Center study published last year found that the federal government could save taxpayers up to $2.15 billion annually if insurers operating in the Medicare prescription drug plans purchased seven generic oncology drugs at the prices obtained by Cost Plus Drugs.More transparent pricing would have a bigger impact if more Americans were in control of their own health care spending, argues Michael Cannon, the director of health policy for the Cato Institute."You can show them the prices, but they're not going to care unless it's their money on the line," Cannon says. Unfortunately, close to 90 percent of all health care spending in the United States comes from the government or from private insurance companies, leaving individuals with little influence."As a result, we get a health sector that doesn't serve the needs of consumers and patients," says Cannon. "We get a health sector that serves the needs of employers and of the government and whoever controls the government, which ends up being the health care industry."Further reading for this week's episode:"Mark Cuban Has a New Job: Working at an Online Discount Pharmacy," by Joseph Walker at The Wall Street JournalRecovery: A Guide to Reforming the U.S. Health Sector, by Michael CannonThe War on Prices, by Ryan BournePharmacy Benefit Managers: History, Business Practices, Economics, and Policy, by David Hyman, Ge Bai, and T. Joseph Mattingly IIOvercharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care, by David Hyman and Charles SilverWritten by Eric Boehm; produced and edited by Hunt Beaty; fact-checking by Anthony Wallace.
Today's guest is Reason's Eric Boehm, a reporter and the host of the podcast Why We Can't Have Nice Things. The first season of the podcast exposed how little-understood trade policies and regulations screwed with the pricing and availability of everything from baby formula to women's underwear to frozen chicken.The new season focuses on laws and policies that screw up the supply and costs of health care. It debuts on Thursday, September 5, with the first episode featuring billionaire Mark Cuban talking about his company Cost Plus Drugs, which sells prescription drugs directly to consumers at super-low prices. Coming episodes cover how "certificate of need" laws increase the price and reduce the availability of hospital beds, why bans on organ donor compensation cause the death of thousands every year, how restrictions on telemedicine hurt patients with no gain in safety, and how the Food and Drug Administration and Drug Enforcement Administration make legal pharmaceuticals like Adderall tougher and tougher to get.Today's sponsors:The Dispatch: Is former President Donald Trump really going to jail? Does President Joe Biden really have what it takes for a second term? Do these questions even matter in the 2024 election? Get past the bluster and get back to the facts by joining The Dispatch.The Reason Speakeasy: The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. The next event is scheduled for Wednesday, September 11, and features Fox News' Kat Timpf, whose new book is I Used To Like You Until…(How Binary Thinking Divides Us). Tickets are $15 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and food. Go here for details.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie welcome special guest Charles C.W. Cooke to the show. The group discusses the six Israeli hostages, including American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who were found murdered in Gaza over the weekend, before dissecting Kamala Harris' first major interview since entering the presidential race and Donald Trump's recent thoughts on abortion laws.02:39—Six Israeli hostages found murdered by Hamas20:25—Kamala Harris sits down for her first major interview with CNN's Dana Bash.34:25—Weekly Listener Question43:34—Donald Trump on in vitro fertilization and abortion laws54:09—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. On the app, it lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs, and it gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workouts, sleep, and even stress management. All you have to do is breathe into your Lumen first thing in the morning, and you'll know what's going on with your metabolism, whether you're burning mostly fats or carbs. Then, Lumen gives you a personalized nutrition plan for that day based on your measurements. You can also breathe into it before and after workouts and meals, so you know exactly what's going on in your body in real time, and Lumen will give you tips to keep you on top of your health game. Your metabolism is your body's engine—it's how your body turns the food you eat into fuel that keeps you going. Because your metabolism is at the center of everything your body does, optimal metabolic health translates to a bunch of benefits, including easier weight management, improved energy levels, better fitness results, better sleep, etc. Lumen gives you recommendations to improve your metabolic health. It can also track your cycle as well as the onset of menopause, and adjust your recommendations to keep your metabolism healthy through hormonal shifts, so you can keep up your energy and stave off cravings. So, if you want to take the next step in improving your health, go to lumen.me/ROUNDTABLE to get 15 percent off your Lumen.In an election year, getting overwhelmed by the constant buzz of news and opinions is easy. Understanding the true impact of political events can be a challenge. Not another Politics Podcast, from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, provides clear, research-driven perspectives on the biggest issues. Get the insights you need to truly understand the political landscape—no spin, just facts. Subscribe today at harris.uchicago.edu/napp or look for "Not Another Politics Podcast," wherever you get your podcasts.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
How's the economy actually doing?In 2022, economists forecasted that we'd be in a recession by now. Did it ever actually happen, though? Prices got higher, interest rates ticked up, but mass layoffs never really happened and gross domestic product growth chugged on. People mostly weathered the turbulence.Joining us today to talk about all that and to speculate on what effects former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris' proposals might have on the economy is Kyla Scanlon. She worked as a macroeconomic analyst at Capital Group before founding Bread, a financial education company. She has built a large social media following by teaching finance and economics via YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and TikTok. She recently published her first book In This Economy: How Money and Markets Really Work.As we came out of the pandemic, we experienced inflation beyond what most millennials have seen in their lifetimes. The Federal Reserve hiked interest rates to attempt to achieve a soft landing—using the power of the central bank to cool a hot economy without causing a recession. We start by asking Kyla: "We're in an election year. How do you think voters should perceive the current state of our economy?"Show notes: https://reason.com/podcast/2024/08/29/kyla-scanlon-whats-actually-wrong-with-the-economy
Today's guest is Nick Cave, the music legend who emerged from Australia in the 1980s. Over the years, Cave has written screenplays, soundtracks, and novels, and has collaborated with a diverse range of artists, from Johnny Cash and Kylie Minogue to P.J. Harvey and Neko Case.Known for his brooding and meditative mystique, he coauthored the bestselling Faith, Hope, and Carnage in 2022, receiving plaudits for openly discussing his struggles with heroin addiction, his lifelong fascination with Jesus Christ, and his artistic development. Since 2018, he's published The Red Hand Files, where he answers readers' questions in a manner that is deeply vulnerable, touching, and insightful. Wild God, his rave-reviewed new album with his longtime band The Bad Seeds, is out on August 30.Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with Cave about his unshakeable commitment to free speech, how the death of his 15-year-old son affected his art, his abiding interest in ritual and religion, and why he refuses to join artist boycotts of countries such as Israel.This interview was recorded on location at the storied Electric Lady Studios in New York City.0:00—Introduction1:09—Ad: The Dispatch2:15—The Red Hand Files8:13—Connecting with audiences after loss16:20—The Birthday Party's early days in London20:10—Is Nick Cave a "goth"?25:19—Ad: Bank On Yourself27:09—New album, Wild God29:53—Transcending cynicism and contempt33:23—AI, pessimism, and losing avenues of meaning39:35—Religious yearning and doubt45:32—Defending free thought and expression48:25—Kanye West's antisemitism and extraordinary creations of gospel music50:26—Antisemitism, Jews, and Israel52:47—Roger Waters, Brian Eno, and Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS)58:33—Brief stint in Los Angeles59:50—Loss and creation during COVID-191:03:10—Social media and censorship1:05:10—The freeing effects of agingToday's sponsors:Bank On Yourself: Bank On Yourself is a proven retirement plan alternative that banks and Wall Street are desperately hoping you never hear about. It gives you guaranteed, predictable growth and retirement income; access to your money for any purpose with NO questions asked and NO government penalties or restrictions; and the peace of mind that comes from knowing the minimum guaranteed value of your retirement savings on the day you plan to tap into them. Go to Bank On Yourself.com/WORD and get a free report about the retirement plan alternative that lets you bypass banks and Wall Street, and take back control of your financial future.The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. The next event is scheduled for Wednesday, September 11, and features Fox News' Kat Timpf, whose new book is I Used To Like You Until…(How Binary Thinking Divides Us). Tickets are $15 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and food. Go here for details.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman reminisce on the supposed joy and freedom on offer during last week's Democratic National Convention (DNC) and assess Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s decision to essentially drop out of the presidential race.02:36—At the DNC, Democrats showcase their misunderstanding of freedom.25:05—RFK Jr. suspends his campaign for president in 10 key states, endorses Donald Trump41:22—Weekly Listener Question48:27—Telegram founder Pavel Durov is arrested in France.54:02—The continued fallout from Matthew Perry's death56:14—This week's cultural recommendationsSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
How do Democrats define "freedom"? Just asking questions. It's Democratic National Convention week, so we wanted to talk about what's been unfolding there so far: the rhetoric, the thematic choices, and what it all reveals about the Democrats' 2024 agenda. How should we state-power skeptics and liberty appreciators view that agenda?We invited Jane Coaston to discuss all that with us this week. She's a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times and a former politics reporter at Vox, and she exhibits self-described "libertarian tendencies."
If you ever wanted to live in a world of endlessly fascinating conversations about the arts, science, and philosophy, you're going to love today's guest—Anna Gát. She's the person behind a membership platform called Interintellect, which hosts hundreds of online salons a year. While some of them feature superstars like Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, relationship guru Esther Perel, and economist Tyler Cowen, all of the salons are built around civil yet engaging discussions on interesting cultural ideas.Interintellect's stated ambition is to reinvent French salon culture for the 21st century, and the platform is increasingly hosting in-person events too. Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with Gát about why she started Interintellect, how it grew to have tens of thousands of participants all over the world, and how her new podcast, The Hope Axis, fits into her vision of a future marked by optimism (guests on the podcast have included economist Noah Smith, online-culture analyst Katherine Dee, and Quillette founder Claire Lehmann). They also talk about how her early years in post-communist Hungary shaped her worldview and ambitions.0:00—Introduction1:29— Interintellect : a public marketplace for intellectual salons3:31— Gát's background & vision14:05— Interintellect's scope of events19:05— A perpetual festival with multiple paths for participation23:38—Ad: Bank On Yourself25:30— An apolitical self-moderating cultural community27:52— Interintellect's global reach31:39— "The Hope Axis" podcast37:07— Why is 'doomerism' so appealing to millennials?42:32— Using the hope axis to defeat "no way out" mentality45:55— Gát's intellectual heroesToday's Sponsors:Bank On Yourself: Bank On Yourself is a proven retirement plan alternative that banks and Wall Street are desperately hoping you never hear about. It gives you guaranteed, predictable growth and retirement income; access to your money for any purpose with NO questions asked and NO government penalties or restrictions; and the peace of mind that comes from knowing the minimum guaranteed value of your retirement savings on the day you plan to tap into them. Go to Bank On Yourself.com/TSN and get a free report about the retirement plan alternative that lets you bypass banks and Wall Street, and take back control of your financial future.The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. The next event is scheduled for Wednesday, September 11, and features Fox News' Kat Timpf, whose new book is I Used To Like You Until…(How Binary Thinking Divides Us). Tickets are $15 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and food. Go here for details.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie welcome special guest Ben Dreyfuss onto the pod ahead of this week's Democratic National Convention in Chicago to talk about Kamala Harris' truly terrible economic policy proposals.02:48—Dreyfuss' YIMBY conversion thanks to Reason13:20—Harris drops some lousy economic policy ideas.32:37—The DNC begins.44:25—Weekly Listener Question53:33—Tariffs are timeless.1:03:32—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. On the app, it lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs, and it gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workouts, sleep, and even stress management. All you have to do is breathe into your Lumen first thing in the morning, and you'll know what's going on with your metabolism, whether you're burning mostly fats or carbs. Then, Lumen gives you a personalized nutrition plan for that day based on your measurements. You can also breathe into it before and after workouts and meals, so you know exactly what's going on in your body in real time, and Lumen will give you tips to keep you on top of your health game. Your metabolism is your body's engine—it's how your body turns the food you eat into fuel that keeps you going. Because your metabolism is at the center of everything your body does, optimal metabolic health translates to a bunch of benefits, including easier weight management, improved energy levels, better fitness results, better sleep, etc. Lumen gives you recommendations to improve your metabolic health. It can also track your cycle as well as the onset of menopause, and adjust your recommendations to keep your metabolism healthy through hormonal shifts, so you can keep up your energy and stave off cravings. So, if you want to take the next step in improving your health, go to lumen.me/ROUNDTABLE to get 15 percent off your Lumen.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Economist and author Arthur B. Laffer and L.P. presidential candidate Chase Oliver debate the resolution, "Among the candidates actively running for President in November, Donald Trump is the best choice."Defending the resolution is Laffer, who is widely recognized as "The Father of Supply-Side Economics," as his Laffer Curve is one of the main theoretical constructs of supply-side economics. Dr. Laffer was a member of President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board for both of his terms and was a founding member of the Reagan Executive Advisory Committee for the presidential race of 1980. He also advised Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on fiscal policy in the UK during the 1980s. In 2019, Dr. Laffer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Donald Trump. He's authored numerous books including his most recent, Taxes Have Consequences: An Income Tax History of the United States.Arguing against the resolution is Oliver, the Libertarian Party's candidate for president. He rose to prominence in the party as the 2022 Libertarian Senate candidate in a highly competitive race in Georgia, where he pulled 2 percent of the vote, forcing it into a runoff, which ultimately resulted in the Democratic candidate winning, tipping the balance of the Senate in their favor.The debate is moderated by Soho Forum director Gene Epstein.
What's really happening in Venezuela?Nicolás Maduro claimed victory in Venezuela's presidential election last month, but much of the rest of the world isn't buying it. Neither are many Venezuelans, who've taken to the streets to protest what they say is a fraudulent election in the face of increasingly violent crackdowns and menacing threats from the Maduro regime.The opposition says its tallies show it won 67 percent of the vote. Official statements from the European Union and U.S. State Department each say the evidence shows Maduro lost. Argentina's Javier Milei posted to X minutes after the polls closed: "Argentina is not going to recognize another fraud, and hopes that the Armed Forces this time will defend democracy and the popular will."To help us understand how Venezuela ended up here and what might happen next, we've brought on two of our trusted Venezuelan analysts, Daniel Di Martino and César Báez.Di Martino is a Venezuelan-American who founded the Dissident Project and is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Báez is a producer at Reason, and he writes about liberty in Latin America on his Substack, Espacio de Libertad.Sources referenced in this conversation:Venezuelan presidential race results as tabulated from digital records by the opposition partyMilei calls for the ousting of Maduro on XOpposition party leader María Corina Machado's post-election message "for the future of the Republic"U.S. State Department: "Assessing the Results of Venezuela's Presidential Election"The New York Times says that Venezuela suffers from "brutal capitalism"Daniel Di Martino: "How Socialism Destroyed Venezuela"The E.U.'s statement on Venezuela's election
Charles Gasparino is a senior correspondent for the Fox Business Network and a columnist for the New York Post. He's also the author of the new book Go Woke, Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America. Gasparino analyzes major missteps by companies such as Anheuser-Busch, Target, and Disney and explores how CEOs and top management become entranced by things like stakeholder capitalism; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; and environmental, social, and governance plans to the detriment of customer satisfaction, public relations, and the bottom line. Four years out from the COVID-19 pandemic and the death of George Floyd, Gasparino talks with Reason's Nick Gillespie about whether peak woke has ended and why he views people like Ed Rensi, the former head of McDonald's, as models for how businesses can make profits while being socially responsible. They also discuss how the 2024 election will impact the economy.Today's sponsors:ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Get 15 percent off by going to ZBiotics/TRI and using the code TRI at checkout.The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. The next event is scheduled for Wednesday, September 11, and features Fox News' Kat Timpf, whose new book is I Used To Like You Until…(How Binary Thinking Divides Us). Tickets are $15 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and food.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, Katherine Mangu-Ward and Peter Suderman are back alongside Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie. The editors analyze Vice President Kamala Harris picking Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate and discuss the ongoing crisis in Venezuela.02:06—Kamala Harris picks Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as veep24:06 —The crisis in Venezuela continues36:12—Weekly listener question44:31—U.S. Food and Drug Administration stifles MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD53:12—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsor:Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. On the app, it lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs, and it gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workouts, sleep, and even stress management. All you have to do is breathe into your Lumen first thing in the morning, and you'll know what's going on with your metabolism, whether you're burning mostly fats or carbs. Then, Lumen gives you a personalized nutrition plan for that day based on your measurements. You can also breathe into it before and after workouts and meals, so you know exactly what's going on in your body in real time, and Lumen will give you tips to keep you on top of your health game. Your metabolism is your body's engine—it's how your body turns the food you eat into fuel that keeps you going. Because your metabolism is at the center of everything your body does, optimal metabolic health translates to a bunch of benefits, including easier weight management, improved energy levels, better fitness results, better sleep, etc. Lumen gives you recommendations to improve your metabolic health. It can also track your cycle as well as the onset of menopause, and adjust your recommendations to keep your metabolism healthy through hormonal shifts, so you can keep up your energy and stave off cravings. So, if you want to take the next step in improving your health, go to lumen.me and use ROUNDTABLE to get $100 off your Lumen.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
How likely is a Kamala Harris presidency? Just asking questions. Join Zach Weissmueller, Reason senior producer, and Liz Wolfe, Reason associate editor, for a live discussion with Nate Silver, statistician and author of the new book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. Silver founded the renowned polling aggregator and politics website FiveThirtyEight and now runs his own Substack, Silver Bulletin.They'll discuss Vice President Kamala Harris' rise in the polls, the selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as a vice presidential candidate, the "long, strange political shadow of 2020," and how Silver's experience as a gambler, as documented in his new book, affects his view of the world.Watch the full conversation above or on Reason's YouTube channel.
Today's guest is the Libertarian Party's candidate for president Chase Oliver, who wants to phase out Social Security and Medicare for younger Americans, create a 21st century version of Ellis Island, and get the government out of bedrooms and boardrooms. A longtime antiwar activist, he also wants to bring American troops home and slash the Pentagon's budget. Despite such ultralibertarian positions, a number of high-profile Libertarian Party figures and state parties have declined to endorse him because he is not part of the national party's Mises Caucus and he believes that the nonsurgical transitioning of minors should be decided by doctors, parents, and kids without the state intervening. Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with Oliver about misunderstandings surrounding his opposition to mask and vaccine mandates, how he first encountered the Libertarian Party at a gay pride event, and why he thinks millennials and Gen Z are particularly ready to listen to libertarian ideas after constantly being lied to by boomers like Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.0:00— Introduction1:29— Economic policy & entitlement reform11:45— Immigration reform19:55— COVID-19 policy22:21— A message to younger voters24:20— The cases for and against Kamala Harris28:21— How Libertarians can appeal to Millennials & Gen-Z29:52— The case against Trump and Vance32:07— Are Millennials cynically attached to institutions?33:29— Libertarian Party conflicts36:12— Ad: Students For Liberty37:44— A libertarian view on trans issues44:59— Being the first openly LGBTQ national candidate46:55— LNC's unusual collaboration with RFK Jr.51:05— Uptick in Gen-Z LGBTQ identification53:32— Oliver's political evolution56:53— Foreign policy: Ukraine, Israel, and China1:04:40— Could Trump or Harris turn more libertarian?Today's sponsor:Students for Liberty (SFL). Are you a freedom-loving college student seeking a platform to amplify your voice? Then you need to check out Students for Liberty, a global hub for liberty-loving students like you. With members in over 100 countries, empower yourself and others to champion freedom. Visit StudentsForLiberty.org to discover how you can join their movement and contribute to building a freer future.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie welcome not just one but two special guests from The Dispatch. In this convivial Roundtable crossover episode, Jonah Goldberg and Kevin D. Williamson ruminate on Kamala Harris' veep options, identity politics, and drug legalization.04:54—Kamala Harris' potential running mates20:09—Identity politics across both major parties36:40—Weekly Listener Question56:16—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:We all carry around different stressors—big and small. When we keep them bottled up, it can start to affect us negatively. Therapy is a safe space to get things off your chest—and to figure out how to work through whatever's weighing you down. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Get it off your chest, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Is the future of the GOP more libertarian, nationalist, or, somehow, both?Joining us today is Vivek Ramaswamy, entrepreneur, author, and former presidential candidate. He's been making a hard pitch for what he's called a "libertarian-nationalist alliance" for the past several months. He was at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention where he tried to convince libertarians to vote Republican. Reason's Zach Weissmueller also saw Ramaswamy at the Republican National Convention, where he was trying to convince MAGA supporters to be more libertarian. Reason's Stephanie Slade saw him make his case for "national libertarianism" at the National Conservatism Conference. That event was also attended by vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, who has a different vision for the conservative movement. Those dueling visions are the subject of today's episode.Note: This episode is plagued by technical issues due to a software malfunction. With the exception of an approximately nine-minute section (which is marked in the episode), the full conversation is intact.
Today's guest is libertarian legal giant Randy Barnett, who has just published his memoir, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist. Currently a law professor at Georgetown, Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with Barnett about his days as a prosecutor in Chicago, how he helped create the legal philosophy of originalism, what it was like arguing medical marijuana and Obamacare cases at the Supreme Court, and what he learned from anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard. They also discuss why he thinks the libertarian movement needs an intellectual reboot and how his working-class, Jewish upbringing in Calumet City, Illinois, remains central to his identity.Today's sponsor:Bank On Yourself: Bank On Yourself is a proven retirement plan alternative that banks and Wall Street are desperately hoping you never hear about. It gives you guaranteed, predictable growth and retirement income; access to your money for any purpose with NO questions asked and NO government penalties or restrictions; and the peace of mind that comes from knowing the minimum guaranteed value of your retirement savings on the day you plan to tap into them. Go to Bank On Yourself.com/TSN and get a free report about the retirement plan alternative that lets you bypass banks and Wall Street, and take back control of your financial future.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman altogether flinch at the newfound media fawning over Vice President Kamala Harris' ascendancy to the top of the Democratic party's presidential ticket.01:35—Cringe media honeymoon phase with Kamala Harris21:23—GOP buyer's remorse with J.D. Vance39:14—Weekly Listener Question47:58—President Joe Biden proposes SCOTUS reforms51:46—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:Students for LibertyZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Just remember to make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Go to zbiotics.com/ROUNDTABLE to get 15 percent off your first order when you use ROUNDTABLE at checkout.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
The past month has been one of the most tumultuous in modern American political history: a devastating face-plant in a televised presidential debate, an attempted assassination of an ex-president favored in the polls to win reelection, a COVID-19 infection of the sitting president and his subsequent exit from the race, and an endorsement and loads of money pouring into the campaign of a previously unpopular vice president.What was going on behind the scenes that led us to this moment? This week on Just Asking Questions, Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller are joined by Alex Thompson, who writes about Joe Biden's White House for Axios. He's had a number of scoops about the internal goings-on in the Biden White House despite the fact that, according to previous guest Dave Weigel, Thompson has been pushed away for his previous reporting on Biden's declining health.They discuss the internal politics behind Biden's decision to drop out, the prospects for Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement in the 2024 presidential race, the media's insistence that Harris was not the president's "border czar," and the reluctance of former President Barack Obama to endorse Harris. Liz and Zach also react to Biden's exit speech, Harris' recent rally, and musician Charli XCX endorsing Harris as "brat."Sources referenced in this conversation:Biden drops out on XAxios: "Scoop: Biden doubted Harris' election chances"Axios: "Scoop: Biden changes walking routine to Marine One"Axios: "Harris border confusion haunts her new campaign"Charli XCX on X: "kamala IS brat"18–34s Harris vs. Trump, CNN (July 22–23): "CNN Poll: Harris improves on Biden's performance against Trump in early look at new matchup"18–34s Quinnipiac (July 19–21)
Ted and Courtney Balaker are the team behind the new documentary The Coddling of the American Mind. Based on the 2018 best-selling book by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, the film follows a series of students as they navigate life on today's highly charged college campuses. I spoke with Courtney and Ted, who started his video career as one of the first hires at Reason TV, about the Gen Z mental health crisis, free speech, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs, the oppressor-victim worldview, and why they chose to host the film on the innovative platform Substack rather than a more traditional venue.0:00— Introduction0:54—The Coddling of the American Mind in documentary form2:05— Finding student participants3:22— Lucy7:15— Kimi11:17— Aryaan13:32— International students vs. American students17:16— Are we past peak woke on campuses?20:44— Distributing films on Substack24:30— Korchula Productions' previous projects26:20— Are filmmakers sick of censorship yet?28:30— The Balakers' non-traditional media backgrounds32:10— Working with Drew Carey on Reason TV33:20— Visual storytelling as powerful conduits for ideas35:07— Where to see this documentaryToday's sponsor:ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Get 15 percent off by going to ZBiotics/TRI and using the code TRI at checkout.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman assess the state of the 2024 presidential race one day after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection.01:41—President Joe Biden drops out of the presidential race and endorses Vice President Kamala Harris.32:52—Weekly Listener Question41:44—Republican National Convention reactions52:06—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:Students for LibertyQualia Senolytic: Have you heard about senolytics yet? It's a class of ingredients discovered less than 10 years ago, and it's being called the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging and enhancing your physical prime. Your goals in your career and beyond require productivity. But let's be honest: The aging process is not our friend when it comes to endless energy and productivity. As we age, everyone accumulates "senescent" cells in their body. Senescent cells cause symptoms of aging, such as aches and discomfort, slow workout recoveries, and sluggish mental and physical energy associated with that "middle age" feeling. Also known as "Zombie Cells," they are old and worn out and not serving a useful function for our health anymore, but they are taking up space and nutrients from our healthy cells. Much like pruning the yellowing and dead leaves off a plant, Qualia Senolytic removes those worn-out senescent cells to allow for the rest of your cells to thrive in the body. Take it just two days a month. The formula is non-GMO, vegan, and gluten-free, and the ingredients are meant to complement one another, factoring in the combined effect of all ingredients together. Resist aging at the cellular level and try Qualia Senolytic. Go to neurohacker.com/ROUNDTABLE for up to $100 off and use code ROUNDTABLE at checkout for an additional 15 percent off.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Best-selling science and technology author Matt Ridley and University of Utah virologist Stephen Goldstein debate the resolution: "It is likely that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in the Wuhan laboratory in China."Defending the resolution is Ridley, the author of 10 books, including Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. He sat in the U.K.'s House of Lords between 2013 and 2021 and served on the Science and Technology Select Committee. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a fellow at the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Arguing against the resolution is Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah conducting research on human genetics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he conducted research on the biology of MERS-CoV, a zoonotic virus first identified in 2012. Over the course of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Goldstein has engaged with the Utah Department of Health and Human Services, University of Utah Health, and local and national media to provide scientific expertise. He has co-authored reviews and original research papers on the origin of SARS-CoV-2.The debate is moderated by the Soho Forum's Chief Operating Officer Jane Menton.
Where does former President Donald Trump want to take this country?As the Republican Party coronates Trump as its presidential nominee at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, there will be a lot of talk about Trump's vice presidential pick, his dominance in the polls, and the decline of President Joe Biden. But what about policy? What is the Trump agenda? Trump's opponents implore us to fear Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation proposal that they characterize as a vengeful, authoritarian power grab. Trump himself waves that away and tends to focus more on his plans to levy tariffs on foreign goods, deport illegal immigrants, and yes, finally build that wall. Neither Trump nor the Democrats seem interested in talking much at all about our soon-to-be $35 trillion national debt, which has eclipsed our total national gross domestic product for the first time since World War II. To help us anticipate what an increasingly likely second Trump term might look like, and help explain how Trump 2024 is even possible all things considered, we've invited Mary Katharine Ham, a conservative political journalist and commentator at Fox News and on her own podcast Getting Hammered. We wanted to talk with her because she's Trump-critical, but also understands the conservative mind and movement as someone who's been immersed in it for years.Note that this episode was recorded on Friday, July 12, 2024. A new introduction by Zach Weissmueller was recorded on Tuesday, July 16, contextualizing this conversation in light of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.Sourced referenced in this conversation:Project 2025's Official Site https://www.project2025.org/Joe Biden's campaign website page on the project https://joebiden.com/project2025/Understanding the National Debt | U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/national-debt/Brookings Institute: Data on how the suburbs voted in 2020 https://www.brookings.edu/articles/bidens-victory-came-from-the-suburbs/ St. Louis Federal Reserve: Gross Federal Debt as Percent of Gross Domestic Product https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDGDPA188SThe U.S. Justice Department Is Not Independent | The Center for Renewing America https://americarenewing.com/issues/the-u-s-justice-department-is-not-independent/Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts on the War Room, July 2, 2024 https://americasvoice.news/video/WttAoA7Ya7L0FaN/?related=playlistSteve Bannon on Tucker Carlson's podcast, June 11, 2024 https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1800649304236859620Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) on Just Asking Questions https://youtu.be/n6rxC0JcFPATimestamps:00:00 Context for this pre-recorded episode02:11 Setting the Tone for the Episode03:08 Analyzing Trump's 2024 Agenda05:41 Key Issues for the Suburban Vote09:03 Trump's Vice Presidential Pick14:04 Abortion and the 2024 Election20:58 Libertarian Appeal and Trump's Strategy28:58 National Debt Concerns33:24 Navigating the Political Spectrum36:29 Project 202542:45 Concerns Over Expanding Executive Power47:26 Vengeance vs. Accountability in Politics01:01:35 The State of the 2024 Election01:04:22 Final Thoughts and Reflections
This week's guest on The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie is school choice activist Corey DeAngelis, whose provocative new book is The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools. A senior fellow at the American Federation for Children and a former education policy analyst at the Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes Reason magazine), Corey has been called "the most effective school choice advocate since Milton Friedman."His new book explains why K-12 education failed so badly before and during the COVID pandemic and how to fix it once and for all by making the needs of parents and students the central concern of schooling.Today's Sponsors:The Dispatch: Is Donald Trump really going to jail? Does Joe Biden really have what it takes for a second term? Do these questions even matter in the 2024 election? Get past the bluster and get back to the facts by joining The Dispatch.Students for LibertyNew York City premiere of Reason's Backpage documentary and panel discussion, Tuesday, July 23. Was the federal prosecution of the online classified ad site Backpage.com a win for opponents of sex trafficking or a loss for First Amendment rights? View a new documentary by Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Paul Detrick, and participate in a panel with Brown and Old Pros' Kaytlin Bailey about the case moderated by Nick Gillespie. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and a light buffet. Seats are limited.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman grapple with the current political climate in the U.S. after the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump over the weekend.01:44—Trump's Assassination attempt27:06—President Joe Biden's press conference43:07—Republican National Convention begins today52:08—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Upcoming events:Tuesday, July 23: New York City premiere of Reason's Backpage documentary and panel discussion. Was the federal prosecution of online classified ad site Backpage.com a win for opponents of sex trafficking or a loss for First Amendment rights? View a new documentary by Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Paul Detrick and participate in a panel with Brown and Old Pros' Kaytlin Bailey about the case moderated by Nick Gillespie. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and a light buffet. Seats are limited. Details here.Today's sponsors:Students for LibertyComparison is the thief of joy, and it's easy to envy other people's lives. It might look like they have it all together on their Instagram. But in reality, they probably don't. Therapy can help you focus on what you want, instead of what others have, so you can start living your best life. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Stop comparing and start focusing, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
What if President Joe Biden drops out? Just asking questions. Biden is facing increasing pressure from his own side to drop out of the 2024 race, which nearly every poll taken since his disaster debate performance last week shows him losing. The latest RealClearPolitics average has him down by about 3.5 percentage points nationally. Several Democratic congress members have called for him to step aside. So have Democratic megadonors. Much of the national press, once dismissive of those pointing out Biden's mental deterioration, has turned on him. So where do we go from here?To help us begin to answer that, Just Asking Questions invited David Weigel, a political reporter for Semafor, and previously for The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Slate, and Reason.Weigel talked with Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe about the media's slow acknowledgment of Biden's deteriorating condition, Biden's turn against the Democratic "elite," getting "coconut-pilled" on a Vice President Kamala Harris candidacy, and what a contested Democratic primary might look like.Timestamps:0:00 - intro1:28 - How bad is Biden losing?4:58 - How long has Biden been cognitively impaired? 6:58 - How much medical info should the White House release?11:46 - Why didn't the DC media say something sooner? 32:06 - Media gaslighting Biden's decline as "cheap fakes"39:10 - The media has turned on Biden48:13 - How does Zach feel about voting for Biden?50:35 - Biden's pushback to the press and the Democratic "elite"56:41 - Why Democrats are turning on Joe Biden1:05:26 - Getting "coconut pilled" on a Kamala Harris candidacy1:15:00 - How would removing Biden actually work?
Today's guest is Eric Brakey, the new executive director of The Free State Project, a nonprofit that has been working since 2001 to get small-government diehards to move to New Hampshire and make the Granite State a stronghold for libertarian ideas. Prior to becoming head of the Free State Project, Brakey was a Republican state senator in Maine, where he authored successful legislation that expanded gun rights, legalized over-the-counter birth control, and enacted Right To Try legislation. Reason's Nick Gillespie talks to Brakey about the state of the libertarian movement, how Ron Paul and Young Americans for Liberty shaped his worldview, and how he hopes to concentrate what he calls "the libertarian diaspora" in New Hampshire.Today's Sponsor:The Dispatch: Is Donald Trump really going to jail? Does Joe Biden really have what it takes for a second term? Do these questions even matter in the 2024 U.S. election? Get past the bluster and get back to the facts by joining The Dispatch.Bank On Yourself: Bank On Yourself is a proven retirement plan alternative that banks and Wall Street are desperately hoping you never hear about. It gives you guaranteed, predictable growth and retirement income; access to your money for any purpose with NO questions asked and NO government penalties or restrictions; and the peace of mind that comes from knowing the minimum guaranteed value of your retirement savings on the day you plan to tap into them. Go to Bank On Yourself.com/WORD and get a free report about the retirement plan alternative that lets you bypass banks and Wall Street, and take back control of your financial future.New York City premiere of Reason's Backpage documentary and panel discussion, Tuesday, July 23. Was the federal prosecution of the online classified ad site Backpage.com a win for opponents of sex trafficking or a loss for First Amendment rights? View a new documentary by Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Paul Detrick, and participate in a panel with Brown and Old Pro's Kaytlin Bailey about the case moderated by Nick Gillespie. The $10 tickets include beer, wine, soft drinks, and light buffet. Seats are limited. Details here.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and special guest Elizabeth Nolan Brown size up the fallout from the mainstream media's lag in coverage of Joe Biden's cognitive decline, despite evidence existing well before his seismic debate performance on June 27.01:50—Media fallout after Biden's debate performance28:13—The Supreme Court rules on presidential immunity.37:06—Weekly Listener Question42:46— The Supreme Court's ruling on social media moderation50:39—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:Students for LibertyLumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. On the app, it lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs, and it gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workouts, sleep, and even stress management. All you have to do is breathe into your Lumen first thing in the morning, and you'll know what's going on with your metabolism, whether you're burning mostly fats or carbs. Then, Lumen gives you a personalized nutrition plan for that day based on your measurements. You can also breathe into it before and after workouts and meals, so you know exactly what's going on in your body in real time, and Lumen will give you tips to keep you on top of your health game. Your metabolism is your body's engine—it's how your body turns the food you eat into fuel that keeps you going. Because your metabolism is at the center of everything your body does, optimal metabolic health translates to a bunch of benefits, including easier weight management, improved energy levels, better fitness results, better sleep, etc. Lumen gives you recommendations to improve your metabolic health. It can also track your cycle as well as the onset of menopause, and adjust your recommendations to keep your metabolism healthy through hormonal shifts, so you can keep up your energy and stave off cravings. So, if you want to take the next step in improving your health, go to lumen.me and use ROUNDTABLE to get $100 off your Lumen.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Free State Project activist Dennis Pratt and Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein debate the resolution, "A better way to persuade more people of libertarianism is to convince them of the ethics stemming from self-ownership and the non-aggression principle, without relying primarily on consequentialist/utilitarian arguments."Dennis Pratt, a libertarian writer and activist in New Hampshire, took the affirmative, arguing that the consequentialist arguments typical of libertarian economists are only narrowly effective, don't represent the core of libertarianism, and are too difficult for most people to quickly grasp. The philosophy of self-ownership, he said, has far more force in its ability to persuade the most people.Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein disagreed. While he espouses the same philosophy as his opponent, he made the argument that the empirical facts related to the poor results of government interventions can get many people to rethink their anti-libertarian assumptions.The debate occurred on June 20, 2024, at the Porcupine Freedom Festival in Lancaster, New Hampshire, and was moderated by Free State Project founder Jason Sorens.
Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein and Chicago school economist David Friedman debate the resolution, "The Austrian economics of Mises and Rothbard contains economic intuitions that are important, correct, and missing from Chicago School economics."Taking the affirmative was Gene Epstein, the director of the Soho Forum and former economics and books editor at Barron's. His last published book was Econospinning: How to Read Between the Lines When the Media Manipulate the Numbers. Epstein has taught economics at the City University of New York and St. John's University, and he has worked as a senior economist for the New York Stock Exchange.Arguing for the negative was David Friedman, an economist, legal scholar, and anarcho-capitalist theorist, as well as author of six non-fiction books and three novels. His most popular book is The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism.The debate occurred on June 19th, 2024 at the Porcupine Freedom Festival in Lancaster, New Hampshire, and was moderated by libertarian writer and Free State Project activist, Dennis Pratt.
Are the boys okay?For much of history, parents have preferred boys, perceiving them as the providers, the family legacy, the heirs to the throne. A dark consequence of China's 36-year-long one-child policy was a 120 boy to 100 girl birth ratio. But in 21st-century America, the script seems to have been flipped. The New York Times has run headlines like "Wanting Daughters, Getting Sons" and "It's a Boy, and It's Okay to be Disappointed." Boys are falling behind in school, are more likely to display behavioral problems, and are more likely to be both perpetrators and victims of violence. Shifting gender norms, changing conceptions of masculinity, and the pitched political battles around these questions have made boyhood—and parenthood—that much more complicated. Raising boys these days ain't easy.Today's guest knows this all too well. Ruth Whippman is the author of BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, and the mother of three young boys. The book is about her experience as a modern "BoyMom" living in the hyper-progressive Bay Area, as well as what she learned from studying the psychological and sociological research on boys and from talking to boys and men across the country and the political spectrum about their experiences and, importantly to the theme of this book, their feelings.Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.Sourced referenced in this conversation:The New York Times: Wanting Daughters, Getting SonsThe New York Times: It's a Boy, and It's Okay to Be DisappointedGender differences in individual variation in academic grades fail to fit expected patterns for STEMPoverty hurts the boys the most: Inequality at the intersection of class and genderLoneliness around the world: Age, gender, and cultural differences in lonelinessProvisional Estimates of Suicide by Demographic Characteristics: United States, 2022Andrew Tate's 10 Rules of Life on Rumble (discussed at 55:28)Timestamps:00:00 Intro Monologue01:24 Introducing Ruth Whippman02:20 Nature vs. Nurture in Boyhood05:31 Emotional Vulnerability in Boys06:31 Parenting Strategies for Boys09:56 Cultural Shifts and Gender Preferences14:01 Raising Boys in Progressive Areas27:28 Challenges Boys Face in School41:34 Traditional Masculinity and Emotional Connection45:47 The American Psychological Association's Stance on Traditional Masculinity53:16 The Hero's Journey and Masculine Expectations55:28 Andrew Tate's Influence on Young Men01:04:18 High Agency Worldview and Self-Help for Men01:14:17 Promoting Emotional and Relational Skills in Boys01:16:19 Final Thoughts and Reflections
This week's guest is Andy Mills, the co-creator of Reflector, a new documentary podcast. Reflector's early episodes delve into controversial treatments for alcoholism and the free speech implications of the trial of rapper Young Thug, whose lyrics are being used by prosecutors to build a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) case. Mills is a legend in podcasting circles. He helped create The New York Times podcast The Daily, one of the most listened-to shows on the planet, and he produced the wildly popular and controversial The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling for The Free Press. Reason's Nick Gillespie and Mills discuss why podcasting is having such a moment, his tumultuous tenure at the Times (which ended with his resignation in 2021), and whether there is a market for investigative journalism that isn't done in the service of partisan politics.0:00—Introduction1:03— Reflector: Andy Mills' new podcast3:47— Reflector Episode 1: Naltrexone for alcoholism7:00— Reflector Episode 2: Drill rap on trial18:16— Economics of podcasting22:22— Has the podcast era peaked?25:28— Starting The Daily at The New York Times29:06— Spotify's bad Meghan Markle bet31:04— The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling37:15— Caliphate controversy and The New York Times part 141:06— Ad: Lumen43:09— Caliphate controversy and The New York Times part 245:33— What does healthy media consumption look like?47:46— Andy Mills' rural Christian upbringing52:50— 'Wokeness' at The New York Times1:00:24— Q&AToday's sponsors:Students for LibertyLumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. On the app, it lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs, and it gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workouts, sleep, and even stress management. All you have to do is breathe into your Lumen first thing in the morning, and you'll know what's going on with your metabolism, whether you're burning mostly fats or carbs. Then, Lumen gives you a personalized nutrition plan for that day based on your measurements. You can also breathe into it before and after workouts and meals, so you know exactly what's going on in your body in real time, and Lumen will give you tips to keep you on top of your health game. Your metabolism is your body's engine—it's how your body turns the food you eat into fuel that keeps you going. Because your metabolism is at the center of everything your body does, optimal metabolic health translates to a bunch of benefits, including easier weight management, improved energy levels, better fitness results, better sleep, etc. Lumen gives you recommendations to improve your metabolic health. It can also track your cycle as well as the onset of menopause, and adjust your recommendations to keep your metabolism healthy through hormonal shifts, so you can keep up your energy and stave off cravings. So, if you want to take the next step in improving your health, go to lumen.me/INTERVIEW to get $100 off your Lumen.
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman stare ever deeper into the abyss while recapping the hapless display at last week's first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.01:50—Reactions to the Biden vs. Trump debate21:43—Were any concrete policies discussed during the debate?33:46—Weekly Listener Question41:02—Supreme Court rules on Chevron deference48:39—This week's cultural recommendationsToday's sponsor:Students for LibertyZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Go to zbiotics.com/ROUNDTABLE to get 15 percent off your first order when you use ROUNDTABLE at checkout.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
Today's guest is Mike Rowe, the podcaster, former host of Dirty Jobs, and star of Something To Stand For, an unabashedly patriotic film in which he tells unknown stories about legendary figures in American history. Something To Stand For will be in theaters from June 27th through the 4th of July, and will be available online afterward. Reason's Nick Gillespie and Rowe talk about the decline of patriotism and trust in experts over the past 50 years, the necessity of knowing history and your neighbors, and how developing gratitude may lead to a social renaissance even in the midst of political polarization.0:00—Introduction1:20—Rowe's new movie: Something To Stand For6:29—Remembering the veterans of World War II and Korea10:30—Faith Popcorn and futurism12:50—Boys Scouts and crumbling social institutions19:13—Are we sheep or goats?21:15—Generational disconnections for patriotism27:28—Ad: Students For Liberty28:29—Paul Harvey and "God made a farmer"31:00—"The Way I Heard It" and expanding stories into movies32:34—How do we acknowledge failings and still celebrate progress?35:55—Grounding the American experience in gratitude38:38—"Embrace the suck" so you can make new discoveries41:50—Finding optimism for the future despite our sordid past44:42—Mike Rowe is "skeptimistic"45:58—The end has always been "near"48:50—Gratitude and curiosity require humilitySubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman lament the latest dire forecast from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) last week forecasting a $2 trillion budget deficit in 2024.02:31—$2 trillion federal budget deficit21:17— Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump on immigration37:02—Weekly Listener Question46:23—Revisiting Anthony Fauci and COVID-19 origins55:18—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsor:Students for LibertyLumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. On the app, it lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs, and it gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workouts, sleep, and even stress management. All you have to do is breathe into your Lumen first thing in the morning, and you'll know what's going on with your metabolism, whether you're burning mostly fats or carbs. Then, Lumen gives you a personalized nutrition plan for that day based on your measurements. You can also breathe into it before and after workouts and meals, so you know exactly what's going on in your body in real time, and Lumen will give you tips to keep you on top of your health game. Your metabolism is your body's engine—it's how your body turns the food you eat into fuel that keeps you going. Because your metabolism is at the center of everything your body does, optimal metabolic health translates to a bunch of benefits, including easier weight management, improved energy levels, better fitness results, better sleep, etc. Lumen gives you recommendations to improve your metabolic health. It can also track your cycle as well as the onset of menopause, and adjust your recommendations to keep your metabolism healthy through hormonal shifts, so you can keep up your energy and stave off cravings. So, if you want to take the next step in improving your health, go to lumen.me and use ROUNDTABLE to get $100 off your Lumen.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is John Mackey, the co-founder and former CEO of Whole Foods, who just released his memoir, The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism. As befits the entrepreneur who revolutionized grocery shopping from a grim, pragmatic necessity into an exciting, multi-sensory adventure, Mackey's story is far from conventional and we talk frankly about the failures, successes, and psychedelics he encountered while reshaping how Americans think about food, fitness, and free enterprise. We also discuss Love.Life, the chain of holistic health and wellness clubs he's opening this summer.00:00— Introduction00:48— The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism03:45— Capitalism disrupts the status quo07:57— Whole Foods' bumpy start15:02— How to foster rich environments for capitalism & innovation19:00— Why socialism ALWAYS fails21:05— John Mackey's upbringing26:38— Where is the next generation heading?29:53— The Capitalism scapegoat32:36— Ad: BankOnYourself.com34:27— LSD and other psychedelics38:15— Applying "Expand into love, don't contract into fear" to business40:41— Conscious capitalism as a management philosophy45:45— Unionization at Whole Foods51:11— The pros & cons of selling Whole Foods to Amazon59:48— Mackey's new venture: Love.Life01:05:19— John Mackey's secrets to health01:09:38— Capitalism: an infinite gameToday's Sponsor:Bank On Yourself: Bank On Yourself is a proven retirement plan alternative that banks and Wall Street are desperately hoping you never hear about. It gives you guaranteed, predictable growth and retirement income; access to your money for any purpose with NO questions asked and NO government penalties or restrictions; and the peace of mind that comes from knowing the minimum guaranteed value of your retirement savings on the day you plan to tap into them. Go to Bank On Yourself.com/WORD and get a free report about the retirement plan alternative that lets you bypass banks and Wall Street, and take back control of your financial future.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman pore over recent Supreme Court decisions regarding the abortion pill mifepristone and the Trump administration's ban on gun bump stocks.02:01—Supreme Court rulings on abortion pill and bump stocks16:45—Secret recording of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito27:45—Weekly Listener Question37:11—Hunter Biden's conviction44:30—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsor:Students for LibertyQualia Senolytic: Have you heard about senolytics yet? It's a class of ingredients discovered less than 10 years ago, and it's being called the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging and enhancing your physical prime. Your goals in your career and beyond require productivity. But let's be honest: The aging process is not our friend when it comes to endless energy and productivity. As we age, everyone accumulates "senescent" cells in their body. Senescent cells cause symptoms of aging, such as aches and discomfort, slow workout recoveries, and sluggish mental and physical energy associated with that "middle age" feeling. Also known as "Zombie Cells," they are old and worn out and not serving a useful function for our health anymore, but they are taking up space and nutrients from our healthy cells. Much like pruning the yellowing and dead leaves off a plant, Qualia Senolytic removes those worn-out senescent cells to allow for the rest of your cells to thrive in the body. Take it just two days a month. The formula is non-GMO, vegan, and gluten-free, and the ingredients are meant to complement one another, factoring in the combined effect of all ingredients together. Resist aging at the cellular level and try Qualia Senolytic. Go to neurohacker.com/ROUNDTABLE for up to $100 off and use code ROUNDTABLE at checkout for an additional 15 percent off.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is maverick journalist Glenn Greenwald, whose work publicizing Edward Snowden's revelations of ubiquitous and illegal surveillance of Americans helped The Guardian win a Pulitzer Prize. Greenwald now hosts the nightly news show System Update on Rumble and maintains an active presence on X (formerly Twitter). Reason's Nick Gillespie and Greenwald talked about the failing fortunes of The Intercept, the investigative website he co-founded in 2014 and had an acrimonious break with in 2020, the Israel/Gaza War, student protests on campuses, legacy media's obsession with disinformation ad Russian interference in the 2016 election, and whether a victory by President Joe Biden or Donald Trump would be worse for America—and the world. This interview was conducted before a live audience in New York City, a day after Greenwald debated Alan Dershowitz at the Soho Forum about whether the United States should attack Iran's nuclear program.0:00— Introduction1:10— The Intercept: the trajectory from Snowden reporting to crying emojis7:09— Trump v Clinton and Biden11:57— Julian Assange and Wikileaks21:10— Rumble and decentralized media26:25— Greenwald's journalistic origin story29:26— College students protests37:28— Greenwald's Jewish heritage39:53— What's going on in Gaza?45:58— Greenwald's foreign policy positions51:50— Latin American: Milei, Lula, an Bukele58:50— Drug policy1:03:18— 2024 Biden vs. Trump election1:07:00- Audience Q&APrevious appearances:Glenn Greenwald: Tucker Carlson, Left-Wing Authoritarians, Identity Politics, and Free Speech, July 20, 2022Glenn Greenwald on Biden, Free Speech, and Leaving The Intercept, November 27, 2020Glenn Greenwald on Wikileaks, Russian Hacking, and Distrusting Legacy Media and U.S. Intel, January 16, 2017Glenn Greenwald on Drug Decriminalization in Portugal and Obama's Iffy Take on Civil Liberties, April 13, 2009Today's Sponsor:Better Help. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, Better Help is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.
My guest today is economist and podcaster Glenn Loury, whose new memoir is titled Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. Born in 1948 and raised working-class in Chicago's predominantly African American South Side, Loury tells a story of self-invention, ambition, hard work, addiction, and redemption that channels Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, Richard Wright's Native Son, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, and Milton Friedman's Capitalism & Freedom. The first tenured black economist at Harvard, Loury emerged in the 1980s as a ubiquitous commenter on race and class and was offered a post in the Reagan administration. Then a series of scandals involving affairs, arrests, and addiction threatened the end of his personal and professional lives. Late Admissions is an unflinching look at Loury's failures and successes, written by one of the most popular academic presences on YouTube.0:00— Introduction1:34— Why write a memoir now?4:17— What is a black conservative?7:47— Glenn Loury's background15:10— Addiction and self destruction17:00— 'A hustler and a player'21:34— Crack, Infidelity, and the remarkable Dr Linda Loury25:44— Loury's downfall in the late 80s28:38— Recovery, self-knowledge, and making amends36:32— 'Rise Above It': a MLM scam with real lessons 40:40- Loury's career and legacy in Economics45:08— College students and protests49:00— Affirmative action and conservatives52:30— Equality, childhood development, and cultural influences57:21— The Black Experience and healthy cultural discourse1:02:22— Immigrants as beacons of hopePrevious appearance:Glenn Loury: 'We're Being Swept Along by Hysteria' About Racism in America, June 24, 2020Today's Sponsor:ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Get 15 percent off by going to ZBiotics/TRI and using the code TRI at checkout.Video Editor: Regan TaylorAudio Production: Hunt Beaty
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman scrutinize President Joe Biden's executive order updating asylum restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border in response to illegal border crossings.01:32—Biden's new asylum restrictions21:38—The prosecution of political opponents: former President Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, and Steve Bannon33:25—Weekly Listener Question39:56—No one is reading The Washington Post48:09—This week's cultural recommendationsMentioned in this podcast:"Biden Announces Sweeping Asylum Restrictions at U.S.-Mexico Border" by Fiona Harrigan"Biden's New Asylum Policy is Both Harmful and Illegal" by Ilya Somin"Travel Ban, Redux" by Josh Blackman"Immigration Fueled America's Stunning Cricket Upset Over Pakistan" by Eric Boehm"Libertarian Candidate Chase Oliver Wants To Bring Back 'Ellis Island Style' Immigration Processing" by Fiona Harrigan"Donald Trump and Hunter Biden Face the Illogical Consequences of an Arbitrary Gun Law" by Jacob Sullum"Hunter Biden's Trial Highlights a Widely Flouted, Haphazardly Enforced, and Constitutionally Dubious Gun Law" by Jacob Sullum"Hunter Biden's Multiplying Charges Exemplify a Profound Threat to Trial by Jury" by Jacob Sullum"The Conviction Effect" by Liz Wolfe"Laurence Tribe Bizarrely Claims Trump Won the 2016 Election by Falsifying Business Records in 2017" by Jacob Sullum"A Jumble of Legal Theories Failed To Give Trump 'Fair Notice' of the New York Charges Against Him" by Jacob Sullum"Does Donald Trump's Conviction in New York Make Us Banana Republicans?" by J.D. Tuccille"The Myth of the Federal Private Nondelegation Doctrine, Part 1" by Sasha Volokh"Federal Court Condemns Congress for Giving Unconstitutional Regulatory Powers to Amtrak" by Damon Root"Make Amtrak Safer and Privatize It" by Ira Stoll"Biden Threatens To Veto GOP Spending Bill That Would 'Cut' Amtrak Funding to Double Pre-Pandemic Levels" by Christian Britschgi"This Company Is Running a High-Speed Train in Florida—Without Subsidies" by Natalie Dowzicky"Do Not Under Any Circumstances Nationalize Greyhound" by Christian Britschgi"With Ride or Die, the Bad Boys Movies Become Referendums on Masculinity" by Peter Suderman"D.C. Water Spent Nearly $4,000 On Its Wendy the Water Drop Mascot" by Christian BritschgiUpcoming Reason Events:Reason Speakeasy: Corey DeAngelis on June 11 in New York CitySend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsor:We all carry around different stressors—big and small. When we keep them bottled up, it can start to affect us negatively. Therapy is a safe space to get things off your chest—and to figure out how to work through whatever's weighing you down. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Get it off your chest, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Justin Zuckerman and John CarterAssistant production by Luke Allen and Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline" by The Brothers SteveProducer: Hunt BeatyVideo Editor: César Báez
Today's guest is Jay Bhattacharya, a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration and one of the plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court case charging that the Biden administration and other parts of the federal government illegally colluded "with social media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content." A decision in that case is imminent, and a victory for Bhattacharya's side would make it impossible for the government to pressure X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and other platforms to ban or squelch legal speech. A professor of medicine at Stanford University and a Ph.D. economist, Bhattacharya talks about his experience being blacklisted online because of his criticisms of lockdowns and other COVID policies, the ways in which both Donald Trump and Joe Biden fumbled their responses to the pandemic, and what the public health establishment must do to regain the trust and confidence of the American public.00:00— Introduction01:12— Murthy vs. Missouri17:05— Politicization of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)20:45— Loss of trust in public health25:45— Biden vs. Trump on COVID27:49— What Bhattacharya got wrong29:35— COVID-19 vaccines mistakes34:53— RFK Jr. and other vaccine skeptics39:44— What would Bhattacharya revise?42:17— How Bhattacharya's politics changed44:20— How do we restore trust in public health?Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman debrief in the wake of former President Donald Trump's conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records last week in New York City.00:33—Donald Trump's conviction27:37—Weekly Listener Question42:11—Recent undercovered stories50:48—This week's cultural recommendationsToday's sponsor:Hello, liberty lovers! Are you passionate about preserving civil liberties and individual freedom? Do you want to support organizations that uphold these principles but struggle to navigate the complex world of charitable giving? Well, fear not! We have the perfect solution for you: a giving account with DonorsTrust. A giving account, also known as a donor-advised fund, is a simple, secure, and tax-advantaged way for libertarian givers like you to support the causes you care about most. With a donor-advised fund, you can make a contribution, receive an immediate tax deduction, and then recommend grants to your favorite charities over time. Plus, you retain control over how your charitable dollars are invested, ensuring they align with your values and goals. Whether you're passionate about defending free speech, protecting property rights, or promoting limited government, a donor-advised fund with DonorsTrust empowers you to make a meaningful impact. So, join us in preserving liberty for future generations by opening a donor-advised fund at DonorsTrust today. To learn more and get started, visit our sponsor, DonorsTrust, at www.donorstrust.org/roundtable. Take control of your giving and make a difference in the fight for freedom. That's www.donorstrust.org/roundtable. Remember, every dollar counts in the battle to safeguard our civil liberties. Let's make our voices heard together!Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is Nellie Bowles, a co-founder of the immensely popular Substack publication The Free Press, where she writes TGIF, a weekly news roundup that has earned a fanatical following. She's also the author of the new book Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, a deeply reported account of how America responded to COVID lockdowns and racial unrest in 2020 and 2021 and her tumultuous tenure at The New York Times.This interview was recorded at a live event in New York City.00:00—The Morning After The Revolution2:30— First sparks of the revolution5:30— the working class victims of The Reckoning9:37— BLM's property empire11:16— Bowles' New York Times dispatch from CHAZ13:40— Black and Asian White Supremacists15:55— White women's tears & DEI trainings20:25— Dismantle capitalism, but not too urgently!24:10— The Progressive Stack 26:01- Academic "Pretendians"29:20— The Bon Appétit Cancellation Turducken34:37— The Creation of Non-man37:52— Woman: a submissive vessel?42:40— The Current Thing Speedway44:06— San Francisco: Progressive Libertarian Nihilism?48:33— Nellie Bowles' politics50:25— Positive social change54:17— Q&AToday's Sponsor:The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. The next event on June 11 features Corey DeAngelis. He'll discuss his provocative new book, The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools. Go here for an online archive, and go here to sign up for information about upcoming events.
Last weekend, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman recorded an episode of The Reason Roundtable in front of a live audience at Reason Weekend in Boston, Massachusetts, with topics centered on both past and future U.S. vice presidents.1:23—President Joe Biden proposes new tariffs on China11:42—Potential Donald Trump V.P. picks27:06—Kamala Harris35:35—Favorite vice presidents of American history42:49—This week's cultural recommendations54:06—Audience Q&AUpcoming Reason Events:The Reason Roundtable LIVE!, June 6 in Washington, D.C.Reason Speakeasy: Corey DeAngelis, June 11 in New York CitySend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
How bad is climate change?People are freaked out by climate change, especially young people. Scientists for Nature conducted a survey of 10,000 16- to 25-year-olds in 2021 and found that 59 percent of them were extremely worried or very worried about climate change, and large majorities reported that climate change made them feel sad, anxious, and/or afraid. On Earth Day this year, President Joe Biden shared a picture on X (formerly Twitter) of himself standing next to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) with the caption, "Young Americans know that the climate crisis is the existential threat of our time. They deserve leaders who believe them."Today's guest says it's time to stop catastrophizing. Ted Nordhaus is the co-founder and executive director of the environmental nonprofit The Breakthrough Institute. He recently published an essay in The New Atlantis titled "Did Exxon Make it Rain Today?" which argues that while climate change is a real phenomenon affected by human activity, "we're actually safer than ever before." He says a deliberate campaign of fearmongering and exaggeration about the effects of climate change has misled the public and damaged the credibility and effectiveness of the environmentalist movement.Timestamps00:00:00—Introduction00:02:50—The Evolution of the Climate Change Narrative00:05:23—The Political and Social Impact of Climate Change Rhetoric00:14:57—Analyzing the Science and Misconceptions of Climate Change00:23:46—The Economic and Societal Resilience to Climate Extremes00:35:30—A Rational Perspective on Climate Change Anxiety00:42:55—Human Migration Toward Climate Risks00:44:50—Revisiting Predictions From An Inconvenient Truth00:50:03—Addressing the Fear of Climate Tipping Points00:55:39—Human Ingenuity and Climate Resilience01:02:35—Carbon Emissions and Economic Growth01:10:36—The Climate Movement and Public Perception01:19:02—A Vision for a Focused Environmental Movement
How much do billionaires really pay in taxes?"Today, the superrich control a greater share of America's wealth than during the Gilded Age of Carnegies and Rockefellers," said Gabriel Zucman in a recent New York Times opinion piece entitled, "It's Time to Tax the Billionaires."Zucman is an economist at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, and a frequent collaborator with superstar economist Thomas Piketty, author of the extremely influential book on wealth inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.But today's guest, Phil Magness—an economic historian, author, and the David J. Theroux Chair in Political Economy at the Independent Institute—says the work of Piketty and his circle of inequality-obsessed colleagues is deeply flawed and sometimes outright deceptive. He points out that billionaires do pay taxes…a lot of taxes. And the inequality literature is riddled with errors and bad statistics.Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.Timestamps:00:00 Introduction to Just Asking Questions: Billionaires and Taxes01:38 Unpacking the Misleading Tax Rate Graphs06:38 The Political Motivations Behind Misleading Tax Narratives15:39 Analyzing the Impact of Tax Credits on Lower-Income Earners22:32 The Real Tax Burden: A Closer Look at Wealthy Americans' Contributions27:05 Countering Piketty's Inequality Data With Accurate Accounting34:58 The Practical Problems With a Wealth Tax40:04 Piketty's Inequality Narrative and Its Flaws48:50 Global Financial Transparency and Taxation Proposals54:40 The Moral and Economic Case Against High Taxation57:48 Listener Q&A: Defending the Show's TitleProducer: John Osterhoudt
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman consider U.S. foreign policy toward Iran in the wake of a helicopter crash that left Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian dead.00:51—Iranian president dies in helicopter crash16:46—Drug Enforcement Administration's proposal to reschedule marijuana34:59—Weekly Listener Question45:54—Reason Weekend 202456:09—This week's cultural recommendationsToday's sponsor:Hello, liberty lovers! Are you passionate about preserving civil liberties and individual freedom? Do you want to support organizations that uphold these principles but struggle to navigate the complex world of charitable giving? Well, fear not! We have the perfect solution for you: a giving account with DonorsTrust. A giving account, also known as a donor-advised fund, is a simple, secure, and tax-advantaged way for libertarian givers like you to support the causes you care about most. With a donor-advised fund, you can make a contribution, receive an immediate tax deduction, and then recommend grants to your favorite charities over time. Plus, you retain control over how your charitable dollars are invested, ensuring they align with your values and goals. Whether you're passionate about defending free speech, protecting property rights, or promoting limited government, a donor-advised fund with DonorsTrust empowers you to make a meaningful impact. So, join us in preserving liberty for future generations by opening a donor-advised fund at DonorsTrust today. To learn more and get started, visit our sponsor, DonorsTrust, at www.donorstrust.org/roundtable. Take control of your giving and make a difference in the fight for freedom. That's www.donorstrust.org/roundtable. Remember, every dollar counts in the battle to safeguard our civil liberties. Let's make our voices heard together!Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman conjure up a few changes they'd wish to see in the vain hope of improving U.S. presidential campaigns and consider the Biden administration's threat to cut off arms shipments to Israel.00:35—Desirable presidential campaign reforms23:00—Weekly listener question33:20—FreedomWorks is disbanding49:34—This week's cultural recommendationsToday's sponsor:We all carry around different stressors—big and small. When we keep them bottled up, it can start to affect us negatively. Therapy is a safe space to get things off your chest—and to figure out how to work through whatever's weighing you down. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Get it off your chest, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
What should colleges do about pro-Palestinian encampments?College students across America are camping out to demand their universities divest all investments with Israeli-linked companies that they claim profit from the occupation and oppression of Palestine. It's gone on for weeks, and even administrators at schools known as bastions of progressive activism are finally getting fed up. Harvard's president is threatening "involuntary leave" for protesters. Columbia announced on Monday that it canceled its main commencement ceremony for safety reasons. The University of Southern California has, too.UCLA called in the cops to clear its encampment, and police have arrested more than 2,100 protesters across all U.S. campuses since April, according to the Associated Press.Congress has continued to interrogate Ivy League presidents, and a bill to explicitly define antisemitism for civil rights law enforcement purposes just passed the House with overwhelming support last week.Joining us today to talk about the protests, the backlash, and what it all means for free speech on campus and the wider world is Nico Perrino, executive vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), and host of the free speech podcast So to Speak.Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.Sources referenced in this conversation:Full Text of the Antisemitism Awareness ActInternational Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism.Columbia students define "divest"Harvard President Garber Breaks Silence on Encampment, Threatens 'Involuntary Leave' for ProtestersColumbia cancels commencement amid campus protestsMap: Where College Protesters Have Been Arrested or DetainedPolling 1,200 college students on EncampmentsWhat Americans think about recent pro-Palestinian campus protests | YouGovAmericans' Views of Both Israel, Palestinian Authority DownMajority in US Say Israel's Reasons for Fighting Hamas Are Valid | Pew Research CenterLetter from judges saying they won't hire Columbia grads as clerksTimestamps:00:00 Introduction01:33 Free Speech on Campus: A Conversation with Nico Perrino02:13 The Historical Context of Campus Protests and Free Speech Debates07:28 The Legal and Social Implications of Campus Encampments31:38 The Role of Civil Disobedience in Campus Activism38:31 Evaluating the Effectiveness of Campus Protests Through Polling Data43:07 Congressional Involvement in Campus Free Speech Issues50:48 The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2023: A New Legal Battleground54:56 The Complexities of Free Speech and Political Expression on Campus59:17 Navigating the Tensions of Privacy and Free Speech01:03:42 The Role of Public Shaming and Cancel Culture in Free Speech Debates01:20:03 Nico Wants You To Ask Yourself This Question About Censorship01:23:58 Just Ask Us Questions: A Libertarian's Evolving Stance on Immigration
Today's guest is Noam Dworman, the owner of New York's Comedy Cellar, the most influential—and controversial—comedy club on the planet. Dave Chapelle, Louis C.K., Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock, Andrew Schulz, and many others not only broke out from this club, but they also regularly return to try out new material. Trained as a lawyer, Dworman is a staunch defender of the First Amendment and, in an era of groveling apologies and censorship on the down low, he remains outspoken on the value and importance of free expression to a flourishing society. His podcast Live From the Table has guests ranging from Israel critic Norman Finkelstein to atheist Sam Harris to former Reasoners Radley Balko and Michael Moynihan—and never has a dull moment. Nick Gillespie talks with Dworman about free speech, the history of comedy in Greenwich Village, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia.Today's sponsors:Better Help. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. Better Help is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.The Reason Roundtable Live in D.C.! Come out on Thursday, June 6 as Reason magazine's own Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch put their personal "free minds and free markets" filter on the biggest stories of the day. Tickets are $10 and going fast! Go here for details.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman assess the mismatch between Americans' lingering concerns over inflation compared to politicians' failure to address it.01:39—Americans still care about inflation.16:49—Donald Trump to speak at Libertarian Party National Convention41:08—U.S. House of Representatives passes the Antisemitism Awareness Act50:24—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsor:We all carry around different stressors—big and small. When we keep them bottled up, it can start to affect us negatively. Therapy is a safe space to get things off your chest—and to figure out how to work through whatever's weighing you down. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Get it off your chest, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production and video edit by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Stephen Wolfram is, strictly speaking, a high school and college dropout: He left both Eton and Oxford early, citing boredom. At 20, he received his doctorate in theoretical physics from Caltech and then joined the faculty in 1979. But he eventually moved away from academia, focusing instead on building a series of popular, powerful, and often eponymous research tools: Mathematica, WolframAlpha, and Wolfram Language.He self-published a 1,200-page work called A New Kind of Science arguing that nature runs on ultrasimple computational rules. The book enjoyed surprising popular acclaim.Wolfram's work on computational thinking forms the basis of intelligent assistants, such as Siri.Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward interviewed Wolfram as part of the June 2024 AI special issue of Reason. He offered a candid assessment of what he hopes and fears from artificial intelligence, discussed the complicated relationship between humans and their technology, and elaborated on the ways that artificial intelligence can already overcome existing regulatory burdens.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Jesse Signal questions the science of "gender affirming care."Text and links to sources available here: https://reason.com/podcast/2024/05/02/jesse-singal-should-kids-medically-transitionChapters:00:00 Introduction to the Show and Topic: Kids and Gender Transition02:14 Media Coverage and Jesse Singal's Insights04:50 The Impact of Social Media and Activism on Youth Gender Medicine09:36 Exploring the Tavistock Controversy and Its Implications12:38 The Debate on Informed Consent and Medical Ethics28:37 Social Contagion Theory and Its Effects on Gender Identity34:03 Scrutinizing the Science Behind Gender Affirming Treatments42:32 Navigating the Complexities of Youth Gender Medicine43:03 The Role of Data and Evidence in Gender Transition Debates44:34 The Impact of Politics and Misinformation on Transgender Healthcare47:34 Exploring the Cass Review's Recommendations on Gender Medicine49:24 Comparing Gender Medicine Practices: UK vs. USA50:47 The Challenges of Establishing Effective Guidelines in Transgender Healthcare51:25 The Influence of Activism and Politics on Medical Standards55:16 Addressing the Concerns Around Puberty Blockers and Hormone Treatments01:20:32 Just Ask Us Questions: A Discussion of anarcho-capitalist SecurityShould kids medically transition between genders?The number of kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria has surged in recent years. In America, diagnoses have almost tripled from about 15,000 to more than 42,000 between 2017 to 2021. In the United Kingdom, the number of minors referred to the national Gender Identity Development Service grew from 51 in 2009 to 1,766 by 2016, leading to years' long waitlists for care within the government-run health system. This surge caused England's National Health Service to commission an extensive study of youth gender treatment. That study is known as The Cass Review, and its results dropped on April 10. The review's author, former head of the Royal College of Pediatrics Hilary Cass, concluded that modern youth gender dysphoria interventions are informed by "remarkably weak evidence" drawing on studies "exaggerated by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint" and that "we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress." The science, it turns out, is not settled—or anywhere close to it.NHS England opted to stop routine prescriptions of puberty blockers following the review's publication, as have NHS Scotland and the Welsh Government. Major American medical groups like the American Psychiatric Association, American Medical Association and American Academy of Pediatrics, all of which endorse prescribing puberty blockers for gender-dysphoric kids, have yet to officially respond.American media coverage of the Review, which seems to throw the entire youth gender treatment paradigm in this country into question, has been remarkably muted. But today's guest is never muted. Jesse Singal has been covering this topic—and taken a lot of heat for it—for years in the pages of publications like The Atlantic, The Dispatch, and on his substack, Singal-Minded.Sources referenced in Just Ask Us Questions:https://youtu.be/TwiE1dxGYNYhttps://youtu.be/Cy2Xla_urNI
Today's guest is comedy writer Rob Long, who served as a writer for and producer of the great sitcom Cheers for years, writes the weekly Martini Shot commentary, and cohosts the GLoP Culture podcast with Jonah Goldberg and John Podhoretz. He is a columnist for Commentary and a cofounder of Ricochet, the online community and podcast platform. At a live event in New York City, Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Long about whether Hollywood is out of ideas, what it's like being a libertarian-leaning conservative in a very progressive industry, and the role that psychedelics have played in his creative process.Today's sponsor:Nick Gillespie with Students for Sensible Drug Policy's Kat Murti, May 8. 2023. In a world where drug use and policy are rapidly changing, what role will younger people play in challenging legal and cultural prohibitions of psychoactive substances? Join us for a candid conversation with Kat Murti, the new executive director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, which for over 25 years has been the leading voice on college campuses for changing laws and attitudes about psychedelics and other drugs. She will be interviewed by Reason Editor at Large Nick Gillespie and the conversation, including audience Q&A, will be recorded for a future episode of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast. Use the discount code REASON42 at checkout for 20 percent off all tickets.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman assess the spate of anti-Israel campus protests at universities across the country, followed by another look at the trials of both Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump in New York.00:37—Campus protests across the country31:35—Weekly Listener Question38:01—Harvey Weinstein rape conviction overturned in New York44:01—Trump trials continue apace48:57—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsor:Hello, liberty lovers! Are you passionate about preserving civil liberties and individual freedom? Do you want to support organizations that uphold these principles but struggle to navigate the complex world of charitable giving? Well, fear not! We have the perfect solution for you: a giving account with DonorsTrust. A giving account, also known as a donor-advised fund, is a simple, secure, and tax-advantaged way for libertarian givers like you to support the causes you care about most. With a donor-advised fund, you can make a contribution, receive an immediate tax deduction, and then recommend grants to your favorite charities over time. Plus, you retain control over how your charitable dollars are invested, ensuring they align with your values and goals. Whether you're passionate about defending free speech, protecting property rights, or promoting limited government, a donor-advised fund with DonorsTrust empowers you to make a meaningful impact. Join us in preserving liberty for future generations by opening a donor-advised fund at DonorsTrust today. To learn more and get started, visit our sponsor, DonorsTrust, at www.donorstrust.org/roundtable. Take control of your giving and make a difference in the fight for freedom. Remember, every dollar counts in the battle to safeguard our civil liberties. Let's make our voices heard together!Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Important Update from The Soho Forum: "[We regret] to inform you of a significant change to tonight's debate between Brent Orrell and Tom Woods. Unfortunately, Brent Orrell will not be able to participate as his granddaughter tragically passed away over the weekend. Our hearts go out to Brent and his family during this difficult time. In light of this, we've made adjustments to the event to ensure it can still proceed. Our director Gene Epstein will read, word-for-word, the script that Brent prepared, along with the slides Brent submitted. Tom Woods will then make his case for the negative. In lieu of an Oxford-style before/after voting, we will extend the Q&A portion and conclude the program with a 5-mins summation from Tom Woods."The originally scheduled event was as follows:Brent Orrell of the American Enterprise Institute and podcaster and author Tom Woods debate the resolution, "Government-imposed restrictions during the Covid pandemic were prudent and essential."Taking the affirmative is Brent Orrell, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute focusing on job training, work force development, and criminal justice reform. Orrell has over 20 years of experience in the executive and legislative branches of government and was nominated by President George W. Bush to lead the Employment and Training Administration at the U.S. Department of Labor. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he wrote extensively on the impact of the disease on working conditions and the role of social distancing policies and practices in protecting worker and public health.Taking the negative is Tom Woods, the host of The Tom Woods Show and author of 13 books, including latest Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania. He won the $50,000 first-place prize in the Templeton Enterprise Awards for his book The Church and the Market and was the winner of the 2019 Hayek Lifetime Achievement Award, given in Vienna by the Hayek Institute and the Austrian Economics Center.
Why has President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's dark side been hidden?Scholars consistently rank FDR as one of America's greatest presidents. The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey ranked him number two, below Lincoln, and respondents to the Siena College Research Institute studies have ranked him number one in six out of seven survey years. Perhaps it's understandable that the longest-serving president who saw the country through the Great Depression and a World War II victory would rank so highly. But do presidential scholars exhibit a major blind spot when it comes to the authoritarian aspects of FDR and his New Deal agenda? That's what today's guest argues in his book, The New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR's Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance. Those civil liberties abuses, and how they permanently changed America and the relationship between citizen and state, are the subject of this episode. The book's author, David Beito, is an American historian and history professor at the University of Alabama and a research fellow at the Independent Institute.Timestamps:00:00 Introduction00:33 FDR's Legacy: A Closer Look at the New Deal's Impact on Civil Liberties02:03 Exploring FDR's Authoritarian Tactics and Media Manipulation05:00 The Power of Radio: FDR's Fireside Chats and Control Over Public Opinion39:09 The Black Committee: The Beginnings of Mass Surveillance in America44:38 The Black Committee's Investigation and Western Union's Resistance45:26 The Extensive Telegram Surveillance Operation48:09 Legal Battles and Public Outcry Against Privacy Violations51:17 The Minton Committee's Further Overreach and the War on Fake News58:13 FDR's Court Packing Plan and Its Echoes in Modern Politics01:04:59 Revisiting FDR's Role in Japanese Internment01:17:15 The New Deal's Dark Side: A Critical Reexamination01:24:59 Reflecting on FDR's Legacy and Its Implications Today
You've probably seen footage and images of the January 6 riot at the Capitol captured by today's guest, videographer Ford Fischer. A decade ago, Fischer cofounded New2Share, a radical experiment in decentralized video journalism. He and his colleagues gather long-form footage from all sorts of breaking news events, including protests organized by radicals across the political spectrum. They upload it to YouTube and elsewhere, and then let viewers draw their own conclusions. His coverage has been licensed worldwide and appears regularly on networks ranging from CNN to Fox News to NBC. Fischer's YouTube and Facebook channels routinely get demonetized and in other sorts of trouble because of the controversial nature of his work. Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with him about why he started News2Share, what he hopes to accomplish by offering something truly unique in an age of 24/7 news coverage, and how his training as a Reason intern informs his worldview.Today's sponsors:"3 Takeaways." It's a top 2 percent global podcast, and for good reason. 3 Takeaways brings you conversations with people who are changing the world. In each episode, a newsmaker talks about lessons they've learned—whether in the halls of power, the corner office, or the research lab. Plus they share three key insights to help you understand the world in new ways. You'll hear revealing talks with people such as former Secretaries of the Treasury and Homeland Security, Nobel prize winners, former Prime Ministers, past CEOs of Google and American Express, and a former Chief of MI6 and many others. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast. The next one is on Wednesday, May 8 and the guest is Feminists for Liberty cofounder and former CATO staffer Kat Murti, the new head of Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), a nonprofit working to change laws and culture around prohibition. The event is cosponsored by The Psychedelic Assembly in midtown Manhattan. Use REASON42 to get 20 percent off all tickets.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and special guest Eric Boehm lament a horrible weekend for freedom, as Congress passed a collection of bad bills concerning military spending for Ukraine and Israel, a TikTok ban, and a reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).00:53—House of Representatives passes substantial bipartisan military spending aid package that includes Ukraine and Israel22:50—New Title IX rules34:00—Weekly Listener Question41:03—House votes to reauthorize Section 702 of the FISA48:29—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsor:Hello, liberty lovers! Are you passionate about preserving civil liberties and individual freedom? Do you want to support organizations that uphold these principles but struggle to navigate the complex world of charitable giving? Well, fear not! We have the perfect solution for you: a giving account with DonorsTrust. A giving account, also known as a donor-advised fund, is a simple, secure, and tax-advantaged way for libertarian givers like you to support the causes you care about most. With a donor-advised fund, you can make a contribution, receive an immediate tax deduction, and then recommend grants to your favorite charities over time. Plus, you retain control over how your charitable dollars are invested, ensuring they align with your values and goals. Whether you're passionate about defending free speech, protecting property rights, or promoting limited government, a donor-advised fund with DonorsTrust empowers you to make a meaningful impact. Join us in preserving liberty for future generations by opening a donor-advised fund at DonorsTrust today. To learn more and get started, visit our sponsor, DonorsTrust, at www.donorstrust.org/roundtable. Take control of your giving and make a difference in the fight for freedom. Remember, every dollar counts in the battle to safeguard our civil liberties. Let's make our voices heard together!Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Is war with Iran coming? Last Saturday, Iran launched hundreds of armed drones and missiles to attack Israel in retaliation for an airstrike on an Iranian consulate in Syria that killed seven members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, including a general. Israel and the U.S. report that they intercepted most of the drones, and the sole known casualty was a 7-year-old girl critically injured by falling missile shrapnel. Israel has not retaliated…yet. In the wake of all that, today's guest had something to say about the way some American activists loudly defended the Islamic Republic of Iran after staying conspicuously silent during protests against the regime and crackdowns that began almost two years ago.That was Elica Le Bon, a first-generation Iranian immigrant born in the U.K. and currently living in Los Angeles, where she practices law and runs several large social media accounts that bring attention to the plight of the Iranian people. On the latest episode of Just Asking Questions, she talked to Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe about the Iranian attack, the state of the protest movement and how social media has affected it, and her recent televised exchange with Dave Smith. Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Today's guest is Jonathan Haidt, whose new book is The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. The New York University psychologist and Heterodox Academy cofounder argues that what he calls a play-based childhood has been replaced with a phone-based one over the past 50 years, leading to skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide among younger Americans. He says parents, schools, and society must keep young kids away from smartphones and social media if we want them to thrive.Haidt is coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018) and he's also cofounder of Let Grow, a nonprofit that lobbies for policies, laws, and pedagogy that will increase children's resiliency and independence. "The Fragile Generation," the 2017 Reason article he coauthored with Lenore Skenazy, is among the most-read stories on this website. Reason's Nick Gillespie asks Haidt about what is driving Gen Z and younger kids to distraction and whether it's possible–or wise–to childproof the internet. This interview was taped in front of a live audience in New York City as part of the Reason Speakeasy series.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Abigail Shrier is author of the best-selling new book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up. She argues that the mental health of Gen Z—people born between 1997 and 2012—is a mess because an infantilizing therapeutic culture pervades every aspect of their lives.Shrier stresses that she's not against psychological counseling and help per se, but she believes too many unqualified and misguided people are causing far more problems than they solve.Her previous book was the controversial Irreversible Damage, which looked at the rapid rise of girls identifying as transgender. We talk about the roots of today's therapeutic culture, the extent of the problems it causes, and how parents, teachers, and young people themselves might find a better way forward.Previous appearance:Abigail Shrier: Trans Activists, Cancel Culture, and the Future of Free Expression, July 7, 2021Today's sponsor:"3 Takeaways" It's a top 2 percent global podcast, and for good reason. 3 Takeaways bring you conversations with people who are changing the world. In each episode, a newsmaker talks about lessons they've learned—whether in the halls of power, the corner office, or the research lab. Plus they share three key insights to help you understand the world in new ways. You'll hear revealing talks with people such as former Secretaries of the Treasury and Homeland Security, Nobel prize winners, former Prime Ministers, past CEOs of Google and American Express, and a former Chief of MI6 and many others. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman contextualize Iran's retaliatory strike against Israel before bemoaning the recent vote in Congress on the renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).02:20 - Iran's retaliatory strike on Israel13:05 - House votes to reauthorize Section 702 of FISA.29:21 - Weekly Listener Question42:00 - Arizona Supreme Court rules on law that would ban nearly all abortions.47:23 - This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsor:What's the first thing you'd do if you had an extra hour in your day? A lot of us spend our lives wishing we had more time. The question is, time for what? If time was unlimited, how would you use it? The best way to squeeze that special thing into your schedule is to know what's important to you, and make it a priority. Therapy can help you find what matters to you, so you can do more of it. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Learn to make time for what makes you happy, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
At least 40 U.S. colleges still require a COVID vaccine, according to nocollegemandates.com, an initiative that tracks and opposes the mandates.Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine and biostatistician who lost his job at Harvard for refusing the vaccine even though he'd already survived a COVID infection, says such mandates are "unscientific" and "unethical." Harvard has since dropped the mandate, but Kulldorff likely won't be getting his job there back anytime soon because the Harvard-affiliated hospital that employs medical school faculty still requires a COVID vaccine. Kulldorff, who created one of the earliest disease outbreak surveillance software systems, was also booted from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) COVID-19 vaccine safety commission and regularly de-boosted on Twitter and YouTube for his views. Former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins labeled him and his co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration "fringe epidemiologists" and demanded a "quick and devastating…takedown" of their call to end lockdowns in favor of a "focused protection" strategy. Kulldorff joined Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to talk about his ordeal at Harvard, his retrospective on the pandemic and the cultural and governmental response to it, and his involvement in the ongoing Supreme Court case Murthy v. Missouri, in which plaintiffs argue that federal agencies violated the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to take down certain content about COVID-19. Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman consider President Joe Biden's updated response to the war in Gaza following a strike by Israeli military forces that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers. And with tax day on the horizon, the editors reflect on how Biden's plan to hire new IRS agents is resulting in more audits of the middle class.03:02—Biden's response to Israeli military forces killing seven aid workers in Gaza27:04—The IRS hires more workers, and more middle-class audits result.36:16—Weekly Listener Question47:56—Eclipse day!53:25—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:CSN Mint has been providing certified U.S. Mint collectible coins and precious metals for over 20 years, and we are one of the most trusted names in numismatics. Explore CSN Mint's extensive catalog of bullion bars, coins, and numismatic collectibles. Whether you're a seasoned investor or a passionate collector, you'll find a diverse range of products to suit your needs and preferences. At CSN Mint, trust is paramount. Rest assured that every product you purchase includes the original certificate of authenticity or is certified and graded by a third-party grader to ensure origin and purity. With CSN Mint, you can build your collection with confidence. Experience world-class customer service and support with CSN Mint. Our team of knowledgeable professionals is here to assist you every step of the way, from product selection to order fulfillment and beyond. If you are going to collect something, it might as well be money! Go to CSNmint.com/roundtable and use promo code Roundtable at checkout to get a free Silver American Eagle—over $30 in value—with your purchase of $75 or more.What's the first thing you'd do if you had an extra hour in your day? A lot of us spend our lives wishing we had more time. The question is, time for what? If time was unlimited, how would you use it? The best way to squeeze that special thing into your schedule is to know what's important to you, and make it a priority. Therapy can help you find what matters to you, so you can do more of it. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Learn to make time for what makes you happy, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Joe Nocera of The Free Press and Gene Epstein of The Soho Forum debate the resolution, "Capitalism has been a key factor in leaving the United States unprepared to address the COVID-19 pandemic."Taking the affirmative is Nocera, a columnist for The Free Press and co-author (with Bethany McLean) of The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind. His business journalism has appeared in numerous publications, including Esquire, Bloomberg, and The New York Times.Arguing against the resolution is Epstein, the executive director of the Soho Forum. He is the former economics and books editor of Barron's, a position he left in January 2018 after a 26-year stint. He frequently appears on libertarian podcasts, especially The Tom Woods Show.
"I discovered something remarkably similar to an alien co-intelligence," wrote Ethan Mollick in his new book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, describing the "sleepless nights" he experienced upon first encountering ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022.Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of the One Useful Thing Substack, has studied, taught, and written about the effects of artificial intelligence on work and education for years. He joined Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to discuss the ways in which large language models like ChatGPT and Google Gemini are already transforming the workplace, the classroom, artistic production, and the truth-seeking process itself.In this episode, they discuss why you should treat your chatbot like a person even though it's not, how AI is "decomposing" jobs, what tools like OpenAI's Sora mean for the future of filmmaking, how to protect one's identity in the age of deepfakes, The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, the prospects for AI "doomsday," and whether regulation of AI is necessary or even possible.Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Joe Lonsdale is a co-founder of the data analytics firm Palantir; OpenGov, which provides cloud software services for governments; and the University of Austin, which seeks to reform higher education. He's the managing partner of 8VC, a tech and life sciences venture capital fund, and is chairman of the board of the Cicero Institute, a nonprofit working to "restore liberty, accountability, and innovation in American governance."Reason's Nick Gillespie asked Lonsdale why he relocated to Texas from California, how to curb government overreach while providing essential services, his goals for his podcast American Optimist, and his 2020 article, "Libertarianism is Dysfunctional, but Liberty is Great."Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman discuss Donald Trump's horrible tariff proposal, reactions to the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore, and the late Joe Lieberman.02:05—Trump vs. Biden on trade19:39—Reactions to the Baltimore bridge collapse31:17—Weekly Listener Question39:22—R.I.P. Joe LiebermanSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:CSN Mint has been providing certified U.S. Mint collectible coins and precious metals for over 20 years, and we are one of the most trusted names in numismatics. Explore CSN Mint's extensive catalog of bullion bars, coins, and numismatic collectibles. Whether you're a seasoned investor or a passionate collector, you'll find a diverse range of products to suit your needs and preferences. At CSN Mint, trust is paramount. Rest assured that every product you purchase includes the original certificate of authenticity or is certified and graded by a third-party grader to ensure origin and purity. With CSN Mint, you can build your collection with confidence. Experience world-class customer service and support with CSN Mint. Our team of knowledgeable professionals is here to assist you every step of the way, from product selection to order fulfillment and beyond. If you are going to collect something, it might as well be money! Go to CSNmint.com/roundtable and use promo code Roundtable at checkout to get a free Silver American Eagle—over $30 in value—with your purchase of $75 or more.If there's a surefire way to wake up feeling fresh after a night of drinking, it's with ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. Just remember to make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Go to zbiotics.com/ROUNDTABLE to get 15 percent off your first order when you use ROUNDTABLE at checkout. ZBiotics is backed with a 100 percent money-back guarantee so if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Immigration ranks as the second-most important issue among registered U.S. voters and the top issue for Republican voters, according to a Marist Poll/PBS NewsHour/NPR poll released last month. Perhaps that's because of the 3.2 million border encounters documented by Border Patrol in 2023—a new record high that's so far being outpaced this year.Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who continues to erect razor wire fencing at the border despite a Supreme Court ruling prohibiting Texas from stopping federal agents from cutting through the barriers, has likely also heightened the salience of the issue for Republican voters. Even politicians in blue cities like New York are calling the influx a problem, with Mayor Eric Adams saying that the arrival of 110,000 asylum seekers over a year and a half would "destroy New York City" as shelters become overwhelmed. What do libertarians, traditionally in favor of permissive immigration laws, have to say about this? The truth is, there's a divide. Today's episode of Just Asking Questions features two thinkers on either side of that divide laying out what they each believe is the ideal immigration policy.Libertarian podcaster and comedian Dave Smith said on the Liberty Lockdown show last month that "all of our troops should come home and be stationed around our borders." He continued saying that "if you believe in open borders right now, under current circumstances, you're an insane person, and you're as bad as a communist."That sparked a social media firestorm, which included exchanges between Smith and today's other guest, Chris Freiman, a professor at the John Chambers College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University and author of several notable papers about the ethics of immigration. Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Psychologist and bestselling author Steven Pinker is one of the leading defenders of academic freedom and liberal values of limited government, secularism, tolerance, and free enterprise.A year ago, he helped found the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, "a faculty organization to advocate for the free and civil exchange of ideas inside and outside the classroom." In the wake of the reaction by the campus left to the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, he published "A Five-Point Plan To Save Harvard from Itself" in The Boston Globe. His ultra-influential home institution, he wrote, "is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context." Reason's Nick Gillespie and Pinker discuss if higher education is doomed, why so many people on the right and left are skeptical about moral and material progress, and how his "stereoscopic" photography fits into his larger worldview.Previous appearances:Steven Pinker: Rationality Has Made Us Richer, Kinder, and More FreeSteven Pinker Wants Enlightenment Now!Steven Pinker on the Decline in Violence and the "Better Angels of Our Nature"Biology vs. the Blank Slate: Q&A with Steven PinkerToday's sponsors:Better Help. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. Better Help is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.The Reason Speakeasy is a live, unscripted, monthly event held in New York City that doubles as a taping of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie podcast. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soda, and food. For details and to buy tickets, go here.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman assess the Justice Department's nonsensical antitrust case against Apple before turning their attention to Donald Trump's $464 million bond payment deadline in his New York civil fraud case.00:41—Bonkers antitrust suit against Apple20:27—Congress passes $1.2 trillion spending package29:54—Weekly Listener Question42:20—Trump contests $464 million bond payment in New York civil fraud case50:52—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:CSN Mint has been providing certified U.S. Mint collectible coins and precious metals for over 20 years, and we are one of the most trusted names in numismatics. Explore CSN Mint's extensive catalog of bullion bars, coins, and numismatic collectibles. Whether you're a seasoned investor or a passionate collector, you'll find a diverse range of products to suit your needs and preferences. At CSN Mint, trust is paramount. Rest assured that every product you purchase includes the original certificate of authenticity or is certified and graded by a third-party grader to ensure origin and purity. With CSN Mint, you can build your collection with confidence. Experience world-class customer service and support with CSN Mint. Our team of knowledgeable professionals is here to assist you every step of the way, from product selection to order fulfillment and beyond. If you are going to collect something, it might as well be money! Go to CSNmint.com/roundtable and use promo code Roundtable at checkout to get a free Silver American Eagle—over $30 in value—with your purchase of $75 or more.What's the first thing you'd do if you had an extra hour in your day? A lot of us spend our lives wishing we had more time. The question is, time for what? If time was unlimited, how would you use it? The best way to squeeze that special thing into your schedule is to know what's important to you and make it a priority. Therapy can help you find what matters to you, so you can do more of it. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Learn to make time for what makes you happy, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with one of the great pioneers of podcasting, Dan Carlin, the host of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. Carlin has been putting his thoughts out there for all to hear since the aughts. His deeply researched and urgently delivered takes on everything from Julius Caesar's wars on the Celtic tribes of Gaul to 20th century Imperial Japan's horrific conquest of Asia are downloaded by the millions.They discussed Carlin's upcoming live tour, how he would update his 2019 book The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments From the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses in light of COVID-19, and whether he believes we can really learn meaningful lessons from history.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Are American cities crime-ridden hellscapes right now? Have cities rebounded from pandemic-era homicide spikes? Why do subway shootings in New York and carjackings in D.C. keep making the news?"I think a lot of this has to be disaggregated: There is a public order problem, and there is a violent crime problem, and they're not necessarily the same problem," Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and former Baltimore cop, tells Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions.They discussed the pros and cons of broken-windows policing, how "soft-on-crime" district attorneys affect the cities they're tasked with keeping safe, and whether New York City should become more like Singapore by cracking down on petty crimes.Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Few individuals have had a bigger impact on the libertarian movement than David Boaz, the longtime executive vice president of the Cato Institute. Boaz recently turned 70 and gave a keynote address at LibertyCon, the annual gathering of Students for Liberty, in Washington, D.C. Reason's Nick Gillespie caught up with Boaz to discuss the disarray in the libertarian movement, why he thinks the nonaggression principle and cosmopolitanism form the core of the movement, why libertarians can never seem to take wins when they get them, and whether there's anything to look forward to in a rematch of Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman weigh in on the approved House bill that could potentially usher in a ban on popular social media app TikTok in the United States.01:49—Legislation to ban TikTok16:39—California's continued high-speed rail boondoggle33:48—Weekly Listener Question43:25—Elon Musk launches Starship rocket46:31—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:CSN Mint has been providing certified U.S. Mint collectible coins and precious metals for over 20 years, and we are one of the most trusted names in numismatics. Explore CSN Mint's extensive catalog of bullion bars, coins, and numismatic collectibles. Whether you're a seasoned investor or a passionate collector, you'll find a diverse range of products to suit your needs and preferences. At CSN Mint, trust is paramount. Rest assured that every product you purchase includes the original certificate of authenticity or is certified and graded by a third-party grader to ensure origin and purity. With CSN Mint, you can build your collection with confidence. Experience world-class customer service and support with CSN Mint. Our team of knowledgeable professionals is here to assist you every step of the way, from product selection to order fulfillment and beyond. If you are going to collect something, it might as well be money! Go to CSNmint.com/roundtable and use promo code Roundtable at checkout to get a free Silver American Eagle—over $30 in value—with your purchase of $75 or more.ZBiotics. Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works: When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's this byproduct, not dehydration, that's to blame for your rough next day. ZBiotics produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make ZBiotics your first drink of the night and to drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Go to zbiotics.com/roundtable to get 15 percent off your first order when you use code ROUNDTABLE at checkout. ZBiotics is backed with a 100 percent money-back guarantee, so if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Pano Kanelos is the president of the University of Austin, which will be admitting its first class of 100 students this fall. The college was founded in 2021 as an antidote to left-wing monoculture in academia and is committed to free speech and the pursuit of truth. Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Kanelos, a Shakespeare scholar and first-generation college kid who grew up in a Greek diner in Chicago, about how the University of Austin will be different from virtually every other college around, why the humanities have virtually disappeared from higher education, and how a chance encounter with Nobel laureate Saul Bellow changed his life. He also does a quick, improvised close reading of the poem "Ovid in the Third Reich," by Geoffrey Hill, one of his major intellectual influences.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Writer and podcast host Coleman Hughes published a column in The Free Press in January entitled, "What Really Happened to George Floyd?" in which he analyzes a documentary called The Fall of Minneapolis, which has racked up more than 6 million views on YouTube and Rumble. The documentary makes the case that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin may have been wrongly convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020. In his column, Hughes ultimately concluded that it's time for Americans to "consider the possibility that Chauvin was not a murderer, but a scapegoat."Later in January, investigative journalist and former Reason staffer Radley Balko began publishing an extensive three-part rebuttal on his Substack The Watch, which he concluded earlier this month. It's entitled "The Retconning of George Floyd," and he takes apart errors and what he says are outright lies in the documentary. He also heavily criticizes Hughes and The Free Press for failing to consult experts or include research that he says could've helped them avoid serious mistakes.Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe hosted Hughes and Balko on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions. Balko argued that Hughes and The Free Press missed or misrepresented key facts about the killing of Floyd and Chauvin's trial. Hughes defended his skepticism of the felony murder verdict. They also discussed their opposing views of the protests and police reforms that followed Floyd's death.Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Did you know that a mere 44,000 votes spread across Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin kept Joe Biden and Donald Trump from an Electoral College tie in 2020? That was even tighter than in 2016, when 80,000 votes in three states gave Trump a decisive Electoral College win. Patrick Ruffini is a Republican pollster at Echelon Insights and author of Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP. Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with Ruffini about why the major parties continue to leak market share, why 2024 is going to be another super-close presidential race, and whether small-l libertarian voters will make the difference in November.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie welcome back sudden special guest (and former Roundtable host) Andrew Heaton! The editors reflect on President Biden's recent State of the Union address and look ahead to the unavoidable slog of eight more months of election coverage.04:11 - President Biden's feisty, yet empty, State of the Union address24:27 - Third party election outlook46:43 - Weekly Listener Question55:49 - This week's cultural recommendationsToday's sponsor:A common misconception about relationships is that they have to be easy to be "right." But sometimes, the best ones happen when both people put in the work to make them great. Therapy can be a place to work through the challenges you face in all of your relationships—whether with friends, work, your significant other, or anyone else. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In a special edition of Just Asking Questions recorded before a live audience on the Honduran island of Roatán, Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe talk with Mark Lutter, founder of the Charter Cities Institute, and Patri Friedman, founder and board member of Pronomos Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in charter cities.The conversation took place at the Alternative Visions for Governance conference sponsored by the Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason. The conference happened within the jurisdiction of Próspera, an autonomous zone for economic development—known as a ZEDE—made possible by a 2013 law passed by the Honduran National Congress. They discussed lessons learned from the launch of Próspera, which has expanded despite a hostile presidential administration, the proliferation of biohacking and medical procedures within the zone, the history of self-governing cities, the relationship between charter cities and democracy, and where in the world prospects are best for future experiments in privatized governance. Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Journalist Nate Silver burst onto the national scene in 2008, when he correctly predicted 49 out of 50 states in that year's election, outstripping all other analysts. His former website FiveThirtyEight became a must-visit stop for anyone interested in political forecasting and helped mainstream the concept of "data journalism," which utilizes the same sort of hard-core modeling and probabilistic thinking that helped Silver succeed as a professional poker player and a staffer at the legendary Baseball Prospectus. Reason's Nick Gillespie talked to Silver about the 2024 election, why libertarian defenses of free speech are gaining ground among liberals, his take on the "crisis" in legacy media, and his forthcoming book, On The Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman debate the pros and cons of various ideas for electoral reform ahead of this week's Super Tuesday primary contests.00:27—The Supreme Court rules Colorado can't remove Donald Trump from the ballot.06:19—Electoral dysfunction, incentives, plus pros and cons of various proposed reforms36:40—Weekly Listener Question45:48—Sen. Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) announces his retirement.56:06—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsor:A common misconception about relationships is that they have to be easy to be "right." But sometimes, the best ones happen when both people put in the work to make them great. Therapy can be a place to work through the challenges you face in all of your relationships—whether with friends, work, your significant other, or anyone else. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Reporter and podcaster Eli Lake and author Jeremy Hammond debated the resolution, "The root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Palestinians' rejection of Israel's right to exist."Taking the affirmative is Lake, the former senior national security correspondent for The Daily Beast and Newsweek. He is currently a reporter at The Free Press and host of The Re-Education podcast. He has also contributed to CNN, Fox News, C-SPAN, Charlie Rose, the I Am Rapaport: Stereo Podcast, and Bloggingheads.tv.Hammond, an independent journalist and author, takes the negative. He is the author of several books, including Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
Bryan Johnson made his fortune when he sold his company Braintree to PayPal for $800 million, netting about $300 million for himself. He spends about $2 million a year creating a system to reverse his "biological age." He's 46 years old, chronologically, but claims he's de-aged himself following a program he's branded "the Blueprint protocol." "I wanted to pose the question in this technological age: Can an algorithm, paired with science, in fact, take better care of me than I can myself?" Johnson tells Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions.They talked with Johnson about his daily routine, the results he's published including measurement of his nighttime erections, the transhumanist philosophy he outlines in his free e-book Don't Die, the role that artificial intelligence is likely to play in prolonging human life and health spans, and the value and limitations of self-experimentation in an era of pharmaceutical stagnation.Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
You probably already know that the national debt is bigger than our whole economy. But relax, because things can always get worse! And they will, regardless of whether Biden or Trump gets elected in the fall. Each has a proven track record of spending like a drunken sailor and most projections show that debt will grow to between 181 percent and 340 percent of GDP over the next few decades. Reason's Nick Gillespie discussed all of this and more with Brian Riedl, a budget expert at the Manhattan Institute. Riedl explains why massive and growing debt is really bad, why reducing it is really hard but really important, and why young people should be really pissed.Today's sponsor:DonorsTrust is the oldest and largest donor-advised fund made for people who live out with their charitable giving the idea of free minds and free markets. If you don't know about donor-advised funds, you should. The fund gives you a simple, tax-advantaged way to easily donate to charities that align with your values. Whether it's promoting education freedom, protecting free speech, or just helping people live better lives, the choice is yours. There are lots of providers of donor-advised funds, but DonorsTrust is the one that understands you the best. DonorsTrust is a great friend of Reason and to all other groups like it.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch is back, alongside Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman. The editors talk about Nikki Haley's primary defeat in her home state of South Carolina and President Joe Biden's plan to attack "corporate greed."00:36—Nikki Haley loses in South Carolina.15:42—Biden's plan to attack "corporate greed"29:06—Weekly Listener Question46:41—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsor:A common misconception about relationships is that they have to be easy to be "right." But sometimes, the best ones happen when both people put in the work to make them great. Therapy can be a place to work through the challenges you face in all of your relationships—whether with friends, work, your significant other, or anyone. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
"One of the ways you understand a society is through its infrastructure," said Tucker Carlson as he stood in front of a Moscow subway station in a video he posted after his two-hour interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In contrast to America's public transit, Moscow's "is perfectly clean and orderly," explained Carlson. "How do you explain that? We're not even going to guess. That's not our job. We're only going to ask the question."On the latest episode of Just Asking Questions, journalist and Fifth Column podcast co-host Michael Moynihan joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe to dissect Carlson's interview with Putin and analyze his subsequent behavior, from releasing videos praising Russia's subway stations and grocery stores to his explanation at the World Government Summit that his reason for not challenging Putin to defend his political repression is that it's not interesting because "every leader kills people."They also discuss the recent death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison, Moynihan's experience reporting in Russia, and the state of economic and political freedom under Putin's rule.Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Just 15 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. But why is it broken and how do we fix it? Those are just two of the questions that Reason's Nick Gillespie asked Justin Amash, the former five-term congressman from Michigan who is currently exploring a Senate run.Elected as part of the Tea Party wave in 2010, Amash helped create the House Freedom Caucus but became an increasingly lonely, principled voice for limiting the size, scope, and spending of the federal government. After voting to impeach Donald Trump, he resigned from the GOP, became an independent, and then joined the Libertarian Party in 2020, making him the only Libertarian to serve in Congress.They talked about the 2024 presidential election and the country's political and cultural polarization that seems to be growing with every passing day. And about how his parents' experiences as a Christian refugee from Palestine and an immigrant from Syria inform his views on foreign policy, entrepreneurship, and American exceptionalism.This Q&A took place on the final day of LibertyCon, the annual event for Students for Liberty that took place recently in Washington, D.C.Today's sponsor:DonorsTrust is the oldest and largest donor-advised fund made for people who live out with their charitable giving the idea of free minds and free markets. If you don't know about donor-advised funds, you should. The fund gives you a simple, tax-advantaged way to easily donate to charities that align with your values. Whether it's promoting education freedom, protecting free speech, or just helping people live better lives, the choice is yours. There are lots of providers of donor-advised funds, but DonorsTrust is the one that understands you the best. DonorsTrust is a great friend of Reason and to all other groups like it.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, Katherine Mangu-Ward is in the driver's seat, alongside Nick Gillespie and special guests Zach Weissmueller and Eric Boehm. The editors react to the latest plot twists in Donald Trump's various legal proceedings and the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.00:41—The trials of Donald Trump in Georgia and New York25:04—Weekly Listener Question33:23—Sora, a new AI video tool43:55—The death of Alexei Navalny49:58—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsor:ZBiotics. Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works: When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's this byproduct, not dehydration, that's to blame for your rough next day. ZBiotics produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make ZBiotics your first drink of the night and to drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Go to zbiotics.com/roundtable to get 15 percent off your first order when you use code ROUNDTABLE at checkout. ZBiotics is backed with a 100 percent money-back guarantee, so if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
"The greatest risk of a Republican administration is a war with Iran, and the greatest risk of a Democratic administration is a war with Russia," says Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative, a magazine for the types of conservatives who are skeptical of foreign military intervention.Mills joined Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to talk about a $95.3 billion aid package, including $60 billion for Ukraine, that passed the Senate this week, which Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) called a "middle finger to America" during his filibuster of the bill. In this episode, they discuss the bill's passage, Paul's filibuster, Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent interview with Tucker Carlson, the Biden administration's airstrikes against Yemen, and whether or not the surge of foreign policy noninterventionism within the GOP is likely to last past 2024.Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
In January, the Senate Judiciary Committee dragged the heads of Meta, TikTok, and X, formally known as Twitter, to Washington to charge them with exploiting children by allegedly addicting them to social media that sexually harms them, drives them to eating disorders, and even kills them. The Spanish Inquisition vibe of the proceedings reached a crescendo when Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) demanded that Mark Zuckerberg apologize to the families of children for the "harms" supposedly caused by Facebook and pay compensation out of his personal fortune.But is social media really that bad for kids? And is the solution being pushed by Democrats and Republicans alike—universal age verification for all users of the internet—even technically feasible without shredding the First Amendment, destroying privacy, and creating major security issues? The answer is a resounding no, according to Shoshana Weissmann, director of digital media at R Street, a free market think tank, and author of "The Fundamental Problems with Social Media Age-Verification Legislation." Reason's Nick Gillespie interviewed Weissmann in Washington, D.C., in early February.Today's sponsor:Better Help. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, Better Help is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.Photo Credits: CNP/AdMedia/SIPA/Newscom/ Rod Lamkey - CNP/picture alliance / Consolidated News Photos/Newscom/ CNP/AdMedia/SIPA/Newscom.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and special guest Emma Camp react to the announcement that President Joe Biden will not be prosecuted for mishandling classified documents and parse a fresh batch of speech gaffes underpinning his apparent cognitive decline.00:29—Quick reactions to last night's Super Bowl LVIII06:10—Special counsel will not prosecute Joe Biden in classified documents case.26:06—House Republicans attempt to tie foreign aid spending bill to domestic border crisis.35:12—Weekly Listener Question44:48—Congressional Budget Office delivers latest bleak report on future U.S. economic outlook52:26—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsor:A common misconception about relationships is that they have to be easy to be "right." But sometimes, the best ones happen when both people put in the work to make them great. Therapy can be a place to work through the challenges you face in all of your relationships—whether with friends, work, your significant other, or anyone. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Become your own soulmate, whether you're looking for one or not. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
"We're in dark and uncertain times, but we've made it through worse," writes Peter Meijer in a November 6 announcement that he's running for a Senate seat in Michigan soon to be vacated by Democrat Debbie Stabenow.Meijer is a former Republican representative for Michigan's third Congressional district–a position once held by Justin Amash, the Republican-turned-Libertarian congressman. Amash recently announced that he is launching an exploratory committee and may enter the Republican primary for the open Senate seat as well. Meijer joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to talk about his run for Senate, what the prospects are for a candidate who voted to impeach Trump for his behavior on January 6, and how he hopes the GOP can change for the better to usher in "a new American century." They also discuss how Democrats funded ads to help a Trump-backed candidate defeat Meijer in Michigan's 2022 primary, the hypocrisy of groups proclaiming to "protect democracy" while fighting against ballot access, and what Meijer thinks about the prospect of running against Justin Amash this year.Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Reason's Nick Gillespie interviews Rachel Nuwer, author of I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World. It's a history of the drug known as molly and ecstasy that the FDA is currently evaluating as an aid in fighting PTSD.Today's sponsors:ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Get 15 percent off by going to ZBiotics/TRI and using the code TRI at checkout.The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. Go here for an online archive and go here to sign up for information about upcoming events.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman counter the twisted logic of former President Donald Trump's recent claim that he would raise tariffs on all Chinese imports if he were to retake the White House.00:24—Trump proposes more tariffs15:24—Bidenomics and the weird economy30:49—Weekly Listener Question44:22—Senate hearing on social media harms52:41—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:The world would be a better, freer, and happier place if constitutional protections for private property were taken just a tad more seriously. That's according to our friends over at the Institute for Justice, who have just begun releasing a new season of their legal history podcast, Bound By Oath. Bound By Oath tells the story of how the Supreme Court has cleared the way for government officials to abuse property rights: to trespass on private land without a warrant, to restrict peaceful and productive uses of property, to seize and keep property without sufficient justification, and much more. Featuring interviews not only with scholars and litigators but also with the real-life people behind some of the Supreme Court's most momentous property rights decisions, the new season explores the history behind today's civil rights battles. So plug Bound By Oath into wherever you get your podcasts, and start with Episode 1.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
M. Anthony (Tony) Mills of the American Enterprise Institute and Terence Kealey of The Cato Institute debate the resolution, "Government must play a role in fostering scientific and technological progress by funding basic research."Defending the resolution is Mills, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Technology, Science, and Energy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a senior fellow at the Pepperdine School of Public Policy and a scholar associate of the Society of Catholic Scientists. Dr. Mills was previously a resident senior fellow at the R Street Institute and an editor for numerous publications. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Atlantis, National Affairs, Issues in Science and Technology, and various peer-reviewed journals. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame.Taking the negative is Kealey, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. Originally trained in medicine and biochemistry, he is a former lecturer in clinical biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. Between 2001 and 2014 he was the vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham. He is known for his 1996 book, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research.
A recently published document reveals "smoking gun" evidence of COVID-19's lab-based origin, according to Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers and one of the earliest proponents of the lab leak hypothesis.Ebright is referring to an invoice that shows an order for a particular enzyme that he believes scientists used to stitch together the genome for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. However, Alina Chan, a microbiologist affiliated with MIT and Harvard and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, says that because the documents in questions are from early 2018, they do not constitute direct evidence, meaning there still "isn't enough to say a lab accident happened beyond reasonable doubt."Emily Kopp, a science and health reporter working for the public health watchdog group U.S. Right to Know, obtained and published this latest batch of documents—which she obtained through a FOIA request to the U.S. Geological Survey—on January 18. The more than 1,400 pages are communications about and early drafts of the DEFUSE proposal, a grant application seeking funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to collect and manipulate bat-borne viruses. EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nonprofit group, authored the grant, which they proposed as a collaboration between U.S.-based virologists and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab located in the city where the first known cases of COVID-19 appeared. DARPA ultimately rejected the proposal as too risky, but critics like Ebright believe that the work likely continued on in Wuhan anyway.Kopp joined Reason's Zach Weissmueller to discuss the documents on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions. Also joining them was mathematical biologist Alex Washburne, who co-authored a pre-print in October 2022 arguing the genome of SARS-CoV-2 had a "fingerprint" indicating that it was created in a lab. The virus that scientists proposed creating in the newly released DEFUSE documents shares several characteristics that Washburne and his colleagues flagged in the study, such as unusually uniform segment lengths and the presence of the enzyme that Ebright flagged as a "smoking gun."In this conversation, they discuss the documents in detail, the ways in which they validate predictions in Washburne's paper, the remaining unknowns in the COVID origin case, comments from EcoHealth Alliance founder Peter Daszak seemingly downplaying that most of the proposed virology work would be done in China, and the difficulty of getting the scientific and media establishments to take new evidence pointing to a lab origin seriously.Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
As Ronald Reagan's first budget director, former Michigan congressman David Stockman led the charge to cut the size, scope, and spending of the federal government in the early 1980s. He made enemies among Democrats by pushing hard for cuts to welfare programs—and he ultimately made enemies among his fellow Republicans by pushing equally hard to slash defense spending. His memoir of the era, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, is a legendary account of how libertarian principles got sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.Stockman's new book is Trump's War on Capitalism, and it takes a blowtorch to the former president's time in office. "When it comes to what the GOP's core mission should be…standing up for the free markets, fiscal rectitude, sound money, personal liberty, and small government at home and non-intervention abroad," he writes, "Donald Trump has overwhelmingly come down on the wrong side of the issues."At a Reason Speakeasy event in New York City, I talked with Stockman about his political journey from being a member of Students for a Democratic Society who protested the Vietnam War to being one of Reagan's main advisers to his denunciation of Donald Trump and his hope that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s candidacy helps throw the 2024 election into the House of Representatives.Stockman also explains how Trump led the disastrous charge on COVID-19 lockdowns, got rolled by Wall Street and the Federal Reserve, and why his nativist views on immigration are inimical both to freedom and economic growth.Today's sponsor:ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Get 15 percent off by going to ZBiotics/TRI and using the code TRI at checkout.The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. Go here for an online archive and go here to sign up for information about upcoming events.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman weigh in on the unfolding situation along the U.S.-Mexico border and reckon with the recent deaths of three U.S. soldiers in Jordan.01:14—Border crossing disputes at U.S.-Mexico border19:49—U.S. soldiers killed in Jordan29:12—Weekly Listener Question37:39—White House halts natural gas export terminals44:22—New Hampshire primary post-game47:22—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:The world would be a better, freer, and happier place if constitutional protections for private property were taken just a tad more seriously. That's according to our friends over at the Institute for Justice, who have just begun releasing a new season of their legal history podcast, Bound By Oath. Bound By Oath tells the story of how the Supreme Court has cleared the way for government officials to abuse property rights: to trespass on private land without a warrant, to restrict peaceful and productive uses of property, to seize and keep property without sufficient justification, and much more. Featuring interviews not only with scholars and litigators but also with the real-life people behind some of the Supreme Court's most momentous property rights decisions, the new season explores the history behind today's civil rights battles. So plug Bound By Oath into wherever you get your podcasts, and start with Episode 1.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Marcos Falcone, a political scientist, project manager at Argentina's Fundación Libertad, and podcast host, joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to watch and analyze Argentine President Javier Milei's speech at the World Economic Forum's annual conference in Davos, Switzerland. They also discuss the political agenda of the World Economic Forum and the anti-libertarian comments of its founder Klaus Schwab.They conclude with a conversation about what's transpired in Argentina since Milei was sworn in as president on December 10. Falcone describes his policy approach as "an offensive against crony capitalism," which has sparked a massive strike organized by the country's largest union to protest Milei's deregulation, labor reforms put on hold by the courts that would allow workers to more easily opt out of union dues, and aggressive proposals to downsize the government.Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
While some of us went a little nuts during the COVID-19 lockdowns, others—including many of our country's leaders and people in the media—went absolutely batshit crazy, often with disastrous results. Exactly why that happened is the subject of author Jon Ronson's latest season of Things Fell Apart, a podcast that explores the deep origins of today's culture wars in controversies, panics, and delusions from decades ago.I talked with Ronson about why he believes the creation of a fake medical condition called "excited delirium" in 1988 ultimately led to the death of George Floyd in 2020, how law enforcement fixations on white supremacy warped the investigation into a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and how the director of the massively influential Plandemic documentaries was actually rewriting the script of Star Wars.Ronson is best known as the author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, an account of a U.S. Army unit that tried to perfect paranormal powers like walking through walls, and So You've Been Publicly Shamed, which helped define cancel culture just as it was becoming widespread via social media.We also talk about Things Fell Apart, how he survived COVID, and how critical thinking and media literacy are more important than ever in a world in which we can all produce and consume our versions of the truth.Today's sponsor:Better Help. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, Better Help is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman hold a postmortem examination of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' suspended campaign for president before considering Donald Trump's recent claim that presidents deserve full immunity from prosecution.00:27—Ron DeSantis drops out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination19:54—Trump claims full presidential immunity30:05—Weekly Listener Question47:00—Argentine President Javier Milei addresses Davos54:38—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:The world would be a better, freer, and happier place if constitutional protections for private property were taken just a tad more seriously. That's according to our friends over at the Institute for Justice, who have just begun releasing a new season of their legal history podcast, Bound By Oath. Bound By Oath tells the story of how the Supreme Court has cleared the way for government officials to abuse property rights: to trespass on private land without a warrant, to restrict peaceful and productive uses of property, to seize and keep property without sufficient justification, and much more. Featuring interviews not only with scholars and litigators but also with the real-life people behind some of the Supreme Court's most momentous property rights decisions, the new season explores the history behind today's civil rights battles. So plug Bound By Oath into wherever you get your podcasts, and start with Episode 1.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Matt Welch, editor-at-large for Reason and podcaster on The Reason Roundtable and The Fifth Column with Kmele Foster and Michael Moynihan, joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to discuss the recent Iowa caucus results and talk about what it means for the 2024 election going forward.They also talk about where libertarians and independents are leaning in the presidential race and some of the increasingly glaring divides within libertarianism that have led different factions to pursue very different strategies and hold widely divergent views of political candidates like former President Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley.Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.Sources referenced in this conversation:Iowa caucus results: The GOP presidential field narrows as Ramaswamy and Hutchinson drop out | NPRMatt Welch at Reason: Vivek Ramaswamy Really Wants You to Know He Thinks January 6 Was an 'Inside Job'Rand Paul announces he's "Never Nikki" on X.comLibertarian Party of Iowa poll resultsDave Smith on libertarian populism on Just Asking Questions
"If the problem with campus speech codes is the selectivity with which universities penalize various forms of bigotry," wrote James Kirchick recently in The New York Times, "the solution is not to expand the university's power to punish expression. It's to abolish speech codes entirely."Kirchick was writing about widespread outrage at the deeply nuanced and deeply hypocritical defense of speech offered by the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania at a congressional hearing about antisemitic and anti-Zionist campus reactions to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel.Although Kirchick, the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington and The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, is an ardent defender of Israel, he is also a self-described free-speech absolutist who is disgusted by calls to restrict expression, whether on or off-campus. He says that instead of clamping down on speech, we should be arguing more openly and publicly, even when it's deeply uncomfortable, as it was when he raised novelist Alice Walker's antisemitic views during a literary conference at which they were both speaking.We talk about how identity politics has overwhelmed the left's traditional defense of free speech, why so many younger journalists seem lukewarm at best to the First Amendment, and how to muster the courage to speak up for first principles in uncomfortable and hostile situations.Previous appearances on The Reason Interview:How Homophobia Warped the Cold War, June 1, 2022The Very Idea of Europe Is Finished, April 23, 2017Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman stare down the results of last night's Iowa caucuses, which saw former President Donald Trump notch a resounding win in his bid to return to the White House.01:45—Iowa caucuses results and recap33:52—Weekly Listener Question41:02—The U.S. attacks on Houthis in Yemen47:13—The latest on the bipartisan spending deal drama in Congress49:58—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:LibertyCon International 2024The world would be a better, freer, and happier place if constitutional protections for private property were taken just a tad more seriously. That's according to our friends over at the Institute for Justice, who have just begun releasing a new season of their legal history podcast, Bound By Oath. Bound By Oath tells the story of how the Supreme Court has cleared the way for government officials to abuse property rights: to trespass on private land without a warrant, to restrict peaceful and productive uses of property, to seize and keep property without sufficient justification, and much more. Featuring interviews not only with scholars and litigators but also with the real-life people behind some of the Supreme Court's most momentous property rights decisions, the new season explores the history behind today's civil rights battles. So plug Bound By Oath into wherever you get your podcasts, and start with Episode 1.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Aaron Sibarium, a staff writer at the Washington Free Beacon, whose work has been widely credited for exposing the plagiarism of former Harvard President Claudine Gay, joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to discuss Gay's downfall, as well as its implications for the Ivy League; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and writers and thinkers of all kinds who can now have their work subjected to AI-powered plagiarism detection.Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Did you know that by 2050, a quarter of the planet's population will reside in Africa? Yet despite abundant natural resources and a young and ambitious population, the continent remains the poorest of them all.Born in Senegal and now residing in Austin, Texas, Magatte Wade is director of the Center for African Prosperity at the Atlas Network, a nonprofit that supports think tanks and activist groups in the developing world. A serial entrepreneur, she's currently the CEO (and founder) of SkinIsSkin, which sells a series of skin and lip products sourced in Africa.Wade is also the author of the new memoir and manifesto, The Heart of a Cheetah: How We Have Been Lied To about African Poverty, and What That Means for Human Flourishing. She claims the solution to Africa's problems lies with what her mentor, the late economist George Ayittey, called "the cheetah generation," young Africans who embrace free markets, individualism, human rights, and transparency in government.Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Wade to discuss her book, "conscious capitalism," charter cities, and how cryptocurrencies are helping people like her build the Africa—and the world—they want.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's episode of The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman and Katherine Mangu-Ward welcome back Nick Gillespie, alongside special guest Christian Britschgi. The editors check in on Nikki Haley's slight surge in the Republican primary race and then assess the Democratic Party's growing fears about the state of Joe Biden's reelection campaign.00:32—Nikki Haley's campaign situation25:23—Democratic concerns about the Biden campaign38:19—Weekly Listener Question40:44—Harvard President Claudine Gay resigns.47:05—This week's cultural recommendationsToday's sponsor:Around New Year's, we get obsessed with how to change ourselves instead of just expanding on what we're already doing right. Maybe you finally organized one part of your space, and you want to tackle another. Or maybe you're taking your supplements every morning, and now you want to actually eat breakfast too. Therapy helps you find your strengths, so you can ditch the extreme resolutions and make changes that really stick. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Celebrate the progress you've already made. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
"To be a sane and happy parent, you need to be counter-cultural in our family-unfriendly culture," writes Tim Carney in his forthcoming book Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be.Carney, senior columnist at the Washington Examiner, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the father of six children, talked with Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe about declining fertility in America and worldwide and why he thinks it's time for "governments, employers, and other institutions" to "abandon the idea of neutrality and instead take a side: the pro-family side." They also discussed how governments make it harder to afford large families by implementing counterproductive housing and labor regulations. The conversation delved into the role that technology might play in increasing fertility in the future, the enduring cultural relevance of Mike Judge's 2006 movie Idiocracy, and their reactions to clips about DINK couples ("double-income, no kids"). Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.Sources referenced in this conversation:Americans' ideal family size is smaller than it used to be | Pew Research CenterChildstats.gov—America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2023—Demographic BackgroundBuilding the New America: Urban Reform Institute, September 2023World Fertility Rate 1950-2024 | MacroTrendsWorld Population Prospects—Population Division—United Nations
This week's episode of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie is hosted by Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward. She sat down with former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey.During his two terms as governor, Ducey managed to pass a flat income tax with a rate of 2.5 percent, reform public sector pensions, universalize important school choice measures, reform occupational licensing rules, turn a budget deficit into a surplus, and substantially shrink the size of the government work force. He also built a makeshift border wall out of shipping crates, pushed back on marijuana legalization, and was accused of doing both too much and too little by his constituents during the COVID pandemic. Today, he runs Citizens for Free Enterprise.In December, Ducey received the Reason Foundation's Savas Award for Privatization, which is given annually to someone who is advancing innovative ways to improve the provision and quality of public services by engaging the private sector. In this week's episode, he talks to Mangu-Ward about his worries for the future of the Republican Party, his commitment to fusionism, and why Arizona politicians are so weird.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this year's first episode of The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman and Katherine Mangu-Ward welcome special guests Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Zach Weissmueller to make predictions for 2024 and take one last look at 2023.02:31—2024 predictions20:08—Lessons from 202332:05—Assorted resolutions36:32—Weekly Listener Question43:22—State officials attempt to remove Donald Trump from the ballot.46:24—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsor:Around New Year's, we get obsessed with how to change ourselves instead of just expanding on what we're already doing right. Maybe you finally organized one part of your space, and you want to tackle another. Or maybe you're taking your supplements every morning, and now you want to actually eat breakfast too. Therapy helps you find your strengths, so you can ditch the extreme resolutions and make changes that really stick. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Celebrate the progress you've already made. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
When Russ Roberts, an economist and host of the podcast EconTalk, received a job offer to become president of Jerusalem's Shalem University, it seemed like "a no-brainer," he wrote in his 2022 book Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us. Giving up his ability to work from his home in America on whatever interested him intellectually as a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution? "Only a fool would take the job," he wrote. But that was only if one considered the opportunity using a purely utilitarian pro/con checklist. For Roberts, this was a "wild problem," one that required him to consider "who I am and who I want to be." And with that in mind, he said, "It was a no-brainer in the other direction." He took the job and moved to Israel in 2021.Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel here or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.Reason's Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller spoke with Roberts about Hamas' October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel and their aftermath. They discussed how the attacks have transformed Israeli culture and politics, what it's like to live within a 90-second missile trip from Gaza, how a free society should respond to openly anti-Jewish rallies and actions such as tearing down hostage posters, and what the relationship between the United States and Israel has been and should be.
William D. Eggers is co-author, with Donald F. Kettl, of Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries To Solve Big Problems. He's now the executive director of Deloitte's Center for Government Insights, but 30 years ago, he was the director of government reform for Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason and this podcast. In fact, I interviewed with him when I applied for my first job here. Eggers has since worked with dozens of governments at all levels, both in the United States and internationally, and he's written a shelf's worth of books on the proper scope and function of government. I talked with him about Bridgebuilders, what he's learned over the past three decades about making government more effective and less intrusive, and why it's long past time to move beyond what he and his co-author call "the vending machine model" of government.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this calendar year's last episode of The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman select various under-covered stories from the past year across three categories: politics, science, and culture. So long, 2023!01:45—Under-covered stories in politics30:13—Under-covered stories in science46:00—Under-covered stories in cultureSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Should the federal government be able to "urge," "encourage," "pressure," or "induce" social media companies into censoring free speech about COVID-19? A recent ruling in federal court said no. That ruling is the subject of this month's Soho Forum Debate between law professor Kate Klonick and professor of medicine Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. The resolution is: "The making of national internet policy was hindered, rather than helped, by the July 4th federal court ruling that restricted the Biden administration's communications with social media platforms."Arguing for the affirmative is Kate Klonick, an associate professor at St. John's University Law School, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a distinguished scholar at the Institute for Humane Studies. Her writing has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and numerous other publications.Arguing against the resolution is Jay Bhattacharya, M.D. Ph.D., a professor of medicine at Stanford University. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, as well as a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His research focuses on the economics of health care around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. His peer-reviewed research has been published in economics, statistics, legal, medical, public health, and health policy journals. Dr. Bhattacharya was one of three main co-signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration of October 2020, an open letter published in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns.
Julian Assange was arrested outside England's Ecuadorian embassy after Ecuador's president revoked his political asylum. The U.S. unsealed an extradition request outlining Espionage Act charges, and U.K. authorities moved him to London's Belmarsh Prison in April 2019, a maximum security facility where inmates are held in small single cells. Amnesty International has drawn parallels between Belmarsh and Guantanamo Bay. Reports and statements from doctors emerged quickly after his imprisonment testifying to his deteriorating mental and physical health. Stella Assange—an attorney specializing in international law, a human rights activist, and the wife of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, with whom she has two children—joined Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on episode three of Just Asking Questions to talk about the toll that imprisonment has taken on Assange and his family. They also discuss the threat to freedom of speech that the United States' Espionage Act case against Assange poses, why she believes that the Swedish sex charges against him were bogus, and why many in the U.S. media seem hostile to Assange and WikiLeaks. Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Was Milton Friedman the most important libertarian of them all? That's part of the conversation I had with today's guest, Stanford historian Jennifer Burns, who has written a masterful and definitive new biography of the Nobel Prize–winning economist. Without reservation, I recommend you check out her new book, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. Friedman was arguably not just the most influential free market economist of the 20th century but the central figure in building the broad political and intellectual coalition that successfully challenged Keynesian economics and the top-down rule of experts in so many aspects of our lives. I talked with Burns about Friedman's conceptual and methodological breakthroughs in economics; his way-ahead-of-his-time collaboration with female economists such as Anna Schwartz and his wife Rose; his role in popularizing free market economics through his columns in Newsweek and the TV series Free To Choose; his controversial engagements with politicians such as Richard Nixon and Augusto Pinochet; and his role in ending the military draft and championing school choice. We also talked about Burns' previous book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, and its connections to her new work.This episode was taped at the Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a live taping of this podcast.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman review supposed items on the agenda for former President Donald Trump's potential second term.00:26—Donald Trump's second-term agenda34:56—Weekly Listener Question44:00—Congress passes FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act of 202350:50—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:This time of year can be A LOT, and it's natural to feel some sadness or anxiety about it. But adding something new (and positive) to your life can counteract some of those feelings. Therapy can be a bright spot amid all of the stress and change—something to look forward to, to make you feel grounded, and to give you the tools to manage everything going on. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Find your bright spot this season, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
"I have a history of being the only vote that was a 'no,'" says Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). "I've developed some trust with my constituents on those lone votes."In the second episode of Just Asking Questions, Massie joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe to talk about his recent votes against aid to Ukraine and Israel, as well as a controversial meme that he posted on X (formerly Twitter), which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer blasted as "antisemitic, disgusting, dangerous."Massie says charges of antisemitism are "simply not true" and that his objectives are to avoid "open-ended support" for Israel's war and resist encroachments on free speech.They also discussed Massie's attempt to force an in-person Congressional vote on a $2.2 trillion COVID-19 relief bill in March 2020, a move which prompted former president Donald Trump to label Massie "a third-rate grandstander" and demand he be kicked out of the Republican Party. Massie defeated primary challenger Todd McMurtry 81-19 less than three months later."I was just trying to get people on record," says Massie. "The reason I was trying to get people on record is I knew this was one of the worst votes in history and nobody was going to be accountable for it… Here we are three years later, every bad thing that I said would happen as a result of [passing the $2.2 trillion relief package] has happened."Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Quitting is massively underrated, says Annie Duke, an author, psychologist, and former professional poker player who holds a bracelet from the 2004 World Series of Poker.Her latest book is Quit: The Power of Knowing When To Walk Away. Using examples ranging from Muhammad Ali's refusal to retire from boxing earlier in his career to the over-budget, much-delayed California high-speed rail project to catastrophic American wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, she makes the case that blind commitment to grit and stick-to-it-iveness routinely leads us down the wrong path is our careers, politics, and personal lives.She talks about misleading mental tics like the sunk-cost fallacy, the cult of identity, and the endowment effect, and how to understand and reverse them in our personal lives, our work, and our politics. She earned her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, getting her degree in 2023 after taking a 30-year break from academia. We talk about how her experience of knowing when to quit in poker—and higher education—informed her high regard for knowing when to head for the exits.Today's sponsor:BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman debate free speech on campus amid the fallout from a tense congressional questioning of elite university presidents last week.02:35—University presidents face free speech questions during contentious congressional hearing31:02—Weekly Listener Question39:50—Another GOP debate51:13—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:LibertyCon International 2024Reason's Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller have been hosting a weekly show on Reason's YouTube channel that they're rebranding and launching as a separate podcast called Just Asking Questions. Each week they'll bring you long-form conversations diving deep into a single topic for an hour or more at a time with data, media clips, and guests who can teach, challenge, and just have some fun. It will air every Thursday at 1 p.m. ET on YouTube and appear shortly thereafter on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed. The first episode is out now; it's a conversation with podcaster Dave Smith, where the title question of the show is: What is a libertarian?Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this inaugural episode of Just Asking Questions, podcaster Dave Smith joins the show to tackle a fundamental question: "What is a libertarian?"Smith spearheaded the Mises Caucus takeover of the Libertarian Party (L.P.), telling Reason's Nick Gillespie at the party convention in 2022 that the new L.P. needs "a game changer," someone capable of "re-sparking the Ron Paul Revolution" in the lead-up to the 2024 election. In this episode, Smith discusses what has transpired in the Libertarian Party since the convention, his past and present disagreements with Reason-style libertarians, whether politicians are incompetent, evil, or both, and his greatest libertarian "white pill" for the future.Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Over the past decade, no legal scholar has pushed arguments for free speech as far or as influentially as today's guest: Jeff Kosseff, a former journalist who now teaches cybersecurity law at the U.S. Naval Academy. In previous books, he defended Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet and stood up for anonymous speech in The United States of Anonymous: How the First Amendment Shaped Online Speech.His new book is his boldest yet. It's called Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation and I liked it so much that I blurbed it, calling it "a smart, wry, deeply researched and utterly convincing defense of legal protections for 'misinformation' in an age when we are less likely to agree on basic facts than ever before."We talk about why "misinformation"—however defined—should be legally protected, how the boundaries between private companies and government are getting blurrier and blurrier, and why so many journalists are calling for limits on the First Amendment.Today's sponsors:DonorsTrust. DonorsTrust is the oldest and largest donor-advised fund made for people who live out with their charitable giving the idea of free minds and free markets. If you don't know about donor-advised funds, you should, especially here at the end of the year. A fund gives you a simple, tax-advantaged way to support the charitable causes you care about. There are lots of providers of donor-advised funds, but DonorsTrust is the one that understands you the best. DonorsTrust is a great friend of Reason and all other nonprofit groups like it. Go find out yourself at donorstrust.org/nick. Watch a short video on how it works and request information to get started.The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. Go here to listen to past Speakeasy events and go here to learn about upcoming ones, including one on Tuesday, December 12 with Stanford historian Jennifer Burns, whose new book is The Last Conservative, a highly praised biography of Milton Friedman.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman consider the ouster of Rep. George Santos (R–N.Y.) from Congress and unpack the debate between Gov. Ron DeSantis and Gov. Gavin Newsom, before examining the legacy of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.01:33 - Rep. George Santos (R–N.Y.) ousted from Congress12:42 - What matters when donating to Reason17:19 - Gov. Ron DeSantis vs. Gov. Gavin Newsom debate aftermath34:19 - Weekly listener question47:03 - This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's sponsors:LibertyCon International 2024Do you ever feel like your brain is getting in its own way? Like you know what you should do, what's good for you, but you just can't do it? Like you know what you should do, what's good for you, but you just can't do it? Therapy helps you figure out what's holding you back. So you can work for yourself, instead of against yourself. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Make your brain your friend, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline" by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
It's that special time of year again when we ask you to open your wallets, dear listener, and make a tax-deductible donation to Reason's annual webathon.In this special video episode of The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman respond to an array of listener questions. More Christians in the liberty movement? Is it a weird time for libertarianism? How to best celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States? Plus, Nick's treasured pen, Katherine's socks, Peter's power of the Mai Tai, and Matt's favorite pizza.All this and so much more on this week's extra special episode of The Reason Roundtable.Now go donate, you wonderful swashbuckling bunch of free-thinking freaks!Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve Videography by Isaac Reese, Justin Zuckerman, and Adam Czarnecki; edited by Adam Czarnecki.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is a bonus episode, hosted by Reason Features Editor Peter Suderman. A few weeks back, at our Washington, D.C. HQ, he moderated a discussion with former Reason Editor in Chief Virginia Postrel (Reason archive here)and American Enterprise Institute Fellow James Pethokoukis about the future—why it matters, why it's misunderstood, and how we might get a better one.Both have written extensively on the topic. Postrel is the author of many books, including The Future and Its Enemies. Pethokoukis is the author of the just-released The Conservative Futurist—How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised. It's a great conversation about economics, progress, science fiction—and kitchen gadgets.Today's sponsor:The Reason webathon. Once a year, we ask our readers, viewers, and listeners to make tax-deductible donations to support our principled libertarian journalism. Go here to see giving levels and make a contribution.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In a special bonus Reason Roundtable podcast, Reason's very own Floridians Peter Suderman, Stephanie Slade, Zach Weissmueller, and C.J. Ciaramella discuss stories specific to the Sunshine State culled from the upcoming Florida-themed issue of the magazine. Topics include the origins of the infamous "Florida Man," monkeys with herpes, the colorful history of Key West, and alligator knowledge.09:30—The Villages, a unique retirement community21:44—Origins of the "Florida Man" meme41:00—Key West, the Conch Republic39:50—The Bushwacker cocktail44:54—Favorite weird Florida storiesSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
My guest today is Sandra Newman, my favorite novelist currently at work in America—I highly recommend her recent works The Men and The Heavens. Her new book is titled Julia and it's a retelling of George Orwell's 1984 from the point of view of Winston Smith's lover who, as you probably recall, is ironically a member of the Anti-Sex League.I don't even know how to do this novel justice—it's a stylistic and conceptual tour de force that updates and expands Orwell's universe in deeply profound, disturbing, and highly contemporary ways. We talk about the book's origins—the Orwell estate asked Newman to write it—and why 1984 continues to resonate with readers. We discuss the role of literature in a world where television and movies command greater audience attention and past controversies involving Newman's writing.It's a wide-ranging conversation and one of my very favorite episodes of this podcast.Today's sponsor:The Reason webathon. Once a year, we ask our readers, viewers, and listeners to make tax-deductible donations to support our principled libertarian journalism. Go here to see giving levels and make a contribution.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman compare and contrast Florida and California politics ahead of this week's debate between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.0:54—Ron DeSantis will debate Gavin Newsom this week.24:43—Hamas begins releasing hostages.34:29—Weekly Listener Question45:35—Elizabeth Warren and a sandwich shop monopoly50:49—This week's cultural recommendationsSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's Sponsor:The last Reason Speakeasy of the year will be on Tuesday, December 12. Nick Gillespie will sit down with Stanford University historian Jennifer Burns to talk about The Last Conservative, her highly-praised and definitive biography of Milton Friedman. This one's at The Blue Building, located at 222 E. 46th St. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., and your ticket for the evening includes beer, wine, soft drinks, and a buffet of light bites. More information is available here.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Born and raised in Texas, Jeb Bush moved to Florida in 1980. The son and brother of presidents, he was governor of the Sunshine State from 1999 to 2007, where he quickly became known as a champion of school choice and fiscal responsibility. In 2016, he made an unsuccessful run for the Republican presidential nomination and he now resides in Miami-Dade County—happily retired from political life. A self-proclaimed "old-school conservative with libertarian blood running through [his] veins," I talked to Bush a few weeks ago for our new special issue of Reason devoted to all things Florida (subscribe now and read the full issue online!). He told me that more people are moving to Florida than any other state in the country because "we don't try to micromanage people's lives" and that the government "works pretty good," especially when it comes to education, regulation, and infrastructure. We discussed what he really thinks of Gov. Ron DeSantis, former President Donald Trump, current President Joe Biden, and whether the "Florida Man" meme captures something essential about the state's residents. "It's probably not fair, but who cares?" he says. "It's funny. We should embrace it. We're striving to have a disproportionate number of candidates for the Darwin Award each year. We should be very proud of it."And we talked about what really makes America great. "I would say the shared identity should be that it doesn't matter where you start in life," Bush told me. "It doesn't matter where you were born. What matters is that you have a chance to rise up, that your hard work will be rewarded, and that you will be part of the exceptionalism of our country where people…have a chance to succeed. That's being challenged like never before."Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman laud the election of libertarian economist Javier Milei in Argentina and parse the results of the federal case involving the online advertising platform Backpage.0:31—Javier Milei elected president of Argentina16:25—Verdicts in the Backpage trial36:43—Weekly Listener Question46:44—Sam Altman out at OpenAI54:48—This week's cultural recommendationsToday's Sponsor:Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Do your thoughts start racing right before bed or at other inopportune moments? It turns out, one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that, so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental (and emotional) peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Join us on November 27 in New York City for a viewing (and afterparty) of the new Reason documentary: Bitcoin, Bathhouses, and the Future of Energy. Tickets and details here. Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern."Senator Paul, you do not know what you what you are talking about." Those were the words that Anthony Fauci spoke in July 2021 to Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) following a series of questions from Paul about the possibility that Fauci's agency had funded research in Wuhan, China, that led directly to the COVID-19 pandemic.Paul's new book, Deception: The Great COVID Cover-Up, aims to show that, in fact, he very much did know what he was talking about when it came to U.S. funding of risky gain-of-function research that involves making viruses more infectious and deadly to humans. Internal emails later obtained by Congress showed that in February 2020, Fauci was concerned about gain-of-function research in Wuhan, and National Institutes of Health Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak admitted in an October 2021 letter to the House of Representatives that the agency had funded work there that led to a virus becoming more deadly in mice with humanized lungs. I spoke with Paul about his book and his investigations into the origins of COVID-19. I asked him to reflect on his famous exchange with Fauci and what he thinks real accountability would look like. We also talked about his proposals to end all government funding of gain-of-function research and to prohibit government officials from meeting with social media companies for the purpose of censoring legal speech.
Susan Schneider of the Center for the Future Mind and AI entrepreneur Jobst Landgrebe debate the resolution, "Artificial intelligence poses a threat to the survival of humanity that must be actively addressed by government."For the affirmative is Schneider, the director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University. She previously held the NASA chair and the distinguished scholar chair at the Library of Congress. In her recent book, Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, she discusses the philosophical implications of AI and, in particular, the enterprise of "mind design." She also works with Congress on AI policy, appears on PBS and the History channel, and writes opinion pieces for The New York Times, Scientific American, and the Financial Times.Taking the negative is Landgrebe, an entrepreneur and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence working on the mathematical foundations and the philosophical implications of AI-based technology. In 2013, he founded the company Cognotekt, where he serves as managing director. Together with philosopher Barry Smith, he co-authored Why Machines Will Never Rule the World: Artificial Intelligence without Fear. He is also a research associate in the philosophy department at the University at Buffalo.
Last week, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman recorded an episode of The Reason Roundtable in front of a live audience at Reason's brand-new Washington, D.C., office. Topics ranged from Lina Khan's crusade against corporations at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to deciding which foreign policy views of the remaining Republican candidates are the least bad. 1:15—The administrative state and Lina Khan's anti-corporatism 17:53—Presidential politics and what Republican candidates think about Israel33:08—The sequel to Choice: The Best of Reason 46:54—Pieces of art or whatever that are about Washington, D.C. Mentioned in this podcast:Why We Can't Have Nice Things, hosted by Eric Boehm."Is it Time to Trust-Bust Taylor Swift?" by Peter Suderman"Cypherpunks Write Code," by Jim Epstein"How Virginia's Hospital Licensing Laws Led to an Infant's Death," by Eric Boehm"The Paranoid Center," by Jesse WalkerSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Video edit by Adam Czarnecki; audio production by Luke Allen; assistant production by John Carter and Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
"I'm under no illusion that humanity will completely eradicate the racial tribal instinct or racism or bigotry itself. But I feel that colorblindness is the North Star that we should use when making decisions," argues Coleman Hughes during a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast in New York City.Hughes is a writer, podcaster, and opinion columnist who specializes in issues related to race, public policy, and applied ethics. His new book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America is about returning to the ideals of the American Civil Rights movement because our departure from the "colorblind ideal has ushered in a new era of fear, paranoia, and resentment." When his recent TED talk was seen as "hurtful" by some TED conference attendees, for example, he discovered that TED actually suppressed his presentation. Hughes describes how that situation left him concerned, "that TED, like many organizations, is caught between a faction that believes in free speech and viewpoint diversity and a faction that believes if you hurt my feelings with even center left, center right or, God forbid, right-wing views, you need to be censored."
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman commend the victories for pot legalization and abortion from last week's elections.02:56: Election week takeaways18:41: Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W. Va.) announces he's retiring.33:33: Weekly Listener Question38:40: Lightning round on last week's GOP debate45:20: This week's cultural recommendationsMentioned in this podcast:"Abortion's Big Night," by Liz Wolfe"Ohio Becomes the 24th State To Legalize Recreational Marijuana," by Jacob Sullum"Is Wichita Mayor-Elect Lily Wu a Libertarian?" by Eric Boehm"Republicans Blow Another Opportunity at the Ballot Box," by J.D. Tuccille"Exit poll: Most Ohio voters still largely favor legal abortion," by Ariel Edwards-Levy"In Defense of Roe," by Nick Gillespie"The U.S. Needs a Fiscal Commission Because Congress Won't Do Its Job," by Veronique de Rugy"Joe Manchin Isn't the Fiscal Conservative We Need, but He's the Best We've Got," by Veronique de Rugy"3 Reasons Mitt Romney and Republicans Lost Big in Election 2012," by Nick Gillespie and Meredith Bragg"Mitt Romney, Like So Many NeverTrumpers, Was Hobbled by His Own Grubby Political Ambitions," by Matt Welch"Third Party Candidates Shouldn't Get Their Hopes Up," by Andy Craig"The Real Worry Behind the Unhinged Freakout Over No Labels," by Matt Welch"Joe Manchin Is Once Again Telling Republicans and Democrats What They Don't Want To Hear," by Eric Boehm"Exit Poll: Most Voters Think Trump, Biden Should Not Run in 2024," by Eric Boehm"Are We Really Doing a Trump vs. Biden Rematch?" by Steven Greenhut"Are Republicans Finally Getting Serious About Social Security?" by Eric Boehm"The Libertarian Party's Internal Strife Is as Old as the Party Itself," by Brian Doherty"What is the Ideal Strategy for the Libertarian Party?" by Nicholas Sarwark, Dave Smith, and Gene Epstein"'A Tyranny of the Minority': Why This College Dropout Wants To Cancel Cancel Culture," by John Stossel"The Canceling of the American Mind, by FIRE's Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott," by Eugene Volokh"Why Are College Kids Terrified?" by Nick Gillespie"Jeff Flake Is a Casualty of Collectivist Conflict," by Matt WelchReason's interview with Vivek Ramaswamy, by Nick Gillespie and Zach WeissmuellerSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Today's Sponsor:Left-wing megadonors are shoveling money into pet projects that don't reflect American values. What's more, lawmakers continue to push bloated, big-government policies—like so-called student loan cancellation—and other programs that will inevitably raise prices and fail to reach the people they are meant to help. All isn't lost, though. You can help turn the tide with a charitable-giving account at DonorsTrust. DonorsTrust is a refuge from the storm of harmful, progressive philanthropy and big-government wheeling and dealing that's hurting our institutions and, more importantly, our loved ones. So, take cover and let my friends at DonorsTrust help you maximize your giving while minimizing your tax liability. Whether it's defending speech, empowering entrepreneurs to offer educational alternatives, or fighting green-energy extremists that want to consolidate power and raise prices on individuals and families, DonorsTrust is the charitable-giving-account provider for you. Visit www.donorstrust.org/reason to learn more.Audio production by Luke Allen; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.When Russ Roberts, an economist and host of the podcast EconTalk, received a job offer to become president of Jerusalem's Shalem University, it seemed like "a no-brainer," he wrote in his 2022 book Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us. Giving up his ability to work from his home in America on whatever interested him intellectually as a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution? "Only a fool would take the job," he wrote. But that was only if one considered the opportunity using a purely utilitarian pro/con checklist. For Roberts, this was a "wild problem," one that required him to consider "who I am and who I want to be." And with that in mind, he said, "it was a no-brainer in the other direction." He took the job and moved to Israel in 2021.Reason's Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller spoke with Roberts about Hamas' October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel and their aftermath. They discussed how the attacks have transformed Israeli culture and politics, what it's like to live within a 90-second missile trip from Gaza, how a free society should respond to openly anti-Jewish rallies and actions such as tearing down hostage posters, and what the relationship between the United States and Israel has been and should be.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
My guest today is Colleen Eren, a sociologist at William Paterson University in my favorite state in the country, New Jersey. She's also the author of the fantastic new book Reform Nation: The First Step Act and the Movement To End Mass Incarceration.Signed into law by Donald Trump in 2018, the First Step Act is one of the few major reforms in the past 50 years aimed at reducing federal prison time and post-incarceration stigma and recidivism. The legislation was championed by the president's son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose father had served time for tax evasion and witness tampering, and celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Alyssa Milano. It also drew major support from philanthropic foundations all over the political and ideological spectrum. It's a great case study of how political change actually gets done. Eren's book is a masterful account of how grassroots activism on a cause that very few people really cared about blossomed into a win for not just better treatment of people convicted of certain crimes but a better use of tax dollars. She blends original interviews with major players in the reform movement with great storytelling and a sociological framework that illuminates the complexities of all reform efforts.This is a wide-ranging discussion that also covers my time back in the 1980s when I ghostwrote an advice column for Alyssa Milano, who really played a major role in helping the First Step Act become law, at the late and unlamented magazine Teen Machine. We talk about what it's like being a libertarian-leaning academic—which Eren is—in today's universities and the value of the oft-maligned discipline of sociology as a framework for understanding who we are as a society. And, of course, we talk about what, if anything, might come next in criminal justice reform. As its name implies, the First Step Act was supposed to be the start of something, not its final triumph.Today's sponsors:BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there.The Best of Reason Magazine. Every Tuesday, listen to a curated selection of some of the best writing from Reason, read aloud to you by a robot voice modeled on Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman assess President Joe Biden's tanking poll numbers and parse the continuation of seething protests against the Israel-Hamas war.1:04: New polls are bad news for Joe Biden.15:09: Protests surge against Israel-Hamas war.36:54: Weekly Listener Question44:11: An executive order attempts to regulate artificial intelligence tech.49:37: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern."At its core, money is a ledger," writes investment analyst Lyn Alden in her new book Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better. And if money is a ledger, she says, the most important question to consider is, "Who controls the ledger?"Zach Weissmueller spoke with Alden about her book, which is a true tour de force that lays out the history of money from its inception to present, takes you deep into the dueling schools of thought around money's fundamental properties, offers a macro analysis of today's global monetary and fiscal situation, and charts a path forward for transitioning the world to better, more sound money in the future. If you care about any of this—and really, who doesn't care about money?—this one is a must-read.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is Swedish historian Johan Norberg, author of The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World, which caught the eye of Elon Musk. "This book is an excellent explanation of why capitalism is not just successful, but morally right," Musk tweeted. Norberg wrote the book to combat a growing belief on the right and the left that libertarian values of individual autonomy, property rights, limited government, and free enterprise are failing to raise living standards and need to be ditched in favor of more centralized power and control over virtually all aspects of our lives. A senior fellow at the CATO Institute, Norberg shows that life is actually getting better for all of us—especially the world's poor—and that economic globalization, political liberalization, and cultural freedom are the main drivers of that improvement. We talk about how liberals and conservatives get the past wrong, why he's not worried about China's supposedly unstoppable economic growth, and why the cases for free trade, free expression, and more immigration need to be constantly updated and renewed.Today's sponsor:The Best of Reason Magazine. Every Tuesday, listen to a curated selection of some of the best writing from Reason, read aloud to you by a robot voice modeled off Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman assess the latest batch of troublesome responses to the Israel-Hamas war, discuss Janet Yellen's shoddy wartime "girl math", and check in on the weird economy under President Joe Biden.1:25: Distressing responses to Israel-Hamas war24:17: Biden's weird economy34:24: Weekly Listener Question43:47: Rep. Mike Johnson (R–La.) is the new speaker of the House of Representatives50:36: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.Javier Milei, the self-described libertarian candidate for Argentina's presidency, surprised the world with a first-place finish in the primaries this August. But in the presidential election this past weekend, he finished second behind Argentina's current economy minister, Sergio Massa, a part of the Peronist political movement that's long governed Argentina. Neither candidate passed the threshold needed to become the next president, so they will have a head-to-head rematch on November 19.Does Milei still have a chance against an entrenched political elite that began handing out money and free bus passes in the run-up to the election? If elected, how will Milei deliver on his promise to take a chainsaw to government, abolish the central bank, and dollarize the economy? And what can American libertarians learn from the movement Milei has built in Argentina? Reason's Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller discussed these questions and reacted to recent interview clips of Milei with Marcos Falcone, a political scientist, project manager at Argentina's Fundación Libertad, and podcast host.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
"We've taught young people that any of their missteps or any of their heterodox opinions are grounds to tear them down. That's no way to grow up."That was journalist Rikki Schlott speaking before a sold-out crowd on Monday night at a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast in New York City. Schlott, 23, teamed up with Greg Lukianoff to co-write The Canceling of the American Mind.Lukianoff, 49, is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and co-author with Jonathan Haidt of the bestselling The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Schlott is a fellow at FIRE, a New York Post columnist, and a cohost of the Lost Debate podcast. Cancel culture, they argue, constitutes a serious threat to free speech and open inquiry in academia and the workplace and is best understood as a battle for power, status, and dominance. I talked with them about the roots and extent of cancel culture, whether it's fading, and whether firing or not hiring someone who supports Hamas' killing of Israeli citizens is an act of cancel culture.Live tapings of this podcast take place once a month in New York at the Reason Speakeasy.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman evaluate President Joe Biden's visit to Israel in the wake of the Hamas attacks and highlight particularly bad U.S. responses to the war in the Middle East.0:24: President Biden visits Israel16:24: Bad U.S. domestic responses to the war in Gaza26:52: Weekly Listener Question42:13: House Republicans' enduring embarrassment48:23: This week's cultural recommendationsToday's sponsor:Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Do your thoughts start racing right before bed or at other inopportune moments? It turns out, one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that, so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental (and emotional) peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time."Despite clear interests on almost all sides against a regional war [in the Middle East], all sides are acting in a manner that makes such a war increasingly likely," writes Trita Parsi in an October 15 article calling for the Biden administration to push for "de-escalation" between Israel and Hamas. Parsi is the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a D.C. think tank that promotes a more restrained U.S. foreign policy. He is the former head of the National Iranian American Council and the author of several books, including A Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S.Parsi says that although the Biden administration is "well aware" of "escalation risks" that might lead to a broader regional war, talk of de-escalation remains off-limits. HuffPost reported late last week that it has obtained State Department memos instructing employees to avoid terms like "de-escalation/ceasefire," "end to violence/bloodshed," and "restoring calm" in press materials and statements.Is de-escalation feasible after Hamas slaughtered Israeli civilians and continues to hold more than 200 hostages? How should Israel respond to the worst terrorist attack in its history? What can U.S. policymakers do to make the prospect of a bigger war less likely?We discussed these questions and more with Parsi. We also revisited the topic of domestic reactions to the Hamas attack, namely the comments of a Cornell professor who claimed to be "exhilirated" by it.Sources referenced in this conversation:"Biden refuses to talk 'ceasefire' even though it could prevent a regional war," by Trita Parsi"Stunning State Department Memo Warns Diplomats: No Gaza 'De-Escalation' Talk," by Akbar Shahid Ahmed"Source: Iran warns Israel through UN against ground offensive in Gaza," by Barak Ravid"Iran says 'preemptive action' by resistance front expected in coming hours," by Reuters"Talks fail to let aid reach Gaza; Israel evacuates Lebanon border," by Nidal Al-Mughrabi, Dan Williams and Yusri Mohamed"Biden is expected to request $100 billion for Israel, Ukraine and other crises," by Karoun DemirjianSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
The Manhattan Institute's Mark Mills and InOrbis CEO Rosario Fortugno debate the resolution, "Between now and 2035, electric vehicles in the consumer market will disappoint environmentalists by remaining a product bought mainly by the well-heeled minority."Taking the affirmative is Mills, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, a faculty fellow at Northwestern University's engineering school, and a partner in Montrose Lane, an energy-tech venture fund. He is author of the book The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and a Roaring 2020s.Taking the negative is Fortugno, the CEO of InOrbis, a company that works to develop technologies for electric vehicle fleet management, autonomous vehicles, and machine learning. He blogs at ApplyingAI.com on the topics of free markets, electric vehicle adoption, and the benefits of artificial intelligence.
My guest is Shane Mauss, a comedian who tours the country discussing his psychedelic experiences in fantastic, immersive shows like DMT: A Love Story and A Better Trip. If you're in the New York City area, he'll be appearing at the Psychedelic Assembly in midtown October 27-31 as a part of a Halloween-themed show called Spookadelic.I caught up with him at the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, held in Denver this June, where he participated in a "roast" of the psychedelic scene. Go here for "The Psychedelic Renaissance Is Here," Reason's 30-minute documentary about that event and the larger psychedelic movement.Mauss, who also hosts a science podcast called Here We Are, shared his thoughts about the mainstreaming of psychedelic drugs, the surprising pace of legalization efforts, and the role that Joe Rogan, Aaron Rodgers, and other public figures play in normalizing psychedelics and promoting cognitive liberty.Today's sponsor:DonorsTrust, the principled, tax-friendly way to simplify your charitable giving. Do you want to make a real difference in the world instead of relying on ineffectual government programs? Consider opening a giving account with DonorsTrust. Giving accounts with DonorsTrust are simple, secure, and tax-advantaged. The DonorsTrust team understands the conservative and libertarian philanthropic landscape and they know which charities are clawing back our civil liberties. Visit www.donorstrust.org/nick to get a free copy of their donor prospectus.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman continue to survey the Israel-Hamas war a little over a week after the conflict began. They also discuss the array of U.S. reactions to the clash.2:19: Israel-Hamas conflict continues apace28:06: U.S. response to the conflict37:25: Weekly Listener Question44:58: The search for the next speaker of the House continues.49:09: This week's cultural recommendationsMentioned in this podcast:"Blaming Hamas Shouldn't Mean Ignoring the Palestinians' Plight," by Bonnie Kristian"Ice Cream Truck Morgues," by Liz Wolfe"Max Abrahms: Historic Escalation in the Israel-Hamas War," by Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe"Israel Eases Guns Restrictions Amidst Security Failures," by J.D. Tuccille"Another Hostage Crisis Bedevils an American President," by Matt Welch"Memo to Speaker Boehner: If You Won a Congessional Majority Because You Pledged to Cut Spending and You Can't Think of a Single Program to Cut Now, Please Go Home," by Nick Gillespie"9/11's Lesson: War Doesn't Work," by Nick Gillespie with Stephen Wertheim"Biden's ATF Can't Stop Cody Wilson's Ghost Guns," by Zach Wiessmueller and Nick Gillespie"3D Guns Advocate Cody Wilson is About More Than Weapons and That's What Most Frightens People About Him," by Brian Doherty"5 Other Fake Indians Besides Elizabeth Warren," by Nick Gillespie"A Radical Takes the Stand," by Katherine Mangu-Ward"Baby Boomers Are America's Sith Lords," by Nick Gillespie"American Confetti," Mad magazine's original 1974 parody of American GraffitiA live Reason Interview podcast taping with Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott on Monday, October 23, in Manhattan.Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your nameAudio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time.Hamas stunned the world last weekend by launching a brutal terrorist attack on Israeli civilians and posting their crimes on social media. Israel's government responded with a sustained bombing campaign and a total blockade of the Gaza Strip. Why would Hamas provoke what was certain to be a devastating response from the powerful Israeli military? What is likely to happen next in an Israel-Hamas war that threatens to spill far beyond the region? And what, if anything, should be America's involvement? To explore these questions, Reason's Liz Wolfe and I spoke with Max Abrahms, a political science professor at Northeastern University and author of Rules for Rebels: The Science of Victory in Militant History, a lengthy study of terrorism and insurgency. "The first thing smart militants do is recognize that civilian attacks are a recipe for political failure," writes Abrahms. "You might say that the first rule for rebels is to not use terrorism at all."While he's called Hamas's attack a "major strategic mistake" for the Palestinian cause, he told Reason that their objective might not be to secure autonomy for Palestine at all in the near term but rather an attempt to position "itself as a leader in the larger global Sunni terrorist movement" by provoking a violent response that will galvanize jihadists from around the world to join them. We analyzed the likely outcomes of Israel's response to the terrorist attack, reacted to statements from GOP politicians like Lindsey Graham who has called for America to bomb Iran if U.S. hostages are killed in Gaza, discussed the principle of US military noninterventionism as articulated by Ron Paul in clips that have circulated social media in the wake of the attack, and the, frankly, insane reactions from American leftists who celebrated Hamas' violent attack as an act of "decolonization."Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Beyond obvious political polarization and the rancor that generates, Alexandra Hudson says that contemporary America—and the world—is "otherizing" people in a way that makes us all worse off by threatening our ability to peacefully coexist. In her new book The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles To Heal Society and Ourselves, Hudson draws on the writings of figures from antiquity through Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. to show how to reawaken classical liberal virtues of mutual respect and tolerance in a world seemingly hell-bent on putting politics at the center of human meaning.We talked about the difference between civility and manners, the need for and limits of civil disobedience, Hamas terrorism and the rules of war, and whether the decline of religion, family, and traditional forms of community spell the end of self-governance. Hudson publishes a Substack called Civic Renaissance, "a newsletter and community dedicated to ennobling our public discourse with the wisdom of the past."This episode was taped live in New York City as a Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. Go here to listen to past Speakeasy events and go here to learn about upcoming ones (including one on October 23, featuring Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott discussing their new book, The Canceling of the American Mind). This event was cosponsored by Young Voices, "a nonprofit talent agency and PR firm for a rising generation of heterodox thinkers." Go here to learn more about them.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman bemoan the atrocities committed by the militant group Hamas over the weekend in Israel and discuss the removal of Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) from his role as speaker of the House.0:19: A massacre in Israel23:29: Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy ousted37:22: Weekly Listener Question50:23: This week's cultural recommendationsToday's Sponsor:Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Do your thoughts start racing right before bed or at other inopportune moments? It turns out, one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that, so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental (and emotional) peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.On June 30, Pornhub—America's most-trafficked adult website—announced that it was blocking access in Mississippi, Virginia, and Utah. Why? Well, Pornhub was reacting to the passage of age-verification laws in those three states. Similar laws have passed in Louisiana, Texas, Montana, and Arkansas, leading Politico to declare that "A Simple Law Is Doing the Impossible. It's Making the Online Porn Industry Retreat." But the industry is fighting back and won a preliminary injunction against Texas' law.Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe talked about these developments with Aella, a former OnlyFans star and outspoken libertarian defender of sex workers who leverages her sizable social media following to run sex polls and surveys, the results of which she analyzes and publishes on her blog Knowingless. In this conversation, they discuss Aella's sex surveys, delve into the psychological literature examining online porn consumption, unpack the privacy implications of age verification laws, and talk about a recent debate Aella attended hosted by The Free Press and FIRE about the effects of "the sexual revolution" on American society.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
My guest today is Johns Hopkins professor Yascha Mounk, the founder of the online magazine Persuasion and the author of the important new book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. The Identity Trap explains how identity politics and social justice discourse have come to dominate contemporary discussions of just about everything, analyzes their negative influence on society, and shows how to confront and defeat them in the name of liberal values of free expression and open inquiry.Yascha was a prime mover behind the 2020 open letter on "justice and open debate" in Harper's magazine and is one of the most powerful defenders of free speech and the marketplace of ideas at work today.This interview took place at the Reason Speakeasy, a live, unscripted monthly conversation held in New York City with outspoken defenders of free speech and heterodox thinking. Go here for information about upcoming events.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman sprint through a buffet of topics including government shutdowns, Mexican fentanyl, the second GOP presidential debate, and the death of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.).1:04: The government didn't shut down.10:03: Fentanyl and the border with Mexico25:05: Reactions to the second GOP debate38:18: Weekly Listener Question42:52: Death of Sen. Dianne FeinsteinAudio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.The second GOP primary debate of the season took place this Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, absent frontrunner Donald Trump. The debate revealed real divides among the candidates on issues like foreign policy, broad agreement on topics like closing the southern border, and some candidates' increased willingness to take direct shots at Trump.To help sift through the debate, Reason's Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmuller are joined by Josh Barro, a journalist and political commentator who publishes the newsletter Very Serious and co-hosts the Serious Trouble podcast with attorney Ken White. Barro is a former Republican voter who turned Democrat after Trump's nomination in 2016. We discuss Ron DeSantis' proposal to send U.S. troops to Mexico to fight the drug cartels, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy's feud over TikTok, the candidates' scuffle over whether to continue sending military aid to Ukraine, and more. We wrap up with a broader conversation about the 2024 election and what the best-case scenario might look like for libertarians and political independents.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In 2001, Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg burst onto the international scene with his bestselling and controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist. The onetime member of Greenpeace said that climate change is real and that human activity is clearly contributing to it, but he said the best science didn't support the apocalyptic visions put forth by people like Earth in the Balance author and former Vice President Al Gore.Lomborg went on to create the Copenhagen Consensus, a think tank that applies cost-benefit analysis to problems facing the global poor and works with Nobel laureates, policymakers, philanthropists, and researchers to develop pragmatic, relatively low-cost solutions to issues such as tuberculosis, malaria, lack of education, and access to food. His new book is called Best Things First and it presents what Lomborg says are "the 12 most efficient solutions for the world's poorest people." He argues that for about $35 billion a year—a little more than half of what the U.S. spends annually on humanitarian aid—these policies could save 4.2 million lives and generate an extra $1.1 trillion in value every year.I caught up with Lomborg in New York City during the latest meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. We talked about Best Things First, his view of the current environmentalist movement, and why politicians and the media continue to fixate on the possibility of a future climate apocalypse rather than helping the global poor in the here and now.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman break down the politics of a potential government shutdown on the horizon and assess the United Auto Workers strike ahead of the next Republican presidential primary debate.0:29: Another looming government shutdown20:02: United Auto Workers strike27:46: Weekly Listener Question34:24: The next GOP debate is this week.42:05: Bob Menendez, senator of sleazeToday's sponsor:Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Do your thoughts start racing right before bed or at other inopportune moments? It turns out, one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that, so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental (and emotional) peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.This week, Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe sat for an in-depth discussion with Johan Norberg about the lessons to draw from Sweden's pandemic policiesThe Swedish government's decision to forgo lockdowns as most of Europe, Asia, and North America's political leaders forcibly closed businesses and schools in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic became one of the most controversial policies of 2020.The New York Times in April 2020 designated Sweden "the world's cautionary tale," and President Donald Trump proclaimed that "Sweden is paying heavily for its decision not to lockdown" as an early wave of COVID deaths hit Sweden harder than its Nordic neighbors.But to Swedish officials, "it looked like it was other countries that were engaging in a dangerous experiment," writes Cato Institute Senior Fellow Johan Norberg in a policy paper entitled "Sweden during the pandemic: Pariah or paragon?"Today, Sweden's COVID-19 death rate is not an outlier, and its excess death rate from 2020 to the present is the lowest in Europe.In a retrospective report on the country's pandemic response, Sweden's public health officials say that they should have more aggressively protected senior citizens and tested and quarantined travelers from COVID hot spots in those early days, but they consider the focus on public health recommendations that people can "follow voluntarily" over coercive lockdowns was "fundamentally correct."Norberg also points out that Sweden avoided the economic contraction that its neighboring countries suffered, as well as the learning loss experienced in countries that closed schools for months or even years.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute Yaron Brook and George Mason University professor Bryan Caplan debate the resolution, "Anarcho-capitalism would definitely be a complete disaster for humanity."Taking the affirmative is Brook, host of The Yaron Brook Show. He was the executive director of The Ayn Rand Institute from 2000 to 2017 and is now the chairman of the board. Brook has co-authored many books focused on capitalism and the benefits of free markets, including In Pursuit of Wealth: The Moral Case for Finance, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality, and Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government. He was a columnist at Forbes and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Investor's Business Daily, and more.Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University, is taking the negative. He's The New York Times bestselling author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education, and more. He writes for the Substack Bet On It, and has been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Reason, and more.
Over the past few episodes, I've been talking with people involved with what we at Reason are calling a psychedelic renaissance, or a rebirth of interest in substances long associated with the CIA and hippies and counterculture. Today's interest in these substances is mostly motivated by a desire to help veterans and victims of sexual violence who suffer from PTSD and related conditions, including substance abuse. The psychedelic renaissance may well sound the death knell for the war on drugs, at least in its current form.So it makes sense that today's guest is a historian who studies the man who coined the term psychedelic.Erika Dyck is a professor at the University of Saskatchewan who studies the history of psychedelics with a special interest in the legacy of Humphry Osmond, the British-born psychiatrist who gave Aldous Huxley his first dose of mescaline, and conducted pathbreaking work using LSD to help alcoholics stop drinking. Among Osmond's best-known patients was Bill W., the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.Reason sat down with Dyck at the MAPS Psychedelic Science 2023 conference held in Denver this June, where a reported 13,000 people gathered to talk about all aspects of today's psychedelic renaissance. We talked about why drugs such as MDMA, psilocybin, and LSD are making a comeback; how tensions are rising between indigenous people and medical practitioners; and whether prohibitionists have finally lost the war on drugs.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman pore over last week's indictment of Hunter Biden on federal gun charges and weigh in on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's upcoming meeting with President Joe Biden.1:00: Hunter Biden indicted on federal gun charges23:39: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to meet with President Biden next week32:56: Weekly Listener Question46:40: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s environmental planSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.It's back-to-school season, and for some parts of the country, that means dealing with COVID restrictions again. Americans are no longer experiencing indefinite school closures or ubiquitous masking, but intermittent school closures, temporary mask mandates, and COVID vaccine requirements persist.Will it ever end? Or are we in "the new abnormal?"To examine these questions, Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe spoke with Aaron Kheriaty, the psychiatrist fired from the University of California, Irvine for refusing to get vaccinated. He's a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who wrote a book called The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State, in which he argues that the authoritarian measures implemented during the pandemic are sure to linger and reshape American society for the worse absent concerted and organized political pushback. Zach and Liz discussed his firing at length, surveyed the landscape of remaining COVID restrictions across America, reacted to clips of both Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and California Gov. Gavin Newsom reflecting on their governance through the emergency, and talked about policies that can best help us escape "the new abnormal."Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In June, I traveled to Denver with Zach Weismueller to cover the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a group that has been working to gain Food and Drug Administration approval of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD since the late 1980s. We produced a 30-minute documentary about today's "psychedelic renaissance."
The most surprising speaker at the conference was Rick Perry, the former Texas governor and Trump administration energy secretary. What in tarnation was a conservative Republican doing on the stage, extolling the virtues of drugs long associated with hippies and 1960s counterculture?
I sat down with Perry to learn why he believes psychedelics should be legal medicine for veterans and others suffering from PTSD, how to allow more immigrants to come to America lawfully, and why if he were ever to take a psychedelic drug it would be Ibogaine, a notoriously powerful substance made from the bark of an African tree.
Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontv Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magazine Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason Visit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch and Katherine Mangu-Ward welcome back Nick Gillespie and Peter Suderman to the show. The editors examine the unfolding migrant crisis in New York City before denouncing the city's new law cracking down on Airbnb and other short-term rentals.
1:56: Migrant crisis in major cities
24:16: NYC kneecaps Airbnb
34:27: Weekly Listener Question
48:55: Memorable moments from the political gerontocracy
Today's sponsor:
Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Do your thoughts start racing right before bed or at other inopportune moments? It turns out, one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that, so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental (and emotional) peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month. The Soho Forum: Yaron Brook vs. Bryan Caplan on anarcho-capitalism, September 18. Use REASON promo code to get 25 percent off all tickets.
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontv Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magazine Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason Visit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe sat down for a live discussion about the political and social ramifications of the indictments of Donald Trump with George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin."Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election well deserves punishment from the standpoint of both retribution and deterrence," wrote Somin following the four-count indictment filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith in early August. "For the head of state in a democracy, there are few more serious crimes than using fraud to try to stay in power after losing an election."Somin also says "some of the charges seem compelling" in the case against Trump in Fulton County, Georgia.Critics of the indictments have pointed out the conspicuous timing of a scheduled trial date, accused Trump's prosecutors of trying to "criminalize speech," and suggested that the former president is being held to a double standard. Others worry the prosecution will inspire "ever more aggressive tit-for-tat investigations."Today's sponsor:Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo.BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there.themselves."Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
You probably don't think much about tin cans, even when you're buying one. It's the product inside the can—soup, beans, maybe hairspray or sunscreen—that seems to matter.
But the humble tin can is both a crucial component of modern, globe-spanning supply chains and a product of them: About half of the metal used to make tin cans in the U.S. is imported from abroad. And that's why tin cans—more specifically, tinplate steel, the type of metal used to make those cans—are at the center of a behind-the-scenes fight over tariffs that illustrates so many of the problems with protectionist policies.
On one side of that fight is Cleveland-Cliffs, one of just two companies in the U.S. that produces tinplate steel. In a recent petition to the Commerce Department, Cleveland-Cliffs asked for tariffs of up to 300 percent against imported tinplate steel—the products that account for over half of the supply of tinplate in the American economy.
Those tariffs will translate into reduced supply and higher prices, says Tom Madrecki, vice president of supply chain and logistics for the Consumer Brands Association.
"When the tariffs go into effect, they raise the cost of steel, they raise the cost of the packaging," says Madrecki. The can itself is often the most expensive element of a canned food item, so those prices quickly cause the overall price tag to rise. "You [will] see food prices go up 19 to 30 percent. That translates to 36 to 58 cents per can," he says.
And while new tariffs might protect some tinplate-making jobs at Cleveland-Cliffs, research suggests the higher prices will cause far greater losses throughout the rest of the economy. The Trade Partnership, a think tank, estimates that the proposed tariffs could cause up to 40,000 jobs to be lost in downstream industries, including blue-collar jobs like can-making and food production. If the steel in their tin cans is suddenly more expensive, food production companies might simply purchase finished—and less-highly-tariffed—cans overseas.
"You're going to go to the grocery store one day…and you're going to look at the receipt in disbelief and say, 'How did this happen?'" says Gerard Scimeca, vice president at Consumer Action for a Strong Economy, a free market group that opposes the tariff proposal. "Well, this is how that happened: You had a company trying to take advantage of our trade policy for personal gain."
And here's the real kicker: As a rule, the Department of Commerce doesn't even consider the potential (and often obvious) consequences of these decisions. The tariff petition process is one-sided and skewed heavily in favor of companies seeking protectionism at the expense of consumers and workers throughout the economy.
Government policy, no surprise, is one of the big reasons why we can't have nice things.
Further reading for this week's episode:
"Biden Administration Considering New Tariffs That Will Hike Prices for Canned Goods," by Eric Boehm, Reason.
"U.S. Plans New Tariffs on Food-Can Metal From China, Germany, and Canada," by Yuka Hayashi, The Wall Street Journal
"Tinplate Steel Tariffs Will Harm American Consumers and Manufacturing Jobs," by the Consumer Brands Association
"Four Areas for Congress To Exercise Trade Policy Oversight," by Tori Smith, American Action Forum
Written by Eric Boehm; produced and edited by Hunt Beaty; mixing by Ian Keyser; fact-checking by Katherine Sypher.
In June, I traveled to Denver with Zach Weissmueller to cover the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, which was organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a group that has been working to gain approval of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD and related ailments since the late 1980s. We produced a 30-minute documentary about what is rightly called today's "psychedelic renaissance," or a new flourishing of substances and subcultures that mostly went underground at the end of the 1960s. The documentary tells the history of psychedelics and how today's proponents of better living through chemistry are doing things in a very different way than Timothy Leary and others did back in the '60s. Rather than confront and antagonize the mainstream, MAPS is working within the system. You can watch the documentary here.
MAPS founder Rick Doblin is, more than any other single person, the man behind today's psychedelic renaissance. Reason has been writing about him and MAPS for decades and his goal of getting Food and Drug Administration approval for MDMA-assisted therapy is on the near horizon (he predicts it will happen within a year). We spoke about a lot of topics related to drug policy, self-actualization, and the relationship between mainstream culture and countercultures.
Doblin, who earned a Ph.D. in public policy to help him be more effective in changing laws, is a deep and nuanced thinker about the nuts and bolts of legislation and social change along with the more abstract and visionary "cognitive liberty" he hopes to accelerate. He's also one of the increasingly rare people who has built wide-ranging, beyond-partisan coalitions to effect policy change (at the opening of the MAPS conference in Denver, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a liberal Democrat, and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a conservative Republican, both spoke). Long-lasting social change only happens when a true consensus forms, and it takes a lot of work to build that sort of agreement, especially when you're talking about something as powerful and scary to many as psychedelics. Today's sponsor:
Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo.
BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch and Katherine Mangu-Ward welcome special guests C.J. Ciaramella and Joe Lancaster to consider the particularly long prison sentences handed out to Proud Boys leaders for their roles in the January 6 Capitol riot and discuss President Joe Biden's use of email aliases.2:19: Proud Boys leaders sentenced for their roles in the January 6 Capitol riot20:24: President Joe Biden's email aliases30:44: Weekly Listener Question48:38: The aftermath of Hurricane IdaliaToday's sponsor:Left-wing megadonors are shoveling money into pet projects that don't reflect American values. What's more, lawmakers continue to push bloated, big-government policies—like so-called student loan cancellation—and other programs that will inevitably raise prices and fail to reach the people they are meant to help. All isn't lost, though. You can help turn the tide with a charitable-giving account at DonorsTrust. DonorsTrust is a refuge from the storm of harmful, progressive philanthropy and big-government wheeling and dealing that's hurting our institutions and, more importantly, our loved ones. So, take cover and let my friends at DonorsTrust help you maximize your giving while minimizing your tax liability. Whether it's defending speech; empowering entrepreneurs to offer educational alternatives; or fighting green-energy extremists that want to consolidate power and raise prices on individuals and families, DonorsTrust is the charitable-giving-account provider for you. Visit www.donorstrust.org/reason to learn more.Health insurance is broken. Premiums are increasing, deductibles are getting larger, and claims denials are becoming more common. The headache of health insurance is exactly why CrowdHealth was created. It's not health insurance—it's a better way to pay for health care through crowdfunding. CrowdHealth gives their members the freedom to efficiently and affordably break free from the antiquated insurance system, and into a health care option that fits your needs. The insurance companies don't give you the peace of mind you need. CrowdHealth does. That's why your $50/month membership includes the tools and services you need to get the highest quality health care. You'll get access to telemedicine visits, discounted prescriptions, and so much more—without doctors' networks messing things up. Plus, you'll have access to your own personal care advocate, who will help you navigate the complexities of health events and even negotiate bills on your behalf. And of course, you'll join the Crowd: a group of members just like you who want to help pay for each other's unexpected medical events. It's time you opt out of restrictive health insurance plans and let CrowdHealth help fit your health care needs. Get started today for just $50 per month. Use code ROUNDTABLE to get the health care you deserve.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.The topic this week was a lawsuit challenging California Community Colleges' new diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility—or DEIA—teaching standards, which allegedly "mandate viewpoint conformity" and "compel professors to teach and preach the State's perspective," according to the lawsuit Palsgaard v. Christian, filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE. Reason's Zach Weissmuller and Liz Wolfe welcomed FIRE attorney Jessie Appleby and Bill Blanken, a plaintiff in the case and a chemistry professor at Reedley College in California. Blanken says the standards advanced by the state's community college board amount to "compelled speech" in the classroom and that he will not comply with them. We talked about the details of the case, dove into the substance of the proposed changes in the classroom, discussed the origins of the DEIA standards that now pervade academia and the corporate world, and examined FIRE's other case against Florida's Stop WOKE Act, which prohibits exactly the kind of classroom instruction that California's new standards compel.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
The brief trade war between the U.S. and Europe in the early 1960s might seem hardly worth remembering—and it pales in comparison to the political and cultural upheaval that defined that decade.But any American who has bought a pickup truck in the past 50 years has been collateral damage in that conflict—a conflict that started because European farmers were mad about American exports of frozen chicken.The 25 percent retaliatory tariffs that President Lyndon B. Johnson set on imported light trucks have fenced off the American pickup truck market from foreign competitors for decades. As a result of the so-called chicken tax, consumers pay higher prices, and a handful of brands have become dominant in the marketplace. The other tariffs that were part of that long-ago trade war have been repealed. This one remains."There are a few people highly invested in keeping it around and no one really cares to get rid of it," explains Jordan Golson, a freelance automotive journalist. When it comes to tariffs, he says, "It's not easy to make one of these rules, but it's a thousand times harder to get rid of one."On this week's show, Golson also discusses the lengths that some foreign truck-makers have gone to in order to avoid those tariffs. That includes the story of the Subaru BRAT: a small pickup truck that was imported to America with seats installed in the truck bed—so it would be classified as a passenger vehicle rather than a cargo vehicle and, thus, exempt from the 25 percent import tax.Daniel Griswold, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, reminds us that the chicken tax has caused real economic harm in addition to those funny, creative attempts at tariff dodging."The U.S. government is artificially constricting competition in that market, and that means higher prices, it means less choice," Griswold says.Automobiles can be imported to the U.S. with tariffs of just 2.5 percent, and the result has been a far more robust market for consumers and greater foreign investment in making cars in the U.S.—something that hasn't happened in the truck market due to the trade barriers.The chicken tax has been "a losing proposition all around for Americans, consumers, and the American economy," says Griswold. It's also a great example of how tariffs can stifle, rather than protect, domestic markets.Further reading for this week's episode:"Cheap American Chicken Gave Us This Weird Subaru Pickup," by Golson, Wired"Why Are Pickups So Expensive? Blame the Chicken Tax," by Griswold, Cato Institute"How a Tax on Chicken Changed the Playing Field for U.S. Automakers," by Sonari Glinton, NPRWritten by Eric Boehm; produced and edited by Hunt Beaty; mixing by Ian Keyser; fact checking by Katherine Sypher
My guest today is Eli Lake, a repeat guest who for almost 30 years has been one of the country's leading national security journalists, working as a columnist for and contributor to publications such as Bloomberg Opinion, The Daily Beast, The New Republic, The New York Sun, and Commentary. His 2010 article for Reason, "The 9/14 Presidency," strongly argued for time-limiting all authorizations of the use of military force, especially those involving amorphous struggles such as the global war on terror.
In recent episodes of his podcast, The Re-Education, Lake has conducted deep dives into the dark histories of the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the FBI and how they routinely disregard constitutional limits on their activities. At a recent event in New York City, I talked with him about the fundamental tension between America playing an outsized role in world affairs and having secretive agencies that often keep Congress and voters in the dark about their operations. Can democracy and self-governance survive in such an environment?
Today's sponsor:
Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch and Katherine Mangu-Ward welcome special guests Eric Boehm and Zach Weissmueller for a post-mortem examination of the first Republican presidential primary debate last week and to discuss reactions to former President Donald Trump's mug shot.
0:42: First Republican presidential primary debate
23:08: Donald Trump's interview with Tucker Carlson
32:17: Weekly Listener Question
55:34: Persistent back-to-school COVID measures
Today's sponsor:
Sometimes we're faced with a crossroads in life, and we don't know which path to take. Maybe you're thinking about a career change or feeling like your relationship needs some TLC. Whatever it is, therapy can help you map out your future, and trust yourself to find the way forward. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online and designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Let therapy be your map, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Today's episode is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.
The topic this week was the rise of Javier Milei, a self-described libertarian and Austrian school economist who defied polling expectations in Argentina's recent presidential primary elections, finishing in first with 30 percent of the vote. Milei will head into the October general election as the frontrunner.
Reason's Zach Weissmueller spoke with Gloria Álvarez, a libertarian author and radio and TV host who is a fierce critic of socialism and populism in Latin America and who has declared she's running for president in her home country of Guatemala, and Eduardo Marty, an Argentine political economist who founded the Foundation for Intellectual Responsibility and supports Milei's candidacy.
They talked about Milei's economic policies—which include slashing taxes, abolishing the central bank, and dollarizing an economy beset by triple-digit inflation—and reacted to fiery media appearances in which he lashes out at socialists and calls for the removal of a "parasitic" political class that he says has wrecked and plundered Argentina. They also analyzed U.S. media coverage of Milei, with some outlets characterizing him as an Argentinian Trump and a "far-right libertarian."
Today's sponsors:
Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason magazine podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo.
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Education activist Corey DeAngelis and attorney Stephan Kinsella debate the resolution, "Today's school-choice movement in the U.S. is worthy of support by libertarians."
Taking the affirmative is DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children. He is also the executive director at the Educational Freedom Institute, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, a senior fellow at Reason Foundation, and a board member at the Liberty Justice Center. He was named on the Forbes 30 under 30 list for his work on education policy and received the Buckley Award from America's Future in 2020.
Taking the negative is Kinsella, a libertarian writer and patent attorney. He was previously general counsel for Applied Optoelectronics, Inc., and an adjunct law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston. His publications include Against Intellectual Property, International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution, and a forthcoming book Legal Foundations of a Free Society.
The debate was held at New York City's Sheen Center and hosted by The Soho Forum, which receives fiscal sponsorship from Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason.
Arkansas has some of the strangest liquor laws in the country—or at least the most politically contentious.
Unlike a lot of other places, the state allows counties to hold referendums to decide whether they will allow the retail sale of alcohol. That is, whether they will be "wet" or "dry." And when those elections take place, it's often existing liquor stores—the very businesses that earn money by selling booze—that campaign the hardest to keep county-level prohibition going.
And they often have a powerful, but unexpected ally: churches.
In the fourth episode of Why We Can't Have Nice Things, a new podcast series from Reason, we take a deep dive into the political dynamics that drive Arkansas' local alcohol legalization elections. Jeremy Horpedahl, an economist at the University of Central Arkansas, says public choice theory explains why special interests that might have very little in common sometimes team up to push protectionist regulations.
"What's especially powerful about this coalition is that you have the liquor stores which can provide the money to prevent legalization of alcohol sales," he says, "and the churches, which can provide the moral argument the public face of the campaign to keep these things, keep the rules, how they are."
Chris Swonger, CEO of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, says that arguments about morality are often used as cover when one faction or another wants regulations to boost their own competitive interests.
Once you know what to look for, there are "bootleggers" and "baptists" to be found just about everywhere.
Further reading for this week's episode:
"Bootleggers and Baptists: The Education of a Regulatory Economist," by Bruce Yandle
"Bootleggers, Baptists, and Ballots: Coalitions in Arkansas' Alcohol-Legalization Elections," by Jeremy Horpedahl
Check out the full range of the "Bootleggers and Baptists" phenomenon at Reason.com.
Find out which states allow spirits to be shipped directly to consumers' homes at ShipMySpirits.org, a project of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States.
Written by Eric Boehm; produced and edited by Hunt Beaty; mixing by Ian Keyser; fact checking by Katherine Sypher
Carol Roth is a self-described recovering investment banker and bestselling author whose new book is You Will Own Nothing: Your War with a New Financial World Order and How To Fight Back.
"The United States has been at the center of the global financial universe for about 80 years," she tells me, but that's changing for a whole lot of reasons, most of which are beyond any regular person's ability to control. Yet she isn't one to despair. Instead, she counsels that we should all proactively "do things to control our personal resources and our wealth." Roth's analysis and advice are worth listening to.
Today's sponsor:
Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman consider libertarian responses to natural disasters in the wake of the recent wildfires in Hawaii and examine the outsider candidacy of Javier Milei, a self-described anarcho-capitalist, in his bid for the Argentinian presidency.
0:26: Maui wildfires
23:13: Javier Milei wins Argentina's presidential primary
37:03: Weekly Listener Question
50:34: This week's cultural recommendations
Today's sponsor:
Sometimes we're faced with a crossroads in life, and we don't know which path to take. Maybe you're thinking about a career change or feeling like your relationship needs some TLC. Whatever it is, therapy can help you map out your future, and trust yourself to find the way forward. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online and designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Let therapy be your map, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Today's episode is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.
Zach Weissmueller talked with Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University, and John Vecchione of the New Civil Liberties Alliance. They are among the plaintiffs in the lawsuit Missouri v. Biden, which names the president, the Justice Department, the FBI, and nearly the entire federal public health apparatus as defendants. Attorneys general for the states of Missouri and Louisiana brought the case against the federal government in May 2022 for what they describe as "open collusion with social media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content." Bhattacharya and Vecchione say that the government illegally squelched their speech throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election by pushing social media platforms to remove or minimize the reach of heterodox views on COVID-19.
In July, U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty issued a preliminary injunction ordering the federal agencies to cease meeting with social media companies for the purpose of "inducing in any manner the removal…of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms." Last week, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments challenging that injunction.
Bhattacharya and Vecchione talk with Zach about the state of the lawsuit, what a victory or loss in court would mean for free speech online, the legal limits of government–social media "partnerships," and the ways in which the government blurred the line between private content moderation and outright censorship to suppress or mislabel factual information or opinion as "misinformation" during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Today's sponsors:
BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month. Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason magazine podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo.
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From his second-floor office overlooking the harbor in Norwalk, Connecticut, Bob Kunkel can see Long Island looming over the horizon to the south.
It's only about 10 miles away, straight across the blue waters of the Long Island Sound. But shipping anything from Connecticut to Long Island—or back again—likely means loading a truck, sending it down Interstate 95 toward New York City, passing through some of the most congested highways in the whole country, and eventually meandering toward the final destination.
Kunkel, president of Alternative Marine Technologies, a design and construction supervision firm, says there ought to be a better way. This part of the country was built because Americans used to ship a lot of cargo by water—and he'd like to start doing that again.
"One Connecticut governor told everybody I-95 was a parking lot," he says. "So what are we doing to fix it? You're not going to build another highway. I mean, the costs are phenomenal."
Unfortunately, the costs to ship anything by water in the United States are phenomenal too, thanks to a federal law from 1920 that severely limits the number of cargo vessels operating here. The Jones Act requires that ships moving goods from one American port to another must be American-built, American-flagged, American-crewed, and registered in the United States.
That's a major stumbling block for Kunkel's plan to ease truck traffic along the I-95 corridor in Connecticut. He'd like to buy four mid-sized cargo vessels—big enough to fit more than 80 tractor-trailers but far smaller than the massive container ships built to cross oceans—to move goods from New Jersey to Long Island, bypassing the bottleneck of New York City.
A boat like that costs about $65 million on the international market, he says. But to get one that complies with the Jones Act will cost $125 million, or more.
"So now the numbers don't work," Kunkel tells Reason. "If we can't compete with trucking or support trucking, then there's no sense building the ship."
In the third episode of Why We Can't Have Nice Things, a new podcast series from Reason, we're looking at just some of the ways that the Jones Act drives up prices, makes it more difficult to ship goods to places like Puerto Rico and Hawaii, and snarls supply chains for American industries.
"It's just a very classic case of everything wrong with Washington," says Colin Grabow, a research fellow at the Cato Institute.
Further reading for this week's episode:
The Case Against the Jones Act, by Colin Grabow and Inu Manak
"How a Century-old Law Contributes to CT Traffic," by Jordan Nathaniel Fenster, CT Insider
"Building a Maritime Highway Across the Long Island Sound," by Ira Breskin, The New York Times
"The Obscure Maritime Law That Ruins Your Commute," by Scott Lincicom, The Atlantic
"Protectionist Policies Set To Inflate the Cost of Rebuilding Hawaii," by Colin Grabow
Written by Eric Boehm; produced and edited by Hunt Beaty; mixing by Ian Keyser; fact-checking by Katherine Sypher
My guest today is Eric Boehm, a reporter at Reason who specializes in economic and trade policy. He's also the host of a fantastic, new six-part podcast series, Why We Can't Have Nice Things. Each episode looks at different ways that import and export laws and other sorts of mostly hidden regulations radically alter what we can buy, how much things cost, and how many options we have.
In one episode, Eric explains how the great baby-formula shortage of 2022 was vastly exacerbated by insanely stupid trade laws. Another episode explores why imported women's underwear is taxed at higher rates than men's underwear—and then there's one that shows how frozen chicken is being held hostage to decades-old trade wars. (All the episodes will be released over the coming weeks.)
It's an incredible podcast series that you should subscribe to here, or wherever you get your podcasts. I also talk with Eric about how growing up in eastern Pennsylvania and being raised Catholic shapes and informs his worldview, his politics, and his reporting, long after he has left behind both the Keystone State and weekly attendance at Mass. We also talk about the 2024 election season and what, if anything, he's looking forward to.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman are all back in action, and they tear into recent arguments by the Federal Communications Commission in favor of revoking Fox News' broadcast license. The editors also ponder the appointment of a special counsel in the ongoing Hunter Biden probe.
1:06: Special counsel appointed to investigate Hunter Biden
16:00: Misguided threats to yank Fox News' broadcast license
30:54: Weekly Listener Question
53:47: Age verification laws for online porn
Today's sponsor:
Sometimes we're faced with a crossroads in life, and we don't know which path to take. Maybe you're thinking about a career change or feeling like your relationship needs some TLC. Whatever it is, therapy can help you map out your future and trust yourself to find the way forward. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Let therapy be your map, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontv Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magazine Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason Visit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's episode is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.
The topic this week was the strikes by Hollywood writers and actors and the guest was Rob Long, whose long and storied career in the entertainment industry includes stints writing and show running for the classic sitcom Cheers, among many other things. He's also a longtime contributor to National Review, a columnist for Commentary, a co-creator of the online community and podcast platform Ricochet, and the host of the weekly radio commentary Martini Shot.
Zach Weissmueller and I talked with Long about how the studios and streaming platforms like Netflix brought most of their problems on themselves; whether fears of artificial intelligence taking over Hollywood are overblown (spoiler alert: they are); why studios and production companies refuse to create more mass-audience content like the Roseanne reboot and Top Gun: Maverick; and why Rob believes we are in what he calls an "age of blunder," [OK to add quotation marks here?] where really smart people in charge make really terrible decisions on everything from COVID-19 to foreign policy to the creation and distribution of TV shows and movies.
Today's sponsors:
BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month. Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason magazine podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo.
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It's now been nearly 100 years since Congress overhauled the United States' general tariff system—a system that is by now "quite antiquated and designed for a different time and a different economy," says Ed Gresser.
And that's not all, says Gresser, a former assistant U.S. trade representative who now serves as vice president for the Progressive Policy Institute, a left-of-center think tank. The tariff code is also "quite regressive and somewhat misogynist." Inexpensive goods like cheap sneakers are generally taxed at a higher rate than pricier items like leather boots, and women's underwear is charged a higher tariff rate than boxers and briefs.
In the second episode of Why We Can't Have Nice Things, a new podcast series from Reason, we're diving into the weird and wonky tariff system that imposes hidden taxes on Americans every day. Protectionism usually benefits some special interest at the expense of everyone else, but some of the industries supposedly being protected by these tariffs don't even exist in the U.S. anymore.
"The most effective lobbyist in Washington is muscle memory," says Steve Lamar, president and CEO of the American Apparel and Footwear Association.
The supply chains for basic necessities like T-shirts, shoes, and underwear stretch all the way around the world today. But America's tariff code still acts like those are niche domestic industries. On this week's episode of Why We Can't Have Nice Things, we're explaining what that means for consumers and why we've recently moved in the wrong direction—by applying even more tariffs on top of some of the most highly taxed imports.
Further reading for this week's episode:
"U.S. Underwear Tariffs Are Unfair to Women," by Ed Gresser
"U.S. Tariffs on Cheap Stainless Steel Spoons Are 5 Times Higher Than on Sterling Silver Spoons," by Ed Gresser
"The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade," by Pietra Rivoli
"If Biden's Trade Policy Was Really Driven by 'Equity,' Trump's Tariffs Would Already Be Gone," by Eric Boehm
Written by Eric Boehm; produced and edited by Hunt Beaty; mixing by Ian Keyser; fact checking by Katherine Sypher
What does Kim Kardashian have in common with Leonardo Da Vinci?
Much more than you might have ever guessed, says Tara Isabella Burton, author of the new book Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians. As in her previous work Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, Tara explores the amazing and ever-increasing freedom we have to define our identities and all the complications, problems, and possibilities that come along with greater choice.
We talk about how figures as different as Frederick Douglass, Oscar Wilde, and Clara Bow exemplify aspects of self-fashioning; whether Kim, Kris, or Caitlyn Jenner is the ultimate Kardashian when it comes to reinvention; and how traditional and avant-garde cultures mix uneasily but inevitably in a free society.
Today's sponsors:
BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month. Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason magazine podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman welcome special guest Elizabeth Nolan Brown as they unpack the latest indictment against former President Donald Trump. They also check in on the ongoing legal saga of the classified advertising site Backpage in the wake of founder James Larkin's untimely death.
0:46: The latest Trump indictment
21:21: The legacy of free speech warrior James Larkin
46:25: Weekly Listener Question
53:27: This week's cultural recommendations
Today's sponsor:
Health insurance is broken. Premiums are increasing, deductibles are getting larger, and claims denials are becoming more common. The headache of health insurance is exactly why CrowdHealth was created. It's not health insurance—it's a better way to pay for health care through crowdfunding. CrowdHealth gives its members the freedom to efficiently and affordably break free from the antiquated insurance system and into a health care option that fits their needs. The insurance companies don't give you the peace of mind you need. CrowdHealth does. That's why your $50/month membership includes the tools and services you need to get the highest quality health care. You'll get access to telemedicine visits, discounted prescriptions, and so much more, without doctors' networks messing things up. Plus, you'll have access to your own personal care advocate, who will help you navigate the complexities of health events and even negotiate bills on your behalf. And of course, you'll join the Crowd—a group of members just like you who want to help pay for each other's unexpected medical events. It's time you opt out of restrictive health insurance plans and let CrowdHealth help fit your health care needs. Get started today for just $50 per month. Use code ROUNDTABLE to get the health care you deserve. CrowdHealth is not insurance. Learn more at joincrowdhealth.com, code ROUNDTABLE.
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
Today's episode is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.
The guest this week was actor and filmmaker Alex Winter, whose new documentary is The YouTube Effect, an in-depth look at the ways in which that video site has radically altered how we produce and consume politics, culture, and ideas. In past documentaries, Winter investigated Napster and its users; told the story of Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road dark [OK?] web site; and profiled the life and legacy of rock musician and free expression activist Frank Zappa.
In The YouTube Effect, Winter traces the rise of YouTube from its launch in 2005 to its status as the second-most-visited website on the planet, behind only its corporate owner, Google. My co-host Zach Weissmueller and I talk with him about his concerns about polarization and disinformation in a lively and spirited conversation about the future of free speech and creative expression.
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In the first episode of Why We Can't Have Nice Things, a new podcast series from Reason, we're diving into the causes and consequences of last year's baby formula shortage. Though it was a crisis kicked off by unexpected supply chain issues and contamination problems at a major production facility in Michigan, the roots of the shortage ran straight through Washington, D.C., where poor government policy left American infants hungry and their parents scrambling.
With domestic supply chains snarled, it would have made sense for American grocery stores to turn to foreign producers for replacement supplies of baby formula. Unfortunately, there are "absurdly high" tariffs on imported formula, explains Gabriella Beaumont-Smith, a trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute.
"There are these distribution channels that are basically not established" because the tariffs make it too costly, she says. "And we're talking about baby formula. This is a necessity and we shouldn't be taxing it that high or at all."
It took last year's crisis for Congress to consider lifting those tariffs—and only on a temporary basis. The dairy lobby and other special interests like the isolated, and fragile, American market for baby formula just the way it is.
On this week's episode of Why We Can't Have Nice Things, we'll explain how this crisis unfolded, why the government's efforts to alleviate the shortage mostly failed, and ask whether a free market might have done a better job. Spoiler alert: It would have.
Further reading/viewing for this week's episode:
"Formula for a Crisis," by Scott Lincicome, Beaumont‐Smith, and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon
"My Baby Needed Special Formula From Europe. U.S. Trade Policy Made It Almost Unobtainable," by Kelli Pierce
"The Government Hasn't Learned a Thing From the Baby Formula Shortage," by Emma Camp
"FDA Finally Admits It Caused the Baby Formula Shortage," by Eric Boehm
"The Mystery of the Missing Baby Formula," by ReasonTV
Written by Eric Boehm; produced and edited by Hunt Beaty; additional editing by Ian Keyser. Additional mixing by Luke Allen. Fact-checking by Katherine Sypher.
My guest today is comedian Doug Stanhope. No performer is as idiosyncratic and outspoken about their politics and their personal habits as Stanhope, who dresses exclusively in Goodwill cast-offs and has written can't-put-down books about everything from helping his terminally ill mother commit suicide to celebrating the on-the-road debauchery that ended in him getting married.
Stanhope has been entertaining audiences with his bad taste and unapologetically libertarian tirades for nearly 30 years. Back in the early 2000s, he cohosted The Man Show with Joe Rogan, including an episode where he entered a boxing ring against disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding and took a bit of a beating.
I caught up with Stanhope at FreedomFest, an annual event held this year in Memphis, where he performed a characteristically uncensored set that had the audience alternately groaning and laughing. We talked about why he's dreading the presidential election season, how he survived COVID's effect on touring, what he likes about psychedelics, and why he prefers creative independence over mainstream acceptance.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman welcome special guest Jacob Sullum to wade through the latest Donald Trump indictments and Hunter Biden's legal woes.
1:11: Trump indictment roundup
24:18: Hunter Biden's plea deal
38:59: Weekly Listener Question
48:58: This week's cultural recommendations
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Today's episode is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.
A recent poll found that 44 percent of Millennials want to criminalize misgendering people, showcasing a censorial attitude that has been building among some young people for years. Many Millennials also feel left behind economically, especially compared to baby boomers and Gen Xers.
Can Millennials and boomers ever get along? Or are they creating a generational gap every bit as vast as the one between boomers and their parents?
Today's guests are Reason Senior Editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown, who reported on the poll and writes about generational issues, and psychologist Jean Twenge, whose new book is Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents–and What They Mean for America's Future.
We cover a lot of ground in this conversation, including the central role of technology in changing how we live and how we interact with people younger and older than us.
The Cato Institute's Alex Nowrasteh and attorney Francis Menton debate the resolution, "The U.S. should have free immigration except for those who pose a security threat or have a serious contagious disease."
Taking the affirmative is Nowrasteh, the vice president of economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, where most of his work has focused on immigration. He's the co-author (with Benjamin Powell) of Wretched Refuse?: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions. A native of Southern California, Nowrasteh received a master's degree in economic history from the London School of Economics.
Taking the negative is Menton, who writes at manhattancontrarian.com and was a litigation partner at Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP before retiring in December 2015 after over 40 years with the firm.
The debate was held at New York City's Sheen Center and hosted by The Soho Forum, which receives fiscal sponsorship from Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this site.
Before Matt Taibbi was sparring with Democratic members of Congress on Capitol Hill earlier this year over the Twitter files, he was a darling of the progressive left, appearing regularly on shows like Democracy Now! and others hosted by Bill Moyers and Rachel Maddow.
Though he was always a fierce critic of the Democratic establishment, the rise of Donald Trump suddenly meant that anyone nominally left of center—including progressive journalists like Taibbi—was expected to support Hillary Clinton unconditionally. So when he attacked her as a sellout, argued that the Russiagate narrative was mostly bullshit, and equated the manipulative tactics of right and left media personalities, progressives gave him the cold shoulder. Elected Democrats started treating him like a puppet of the right.
In 2020, Taibbi started publishing his work on Substack and quickly became one of the platform's most popular writers, earning far more than he ever did at Rolling Stone, where he had been chief political reporter. He became even more of a pariah by publishing exhaustive reports that documented how the government sought to control what was said on Twitter about COVID-19 and efforts by Russia to influence U.S. elections. Congressional Democrats unconvincingly pilloried him as a fake journalist, an apologist for Vladimir Putin, and a stooge for Elon Musk.
I caught up with Taibbi at FreedomFest, an annual gathering held this year in Memphis, to talk about the new challenges to free speech, why legacy media is dying, and how identity politics are poisoning political discourse.
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman critique Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' plan to investigate the inclusion of Bud Light's parent company AB InBev in the state's pension funds.
00:40: Gov. Ron DeSantis politicizes Florida pension funds.
20:38: The summer of strikes
32:50: Weekly Listener Question
38:50: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears before the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
43:53: This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"Ron DeSantis Bullies Bud Light Like Elizabeth Warren Bullies Amazon," by Joe Lancaster
"How Corporations' Good Social and Environmental Intentions Undermine the Common Good," by Samuel Gregg
"DeSantis Unironically Frets About 'Criminalizing Political Differences,'" by Eric Boehm
"Politically Motivated Investment Guidelines Making Bad Public Pension Programs Worse," by Scott Shackford
"Three Reasons to Fix Public Sector Pensions Now," by Nick Gillespie and Todd Krainin
Is ESG a threat to capitalism? Live with Samuel Gregg, Russ Greene, and Zach Weissmueller
"Don't Expect Unions To Make a Comeback," by Nick Gillespie
"America Needs a Better Kind of Capitalism," by Veronique de Rugy
"UPS vs. FedEx: Ultimate Whiteboard Remix," by Nick Gillespie and Meredith Bragg
"Artifact: War's Nightmare Landscape," by Nick Gillespie
"Why Color Atom Bomb Footage of Hiroshima & Nagasaki Was Censored by the Government for Decades," by Nick Gillespie
"Obama, Trump, and the Nuking of Hiroshima," by Steve Chapman
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Audio production by Luke Allen; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.
A recent House of Representatives committee report entitled "The Proximal Origin of a Cover-Up" exposes how Anthony Fauci and other leading government officials pressured researchers and the media into dismissing the COVID lab leak theory.
Acclaimed science writer Matt Ridley, co-author with Alina Chan of Viral: The Search for Origin of Covid-19, explains how the interference played out and why it matters to the future of medicine, politics, and an open society.
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Today's guest is Mike Rowe, the bestselling author, Emmy winner, and podcaster best known for his stint hosting The Discovery Channel's long-running Dirty Jobs, where he performed the sort of work we all rely on but don't want to think about too much.
From cleaning septic tanks to putting hot tar on roofs to disposing of medical waste, he's done it all—and loves to talk about the value of the hard, honest work that he thinks is devalued by a society fixated on sending everyone to college. I caught up with Rowe at FreedomFest, an annual gathering held this year in Memphis.
We talked about how his mikeroweWORKS Foundation matches young people interested in learning trades with employers dying for applicants, why men continue to fall further behind women in school and work, and how Rowe's booze brand Knobel Spirits, named after his maternal grandfather, is fueling his nonprofit's impact.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman appraise the current state of "Bidenomics" as well as the self-described No Labels centrist movement.
0:58: Assessing Bidenomics
24:03: The No Labels movement
39:42: Weekly Listener Question
47:43: Over-the-counter birth control!
53:14: This week's cultural recommendations
Today's sponsor:
Sometimes in life we're faced with tough choices, and the path forward isn't always clear. Whether you're dealing with decisions around your career, relationships, or anything else, therapy helps you stay connected to what you really want while you navigate life, so you can move forward with confidence and excitement. Trusting yourself to make decisions that align with your values is like anything—the more you practice it, the easier it gets. It's helpful for learning positive coping skills and how to set boundaries; it empowers you to be the best version of yourself; it isn't just for those who've experienced major trauma. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Let therapy be your map, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the government's response to it cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars and resulted in a major hit to global freedom. What should governments, private companies, and individuals do differently next time disaster strikes?
Alec Stapp, co-founder of the Institute for Progress, has assembled a team devoted to analyzing and applying the lessons of the pandemic. The institute has published papers arguing that Operation Warp Speed was a success that should be duplicated, for greater investment in indoor filtration, and for better biosurveillance. Stapp joined Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe for a live conversation about how to prevent the next global catastrophe.
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Over the past quarter-century, Jonah Goldberg has made his name as one of the most provocative and unapologetic conservative journalists around. He was the editor of National Review Online for years before leaving over differences related to Donald Trump and he's penned bestselling books such as Liberal Fascism and Suicide of the West. He was a Fox News contributor for years, resigning in 2021 in protest of the channel's airing of Tucker Carlson's documentary Patriot Purge.
Along with former Weekly Standard editor Steve Hayes (who also resigned from Fox over the Carlson documentary), he founded The Dispatch in 2019. He also hosts the popular podcast The Remnant.
At a recent event in New York City, I talked with him about the fracturing of the political right into groups such as national conservatives, integralists, Never Trumpers, anti-Trumpers, and more. We also discussed the 2024 election and whether libertarians and conservatives can get along.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman mull over last week's ruling against the Biden administration concerning politically disfavored speech on social media as well as Twitter's latest competitor—Threads—and the latest from the Ron DeSantis campaign.
0:25: A federal judge orders Biden administration officials to stop encouraging social media companies to censor disfavored content.
19:57: Threads: Meta's Twitter competitor
31:50: Weekly Listener Question
39:14: The "Mamas for DeSantis" initiative
51:08: This week's cultural recommendations
Today's sponsor:
Health insurance is broken. Premiums are increasing, deductibles are getting larger, and claims denials are becoming more common. The headache of health insurance is exactly why CrowdHealth was created. It's not health insurance—it's a better way to pay for health care through crowdfunding. CrowdHealth gives its members the freedom to efficiently and affordably break free from the antiquated insurance system and into a health care option that fits their needs. The insurance companies don't give you the peace of mind you need. CrowdHealth does. That's why your $50/month membership includes the tools and services you need to get the highest quality health care. You'll get access to telemedicine visits, discounted prescriptions, and so much more, without doctors' networks messing things up. Plus, you'll have access to your own personal care advocate, who will help you navigate the complexities of health events and even negotiate bills on your behalf. And of course, you'll join the Crowd—a group of members just like you who want to help pay for each other's unexpected medical events. It's time you opt out of restrictive health insurance plans and let CrowdHealth help fit your health care needs. Get started today for just $50 per month. Use code ROUNDTABLE to get the health care you deserve. CrowdHealth is not insurance. Learn more at joincrowdhealth.com, code ROUNDTABLE.
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontv Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magazine Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason Visit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.
The guests this week were the podcaster and writer Coleman Hughes and the Cato Institute's Walter Olson. We talked about the recent high-profile Supreme Court cases that struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions and ruled that a web designer in Colorado could not be forced to make a site for same-sex couples. Along with the legal issues involved, we discussed the immense cultural changes over the past 50 years related to racial, ethnic, and sexual identities.
Today's sponsor:
BetterHelp. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.
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Today's guest is the immensely popular podcaster and writer Bridget Phetasy, who recently packed up her family and left Los Angeles for Texas in search of affordable living, lower crime, and quieter evenings—all within an easy drive to Joe Rogan's Comedy Mothership club in Austin, where she sometimes performs.
Leaving the hustle-heavy entertainment capital of the world hasn't dulled her edge, though. "What stupid fucking times we live in," reads a signature tweet (she's a must-follow on that platform). In recent columns for The Spectator, she talks frankly about how she "learned to stop worrying and love the 'burbs," when she realized she needed to leave California, and talks with members of the LGBTQ+ community about "why Pride lost the public."
We talk about all that, especially what motivated her and her husband to choose Texas over California, and why she remains "politically homeless" despite just moving to a red state. At one point in our conversation, she says that living in a blue area surrounded by red voters might be the best of all possible worlds. She also explains why she's done with Joe Biden and Donald Trump but muses over the circumstances under which she might just vote for conservative Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Within hours of our talking, she messaged me with a link to a terrible DeSantis campaign attack video accusing Donald Trump of being too trans-friendly and touting the Florida governor's bona fides on shutting down gay-friendly activities in the Sunshine State. "I knew I never should have said that I'd vote for him," she wrote, with a laugh/cry emoji. "Puke can we rerecord."
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch is back in the saddle alongside editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman as they discuss the recent batch of Supreme Court decisions ahead of the July 4 holiday.
1:04: The Supreme Court's decision on race-based affirmative action in college admissions
23:16: The Supreme Court's decision involving same-sex wedding websites and free expression
28:40: Weekly Listener Question
38:29: The Supreme Court strikes down President Joe Biden's student loan cancellation plan.
51:06: This week's cultural recommendations
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Economist and libertarian David Friedman and Soho Forum Director and libertarian Gene Epstein debate the resolution, "The right way to persuade people of libertarianism is by showing them that its outcomes are superior by their standards, without any resort to the flawed nonaggression principle."
Coincidentally, both Friedman and Epstein are 78 years old and Jewish. But as Epstein pointed out in his opening remarks, the comparison ends there. Friedman is the son of the famous free market Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman and his wife and collaborator, economist Rose Friedman, and was schooled intensely in the art of debate while growing up. Epstein, by contrast, can claim nothing comparable in his own lineage.
Taking the affirmative, Friedman reviewed key arguments set forth in his book, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism, originally published in 1973 but issued in updated editions since then. Though he does not believe that the libertarian's nonaggression principle, or NAP, is a coherent principle, he also explained that one can do without the NAP in convincing nonlibertarians to accept libertarian solutions to society's problems.
Taking the negative, Epstein argued that what he preferred to call the zero-aggression principle, or ZAP, often plays an essential role in defending the libertarian case for radical reform. He provided examples, including abolishing both drug laws and government's interference with free international trade. He also addressed various aspects of Friedman's view that ZAP is an incoherent principle.
The debate was held before a live audience at noon on June 23 at the Porcupine Freedom Festival ("PorcFest") in Lancaster, New Hampshire. It was moderated by PorcFest leader Dennis Pratt. As Pratt has said, the primary purpose of the six-day event is to induce libertarians to move to the "free state" of New Hampshire.
This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.
The guest for this week's livestream was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist and anti-vaccine activist who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination. My colleague Zach Weissmueller and I talked with him about the war in Ukraine, COVID-19 policy, gun rights, bitcoin, pardoning Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Ross Ulbricht, and much more.
Today's sponsor:
BetterHelp. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.
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My guest today is Kevin Kelly, one of the original gang of people at Wired magazine back when it was not just reporting on but helping to create digital culture and cyberspace (he remains listed on the masthead as a "senior maverick"). He's a longtime techno-optimist who worked with people like Stewart Brand at the Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, and CoEvolution Quarterly and has published a shelf's worth of books such as Out of Control, which helped popularize the idea of emergent orders and self-regulating systems as preferable to traditional, top-down systems of control.
Since 2000, he has published Cool Tools, "which recommends the best/cheapest tools available" and he is one of the people behind a weekly Substack newsletter that suggests interesting gadgets, books, and offerings. He is one of the founders of The Long Now Foundation, which pushes people to think in 10,000-year-long increments, and he maintains a comprehensive database of the writing, art, presentations, blogs, and other material he's generated over the past several decades.
His new book is Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier, a collection of 450 aphorisms and insights gleaned from a life spent traveling the globe and at the intersection of technology and culture. We talk about his body of work, how his Christianity informs his scientific beliefs (and vice versa), and not only why he believes optimism wins in the long run but also why he believes it's warranted by the facts on the ground.
Today's sponsor:
BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman and Katherine Mangu-Ward host not one but two special guests! Reason's own Liz Wolfe and the one and only Kennedy. Buckle up and enjoy as they cover new reporting that lends legitimacy to the lab leak theory of COVID-19's origins, the candidacy of RFK Jr., and the Wagner Group's recent revolt in Russia. Huzzah!
2:20 - New reporting supplies legitimacy to lab leak theory of COVID-19's origins
19:59 - The candidacy of RFK Jr.
45:04 - Weekly Listener Question
48:13 - Wagner Group's armed revolt in Russia
57:09 - This week's cultural recommendations
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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My guest today is Brendan O'Neill of Spiked, whose new collection of essays, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable covers heated topics such as attacks on J.K. Rowling by trans activists; dismissals of populist moments that gave rise to Brexit, Donald Trump, and Emmanuel Macron; and the refusal by elites to own up to their mistakes related to COVID lockdowns. I blurbed this provocative and irresistibly readable book, writing that "Brendan O'Neill is the reincarnation of Christopher Hitchens, a devil's advocate who is willing to always state his case clearly, convincingly, and courageously."
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and special guest Eric Boehm consider the persistent inflation problem alongside government spending and the effect of indicting former President Donald Trump on the GOP election race.
0:33: Persistent inflation and perpetual spending
30:39: Trump's indictment and its effect on the GOP race
40:12: Weekly Listener Question
43:56: Joe Biden and the war on ticket "junk fees"
46:17: This week's cultural recommendations
Today's sponsor:
It's so easy to get caught up in what everyone else needs from you and never take a moment to think about what you need from yourself. But when we spend all of our time giving, it can leave us feeling stretched thin and burned out. Therapy can give you the tools to find more balance in your life, so you can keep supporting others, without leaving yourself behind. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Find more balance, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month. The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview podcast and always provides a great evening of camaraderie and conversation about cutting-edge topics and ideas. On June 26, Nick Gillespie talks with Tara Isabella Burton, author of the phenomenal new book Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians. As in her previous Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, Burton zeroes in on the amazing freedom we have to define our reality and all the complications, problems, and possibilities that come along with such freedom. They'll talk about her findings in Self-Made, whether Kim or Kris is the ultimate Kardashian, the insights she picked up while getting a Ph.D. in theology from Oxford, and how traditional and modern cultures mix uneasily. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soda, food, and plenty of time to talk about politics, culture, and ideas in one of the coolest settings in midtown Manhattan.
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontv Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magazine Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason Visit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.
The guest for this week's livestream was Clark Neily, senior vice president for legal studies at the Cato Institute. We talked about the indictment against Donald Trump, the parallels between the former president's behavior and Hillary Clinton's, whether the Espionage Act should exist, and deep-seated corruption at the Justice Department and the FBI.
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Adam Smith turns 300 this week, and the July issue of Reason commemorates his life and legacy with a great set of articles by fantastic economists such as Deirdre McCloskey and Nobel Prize–winner Vernon Smith (no relation!), both of whom are recent guests on this podcast. My favorite piece in the issue, though, was created by today's guest, Peter Bagge, the legendary alternative comics genius behind Hate, Neat Stuff, and graphic biographies of Margaret Sanger, Zora Neale Hurston, and Rose Wilder Lane.
Born in 1957, Peter has been drawing professionally for over 40 years and contributing to Reason for the entirety of the 21st century. I talk with him about Adam Smith, material and moral progress, and what it's like to be an ardent libertarian in a creative space dominated by liberals and left-wingers. An eyewitness to the punk scene in New York in the late 1970s and the grunge scene in Seattle in the late 1980s, we also talk about what might be coming next in politics and culture and why he's optimistic that the future will be better than the past.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman break down the latest indictment of former President Donald Trump associated with the collection of classified documents in his Mar-a-Lago home.
0:21: Donald Trump indicted again
31:59: Weekly Listener Question
40:57: Senseless constitutional amendments
49:18: This week's cultural recommendations
Today's sponsor:
It's so easy to get caught up in what everyone else needs from you, and never take a moment to think about what you need from yourself. But when we spend all of our time giving, it can leave us feeling stretched thin and burned out. Therapy can give you the tools to find more balance in your life—so you can keep supporting others, without leaving yourself behind. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Find more balance, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month. The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview podcast and always provides a great evening of camaraderie and conversation about cutting-edge topics and ideas. On June 26, Nick Gillespie talks with Tara Isabella Burton, author of the phenomenal new book Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians. As in her previous Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, Burton zeroes in on the amazing freedom we have to define our reality and all the complications, problems, and possibilities that come along with such freedom. They'll talk about her findings in Self-Made, whether Kim or Kris is the ultimate Kardashian, the insights she picked up while getting a Ph.D. in theology from Oxford, and how traditional and modern cultures mix uneasily. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soda, food, and plenty of time to talk about politics, culture, and ideas in one of the coolest settings in midtown Manhattan.
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontv Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magazine Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason Visit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.
The guest for this week's livestream was Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed, the creator of the 3D-printed "Liberator" gun. We talked with Cody about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, which is trying—and failing—to shut down Defense Distributed's ability to sell unfinished gun components; the philosophical roots of his crypto-anarchist project and interest in cyberpunk thinking; and his predictions about the future of gun control and American politics as we enter the 2024 presidential cycle.
Today's sponsors:
BetterHelp. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month. The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview podcast and always provides a great evening of camaraderie and conversation about cutting-edge topics and ideas. On June 26, Nick Gillespie talks with Tara Isabella Burton, author of the phenomenal new book Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians. As in her previous Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, Burton zeroes in on the amazing freedom we have to define our reality and all the complications, problems, and possibilities that come along with such freedom. They'll talk about her findings in Self-Made, whether Kim or Kris is the ultimate Kardashian, the insights she picked up while getting a Ph.D. in theology from Oxford, and how traditional and modern cultures mix uneasily. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soda, food, and plenty of time to talk about politics, culture, and ideas in one of the coolest settings in midtown Manhattan.
Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontv Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magazine Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason Visit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is the Gutfeld! show and Fox News contributor Kat Timpf, whose new book, You Can't Joke About That: Why Everything Is Funny, Nothing Is Sacred, and We're All In This Together, is a massive bestseller. It's also a full-throated defense of free speech and a compelling argument for humor as the best possible coping mechanism.
I talk with Kat about her life as a standup comedian, her past work at National Review and Barstool Sports, how she deals with sexism, what it's like to be an unapologetic libertarian at Fox News, and how her mother's untimely, tragic death convinced her that humor can be a powerful tool to bring a fragmented country together.
This episode was taped live in New York City at the Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation with defenders of free speech and heterodox thinking. Get information about upcoming events by signing up for Reason's NYC Events newsletter.
Today's sponsors:
BetterHelp. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month. The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. On Monday, June 26, Nick Gillespie talks with Tara Isabella Burton, author of Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians. Tickets are $10—which includes beer, wine, soda, food, and plenty of time to talk about politics, culture, and ideas in one of the coolest settings in midtown Manhattan.
Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontv Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magazine Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason Visit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman attempt to disentangle the various roiling debates over sexuality, identity, and the state amid this year's Pride month celebrations.0:25: Pride wars31:10: Weekly Listener Question43:15: California Assembly votes to pass Journalism Preservation Act48:44: This week's cultural recommendationsToday's sponsor:It's so easy to get caught up in what everyone else needs from you and never take a moment to think about what you need from yourself. But when we spend all of our time giving, it can leave us feeling stretched thin and burned out. Therapy can give you the tools to find more balance in your life—so you can keep supporting others, without leaving yourself behind. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Find more balance, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.The guest on this week's livestream was Dave Rubin, the host of The Rubin Report. A self-described classical liberal, Dave talked with Reason about why he's supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president. We cover a lot of ground, including DeSantis's highly controversial and very successful handling of COVID, his disturbing willingness to use the government to punish corporations that cross him, and why Rubin has soured on Donald Trump, who he supported in 2016 and 2020.Today's sponsors:BetterHelp. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview podcast and always provides a great evening of camaraderie and conversation about cutting-edge topics and ideas. On June 5, Nick Gillespie talks with Fox News contributor Kat Timpf about her best-selling book, You Can't Joke About That: Why Everything Is Funny, Nothing Is Sacred, and We're All in This Together. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soda, food, and plenty of time to talk about politics, culture, and ideas in one of the coolest settings in midtown Manhattan.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill wrote, "he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that." He was laying out the case for robust, good-faith, and systematic debate as essential to an open society. If you don't test your beliefs by engaging with people who disagree with you, you're more likely to make weak, incomplete, self-serving, or irrelevant arguments, leading to ruinous outcomes in policy matters or acrimonious misunderstandings in social life.That's where the group Open to Debate comes in. Founded in 2006 as Intelligence Squared U.S., Open to Debate has hosted hundreds of debates with the goal of "restor[ing] critical thinking, facts, reason, and civility to American public discourse." Through a mix of online and in-person events, Open to Debate brings together artists, officials, public intellectuals, scientists, and entrepreneurs from across the ideological spectrum to work through contentious, heated, and seemingly irresolvable issues of the day.Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward, for instance, was part of a debate that asked, "Is Capitalism a Blessing?" Over the years, I've argued for legalizing all drugs and against Medicare for All, net neutrality, and forgiving student loan debt. I also moderate debates for them, including one in New York about millennials taking place on June 7. Open to Debate invites audience participation, and it airs all its programming on public radio, YouTube, and the group's own website, where it provides voluminous notes and materials, all designed to help audience members reach independent and informed conclusions.My guest today is Open To Debate's CEO, Clea Conner, who tells me about her group's mission, its name change, and its push to host actual presidential debates rather than "joint press conferences with really rehearsed talking points."Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman untangle the holiday weekend debt-ceiling deal between President Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) and consider the recent sentencing of Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes for his role in the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
00:50: President Biden and Speaker McCarthy announce debt-ceiling deal
28:45: Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes sentenced to 18 years in prison.
44:35: Weekly Listener Question
00:00: Ron DeSantis officially announces his run for the White House
54:40: This week's cultural recommendations
Today's sponsor:
Andrew Heaton is one of the funny people in Reason TV videos, like "Star Trek: The Libertarian Edition" or "Star Wars Libertarian Special." So it won't surprise you to discover he hosts a science fiction podcast: Alienating the Audience. Alienating the Audience does deep dives into science fiction, like Robert Heinlein's free love libertarianism, the economics of Dune, Kurt Vonnegut and the warfare state, and how Star Wars: Andor loves public choice theory. Guests on the show have included Peter Boghossian on what first contact with aliens would be like, Jonathan Last from The Bulwark defending the Empire in Star Wars, Tim Sandefur of Goldwater Institute on Star Trek's Cold War hot takes, and even Katherine Mangu-Ward has joined to discuss the work of Dan Simmons. If you don't like science fiction, do not listen to Alienating the Audience, as there's an excellent chance your virginity will grow back. But if you DO like science fiction, and with a dollop of politics and economics, served fresh by a mid-level comedian, then check out Alienating the Audience wherever you get your podcasts.
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontv Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magazine Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason Visit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
My guest today is journalist and podcaster Jesse Singal, who first came to national prominence a few years ago when he wrote a cover story for The Atlantic titled "When Children Say They're Trans." The article was meticulously reported but questioned various aspects of contemporary activism and created a firestorm that continues to this day. Since then, he has emerged as a fierce advocate for free speech, open debate, and honesty about the use and limits of social science in journalism and public discourse. In 2020, he and Katie Herzog started hosting the immensely popular podcast Blocked & Reported. In 2021, he published the excellent book, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills.This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at a small gathering in New York City. We talk about Jesse's work and research, how he came by his commitment to truth over advocacy, and how we can all push back against cancel culture and other forms of soft and hard censorship.Related episodes:Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal on Left-Wing Cancel CultureJesse Singal: Why We Keep Falling for Psychological Quick FixesToday's sponsors:Better Help. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, Better Help is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview podcast and always provides a great evening of camaraderie and conversation about cutting-edge topics and ideas. On Monday, June 5, Nick Gillespie talks with Fox News contributor Kat Timpf about her bestselling book, You Can't Joke About That: Why Everything Is Funny, Nothing Is Sacred, and We're All in This Together. Tickets are $10—which includes beer, wine, soda, and food—and plenty of time to talk about politics, culture, and ideas in one of the coolest settings in midtown Manhattan.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.Our topic was the release of and reaction to the Durham report, an investigation into the FBI's probe of possible collusion between former President Donald Trump's campaign and Russian government actors during the 2016 election. Our guest was Eli Lake, host of the Re-Education podcast and a contributor to Commentary and The New York Sun."If the Durham report shows anything, it is that the FBI leadership bent over backward to protect [Hillary] Clinton's campaign while launching a full investigation into [Donald] Trump's campaign on the thinnest of pretexts," he wrote in a recent article for The Free Press.Lake says the 306-page report from special counsel John Durham, released to the public on May 15, is a "black eye for the FBI," which he says was sloppy, inconsistent, and possibly "helped inject what may have been Russian disinformation into the American political discourse."Related episodes and links:"Should Anyone Be Offended by Kanye West? Live With Eli Lake""Jacob Siegel: 'Disinformation' Is the Hoax of the Century""Beverly Gage: The Dark Truth About J. Edgar Hoover's FBI""From Russiagate to the MyPillow Guy, Let's Stop With Electoral Conspiracy Theories""How the United States Can—And Cannot—Help Iranian Protesters""The Deep State's 'Political Assassination' of Michael Flynn Was an Epic Abuse of Power"Today's sponsors:BetterHelp. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview podcast and always provides a great evening of camaraderie and conversation about cutting-edge topics and ideas. On June 5, Nick Gillespie talks with Fox News contributor Kat Timpf about her bestselling book, You Can't Joke About That: Why Everything Is Funny, Nothing Is Sacred, and We're All in This Together. Tickets are $10—which includes beer, wine, soda, food, and plenty of time to talk about politics, culture, and ideas in one of the coolest settings in midtown Manhattan.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Northwestern University law professor Andrew Koppelman and Soho Forum director Gene Epstein debate the resolution, "Libertarianism has been thoroughly corrupted by delusion, greed, and disdain for the weak."Taking the affirmative is Koppelman, John Paul Stevens Professor of Law and a professor of political science at Northwestern University. He received the Walder Award for Research Excellence from Northwestern, the Hart-Dworkin award in legal philosophy from the Association of American Law Schools, and the Edward S. Corwin Prize from the American Political Science Association. He has written more than 100 scholarly articles and eight books, most recently Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy was corrupted by Delusion and Greed. You can find his recent work at andrewkoppelman.com.Arguing for the negative is Epstein, the director of the Soho Forum and former economics and books editor of Barron's. He's the author of Econospinning: How to Read Between the Lines When the Media Manipulate the Numbers. Epstein has taught economics at the City University of New York and St. John's University and worked as a senior economist for the New York Stock Exchange. He has defended the negative at six Soho Forum debates. His November 2019 debate on socialism with University of Massachusetts professor Richard Wolff has gained almost 6 million views on Youtube.
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman wrestle with newfangled viewpoints and contradictions within National Conservatism and its core disagreements with libertarianism. Also, the editors assess a fresh batch of Republican presidential hopefuls.0:23: Libertarians vs. the New Right28:00: Appraising a fresh group of Republican presidential hopefuls43:53: Weekly Listener Question53:46: This week's cultural recommendationsToday's sponsor:Getting to know yourself can be a lifelong process, especially because we're always growing and changing. Therapy is all about deepening your self-awareness and understanding. Because sometimes we don't know what we want or why we react the way we do until we talk through things. BetterHelp connects you with a licensed therapist who can take you on that journey of self-discovery from wherever you are. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Discover your potential with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is the audio version of The Reason Live Stream that takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.The topic this week was whether falling birthrates in the United States and other countries are a bad thing that governments should try to reverse. My guests were Reason Senior Editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown, whose June cover story is "Storks Don't Take Orders From the State," and Scott Winship, who runs the American Enterprise Institute's Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility and has written widely on the myths and realities about economic and cultural decline.We talk about whether past government policies have proven effective in changing birthrates, whether the state should be involved in such decisions from a moral perspective, and why the right and left are increasingly committed to pro-natalist policies.Today's sponsors:The Soho Forum. Reason is proud to sponsor The Soho Forum, a monthly, Oxford-style debate held in New York City on topics of special interest to libertarians. The next one is on Monday, May 22, and features Andrew Koppelman and Gene Epstein debating the proposition, "Libertarianism has been thoroughly corrupted by delusion, greed, and disdain for the weak." For more information and to buy tickets, go here.The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, unscripted, monthly event that doubles as a taping of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie podcast. The next one is on Monday, June 5, and Nick Gillespie will talk with Fox News contributor Kat Timpf about her best-selling book, You Can't Joke About That. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soda, and food. For details and to buy tickets, go here.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Is the world getting better? Or is it on the verge of collapse?Stefan Sagmeister emphatically believes that things are looking up, and his art exhibition "Now Is Better" showcases a bold new way to convince the world that he's right. He takes actual paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries, disassembles them, and creates new works by juxtaposing them with data visualizations of just how much things have improved since the good old days. Some works chart the incredible decline in deaths on the battlefield, from famine, and from natural disasters while others map how much cheaper food and lighting have become in real terms. One piece documents the explosion in the number of guitars per person on the planet—an indicator of growth in leisure and entertainment—while another charts the persistent belief that crime is always rising despite its well-documented decline. A heralded graphic designer who has designed album covers for Jay-Z, The Rolling Stones, and Lou Reed, Sagmeister has won two Grammy Awards, including one for his design of the Talking Heads' boxed set Once in a Lifetime. Born in Austria in 1962, he's called New York City home since the 1990s. He draws on sources such as Our World in Data, Human Progress, and the work of Steven Pinker, who has written the foreword to a book version of the "Now Is Better" series coming out later this year.In a wide-ranging conversation, Sagmeister tells me why it's so important to acknowledge and defend material progress, why art and commerce aren't enemies, and what he loves about the New World he's adopted as his homeland and how that ties into the "Now Is Better" project.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman delve into U.S. immigration policy, prompted by the recent lifting of Title 42, a dreadful COVID-era hangover that restricted the ability of migrants to seek asylum.1:51: Title 42 migrant expulsions finally come to an end.23:50: The Congressional Budget Office's budget outlook projects a federal budget deficit of $1.5 trillion in 2023 alone.35:05: Weekly Listener Question45:53: Donald Trump's CNN town hall appearance49:04: This week's cultural recommendationsToday's sponsors:Left-wing megadonors are shoveling money into pet projects that don't reflect American values. What's more, lawmakers continue to push bloated, big-government policies—like so-called student loan cancellation—and other programs that will inevitably raise prices and fail to reach the people they are meant to help. All isn't lost, though. You can help turn the tide with a charitable giving account at DonorsTrust. DonorsTrust is a refuge from the storm of harmful, progressive philanthropy and big-government wheeling and dealing that's hurting our institutions and, more importantly, our loved ones. So, take cover and let my friends at DonorsTrust help you maximize your giving while minimizing your tax liability. Whether it's defending speech, empowering entrepreneurs to offer educational alternatives, or fighting green-energy extremists that want to consolidate power and raise prices on individuals and families, DonorsTrust is the charitable giving account provider for you. Visit www.donorstrust.org/reason to learn more about how DonorsTrust can minimize your tax liability and maximize your giving.Andrew Heaton is one of the funny people in Reason TV videos, like "Star Trek: The Libertarian Edition" or "Star Wars Libertarian Special." So it won't surprise you to discover he hosts a science fiction podcast: Alienating the Audience. Alienating the Audience does deep dives into science fiction, like Robert Heinlein's free love libertarianism, the economics of Dune, Kurt Vonnegut and the warfare state, and how Star Wars: Andor loves public choice theory. Guests on the show have included Peter Boghossian on what first contact with aliens would be like, Jonathan Last from The Bulwark defending the Empire in Star Wars, Tim Sandefur of Goldwater Institute on Star Trek's Cold War hot takes, and even Katherine Mangu-Ward has joined to discuss the work of Dan Simmons. If you don't like science fiction, do not listen to Alienating the Audience, as there's an excellent chance your virginity will grow back. But if you DO like science fiction, and with a dollop of politics and economics, served fresh by a mid-level comedian, then check out Alienating the Audience wherever you get your podcasts.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is the audio version of this week's The Reason Live Stream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.This week's topic is artificial intelligence, or A.I., and my Reason colleague Zach Weissmueller interviews two leading thinkers on the subject. Jaan Tallinn of the Future of Life Institute organized an open letter calling for a pause on A.I. development that was signed by Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and 27,000 other people. Tallinn is a tech investor, one of the software developers who created Skype and Kazaa, and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute.On the other side of the issue is George Mason University economist Robin Hanson, who thinks the worries over A.I. are overblown. He says much of today's A.I. anxiety is a more generalized "future fear," which is likely to imperil technological progress that would greatly benefit humanity.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
My guest today is one of my favorite people in the world. Vernon Smith is the 2002 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work in experimental economics. He's almost certainly the only male Nobel Prize winner who showed up with a ponytail and an Adam Smith bolo tie. More than anybody else, Smith is responsible for taking economics out of the lecture hall and testing its hypotheses by running actual experiments with living, breathing humans.Born in Kansas in 1927, Smith has lived a life that sounds like a Bob Dylan song. His mother's first husband died in a freak railroad accident, and she used the insurance money to buy a farm that sustained her family during the darkest days of the Great Depression. An engineering whiz, he graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1949 and then turned to studying economics, first at Kansas University and then Harvard. He's taught all over the country, especially at places far flung from big cities, doing much of his most important work at Purdue University and the University of Arizona. He's currently at Chapman University in Southern California, where he created the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy, which seeks to "reintegrate the study of the humanities and economics in the spirit of Adam Smith."I caught up with Smith recently at Reason Weekend, an annual conference sponsored by the nonprofit that publishes this podcast. We talked about the upcoming 300th birthday of Adam Smith and why The Wealth of Nations author remains absolutely essential to understanding the contemporary world—Vernon gives him a special birthday greeting at the start of this show.We also talked about the people that he namechecked in his Nobel toast—an inspired group that included his co-Nobelist Daniel Kahneman, Friedrich Hayek, and the poet Kahlil Gibran—and his impressions of former President Jimmy Carter, who won the Nobel Peace Prize the same year that Vernon won the economics prize. Smith calls Carter "the great deregulator" and shares a wonderful story about the former president learning late in life how governments and bureaucracies often get in the way of people trying to help one another.Today's sponsors:DonorsTrust. DonorsTrust is the principled, tax-friendly way to simplify your charitable giving. Do you want to make a real difference in the world instead of relying on ineffectual government programs? Do you want to push back against heavy-handed government regulations that encroach on civil liberties, especially after living through the corruption that became so apparent during the pandemic? Consider opening a giving account with the folks at DonorsTrust. The DonorsTrust team understands the conservative and libertarian philanthropic landscape, and they know which charities are clawing back our civil liberties. For more information on how DonorsTrust can help you with your charitable giving, visit www.donorstrust.org/nick to receive a free copy of their donor prospectus.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman take a deep dive into the ongoing controversies around the Supreme Court justices as well as Rochelle Walensky's tenure at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).0:31: Ongoing SCOTUS controversies24:10: Rochelle Walensky stepping down as head of the CDC41:43: Weekly Listener QuestionToday's Sponsors:Getting to know yourself can be a lifelong process, especially because we're always growing and changing. Therapy is all about deepening your self-awareness and understanding. Because sometimes we don't know what we want or why we react the way we do until we talk through things. BetterHelp connects you with a licensed therapist who can take you on that journey of self-discovery from wherever you are. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Discover your potential with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
This is the audio version of The Reason Live Stream, which I co-host every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern with my Reason colleague Zach Weissmueller. Today's guest is Jacob Siegel, a journalist who served in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He's written a fantastic essay for Tablet magazine called, "A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation." This is, simply, the best piece I've read about how what Jacob calls "the ruling class" is trying to literally and figuratively control political and cultural discourse about politics, public health, and other pressing topics. Jacob provides a history and a deconstruction of the concept of disinformation, a term borrowed from Cold War spycraft that became ubiquitous in the wake of Donald Trump's presidential victory in 2016.Along the way, we discuss elite apologetics for suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story on social media, the revolving door between the national security state and the media, and how tactics devised for use overseas in the global war on terror are now being used against Americans on a daily basis.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
For today's episode, I talk with Ben Smith, the first editor in chief of recently shuttered BuzzFeed News, former New York Times media columnist, and founder of Semafor. In his new book Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral, Smith charts the rise and fall of Gawker, The Huffington Post, Breitbart News, and his old employer.In the Aughts and early 2010s, these sites dominated news cycles and pulled millions of eyeballs due to their unique abilities to shape media narratives in surprising and irresistible ways. Indeed, it seemed they would define the new century while legacy outlets such as The New York Times would be lucky to survive in the new, massively online mediascape. Yet the rise of Donald Trump, revenge lawsuits, untimely deaths, and the vagaries of the internet ended up disrupting the disrupters.Ben and I talk about all that, plus his controversial decision at BuzzFeed to publish the Steele Dossier, what the firings of Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon mean for journalism, and his aims for his new media platform, Semafor.This episode was taped at the Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It always provides a great evening of camaraderie and conversation about cutting-edge topics and ideas. Go here to sign up for future events in New York City.Today's sponsors:Better Help. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you. Because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, Better Help is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman puzzle over President Joe Biden's announcement that he's seeking reelection in 2024 and plod through the Republican-controlled House's recently passed debt ceiling plan.1:46: President Joe Biden announces he's running again.23:47: House Republicans pass a debt ceiling plan. Now what?36:38: Weekly Listener Question46:40: Revisionist history with Randi Weingarten50:49: This week's cultural recommendationsToday's sponsors:A famous mustache. Saturday Night Live sketches. A college professor who's a Doja Cat fan. What do these three things have in common? They're all part of the wild world of Jeopardy! The brand new podcast, This Is Jeopardy! The Story of America's Favorite Quiz Show, peels back the curtain on the legacy of the show and takes you behind the scenes of the game that's kept us guessing, laughing, and cheering for more than 60 years. Each week celebrates some favorite moments from Jeopardy!'s history. It includes stories from contestants, staffers, and fans—from early days with Art Fleming, to the rise of Alex Trebek, to Ken Jennings' historic run, and many more! Hosted by Buzzy Cohen, find and listen to episodes now wherever you get your podcasts.Andrew Heaton is one of the funny people in Reason TV videos, like "Star Trek: The Libertarian Edition" or "Star Wars Libertarian Special." So it won't surprise you to discover he hosts a science fiction podcast: Alienating the Audience. Alienating the Audience does deep dives into science fiction, like Robert Heinlein's free love libertarianism, the economics of Dune, Kurt Vonnegut and the warfare state, and how Star Wars: Andor loves public choice theory. Guests on the show have included Peter Boghossian on what first contact with aliens would be like, Jonathan Last from The Bulwark defending the Empire in Star Wars, Tim Sandefur of Goldwater Institute on Star Trek's Cold War hot takes, and even Katherine Mangu-Ward has joined to discuss the work of Dan Simmons. If you don't like science fiction, do not listen to Alienating the Audience, as there's an excellent chance your virginity will grow back. But if you DO like science fiction, and with a dollop of politics and economics, served fresh by a mid-level comedian, then check out Alienating the Audience wherever you get your podcasts.Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is Vivek Ramaswamy, an Ohio-based biotech entrepreneur and best-selling author who is running for the Republican presidential nomination. His America First 2.0 platform combines some libertarian elements (prioritizing economic growth, opposing central bank digital currencies, shutting down whole federal agencies) with others that are anything but ("using our military to annihilate Mexican drug cartels").He tells Zach Weissmueller and me why Donald Trump has accomplished as much as he ever will as president and why Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—who, like Ramaswamy, opposes woke corporate activities—is simply "responding to what the base wants, jumping like a circus monkey without actually having independent thoughts about what our actual principles ought to be." He discusses why he thinks Julian Assange should be pardoned and why the FBI, IRS, and other federal agencies should be shuttered. And he explains why he no longer calls himself a libertarian.We also discuss his new book, Capitalist Punishment: How Wall Street Is Using Your Money to Create a Country You Didn't Vote For, a critical analysis of ESG rules and what he calls "lurking state actions" that he says are driving corporations to develop policies to ward off government interference.This is a podcast version of Reason's weekly livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Established in 1958 and peaking in influence and membership in the mid-1960s, the staunchly anti-communist John Birch Society quickly became a powerful force in conservative politics, with leading figures such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan making appeals to its members without fully endorsing its paranoid vision of a country secretly controlled by Soviet agents. Indeed, the society's founder, retired candy magnate Robert Welch, denounced President Dwight Eisenhower as a "conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy."The society also became a running punchline during its heyday, with Bob Dylan recording a song called "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" and the society's fixation on water fluoridation and vaccines finding its way into a character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove who is obsessed with protecting "our precious bodily fluids."In the new book Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, George Washington University's Matt Dallek puts the rise and fall of the Birch Society—which still exists and is based in Appleton, Wisconsin—into a larger Cold War context and argues that its influence on contemporary conservative politics remains as strong as it is unacknowledged."More than the most hard-line Goldwater, Nixon, or Reagan Republicans," he writes, "the Birch Society…bequeathed to subsequent generations an extreme antigovernment zeal and rhetorically violent appeal" that remains part and parcel of Donald Trump's MAGA movement. The Birchers' focus on ending the Federal Reserve; getting the United States out of the United Nations, NATO, and the World Trade Organization; and anti-interventionist foreign policy parallels many of the key elements of the political program articulated by libertarian Republican Ron Paul, who keynoted the group's 50th Anniversary Celebration. And the society's past antagonism toward integration and continuing attacks on feminism and gay rights—and emphasis on traditional Christian values and family structures—is widespread among contemporary conservatives.Dallek's book is not a sneering attack on a backward-looking group but a deep dive into the context and personalities that made it so powerful, if only for a short period of time. He recaptures a sense of just how radical post-war America was, both on the right and the left, and how "conspiracism"—the idea that things are never simply what they appear to be but are really the result of hidden elite machinations—continues to inform how we all think about politics.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, Katherine Mangu-Ward is back alongside editors Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman as they contextualize Fox News' defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems and Tucker Carlson's sudden departure from the network.01:20: Fox News' defamation settlement15:55: BuzzFeed News shuts down29:55: Tucker Carlson out at Fox News44:35: Weekly Listener Question53:54: Elon Musk and rapid unscheduled disassembly50:20: This week's cultural recommendationsMentioned in this podcast:"The Fox/Dominion Settlement Highlights the Importance of Discovery in Proving 'Actual Malice,'" by Jacob Sullum"In a $788 Million Defamation Settlement, Fox News Admits That It Spread False Claims About Election Fraud," by Jacob Sullum"Fox's Excuses Reinforce Dominion's Defamation Case," by Jacob Sullum"Tucker Carlson on The Daily Caller, His Infamous Jon Stewart Debate, and Walking out of the Ron Paul Convention," by Michael C. Moynihan"Tucker Carlson Describes the Capitol Riot as 'Mostly Peaceful Chaos.' Is He Wrong?" by Jacob Sullum"Does Tucker Carlson Get Anything Right About Libertarians?" by Matt Welch"Tucker: The Man and His Dream," by Matt Welch"The Death of BuzzFeed News Was a Facebook Murder-Suicide," by Robby Soave"Democrats Threaten Matt Taibbi With Jail Time Over Twitter Files Testimony," by Robby SoaveSend your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Forty years ago, the National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation At Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform, a scathing indictment of public K-12 schools in America. "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war," announced the report's authors, who included Nobel Prize–winning chemist Glenn T. Seaborg and Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti. The report catalyzed massive increases in per-pupil spending, standardized testing, and "common core" style curricula. Yet by almost every measure, educational outcomes are no better than they were in 1983.In Mediocrity: 40 Ways Government Schools Are Failing Today's Students, the Libertas Institute's Connor Boyack and the American Federation for Children's Corey DeAngelis outline what's wrong with the ways our public schools function—and they offer concrete solutions to improve outcomes for children.In this podcast version of The Reason Live Stream, I talk with Boyack and DeAngelis about why they support maximizing parental rights through education savings accounts (ESAs), disagree with conservative Republicans who want to ban critical race theory and other controversial concepts, and believe that the end of "factory schooling" will vastly improve the civic life of the United States of America.
Woody Holton, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, and Phillip Magness, director of research and education at the American Institute for Economic Research debate the resolution, "The New York Times book The 1619 Project, and the Hulu video series based on it, are important contributions to our understanding of slavery and the role of African Americans in American history."The debate was held at New York City's Sheen Center and hosted by The Soho Forum, which receives fiscal sponsorship from Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason.Taking the affirmative was Holton, who is the author of Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (1999), which won the Organization of American Historians' Merle Curti Social History Award; Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, a finalist for the National Book Award; Abigail Adams, which won the Bancroft Prize; and Liberty is Sweet: The Epic of the American Revolution, which Holton wrote as the Huntington Library's Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow and as a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow.Arguing against the resolution was Magness, the author of The 1619 Project: A Critique. He holds a Ph.D. and master's from George Mason University's School of Public Policy, and a bachelor's from the University of St. Thomas (Houston). Magness' work encompasses the economic history of the United States, with specializations in the economic dimensions of slavery and racial discrimination, the history of taxation, and measurements of economic inequality over time. In addition to his scholarship, Magness's writings have appeared in numerous venues including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, Reason, National Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
My guest today is Daniel Akst, a journalist and novelist who has written one of the most remarkable books I've read in a while. War By Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance is an irresistibly readable history of peace-mongering practitioners of "Christian libertarianism" who refused to sign on to America's entry into World War II even after Pearl Harbor.Two of the main figures in the book, Bayard Rustin and David Dellinger, served prison sentences in the 1940s for refusing to even register as conscientious objectors—they said the state had no right to make such demands on them. Along with others such as Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, they pioneered the use of nonviolent resistance that energized the Civil Rights Movement and anti–Vietnam War protests in which they would figure so prominently.Akst discusses Dwight Macdonald, the leftist writer and editor who worked at Fortune magazine, staunchly opposed the Soviet Union, ruthlessly critiqued mass media, and mentored a generation of public intellectuals including Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, and Bruno Bettelheim. He also explores the origins of the short-lived America First Committee, which opposed U.S. entry into World War II and whose members and sympathizers included a wide range of people, including future President Gerald Ford, Kennedy in-law and Peace Corps leader Sargent Shriver, author Gore Vidal, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, and National Review founder William F. Buckley. In War By Other Means, Akst recovers a lost current in American politics that will make you think differently about the past and the present, especially given how identity politics and the worst sort of unprincipled tribalism reign supreme in our world today.Read Max Longley's review of War By Other Means in the March 2023 issue of Reason.Read Akst's Reason archive.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and special guest Liz Wolfe consider the recent revelation that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accepted lavish trips from his billionaire friend Harlan Crow and contextualize the leak of classified materials by 21-year-old Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira.0:42: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' controversial friendship with billionaire Harlan Crow23:15: Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira leaks classified materials to his online friends.36:25: Weekly Listener Question44:40: Tax Day animus50:14: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
The good news is that President Joe Biden has officially signed legislation declaring the end of "the national emergency related to the COVID-19 pandemic." The bad news? Governmental responses to the pandemic were "a catastrophe for human freedom" all over the globe, says the Cato Institute's Ian Vásquez.He's the lead author of Cato's annual Human Freedom Index, which tracks personal, civil, and economic freedom in 165 countries. The latest version uses data through 2020, and Vásquez says that year saw the single-greatest drop in freedom in the past two decades.In this podcast version of our weekly The Reason Live Stream, my colleague Zach Weissmueller and I get into the specifics with Vásquez about how Covid ran roughshod over freedom everywhere from Armenia to Zimbabwe—including the United States, which dropped down seven slots and out of the top 20 freest countries. Worse still, Vásquez says overall human freedom peaked in 2007, so COVID has merely exacerbated the trend toward a radically less-free planet.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
My guests today are University of San Diego philosopher Matt Zwolinski and Heterodox Academy President John Tomasi, authors of The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism. This is the definitive intellectual history of a movement that they argue began in recognizable form in the 19th century in Europe as a response to socialism and in the United States as part of the abolitionist movement. I liked the book so much that I blurbed it for Princeton University Press. We talk about virtually every aspect of libertarianism, including its strange lack of interest in the civil rights movement given its origin in abolitionism.Today's episode was recorded in New York City before a packed house at a Reason Speakeasy, a monthly live taping of this podcast. I spoke with Zwolinski and Tomasi about major 20th-century figures such as Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard, as well as the complicated and often-contradictory contributions each made to libertarian thinking. We also spoke about the rise of the Mises Caucus within the Libertarian Party, the seemingly complete rejection of libertarian ideas in the contemporary GOP, and whether the larger libertarian movement is ascendant or sputtering out.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman question new opposing decisions from federal judges regarding the abortion pill mifepristone and take up the recent expulsion of two Democrats from the Tennessee state Legislature over their roles in a gun control protest.2:13: New rulings on abortion pill mifepristone22:07: Tennessee House expels two Democratic lawmakers35:03: Weekly Listener Question45:41: Lightning Round: The Trump indictment, continued52:40: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian Keyser;assistant production by Hunt Beaty.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Zach Weissmueller and I go live at YouTube and Facebook with great thinkers, activists, politicians, entrepreneurs, policy makers and other people who are central to the world in which we live. We're excited to present the audio of those conversations as bonus episodes of the Reason Interview podcast.This time around, we talked with The Washington Post's Taylor Lorenz and Coin Center's Peter Van Valkenburgh about bipartisan congressional efforts to ban TikTok and pass the RESTRICT Act, a far-reaching piece of legislation that imperils not just online free speech but all sorts of privacy rights and economic freedom, especially as they related to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
"This book is born of an anxiety I was feeling, which was this sense that we were leaving pieces of ourselves, in all these different forums, in all these different media," says today's guest, former Reason Senior Editor Kerry Howley, whose new book is Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State."There's a piece of yourself in your email. You're leaving traces in Facebook Messenger and text, and the possibility [exists] that all of these could be reassembled to form an identity that looks like you but is not you," she says. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs "tells the story of a young whistleblower named Reality Winner to whom this truly happened. Her life was reassembled by prosecutors in a truly absurd way to suggest that she was a terrorist. And so she is kind of an illustration of that anxiety but also the reality that we're all living in."Howley is now a staff writer at New York magazine and a multi-finalist for the National Magazine Award, the industry's highest honor, most recently for a profile of anti-abortion activist Marjorie Dannenfelser. In a wide-ranging conversation about surveillance, privacy, and journalism in an age where nothing we say or write or post ever really goes away, Howley talks about getting inside the mindset not just of whistleblowers like Reality Winner and Daniel Hale but also the people who would lock them up and throw away the keys. We also talk about how her work at Reason and her stint at an openly censored newspaper in Myanmar continues to inform her worldview.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman anticipate the historic arraignment on criminal charges of former President Donald Trump this week in New York City, before turning back to the unfolding discussion surrounding potential risks posed by artificial intelligence.1:07: Former President Donald Trump awaits arraignment on criminal charges.19:16: Do A.I. systems pose serious risks to humanity and society?38:48: Weekly Listener Question43:45: Terrible things about the proposed RESTRICT Act49:59: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
On March 30, the Manhattan Institute's Jason L. Riley and New York University (NYU) professor Nikhil Pal Singh debated the resolution, "Upward mobility for black Americans lies in rejecting the policies of progressive government, while making the most of the opportunities offered by American society." The debate was held at New York City's Sheen Center and hosted by The Soho Forum, which receives fiscal sponsorship from Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason.Taking the affirmative was Riley, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, where he has written about politics, economics, education, immigration, and social inequality for more than 25 years. He's also a frequent public speaker and provides commentary for television and radio news outlets. Riley is the author of five books, including Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed, False Black Power?, Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, and The Black Boom.Arguing for the negative was Singh, professor of social and cultural analysis and history at NYU and the founding faculty director of the university's Prison Education Program. He is author, most recently, of Race and America's Long War, and of the forthcoming Reconstructing Democracy: Black Intellectuals in the American Century. His essays have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, The New Statesman, n+1, and Boston Review. His November 2018 Soho Forum debate on "anti-racism," opposite John McWhorter, has received more than a quarter-million YouTube views.
Every Thursday at Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Zach Weissmueller and I go live at YouTube and Facebook with great thinkers, activists, politicians, entrepreneurs, policymakers and other people who are central to the world in which we live. We're excited to present the audio of those conversations as bonus episodes of the Reason Interview podcast.This time around, we talked with Ethan Nadelmann, the former head of the Drug Policy Alliance and the host of the excellent Psychoactive podcast. Ethan is one of the the main reasons we live in a world where legal marijuana is increasingly available for adults—and why other drugs are being decriminalized and legalized too.The main was whether we should legalize all drugs and, if so, how best to go about it? It's an in-depth conversation about all aspects of drug policy, drug use, and drug culture, including decriminalization versus legalization, addiction and treatment programs, and the effects of reforms in Portugal and elsewhere around the world.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
It's a surprise bonus Thursday episode of The Reason Roundtable! Peter Suderman is in the driver's seat this time, alongside editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and special guest Robby Soave, who taped this episode live during the recent Reason Weekend in Pasadena, California. Enjoy!1:13 - President Joe Biden and persistent inflation14:20 - The CHIPS Act, and never-ending government subsidies27:08 - Irrational re-editing of children's literature38:48 - Cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
"What we want is a nonslave society, a society without masters," the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey told me late last year at the annual Liberty Forum conference of the Atlas Network, a group founded in 1981 by British businessman Antony Fisher. The Atlas Network supports nonprofits around the globe that fight against authoritarianism and push for free markets, the rule of law, and self-determination. McCloskey was one of a half-dozen participants I spoke with, and she was explaining the end goal of classical liberalism.Strolling through the conference, which was held in a midtown Manhattan hotel, was like attending a great music festival. People from dozens of different countries and organizations were strategizing and planning on how best to defeat new threats to freedom while keeping and expanding the political, economic, and cultural gains we've made over the past decades.These are uncertain times—many human rights activists agree that "tyranny is on the rise"—and the vibe at the conference was a mix of deep anxiety and upbeat commitment to empowering individuals in developing and advanced countries alike.What follows are short conversations I had with McCloskey—whose acclaimed body of work documents the role of property rights, markets, and pluralism in lifting living standards—and five other people, including:Magatte Wade, a Senegalese entrepreneur who coordinates Atlas' work in Africa;Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation and a bitcoin evangelist who helps people use cryptocurrency to evade state monetary restrictions;Mohamad Machine-Chian, an Iranian journalist forced into exile due to his criticism of his country's theocratic leaders;Tony Woodlief, the head of State Policy Network's Center for Practical Federalism and author of I, Citizen: A Blueprint for Reclaiming American Self-Governance; andTom Palmer, who leads Atlas' international programs and has almost 50 years of experience in the libertarian movement.I talked with each of them about what they do and whether they're optimistic about the future.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and special guest Elizabeth Nolan Brown unpack the ubiquitous sense that politicians of every stripe have abandoned a commitment to free expression. They also examine the fast evolution of artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT.0:42: Politicians choose the culture war over the First Amendment20:04: Artificial intelligence and large language model (LLM) chatbots like ChatGPT36:13: Weekly Listener Question44:27: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Most people have no idea that pinball was illegal in New York from the early 1940s until 1976, when a journalist named Roger Sharpe finally won his crusade against the city to free the flippers.The story of that insane ban is the subject of the new movie Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game, which Richard Brody of The New Yorker called "better than all ten of the Best Picture nominees."The film is written and directed by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg, longtime producers at Reason best known for collaborating with Remy on his massively popular song parodies and for making libertarian versions (often featuring Andrew Heaton) of Star Trek, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and other pop culture franchises. A production of MPI Original Films, Pinball is available for streaming on Apple TV, Google Play, Amazon Prime Video, and other platforms.I talked with the Bragg brothers about how they came to tell Roger Sharpe's story, what goes into making the perfect satire in an era when reality is far stranger than anything we can imagine, and the libertarian message of Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman consider the recent announcement from former President Donald Trump that he expects to be arrested this week in New York City.0:32: Impending Trump indictment17:05: The continued fallout from the banking system bailout31:16: Weekly Listener Question43:58: Another Twitter Files on how Stanford's Virality Project encouraged social media companies to police true information51:57: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
My guest today is William Bratton, the former police commissioner of New York City and former [Right?] chief of police in Los Angeles. He is widely credited for playing a major role in the historic decline of crime in the Big Apple in the 1990s, and he's a major presence in the new documentary Gotham: The Fall and Rise of New York, which will be released on video on demand on March 21 (pre-order here).Bratton also had a highly acclaimed run in Los Angeles in the '00s, where he reduced crime and raised trust in a police department that had a truly awful reputation among the people it served. He is an outspoken defender of "broken windows" policing and also helped pioneer the use of CompStat, a data-driven system that focuses resources on where crime is happening at the moment.Bratton is not without his critics, especially when it comes to supporting controversial policies such as "stop and frisk," which detractors say targets minority youth and abrogates civil liberties without increasing public safety.My Reason colleague Zach Weissmueller and I talked with Bratton about all that, plus the recent increases in crime around the country and how qualified immunity, bad training, and weak leadership lead to horrors like the deaths of Tyre Nichols and George Floyd at the hands of the police. We also mixed it up with him over his insistence that legalizing marijuana was a mistake. It's a wide-ranging conversation with one of the most important law enforcement figures of the post-war era.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman analyze the fallout from the historic failure of Silicon Valley Bank and deride a recent congressional hearing concerning the reporting of independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger on the Twitter Files.0:52: Silicon Valley Bank collapse26:30: President Joe Biden's budget proposal34:22: Weekly Listener Question41:02: House Democrats vs. Twitter Files journalists45:52: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's guest is Vinay Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist and associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco.The author of two books on how bad medical policy persists long after it has been recognized as ineffective or even deadly (Malignant: How Bad Policy and Bad Evidence Harm People With Cancer and Ending Medical Reversal: Improving Outcomes, Saving Lives), Prasad has become a lightning rod during the COVID pandemic because he is outspoken both in his support for vaccines and his criticism of the way they're being implemented. We need to think about risks and benefits for individuals, he insists, and not force a one-size-fits-all solution on a country of 330 million people.He's also outspoken in his criticism of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, Anthony Fauci, Rochelle Wolensky, and other aspects and figures of the public health system. "Trust is justified based on how an organization or system performs," he writes. "And the truth is, the entire public health apparatus, failed."My Reason colleague Zach Weissmueller and I talked with Prasad about all that and much more—including the unwillingness of authorities to admit when they are wrong, the lack of evidence for mask mandates, under what circumstances vaccine mandates are actually legit, and why he is so disappointed with the inability of liberal progressives (his tribe, he admits!) to acknowledge government failure with regards to COVID policy.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman scrutinize recurrent attacks on the social media app TikTok from the federal government and reiterate the delusional nature of government subsidies on goods and services across the economy.0:56: TikTok under attack21:55: Government subsidies don't create affordability.33:09: Weekly Listener Question47:46: Former President and presidential candidate Donald Trump lists his vision for America52:07: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Today's Reason Interview podcast has double the hosts and double the guests.Every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Zach Weissmueller and I host a live interview on Reason's YouTube channel. Today's episode is pulled from our recent conversation about government regulation of cryptocurrency and related matters that we had with Hester Peirce, a renegade commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Depression-era agency whose task it is to supposedly "protect investors," "maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets," and "facilitate capital formation." When the SEC recently fined the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken for supposedly offering an unregistered security, Peirce publicly broke with her colleagues, denouncing the decision as "paternalistic and lazy" and sadly representative of the government's unwillingness to issue clear regulations governing bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. We talk with Peirce, who used to work at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, about why she believes the SEC is overreaching when it comes to crypto regulations and what good regulations might look like.In the second half of the show, we're joined by Nic Carter, a partner at Castle Island Ventures and a leading proponent of blockchain technology and the crypto future. He talks about why he didn't invest in Sam Bankman Fried's FTX and how the crypto industry needs to do more to police itself from fraudsters, whose inevitable collapse makes it more likely government will step in with terrible, soul-and-commerce-crushing rules and restrictions.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and special guest Emma Camp look at the Cochrane Library's new study which concluded masks had "little or no difference" on COVID-19 and ponder a new Florida bill that proposes to remove legal protections against defamation lawsuits.0:26: The Cochrane Library's review of masking trials19:46: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the bill to remove legal protections against defamation lawsuits39:46: Weekly Listener Question52:31: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
On February 21, law professor F.H. Buckley and Libertarian Party activist Jonathan Casey debated the resolution, "The breakup of the United States into different regions is a workable option likely to bring a marked improvement in human affairs." The debate was held at New York City's Sheen Center and hosted by The Soho Forum, which receives fiscal sponsorship from Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason.Taking the affirmative was Buckley, a foundation professor at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School. He is a frequent media guest, a senior editor at The American Spectator, and a columnist for the New York Post. He is the author of the 2020 book American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup. Some of his other books include Progressive Conservatism, Curiosity and Its Twelve Rules for Life, and The Republican Workers Party.Taking the negative was Casey, the founder and chair of the Libertarian Party Classical Liberal Caucus. He has worked and volunteered in the liberty movement for several years, specializing in communication. He founded the Classical Liberal Caucus to promote a professional and policy-based message from within the Libertarian Party.
My guest today is the Edgar Award–nominated mystery writer and Reason contributor Kat Rosenfield, whose new novel is You Must Remember This, a Gothic whodunnit set in Maine that is simply impossible to put down. Kat is one of the most fearless—and most interesting—cultural critics at work today. She joined me in February at the Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview podcast. (Go here for information on upcoming events.)l talked with Kat about the persistent appeal of the mystery genre and how gender politics play out both in fiction and in the publishing world. We also talked about her recent essay and video for Reason, "Stop Spazzing Out About 'Spaz': Social media, streaming, and a new era of digital self-censorship," which looks at the troubling ways in which major artists such as Lizzo, Beyonce, and Taylor Swift are internalizing the values of cancel culture. We also discussed her provocative essay on cultural appropriation for Unherd, "Is It Racist To Like Big Butts?" and Feminine Chaos, the podcast she cohosts.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and special guest Zach Weissmueller consider President Joe Biden's surprise visit to Ukraine and the developing list of 2024 Republican presidential candidates.0:23: Joe Biden's visit to Ukraine17:51: Nikki Haley and the developing 2024 presidential race34:43: Weekly Listener Question46:28: Debt, inflation, and entitlements55:06: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Do we use social media—or does it use us?That's one of the fundamental questions posed by artist Dave Cicirelli in a series of works produced in different media—including social media, in real time—over the past decade. He creates what he calls "experiential art" because the audience must interact with it rather than passively contemplate it in order to make sense of it. His signature works include:Fakebook: A True Story Based on Actual Lies, a memoir of a fabricated, increasingly unbelievable cross-country trip that Cicirelli documented in real time for his followers on Facebook;Fake Banksy Sells Out, a street sale of openly counterfeit paintings in Central Park;All Minus One, a graphic novel version of John Stuart Mill's ideas on free speech and social conformity done in collaboration with Jonathan Haidt and Richard V. Reeves; andThe Infinity Cube, a mind-blowing, glass-and-mirrors immersive installation that challenges participants to deny their urge to take a selfie.Born in 1983 and raised in New Jersey, Cicirelli studied art at Rutgers University, where 60 years ago Allan Kaprow and other members of the Fluxus movement pioneered art "happenings" that forced audience members both to participate in the creative process and to produce their own meanings. A longtime Reason reader who is skeptical of both government and corporate power, he is quite possibly the only artist alive who counts comic book legend Jack Kirby and politician Barry Goldwater among his inspirations.Cicirelli's work forces us to contemplate: Why is there so much fakeness in a world that places so much value on authenticity and transparency? How do we maintain our individuality when social media algorithms group us into simplistic categories and tribes? And has technology become a substitute for reality rather than something we use to express our true selves?Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman delve into Congress' perpetual lack of interest in meaningful reforms to entitlements and discuss new data on the student exodus from public schools.0:26: Joe Biden and entitlement spending32:08: Weekly Listener Question38:16: New data on school kids exiting public schools47:54: Super Bowl lightning round55:03: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In the 1990s, Marc Andreessen helped make the World Wide Web navigable by co-authoring Mosaic, the first super-popular web browser, and then by co-founding Netscape, one of the first great internet initial public offerings (IPOs). As a founder of the venture capital powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz, he has had a central role in funding Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Lyft, and other companies that define our age.Unlike many of his peers, Andreessen is also a congenital optimist, who places his hope for the future squarely in the hands of what he once called "the 19-year-olds and the startups that no one's heard of." On this episode, Reason's Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Andreessen to talk about what the future will look like and whether it's still going to emerge from Silicon Valley, the role of government in fostering or destroying innovation, and what you should read on your next beach vacation.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and special guest Elizabeth Nolan Brown examine Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' latest proposals intended to combat various cultural grievances and a listener question concerning private power grids.0:22: Gov. Ron DeSantis and the power of the state27:02: President Joe Biden's upcoming State of the Union address36:09: Weekly Listener Question47:21: Super Bowl myths52:44: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
I'm the father of two adult sons who are thankfully out of the K-12 educational system. I say thankfully because I found education inherently anxiety-inducing. Turning your kids over to a school for years is no simple thing and my own ambivalent memories as a student didn't help.I'm pretty sure it's always been this way, but today it just seems at a fever pitch of awfulness. There's growing (and ineffective) per-pupil spending; lack of meaningful choice for many, if not most, parents and students; a lack of transparency and accountability; the lingering effects of COVID-related lockdowns; the rise of highly politicized curricula about everything from critical race theory (CRT) to gender and sexual orientation; and a return to fights over library books.Today's guest is Robert Pondiscio, an education expert with the American Enterprise Institute who wrote How the Other Half Learns, a fantastic book about Success Academy, a controversial and highly effective charter school system based in New York City (watch my 2019 interview with him about that). What's more, he actually taught in a low-income public school in the South Bronx.Pondiscio is going to add another worry to our list of concerns: Schools aren't teaching kids to read in any meaningful way. He's a strong advocate for all forms of school choice and reform, but he says choice itself is simply not enough to help the lower-income kids who can most benefit from a really good education.We talk about all that, plus wokeness and a ton of other related topics. Let's call this episode "Everything You Wanted To Know About What's Wrong With K-12 Education But Were Too Afraid To Ask." It first ran as a Reason livestream at YouTube (watch here) and is cohosted by my colleague Zach Weissmueller.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and special guest Eric Boehm delve into policing and violence in the wake of the video release showing Memphis police killing Tyre Nichols.0:30: Tyre Nichols killed by Memphis police23:37: The ongoing debt limit drama36:31: Weekly Listener Question44:55: Sending tanks to Ukraine49:25: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
On January 26, economists Lawrence H. White and Frederic Mishkin debated the resolution, "Replacing the Federal Reserve with free market institutions would significantly improve the economy's money, banking, and financial systems." The debate was held at New York City's Sheen Center and hosted by The Soho Forum, which receives fiscal sponsorship from Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason.Arguing the affirmative was White, a professor of economics at George Mason University. His forthcoming book Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin? (Cambridge University Press, 2023) compares and contrasts alternative monetary standards. Best known for his work on market-based monetary systems, White is the author of Free Banking in Britain (1984), Competition and Currency (1989), and The Theory of Monetary Institutions (1999), and co-editor of Renewing the Search for a Monetary Constitution (2015). His research has appeared in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, The Economic History Review, and other leading economics journals. He's also a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a distinguished senior fellow at the Mercatus Center.Mishkin, who argued the negative, is the Alfred Lerner professor of banking and financial institutions at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. From September 2006 to August 2008, he served on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He was previously a senior fellow at the FDIC Center for Banking Research and president of the Eastern Economic Association. From 1994 to 1997, he was executive vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as well as an associate economist of the Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve System. Mishkin's research focuses on monetary policy and its impact on financial markets and the aggregate economy.
"Brown v. Board of Ed ultimately was never about black kids getting into a white school. It was always about ultimately a parent being able to decide where their children should attend school," Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears tells me in today's Reason Interview podcast. She is one of the driving forces behind a new bill that would create so-called backpack funding for kids in Virginia.Parents would be allowed to use the state's portion of per pupil funding—somewhere between $4,000 and $6,000—at any public or private school, for tutoring, books, and other educational expenses. If the bill passes, Virginia would join eight other states with education savings accounts (ESAs) that accomplish similar goals.Sears was born in Jamaica in 1964 and grew up in New York City before joining the Marines and eventually settling in Virginia, where she has served in the House of Delegates and on the Virginia Board of Education. She became lieutenant governor in 2021 on the same ticket as Republican Glenn Youngkin in an election in which controversies over critical race theory (CRT), school lockdowns, and other issues related to education played a significant role. On today's show, we talk about why school choice is her top priority, the ongoing controversy over her administration's proposed history standards that were rejected by the Virginia Department of Education, and the black experience in America over the past half-century.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie discuss the Facebook Files, which revealed the considerable influence the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) wielded in regard to what users were allowed to say on Meta platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic.0:55: The CDC silenced COVID-19 dissent on Facebook.27:25: Weekly Listener Question36:53: National School Choice Week55:09: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Pessimism is everywhere these days, with a whopping 76 percent of Americans telling Gallup they are dissatisfied with the direction of the country. Some of that's understandable: COVID-19 has killed 1.1 million Americans, there's a major land war going on in Europe, the stock market has tanked, and the political scene is filled with fakers and liars whose grasp on reality seems tentative at best.But Mark P. Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an engineering faculty fellow at Northwestern University, makes a compelling case for optimism in The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s. Increasingly, microprocessors, materials, and machines are being tied together through cloud computing to deliver startling, steady, and mostly underappreciated gains that are vastly improving all of our lives.The example of the iPhone, which debuted in 2007 and radically changed how we live, illustrates Mills' point. It basically utilized existing technologies but tied them together in novel ways. He says the same sorts of breakthroughs are happening all around us, creating innovation that is disruptive in the short term but ultimately positive, if we'll finally let go of centuries-old anxiety about change.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie consider the revelation that, like former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden also had a stash of classified documents in his private office and residence.0:23: President Biden also had classified materials in his house10:35: House GOP introduces the Curriculum Review of Teachings, or CRT, Transparency Act31:33: Weekly Listener Question:I have long held what I consider to be a libertarian position on college admissions and affirmative action: that private colleges ought to be able to control their own admissions policies and that those who don't like those policies can seek admission elsewhere. I am somewhat surprised that I do not find any libertarians making this argument. It seems to me that if the Supreme Court makes a determination that affirmative action is illegal, as well as other types of arguably discriminatory admissions policies such as preferences for alumni and attempts to achieve geographic diversity in the student body, then we are in for a tsunami of lawsuits in which every damn college applicant in the country who is turned down by her top college pick will argue that she was the victim of discrimination. Where does it end? I'm an alumnus of Wesleyan University. I always accepted that racial diversity is a laudable goal in assembling a student body, as is geographical diversity (although I read recently that a desire for geographic diversity is just a scheme to keep out Jews; I didn't know I was antisemitic), or a distribution of interests in the arts versus the sciences, or a wide variety of extracurricular activities. So it touched my heart when today's New York Times ran a headline, "If Affirmative Action Ends, College Admissions May Be Changed Forever," with a picture of my dear old alma mater, Wesleyan. What does the panel think? By what logic are the details of private college admissions policies a matter for the courts? How does the Constitution say that the courts need to make these decisions? How did we get here? And again, where will it all end?47:21: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
With more states and localities legalizing what the government still calls "illicit" drugs, how should we rethink criminal penalties and treatment for people with substance abuse problems? What policy and cultural frameworks will allow all of us to make better use decisions, reduce harm to ourselves and others, and make sure people who need help can get it?Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcastAt the latest Reason Speakeasy—a monthly live event in New York City with outspoken defenders of free speech and heterodox thinking—Nick Gillespie talked with Andrew Tatarsky, the founder of the Center for Optimal Living and the author of Harm Reduction Psychotherapy: A New Treatment for Drug and Alcohol Problems, and Maia Szalavitz, the author of Undoing Drugs: How Harm Reduction Is Changing the Future of Drugs and Addiction [Right?] and Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction.Tatarsky is widely recognized as one of the trailblazing pioneers behind the "harm reduction" movement, which seeks to minimize negative consequences of drug use rather than eradicate it. Szalavitz's work (including her articles for Reason) has long explored the role of agency and compassion in understanding and treating addictive and self-destructive behavior, and she writes with the authority of a former heroin user.
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie look back on the House speaker battle and discuss President Joe Biden's trip to the southern border.1:33: Kevin McCarthy is finally selected as speaker of the House.26:44: Weekly Listener Question:In the last episode, you all discussed the (at least at the time of this message) ongoing process for electing a new speaker of the House. You discussed the demand/request of the 19 or so Republicans who don't back McCarthy that he return to more normal House proceedings like the introduction of amendments, debate on the floor, etc. One of their demands, the introduction of the FairTax Bill, was unaddressed in the last podcast. What do the panel members think of the FairTax (both within the speaker vote context but also more broadly)? I'd be interested in a libertarian take on the FairTax. Assuming that abolishing taxation is unlikely, does the FairTax represent a much better alternative to our current system?35:35: President Biden visits the southern border to Mexico.45:57: George Santos and other political fabulists57:44: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
No federal bureaucrat played a bigger role in 20th-century law enforcement than J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972), who served as the head of the FBI and its predecessor agency for half a century.Hoover oversaw crackdowns on everything from real and imagined communists in the first Red Scare of the 1920s and its sequel in the 1950s; staged high-profile shootouts with "public enemies" like John Dillinger and Babyface Nelson in the 1930s; surveilled Nazi and Axis sympathizers during World War II; infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s; and pursued extralegal operations against civil rights leaders and antiwar protesters in the 1960s.His personal vendetta against Martin Luther King, Jr. led to one of the most shameful incidents in FBI history, when the bureau sent an anonymous letter to King shortly before he was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, encouraging him to commit suicide or be exposed as a serial philanderer.Hoover is the subject of Yale historian Beverly Gage's new biography, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. Gage seeks to complicate and flesh out the life and legacy of Hoover, who is rightly notorious for often brushing aside constitutional limits on state power like so much police tape at a crime site. Yet she points out that he opposed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, undermined Sen. Joe McCarthy's overwrought anti-communist witch hunts, and refused to do political surveillance for Richard Nixon, inadvertently leading to the bungled Watergate break-ins and the 37th president's fall from grace.Gage tells Reason that to understand Hoover in all his complexity—including his much-whispered-about personal relationship with his FBI colleague Clyde Tolson—is to understand the moral ambiguities of the country he served, as well as the promise and limits of constitutional government in an open society.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie discuss the government's censorship-by-proxy of social media companies and Kevin McCarthy's ongoing showdown for the speakership in the House of Representatives.3:00: The government's censorship-by-proxy of social media companies for alleged COVID "misinformation."30:45: Weekly Listener Question:Hello Friends, I just finished listening to the Freakonomics Radio three-part series about Adam Smith. The main thesis of the series is that Adam Smith's views were more nuanced than we generally think of him; most people tend to cherry-pick favorite ideas from The Wealth of Nations while completely forgetting about his first work, Theory of Moral Sentiments. So, I'm curious. How have Adam Smith's ideas shaped your own? Have any of you read Adam Smith's works completely? And maybe most importantly, do you think Adam Smith would be a libertarian if he was alive today?39:39: Kevin McCarthy battles for speaker of the House.52:11: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this special end-of-year episode of The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie have some final thoughts on the biggest stories from 2022 and make some predictions about what might unfold in 2023. Have a Happy New Year!1:32: The biggest stories of the year40:44: Predictions for 202355:29: The most impactful cultural recommendations of the yearAudio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Thinking about putting together a great home cocktail bar? Just interested in this fascinating, highly expressive subculture? Guest host Peter Suderman, Reason's features editor, talks with Jacob Grier, a craft cocktail bartender and writer based in Portland, Oregon. Grier is a Reason contributor and the co-author, with Brett Adams, of the new book Raising the Bar: A Bottle-by-Bottle Guide to Mixing Masterful Cocktails at Home. Suderman speaks with Grier about the pleasures of making cocktails, the way the internet and the pandemic have changed home bartending, and what lessons alcohol Prohibition still has for public policy today.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie discuss the depressing end-of-year omnibus government spending deal.0:21: A massive year-end spending bill20:10: The $858 billion National Defense Authorization Act33:59: Notable legislative areas NOT being addressed this week49:17: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Rich Lowry and Alex Nowrasteh debate the resolution, "Nationalism is an important value that Americans should support." The event is produced by The Soho Forum, a monthly debate series presented by Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason.For the affirmative: Richard Lowry is the editor-in-chief of National Review. He was selected to lead the news outlet by its founder, William F. Buckley. Lowry writes a syndicated column for King Features Weekly Service and a weekly column for Politico. He is also a commentator for NBC News. His most recent book is The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free.For the negative: Alex Nowrasteh is the director of economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute where most of his work has focused on immigration. He is widely published in newspapers, blogs, and peer-reviewed academic journals. He is the coauthor (with Benjamin Powell) of the book Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which is the first book on how economic institutions in receiving countries adjust to immigration. He is a native of Southern California and received an MSc in economic history from the London School of Economics.
"This universe is finite. Its resources, finite. If life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist." So declares the Marvel Comics supervillain Thanos near the end of Avengers: Infinity War, when he destroys half of humanity with the snap of his finger.In Superabundance, Marian L. Tupy of the Cato Institute and Gale L. Pooley of Brigham Young University note that Thanos is simply channeling millennia-old critiques of progress and population growth. In the best-known version of this argument, the 19th-century economist Thomas Malthus contended that more people inevitably means famine and starvation. But Malthus—and Thanos—are wrong. The past 200 years have seen historically huge increases in the number of people living on planet Earth. Indeed, we've gone from 1 billion in 1800 to 8 billion in 2022, but we are flourishing more than ever before and living longer, more productive lives.Tupy, who runs the website Human Progress, and Pooley, an economist, chart how the real prices of our most basic necessities—and most of our luxury goods—have declined over time and how free markets and human innovation mean that our planet is infinitely bountiful.I think Superabundance is one of the most compelling—and uplifting books—in years. I think you will too.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie discuss the Brittney Griner prisoner swap and the Twitter Files 2.0.0:27: Brittney Griner released9:46: New Twitter Files drop32:43: Weekly Listener Question:Should Libertarian candidates throw the election one way or the other in exchange for a public pledge by one of the two large-party candidates? For example, adopting an official public policy and/or naming them to a Cabinet position? Obviously, the candidate couldn't force voters to cooperate, but with the large number of libertarians in excess of the number needed suggests that enough would go along with the scheme to make it work… and of course, no one could prove that it didn't. Whaddya think?42:55: Kyrsten Sinema leaves the Democratic party.48:58: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
It might be the oldest profession, but prostitution and other forms of sex work are also among the most prohibited and regulated around the world. At the latest Reason Speakeasy—a monthly live event in New York City with outspoken defenders of free speech and heterodox thinking—I talked with Kaytlin Bailey, the founder and executive director of Old Pros, a sex worker rights group and the writer and performer of Whore's Eye View, a one-woman show about 10,000 years of prostitution, female emancipation, and sexual freedom.Bailey and Old Pros seek not just to decriminalize sex work but to destigmatize it too, arguing that sex workers have not only provided a much-in-demand service but helped to push the boundaries of freedom and liberty.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie dig into the release of the Twitter Files by journalist Matt Taibbi and CEO Elon Musk.1:32: The Twitter Files drop33:48: Weekly Listener Question:Here in my hometown of NYC (where apparently the carpetbagger Gillespie has chosen to make his home), just earlier today, the Adams administration stated its intention to increase involuntary hospitalizations for homeless individuals suffering from severe mental illness. Essentially, they are seeking to expand the interpretation of the legal standard from hospitalizing those who are likely to cause "serious harm" to themselves or others to those "whose mental illness prevents them from meeting their basic survival needs of food, clothing, shelter, or medical care." Notwithstanding the legitimate concerns over "the state" and "involuntary hospitalizations" appearing in the same sentence, or nightmare scenarios about who may be labeled "unable to meet their basic needs" (perhaps someone consuming a large soda?), would the Roundtable care to weigh in on where the line may be here? At what point, if ever, should the state involuntarily hospitalize and/or medicate someone to protect themselves or those around them?52:41: This week's cultural recommendationsAudio production by Ian KeyserAssistant production by Hunt BeatyMusic: "Angeline," by The Brothers SteveSubscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Our cherished listeners of The Reason Roundtable delivered yet another batch of both thoughtful and off-the-wall questions for editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie to consider during this special ask-me-anything-style podcast episode.This is all in service of the annual Reason Webathon, during which we attempt to casually coax you into making a tax-deductible donation to the nonprofit foundation that publishes our work.Is there any hope for transitioning to a fully market-oriented health system? What are the editors' favorite four-dimensional platonic solids? Will Peter make a Star Wars: Andor–themed cocktail at 1.5x speed? And will Katherine have to fire her co-hosts already?All this and more on a rollicking episode of The Reason Roundtable that's both "earball" and eyeball friendly. Donate now and help us continue to bring that much-needed "Free Minds and Free Markets" perspective to your weekly media consumption!Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
Has the Republican Party lost its mind—and its way—in its slavish devotion to Donald Trump, who insists that the 2020 election was stolen from him through extensive voter fraud?That's the question that journalist Robert Draper investigates in his new book Weapons of Mass Delusion, which looks at rising Republican stars such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.) and failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who are diehard Trump loyalists, and established party leaders such as likely Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, who is openly terrified to cross the former president.I spoke with Draper shortly after the midterm elections, in which the GOP had an unexpectedly poor showing against a massively unpopular Joe Biden. Is this a sign that Trump's hold on his party—and the country—is weakening? And is there any reason to believe that the party of Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater may return to its small government roots?We also talked about Draper's 2014 New York Times Magazine cover story, "Has the Libertarian Moment Finally Arrived?," which prominently featured me and Matt Welch.Subscribe at YouTube: http://youtube.com/reasontvLike us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Reason.MagazineFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reasonVisit the archive: https://reason.com/tags/reason-podcast
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie discuss the latest protests against "zero-Covid" policies in China as well as other examples of lingering public health authoritarianism.
0:57: China's protests against harsh "zero-Covid" policies
14:20: Lingering COVID restrictionism in the U.S.
33:10: Weekly Listener Question:
I have found, what is for me, a paradox. I want to hear what y'all think of it, but I am primarily interested in hearing from Katherine, since she is a woman and women account for some 51 percent of the population. My personal paradox is this: How is it that women are 51 percent of the market and yet cannot find women's pants with pockets? Free minds. Free markets. No Potemkin pockets.
40:54: World Cup controversies
49:18: This week's cultural recommendations
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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As a teenager growing up in Greenwich Village in the late 1960s, Steven Heller improbably became the art director of pioneering alternative publications such as The New York Free Press, the pioneering porn magazine Screw, and The East Village Other before eventually moving on to work at The New York Times and teaching at the School of Visual Arts for decades.
He chronicles his youthful misadventures in Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York. In November, Heller spoke at the Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. In a wide-ranging conversation with me, he regaled the Manhattan audience with tales of arrests on obscenity charges, how design and aesthetics can supercharge the meaning of words and pictures, and why so many in the counterculture adopted exactly the same "uniform of alienation" in the name of individualism.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch is back alongside editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie as they wade through the missteps of our modern gerontocracy.
0:32: Nancy Pelosi's countless failures
23:23: President Joe Biden turns 80 years old
36:30: Weekly Listener Question:
Hi Friends! I like weed. Marijuana is a wonderful drug (I don't know why we keep looking for female Viagra when it already exists), and I celebrate recent expansions of legalization. There are risks, just as there are with any drug, and there is a potential for abuse. Nonetheless, if you compare the damage done by weed with the damage done by the war on drugs, it's not even close. Unsurprisingly, I have noted an uptick in news items describing the dangers of marijuana. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal declared, "Marijuana May Hurt Smokers More Than Cigarettes Alone." The conclusion was based on a study of a whopping six marijuana-only smokers. This news trend makes me nervous. What attacks can we expect now that legalization is spreading? I'm thinking flimsy studies to convince everyone it's a major health risk (from the left) and stories about psychosis (from the right). What do you think is the next move against legal marijuana, and how can we anticipate it?
46:53: Donald Trump returns
52:51: This week's cultural recommendations
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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On November 15, Jay Bhattacharya and Sten Vermund debated the resolution, "Focused protection, as set forth in the Great Barrington Declaration, should be the general principle of public health management of highly infectious respiratory virus pandemics." The event was produced by The Soho Forum, a monthly debate series presented by Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason.
For the affirmative: Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford University. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute. His research focuses on the economics of health care around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. His peer-reviewed research has been published in economics, statistics, legal, medical, public health, and health policy journals. He holds an MD and Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University. Bhattacharya was one of three main co-signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020.
For the negative: Sten Vermund is a professor of public health and pediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine. A pediatrician and infectious disease epidemiologist, he has focused on diseases of low- and middle-income countries. He has become increasingly engaged in health policy, particularly around the sustainability of HIV/AIDS programs and their expansion to noncommunicable diseases, COVID-19 pandemic response and prevention, and public health work force development. His recent grants include capacity-building for public health in Chad, molecular epidemiology for HIV in Kazakhstan, and COVID-19 vaccine studies in Dominican Republic and Connecticut. He has worked with schools and arts organizations for COVID-19 risk mitigation and institutional safety.
This was an Oxford-style debate, meaning the debater who changed more audience member minds won the debate. Bhattacharya started with 56.72 percent of the vote, while Vermund started with 7.46 percent. Bhattacharya ended with 81.34 percent of the vote, a 24.63 percent change. Vermund ended with 15.67 percent of the vote, an 8.21 percent change.
The libertarian movement has lost its way over the past 60 years as it's shifted from Friedrich Hayek's classical liberal corrective to Depression-era central planning to Murray Rothbard's full-blown anarcho-capitalism in which all taxation is theft and all transfer payments are immoral.
That's the argument in a provocative new book called Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy was corrupted by Delusion and Greed, by Andrew Koppelman. Along the way, he critiques major libertarian figures such as Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, Ron Paul, and Charles Koch.
I spoke with Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern University, about why he believes classical liberals have given ground to anarchists and how that fundamentally changes not just the rhetoric but the political goals of the libertarian movement.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and special guest Eric Boehm examine initial takeaways from last week's midterm elections.
0:42: Midterms post-mortem
34:59: Weekly Listener Question:
Brazil is a country with over 200 million people, and they counted all of their presidential election votes on election night. U.S. democrats, however, need weeks to count all the votes. What other explanation is there for this than cheating?
41:31: More on Elon Musk and Twitter
54:21: This week's cultural recommendations
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Today's episode is guest-hosted by my Reason TV colleague Zach Weissmueller. Zach went to Philadelphia to talk with Maj Toure, who runs the Solutionary Center in North Philadelphia. It's a place for locals to learn firearms skills and safety, how to avoid and de-escalate conflicts, and to pick up other life skills ranging from first aid to yoga to phlebotomy. "We hear a lot of people say, 'If these communities would just pull themselves up by the bootstraps,'" says Maj. "Okay, this is the bootstraps."
The Philly native is a hardcore libertarian, founder of the gun rights group Black Guns Matter, and a supporter of the Mises Caucus that recently took control of the Libertarian Party. He tells Reason that libertarians can improve their outreach in urban America by getting behind leaders and organizers who have an intuitive understanding of the needs and concerns of the residents who live there.
Here is the Reason interview with Maj Toure.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward and Nick Gillespie survey the political landscape ahead of the midterm elections.
0:31 - Key midterm issues
11:50 - Most laughable major party pre-election pitches
29:28 - Weekly Listener Question:
"How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.
Still to ourselves in every place consign'd,
Our own felicity we make or find:" ― Samuel Johnson
My pithy query is this: do you think candidates would attract the 8-15% of independents by refreshingly stating their actions in office will have little to no effect on individualized happiness? For example, Democrats and Republicans have squabbled over tax cuts - a somewhat nominal 39.6 to 37% for the top rate, while Federal spending on every single mandatory and discretionary program has remained relatively unscathed, but the tax cuts are held up as an Us vs. Them when discussing policy. Will cynicism ever prevail?! Are there any real-life Bulworth examples? Thank you!
49:45 - This week's cultural recommendations
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Over the past decade, no social critic has been more withering toward identity politics and cancel culture than Andrew Doyle, the playwright, comedian, and journalist from Northern Ireland. Whether it's creating the parodic Twitter personality Titania McGrath or penning a best-selling defense of free speech, the Oxford-educated Doyle has never missed an opportunity to show the folly of the political correctness currently eating its way through our universities, corporations, and politics like termites through soft wood.
His new book is The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, and I spoke with him about the sources of and solutions to what he calls the "frenzy of conformity" that characterizes so much of contemporary media, academia, and policy.
Previous appearances by Doyle on The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie:
"Andrew Doyle: Free Speech and Why It Matters," June 2, 2021.
"Meet Titania McGrath, the Wokest SJW on Twitter," February 5, 2020.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie celebrate the triumphant return of Katherine Mangu-Ward with a conversation about Elon Musk's Twitter takeover and the chatter around political violence in the U.S.
1:36: Elon Musk takes over Twitter
11:19: The Paul Pelosi attack and political violence
29:00: Weekly Listener Question:
I was pretty horrified by the $2,500 fines PayPal was handing out. They retracted them, sure, but it was no accident. They targeted a few of my favorite websites. I consider myself libertarian-leaning and agree with you guys on a host of issues. But I always get confused when you defend PayPal as NOT being a monopoly. I mean, forget about a dictionary definition and just think in terms of utility: What viable alternatives do I have in the digital marketplace right now? Let's say I'm horrified by what they're doing and want to vote with my dollars. Because I really really do. What service should I use instead? Venmo? I think they're also owned by PayPal.
40:10: What's currently scariest in government and politics?
48:03: This week's cultural recommendations
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Larry Krasner wants to fix America's criminal justice system, which imprisons more people per capita than any other country on the planet. Since 2018, he's served as the district attorney of Philadelphia—one of America's most highly incarcerated and crime-ridden cities.
Krasner spent three decades as a criminal and civil rights defense attorney before deciding to run for office.
"Our movement did the uncomfortable thing: We took back power," he wrote in a memoir about his successful 2017 run to become Philadelphia's district attorney. "We outsiders went inside and took over the institution we had fought against all our lives."
In his first week as D.A., Krasner fired 31 staffers and replaced them with a new team that he described as "ideologically attached to the mission."
"It's a pretty basic mission for people who are in favor of freedom," Krasner tells Reason. "One of those missions is to be less incarcerated than Vladimir Putin's Russia. I don't think that should be very controversial."
Krasner won reelection easily last year, but today he's under intense pressure. Philadelphia posted a record 562 murders in 2021, and it's on pace for a similar outcome in 2022. The Republican-led state Legislature has begun impeachment proceedings against him.
Reason's Zach Weissmueller sat down with Krasner in his office to talk about his reforms, his city's spike in violent crime, the heat that progressive prosecutors are feeling in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco, and what that means for the future of American criminal justice reform.
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This week on The Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Fiona Harrigan, filling in for Katherine Mangu-Ward, discuss the heated rhetoric surrounding the upcoming midterm elections, theorize what a GOP-controlled House would entail, and answer a listener's question about how libertarians can avoid being labeled "jihadists."
0:48: Discourse over the midterms
19:54: The GOP's anti-immigration ads
32:15: Weekly Listener Question:
"Please see the following comment from British Conservative Party MP Robert Halfon: 'The government has looked like libertarian jihadists and treated the whole country as kind of laboratory mice on which to carry out ultra, ultra free-market experiments,' he told Sky News. How can we prevent libertarians from being slandered as such? If, as the U.K. markets suggested, freer economic policy requires short-term suffering to achieve longer-term gains, do Americans have the stomach required to approach such policies?"
48:21: What have we been consuming?
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Adam Czarnecki
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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"Free market ideology is largely responsible for the dismal performance of the U.S. economy over the past few decades." That was the resolution for a live debate on Monday, October 15, 2022, at the Sheen Center in downtown Manhattan.
Defending the resolution was Binyamin Appelbaum, the lead writer on business and economics for the New York Times editorial board. He previously worked as a Washington correspondent for the Times. He is the author of The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (2019).
Arguing for the negative was Gene Epstein, the director of the Soho Forum and former economics and books editor of Barron's. His last published book was Econospinning: How to Read Between the Lines When the Media Manipulate the Numbers. Epstein has taught economics at the City University of New York and St. John's University, and he has worked as a senior economist for the New York Stock Exchange. He has defended the negative at six Soho Forum debates. His November 2019 debate on socialism with University of Massachusetts professor Richard Wolff has gained more than 5 million views on Youtube.
The debate was moderated by Nick Gillespie.
Over the past 50 years, boys and men have lost ground at school and work and they're living shorter lives. They're less likely than women to graduate from high school and college or to earn advanced degrees. They're dropping out of the labor force in record numbers and account for two-thirds of the so-called deaths of despair stemming from suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdoses..
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The Brookings Institution scholar Richard V. Reeves documents these and other, equally dark developments in Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What To Do About It. He analyzes the structural factors exacerbating these trends—such as the changing nature of work in a postindustrial economy—and suggests solutions that don't come at the expense of women.
I spoke with Reeves at the Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an era of conformity and groupthink.
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie unpack results from a recent Harvard-Harris poll that highlight the mismatch between voter concerns and party interests ahead of the midterm elections.
4:20: Harvard-Harris poll results ahead of midterm elections
20:14: PayPal's fines for "misinformation"
33:25: Weekly Listener Question:
Noah Smith makes an interesting case (below) that the TARP bailouts avoided a second Great Depression. What say you, Roundtable?
"An Econ Nobel for research that saved the world," by Noah Smith
45:30: The 20th anniversary of Authorized Use for Military Force (AUMF) for Iraq
46:52: This week's cultural recommendations
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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In 2013, the serial entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan gave a widely discussed talk at the tech incubator Y Combinator on a paradigm derived from the work of political economist Albert O. Hirschman. There are two basic paths to reform, he explained: You can speak up and remake a system from within ("voice") or you can simply leave and build something new that might one day takes its place ("exit").
That latter concept is the framework through which Silicon Valley tends to solve problems, and it captures the worldview of Srinivasan, whom venture capitalist Marc Andreessen says has "the highest output per minute of new ideas of anybody I've ever met in my life."
In his new book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country, Srinivasan makes the case for migrating much—though not all—of our lives onto the internet while changing how we get together in meatspace. Ever-improving digital tools give humans an unprecedented and always-accelerating ability to create opt-in, fully voluntary communities where people choose to meet, work, live, and love.
From existing, terrestrial countries that are attracting immigrants with the promise of a better standard of living to blockchain communities that draw participants by laying out clear-cut, contractual rules, responsibilities, and obligations, Srinivasan articulates a future that is profoundly democratic and consensual—thus liberating us from a status quo in which self-determination is little more than a pipe-dream.
Raised in suburban Long Island, Srinivasan holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford. He co-founded the genetic testing firm Counsyl and served as the first chief technology officer of Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange. He's been a fierce critic of the FDA, which might account for his being short-listed to head up the agency under President Donald Trump.
"What if this coronavirus is the pandemic that public health people have been warning about for years?," he tweeted in January 2020, as Vox and mainstream outlets were busy attacking Silicon Valley venture capitalists for taking the crisis too seriously. "It would accelerate many pre-existing trends," he wrote, "border closures, nationalism, social isolation, preppers, remote work, face masks, distrust in governments."
I talked with Srinivasan about The Network State, the rise of China as a tightly centralized global power, why billionaire Peter Thiel is part of the "descending class," and the future of freedom both online and offline.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie ruminate on President Joe Biden's sudden announcement regarding federal marijuana convictions and examine the current kooky economy.
1:41: Biden's weed announcement
16:56: The weird economy watch
33:22: Weekly Listener Question:
What's the take on the classic car warranty "renewal" junk mail or life insurance upsells, often employing phrases like FINAL NOTICE? Addressed mail that attempts to fool the recipient into taking out a new service by using personal information (e.g., full legal name, vehicle details) to imply an existing commercial relationship. Bonus: These senders depend on using government data like DMV records and are typically delivered by the U.S. Postal Service. Free market/free speech/consumer (?) beware, or state-enabled spear phishing that defrauds the elderly?
44:20: A masculinity crisis?
57:50: This week's cultural recommendations
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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https://youtu.be/GStogBCF0ss
The killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020 touched off a summer of protests over police brutality, especially with regard to African Americans and Hispanics.
To many, the killings cemented as fact a narrative that began with the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and found expression in highly charged slogans such as "all cops are bastards" and "defund the police." Reformers charge that cops, far from keeping the peace, are simply the most visible agents of white supremacy who systematically surveil and punish racial and ethnic minorities. Long-stalled reforms, such as abolishing qualified immunity and ending cash bail, made big gains as massive crowds marched under the banner of Black Lives Matter.
But what if the narrative that police are increasingly dangerous, violent, and unaccountable is wrong?
In Criminal (In)Justice, Rafael A. Mangual argues that police violence is in fact rare and declining. What's more, he says that the criminal justice reforms favored by social justice activists—and many libertarians—will make life worse for communities of color. "If we're going to have an honest conversation about where reform needs to happen," says Mangual, "we have to be realistic about what the real scope of the problem is because that's the best way that we're going to be able to assess what can actually fix that problem."
Mangual is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, the New York City think tank that played a foundational role in the shift in policing tactics that began in the early 1990s. It published the work of George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson on broken windows policing and championed the development of the crime-tracking program CompStat under New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton.
Mangual grew up in Brooklyn and Long Island, the half-Dominican, half-Puerto Rican son of a New York Police Department detective. He attended Baruch College in the City University of New York system and holds a law degree from Chicago's DePaul University.
I talked with him about the facts and rhetoric surrounding law enforcement, whether violent crime is actually rising, and what the best ways are to keep the peace without harassing and locking up innocent people.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, and Peter Suderman and special guest C.J. Ciaramella talk about the aftermath of Hurricane Ian and the current political discourse surrounding criminal justice reform.
2:05: Hurricane Ian's aftermath
21:38: The Jones Act is still terrible.
25:37: Weekly Listener Question:
Dearly beloved Roundtable,
When considering foreign policy issues, shouldn't libertarians worry not only about acts of commission but also acts of omission? It seems that libertarians are reflexively worried about acts of commission but seldom focus on the consequences that derive from lack of action (i.e., acts of omission). Isn't it at least possible that failure to act can lead to a less-libertarian preferred outcome? If so, how should one balance action vs. inaction?
36:20: The current discourse on criminal justice reform
47:54: This week's cultural recommendations
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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No governor is more cheered and hated right now than Florida Republican Ron DeSantis, currently in the news for flying around 50 Venezuelan migrants to Martha's Vineyard to own the libs. The 44-year-old Navy veteran and double-Ivy-Leaguer also headlined the third National Conservatism Conference, where he emphasized that the state should punish and reward businesses and individuals based on political positions.
Controversially, DeSantis has yanked longstanding tax breaks for Walt Disney Corporation after the company criticized his stance on gay rights, signed legislation that would limit social media platforms' ability to moderate content and users (the law has been blocked by a federal court), banned mask mandates in public schools, and issued an executive order prohibiting businesses from requiring proof of vaccination from customers. He's also pushed cities such as Gainesville to abandon zoning reform aimed at creating more diverse, multi-family housing.
If such top-down edicts seem at odds with traditional conservative support for local decision making and letting businesses act however they want, DeSantis has also gotten high marks for mostly keeping K-12 schools open during the pandemic and overseeing a boom in people moving to Florida to escape lockdowns elsewhere. When COVID death rates are adjusted for the age of residents, Florida's rate (275 per 100,000) draws close to California's (267 per 100,000), while both are below the national average (302 per 100,000). He's a strong supporter of gun rights and signed a $1.2 billion tax break package this spring, promising even more cuts if he gets reelected in November. Despite increased levels of spending each year of his governorship, the state is currently sitting on a $22 billion budget surplus.
So how should libertarians think about Ron DeSantis? Is he "a retaliatory culture warrior" and the leading indicator of an "authoritarian convergence" of the right and left? Or is he a successful large-state governor, the future of the Republican party, and, quite possibly, the next president of the United States? How should libertarians think about his mix of bullying and bravura that is turning the Sunshine State from a joke to one of the hottest destinations in the country?
I recently hosted a conversation about DeSantis and Florida with two recent blue-state refugees: Reason Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller, who pulled up stakes in California, and New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz, who hightailed it out of New York.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie consider the elevated risks from the conflict in Ukraine and commend the recent protests in Iran.
2:22: Russian President Vladimir Putin's mobilization push
16:09: Protests in Iran
30:19: Weekly Listener Question:
It's belated by almost a couple months, but the CIA turned 75 on July 26. Is there a libertarian argument in favor of having a Central Intelligence Agency, and if yes, how closely would a libertarian-approved CIA resemble the one we have?
40:38: New York state lawsuit against former President Donal Trump
48:39: This week's cultural recommendations
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Is it imperative that the world eliminate all nuclear weapons? That was the topic of a live debate hosted by the Soho Forum on September 19, 2022.
Ward Wilson is the author of Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons and president of RealistRevolt. He argued that nuclear weapons have almost no practical application, and it's time to end world leaders' fascination with their awe-inspiring power.
Peter Huessy, is director of strategic deterrent studies at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and president of his own defense consulting firm, GeoStrategic Analysis. He argued that we can't get to nuclear abolition without getting other nuclear powers on board, including Russia and China, which both see them as essential tools in their foreign policy agenda
The debate was held at the Sheen Center in downtown Manhattan, and was moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein.
Narrated by Nick Gillespie; edited by John Osterhoudt
Did you know that Otto Frank, the father of Anne, repeatedly tried to emigrate with his family to the United States after the Nazis came to power in his native Germany? Each attempt failed due to American immigration restrictions put into place in the 1920s.
Two-thirds of European Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II in a systematic, relentless process that still exceeds our ability to comprehend its origins and consequences. The Final Solution, which was the Nazi plan to exterminate all European Jews, wasn't implemented until 1942, but Hitler's government had begun openly dehumanizing, harassing, and attacking Jews upon taking power nine years earlier.
Even when the Nazi death machine kicked into high gear, America kept its doors mostly closed to Jews such as the Franks, as filmmakers Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein recount in The U.S. and the Holocaust, a new three-part documentary series on PBS.
Some lobbied to open the country to refugees in the run-up to war, but anti-immigration legislation, the economic devastation of the Depression, incredulity toward a press that had trafficked in false atrocity accounts during World War I, and deep-seated antisemitism, especially in Franklin D. Roosevelt's State Department, combined to thwart those efforts.
I talked with Burns and Novick about why a nation of immigrants remains so deeply ambivalent about newcomers and the lessons that 21st-century America should draw from our country's response in the lead-up to the Holocaust.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie discuss the fallout from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' political stunt that sent migrants to Martha's Vineyard and Joe Biden's interview on 60 Minutes.
1:58: Migrants at Martha's Vineyard
26:09: Weekly Listener Question:
Many institutions seem to have lost their way recently, often due to audience or donor capture. On the left, the ACLU has lost its free speech absolutism and now thinks some speech is not worth protecting. NPR has become a sad, woke, unlistenable parody of its former self. On the right, Katherine's former employer, The Weekly Standard went under when the editors and financial backers went different ways regarding Trump. Reason has been very consistent for the past 50+ years (with the possible exception of that piece by Matt Welch praising France's health care system: "Why I Prefer French Health Care"). How has the magazine of "Free Minds and Free Markets" been so consistent and done so well for so long? And more importantly, what is being done to ensure its continued success and principled commitment to libertarian ideas? P.S. I will be attending Reason's space-themed Halloween party in a "Sexy Nick Gillespie Astronaut" costume.
35:18: Joe Biden interviewed on 60 Minutes
46:52: This week's cultural recommendations
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Today's guest is Phil Magness, the intellectual watchdog based at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) who is keeping tight tabs on suspect claims from journalists and academics.
His targets have included Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of The New York Times' Pulitzer Prize–winning series The 1619 Project, which Magness documented was being stealth-edited after several prominent historians pointed out major errors in its analysis. He's also gone after Hans-Herman Hoppe, a professor emeritus at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a distinguished senior fellow at the Mises Institute. Hoppe is an arch critic of democracy and increasingly influential within the Libertarian Party. But despite his affiliation with a group named for the eminent Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, Magness says that Hoppe presents "the complete inversion of Mises' thought," especially when it comes to immigration.
Magness has a Ph.D. from George Mason University's school of public policy, and he's written and co-written books on what he calls "the moral mess of higher education" and on Abraham Lincoln's plan for black resettlement after emancipation.
This interview was recorded at FreedomFest, the annual July gathering in Las Vegas, and we also talk about specious attacks on the school choice movement and Nobel laureate economist James Buchanan as racist, as well as Magness' excellent Reason article from earlier this year that has led to the ongoing plagiarism investigation of Princeton historian Kevin Kruse. We also discuss Magness' new project of figuring out how Karl Marx became such a powerful influence on 20th- and 21st-century thinking despite being relatively obscure during his lifetime.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie discuss the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the White House's misguided principles for reforming Big Tech.
0:30: The queen is dead.
10:15: The White House's tech policy push
23:38: Weekly Listener Question:
I see the Forward Party as planting the seeds for the blossoming of a multiparty democracy. As the initial priority of achieving ranked choice voting state by state is laid out, Forward Party is essentially "the third party for third parties." As the saying goes… "may 1000 third parties bloom."
Think of an alliance for a ranked choice voting policy coalition with other third parties. Namely with the other two largest third parties: Libertarian and Green.
This opens up a very interesting dynamic of politics and particularly centrism. No longer is centrism on a binary scale of red or blue, where the center merely takes a little from the left and a little from the right. What is called: "the mushy middle."
Ultimately, should some sort of coalition of libertarians (small and large L), libertarian-adjacent, liberaltarians, and classical liberals join the Forward Party to launch it toward the future?
36:08: This week's cultural recommendations
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Does the world need to rapidly convert to using renewable energy to save the planet from global warming? That was the topic of a Soho Forum debate held at the Sheen Center in New York City on August 15, 2022.
Andrew Dessler, the director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A&M University, argued that fossil fuels are endangering life on the planet by causing global warming through greenhouse gas emissions. He contended that solar energy and wind energy are safe, reliable, and cost-effective means to decarbonize the electric grid.
Steven Koonin, who served as undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy during the Obama administration and is the founding director of New York University's Center for Urban Science and Progress, argued that making large and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions aren't necessary to protect the earth. He also contended that doing so isn't cost-effective and that it's immoral. Koonin is also the author of Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters.
This debate was moderated by Soho Forum director Gene Epstein.
Intro edited by Regan Taylor; interview body edited by Brett Raney.
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"I came to realize that economists…tend to focus on things that can be measured," says Russ Roberts, host of the long-running podcast, EconTalk, and author of the new book Wild Problems. "Dignity is hard to measure. A sense of self is hard to measure. Belonging is hard to measure. A feeling of transcendence is hard to measure. Mattering—that you are important, that people look to you. [These sorts of things are] about the life well-lived and they're not about getting the most out of your money. They're not about what the interest rates are next week. And economists truthfully have virtually nothing to say about these things."
Roberts is an economist by training whose great theme over the past 40-plus years has been the fundamental inadequacy of his chosen discipline to really comprehend what matters most to the people it seeks to explain and understand. Wild Problems deals with the decisions that define us—such as whether to marry, whether to have kids, and what kind of work to pursue—that don't yield to anything like easy cost-benefit analyses.
I talk with Roberts about how to navigate the increasing amount of choice most of us have gained over the past 50 years and how to make sense of a world that is richer than ever in material resources but seemingly lacking in deeper meaning. We discuss Roberts' own life, from earning a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago in the 1970s to starting EconTalk, one of the longest-running podcasts around, to becoming president of Shalem College, a private liberal arts college in Israel, and the central role that religion plays in his life.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie discuss President Joe Biden's speech last week in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia as well as energy policy in California.
1:47: Biden's speech in Philadelphia
25:42: Energy policy in California
33:18: Weekly Listener Question:
Whenever I am having a conversation with a die-hard Trump cultist for long enough, I ask the question "Why? Why do you love him so much? What did he actually do for you? He didn't follow through on any campaign promises. He went the opposite direction on several." If I'm speaking with someone who has a more nuanced response than "He talks shit to the people I don't like," it's something like, "He did a lot of deregulation," but they can never name anything specific that was deregulated.
I know Trump did lead some deregulation, but I'm not sure how much made a big difference. I started thinking about the deregulation under Jimmy Carter that I do know about. Everything from airlines to beer brewing. So now, my question is: "Is it possible that Jimmy Carter did more and better deregulation than Donald Trump, and how could we measure this?"
44:47: This week's cultural recommendations.
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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You've probably heard the latest news that school lockdowns during the COVID pandemic are responsible for erasing two decades of progress in math and reading test scores. On national tests of 9-year-olds, math scores declined seven points between 2020 and 2022. Reading scores dropped by five points. These are "some of the largest declines" in half a century.
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Such news comes on top of the massive frustration about chaotic, nonsensical openings and closings of schools, unscientific mask mandates for K-12 students, and insane policies like one in Washington, D.C., where the mayor and City Council recently decreed that kids ages 12 and older would need to be vaccinated even for remote learning, a measure that would have barred 40 percent of the city's black teens from getting an education. That policy was, thankfully, pushed back until January 2023, but it's still on the books, lurking like a bully at the far end of the hallway.
Today's guest on The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie is Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children. Corey used to work at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this podcast, has a Ph.D. in education from the University of Arkansas, and is widely recognized as one of the leading activists pushing for radical school choice, in which funding dollars follow children to whatever learning institutions they and their parents decide on, whether private, public, religious, secular, charter, online, you name it.
I caught up with Corey at FreedomFest, the annual gathering in Las Vegas, just after Arizona had passed the biggest school choice law in the country, with $7,000 of state funding now following each student per year. We talked about how COVID lockdowns—so heavily pushed by teachers unions—radically raised parental awareness about how bad most K-12 education is; why top-down attempts to ban critical race theory and other specific curricula are misguided and ineffective; recent Supreme Court decisions that rightly get rid of legal concerns over tax dollars funding students at religious schools; why Texas is so incredibly awful on school choice despite being run by Republicans; why Republicans have nonetheless emerged as the party of school choice; and why all of us, whether we have kids in the K-12 gulag system or not, should be invested in education reform.
If you want less expensive housing, you need more housing. And the way to get more housing is actually pretty simple: You have to let people build it.
But that seemingly simple solution has turned out to be incredibly difficult, mostly because of politics. More specifically, the problem is zoning.
Local zoning rules put limits on what can be built and where. Zoning rules restrict how high a building can be, or how many units can occupy a given parcel of land.
In some cases, they also require aesthetic features that can be cumbersome or expensive to build.
In other words, zoning makes housing more scarce—and more expensive.
In theory, President Joe Biden has staked out opposition to the worst of these building restrictions. While campaigning for president, he backed loosening zoning rules.
And the bipartisan infrastructure law Biden signed last year contained billions of dollars for transportation grants the administration indicated could go to localities that reformed strict zoning laws, as part of the administration's Housing Supply Action Plan, which the White House has described as a plan to "ease the burden of housing costs."
But that plan has produced disappointing results.
That's the topic of this week's episode of The Reason Rundown With Peter Suderman, featuring Reason Associate Editor Christian Britschgi.
Audio production and editing by Ian Keyser; produced by Hunt Beaty.
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"I think you could argue that Alice Waters changed us almost as much as Steve Jobs did, almost as much as Chairman Mao did. I mean, it's extraordinary to see what follows from her creation of a tiny restaurant in Berkeley in 1971," says anthropologist Grant McCracken. "The artisanal revolution ushers in a new model of production and consumption. At its best, it ushers in a cruelty-free capitalism or aims for something like that."
Steve Jobs, Mao, and…Alice Waters? Who is she, exactly?
I'll get to that in a moment, but first, let me ask you a question: While you're hanging out in your hip, handmade loungewear, sipping your pot-still bourbon, and noshing on some homemade sourdough bread covered with butter you churned yourself from your neighbor's stash of unpasteurized goat milk, did you ever stop to wonder just how you—and America writ large—got to a place where Wonder Bread is a shorthand for all that is terrible and mediocre and any sort of super-rustic, craggy, unsliced, dense, dark loaf of barely processed grain is a sign not just of cultural sophistication but of moral superiority?
Only a generation or two ago—for our parents and grandparents—the cutting edge of consumption was to buy the most industrial, machine-made products you could afford, preferably objects that had never been touched by human hands and carried a brand insignia that conveyed high status or value. When it came to even white-collar jobs, the dream was often to dress exactly like everybody else and work for a giant corporation that was bigger than the market and, thus, could guarantee you a job for life. You died and went to heaven if you were an IBM salesman, all of whom wore blue suits, white shirts, red ties, and black shoes.
But now we live in an artisanal age, where everything is small-batched and hyper-personalized. This revolution has been building for years or even decades, and now it is everywhere around us, influencing not just what we wear, eat, and listen to but how we work, where we live, and how we think of our deepest identities. Mass production, including of personalities and social types, is out, and individualization is in.
In Return of the Artisan, anthropologist Grant McCracken explains "how America went from industrial to handmade" in the post–World War II era. This is a funny, deep, and well-written book that takes us to small towns and hipster neighborhoods all over the country, from New York City to Bowling Green, Kentucky, to Berkeley, California, where Alice Waters changed everything when she opened up a revolutionary new restaurant called Chez Panisse.
There's no better guide to this brave new—and sometimes incredibly annoying—world than McCracken, a Baby Boomer raised in British Columbia during the 1960s and an early theorist of how the digital revolution and rise of the internet were remaking us in ways that are mostly better but also deeply challenging to community. His own life is as long and strange a trip as the one he documents in Return of the Artisan.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie are joined by Associate Editor Liz Wolfe as they criticize President Joe Biden's recently announced student loan forgiveness program.
2:07: Biden's executive order to cancel student debt.
29:33: Weekly Listener Question:
Why is the abortion debate within libertarianism treated so dismissively by everyone on The Reason Roundtable? Most other topics are approached with an evenhandedness that attempts to at least acknowledge that those who disagree with the panelists are doing so in good faith and are at least attempting to be reasonable. It's not surprising that everyone on The Roundtable is pro-choice. But why can't you all acknowledge your disagreement with pro-life libertarians is over fundamental values that libertarianism can't resolve? The way you approach the subject makes your own colleagues like Liz Wolfe into pariah libertarians who have no place in the movement. Pro-life libertarians begin with the premise that life starts at conception and that all humans have human rights. Further, in this line of thinking, the most foundational right (if any rights exist at all) is the right to not be killed without just cause. And so we conclude that the right of a baby to not be killed outweighs a woman's right to not be pregnant or not to provide the sustenance a growing baby needs to live in her womb. It is perfectly rational for someone else to say that he values a woman's autonomy more than the rights of a potential human life (or even an actual human life), but these two positions are irreconcilable. Why does everyone on The Roundtable go around masquerading as if their position on abortion is based on pure reason and science and the only acceptable libertarian position instead of acknowledging that it really boils down to values and you don't value a baby's life before she is born more than the mother's autonomy?
49:58: This week's cultural recommendations.
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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My guest today is Julie Holland, a psychiatrist whose newest book is Good Chemistry: The Science of Connection from Soul to Psychedelics.
It's a fantastic read that is steeped in the latest research about what she calls the loneliness epidemic and the psychopharmacology that is helping us find our way forward. When I asked her to summarize what her book is about, she told me, "Good Chemistry is about all the good stuff, how you can feel good, with or without drugs." That last point is particularly important, I think: Drugs are tools that can help us become all that we can be (to paraphrase the United States Army's advertising slogan in the 1980s), but they are neither necessary nor sufficient by themselves.
At 56, Holland is armed with degrees from Philadelphia's University of Pennsylvania and Temple University and decades of clinical and research experience. She's a legend and pioneer in the psychedelic space, where she has long worked with groups such as MAPs (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) and edited volumes such as Ecstasy: The Complete Guide and The Pot Book: A Complete Guide to Cannabis. She's one of the people who is building out what I think of as a post-prohibition drug culture by asking what our world might look like when we are finally free from government restrictions on all the tools available to us to actualize fully as individuals and as a society.
Holland is also the author of the bestsellers Moody Bitches and Weekends at Bellevue, parent to two kids, a musician, and a headliner at The Psychedelic Assembly, a fantastic event this September 10 and 11 in New York City at which I'll also be appearing.
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Just in time for the midterm elections, the Biden administration has announced that millions of college graduates don't have to pay back their student loans.
This week, President Joe Biden announced a plan to cancel up to $10,000 in student debt for individual borrowers making less than $125,000 a year and two-income households making up to $250,000 a year. Pell Grant recipients would be eligible for up to $20,000 in debt cancellation.
This would completely eliminate student loan debt for millions. Yet, some progressives say it still doesn't go far enough and have pushed Biden to cancel up to $50,000 in debt for most borrowers.
Even with an income cap, the vast majority of the benefits of Biden's loan cancellation program will accrue to borrowers in the top 60 percent of the income distribution.
There are other problems too: The one-time plan would increase federal debt by at least $300 billion, and possibly more like $500 billion, effectively wiping out all the expected deficit reduction from the Inflation Reduction Act that Biden signed this month.
Additionally, Biden does not have the legal authority to cancel student debt without congressional authorization. But don't take my word for it: That's what Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said last summer. In her exact words: "The president can't do it—so that's not even a discussion."
Yet, President Biden is doing it.
That's the topic of this week's episode of The Reason Rundown With Peter Suderman, featuring Reason Assistant Editor Emma Camp.
Audio production and editing by Ian Keyser; produced by Hunt Beaty.
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I've long found The Babylon Bee to be fantastically funny—all the more so because its editors and writers are hardcore born-again evangelical Christians who believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. That's not a creed one usually associates with anything remotely funny, at least intentionally. Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker aren't people you seek out for the jokes.
Other comedy sites like The Onion don't have to operate under such limiting, self-imposed strictures. The fact that the Bee is very funny, day in and day out, is almost enough to get me, a lapsed Catholic, to believe in divine intervention, if not a covenant of grace not works.
I caught up with Kyle Mann, the Bee's editor in chief, in July at FreedomFest, the annual gathering in Las Vegas. I was especially interested in talking about the site's Twitter account getting frozen earlier this year. Back in March, Twitter suspended the account after it awarded "Man of the Year" honors to Rachel Levine, a trans woman serving in the Biden administration who had been named one of USA Today's "Women of the Year."
The Bee's article struck me as mean-spirited, especially for Christians, and not particularly funny—ditto for recent trans joking by great standups like Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais, too. In today's show, Mann tells me that the offending article was intended to satirize media treatment of identity politics, not demean trans people.
"We love trans people," he says. "We don't consider people like that beneath us. You know, the Christian worldview is that everybody has the opportunity to be saved and we can love everybody. I'm no more deserving of God's grace than a transgender person is. But when the culture bows down and starts handing out trophies to people for stuff like this is when we say, 'Hey, wait a minute, you know, we need to protect women in our society as well.'"
The Babylon Bee's Twitter account remains locked because the publication refuses to delete the tweet and acknowledge that it violated Twitter's policy against hate speech. In response to the Twitter ban and what Mann says is persistent demonetization and minimizing of the reach of its content on Facebook, The Babylon Bee has created its own social network and subscription model, both of which are flourishing. The episode shines a light on how contemporary culture wars are waged online and illustrates the specific travails that evangelical Christians face in a country that is increasingly secular and socially liberal. It also shows one successful way of routing around platform-specific censorship.
Beyond that, we talk about why Mann saves his deepest burns for megachurch pastors such as Joel Osteen; why he believes that the left—and Gen Z—can't deal with humor that makes fun of them; and why he loves "personal liberty and personal freedom" even if it creates a culture that is deeply hostile to his faith.
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To bitcoin enthusiasts, the advantages of cryptocurrency are obvious: It's a global, decentralized financial network that no government or centralized entity can control.
But bitcoin is also incredibly transparent. That's by design. The system relies on a public ledger—an accounting of every single transaction that is visible and trackable to all, including government authorities who want to monitor and control the use of cryptocurrency.
Currently, U.S. law requires cryptocurrency exchanges—essentially marketplaces for buying, selling, and trading various forms of cryptocurrency—to collect personal information about the traders who use their networks.
Those exchanges are also vulnerable to pressure from governments who might want to freeze transactions or shut down accounts.
Not surprisingly, this has inspired workarounds to help bitcoin users maintain financial privacy. Software programs known as "mixers" scramble the ledger, blending unrelated transactions in order to help make cryptocurrency use more difficult to track.
One of those mixers is a program known as Tornado Cash.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that it was adding Tornado Cash to the U.S. sanctions list, thus prohibiting all transactions using the software. The Treasury Department claims Tornado Cash is the equivalent of a high-tech weapon that could be used by terrorists or foreign rivals. But others say it's just code, a software tool no different than any other.
That's the topic of this week's episode of The Reason Rundown With Peter Suderman, featuring Reason Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller.
Audio production and editing by Ian Keyser; produced by Hunt Beaty.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie examine the current state of the GOP in the wake of last week's primary elections and continue to reprehend the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) after it announced lackluster reforms.
1:35: GOP as the "Party of Trump"
12:39: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the "Stop WOKE Act"
24:30 : Weekly Listener Question:
What is the smallest size in which a free market can work? Are three people enough or do you need country-sized populations to reap the benefits? We love free trade, but what about when we trade with slavers and criminal regimes? Why would it not be better to close trade to them and just keep most of our trade internal or with our free-ish pals? Is America's market not big enough to reap the benefits of free trade internally even if nobody could/would send us imports? Would we not just creatively find replacements for all the products that we used to import?
38:20: CDC announces reorganization
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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"I think the second-wave feminists I've talked to are very worried about the kind of woke, gender-identity movement because it's reducing women to just body parts," says Michael Shermer. "A guy can say, 'Well, if I just get breast implants [and] then I can have a vaginal plastic made out of a piece of my skin, I'm in. I'm a woman, right?' Well, no, because women are not just tits and ass. There's more to it than that, a lot more."
That's today's guest, Michael Shermer, who for decades has been one of the most popular and provocative explicators of science to popular audiences, having authored bestselling books such as Why People Believe Weird Things, Why Darwin Matters, The Moral Arc, and The Mind of the Market. He founded Skeptic magazine in 1992, hosts a video podcast with leading activists and intellectuals, and, for nearly 20 years, authored a widely read column for Scientific American in which he debunked beliefs in UFOs and other paranormal phenomena, explained the rise of the "new atheism," and showed how evolution systematically informs human behavior.
Shermer's work is deeply and explicitly rooted in libertarian and Enlightenment ideas about individual responsibility, free market economics, rationality, and the search for something approaching objective truth. In 2019, Scientific American cut him loose, a move he ascribes to the publication's suffocating embrace of the sort of identity politics and wokeness that he says dominates academic and intellectual circles and, increasingly, the culture at large.
Last fall, Shermer, who holds a Ph.D. in the history of science and teaches Skepticism 101 at Chapman University, started a weekly Substack where he posts podcasts and the columns he would have written for Scientific American.
I caught up with the 67-year-old former competitive cyclist during FreedomFest, an annual gathering in Las Vegas. We talked about what he sees as the fundamental clash between wokeness and scientific inquiry, how hard it is to overcome the cognitive biases we all have, why he thinks trans athletes should be banned from most women's sports, why we have so much trouble acknowledging moral and technological progress, and why he now identifies as a classical liberal rather than as a libertarian.
Given his cycling background, we talk about Lance Armstrong and the widespread but illicit use of performance-enhancing drugs, which leads to all sorts of hypocritical and sociopathic behavior among so many of us. We also discuss how technology—including drugs—fuels human excellence in sports, business, and our personal and professional lives.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie huddle on last week's FBI raid of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate.
2:01: The FBI raid of Trump's home
26:18: Weekly Listener Question:
The U.S. federal government, since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, has monopsonized COVID vaccines and therapies. Yet, I haven't heard any complaints from Reason-ers about this expansion of government into health care long after I think all of us would agree that the "emergency" should be over. And the government's performance has actually kind of sort of been OK in the last 18 months. What gives? There are now those who are using this experience as an argument that we should make ALL of health care single-payer. How would you respond to Dr. Topol and others like him who say, "This proves single-payer works, we should adopt it for everything"? And then, more broadly, while I believe our health care economic system is broken, I don't see a viable political path toward implementing more market-based reforms to introduce competition, incentivize innovation, and bring down prices. Would it make sense for (small-"L") libertarians to basically give up on health care and "make a deal with the devil," compromising on single-payer health care in exchange for liberalization of other areas of the economy that otherwise wouldn't see liberalization?
35:13: The attack on Salman Rushdie and free speech
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The climate, health care, and tax bill known as the Inflation Reduction Act that was recently passed in the Senate allocates $80 billion to expand the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) with the aim of bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars in additional tax revenue.
A little more than half of the $80 billion is dedicated to increased tax enforcement, and some estimates suggest it will be used to hire nearly 87,000 IRS agents over the next decade, although not all of those hires will represent new, additional staff positions.
Democrats say the goal is to raise an additional $200 billion in revenue through more aggressive tax enforcement, which they claim will be focused on the wealthy. Further, they say that new enforcement measures won't affect taxpayers who make less than $400,00 a year—even though Democrats explicitly voted down an amendment that would have enshrined that policy into law.
So, is this really just a plan to spend more money catching rich tax evaders? Or will the agency's new enforcement budget and expanded headcount inevitably lead to more audits of low- and middle-income taxpayers?
That's the topic of this week's episode of The Reason Rundown With Peter Suderman, featuring Reason Editor at Large Matt Welch.
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Will gold remain an important form of money, or are cryptocurrencies like bitcoin set to overtake it?
That was the subject of a Soho Forum debate held on July 26 at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, as part of Mises University, an annual instructional program in the Austrian school of economics attended by over 80 accepted students from around the country.
Keith Weiner, CEO of Monetary Metals, defended the resolution: "Gold will remain an important form of money in the 21st century." Weiner took the position that gold is poised to hold on to the monetary status it's enjoyed for the past 5,000 years and that its recent performance only confirms why.
Pierre Rochard, co-host of the Bitcoin for Advisors podcast, took the negative, arguing that the technological advantages of bitcoin will make it the preferred medium of exchange in a post-dollar world.
This debate was moderated by Soho Forum director Gene Epstein.
Narrated by Nick Gillespie; edited by Clay Barnett and John Osterhoudt
"My concern is that I feel like socialists are taking over," Whole Foods CEO John Mackey tells me on today's show. "They're marching through the institutions. They're…taking over education. It looks like they've taken over a lot of the corporations. It looks like they've taken over the military. And it's just continuing. You know, I'm a capitalist at heart, and I believe in liberty and capitalism. Those are my twin values. And I feel like, you know, with the way freedom of speech is today, the movement on gun control, a lot of the liberties that I've taken for granted most of my life, I think, are under threat."
If you're as old as I am (I just turned 59), you will remember how dreary food shopping was before Whole Foods exploded the concept since it came on the scene in 1978. When I was a kid, you were lucky to find two or three types of potatoes in the produce aisle, one type of eggplant, maybe a green bell pepper, and a sad jalapeno or two (jalapenos were almost always sold pickled and in cans). Even in big cities, you had to roam around all over town to find oddball spices that you can now pick up in 7-11s and gas station convenience stores.
At the end of August, Mackey, born in 1953, is retiring from Whole Foods. Throughout his career, John has developed and evangelized for what he calls "conscious capitalism," or businesses that seek to "create financial, intellectual, social, cultural, emotional, spiritual, physical, and ecological wealth for all of their stakeholders." That may sound a bit hippy-dippy to you, but John is one of the most hardcore capitalists I've ever met, yet also an incredibly spiritual and thoughtful guy who wants to help all of us live better, more interesting lives.
That comes through loud and clear in his epic 2005 debate with Nobel laureate Milton Freidman and former Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers about rethinking the social responsibility of business. "I believe that the enlightened corporation should try to create value for all of its constituencies," wrote John. "From an investor's perspective, the purpose of the business is to maximize profits. But that's not the purpose for other stakeholders—for customers, employees, suppliers, and the community. Each of those groups will define the purpose of the business in terms of its own needs and desires, and each perspective is valid and legitimate." In many profound ways, John's vision is now widely accepted, partly because he's speaking to a post-industrial world that is rich enough that more and more of us are starting to bump our snouts further up Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Even in the developing world, more and more of us are trying to figure out how we can flourish rather than just subsist.
I caught up with John at FreedomFest, the annual gathering in Las Vegas, and we talked about his time at Whole Foods, how his company did an exceptional job of staying open and serving people during COVID, what he thought about the government's response to the pandemic, and a whole lot more. We also, of course, talked about what he's going to do once he's retired.
In terms of business ventures, he's planning to open a series of wellness centers and cafes. Of greater interest to me, John said that he felt muzzled in his position as CEO of Whole Foods. For many reasons, he says he couldn't speak his mind on various issues, especially what he sees as a dangerous drift toward more and more control of everyday life, commerce, and speech. That all changes in September, he said, and we should expect him to be even more outspoken in his celebration of capitalism, which he considers the greatest anti-poverty program ever created, and many other issues.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie take further issue with provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act.
1:43: IRS expansion
10:04: The insulin controversy
25:17: Weekly Listener Question:
I would like to ask you about the state of freedom in the U.S.A. and the state of the U.S.A. in comparison to other developed/industrialized nations. America seems to be significantly less free than the other countries in, for example, mass incarceration, excessive punitive punishments, criminalization of drugs, excessive power concentrated in the executive or the presidency, a militarized police, the prosecution of Assange and Snowden, and, of course, the death penalty. What are your thoughts on that? And, in general, America seems to do less well than the rest of the developed nations when it comes to higher prices of health care, higher prices of high education, higher homicide rates, etc. I understand that those problems are the consequence of flawed and excessive intervention in free markets, but how would you respond to an average (nonlibertarian) person who points out those problems and, specially, someone who blames those problems on the lack of a welfare state?
47:11: Potential takeaways from last week's elections
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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William Faulkner once famously wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." I've been thinking a lot about that quote, which comes from his 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun, in regards to today's guest, George Dawes Green.
George is the creator of the massively popular event series, radio show, and podcast The Moth, which has redefined personal storytelling in the digital age. George is also a novelist, and his new book, the best-selling murder mystery The Kingdoms of Savannah, is set in his native Georgia and features a great contemporary update of Faulkner's themes.
What Faulkner, the great neo-Gothic chronicler of the pre–civil rights movement South, was getting at is the idea that if you don't deal with history honestly and truthfully, it keeps getting in the way of your present and future, like the ghost of the murdered king in Hamlet. Individuals and societies alike can't move forward until some form of acknowledgment and justice for past crimes has taken place. That's at the heart of Gothic literature, which is filled with ruins and ghosts and secrets from the past irrupting into the present. It's why the characters in Faulkner's work are literally and figuratively haunted by race relations that they haven't honestly accounted for. That focus on the unaccounted-for past is the reason that Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, is one of the most influential figures not just for American authors like Toni Morrison (herself a Nobelist) but also for writers across the globe—the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez called him "my master" in his Nobel acceptance speech. In too many parts of the world, the past isn't past.
This brings me back to George Dawes Green. The Kingdoms of Savannah is set in the contemporary South and features an old-line aristocratic family whose fortunes and members have dissipated over the years, in part because of hidden secrets and an inability to move on. At the start of the novel, there's a murder that implicates the power structure of Savannah, and the result is a page-turning thriller about race, class, and American history that I simply couldn't put down.
I talked with George at a recent Reason Speakeasy, a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an era of conformity and groupthink. We talk about his experiences on the frontier of creative expression and the ways in which the past doggedly informs the present, whether in his native Georgia or post-COVID New York.
We also talk about how he came to create The Moth, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary and has become nothing less than a global phenomenon. Not surprisingly, George is himself a masterful storyteller, and his own past reads like something out of a novel: He lived in a cemetery for a while, and he created a company that sold clothes made from rare fabrics handwoven in Guatemala. It was only after all that that he became a novelist whose first two books were turned into movies and a cultural entrepreneur whose biggest project is still going strong.
In July, President Joe Biden delivered a speech at a decommissioned coal-fired power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts, following record-breaking heat waves in both the United States and Europe. In his remarks, he said that "climate change is an emergency" and "a clear and present danger to the United States."
This wasn't the official declaration of a national emergency that progressive climate activists had hoped for. But it was a form of lip service to their demands.
Now, less than a month later, a legislative deal between Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) would put $370 billion in new federal spending toward tackling climate change.
That deal, dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act, is a successor to the Build Back Better spending plan that Democrats fought over and failed to pass for the last year. The $370 billion figure is less than progressive activists originally wanted, but it nonetheless represents both the single biggest component of the Inflation Reduction Act and massive increase in the size and scope federal climate spending.
The bill has yet to pass, but Democrats are already arguing that it could be a pivotal moment for climate and energy policy, as well as for the political fortune of Biden's flagging presidency.
That's the topic of this week's episode of The Reason Rundown With Peter Suderman, featuring Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey.
Mentioned in this podcast:
"Are the Inflation Reduction Act's Climate Goals Plausible?" by Ronald Bailey
"President Biden Asserts 'Climate Change Is an Emergency'," by Ronald Bailey
"More Heat Waves But Falling Heat Mortality in U.S.," by Ronald Bailey
Audio production and editing by Luke Allen; produced by Hunt Beaty
Today's guest is the rapper, podcaster, and author, Zuby. He's a social media juggernaut who is known for a popular mix of personal empowerment and political provocation that led to a highly publicized (if temporary) suspension from Twitter in 2020 after he broke the British women's deadlift record and claimed he was the new record holder because he identified as a woman during the lift. We talk about that stunt today, along with lots of other topics.
Born in 1986, Zuby describes himself as "British by birth, Nigerian by blood, Saudi Arabia raised, [and] American at heart." After a childhood in Saudi Arabia, he graduated from Oxford, and now spends most of his time in the United States, where he criticizes identity politics on shows like The Joe Rogan Experience. He tells me that the only way someone can trigger him is by making appeals to racial essentialism and the idea that the United States—or most of Europe and the developed world, for that matter—is fundamentally racist and sexist. He also just published a children's book designed to showcase the benefits of good nutrition, exercise, and self-control.
Earlier this year, Zuby spoke at a Mises Caucus event at the Libertarian Party convention in Reno, Nevada, where he said he was overjoyed to be "talking about freedom, liberty, and all of that good stuff."
I caught up with Zuby at FreedomFest, a conference held annually in Las Vegas, where we discussed his experience of the pandemic while traveling in eight different countries, his defense of tweets mocking transgender athletes (and his support of rights for trans people), and why he's bullish on the future of individual responsibility and freedom.
In this week's Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie rail against the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
1:00: Sens. Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) and Joe Manchin's (D–W.Va.) Inflation Reduction Act.
29:28: Weekly Listener Question:
The New York Times has been running an "I Was Wrong" series by its opinion columnists, such as Paul Krugman being wrong on inflation, Michelle Goldberg on Al Franken, and David Brooks on capitalism. If Katherine were to have Reason editors write similar columns, what would the Roundtable members write about?
Mentioned in this podcast:
"The 'Inflation Reduction Act' Won't Actually Reduce Inflation," by Eric Boehm
"Supersizing the IRS Will Hurt the Working Rich, Not Fat-Cat Tax Evaders," by Liz Wolfe
"Schumer, Manchin Strike Deal To Raise Taxes, Cut the Deficit, Spend Billions on Climate Change," by Eric Boehm
"Biden Won't Close the 'Tax Gap,' but He Will Snoop on Your Bank Records," by Matt Welch
"Another Centrist Project Offers Mushy Technocracy To Soothe a Divided Country," by J.D. Tuccille
"Everyone Agrees Government Is a Hot Mess. So Why Does It Keep Getting Bigger Anyway?" by Nick Gillespie
"Biden Is Clueless About Inflation," by Nick Gillespie and Regan Taylor
"Public Trust in Government: 1958-2022," by Pew Research Center
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
In a career that has spanned seven decades—and included classic shows and movies such as Monty Python's Flying Circus, Fawlty Towers, Life of Brian, and A Fish Called Wanda—the comedian John Cleese has uproariously and relentlessly satirized politics and religion while stretching the boundaries of decorum and good taste like so many silly walks.
Now 82, Cleese—who studied law at Cambridge—has recently set his sights on political correctness and wokeism, which he says are the enemy not only of humor but of creative thinking in all areas of human activity.
I caught up with him at FreedomFest, the annual July gathering of libertarians in Las Vegas. Cleese was the keynote speaker, there to discuss creativity, which was the subject of his 2020 book of the same title. It's a quick and excellent read, summarizing a wide range of psychological research on the topic and drawing from his own experiences.
It's a myth "that creativity is something you have to be born with," he argues. "Anyone can be creative." He also contends that "you can teach creativity," writing, "you can teach people how to create circumstances in which they will become creative."
After giving a talk on the attitudes and habits of mind he believes are necessary for creativity to 2,500 attendees at FreedomFest, I interviewed Cleese from the main stage about the importance of freedom of thought and expression when it comes to being creative, why wokeism is the enemy of that, and why creativity is so important to progress and civilization.
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In August 2021, President Joe Biden committed the United States to withdrawing combat troops from Afghanistan. After two decades of fighting, U.S. involvement in the war would finally be over.
A year after the chaotic and violent withdrawal, America's exit from Afghanistan has produced new challenges. Among the biggest is the resettlement of roughly 100,000 Afghan refugees uprooted by the war.
You might assume that there would be a political consensus that the United States had an obligation to help rebuild the lives of its allies.
But many Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, opposed large-scale resettlement operations. One Republican member of Congress warned that Biden's pullback from Afghanistan could become "an excuse to flood" the U.S. with refugees.
There was, however, a clear exception to the GOP's opposition: the state of Utah. The state has a Republican governor and a Republican attorney general, and there is a Republican majority in the state Legislature. By one measure, it's the second-most Republican state in the country. Yet, in the aftermath of the Afghanistan troop withdrawal, state and local officials were united in welcoming refugees.
That's the topic of this week's episode of The Reason Rundown With Peter Suderman, featuring Reason Assistant Editor Fiona Harrigan.
Audio production and editing by Ian Keyser; produced by Hunt Beaty
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Today's episode—my absolute favorite to date, after almost six years!—is a marathon session with Penn Jillette, the larger, louder half of the fantastical and magical duo Penn & Teller.
Since the 1980s, Penn & Teller have been part of a broad movement to freakify and weirdo-ize American culture in a way that is profoundly individualistic and idealistic. They have helped to create a world where conformity has increasingly given way to self-expression. Before them, to me at least, magic was something dull, something mostly old men did, with boring card tricks, hokey gimmicks, capes, and magic wands. It was Doug Henning on Broadway with feather bangs and Harry Blackstone Jr. making Jiffy Pop on the stove.
Penn & Teller were so different, so alive and fresh, deconstructing magic at the very time they were blowing your mind. They were the reincarnation of Harry Houdini, with a punk attitude, and to me as a kid growing up in suburban New Jersey, they helped make me believe all things were possible, that you could create the life you wanted. Their fantastic show Bullshit! ran for eight seasons on Showtime, during which they debunked everything from alien abductions to the drug war to penis pumps to xenophobia (they even had me on that episode, speaking up for loosening the borders).
Penn especially captivated me: For my entire adult life, he's been one of the most vocal and visible self-identified libertarians out there, always insisting that, as a starting point in any discussion of any issue or problem, we should start by asking, "Can this be addressed by giving people more freedom to make their own choices?"
As impressive: In the mid-2010s, he dropped 100 pounds in three months for health reasons—personifying the personal responsibility and self-improvement near the very center of libertarianism (check out my 2016 interview with him on all that).
But then, in July 2020, he told the excellent website Big Think that the combination of Donald Trump's election four years earlier and the onset of the COVID pandemic was forcing him to rethink his libertarianism. In a video interview titled "The Year That Broke America's Illusions," he went so far as to say that "libertarianism has been so distorted, I don't know if I have to pull my name out of that ring. It's been adopted by people who don't seem to hold the responsibility side of it and don't seem to hold the compassion side of it." He even likened not wearing masks to drunk driving.
As you can imagine, his comments sent shock waves through the libertarian movement. For many of us, trillions in wasted spending, contradictory guidance from public health officials, arbitrary school and business shutdowns, and absurd policies like closing beaches and outdoor dining have made us even more skeptical of government power.
Why did the 2016 election and the pandemic cause one of the best-known libertarians to seemingly go in the other direction?
I recently attended FreedomFest in Las Vegas, where Penn & Teller have a longstanding residency at the Rio Casino, and caught up with Penn on the set of his popular podcast Penn's Sunday School to talk about Donald Trump, COVID restrictions, and whether his view of the world has really changed. Also joining the conversation was Matt Donnelly, a cohost of Penn's Sunday School.
Over nearly two hours, I talked with Penn about Trump, COVID, Bob Dylan, and the $64,000 question: Has libertarianism changed—or has he?
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You've probably heard of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican congressional representative from Georgia's 14th district. Greene has openly dabbled in conspiracy theories, and she's often been cast as a leading example of the GOP's far-right fringe. So it's no surprise that she's inspired some challengers—and not only from the Democratic Party.
This year, Angela Pence, a Georgia mother of eight and a local business owner, announced that she would be challenging Greene for her House seat—and she'd be doing so as a member of the Libertarian Party. Pence would face an uphill battle against Greene under any circumstance since the state's 14th congressional district is one of the most solidly Republican in the country.
But there was a bigger, even more immediate problem: To truly challenge Greene, Pence had to get on the ballot. And Georgia has what are arguably the strictest ballot access rules of any state in the country, making any third-party candidacy a near-impossible feat.
That's the topic of this week's episode of The Reason Rundown With Peter Suderman, featuring reporter Eric Boehm.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie discuss the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act as well as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's (D–N.Y.) awful marijuana legalization bill.
2:07: The House passes the Respect for Marriage Act.
20:04: Schumer's marijuana legalization bill
36:18: Weekly Listener Question:
What's an idea for a book each of you have secretly wanted to write (can be on anything, politics or otherwise) but have never had the opportunity to or gotten around to, and why? (Bonus points if one of the ideas is "Declaration of Independents II: This Time, It's Anarchical")
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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No living American journalist has a fiercer reputation for independence—and invective—than Glenn Greenwald. The Pulitzer Prize winner helped break the Edward Snowden revelations, was once threatened with jail time by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and was part of the team that launched The Intercept in 2014 before resigning six years later, claiming his colleagues were censoring his criticism of the Biden administration.
So what are we to make of the fact that Greenwald, once a contributing writer at Salon who appeared regularly on the left-wing news show Democracy Now!, is now a fixture on Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight? How do we explain the fact that Greenwald, known for his progressive critique of American foreign policy, is now welcomed in conservative circles but considered a pariah by many of his former colleagues on the left?
Has Glenn Greenwald changed, or has the world?
Reason's Nick Gillespie caught up with him in Las Vegas, where he was speaking at FreedomFest, an annual gathering of conservatives and libertarians. Greenwald was part of a roster this year that included Sen Rand Paul (R–Ky.), publisher Steve Forbes, former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Project Veritas' James O'Keefe.
We talked about why he has no qualms about appearing on Carlson's show, why so much of the legacy and left-wing press is quick to apologize for state power, how the trans movement shows the limits of identity politics, and whether the state has any business regulating the internet via antitrust actions.
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Last week, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated by a lone gunman while giving a political speech. The precise motivation for this horrific killing remains murky, with some reports suggesting the killer was mad about Abe's connections to the Unification Church.
But the method has sparked some discussion about violent crime and its causes. That's because Abe was shot with a gun in Japan, a country with some of the strictest gun laws in the developed world.
Some analysts have suggested that Abe's killing, however awful, nevertheless highlights the success of Japanese gun controls, since it serves as a reminder of how rare gun crime is in the country.
But my guest today sees this another way: Even in an island nation where private gun ownership is essentially outlawed, a determined killer can still find a way to obtain, or make, a firearm. This, in turn, has implications for current debates about American gun policy.
That's the topic of this week's episode of The Reason Rundown With Peter Suderman featuring Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum.
"Japan's Gun Restrictions Are Far From Sufficient To Explain Its Low Crime Rate," by Jacob Sullum
"Why Didn't a 'Red Flag' Law Prevent the Illinois Mass Shooting, and Would New Federal Rules Have Mattered?" by Jacob Sullum
"After Uvalde, Politicians Push Irrelevant Gun Control Proposals," by Jacob Sullum
Engineered and edited by Ian Keyser. Produced by Hunt Beaty.
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, Katherine Mangu-Ward returns alongside editors Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch as they contemplate recent murmurs on the reinstatement of certain COVID-19 restrictions, as well as the general failures of the FDA.
1:25: Masks and COVID security theater
14:00: Abolish the FDA
28:00: Weekly Listener Question:
Bryan Caplan recently shared an old Salon article on Twitter, titled "Libertarians' scary new star: Meet Bryan Caplan, the right's next 'great' philosopher," worrying that he was going to become too influential. Being a Salon piece, it was pretty awful, but one part in particular stuck out to me. "For most of its post-1945 history, libertarianism has lacked thinkers of its own, and its intellectual deficit frequently has been filled by government-hating businessmen with third-rate minds like Peter Thiel, the fatuous crackpot who founded PayPal, and the appallingly dumb Leonard Read." As a libertarian who has done a fair amount of reading on the topics of liberty and capitalism, I was appalled at the ignorance, willful or not, of the writer, and it got me wondering: Who would the esteemed panel members cite as the most influential (or their favorite) post-war libertarian thinkers?
40:42: Lightning round highlights from this year's FreedomFest in Las Vegas.
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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"That's not funny!" is the cri de guerre of contemporary progressives, argues Noah Rothman in The Rise of the New Puritans. "No longer is the American left comfortable with hedonistic pursuits," writes the Commentary associate editor. "To the New Puritan, all society's engines must be harnessed to restore a lost paradise….Enchanting diversions and happy frivolities are distractions to be avoided or even forbidden."
In a deeply researched and wittily written book, Rothman explores the totalizing philosophy of the founders of Plymouth Plantation and Massachusetts Bay Colony and argues a similarly sour and single-minded utopianism undergirds contemporary left-wing attacks on standup comedy, ethnic food appropriation, professional sports, and other culture-war skirmishes.
Rothman is smart and funny and, just as he did in his previous book, Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America, argues in exceptionally good faith. This is a deep and wide-ranging conversation and there's no question that Rothman is definitely onto something. But why then, I ask him, are conservatives such drags, too?
photo: Robin Rayne/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom
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Once upon a time, the Golden State was the land of golden opportunity. In postwar America, California was sunny and sprawling, with a booming economy, plentiful employment opportunities, and comfortable middle-class neighborhoods. It was a great place to work, own a home, and raise a family. California was the American dream.
Over time, something changed. California was never exactly a cheap place to live. But more and more, it became prohibitively expensive—especially in and around San Francisco, the epicenter of the tech industry.
Some Californians, however, are voting with their feet. California lost residents in both 2020 and 2021. And many are leaving for places like Austin, Texas, and Miami, Florida, both of which have cultivated reputations as up-and-coming tech hubs, with cheaper housing and better governance. But have these cities really improved on San Francisco's model? Or are they doomed to repeat its mistakes?
That's the topic on this week's episode of The Reason Rundown featuring Reason Associate Editor Liz Wolfe.
Audio production and editing by Ian Keyser; produced by Hunt Beaty
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In this week's The Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch returns alongside editors Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and special guest Stephanie Slade as they dare to consider the earliest (and meaningless) polling and general chatter related to the 2024 presidential campaign.
0:25: Joe Biden 2024 and Democrats
18:49: Post-Dobbs polls on abortion
25:29: "BoJo" banter
33:57: Weekly Listener Question:
I heard about Dutch farmer protests on a social media website (not revealing which one because it is too cringy), and I tried to find out more about what was happening on the interwebs. Couldn't find much coverage in U.S. media, but best I can gather is that the Netherlands adopted a new program to reduce nitrogen emissions that will require farmers to destroy up to 30 percent of their livestock by 2030, which the farmers say will be economically devastating. It would be wonderful to have the experts on The Roundtable shed some light on what is happening and whether this is a good use of government power. I would also like your thoughts on climate change governmental policies generally. They always seem to be hamfisted, arbitrary, and shortsighted or fail to take into account the "unintended consequences" (and I use quotes because if they were thought through better these consequences would not be so surprising).
52:00: Lightning round responses to the question, "How would you change the Constitution?"
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Should the U.S. give full military and political support to Ukraine in its war with Russia, short of sending troops?
That was the subject of a Soho Forum debate held on Thursday, June 23, at the Porcupine Freedom Festival, or PorcFest, in Lancaster, New Hampshire.
Cathy Young, a writer at the Bulwark and a contributing editor at Reason, is a Moscow-native who migrated to the U.S. as a teenager, argued that the U.S. government is correct to impose sanctions on Russia and to send military and economic support to Ukraine.
Scott Horton, who's the host of Antiwar Radio, argued that U.S. backing of NATO provoked the Russian invasion and that imposing sanctions and sending weapons has brought more death and destruction.
He says the only role for the Americans is to call for an immediate ceasefire followed by negotiations.
The debate was moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein.
Narrated by Nick Gillespie; edited by Brett Raney and John Osterhoudt.
Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix, by Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty, tells the story of how people such as Robert Crumb, Trina Robbins, and Art Spiegelman redefined not just what comic books were capable of but what gets counted as art.
Beginning in the late 1950s and 1960s, the characters Doherty writes about shook up pop culture and the high art world, but they also fought for radical, creative, individualized expression in an age of figurative and literal censorship. In today's world of cancel culture and speech codes, there's a lot of lessons to be learned from their struggles. Nick Gillespie interviews Doherty about all that, plus his previous books such as This Is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground and Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.
This episode of The Reason Interview was recorded in front of a live audience in New York City on Monday, June 20, 2022, as part of our Reason Speakeasy series, where we host monthly conversations about free speech, creative expression, and maverick thinking.
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In this week's July 4 edition of The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and special guest Christian Britschgi ruminate on the so-called Disunited States.
1:24 - The current conversation surrounding "National Divorce"
37:55 - Weekly Listener Question:
Where does Supreme Court legitimacy come from, and if it was lost, how does it get it back? Is the only cure to New Deal–era judicial activism yet more judicial activism today to rein in the Commerce Clause? Does this enhance its legitimacy because they are being faithful to the Constitution; or does that illegitimate the court because it upends the present order and is wildly unpopular?
41:52 - How the editors spent July 4, and "libertarian Festivus"
This week's links:
"Once Again, the Firework Cops Failed To Stop People From Celebrating Freedom With a Boom," by Christian Britschgi
"3 Myths About American Decline," by Nick Gillespie
"70 Percent of Republicans and Democrats Agree: The Other Side Are 'Bullies,'" by Christian Britschgi
"America's Founders Raged Against Qualified Immunity, Trade Restrictions, and Anti-Immigrant Policies," by Eric Boehm
"Randy Barnett: Abortion, Guns, and the Future of the Supreme Court," by Nick Gillespie
"Inside the Mises Caucus Takeover of the Libertarian Party," by Zach Weissmueller, Nick Gillespie, and Danielle Thompson
"Confidence in U.S. Institutions Down; Average at New Low," by Jeffrey M. Jones
"Spurred by the Supreme Court, a Nation Divides Along a Red-Blue Axis," by Jonathan Weisman
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Last week, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and with it the nationwide guarantee of a constitutional right to abortion. It was a major moment in constitutional history. But for millions of American women, the decision will also have significant personal ramifications.
In this inaugural episode, host Peter Suderman speaks with Reason Senior Editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown about the future of abortion after Roe—the legal mess, the impact on women, and what sort of responses we're likely to see.
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As the most momentous Supreme Court term in recent memory comes to a close, are things better or worse for libertarians?
Georgetown Law's Randy Barnett is arguably the most important and influential libertarian legal scholar walking the planet today. Over the years, he's argued against Obamacare and for medical marijuana in front of the Supreme Court. In books like Restoring the Lost Constitution and The Structure of Liberty, he's developed the concept of what he calls "judicial engagement," or the idea that judges need to be more forceful in striking down laws that restrict rights guaranteed by the Constitution. At the same time, he's a powerful critic of liberal judicial activism where judges effectively create law out of ideological preference and he pushes back against conservative majoritarianism, which holds that legislatures can basically do whatever they want.
In a nearly two-hour-long conversation, I talk with Barnett about the Dobbs decision that struck down a women's right to an abortion, the Bruen decision that struck down a New York state law limiting the ability of gun owners to carry weapons, and other major rulings. We talk about the general direction of the Supreme Court and whether it's headed in a more—or less—libertarian direction. And we discuss the treatment of Ilya Shapiro, the former Cato staffer who was going to join Barnett at Georgetown until a controversy erupted over one of Shapiro's tweets.
Today's sponsor:
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In this week's Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and special guest senior editor Damon Root unpack the long-awaited SCOTUS ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade (1973).
1:31: Discussion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization
39:06: "Lightning round" on SCOTUS decisions concerning guns and school choice
51:32: Weekly Listener Question: More than most political ideologies, many of the prominent libertarian thinkers were women—Ayn Rand, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, etc. I think it's safe to say that the movement wouldn't exist without them. But libertarianism today, fairly or not, is stereotyped as being almost all men, often men who are, shall we say, not the most socially adept. Why has that stereotype developed? And how do we, in practice, change both the impression and the actual amount of women in the movement? Bonus question: Katherine—which Roundtabler is like which Buffy the Vampire Slayer character? And why is Nick Cordelia Chase (or Faith, though mostly because of the leather jacket aesthetic)?
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Is the Libertarian Party (LP) being "trumpified?" Or is it now—finally!—home to the second coming of the Ron Paul Revolution?
If you're a watcher of Reason's videos, you know that a few weeks ago, I went to Reno, Nevada, to cover the long-awaited, much-anticipated Libertarian Party national convention, where a group called the Mises Caucus took over the party by winning all the leadership positions. I'm joined today by Reason video producer Zach Weissmueller, who coordinated and directed our video coverage (here's a full playlist).
Founded in 2017 by Michael Heise, the Mises Caucus has long pledged to "make the Libertarian Party libertarian again." Over the past several years, it's taken control of several dozen state parties. Caucus members call themselves the Ron Paul Revolution 2.0, stress the need for bolder messaging, and came to Reno promising to remove the party's longstanding pro-choice plank, push for less emphasis on open-borders-style immigration, and strip out platform language condemning "bigotry as irrational and repugnant" that dates back to 1974. They also stress that the L.P. national's response to Covid restrictions was far too timid and accommodating.
Critics of the Mises Caucus say the group is filled with shitposting edgelords who are tacking hard toward Trump fans, social conservatives, and even people with alt-right sympathies. They worry that the Mises Caucus takeover will be the end of the Libertarian Party.
For today's podcast, I talk with Zach about we saw in Reno, the often-heated response to Reason's coverage of the convention, and what the future not just of the L.P. but of the bigger libertarian movement looks like.
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In this week's Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie discuss President Joe Biden's bungled policy statements and abysmal approval ratings.
1:35: Biden botches inflation, gas prices, taxes, and bicycling.
29:21: Weekly Listener Question: Even though most, if not all of you, are resigned to the fate that we'll never see a Libertarian president elected, those of you who do vote typically still vote for the Libertarian candidate, from what I gather. So, my naively hypothetical question is: Were a Libertarian ever elected president, what realistic things would you like to see on their "First 100 Days" agenda? The online libertarian crowd, of course, loves to post routinely about Abolish the Fed, Defund the CIA, Disband the ATF, and much more. Still, in reality, not all libertarian wishes can be granted with the power of a pen and a phone. Rightly so, mind you. Even a well-intentioned liberty-minded dictator is still a dictator, but there are things presidents can do that would be incremental steps toward a society with more freedom. The first thing that comes to mind for me is using executive pardon capabilities for Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, but the list certainly doesn't stop there. So, I'm very interested to hear your Libertarian presidential wish list ranging from complete anarchy as KMW would have it to Nick's likely entirely drug-related list to Peter's statist apologist desires and cocktail party requirements, and even whatever baseball mandates and classic rock reforms Matt would request.
40:35: Polarization in the wake of the upcoming Supreme Court decision on abortion.
46:17: Media recommendations for the week
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Bitcoin is trading under $23,000 as I write this, which means the value of the world's biggest cryptocurrency has lost about $45,000 per coin since last November, when it was at about $68,000.
Though the recent slide in the price of bitcoin has sent many speculators scrambling back to fiat currency, it's done nothing to cool the fervor of Robert Breedlove, a self-proclaimed freedom maximalist whose Twitter feed is filled with encomia for the inflation-proof monetary system that has a supply fixed via the consensus of a decentralized, global software network.
"Unlike the US Constitution," he writes, "#Bitcoin cannot be amended—that's why incorruptible money is a greater instrument of freedom than the US Constitution." "#Bitcoin," he predicts, "will prove to be history's ultimate example of the old adage 'when you can't beat them, join them.'"
The 36-year-old former hedge fund manager and accountant by training is a leading thinker and writer in the bitcoin space, where he publishes The Freedom Analects and hosts The "What is Money?" Show podcast and video series.
I talked with Breedlove at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami this April about why bitcoin is the best hedge against hyperinflation, how Austrian economics informs his worldview, and why he believes bitcoin will inevitably become the basis of the global economy. "No one's figured out how to stop bitcoin, basically meaning turn it off," he says. "And so, if you can't turn it off, that effectively operates as this vortex of incentives. It's just incentivizing people to interact with it, to hold it, to save and build businesses on it."
The months between our conversation and today have not been kind to bitcoin, but Breedlove remains a stalwart defender, tweeting recently that "instead of focusing on price, just follow the energy," and pointing to a chart showing that bitcoin's hash rate—a measure of the total computational power being used on the network and thus a proxy for its health—has gone upward despite the price declines.
This week on The Reason Roundtable, senior editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman discuss the beginning of the January 6 hearings, the inflation crisis reaching new heights, and the results of the June 7 elections.
1:24: The January 6 hearings20:23 Inflation reaches its highest level in 40 years.
31:01 Weekly Listener Question: Who is in charge at the White House? Several times we've heard the president make off-the-cuff remarks only to have the "White House" walk it back afterward. Who's making that call? Who speaks for the White House? Obviously the president isn't the one running the show. Is our government a reboot of Weekend at Bernie's? Who is the man behind the curtain we are not supposed to pay attention to? How did they get this position?
40:42 Last Tuesday's elections
46:58 Media recommendations
Audio production by Luke Allen
Assistant production by Adam Czarnecki and Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Has America's overdose crisis been caused by doctors over treating patients with opioids?
That was the subject of this month's Soho Forum debate, held at the Sheen Center in downtown Manhattan.
Adriane Fugh-Berman defended the proposition, "America's overdose crisis is the result of doctors over‐treating patients with opioids." She's a medical doctor and a professor of pharmacology and physiology at Georgetown University Medical Center. She argued that the overdose crisis traces back to pharmaceutical companies convincing doctors that opioids were safe and effective, causing rising rates of addiction.
Jeffrey Singer, a surgeon and Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, took the negative. He argued that the rate of overdoses and the rate at which doctors prescribe opioids aren't correlated. The real culprit, he said, was drug prohibition.
This debate was moderated by Soho Forum director Gene Epstein.
Narrated by Nick Gillespie.
In the late 1970s, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) famously—and controversially—defended the right of neo-Nazis to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois, which was home to many Holocaust survivors. It was a defining moment for the group and for the idea that free speech, no matter how vile, must be guaranteed to everyone.
But over the past 20 years—and especially over the past few years—the ACLU has seemingly retreated from its unwavering defense of free speech in favor of supporting progressive candidates and causes. It ran ads supporting Stacey Abrams in her gubernatorial campaign in Georgia, for instance. It's called for the forgiveness of $50,000 in student loan debt. It even ghostwrote and placed the Washington Post op-ed about domestic violence that led to Amber Heard losing a defamation case against Johnny Depp.
Its lack of focus on its traditional mission of defending free speech has gotten to a point where its former executive director, who led the group during the Skokie controversy, has become one of its biggest critics. "If the Skokie case happened again," Ira Glasser told me in 2020, "would the ACLU take it? I don't know."
But if the ACLU is retreating, another free speech group is expanding to fill the void left behind. Founded in 1999 to combat speech codes on college campuses, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education—FIRE—has announced a new name and an expanded mission of defending free speech off-campus as well as on.
The new name is the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the group has announced "a three-year, $75 million litigation, opinion research and public education campaign aimed at boosting and solidifying support for free-speech values." FIRE's longtime president is Greg Lukianoff, the co-author of the bestselling book The Coddling of the American Mind, and, as it happens, a former employee of the ACLU—a group for which he has lots of praise.
In today's episode, he tells me about why he's concerned that support for what he calls the "culture of free speech"—broad-based belief in the value of tolerance and civil disagreement—has been declining for the better part of a decade and how FIRE is going to work to turn that around.
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In this week's Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie scrutinize Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' style of conservatism and touch on President Joe Biden's upcoming visit with the House of Saud.
1:28: DeSantis and his approach to governance
30:36: Weekly Listener Question: You guys occasionally talk about the Libertarian Party, and you might be aware of the recent convention which saw power go to one faction that many describe as quite alienating. This has led to many of the traditional libertarians leaving the party altogether. My question for you all is do you think that the Libertarian Party is necessary for facilitating more libertarian representation in politics? If not, how do you see libertarian ideals grow in the traditional duopoly?
38:39: Biden's forthcoming visit to Saudi Arabia
52:30: Media recommendations for the week
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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During the Cold War in America, about the two worst things you could be accused of was being a communist or a homosexual. In fact, people like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover routinely conflated the two, asserting that the Soviet Union blackmailed gay diplomats, politicians, and citizens into betraying the United States. Despite no evidence of that, the federal government banned gay and lesbian employees, leading to all sorts of discriminatory and stupid behavior on the part of government officials and private actors.
In the new book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, James Kirchick explores how panic and hysteria over gays informed everything from the Alger Hiss trial to Lyndon Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign to Ronald Reagan's first run for governor of California and his two terms in the White House.
Kirchick, a columnist at Tablet and a writer at large for Air Mail, also talks to me about a libertarian angle to all this too besides the government discriminating against people due to sexual orientation: Gay rights activists such as Randy Shilts, whose And The Band Played On was the first big history of the AIDS crisis, and Harvey Milk, the openly gay politician who was assassinated after being elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, started out as ardent Barry Goldwater supporters. So did Young Americans for Freedom activist and former Rep. Robert Bauman (R–Md.), who lost his 1980 re-election bid after getting caught soliciting sex from a 16-year-old male prostitute.
"For gay men of this particular generation, of this particular political disposition, they were inclined towards libertarianism," Kirchick tells me. "They were inclined towards small government. Get off my back. That's what Barry Goldwater was was advertising in 1964."
We also talk about people like Frank Kameny, a federal employee who sued the government after getting fired simply for being gay, and how the gay rights movement is a powerful model for social and political change based on individual rights.
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In this week's Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie consider the slate of policy prescriptions on offer in the wake of the Uvalde school shooting.
1:21: The gun control debate after Uvalde
27:41: Weekly Listener Question: My question to you pertains to guns and gun culture, specifically "where are the gun nuts?" Where at Reason or elsewhere in the high-profile, opinion journalism world are the people who love guns or at least enjoy being a gun owner, enjoy going to the shooting range or participating in shooting competitions or what have you? Why aren't they more common among the pro-liberty or even the conservative press? It seems to me that there is a class divide in this country on guns. Upper-middle to upper class urban dwellers (such as the media class) all seem to hate guns and do not partake in gun culture, while more "blue-collar" and, of course, rural Americans are heavily into guns yet get little to no representation in media. Is there a class element to the gun control debate which is not being given proper attention?
49:08: The Libertarian National Convention and the Mises Caucus
1:00:54: Media recommendations for the week
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Faisal Saeed Al Mutar and Melissa Chen are the outspoken, courageous co-founders of Ideas Beyond Borders (IBB), a nonprofit that translates books about pluralism, science, civil liberties, and critical thinking like John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now into Arabic and distributes them for free as e-books throughout the Middle East. They've also translated thousands of Wikipedia pages on the same topics and made them available to an audience desperately interested in new ways of thinking about culture, politics, and ideas.
Faisal left Iraq after extremists killed his brother and threatened his life, and Melissa was once a persona non grata in her native Singapore due to free speech activism. Founded in 2017, IBB is also funding underground girls schools in Afghanistan, actively helping Afghans find refuge from the Taliban, and running a campaign against censorship at endbannedbooks.org. Disclosure: I'm on the board of Ideas Beyond Borders.
This Reason Interview podcast was taped live on Monday, May 2, 2022, as part of the Reason Speakeasy series, held monthly in New York City. Go here for podcast and video versions of past events.
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What sorts of paintings will be hanging in the museums of the future?
Agnieszka Pilat is betting that we'll be looking at what she calls "heroic portraits of machines"—fine-art renderings of the technology that freed the modern world from the bone- and soul-crushing labor that our parents and grandparents endured.
Pilat's paintings—especially ones featuring Spot, Boston Dynamics' robot dog—are sought after by Silicon Valley collectors drawn to her valorization of technology, a welcome alternative to the traditional demonization by artists of the man-made world.
Her work is rich in callbacks to artists ranging from Leonardo da Vinci to Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol, and she incorporates augmented reality to further highlight how technology shapes our perceptions. A sure sign of success: One of her paintings appeared in The Matrix sequel released last year as a representation of future art.
Born in Poland in 1973, Pilat remembers life under communism as an extended period of conformity and repression that ended almost immediately after the communist regime collapsed in 1989. She talks about how her father, finally able to operate his own shop, stopped drinking and built a prosperous bakery business.
Pilat immigrated to the United States in the early 2000s. Landing in San Francisco, she encountered amazingly wealthy tech workers espousing the same collectivist ideas that had made her childhood so miserable. "I was just really shocked," she tells Reason. "I didn't realize that people still think that communism or socialism is a good idea. Moral outrage was growing within me and also a feeling that I need to protect America by telling people what it really means."
Shortly after arriving in the States, Pilat stumbled across the work of another Eastern European immigrant: Ayn Rand. Though she didn't become an Objectivist, Pilat responded viscerally to Rand's insistence that "you have a right and a moral obligation to yourself to have a purpose and work towards the purpose as hard as you can."
As her work gains stature, Pilat is moving on to a new frontier, if not quite the final one: She's an artist in residence at Elon Musk's SpaceX, where she is looking forward to possibly producing "superheroic portraits" of machines in zero gravity.
I talked with her in her New York studio about being upstaged by a robot dog, why she wants everyone to remember what communism was really like, and how to best appreciate—and protect—the economic and cultural freedom we too often take for granted.
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In this week's Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie question the $40 billion aid package to Ukraine and describe the impact of rising interest rates on public policy.
1:10 - The aid package to Ukraine.
22:25 - Weekly Listener Question: I work as a rural mail carrier for USPS. I am confronted on a daily basis with stupidity and bureaucracy. My question is, how do you fight bureaucracy, not only from the post office but government in general? Is bureaucracy ever good? Is it always harmful?
35:10 - Continued uncertainty around inflation and interest rates.
44:28 - Media recommendations for the week.
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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I'm excited to share a special bonus episode of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. It's a debate about forgiving student loan, debt organized and produced by the good folks at Intelligence Squared US, America's leading platform for fair, balanced, informed debate on all the leading issues of the day. I've been involved with them for years, including participating in debates on drug legalization, Medicare for All, Net Neutrality, and today's show about student loans (which originally took place in March 2021).
In the interests of transparency, you should know that this is a paid promotion. But I'm happy to share this Intelligence Squared US debate not just because I'm one of the debaters, but because it's modeling exactly what we need more of: deeply informed and civil arguments over what sorts of policies we need to help make our country the best it can be.
They're doing great stuff over at Intelligence Squared by bringing reason and passion to controversial topics and presenting all sides fairly and creatively. The debates are done "Oxford style," which means the winner is the team that persuades more people to its side. That adds drama and excitement to each debate.
The moderator is John Donvan, a legendary, award-winning journalist who doesn't let anyone get away with cheap shots or slippery language. I always learn a ton, whether I'm just listening to or participating in one of the debates. It's a terrific series that reaches back years and covers just about every topic you can imagine and you can access it all by subscribing to their podcast feed or by going over to their website, where they also have video and a ton of links and supporting materials so you can do your own research and come to your own conclusions.
And now, without further ado, here's a great debate from Intelligence Squared, Should We Forgive Student Debt? If you want to check out the video version, transcript, and background about all the participants, go here.
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Do people who hire sex workers deserve to go to jail, or should all laws prohibiting consensual sex work be repealed?
On May 9, 2022, writer and activist Julie Bindel debated Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown at the Sheen Center in lower Manhattan. The resolution was "A good society should criminalize the purchase of sex."
The event was hosted by The Soho Forum, a monthly debate series sponsored by the Reason Foundation.
Bindel is the London-based author of The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth. She opposes arresting women for the selling of sex but wants their customers to face consequences for their actions.
Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown, who's also the co-founder and president of Feminists for Liberty, took the position that all laws prohibiting consensual sex work should be abolished.
The debate was moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein.
Narrated by Nick Gillespie; intro edited by John Osterhoudt
My guest today is Alex Epstein, the author of Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less.
Two basic beliefs frequently circulate today: First, that fossil fuels are causing imminent global catastrophe and, second, that renewable energy sources (especially solar and wind) can supply all our energy needs either right now or in the very near future.
Epstein says that both of those points are wrong. He believes that fossil fuels have contributed to a warming global climate system but argues that they give us more and more mastery over the environment and their renewable replacements can't scale up to fulfill our needs. Humans, he says, are flourishing like never before precisely because oil, gas, and coal allow us to withstand a world that is very inhospitable to our living here. Wind and solar make up just 3 percent of all energy right now and forcing a fast-paced shift to renewables, he argues, would consign billions of people to poverty or death in order to stave off the impact of man-made climate change, the consequences of which have often been exaggerated and with which humans are equipped to deal.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Epstein discusses how he came to his views, how he fought an attempted hit piece in The Washington Post by using social media, why Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) corporate rules are troubling, and how Ayn Rand influences his thinking.
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In the latest Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie debunk the "great replacement theory" and highlight some particularly awful responses to recent economic woes.
1:31 - The Buffalo mass shooting and "great replacement theory"
28:34- Weekly Listener Question: Matt's prompt this week to evaluate why the audience listens to the Roundtable podcast pushed me to pose a question that's been on my mind for a while: What is one general principle, or area of practical politics, that each of you feels you disagree with the most of the others on the Roundtable about? I regularly listen to several political roundtable podcasts to help me triangulate my views on issues, and to my ear your podcast—which I do enjoy—can often be summarized as follows: "[Insert name here], is such-and-such action by the government a good idea?" "No." I don't identify as a libertarian, so there are very likely subtleties to your views that I don't pick up on as a layman. But I would be curious to hear in your own words how you feel your viewpoints are distinct.
37:19 - Bad responses to current economic hardship
49:05 - Media recommendations for the week
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Back in April, I attended Bitcoin 2022, held in Miami, where I spoke with today's guest, who is the CEO of the publicly traded company that owns more bitcoin than any other.
Can you guess which company that is?
It's not Tesla, Square, or Coinbase.
It's MicroStrategy, which is based in Virginia and provides business intelligence, mobile software, and cloud computing. It owns about 2 1/2 times as much bitcoin as the next closet company, which would be Tesla.
The reason MicroStrategy is so long on bitcoin is because its 57-year-old billionaire CEO, Michael Saylor, had an epiphany in 2020, when COVID-19 had shut down most of the country. Bitcoin, he tells me, "is an approximation of a perfect monetary system because it is correct. It has no inflation in it. It's not corruptible because it's decentralized." He believes bitcoin is the last, best hope of creating an economy that is independent of the machinations of politics, central banks, and connected investors who rig the system to benefit themselves at the expense of regular people.
While the economy tanked due to external factors, Saylor directed MicroStrategy to keep buying bitcoin regardless of the price. The company is committed to "hodling" for the long term, a position Saylor believes in now more than ever as inflation takes hold.
And he's still saying that today, even as bitcoin has slid down to just $31,0000 as I write this—down from its peak of almost $68,000 last November. Saylor's Twitter account is a beauty to behold, with him recently quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes to the effect that "youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all" and posting a picture of him working at a McDonald's saying it's "time to get back to work."
So bitcoin's bear market is actually a perfect time to release my interview with him from Miami in April, where he explains why he's all in on bitcoin, how his training as an engineer informs his worldview, and his belief that one thing holding back the mass adoption of a non-state-backed currency is a lack of clarity in how the U.S. government will regulate it.
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In the latest Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie unpack the leaked draft opinion concerning abortion.
8:00: The great Dobbs debate
38:00: Weekly Listener Question: It seems to me that ostensibly "public health" or "public good" policies at their core often betray a deep condescension on the part of the "people in charge." In the case of cigarettes, Sullum says that the ban suggests that "consumers are no match for Big Tobacco's persuasive wiles," and similarly, it seems like a lot of the mis/disinformation discourse imagines the American public as empty vessels, just waiting to be filled with Russian propaganda, vaccine misinformation, claims of election fraud, or whatever the topic of the moment is, and assumes that people just simply aren't smart enough or capable to determine what's true from what isn't. Katherine touched on the importance of media literacy this week, and all of you have touched on it in different ways in other episodes, but I'd be interested in hearing more about how you see the role that personal responsibility should have in figuring out the quality of information.
57:00: Media recommendations for the week.
Audio production by Robin Shore
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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The leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion by Associate Justice Samuel Alito overturning Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) has sent shock waves throughout America, with pro-choice and pro-life advocates scrambling to figure out what happens next if the right to an abortion is withdrawn at the federal level. "Roe was egregiously wrong from the start," wrote Alito in February. "We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled."
While there's no question whether the document is authentic (Chief Justice John Roberts says it is), many questions remain. First and foremost among them: Does the draft, written up in response to Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a case challenging Mississippi's ban on abortions after 15 weeks, represent the current thinking of the Court's majority? We won't know for sure until a ruling is released sometime before the end of June.
What's the best way to think about abortion rights, Roe v. Wade, and Alito's arguments from a libertarian perspective? I spoke with constitutional scholar Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a blogger at The Volokh Conspiracy. Blackman is an unabashed admirer of Alito's draft, writing that it "meticulously dissects, and forcefully responds to, every conceivable position in favor of retaining Roe and Casey."
I'm not convinced about that at all and, in a wide-ranging conversation about the history of abortion and "fundamental rights," the changing nature of the Supreme Court, federalism, and partisan politics, we go deep on whether returning decisions about abortion to the states will increase or decrease individual liberty. This is an important discussion about a topic that will likely dominate politics for months to come.
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In the latest The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie discuss the formation of the "Disinformation Governance Board," as well as President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness plan.
1:38: The "Disinformation Governance Board," brought to you by DHS
26:58: Weekly Listener Question: I have often heard Nick make the case for a welfare state that is designed to go to those that need it over universal systems such as all the old age retirement programs. I find "need rather than universal" compelling. However, per Nick's book recommendation "The High Cost of Good Intentions," I don't see how we can have a reasonable expectation that any system designed to help the needy does not become universal. It seems the history of the U.S. is almost entirely one that is for expanding safety nets to people who don't need it (but would nonetheless like "free" stuff). I can't see anyone running on a platform that goes against entitlements and winning (long-term). The person who runs on either keeping entitlements the same or expanding them will always beat the person who says we need to reduce the number of people receiving the entitlements. So my question is—Is the idea of a welfare state strictly for the needy utopian?
32:39: Biden's latest proposal for student loan forgiveness
48:30: Media recommendations for the week
This week's links:
"New DHS Board Seeks To Counter What It Thinks Is Disinformation," by Joe Lancaster
"Homeland Security Chief Admits New Disinformation Board Already Did a Bad Job of Informing Public," by Robby Soave
Tracing The Truth with Emmanuelle Saliba
"Elizabeth Warren Wants Joe Biden To Deliver a Massive, Illegal Handout to the Well-Off," by Peter Suderman
"Are Millennials Responsible for Their Own Student Debt?" by Nick Gillespie
"3 Reasons We Shouldn't Bail Out Student Loan Borrowers," by Nick Gillespie and Meredith Bragg
"The FDA's Menthol Cigarette Ban Is a 'Racial Justice' Issue, but Not in the Way Its Supporters Mean," by Jacob Sullum
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," went from being a weird online experiment 21 years ago to one of the mainstays of the modern internet with astonishing speed. Even more astonishing, it has maintained its reputation and functionality since its founding, even as the rest of the social internet seems hellbent on tearing itself apart.
As Twitter, Facebook, and others are consumed with controversy over moderation, governance, and the definition of free speech, Wikipedia continues to quietly grow in utility, trustworthiness, and comprehensiveness. There are now nearly 6.5 million articles on the English version alone, and it has held its place in the top 15 most-visited sites on the internet for well over a decade.
Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward spoke with Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, about what he got right—and what he's worried about as politicians all around the globe are pushing for more control of online content.
A key ingredient to Wikipedia's success, says Wales, is its high degree of decentralization. After this interview was conducted, Elon Musk made a bid to buy Twitter, bringing new salience to the battle over who controls the flow of information (and disinformation) online.
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Meet Aella, the daughter of evangelical Christians from Idaho who were so poor they couldn't always put food on the table.
A former factory worker who never graduated college, she became one of the most successful performers on the adult subscription site OnlyFans, sometimes taking home over $100,000 a month on the platform. She still does one-on-one appointments but only with clients who can afford to pay her current rate of $3,000 an hour.
These days, Aella is known for her forays into data science, oddball social media polls, sexy and silly personal moments on Twitter, and using her giant platform to spread hot libertarian takes, such as declaring, "I like capitalism."
"I am not okay with you making laws that prevent me from doing what I feel is good for me," Aella tells Reason. An outspoken defender of sex worker rights, she compares her current life to what it was like at the age of 19, when she would wake up at 4:30 a.m. to go do repetitive tasks on an assembly line in a windowless factory, often putting in over 50 hours a week.
"Why do people talk about survival sex work but not like…survival factory work or survival burger flipping?" she wonders. Yes, there's exploitation in sex work, but "decriminalizing sex work would let workers actually go get police help if they needed it."
Even before she got rich and famous, back when she was "scraping change off the ground to eat," Aella says she still "had libertarian-leaning economic views."
Reason's Liz Wolfe met up with Aella at her home in Austin, Texas, for a wide-ranging conversation about everything from how sex work made her a better data scientist to why many successful practitioners in her industry are selling not only sex but also the personal connections that so many of us are missing in our lives.
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Colorado's Jared Polis might be the most libertarian governor in America, at a time when his big-state Democratic colleagues are getting exposed as hypocrites while presiding over historic population declines or getting kicked out of office for sexual harassment and sending COVID infected patients back to nursing homes and then lying about it. I'm not sure that Polis' 2014 claim in the pages of Reason that "libertarians should vote for Democratic candidates" because they're "more supportive of individual liberty and freedom" has held up, but he's certainly leading by example.
The 46-year-old governor is presiding over one of the fastest-growing states in the country and a place that has one of the lowest death rates during the pandemic. He pushed back against members of his own party to remove mask mandates, and he consistently argued that public health decisions should be made at as local a level as possible. Last fall, at a conference held by the conservative Steamboat Institute, he declared that the state income tax rate "should be zero" and has supported ballot initiatives that reduced the rate. Polis has embraced occupational licensing reform and was an outspoken defender of bitcoin back in 2014 when Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) called on then-head of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen to ban it.
The openly gay, married father of two recently signed a free-range parenting bill that effectively relegalizes the sort of Colorado childhood he recalls as the son of two ex-hippie parents: "Just because a kid is playing alone outside, it doesn't mean they're in danger," Polis said at the signing ceremony. "It will help decrease false reports so…we can focus on the serious and the real instances of child abuse."
As conservative states pass laws strictly limiting abortions, he signed legislation guaranteeing a woman's right to choose. The founder of two charter schools, he is an outspoken advocate for school choice, saying earlier this year that "public school choice is an asset to improve all public schools." A former tech entrepreneur and five-term congressman, Polis is steadfast against limiting speech rights or treating social media platforms as utilities that can't moderate content or bounce users for transgressing terms of service.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Reason, Polis talks about trying to govern from the middle, takes shots at President Joe Biden's moves on free trade and immigration, and repeats his argument that libertarians should vote for Democrats. Up for re-election in the fall and a heavy favorite to win a second term, Polis also discusses his political ambitions as a rising star in a party that is expected to get blown out in the midterm elections.
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In the latest Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie discuss the broad implications of the unfolding DeSantis vs. Disney saga.
1:26: DeSantis vs. Disney continues.
33:39: Weekly Listener Question: I'm wondering when it becomes ethical and even required under one's belief in liberty to begin enacting civil disobedience? In this case, I was thinking about riding the U-Bahn maskless, as a forty-something man publicly disobeying the most visible of the restrictions might invite others to question the wisdom of the policy. It's relatively low-risk as I'm triple-vaxxed, as is 75 percent of Hamburg, so I wouldn't be unnecessarily risking others' health, and they can wear a mask anyway. It's also a 40-euro fine, but I'd be willing to eat that cost for the statement of principle.
I acknowledge that state power is strongest in a time of emergency, but we're two years in at this point and have had vaccines for almost a year. And I realize that I could cause myself visa headaches. But, aside from that, is there any ethical reason not to begin a personal campaign of civil disobedience if I object strongly enough to the rules that look like they'll never go away or, at least, that the people in charge hope will never go away?
44:51: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"Rethinking the Social Responsibility of Business" by Milton Friedman, John Mackey, and T.J. Rodgers
"DeSantis Calls for End of Walt Disney World's Self-Rule" by Scott Shackford
"DeSantis Understands the Best Defense Is a Good Offense" by Jon Gabriel
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Should the United States use military force to deter China from invading Taiwan?
That was the subject of this month's Soho Forum debate, which took place in front of a full house at the Sheen Center in downtown Manhattan.
William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, defended the resolution. He argued that the U.S. should use all the tools at its disposal to deter foreign powers from engaging in conflict with their neighbors, with the ultimate goal of preventing an outright war such as the one we are witnessing in Europe.
Peter Van Buren, who spent 24 years working as a diplomat for the U.S. State Department, took the negative. He argued that Americans rarely have the context or understanding to intervene productively in foreign conflicts, and that more often than not, what looks like deterrence to one party looks like provocation to the other. Invoking the many years of experience he gained as a State Department diplomat stationed in Asia, he stated confidently that there would be no invasion of Taiwan by China either soon or in the distant future.
The debate was moderated by Soho Forum director, Gene Epstein.
Narrated by Nick Gillespie; intro edited by John Osterhoudt.
Photo: Ju Peng Xinhua News Agency/Newscom
On October 4, 2020, when COVID-19 was raging, American schools were mostly shuttered, and vaccines were believed to be years away—a team of top researchers at the world's most prestigious universities, including Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya, Harvard's Martin Kulldorff, and Oxford's Sunetra Gupta—published the Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial open letter challenging the official U.S. response of lockdowns and government control of ever-larger parts of the economy and everyday life.
Recognizing that COVID overwhelmingly affected elderly Americans and others with specific, identifiable health conditions, they called for a policy of "focused protection," in which the vulnerable would be kept safe and the rest of us, especially children and young adults, would be able to get on with our lives.
The response at the very highest levels of government was quick and draconian. Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, wrote a private email to Anthony Fauci, which was later obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, denouncing Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and Gupta as "fringe epidemiologists" who deserved to be the subject of a media "takedown."
"Big tech outlets like Facebook and Google followed suit, suppressing our ideas, falsely deeming them 'misinformation,' says Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford who also holds a Ph.D. in economics. "I started getting calls from reporters asking me why I wanted to 'let the virus rip,' when I had proposed nothing of the sort. I was the target of racist attacks and death threats."
I sat down with Bhattacharya to talk about what it was like to be at the very center of an official effort to suppress heterodox thinking about the pandemic, why he believes he and his Great Barrington Declaration co-authors have been vindicated, and whether the public health establishment can ever recover from ongoing revelations of incompetence, malfeasance, and politically motivated decision-making. He also discusses how the centralization of science funding encourages dangerous groupthink, why he believes in mRNA vaccines but remains staunchly anti-mandate, and why he stopped wearing masks a long time ago.
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On this Monday's Reason Roundtable, Katherine Mangu-Ward is back with Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie. The editors each describe a tax they would like repealed and unpack Elon Musk's attempt to purchase Twitter.
1:52: Taxes worth repealing
17:43: Commonly held notions about taxation that should be refuted
25:30: Elon Musk's ongoing attempt to purchase Twitter
41:52: Weekly Listener Question: Mickey Mouse is set to enter the public domain in 2024 unless Congress acts to amend copyright law (as they did to avoid this same scenario in the past). I read Joe Lancaster's very informative recent piece on this topic for Reason, and of course, I agree that denying or granting such an extension on the basis of what ideology Disney does or doesn't promote is ridiculous. But I was surprised to see it presented as an obvious libertarian position that the copyright should be allowed to expire. It seems to me that putting Mickey Mouse—a piece of intellectual property actively being used by its creator to generate further original work—into the public domain would contrast with the typical libertarian support of strong property rights. Is intellectual property so different from physical property? And wouldn't it likely reduce net creativity if other creators could make easier money by just copying Mickey than by creating their own original characters? How does the panel feel about the state of copyright law? Does Suderman think other studios should be able to start making cheap filler movies with Marvel characters a few decades from now? Do we need a new form of intellectual property protection in an era when corporate creative enterprises can thrive for so many decades? Please share your thoughts; if I need money 75 years from now, I can sell copies of them.
51:36: Media recommendations for the week
This week's links:
"Tax Day Is Here, Because Government Bungling Won't Pay for Itself" by J.D. Tucille
"Americans Will Spend 6.5 Billion Hours on Income Taxes this Year" by Eric Boehm
"Gatekeepers Very Afraid that Elon Musk Will Remove the Gates From Twitter" by Matt Welch
"Musk bid for Twitter underscores the risks of social media ownership" by Joseph Menn, Cat Zakrzewski, and Craig Timberg
"Elon Musk Demonstrates How Little He Understands About Content Moderation" by Mike Masnick
"Abolish Copyrights and Patents? A Soho Forum Debate" by Gene Epstein
"Too Much Copyright" by Zach Weissmueller
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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In a world where drug legalization efforts are on the march and the pernicious effects of drug prohibition on criminal justice, education, foreign policy, and racial and ethnic communities are being scrutinized like never before, Columbia neuroscientist Carl Hart is breaking bold new ground on how we think about drug policy, substance use and abuse, and individual freedom.
"The Declaration of Independence guaranteed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all of us, as long as we don't disrupt anybody else's ability to do the same," says the author of Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear. "That means we get to live our life as we choose, as we see fit. Taking drugs is a part of that for a lot of Americans."
He writes that his use of drugs—including heroin—helps him be a better person. "I do not have a drug-use problem," he declares. "Never have. Each day, I meet my parental, personal, and professional responsibilities. I pay my taxes, serve as a volunteer in my community…and contribute to the global community as an informed and engaged citizen."
Nick Gillespie talks with Hart about all that, his path-breaking research on addiction, why he turned from an ardent supporter of the drug war to one of its leading critics, elitism within the legalization movement, and how he talks with his kids and his students about responsible drug use.
This Reason Interview podcast was taped live on Monday, April 4, 2022, as part of the Reason Speakeasy series, held monthly in New York City. Go here for podcast and video versions of past events.
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On this Monday's Reason Roundtable, with Katherine Mangu-Ward out, Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and special guest Fiona Harrigan discuss the latest on the war in Ukraine and the ongoing Disney "groomer" panic.
1:37: Ukraine update: What the U.S. should and shouldn't do in Ukraine
19:27: The great "groomer" debate.
38:01: Weekly Listener Question: "Can a tent be too big? I understand the definition of libertarianism is fluid, but there has to be limits to that. Any time someone tries to nail down a few ideas, it's always countered with them saying "no true Scotsman fallacy" or "libertarianism is the goal, but we need to be pragmatic in the short term". All of this, however, is a convoluted way for me to say the LP of NH, the Mises Caucus, and last week's Roundtable emailer are not libertarian and should stop using the word. DeSantinistas, Trumpers, pro-Putin trad cons, and all right-wing reactionaries need to be disavowed and loudly."
This week's links:
"The Case for Pursuing the Issue of Russian War Crimes in Ukraine - Even Though Putin is Highly Unlikely to Ever be Tried and Punished" by Ilya Somin
"From Iraq to Ukraine, the American Press Loves a War" by Fiona Harrigan
"Ukraine Crisis: U.S. Must Use Restraint" by Nick Gillespie
"'Equity,' 'Multiculturalism,' and 'Racial Prejudice,' Among Concepts That Could Be Banned in Schools by Wisconsin Bill" by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"40 Years of Free Minds and Free Markets" by Brian Doherty
"Goodnight, Moonshot" by Matt Welch
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty and Adam Czarnecki
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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A Friday bonus Reason Roundtable! Live from Reason Weekend in Nashville.
In the latest special Friday Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie discuss President Joe Biden's student loan moratorium extension and Big Labor.
14:47: The Biden administration's student loan moratorium extension
34:52: Biden and Big Labor
40:58: Editors answer questions from a live audience at Reason Weekend.
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In 2019, Jeff Kosseff published The Twenty-Six Words that Created the Internet, the definitive "biography" of the controversial law known as Section 230. Part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, Section 230 grants broad immunity to websites and internet service providers from legal actions based on user-generated content. Section 230 enabled the participatory nature of the web, from YouTube videos to Yelp reviews to basically all of Twitter. It's the reason why Reason can't be sued for libelous or defamatory content posted in our comments section (though the authors of such comments can be).
Now Kosseff, who teaches cybersecurity law at the United States Naval Academy, is back with The United States of Anonymous: How the First Amendment Shaped Online Speech. His new book looks at the history of and controversy surrounding anonymous speech and activism.
Before becoming a law professor, Kosseff worked as a journalist at The Oregonian, where he was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a winner of the George Polk Award. Nick Gillespie talks with him about why he thinks anonymous speech is generally a good thing but getting harder to maintain, why Democrats and Republicans alike keep freaking out over Section 230, and how his past as a journalist informs his interest in protecting freedom of speech and assembly.
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In the latest Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie discuss President Joe Biden's newly proposed budget and wealth tax.
1:29: Biden's budget proposal.
7:31: Biden wants a wealth tax.
36:36: Weekly listener question: "With respect to the school curriculum debates, I can easily imagine various tradcons responding to Nick's take ('Let schools teach what they want') in the following manner: 'Teacher schools in America are, in effect, progressive indoctrination camps. So when you have a libertarian approach to curriculum, the de facto result is all these progressive teachers indoctrinating your kids with warmed-over Marxism. This is a perfect example of libertarianism being tantamount to surrender in the culture war. Putatively neutral policies, in fact, tilt heavily leftward.' Given that some members of the panel have first-hand experience with their kids imbibing wokeism at their public schools, what say you to this critique?"
This week's links:
"Biden Is Clueless About Inflation," by Nick Gillespie and Regan Taylor "Biden's Economy Is Extraordinary. But Inflation Is Still The Achilles' Heel Of Democrats" by Jennifer Rubin Joe Biden's Twitter
"How Biden's Agenda Is Causing Inflation" by Nick Gillespie "Want To Stop School Book Battles? Give Parents Real Choice in Education" by Nick Gillespie "The 19 Percent Solution" by Nick Gillespie and Veronique De Rugy "Joe Manchin on Biden's Wealth Tax: 'You Can't Tax Something That's Not Earned.'" by Peter Suderman "Biden's Desperate Wealth Tax Flip-Flop" by Peter Suderman
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Audio production by Ian Keyser Assistant production by Adam Czarnecki Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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"I am a professional rememberer," writes Nathan Rabin in The Joy of Trash. "It is my duty to remember not just for my own but for society."
Rabin is really taking one for the team here, especially since his new book accurately bills itself as the "definitive guide to the very worst of everything." Among the godawful things he explicates are Academy Award-winning actress Joan Crawford's bizzare and patently false 1971 lifestyle guide, My Way of Life; the misbegotten Brady Bunch Variety Hour, which improbably included numerous "water ballet" routines along with endless dad jokes; cocaine-addicted movie producer Robert Evans' 1981 court-ordered, star-studded, anti-drug TV special Get High on Yourself; and the entirety of billionaire Mike Bloomberg's 2020 presidential candidacy.
Rabin was the headwriter for The A.V. Club for two decades and the inventor of the popular-but-controversial term "Manic Pixie Dreamgirl" to describe a recurring film character who "exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." He now runs his own website, Nathan Rabin's Happy Place, where he sifts through all manner of cultural detritus with endless wit and energy. He also co-hosts Travolta/Cage, a podcast about "the greatest actors in history."
The 45-year-old Rabin talks with Nick Gillespie about how his Gen X roots inform his appreciation for and critique of consumer culture. Kids his age, he explains, learned early on through D.A.R.E. and transparently phony TV shows that adults and other authorities were often lying. Gen X came of age in the 1990s, he says, a time when the belief that technology would make everything perfect was widespread, an optimism severely tested both by the bursting of the tech bubble and the 9/11 attacks. "Irony and satire and comedy," he says, "can bring light to a very dark situation, and it can be very cathartic being able to laugh at things that you're not supposed to laugh about or being able to laugh about things that are incredibly dark."
Rabin also discusses how musician Grimes, who had a widely covered relationship and two children with billionaire Elon Musk, is reclaiming—or perhaps satirizing—the manic pixie dream girl trope and why Weird Al Yankovic, the subject of a good deal of his writing, has had a career far longer than most of the people he parodies.
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In the latest Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie discuss the violent turn at an otherwise standard Oscar Sunday as well as President Joe Biden's regrettable remark on Russia.
1:56: Will Smith slaps Chris Rock at the Oscars
13:51: Biden calls for regime change in Russia
27:49: Weekly listener question: "Do you think the U.S. has moved from a society of 'tolerance' to one of 'forced acceptance'? And based on your answer, do you think that's a positive or a negative? It seems to me that major 'culture war' issues bubble up when they are forced upon adults or involve children. For instance: No one really cared about drag queens until drag queen story hours. No one really cared about the trans movement until the bathroom bills and sports issues. Many more examples could be named, I'm sure."
40:55: Supreme Court hearings and thoughts about Ketanji Brown Jackson.
This week's links:
"Be Like Chris Rock," by Eric Boehm "Josh Hawley's Attack on Ketanji Brown Jackson Illustrates the Emotionalism She Criticized," by Jacob Sullum "Biden says Putin 'cannot remain in power'," by Kevin Liptak and Maegan Vazquez Jacqui Heinrich's Twitter
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Audio production by Ian Keyser Assistant production by Adam Czarnecki Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Do you want to build a rocket ship but don't have the deep pockets of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson?
You might want to turn to the Rocket Factory, "a trans-dimensional manufacturing plant" created by artist Tom Sachs, in which you can build and own a personalized rocket in both the physical and virtual worlds. The project is one of the most inventive uses of NFTs, a groundbreaking technology that makes digital items one-of-a-kind by giving them a unique code that can't be duplicated or forged. Sachs' Rocket Factory stands at the intersection of crypto, the metaverse, and the persistent human longing for the new frontier. You choose your components and create a unique rocket online that gets minted as an NFT. Sachs builds a meatspace replica and launches it and you decide what happens next to the spent rocket: He can mail it to you, donate it to a museum, or shred it for you.
Sachs' project makes use of the Ethereum blockchain, the shared public database that makes it possible to prove that you and you alone own a particular NFT; of the metaverse, the 3D virtual world to which a great deal of human interaction may soon migrate; and of our persistent longing for the new frontier, which is what John F. Kennedy talked about when announcing his space program in 1961. all of which are characteristics of what is often referred to as web3—the next phase in the evolution of the internet.
Nick Gillespie spoke with Sachs in his studio in Manhattan's Soho neighborhood to learn about the role of psychedelics in his creative process, how the internet has radically flattened and improved the relationship between artist and audience, and why his meticulously handcrafted NFT rockets can be just as exciting, innovative, and inspiring as the ones made by Bezos, Musk, and Branson.
Today's episode is sponsored by the Donors Trust's Novus Society, a community of givers under 40 actively building their charitable investment account. Attention, New York City metro-area listeners: Come out on Monday, April 4, to see a live taping of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie featuring Columbia neuroscientist Carl Hart, author of Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear. Doors open at 6 p.m. at Caveat Theater and Bar, 21-A Clinton Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Tickets cost $10. Go to reason.com/events for details.
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In the latest Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie discuss a recent editorial in The New York Times and a wave of laws regulating school curriculums.
1:42: NYT Editorial Board's op-ed on the state of free speech in America.
24:47: Law makers trying to ban certain content from being taught in schools.
31:56: Weekly listener question: Who do you think was the best postwar president? P.S. Is the western the ultimate libertarian genre?
This week's links:
"America Has A Free Speech Problem," by the New York Times editorial board "Self-Cancellation, Deplatforming, and Censorship," by Nick Gillespie Google Trends, "Cancel Culture"
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Audio production by Ian Keyser Assistant production by Adam Czarnecki Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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"If you're not living in a culture that has room for 'thought crime,' then you're not living in a culture that is growing," says Mike Solana. "You're not living in a culture that has the potential to progress in an exciting and—I want to say utopian—a positive direction."
Solana is a vice president at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that has backed a ton of companies that you probably know well, from home-sharing platform Airbnb to payment processor Stripe. He's also a feisty online presence who's an outspoken critic of what he sees as the moralizing strain present in today's tech journalism.
Solana writes a Substack called Pirate Wires that offers perceptive commentary on the role of technology in politics and culture (a recent entry is titled "Social Media's Slow March to Oblivion") and his Twitter feed is a must-read.
Earlier this year in Miami, he organized Hereticon, which was billed as a "conference for thought crime" and focused on ideas and arguments that have largely been shut out of mainstream discourse. Guest host Peter Suderman talks with Solana about ideological tribalism, how the media can be an agent of distrust, and what he sees as the limitations of libertarian thinking when it comes to dealing with things like Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
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Reason editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie discuss U.S. foreign policy debacles other than the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
28:15: Weekly listener question: I was wondering if you could discuss alternative strategies to address Russia. For example, can we weaponize immigration policy instead of solely relying on money for weapons systems and sanctions? What if the U.S. issued an uncapped number of visas to any Russian citizen? What if we provided immediate U.S. citizenship to any active duty Russian soldiers and their families who surrender? Could be interesting if you include bonuses to defecting soldiers for bringing their equipment—$1,000 for a rifle, $100,000 for a tank, $1 million for a MiG… all much cheaper than weapons used against them. Seems like the army would rapidly depopulate, and Putin couldn't backfill if millions of Russian citizens decamped for the U.S. You'd also get the side benefit of eliminating any labor shortages and maybe do something real against inflation, so I think it's a fun idea, but I'd appreciate your thoughts on this idea or any other alternative strategy for dealing with the Russian conflict.
This week's links:
"Biden Takes Big Step Toward Government-Backed Digital Currency" by Jason Abbruzzese and Kevin Collier Townhall.com tweet "How the Russian Invasion of Ukraine Upended Germany" by Alec MacGillis "Biden's Hidden War Is Destroying Yemen" by Fiona Harrigan
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Audio production by Ian Keyser Assistant production by Adam Czarnecki Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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This week's Reason Interview was recorded in front of a audience at New York's Caveat theater, the first in a monthly series of live "speakeasy" events in which I talk with guests known for their commitments to heterodox thinking, free expression, and open debate.
I interviewed the only writer—living, dead, or likely ever to be born—who has been favorably compared to Norman Mailer and Roseanne Barr. Laura Kipnis is a professor emerita of film and journalism at Northwestern who survived a ridiculous disciplinary hearing when graduate students (not in her class!) filed a Title IX complaint charging they felt unsafe after she published an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education about "sexual paranoia" on campuses (she wrote about that in 2017's Unwanted Advances).
Her new book, Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis, explores the effects of COVID-19 on personal relationships in a wide variety of settings. How will it change our ideas of romance, commitment, and sexuality? How has it intensified already boiling generational resentments among boomers, Gen Xers, millennials, and Gen Zers? Why exactly did we let governments structure all aspects of our lives, even the most intimate ones, for so long?
We talk about how the "sexual paranoia" she once saw largely confined to universities has escaped the college campus and now infiltrates workplaces. How do the widely acknowledged repulsive physical appearances of bad actors like Harvey Weinstein, former President Donald Trump, and Jeffrey Toobin condition our reactions to their behaviors, which range from criminal to merely disgusting? Why has intergenerational desire been demonized even when people acting on it speak out in its defense? And why has the blossoming and acceptance of a seemingly infinite number of gender identities and sexual orientations not brought the liberation that was promised?
This is a rollicking, rich, and ribald conversation that goes to the heart of human relationships in a post-COVID world.
Photo Credit: Chris Sweda/TNS/Newscom
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Reason editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie discuss attempts to isolate Russia from the rest of the world.
2:28: Americans boycotting all things Russia.
31:26: Weekly listener question: The Cork Opera House canceled an upcoming performance of Swan Lake by the Royal Moscow Ballet. FIFA has said that Russia will not be allowed to compete in the World Cup. And the Eurovision Song Contest announced Russia will not participate in the 2022 show. On the Reason website, Christian Britschgi (March 2, 2022) makes the case that Russian civilians are not in any way responsible for this or any of the actions of an authoritarian government: "Russian tanks have entered Ukraine, so Disney's films can't enter Moscow's cinemas?" The Economist tweeted, "The world must be willing to bleed Vladimir Putin's regime of the resources that enable him to wage war and abuse his own people even if that imposes costs on Western economies." I suspect that sanctions, such as the ones The Economist calls for, will hurt the most vulnerable in Russia's population. I think there is something of a consensus that Putin believes that Russia ought to be an imperialist nation, and he craves to be a large player on the world stage, such that Russia is respected as a world-class power. Is it possible that the snubbing of Russian performances will have no effect on Putin?
41:22: Biden's State of the Union address
This week's links:
"Congress Tees Up a Plan To Seize Russian Yachts and Properties in the US — and Sell Them for Ukraine Aid," by Juliana Kaplan, Ben Winck, Joseph Zeballos-Roig, and Hillary Hoffower "International Cat Federation Bans Russian Cats From Competition," by Jennifer Hassan
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Audio production by Ian Keyser Assistant production by Adam Czarnecki Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Should the United States do more to support Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders? Will financial sanctions against Russia work and are they moral? What does a libertarian foreign policy predicated on "realism and restraint" look like?
Today's guest on The Reason Interview is Will Ruger, the newly appointed president of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), who holds a Ph.D. in politics specializing in foreign policy. He's a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and was a prominent voice in calling for U.S. withdrawal. Ruger was nominated to be ambassador to that country late in the Trump administration (his confirmation was never brought to a vote).
He's a proponent of what he calls "libertarian realism" when it comes to foreign policy, meaning that America's interventions abroad should be focused on defending a narrowly defined national interest and that the use of military force should be strictly subjugated to diplomacy. Ruger is skeptical that the United States can or should play a leading role in defending Ukraine and he doesn't think sanctions are likely to accomplish anything, especially in the short run.
We talk about all that, how NATO, the European Union, and China figure into current events, and what he plans to do as the head of AIER, one of the oldest free market think tanks in the country.
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Reason editors Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Peter Suderman discuss the world's reaction to the ongoing Russian invasion as well as what they'd like to hear in President Joe Biden's SOTU speech.
Discussed in this show:
3:23: The world reacts to Russia's invasion.
44:15: Weekly listener question: I've been an avid Reason fan for over a decade, and as a result, I now implicitly trust Reason. While I know that Reason speaks to issues from a certain point of view, I feel like I "know" the four of you and the magazine generally well enough to trust that there is no nefarious or otherwise deceptive intent behind what you provide. Which individual journalists or outlets do you all implicitly trust in this way? Obligatory mention of Peter and cocktails. Thanks.
59:41: President Biden's State of the Union
This week's links:
"EU Moves Toward Ousting Russia From SWIFT As German Shifts," by Alberto Nardelli, Milda Seputyte, John Follain, Arne Delfs David French Jack Shafer Michael Powell Timothy Garton Ash Doug Arellanes "A Year Ago, the Media Mangled the Covington Catholic Story. What Happened Next Was Even Worse." by Robby Soave
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
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Are platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram harming Americans in ways that government regulation could help correct?
On Thursday, February 17, Jonathan Haidt and Robby Soave had an Oxford-style debate on the role of government regarding social media before a capacity crowd at the Sheen Center in downtown Manhattan. It was hosted by the Soho Forum, a monthly debate series sponsored by Reason. Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein served as moderator.
Haidt, professor of ethical leadership at New York University and co-founder of Heterodox Academy, defended the debate resolution, "The federal government should increase its efforts to reduce the harms caused by social media."
Soave, who took the negative, is a senior editor at Reason and author of the recently published Tech Panic: Why We Shouldn't Fear Facebook and the Future. He argued that widespread criticisms of social media stem from our innate—and misguided—distrust of new technology. Soave also contended that, for all its flaws, social media confers huge net benefits, and that the application of "government force" is likely to do far more harm than good.
Haidt, author of a recent article in The Atlantic on social media's harm to mental health, pointed out that while the platforms were not initially designed for people under 18, those individuals have arguably been its victims. Haidt likened the platforms to sugar—best taken in moderation.
Narrated by Nick Gillespie. Edited by John Osterhoudt.
Is libertarianism a specifically political philosophy whose only legitimate concern is the role of the state and its use of force vis a vis the people it rules?
Or does libertarianism, properly understood, also entail a variety of cultural commitments that range far beyond arguments over the size, scope, and spending of government?
To put it slightly differently: Can you really be a libertarian in the streets but an authoritarian or progressive in the sheets?
That's the starting point of "Two Libertarianisms," a trenchant essay by Stephanie Slade that appears in the April 2022 issue of Reason (subscribe!). She's a senior editor at Reason and a student of the libertarian movement's often fractious relationships with conservatives and religion.
For today's Reason Interview, I talk with her about "thick" vs. "thin" libertarians, her background in political polling and growing up in the great state of Florida, and her ideas about the compatibility between Roman Catholicism and libertarianism.
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With Matt Welch out, Peter Suderman hosts John Osterhoudt, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie on their thoughts on Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the reactions to it across the political spectrum.
Discussed in this show:
0:34: Russia's invasion of Ukraine
35:12: Blue state's rolling back mask mandates
50:16: Weekly listener question: Hi Roundtable! Misery loves company. As such, I would love to find like-minded liberty-loving individuals to commiserate within my very blue Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Of course, I do my share of screaming into the Twitter void (@nwwong) but want to build out my network of local libertarians to discuss more specific issues, how to tackle them, and even possibly launch a campaign for a local office. I'm hesitant to join the party, as I believe it would make things harder if I ever decided to run for a seat in MA; so what is another way to find friends short of "Tinder for Liberals"? Thanks, and keep up the great work!
This week's links:
"Why Ukraine Is Different," by David Leonhardt "Florida governor signs sweeping laws against vaccine, mask mandates," by Alex Pickett "This Texas Town Rejected Stimulus Money to Avoid Vaccine Mandates," by John Osterhoudt (Video) "Artist Ai WeiWei Warns of Chinese and American Authoritarianism," by Meredith Bragg (Video) "Populist Flamethrowers Rock Media" by Neal Rothschild and Sara Fischer
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
We all want to make sure our family is protected in a medical emergency. What many of us don't realize is that health insurance won't always cover the full amount of an emergency medical flight. Even with comprehensive coverage, you could get hit with high deductibles and co-pays. That's why an AirMedCare Network membership is so important. As a member, if an emergency arises, you won't see a bill for air medical transport when flown by an AMCN provider. Best of all, a membership covers your entire household for as little as $85 a year. If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online.
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In Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, the Danish activist and scholar Jacob Mchangama argues there has always been a tension between "elite speech" and "egalitarian speech" and that today's battles over Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are the latest in a long line of attempts by the powerful to silence the masses.
The 43-year-old founder of the think tank Justitia tells me how the "Danish cartoon controversy" intensified his commitment to free speech, why hate speech laws empower authoritarians and hurt the people they are designed to protect, and why he's optimistic that the current global "free speech recession" will be eventually be beaten back.
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Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie talk about the ongoing protests in Ottawa, the Super Bowl, the next framework for political engagement, and more on this Monday's Reason's Roundtable.
Discussed in this show:
2:15: The reopening of the Ambassador Bridge amidst the ongoing trucker protests.
32:23: Weekly listener question: My vaccination status notwithstanding, I am mandate-hesitant and am reluctant to trust Drs. Fauci and Wallensky most of the time. I would like to hear the panel's thoughts on the Johns Hopkins meta-analysis report that was released last week, indicating lockdowns had provided a .2% effect on mortality and suggesting they should be avoided to combat this virus. My frustration is that this report was virtually buried by most left-leaning media, and probably oversimplified by the right. Does the panel think this study should have got more play or did it have flaws in their analysis?
40:32: The current state of political engagement and its future.
45:46: Media recommendations for the week. (And click here for all of the Roundtable's media recommendations, ever.)
This week's links:
"The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium," by Martin Gurri "Justin Trudeau Condemns Convoy Protesting Pandemic Restrictions" by Dan Bilefsky and Vjosa Isai NBC News Exclusive: One-on-one with President Biden "WATCH: Boston Dynamics Robots Dance, Drink Beer In Super Bowl Ad With Sam Adams." "Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg headline hip-hop halftime show as Eminem takes a knee." by Caryn Ganz Aaron Ginn Twitter
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsor:
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Though he's black and proud of it, libertarian school-choice activist Chris Stewart isn't celebrating Black History Month this February.
Instead, he's pushing what he calls "Uncomfortable History Month," or an embrace of teaching the past in all its contradictions, hypocrisies, and triumphs. At his Substack, a free mind, he tells the story of Mary Turner, a 21-year-old pregnant woman who was lynched in Georgia in 1918 for daring to protest the lynching of her own husband. When a statue honoring Turner was erected in 2010, vandals shot it up.
Turner's story is the sort of brutal incident whose telling is threatened by nearly 90 proposed local and state education laws—Stewart calls them "gag orders"—that would ban schools from teaching the grisly particulars of American history, including state-sanctioned and state-tolerated violence against racial, sexual, and other minorities. The former St. Paul, Minnesota school board member and current head of school-choice organization brightbeam has a radical vision for educational reform in which public funding follows K-12 students and parents freely choose among public, private, secular, and religious institutions that would teach radically different curricula.
That vision flows directly from Stewart's libertarian philosophy: The "cardinal rule is that the rights of individuals will not be infringed upon by anyone." He fears that the enormous advantage handed to reformers in the wake of the failed K-12 response to COVID-19 lockdowns is being squandered on culture war battles that have more to do with helping Republicans get elected by denouncing Critical Race Theory than with fundamentally changing the way schools work.
In a wide-ranging discussion, we talk about the failure of the libertarian movement to win over blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities who should rally to our critique of state power and support for criminal justice reform. Stewart also details his problems with the progressive left, how he moved from Ralph Nader to Jesse Ventura to libertarianism, and why he thinks laws criminalizing speech are always and everywhere wrong. He discusses the origins and aims for Eight Black Hands, his weekly podcast featuring conservative, liberal, progressive, and libertarian black men talking about public education and private responsibility.
Today's sponsor is The Long Time Academy, a podcast about being a better ancestor.
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Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie gather to discuss (and debate) takeaways from the Ottawa trucker protests, U.S. foreign policy, and the Olympics. All this and more on this Monday's Reason Roundtable.
Discussed in the show:
1:45: Protests in Ottawa, GoFundMe's response, and Joe Rogan.
32:50: Weekly listener question: While I very much agree that the U.S. shouldn't be the world's police vis-à-vis random dictators doing evil things to their citizens, I'm less convinced that we should withdraw from all great power competition as many libertarians wish. If Jo had won in 2020, what would stop Xi from, say, declaring ownership of the South China Sea and dominating or even invading Japan/Taiwan/Australia? How are we better off if Putin can occupy Estonia and Poland because he feels like it?
47:54: Why the Olympics aren't doing as well this year.
52:39: Media recommendations for the week. (And click here for all of the Roundtable's media recommendations, ever.)
This week's links:
"GoFundMe Rejects Fundraising for Canadian Freedom Convoy," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown. (If you want to receive this daily newsletter, Reason Roundup, in your inbox, subscribe here.) "Stephen Wertheim: 9/11, Afghanistan, and Failed Foreign Policy" (podcast) "Pelosi warns US Olympians not to speak out against Chinese abuses while in Beijing," by Jerry Dunleavy "Wikipedia and Beyond," by Katherine Mangu-Ward "UPDATED!: An Incomplete List of Why Nobody Really Gives a Shit About the Olympics Anymore," by Nick Gillespie
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
We all want to make sure our family is protected in a medical emergency. What many of us don't realize is that health insurance won't always cover the full amount of an emergency medical flight. Even with comprehensive coverage, you could get hit with high deductibles and co-pays. That's why an AirMedCare Network membership is so important. As a member, if an emergency arises, you won't see a bill for air medical transport when flown by an AMCN provider. Best of all, a membership covers your entire household for as little as $85 a year. Now, as a listener of our show, you'll get up to a $50 Visa or Amazon gift card when you become an AMCN member. Simply visit AirMedCareNetwork.com/reason and use the offer code REASON. If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online.
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On today's show, I talk with writer Kat Rosenfield, whose new mystery novel No One Will Miss Her has been nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe award, the highest honor in that genre.
She also authored a fantastic recent essay for Reason about the immense cultural staying power of The Matrix, the 1999 movie that introduced the concept of being red-pilled, or made aware of the dark ways the world and power really work. "It's hard to overstate the long-tail impact of The Matrix on popular and political culture," she writes. "It has left a vast imprint on everything from action movies to fashion to how we understand technology."
We talk about No One Will Miss Her, The Matrix, and the raging controversy she's found herself in after going on CNN to critique legacy media's attacks on podcaster Joe Rogan for spreading misinformation about Covid-19. Despite her critical comments about the way CNN and other outlets were demonizing Spotify and podcasting, rabid and profane Rogan fans started attacking Rosenfield as if she was sticking up for old media.
The result is a dark—even dank—look at how rapidly discourse degenerates on social media. And a fun, rollicking conversation about if and when public discourse is going to improve any time soon.
Today's sponsors include The Long Time Academy, a podcast about being a better ancestor, and Better Help, a licensed, online therapy service (click here to get 10 percent off your first month as a Reason Interview listener).
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This Monday The Reason Roundtable's Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie gather together to discuss the upcoming Supreme Court appointment, Neil Young leaving Spotify, and why they all live in libertarian-unfriendly cities.
Discussed in the show:
2:06: Supreme Court and identity politics.
17:47: Neil Young's ultimatum with Spotify.
41:45: Weekly listener question: I'm a pretty radical libertarian; living in NY/DC/California is my personal nightmare. Why do you guys live there? Are there important journalism reasons? How do you feel about the idea of "voting with your feet?" Extra bonus points if Suderman can answer without using the phrase "cocktail bar."
52:43: Media recommendations for the week. (And click here for all of the Roundtable's media recommendations, ever.)
This week's links:
"It's Time for an Honest Conversation About Affirmative Action," by Jay Caspian Kang Tulsi Gabbard's mentioned tweet "Spotify's Platform Rules and Approach to COVID-19," by Daniel Ek "My My, Hey Hey, Neil Young's Songs Are Here To Stay (Just Not on Spotify)," by Nick Gillespie "Challenging Affirmative Action and Gerrymandering: AEI's Edward Blum," by Anthony Fisher Kat Rosenfield's mentioned tweet Joe Rogan's mentioned IG post Kenny Xu: The Growing Attacks on Asian American Excellence (podcast) Challenging Affirmative Action and Gerrymandering: AEI's Edward Blum (video) Peter Suderman's cocktail substack
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
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2021 was "the year of school choice, and we're just getting started," says Corey DeAngelis, national director of research at the American Federation for Children and a leading advocate for school choice.
The disruption to schooling caused by COVID-19, demands by teacher unions for more money and less accountability, and the mounting frustration of parents over everything from failed attempts at distance learning to medically dubious mask mandates have created the greatest opportunity for radical K-12 education reform in American history. Last year, 18 states either expanded or created new school-choice options, from publicly funded charter schools to education savings accounts to voucher programs. The percentage of households saying they are homeschooling their kids more than doubled from 5.4 percent in 2020 to 11.1 percent in 2021.
I talked with DeAngelis about what reforms have already been passed, what fixes are coming next, and what barriers need to be smashed in order to deliver on the promise of a quality, individualized education for every kid in the country. We discussed why he is against state-level laws banning Critical Race Theory (CRT) and other controversial pedagogies, why he believes Republicans are the party of school choice, and why he thinks parents should lobby state legislatures rather than local school boards if they want real choice for their kids.
This episode is supported by The Long Time Academy, a new podcast about how to be a good ancestor. It's a show about time, and how we think about time. The Long Time Academy is an audio documentary, but it also includes with practical exercises designed to expand your sense of time and help you be a good ancestor. Search for The Long Time Academy anywhere you listen to podcasts. Life is short. Time is long. The Long Time Academy.
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This Monday, Peter Suderman hosts Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and special guest Reason Senior Editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown! The Reason Roundtable discusses Joe Biden's first year as president and National School Choice Week.
Discussed in the show:
1:56: One year of Joe Biden's presidency.
16:47: Congress' antitrust push.
34:34: Weekly Listener Question: So in a perfect world where the quality and safety of most schools available to a specific parent were commensurate, what criteria would they default to when choosing one? Specialty classes and opportunities would certainly be one of them but would many not desire for their children to be in an environment where people shared the same values or with other children "like them"? Whether this be based on race, class, political affiliation, or some other trait, in our hyper-polarized environment, could you imagine a world where parents and students self-segregate? While I firmly believe in the merits of individual choice, I also want to see a world where children of all backgrounds interact and learn from each other's experiences. Diversity of class, race, and thought are essential for this to take place and to stop this worrying trend of polarization. While they've proven inordinately bad at providing equal opportunities to all students, public schools do in many cases force students of different backgrounds into the same building, which has its benefits. Am I being misanthropic here? Is there reason to believe that changing the system would also change the choice-making dynamic among parents for the better?
46:05: Joe Biden is thinking about moving warships to Eastern Europe.
50:55: Media recommendations for the week. (And click here for all of the Roundtable's media recommendations, ever.)
This week's links:
"Biden's Boring First Year," by Katherine Mangu-Ward "Anti-Tech Antitrust Bill Draws Criticism From All Sides," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown "Biden Weighs Deploying Thousands of Troops to Eastern Europe and Baltics," by Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt "The Biggest Education Innovation Is Growing Use of School Choice," by J.D. Tuccille
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
This episode is supported by The Long Time Academy, a new podcast about how to be a good ancestor. It's a show about time, and how we think about time. The Long Time Academy is an audio documentary, but it also includes with practical exercises designed to expand your sense of time and help you be a good ancestor. Search for The Long Time Academy anywhere you listen to podcasts. Life is short. Time is long. The Long Time Academy. If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online.
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The history of censorship in the United States is a long and ugly one—and far from over. It's also a deeply ironic tale, with seemingly successful attempts to stamp out unwanted expression ultimately giving way to more and more freedom of speech.
In The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder, legendary First Amendment lawyer Robert Corn-Revere documents how attempts by legendary censors such as Anthony Comstock (the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, whose name became synonymous with priggishness), Fredric Wertham (the communist-friendly psychiatrist whose crusade against comic books changed the publishing industry), and Newton Minow (the sainted FCC chairman who memorably—and incorrectly—denounced television as a "vast wasteland") ended up creating backlashes that undermined their attempts to control what Americans could read, watch, and listen to.
Corn-Revere tells me that although no one cops to being a censor these days, attempts to delegitimate the First Amendment are everywhere around us, especially when it comes to limiting speech in the name of supposedly protecting the feelings of religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities. "If you look at the history of this, you find it is the protection of individuals' speech rights that has made all of the mass movements by minorities and previously marginalized people possible," says Corn-Revere. "There wouldn't have been a gay rights movement or a women's movement. Certainly the civil rights movement was a defining time for protecting the speech of individuals."
He also talks about worrying shifts away from robust defenses of the First Amendment among Millennials and Gen Z, why every plan to put elected officials in charge of speech would be worse than trusting the relatively unregulated marketplace of ideas, and why he's ultimately optimistic about the future of free expression.
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The Reason Roundtable's Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie discuss the new COVID-19 variant and their predictions for 2022.
Discussed in the show:
1:32: Reflections on President Joe Biden's Atlanta speech and his presidency so far.
31:26: Weekly listener question: My fellow social studies teachers and I have created a media literacy unit for our seventh-graders, but we're struggling to winnow down the endless topics and skills that fit in this category. We can also tell some stuff is too complex for that age group. So I'm curious what y'all think would be the most important topics or skills to cover in a unit like that?
43:38: Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and mask mandates.
50:18: Media recommendations for the week. (And click here for all of the Roundtable's media recommendations, ever.)
This week's links:
"Remarks by President Biden on Protecting the Right to Vote" (transcript) "Citing Debunked CDC Research, Virginia School Districts Vow To Defy Youngkin on Mask Mandates," by Robby Soave "Poll: Democrats Drop and Republicans Rise, but the Real Juice Is With the Independents," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown "'Don't Declare a Mandate. Because You Don't Have One.'," by Nick Gillespie "Joe Biden's $11 Trillion Plan To Bankrupt America" (video)
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
We all want to make sure our family is protected in a medical emergency. What many of us don't realize is that health insurance won't always cover the full amount of an emergency medical flight. Even with comprehensive coverage, you could get hit with high deductibles and co-pays. That's why an AirMedCare Network membership is so important. As a member, if an emergency arises, you won't see a bill for air medical transport when flown by an AMCN provider. Best of all, a membership covers your entire household for as little as $85 a year. Now, as a listener of our show, you'll get up to a $50 Visa or Amazon gift card with a new membership. Simply visit AirMedCareNetwork.com/reason and use offer code REASON. This episode is supported by The Long Time Academy, a new podcast about how to be a good ancestor. It's a show about time, and how we think about time. The Long Time Academy is an audio documentary, but it also includes with practical exercises designed to expand your sense of time and help you be a good ancestor. Search for The Long Time Academy anywhere you listen to podcasts. Life is short. Time is long. The Long Time Academy.
Audio production by Ian Keyser Assistant production by Regan Taylor Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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On December 17, 2021, San Francisco Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in the city's Tenderloin district, which will lead to an increased police presence in the epicenter of the city's growing homelessness and addiction crisis.
"It is time for the reign of criminals to end," she said in a press conference. "It comes to an end when we are more aggressive with law enforcement & less tolerant of all the BULLSHIT that has destroyed our city." It was a sharp turnaround for Breed, who after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 called for "ending the use of police in responding to non-criminal activity."
Breed was roundly criticized by progressive politicians and groups like the Coalition on Homelessness, who castigated the move as an "expansion of strategies that have been tried and failed" that would contribute to the "instability and poor public health outcomes" of people living on the streets.
Michael Shellenberger, the author of the controversial new book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, has called Mayor Breed's new "tough love" approach a "big step in the right direction." Better known as a pro-nuclear-power environmentalist, Shellenberger appeared on The Reason Interview in July 2020 to discuss his book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
Today, Shellenberger talks with guest host Zach Weissmueller about the homelessness crisis in America's big cities, which the environmentalist says is actually an addiction-and-mental-health crisis enabled by progressive policies that permit open-air drug scenes on public property, prevent police from enforcing the law, and undermine the creation of a functional mental health system. Zach talks with Shellenberger about his foray into social policy, his critiques of both progressive and libertarian politics, and how he thinks America's big cities can clean up their streets without grossly violating civil liberties.
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Get your weekly dose of libertarian commentary from The Reason Roundtable, with Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and special guest Christian Britschgi. Today they reflect on January 6, unemployment rates, and the podcast itself.
Discussed in the show:
1:57: A look back on the one-year anniversary of the Capitol riot.
22:17: What's happening with the jobs report? The unemployment percentage is low…but so is the number of jobs.
34:21: Weekly Listener Question: I really love the podcast but I wonder if you realize how large your blindspot is when it comes to rural and blue-collar liberty lovers?
48:07: Media recommendations for the week. (And click here for all of the Roundtable's media recommendations, ever.)
This week's links:
"Was the Capitol Riot Really the Opening Battle of a Civil War?" by Jacob Sullum "The End of Farming," by Ron Bailey "Jobs Created By President" chart (Instagram)
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
This episode is supported by The Long Time Academy, a new podcast about how to be a good ancestor. It's a show about time, and how we think about time. The Long Time Academy is an audio documentary, but it also includes with practical exercises designed to expand your sense of time and help you be a good ancestor. Search for The Long Time Academy anywhere you listen to podcasts. Life is short. Time is long. The Long Time Academy. If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online.
Audio production by Ian Keyser Assistant production by Regan Taylor Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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"About three times as many Europeans leave their homelands and immigrate to the United States every year as the other way around," reports David Harsanyi. Yet "a growing number of American elites—politicians, academics, pundits, journalists, among others—argue, with increasing popularity, that we should look across the Atlantic for solutions to our most pressing problems." Figures such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman want us to follow Europe's lead when it comes to healthcare, government spending, tax policy, business regulations, and restrictions on free speech.
In Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent, Harsanyi, a syndicated columnist and senior writer at National Review, documents how the United States is doing far better across a wide array of economic, cultural, and political indicators than Europe. It's a powerful argument that is as nuanced as it is polemical. For instance, he notes that Scandinavian countries are hardly as socialist as their American champions and critics both claim. He also notes that many nationalist conservatives seem hellbent on importing a loathsome blood-and-soil populism from Hungary and other European countries.
I talk with Harsanyi about all that and how his career—which includes stints at The Denver Post, Glenn Beck's The Blaze, and The Federalist—reflect massive changes in the media landscape and what it means to be on the political right (he considers himself a conservative with some libertarian leanings). Born in 1970 and raised in Queens and Long Island by Hungarian refugees from communism, he remains deeply critical of many of former President Donald Trump's protectionist policies while also freaked out by President Joe Biden's massive government spending.
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The Reason Roundtable is back! After a week off from being affected by the pandemic one way or another, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie discuss the new COVID-19 variant and their predictions for 2022.
Discussed in the show:
1:44: The new COVID-19 variant and the latest policy changes.
19:50: Weekly Listener Question: Help me understand something. Anthony Fauci is in charge of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. As such he has almost no statutory authority. He can't make anybody do anything. In his role as White House adviser his job is to dispense advice. That's it. He has the moral authority of someone who led his agency through the AIDS crisis and the intellectual authority of someone who has done actual science in service of human health, but he can't give an order that anyone has to obey. So why has Reason (maybe not all of its writers, but I'm lookin' at you Mr. Soave) jumped on the bandwagon to cast him as a comic book supervillain? There are people and agencies of the government that bear direct responsibility for obstructing solutions to this crisis and exploited it for political gain. Good on you for calling them on it. But why has this man become the target of choice for vilification, when really all he can do is make suggestions?
31:05: 2022 predictions!
57:34: Media recommendations for the week. (And click here for all of the Roundtable's media recommendations, ever.)
This week's links:
"CNN's Leana Wen: 'Cloth Masks Are Little More Than Facial Decorations,'" by Robby Soave "Against Faucism," by Robby Soave "Fauci Wants To Kick the Unvaxxed Off of Airplanes," by Matt Welch "RIP, 'Pandemic of the Unvaccinated,'" by Matt Welch "We Don't Know Why Murder Rates Spiked in 2020," by Brian Doherty "What's inside Tyler Perry's new $250M Southwest Atlanta movie studio?" by Sean Richard Keenan "The Matrix Resurrections Is Less a Sequel and More a Bizarre Thinkpiece About The Matrix's Legacy," by Peter Suderman
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
We all want to make sure our family is protected in a medical emergency. What many of us don't realize is that health insurance won't always cover the full amount of an emergency medical flight. Even with comprehensive coverage, you could get hit with high deductibles and co-pays. That's why an AirMedCare Network membership is so important. As a member, if an emergency arises, you won't see a bill for air medical transport when flown by an AMCN provider. Best of all, a membership covers your entire household for as little as $85 a year. Now, as a listener of our show, you'll get up to a $50 Visa or Amazon gift card with a new membership. Simply visit AirMedCareNetwork.com/reason and use offer code REASON. If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online.
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"More and more people are seceding from the pandemic, basically saying, 'Well, we've got a better idea of what the risks are for us personally. We now can calibrate…more of the risks that we want to take. As that happens, more and more people will be able to leave the pandemic behind as we go forward into the next year," says Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey, who has written provocatively that the pandemic will end when "we decide to stop paying attention to it." But will authorities at the local, state, and federal levels allow us to get back to our lives?
For the past two years, no topic has dominated our lives like COVID-19, the respiratory virus that has killed 820,000 Americans and triggered lockdowns at work and school, travel restrictions, vaccine and mask mandates, massive levels of new government spending during peacetime, and other big and small interventions into our everyday lives.
We've also responded to the pandemic with heroic measures such as the historically fast development and deployment of safe and effective vaccines and therapeutics and an increasingly healthy skepticism toward state power. In 2020, the first year of COVID, Gallup reported that fully 54 percent of Americans said the government should be doing more to solve our problems, only the second time in 30 years that a majority called for more state intervention. But after another year—and another unpopular president at the helm—the situation has reversed back to historical patterns, with 52 percent now agreeing that "the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses."
So how and when will the pandemic—and all the policies, good and bad, that have followed—finally end? I sat down with Bailey and Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum to talk about the uselessness of more lockdowns and mandates in the wake of ubiquitous vaccines, how the politicization of public health has rightly driven down trust in medical experts, the ongoing failure of the FDA and other government agencies to rise to the occasion, and the troubling turn of many people, including libertarians, into full-blown anti-vaxxers in the wake of so much misinformation coming from official sources and activists alike.
Sullum, who writes about public health, sounds a cautious note about the legacy of COVID-19. He says that COVID-19 is the sort of emergency—an airborne respiratory virus—that, from a libertarian perspective, government has a legitimate role in combating. But he worries that we'll forget how various levels of government overreached and exceeded legitimate functions of the state with no increase in positive outcomes. "We'll have more emergencies in the future," he says. "We could have a life that's just filled with these sort of rolling emergencies that justify what are no longer extraordinary exercises of power, but just [become] standard operating procedure. I don't think that adults will respond that way because they remember what it was like beforehand and they understood the transition. Younger kids might, if that's mostly what they've known. So I have a hope and a fear."
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"I am leaving New York City for Florida." wrote self-confessed "New York supremacist" and New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz in a widely circulated article for Fox News. She's not happy about it, but she's also not apologizing. What drove her out of the city she and her husband called home for decades was the arbitrary and capricious treatment of students, including her three young children, stuck in public K-12 schools during the pandemic. She's vamoosing "because they took away school during the pandemic and not enough of my fellow New Yorkers cared. I kept looking around at a civilization that does not value education. Or worse, values it for their own kids, in the form of private pods or putting them into open private schools, but won't fight for their less fortunate neighbors to have the same."
Markowicz is not alone. In 2020, some 320,000 people left New York City. Her family's destination is Florida, where the cost of living is cheaper and the schools—and just about everything else—have stayed open during much of the past two years.
Her story is representative of a large swath of refugees leaving big-population blue states for places like Texas and Florida. For the first in recorded history, California lost people year over year and a congressional seat. The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles reported that "51,108 New Yorkers moved to Florida between April 2020 and April 2021." The Sunshine State surpassed New York in population in 2014 and over the course of the decade between 2010 and 2020, it gained 14.6 percent in residents while New York scratched out a gain of just 4.2 percent, well below U.S. growth of 7.4 percent. The gap between the two states continues to grow, with Florida boasting 21.8 million people and New York at 19.8 million people in the latest Census data.
"It's ridiculous to live anywhere else," Markowicz tells Nick Gillespie. "But it turns out that the city hates children and I can't be a part of that anymore."
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It's a Reason Roundtable remix this Monday! With Matt Welch out, Peter Suderman fills in and leads Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Associate Editor Billy Binion through the latest news on the coronavirus, congressional drama, billionaires, pop culture, and more. You don't want to miss this.
1:45: Editor holiday plans in the face of the latest COVID panic.
19:31: Congressional update: Biden's Build Back Better stalling and Manchin's objections.
41:05: Weekly Listener Question: I have a theory (some might call it a conspiracy theory) that Elon Musk is gearing up to run for President in the 2024 election cycle. Would anyone on the Roundtable consider voting for Elon if he were to run for President, as a Republican, in 2024? Could his running for office potentially strangle Justin Amash's chances of being successful as the prospective Libertarian Party nominee?
54:55: Media recommendations for the week. (And click here for all of the Roundtable's media recommendations, ever.)
This week's links:
"Where I Live, No One Cares About COVID," by Matthew Walther "White House lights up Manchin after he crushes Biden's megabill," by Burgess Everett, Nicholas Wu, and Jonathan Lemire "Kim Kardashian's Love of Lower Taxes and Individual Rights Has Made Her Politically Homeless," by Billy Binion U.S. Billionaire Wealth Would Fund Government For Just 6 Months (video)
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Imagine an app where you can get unlocked access to reliable news sites. An app that filters out fake news and clickbait but still shows you every story from multiple perspectives to counter bias. Where good news, as in positive stories, is highlighted—so you don't become despondent. And where journalists dig through news from around the world to find stories you wouldn't normally see. That's what an innovative Australian startup called Inkl has come up with. The service unlocks more than $12,000 of premium news for $100 a year. If you go now to inkl.com/podcast, they'll give you an additional 25 percent discount, so you can get a whole year's worth of headache-free news for just $75. We all want to make sure our family is protected in a medical emergency. What many of us don't realize is that health insurance won't always cover the full amount of an emergency medical flight. Even with comprehensive coverage, you could get hit with high deductibles and co-pays. That's why an AirMedCare Network membership is so important. As a member, if an emergency arises, you won't see a bill for air medical transport when flown by an AMCN provider. Best of all, a membership covers your entire household for as little as $85 a year. Now, as a listener of our show, you'll get up to a $50 Visa or Amazon gift card with a new membership. Simply visit AirMedCareNetwork.com/reason and use offer code REASON.
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Is there a libertarian case for vaccine mandates?
George Mason University Law Professor Ilya Somin supports vaccine mandates in certain cases because he believes they're a relatively "small infringement on freedom" and are preferable to harm reduction strategies like mask mandates and lockdowns, which he sees as posing a greater threat to our liberties.
Angela McArdle, the chair of the Libertarian Party of Los Angeles County, says she'll "actively work to destroy any institution that tries to enforce a vaccine passport," and is currently launching legal challenges to overturn vaccine mandates in California and New York.
On September 8, Somin and McArdle went head-to-head at the Soho Forum in New York City. Somin took the affirmative, and McArdle the negative, on the resolution: While vaccine mandates are an infringement on freedom, some are justified due to their big payoff in lives saved.
The debate was moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein.
Narrated by Nick Gillespie. Intro edited by John Osterhoudt.
Photos: Brett Raney
Everywhere you looked this past spring, you saw stories about the preordained "hot vax summer" and "slutty summer" that was about to erupt in America like a long-simmering volcano of carnal desire.
Real and imagined experts predicted that single people, newly vaxxed and after a long, involuntary sexual pause due to COVID-19 lockdowns, would be on the prowl like some mix of the premenopausal Sex and the City girls, inmates freed after 18 months in solitary confinement, and the randy castaways of Love Island.
But like so many action films released in June, July, and August, the reality just didn't live up to the hype. While some observers say the reasons for "hot vax summer" going softer than Liberace at a speculum conference include the delta variant and the rise of online porn, Helen Fisher says it's simply because there's been a long, slow decline in one-night stands and hookup culture for years.
Fisher is an anthropologist who is the chief science adviser to Match.com, a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute, and the author of, most recently, a revised edition of Anatomy of Love (2016).
For each of the past 11 years, she's overseen Singles in America, an annual survey of more than 5,000 singles of every age, gender, and sexual orientation. Across the board, but especially among millennials and Generation Z, she says that "looks are out, emotional maturity is in. Stability is the new sexy." There are lots of reasons for this, but she cites younger people's interests in self-care as driving the changes along with the ever-rising options for women in education and work.
As women's status, earnings, and life opportunities have risen, says Fisher, they have become pickier about partners. Men, too, have changed, and are now more likely than women to say they want a long-term partner. They also want a partner who is well-educated, successful, and financially stable—the so-called George Clooney Effect. This new parity is reflected in one of the survey's most remarkable findings: An equal number of men and women say they faked orgasms in the past year.
Fisher talks with Nick Gillespie about the turn to what she calls "slow love" in an age of dating apps, the relief most men feel at not having to be the sole breadwinner, and why the rise of growing sexual opportunities is libertarian but not libertine.
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On this Monday's Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie dive into inflation, civil asset forfeiture, and the extradition of Julian Assange.
Discussed in the show:
1:36: Julian Assange and freedom of the press.
17:15: Inflation and the Biden administration.
32:39: Weekly Listener Question: I live in L.A. county, where the new D.A. has taken a lot of heat for decisions he has made related to charging and sentencing, or rather the lack thereof, of relatively minor crimes. I fully support bail reform and other causes George Gascón has implemented. Is he someone who has the right ideas but is in power at the wrong time? Or is it just human nature to take as much advantage of a system as we think we can get away with? Put another way, is the pandemic just making everyone crazy, or are certain criminal justice reforms destined to increase crime regardless of outside circumstances?
45:50: Civil asset forfeiture!
49:20: Media recommendations for the week. (And click here for all the Roundtable's media recommendations, ever.)
This week's links:
"Julian Assange Extradition Decision the Latest Blow to Freedom of the Press," by J.D. Tuccille "Few approve of President Biden's handling of inflation," by Mallory Newall and Hailey Foster "By Refusing To End Trump's Tariffs, Biden Is Making Inflation Worse," by Eric Boehm "Florida's Civil Asset Forfeiture Reforms Haven't Stopped the Shakedowns," by C.J. Ciaramella "The Civil Asset Forfeiture Racket," by A. Barton Hinkle
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Imagine an app where you can get unlocked access to reliable news sites. An app that filters out fake news and clickbait but still shows you every story from multiple perspectives to counter bias. Where good news, as in positive stories, is highlighted—so you don't become despondent. And where journalists dig through news from around the world to find stories you wouldn't normally see. That's what an innovative Australian startup called Inkl has come up with. The service unlocks more than $12,000 of premium news for $100 a year. If you go now to inkl.com/podcast, they'll give you an additional 25 percent discount, so you can get a whole year's worth of headache-free news for just $75. If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online.
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Kenny Xu is the president of the nonprofit Color Us United, which advocates "for a race-blind America" and the author of An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy. He's also a Robert Novak fellow at The Fund for American Studies.
Xu is the son of Chinese immigrants. Some of the most interesting parts of his book retell his experiences grappling with failing to live up to model-minority expectations. Just 24 years old, he writes passionately about the long history of legal discrimination against Chinese and Japanese people in America and what he says are increasingly harsh attacks on traditional definitions of merit and achievement that disproportionately hurt Asian Americans. He's a critic of Harvard's controversial admissions practices, which he says discriminate against Asians in an ill-fated attempt to pump up representation by blacks and Latinos.
In a fiery and intense conversation with Nick Gillespie, Xu also talks about the roles of religion and family in his life and the life of the Asian American community more broadly.
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Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie discuss a new vaccine mandate and a new abortion case at the Supreme Court in this Monday's Reason Roundtable.
2:14: Abortion at the Supreme Court.
19:07: Mayor Bill de Blasio expands the vaccine mandate to private sector jobs and to kids five and up.
32:20: Weekly Listener Question: Any plans to do any live tapings or special events with the Roundtable crew?
37:15: BONUS Second Listener Question: Why do you think it's important not just to celebrate the principles of liberty, but also to actually engage with things people create with their freedoms?
42:12: Media recommendations for the week. (And click here for all the Roundtable's media recommendations, ever.)
This week's links:
"#FedSoc2021 and Dobbs," by Josh Blackman "Without Promising Alternatives to the 'Viability' Rule, the Supreme Court Seems Inclined to Ditch Its Abortion Precedent," by Jacob Sullum "Dobbs and the Fate of the Conservative Legal Movement," by J. Joel Alicea "The Laissez Faire Origins of the Supreme Court's Abortion Precedents," by Damon Root "NYC Expands Vaccine Mandate to Whole Private Sector, Ups Dose Proof to 2 and Adds Kids 5-11," by Romney Smith and Tracie Strahan
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Imagine an app where you can get unlocked access to reliable news sites. An app that filters out fake news and clickbait but still shows you every story from multiple perspectives to counter bias. Where good news, as in positive stories, is highlighted—so you don't become despondent. And where journalists dig through news from around the world to find stories you wouldn't normally see. That's what an innovative Australian startup called Inkl has come up with. The service unlocks more than $12,000 of premium news for $100 a year. If you go now to inkl.com/podcast, they'll give you an additional 25 percent discount, so you can get a whole year's worth of headache-free news for just $75. We all want to make sure our family is protected in a medical emergency. What many of us don't realize is that health insurance won't always cover the full amount of an emergency medical flight. Even with comprehensive coverage, you could get hit with high deductibles and co-pays. That's why an AirMedCare Network membership is so important. As a member, if an emergency arises, you won't see a bill for air medical transport when flown by an AMCN provider. Best of all, a membership covers your entire household for as little as $85 a year. Now, as a listener of our show, you'll get up to a $50 Visa or Amazon gift card with a new membership. Simply visit AirMedCareNetwork.com/reason and use offer code REASON.
Audio production by Ian Keyser Assistant production by Regan Taylor Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Our beloved Reason Roundtable listeners did not hold back: per Reason tradition, they sent in questions (and one limerick) and editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch have now given their answers. This is all in the spirit of Reason's annual webathon, in which we try to persuade you to make a tax-deductible donation to the nonprofit foundation that publishes our work. In fact, an anonymous, generous donor offered to match the next $100,000 you give us! Or, bid now to win the first-ever Reason NFT, if that's more your thing.
What did the editors do as soon as they were vaccinated? Which fictional characters best represent them? Are there new Reason podcast shows on the horizon? Can Peter really segue almost anything into a Marvel reference? (Spoiler: Yes.) Cocktails, American literature, relationship advice (it is cuffing season after all) and more all right here on this special video podcast. Want to not just hear but also see the collective groan in response to the phrase "2024 election"? Check out the video version here. You definitely, maybe, possibly will be a better, smarter, more interesting, and maybe freshly date-able person after consuming this podcast. So please give us some money so we can do this all again next year, okay? Okay.
Cheers and libertarian love,
The Reason Roundtable
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With apologies to Elvis Presley: Can 75 million Kenny G fans be wrong to love the man who inspired the "smooth jazz" genre? That's the question at the heart of the brilliant new HBO documentary, Listening to Kenny G.
Best known for such instrumental hits as "Songbird" and "Silhouette," the saxophonist formerly known as Kenneth Gorelick has sold 75 million records since the 1980s and has recently enjoyed new fame by collaborating with such artists as Kanye West and the Weeknd. Yet one constant throughout his career has been the incredible amount of bile that jazz artists and critics have spewed his way.
Listening To Kenny G is, director Penny Lane tells Nick Gillespie, "an exploration of why Kenny G is the most popular and successful and best-selling instrumentalist of all time and why that success makes a certain subset of people like really mad." It's by turns funny and deep as jazz critics rail against the title character, who seems to take everything in stride.
Lane also talks about her previous documentaries, including Our Nixon (2013) and Hail Satan? (2019; watch a Reason interview about it here), why Errol Morris is her guiding light as a nonfiction filmmaker, and what she likes about Reason, which she started reading in college. "Society," she explains, "needs people who are annoying, who stand outside and say, yeah, but what about this? You know? I've always identified with that kind of personality."
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It's talk of lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccines this Monday with Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie. Deja vu? Nope, just the omicron variant. The editors also opine on school curriculum and Cyber Monday, all on today's Reason Roundtable.
2:18: How is the world reacting and how should the U.S. react to the new COVID-19 variant, omicron?
26:11: Weekly Listener Question: Starting this fall, students across the 23-campus California State University system are required to take an ethnic studies course in order to graduate. It's a result of A.B. 1460 which Gavin Newsom signed into law in August 2020. Students have a range of choices covering the historically disadvantaged points on the ethno-racial pentagon. However, all of these courses hew closely to a single state-defined model, so the course outcomes are largely the same. What's your take on a requirement that all graduates of a public university system take a specific course? Does your opinion depend on the content of the course, and if so, where do you draw the line? What's your opinion on the curriculum?
37:51: Reason Webathon details!
44:52: Thoughts on Cyber Monday, and the internet overall.
52:51: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"Omicron Is Coming. The U.S. Must Act Now," by Zeynep Tufekci "California State University now requires ethnic studies," by Mikhail Zinshteyn "'Woke Racism' Has Betrayed Black America" (video) "A Worrisome New COVID-19 Variant Identified in South Africa," by Ronald Bailey
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Imagine an app where you can get unlocked access to reliable news sites. An app that filters out fake news and clickbait but still shows you every story from multiple perspectives to counter bias. Where good news, as in positive stories, is highlighted—so you don't become despondent. And where journalists dig through news from around the world to find stories you wouldn't normally see. That's what an innovative Australian startup called Inkl has come up with. The service unlocks more than $12,000 of premium news for $100 a year. If you go now to inkl.com/podcast, they'll give you an additional 25 percent discount, so you can get a whole year's worth of headache-free news for just $75. If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online.
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Have you ever stopped to think about why all the food at the traditional Thanksgiving dinner gets put out at the same time? No courses and no servers—just a culinary dump of turkey and all the fixings onto the table and an ensuing feeding frenzy.
As food historian Rachel Laudan explains, both what gets eaten at Thanksgiving and how it gets served is no accident. When Thanksgiving became a national holiday back in 1863, the Cuisine and Empire author says, its creator explicitly conceived of the day as a repudiation of European customs, particularly those steeped in class-based French origins. Sarah Josepha Hale designed the standard Thanksgiving meal as an affirmation of our (small "r") republican virtues. Turkey was cheap to procure, pumpkin pie was easy to make, and cranberry sauce was a simple take on the fancy toppings typical in a French court.
The meaning of Thanksgiving has changed over the years—thanks in part to Julia Child's successful effort to democratize French cuisine—but even today, "nobody suggests adding truffles to your turkey," says Laudan, who wrote about the politics of Thanksgiving for the Boston Globe.
Back in 2016, Nick Gillespie interviewed Laudan about the meaning of Thanksgiving, why she is not a fan of "organic" food, and other aspects of culinary history. It's a great conversation that is every bit as filling as Thanksgiving—and a lot less coma-inducing—and Reason is happy to share it again on the eve of Thanksgiving in 2021.
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The United States Constitution explicitly calls for copyright and patent laws to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" by "authors and inventors." But would getting rid of all intellectual property laws actually encourage more creativity and innovation by inventors, writers, and artists?
That was the topic of a November 15 Soho Forum debate held in New York City.
Stephan Kinsella, who's spent 28 years as a practicing patent law attorney, argued in favor of the proposition that "all patent and copyright law should be abolished."
He believes that government-created intellectual property laws empower patent and copyright trolls and powerful corporate interests while limiting the free flow of information, thus reducing the rate of innovation and creativity.
Richard Epstein, the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, says that our current system isn't perfect but sees copyright and patents as a natural extension of private property rights and believes that it should be defended by libertarians accordingly.
The debate took place in New York City in front of a live audience and was moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein.
Narrated by Nick Gillespie. Edited by John Osterhoudt. Production by Caveat. Photos by Brett Raney.
Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie get meta on this Monday's Reason Roundtable, talking about how the media talked about the Rittenhouse trial. Plus, hear their thoughts on the various freedom indexes and Joe Biden's domestic agenda.
Discussed in the show:
1:42: The Kyle Rittenhouse results and media reactions.
32:08: Weekly Listener Question: How much stock do you put in the international rankings of freedom in the world put out by places like Cato, the Fraser Institute, Freedom House, The Economist, and Heritage?
38:09: The house passed Biden's domestic agenda.
51:14: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"The ACLU Thinks Kyle Rittenhouse's Civil Liberties Got Too Much Protection," by Robby Soave "A Reality Check for Progressives on the Rittenhouse Case," by David Bernstein "America Still Seen as Free in an Increasingly Unfree World," by J.D. Tuccille "House-Passed 'Build Back Better' Plan Aims To Curb Methane Emissions by Hiking Heating Prices," by Eric Boehm
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
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Imagine an app where you can get unlocked access to reliable news sites. An app that filters out fake news and clickbait but still shows you every story from multiple perspectives to counter bias. Where good news, as in positive stories, is highlighted—so you don't become despondent. And where journalists dig through news from around the world to find stories you wouldn't normally see. That's what an innovative Australian startup called Inkl has come up with. The service unlocks more than $12,000 of premium news for $100 a year. If you go now to inkl.com/podcast, they'll give you an additional 25 percent discount, so you can get a whole year's worth of headache-free news for just $75. We all want to make sure our family is protected in a medical emergency. What many of us don't realize is that health insurance won't always cover the full amount of an emergency medical flight. Even with comprehensive coverage, you could get hit with high deductibles and co-pays. That's why an AirMedCare Network membership is so important. As a member, if an emergency arises, you won't see a bill for air medical transport when flown by an AMCN provider. Best of all, a membership covers your entire household for as little as $85 a year. Now, as a listener of our show, you'll get up to a $50 Visa or Amazon gift card with a new membership. Simply visit AirMedCareNetwork.com/reason and use offer code REASON.
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In his bestselling new book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, New York Times columnist and Columbia University linguist John McWhorter argues that the ideas of Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and The 1619 Project undermine blacks by sharpening racial divides and distracting from actual obstacles to real progress.
Nick Gillespie spoke with the 56-year-old McWhorter about what white people get out of cooperating with an ideological agenda that casts them as devils, what black people gain by "performing" victimhood, and what needs to change so that all Americans can get on with creating a more perfect union.
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This Monday, your trustworthy libertarians Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie break down the significance of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, discuss the labor shortage, and divulge their personal standings on cryptocurrency. All this and more on today's Reason Roundtable.
Discussed in the show:
1:52: What are the takeaways from the Rittenhouse trial?
21:33: What is going on with the labor shortage, and what does it mean looking forward?
32:55: Weekly Listener Question: Over the past few years, I've become more persuaded that bitcoin represents a major increase in the potential for human freedom by giving anyone with an internet connection access to sound money. My question is this: Why don't you talk more about this? More often than not, when anyone on the podcast refers to a "libertarian moment," it sounds like it's with a "this ain't never gonna happen" eye roll—but what if bitcoin is the libertarian moment? Are you wary of contributing to the hype? Is there anything analogous to bitcoin that in the past promised so much but failed to deliver? Do any of you own any cryptocurrencies?
48:41: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"Climate Controls," by Gregory Benford "The Rittenhouse-Trial Judge Isn't a Trumpist," by Charles C.W. Cooke Bitcoin Is Protecting Human Rights Around the World (video) "Why the Prosecution of Silk Road Creator Ross Ulbricht is 'The Most Important Trial in America,'" by Nick Gillespie Sen. Cynthia Lummis: Why I'm All In on Bitcoin (podcast)
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
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If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online. Imagine an app where you can get unlocked access to reliable news sites. An app that filters out fake news and clickbait but still shows you every story from multiple perspectives to counter bias. Where good news, as in positive stories, is highlighted—so you don't become despondent. And where journalists dig through news from around the world to find stories you wouldn't normally see. That's what an innovative Australian startup called Inkl has come up with. The service unlocks more than $12,000 of premium news for $100 a year. If you go now to inkl.com/podcast, they'll give you an additional 25 percent discount, so you can get a whole year's worth of headache-free news for just $75.
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All respiratory pandemics follow a script, one that's as much social and political as it is medical or epidemiological, says Yale sociologist and medical doctor Nicholas Christakis, who has just released a new paperback edition of his authoritative book, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live.
In his conversation with Nick Gillespie, Christakis pulls no punches when slamming the failures of our politicians and public health officials to act quickly and speak honestly about the COVID-19 pandemic which has left 750,000 Americans dead.
As a newly minted member of the advisory council for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and a high-profile target of ultra-woke campus activists, Christakis talks about how COVID misinformation has also been spread by pundits and politicians who seem more interested in pushing ideology than science and why the best way forward—really, the only way forward—is through robust debate in the public square. He also argues that recent events on campuses—such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology canceling a talk by a scientist due to his critical views on affirmative action—underscore the need for a radical shift in favor of free speech at our colleges and universities.
Christakis previously appeared on The Reason Interview in April 2019, to discuss his book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society and his viral showdown with students over Halloween costumes. Listen to it or watch it here.
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In this week's Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie gather to berate one of the most expensive legislative packages in U.S. history and discuss some significant takeaways from last Tuesday's elections.
Discussed in the show:
1:52: That $2.1 trillion (yes, trillion) infrastructure bill that just passed.
20:35: Lessons from last week's elections.
29:05: Weekly Listener Question: I'm an attorney. All of my colleagues and I are fully vaccinated, yet we wear masks in the office. We are all required to be vaccinated. I hate it. Your response would be to find another job. I think Peter just had the audacity to suggest that switching employers is similar to going to a different restaurant because you don't like the spaghetti at the Olive Garden. For me, libertarianism is more than just a paradigm for government. It's a life philosophy. I am weary of the idea that anything goes, even if it's bad, as long as it only happens in the private sector. I am writing this email using a ridiculous pseudonym because I would not want my employer to know that I read and listen to Reason. They could fire me if they associate me with anything that looks un-woke; is this OK with you? Sure, I could quit my job. But any other job will have the same requirements. That doesn't really represent choice. Out here in the real world, you do not get to choose your job so easily. I do not have the option of being a professional libertarian. So I jab and mask, so I can keep making enough money to help my parents, no matter what I believe or what I wish to do with my body. This is OK with you?
41:53: The unveiling of the OSHA/vaccine mandate specifics.
51:58: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"Biden gets his 'infrastructure week,' crossing another goal off Trump's to-do list," by Matt Viser "Self-Cancellation, Deplatforming, and Censorship," by Nick Gillespie "These 6 House Democrats voted against the infrastructure bill. These 13 Republicans voted for it." by Annie Grayer "Here's what's in the bipartisan infrastructure bill," by Katie Lobosco and Tami Luhby "Congress Finally Passed Biden's Inefficient, Deficit-Hiking Infrastructure Bill," by Eric Boehm "The Details of OSHA's Vaccination Rule for Private Employees Suggest Several Ways It Could Be Vulnerable to Legal Challenges," by Jacob Sullum "They Just Keep Closing Schools and Mandating Masks," by Matt Welch
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
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Reason's December special issue marks the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. This story is part of our exploration of the global legacy of that evil empire, and our effort to be certain that the dire consequences of communism are not forgotten.
If the Soviet Union was notoriously incapable of producing blue jeans, smokeable cigarettes, and durable cars in the numbers its citizens craved, it was unrivaled at producing world-class chess grandmasters. From the end of World War II until the Evil Empire dissolved in 1991, all but one world champion—the American Bobby Fischer, who claimed the title in 1972 from one Soviet and surrendered it to another in 1975 when he refused to defend his crown—represented the USSR.
None was better than Garry Kasparov, who became world champion in 1985 at the tender, record-setting age of 22 and held the title until 2000. Widely considered the greatest chess player in modern history, he held the global top ranking for a total of 255 months between 1984 and his retirement in 2005.
Yet Kasparov was never a pliant supporter of the system that produced him—far from it. Born in 1963 to parents who were Jewish and Armenian, two minorities regarded as suspect, and raised in the relatively provincial city of Baku, Azerbaijan, he grew up feeling alienated from the Soviet Union's cultural and political centers in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Because of his chess prowess—which he emphasizes was greatly nurtured by the same government that immiserated and imprisoned so many of his countrymen—he was able to travel abroad for competitions, and he describes youthful trips to France and Germany as nothing short of revelatory. The casual "abundance" of what used to be called "the free world" "just felt different," he says. "I could immediately see the quality of life….It was different and it was more natural." Beyond the Iron Curtain, he encountered the anti-communist works of George Orwell and was able to read exiled dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn's suppressed indictments of totalitarianism.
Kasparov joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1984 but was critical of the regime during that decade. In 1990, he joined the Democratic Party of Russia and became increasingly outspoken in favor of human rights, representative democracy, and limited government. In post-Soviet Russia, he used his celebrity and influence to spearhead attempts to build civil society and conduct fair elections, emerging as a leading critic of Russian leader Vladimir Putin. He aborted a run for president in 2007 only after authorities made it impossible for his followers to meet. By the early 2010s, he had been arrested for participating in unauthorized anti-government demonstrations and was widely believed to be the author of a popular petition demanding Putin's resignation. Today he resides in New York City and Croatia with his wife and two of his children; they cannot return to Russia for fear of persecution.
Kasparov continues to lobby for freedom, in the former Soviet Union and beyond. Since 2011, he has served as the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, an organization that focuses on reform in closed societies such as North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and several former Soviet republics.
In September, Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with the chess grandmaster in New York about what it was like to be the beneficiary of a catastrophically failed Soviet system and what lessons the world—especially American democratic socialists—should remember three decades after its collapse.
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On this Monday's Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie cover even more disappointing details of the reconciliation bill.
Discussed in the show:
4:21: The bad policies in the "Build Back Better" bill.
19:07: The Virginia gubernatorial race: What's the significance of it being so close, so suddenly, and apparently a lot over education kerfuffles?
39:05: Weekly Listener Question: Is it consistent with libertarian principles to support public- or private-sector vaccine mandates that don't provide a reasonable accommodation for those that have legitimate concerns?
52:34: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"Biden's New Spending Framework Promises To Do Everything but Still Cost Nothing. That Doesn't Make Sense." by Eric Boehm "Joe Biden Will Let World Leaders Know He Wants To Spend a Lot of Money on Climate Change," by Christian Britschgi "Barack Obama Loves Children So Much He Wants to Make Daycare ALOT More Expensive," by Nick Gillespie "What it's like to be on the front lines of the school board culture war," by Anya Kamenetz "CNN Poll: Most Democrats favor a bigger bill on social safety net and climate," by Jennifer Agiesta and Ariel Edwards-Levy "'Parents' rights' is code for white race politics," by Juan Williams
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
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As anyone who is involved in drug policy can tell you, Afghanistan wasn't really America's longest war. That shady honor belongs to the war on drugs, which has been waged at the state, local, and federal levels for well over a century, even before President Richard Nixon officially declared in 1971 that he was starting "an all-out offensive" on the "drug abuse" he called "America's public enemy number one."
Yet it's obvious that the drug war is in fact winding down. In the 1990s, medical marijuana was legalized in various states. Now 16 states have legalized recreational marijuana, with more to come. Last fall, nine out of nine drug legalization or decriminalization measures passed at the ballot box, the use of MDMA to treat PTSD is in final clinical trials with the Food and Drug Administration, and there is an increasingly visible cultural shift that is welcoming to psychedelics and other mind-expanding substances. This November, LSD even comes to that safest of all cultural playgrounds, Broadway, with the musical Flying Over Sunset, a fictional account of a meeting between novelist Aldous Huxley, playwright/ambassador Clare Boothe Luce, and movie star Cary Grant, all of whom experimented with psychedelics in the late 1950s and early '60s.
Nick Gillespie's guest is the one person in the best position to explain and interpret the country's shifting attitudes toward drug prohibition and drug use. He's Ethan Nadelmann, the 64-year-old founder and former head of the Drug Policy Alliance, one of the oldest and most effective outfits fighting for pharmacological freedom. A former college professor who taught political science, Nadelmann brings together an academic's rigor and depth of knowledge with an activist's sense of urgency and energy (read a 1994 Reason interview with him conducted by Jacob Sullum).
Over the years, Nadelmann has allied and sparred with everyone across the political spectrum to make drug policy more humane and less punitive while also talking up the positives of responsible drug use. You can listen to him on his new weekly podcast Psychoactive, where recent guests have included psychedelic enthusiast and best-selling author Tim Ferriss, leading psychotherapist and psychopharmacologist Julie Holland, integrative medicine guru Andrew Weil, and advice columnist Dan Savage on "sex, drugs, and freedom."
This is a great and rollicking conversation about the past 40 years of drug laws and drug culture—and what comes next as America oh-so-slowly starts pulling out of its longest war.
Photo: Gage Skidmore.
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Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie discuss the thorny relationship between individual freedom and coronavirus policy. Plus some tax talk and reconciliation bill updates, all on this Monday's Reason Roundtable.
Discussed in the show:
0:32: Is refusing the vaccine equivalent to "exercising the freedom to kill people"? What at this point is the relationship between freedom and COVID-19 policy?
26:57: Weekly Listener Question: An argument against sales and value-added taxes is that they lead to higher costs of goods that low-income workers rely on. A simplistic viewpoint of taxes and economics dictates that all taxes are eventually paid by consumers. This view implies product prices are adjusted to maintain profitability regardless of whether the tax burden paid to the government is a multiplier on the compensation of labor, value added to the goods, or total sales cost. If that understanding is true, am I missing the argument that any of the taxes are more progressive or regressive on the basis of causing a higher cost of goods? A counterargument could be made that income taxes weigh compensation of labor more heavily against the value of materials when viewed as the total tax burden passed on to consumers. Since the ultra-wealthy don't rely on wages but rather on the growth in value of their businesses and investments, income taxes should affect the wealthy the least. Are these arguments wrong, and are there better arguments out there to help steer the left parties away from income taxes?
36:30: A tax on unrealized capital gains in the reconciliation bill? What could go wrong?
45:59: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"Media Try To Cancel In-N-Out Burger Over Refusal To Enforce San Francisco's Vaccine Passports," by Christian Britschgi "KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor: September 2021," by Liz Hamel, Lunna Lopes, Grace Sparks, Ashley Kirzinger, Audrey Kearney, Mellisha, Stokes, and Mollyann Brodie "No, Biden, This Is About Freedom and Personal Choice," by Nick Gillespie "When It Comes to Coronavirus, Nobody Knows Anything" (video) "Dems plan billionaires' unrealized gains tax to help fund $2T spending bill," by Patrick Reilly "Dems Try To Pass Off $10,000 IRS Reporting Threshold as Merely Going After the 1 Percent," by Matt Welch "The tax on unrealized capital gains," by Tyler Cowen
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
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Andrew Yang's run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination didn't last all that long, but his support for a universal basic income (UBI) pushed that arcane topic to the center of ongoing policy debates about how best to help Americans dislocated by technological and economic change.
The 46-year-old entrepreneur, who also ran unsuccessfully this year to become New York City's mayor, has a new book out. Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy, is part campaign memoir and part political manifesto in which he outlines the principles and policies he thinks are essential to making America once again a land of opportunity. To further his agenda, he has also launched the Forward Party, which proclaims it is neither left nor right in its mission statement.
"We can tell that the duopoly is killing us," says Yang. "It's turning us against each other. Political stress is at civil war levels. Political violence is becoming more and more of an inevitability." The Forward Party's core principles include pushing for open primaries and ranked-choice voting, creating a basic income for all citizens, promoting "human-centered capitalism," and infusing politics with "grace and tolerance."
He talked about all that—and how his agenda intersects with libertarian ideas—with Reason's Nick Gillespie.
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Bernie Sanders wants better press coverage of the Build Back Better bill? Ask and you shall receive, Sanders. Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie detail the most egregious parts of this giant pile of potential spending. Plus we talk about the Jones Act, all on this Monday's Reason Roundtable.
Discussed in the show:
1:05: The Roundtable sets the record straight after the official White House Twitter account claimed the "Build Back Better Agenda is $0."
33:07--: Weekly Listener Question: I am a Jones Act mariner. While I, and many other American merchant mariners, are pretty libertarian, the Jones Act is the third rail of the maritime industry and turns many mariners away from the libertarian movement (Cato, Ronald Reagan, and John McCain are not popular among Jones Act Mariners). While I agree with many reforms, like removing the U.S. shipbuilding requirement for Jones Act (that is, domestic) trade, I do not agree with removing the cabotage rules for domestic trade. Airlines, trucking, and trains all enjoy cabotage protections for domestic trade, but it seems that the sights are always on the Jones Act unfairly and the American Merchant Marine. What say you?
39:03: William Shatner went to space!
44:20: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"Biden Says $3.5 Trillion Reconciliation Bill Has a Price Tag of 'Zero.' That's Dubious," by Eric Boehm "Biden to GOP: 'Get Out of the Way, So You Don't Destroy' the Country," by Matt Welch a concerning tweet from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority "Heaton Fixes the Jones Act" (video) "Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho, Hollywood Hypocrisy, and the Excesses of #MeToo" (video) "How Government Devastated Minor League Baseball," by Matt Welch
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
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Living in a digital age where your personal data are always under attack, your online privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Did you know there is a way to protect your information and privacy without worrying about Big Tech mining and stealing your private data? Introducing Sekur—an encrypted instant messaging and secure email service hosted in Switzerland, where the world's strictest data privacy laws are applied. Take back your privacy and online security with Sekur, by going to Sekur.com. If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online.
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In the controversial yet bestselling books The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now, Harvard linguist Steven Pinker made the case that humanity has been getting richer and less violent over the past two centuries.
In his new book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, he argues that our ability to reason and think critically is central to human flourishing and undergirds our phenomenal material and moral progress since the Enlightenment. Pinker lays out the basic cognitive biases that cloud our thinking and give rise to intensely polarized and tribalistic worldviews that threaten continued advances. And he tells Reason's Nick Gillespie how all of us can become better, sharper thinkers in all aspects of our lives.
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On October 4, 2021, Bill Kristol, an editor-at-large of The Bulwark, went up against Scott Horton of the Libertarian Institute in an Oxford-style debate on U.S. foreign policy at Symphony Space in New York City.
Kristol was a leading proponent of the invasion of Iraq, the founding editor of The Weekly Standard, a foreign policy advisor to John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, and Chief of Staff to Vice President Dan Quayle.
Scott Horton is the author of Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism and Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. He's the editorial director of AntiWar.com and the host of AntiWar radio and the Scott Horton Podcast.
The debate was hosted by The Soho Forum, with director Gene Epstein moderating.
Narrated by Nick Gillespie. Thumbnail by Brett Raney.
Job numbers are lousier than expected, supply chains are wrecked across several industries, cargo ships are backed up in ports, and Biden is pulling a Trump by insisting we "buy American." On this Monday's Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie try to gauge what the heck is happening with the economy right now.
Discussed in the show:
1:09: Lousier-than-expected job numbers, supply chain failures, and cargo ships backed up. Is this all the new normal?
18:52: Workers' strikes in response to vaccine mandates conflict with Biden's pro-union agenda.
36:28: Weekly Listener Question: In regards to our country's budgeting process, when do each of you foresee the proverbial fiscal can getting kicked off the proverbial fiscal cliff resulting in a new fiscal reality being forced on all of us?
48:00: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"Inside America's Broken Supply Chain," by David J. Lynch "World leaders reach landmark deal on a global corporate tax rate," by Silvia Amaro The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America, by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch "Biden's labor secretary is stumped by the worker shortage," by Dan Primack "Fed to the lions: Jerome Powell's 'taper' chase may cost him his job," by Charles Gasparino
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
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Because of the war on terror, argues Rafia Zakaria, American feminism has been recast from a "movement that existed in opposition to the state, as a critique of its institutions and mores…[to] one that serve[s] the state's interests through any means imaginable." Nothing exemplifies this tragic turn better, she says, than the Oscar-winning movie Zero Dark Thirty, in which the female lead (played by Jessica Chastain) is exalted as a torturer who can more than keep up with her male colleagues when it comes to breaking the bodies of real and suspected terrorists.
In Against White Feminism, Zakaria makes the case that Western feminism has been mostly interested in achieving equality between white women and white men, often at the expense of black and brown people. After the 9/11 attacks, for instance, this led many feminist organizations to support the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and to push for top-down aid programs that didn't take into account what Afghan women actually wanted or needed.
It's a provocative book that critiques feminists from Simone de Beauvoir to Betty Friedan to Eve Ensler and forces a reevaluation of how best to empower all women around the globe, who are often struggling against sexism that is deeply entwined with state power.
Born in Pakistan and now living in the United States, Zakaria is the author of The Upstairs Wife and writes at Rafia (Unedited) on Substack. In 2017, Nick Gillespie interviewed her about her book Veil for Reason.
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This week on The Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie tackle the pending $3.5 trillion spending bill and the also-pending vaccine mandates for students under 12.
Discussed in the show:
1:23: The infrastructure bill that was supposed to be finalized last week (and why no one is talking about it).
22:54: Weekly Listener Question: I get that trains aren't the most efficient way of getting around and require massive tax hikes, eminent domain, etc., but I still want them. How do I reconcile that with being a libertarian? Why can't we get them in places besides New York City?
31:48: Gavin Newsom plans to add the coronavirus vaccine to the list of mandated vaccines for public schools—as soon as it's approved, that is.
49:56: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"What Americans Think About The Fight Over The Debt Ceiling," by Geoffrey Skelley and Mackenzie Wilkes "Joe Manchin Is Forcing Congress To Think About the Deficit. Good," by Eric Boehm "Joe Manchin Just Cooked the Planet," by Jeff Goodell "Vaccine Mandates Coming for K-12 Students," by Matt Welch "Public Health Officials Blew Up Their Credibility, and We're Paying the Price," by J.D. Tuccille
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online. Living in a digital age where your personal data are always under attack, your online privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Did you know there is a way to protect your information and privacy without worrying about Big Tech mining and stealing your private data? Introducing Sekur—an encrypted instant messaging and secure email service hosted in Switzerland, where the world's strictest data privacy laws are applied. Take back your privacy and online security with Sekur, by going to Sekur.com.
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What are the long-term psychological effects of growing up in a world where the 9/11 attacks and school shootings drastically restructured your childhood around overblown fears of random violence, where the Great Recession wiped out your parents' savings and the historically slow economic recovery hampered your job prospects for a decade, and where you were reminded every single day that the world only has a few years left before climate change makes the planet uninhabitable? And on top of all that, add increasingly intense political polarization, racial reckonings, and Covid-19?
Meet "Generation Disaster," the subject of a fascinating new book by State University of New York psychologist Karla Vermeulen. Subtitled Coming of Age Post 9/11, Generation Disaster is built around a massive national survey of people born between 1990 and 2001. Vermeulen looks at the cumulative impact of being raised in a relentlessly apocalyptic social and political environment, the role that Boomer and Gen X parents and authorities play in stoking anxiety, and how new forms of technology and media have influenced the worldviews of Millennials and Gen Z members roughly between the ages of 20 and 30.
In an era of mounting generational hostility, Karla Vermeulen is an essential mediator between older and younger Americans and her book, Generation Disaster, is a rich, empathetic portrait of a group too often simply—and wrongly—dismissed as weak, lazy, and entitled.
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On this Monday's Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie cover Biden's domestic agenda package, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and other ways D.C. exhibits dysfunction.
Discussed in the show:
1:49: Biden's domestic agenda package will allegedly cost "nothing."
27:46: The $778 billion NDAA illustrates D.C. dysfunction.
31:09: Weekly Listener Question: "While attending graduate school, it was obvious to me that people on both the left and the right have authoritarian tendencies. How do we as libertarians deal with people who can see bad instincts or tendencies in the other side but can't see those same instincts in themselves or their side? I feel like pointing out the hypocrisy won't be a productive approach, but haven't been able to come up with a way of bringing it up with friends and acquaintances who exhibit this behavior. What do you think?"
48:26: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"Biden Backs Tax on Billionaires' Unrealized Investment Gains," by Laura Davison "Biden defends his social agenda bill, saying the cost will be zero," by Seung Min Kim and Tony Romm "Democrats Don't Have a Filibuster Problem. They Have a Joe Manchin Problem," by Peter Suderman "The Experts Somehow Overlooked Authoritarians on the Left," by Sally Satel "Stealthily Wielding Caesar's Sword," by Stephanie Slade "Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks," by Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor, and Michael Isikoff
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Imagine an app where you can get unlocked access to reliable news sites. An app that filters out fake news and clickbait but still shows you every story from multiple perspectives to counter bias. Where good news, as in positive stories, is highlighted—so you don't become despondent. And where journalists dig through news from around the world to find stories you wouldn't normally see. That's what an innovative Australian startup called Inkl has come up with. The service unlocks more than $12,000 of premium news for $100 a year. If you go now to inkl.com/podcast, they'll give you an additional 25 percent discount, so you can get a whole year's worth of headache-free news for just $75. Living in a digital age where your personal data are always under attack, your online privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Did you know there is a way to protect your information and privacy without worrying about Big Tech mining and stealing your private data? Introducing Sekur—an encrypted instant messaging and secure email service hosted in Switzerland, where the world's strictest data privacy laws are applied. Take back your privacy and online security with Sekur, by going to Sekur.com.
Audio production by Ian Keyser Assistant production by Regan Taylor Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Everywhere you turn these days, big tech companies are under fire. Instagram's supposedly addictive and negative effects on teenage girls have lawmakers comparing its parent company Facebook to Big Tobacco.
Conservatives like Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) and Gov. Gregg Abbott (R-Texas) have signed controversial legislation banning social media platforms from suspending or moderating the accounts of political candidates. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas has suggested private businesses like Twitter and YouTube should be classified as common carriers, subject to strict regulation by the federal government.
Liberal legislators in Colorado have proposed creating a "digital communications commission" that would have the power to change how platforms do business in the name of fighting "hate speech" and "misinformation." Lawmakers in at least 38 states have introduced over 100 laws in the past couple of years to regulate online speech and related issues.
In his new book Tech Panic, Reason Senior Editor Robby Soave says such attacks are nothing more than modern-day witch hunts whose main accusations fall apart under even mild scrutiny. They are contemporary versions of past freakouts over video games, rock music, and comic books. "We shouldn't fear Facebook or the future," writes Soave. The actual threat, he says, comes not from private companies but from politicians, woke mobs, social conservatives, and activists whose real goal is to limit speech they don't like.
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Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie evaluate the border crisis and current state of immigration on this Monday's Reason Roundtable.
Discussed in the show:
00:02: Immigration crisis at the border: What is happening and what are we doing about it?
39:27: Weekly Listener Question: Where do you get your news?
00:45: California's recall process: any takeaways?
51:34: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"Biden's Plan To Crack Down on Tax Cheating: Snooping on Everyone's Bank Accounts," by Eric Boehm "Biden's 'incomprehensible' travel ban on European visitors widens transatlantic rift," by Adam Taylor "Secret Recordings Reveal Officials Discussing 'Filthy' Conditions of 4,632 Immigrant Kids Held in Texas Tent Camp," by C.J. Ciaramella "Gov. Newsom Poised To Hold Off Recall Effort," by Scott Shackford
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online. Living in a digital age where your personal data are always under attack, your online privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Did you know there is a way to protect your information and privacy without worrying about Big Tech mining and stealing your private data? Introducing Sekur—an encrypted instant messaging and secure email service hosted in Switzerland, where the world's strictest data privacy laws are applied. Take back your privacy and online security with Sekur, by going to Sekur.com.
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Do voter identification laws ensure secure and trustworthy elections, or are they a way for political parties to manipulate the democratic process in their favor?
At a September 8th debate in New York City hosted by the Soho Forum, Eliza Sweren-Becker from NYU's Brennan Center for Justice, argued that state legislators are using arbitrary rules to suppress the voting rights of vulnerable citizens.
The Heritage Foundation's Hans von Spakovsky countered that these rules are necessary to guarantee that every vote cast is valid, noting that in states where voter ID laws already exist, registration rates have risen.
This was an Oxford-style debate, in which the audience voted before and after the event to see which side swayed more people. It was moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein.
Narrated by Nick Gillespie. Audio edit by John Osterhoudt. Live production by The Sheen Center.
Photo: Anthony Behar/Sipa USA/Newscom
"Arguing about the nature of the country is as American as frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese," says the aspirationally acute 80-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner George Will, now in his sixth decade as a leading voice in debates over culture, politics, and ideas. "If you don't like arguing, you picked the wrong country."
In 1973, Will was a young academic coming off a stint as a Senate staffer when he began writing columns for National Review and The Washington Post. Since then he has churned out "6,000 or so" pieces (his count) on a weekly schedule, calling to mind the longevity and endurance of Cal Ripken, Jr., who played more consecutive baseball games than anyone in history and whose work ethic was lionized by Will in his 1990 bestseller, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball.
Will's newest book is American Happiness and Discontents, a collection of columns from 2008 to 2020 that covers the Great Recession and the Obama years to what he calls the crybaby presidency of Donald J. Trump and the rise of identity politics as a major force in contemporary America. Of special interest are his columns drawing complicated lessons from the World War II era, when the country triumphed over authoritarianism and genocide abroad even as it practiced racial apartheid at home. Will's analysis of and love for America is unabashedly patriotic but it is never jingoistic or untroubled by tough historical truths.
Though he started out firmly on the conservative right, Will has become more and more libertarian, especially in his insistence that mere politics should never be the all-consuming passion of human endeavor and that America remains a place dedicated to a future that is better than the present. "If we can rein in our appetite for government to dispense benefits," he says, and replace it with a government "that defends the shores, fills the potholes, and otherwise gets out of the way, we're going to see again, the creativity of the American people."
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On today's episode of The Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie commiserate over President Joe Biden's "path out of the pandemic" plan and the latest tax hike proposals.
Discussed in the show:
1:48: Biden's "path out of the pandemic."
26:33: Congress is back in session. Let's talk about these (ridiculous) proposed tax hikes and breaks.
39:27: Weekly Listener Question: As someone who entered the realm of libertarian ideals through growing up in endless wars on terror, drugs, and the like, how do I effectively teach these ideals to my coming child?
51:34: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"Update on required COVID vaccines for postal workers," by the Postal Times This tweet from Reason Reporter Eric Boehm on proposed environmental tax breaks "Let's Play Horseshoe Theory," by Katherine Mangu-Ward "House Democrats Ready Taxes on E-Cigarettes and Cryptocurrency," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown (today's edition of the Reason Roundup, our morning newsletter, which you can subscribe to here) "Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy," by Margaret Sullivan
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Imagine an app where you can get unlocked access to reliable news sites. An app that filters out fake news and clickbait but still shows you every story from multiple perspectives to counter bias. Where good news, as in positive stories, is highlighted—so you don't become despondent. And where journalists dig through news from around the world to find stories you wouldn't normally see. That's what an innovative Australian startup called Inkl has come up with. The service unlocks more than $12,000 of premium news for $100 a year. If you go now to inkl.com/podcast, they'll give you an additional 25 percent discount, so you can get a whole year's worth of headache-free news for just $75. Living in a digital age where your personal data are always under attack, your online privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Did you know there is a way to protect your information and privacy without worrying about Big Tech mining and stealing your private data? Introducing Sekur—an encrypted instant messaging and secure email service hosted in Switzerland, where the world's strictest data privacy laws are applied. Take back your privacy and online security with Sekur, by going to Sekur.com.
Audio production by Ian Keyser Assistant production by Regan Taylor Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded and occupied two countries, bombed four others, helped to create 21 million refugees and cause over 800,000 deaths, and spent over $6 trillion on combat and anti-terrorism measures.
In Reign of Terror, national security reporter Spencer Ackerman argues that the war on terror also profoundly destabilized American politics and helped to produce the Donald Trump presidency. He talks with Reason about how to stop the growth in government surveillance and military interventionism underwritten by overwrought fears of Islamic terrorism.
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On this week's edition of the Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie reflect on where they were on 9/11, the subsequent policy shifts we still see today, and the new Texas abortion law.
Discussed in the show:
1:08: How 9/11 influenced our lives.
29:50: Weekly Listener Question: Reason frequently makes the case that, "if Republicans do x, what's to stop Democrats from doing x against Republicans?" However, is that a good argument when Democrats are already doing what Reason claims Republicans should be worried about?
37:50: What the Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees' entitlement report tells us.
47:11: Media recommendations for the week.
This weeks links:
"Conservatives Should Worry About the Texas Abortion Law Too," by Damon Root "Rep. Peter Meijer Is 'Furious' at the White House's Afghanistan 'Lies'," by Matt Welch "Social Security Will Be Insolvent in 12 Years," by Eric Boehm "Key Medicare Fund Will Be Insolvent in Just Five Years," by Peter Suderman Plus, subscribe to Reason to get get an early read of Brian Doherty's October issue cover story on the Patriot Act.
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Living in a digital age where your personal data are always under attack, your online privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Did you know there is a way to protect your information and privacy without worrying about Big Tech mining and stealing your private data? Introducing Sekur—an encrypted instant messaging and secure email service hosted in Switzerland, where the world's strictest data privacy laws are applied. Take back your privacy and online security with Sekur, by going to Sekur.com. If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online.
Audio production by Ian Keyser Assistant production by Regan Taylor Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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"You don't get to lose a war and expect the result to look like you won it," says historian Stephen Wertheim of the violent and chaotic withdrawal of United States forces and personnel from Afghanistan. "Yet some in Washington are denying reality, calling for still more war and blaming Biden for their failure."
Wertheim is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, a study of how American strategists during World War II conflated military supremacy with internationalism, and a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
He talks with Nick Gillespie about how the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were doomed to failure from their earliest days, what policy makers should be focused on as we approach the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and why a fundamental rethink of U.S. military and foreign policy is not only urgent but, after a radical shift in public opinion, eminently possible.
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On the latest Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie talk about how to live with the coronavirus given what we've learned over the last two years.
Discussed in the show:
1:48: How can we learn to live with COVID-19?
20:34: Upcoming school policies under coronavirus.
33:07: Weekly Listener Question: Aren't you missing a huge opportunity to advance the party by not placing the blame for the Afghanistan fiasco squarely on the shoulders of the 97 percent of Americans who continue to vote for Democrats and Republicans?
42:28: Media recommendations for the week.
This weeks links:
"See the Data on Breakthrough Covid Hospitalizations and Deaths by State," by The New York Times "Society Will Never Be Free of COVID-19—It's Time to Embrace Harm Reduction," by Jeffrey A. Singer "K-12 School Reopening Trends," by Burbio "To Stop War, America Needs a Third Party," by Matt Taibbi "A Calif. elementary school teacher took off her mask for a read-aloud. Within days, half her class was positive for delta," by Ariana Eunjung Cha
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Imagine an app where you can get unlocked access to reliable news sites. An app that filters out fake news and clickbait but still shows you every story from multiple perspectives to counter bias. Where good news, as in positive stories, is highlighted—so you don't become despondent. And where journalists dig through news from around the world to find stories you wouldn't normally see. That's what an innovative Australian startup called Inkl has come up with. The service unlocks more than $12,000 of premium news for $100 a year. If you go now to inkl.com/podcast, they'll give you an additional 25 percent discount, so you can get a whole year's worth of headache-free news for just $75. Living in a digital age where your personal data are always under attack, your online privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Did you know there is a way to protect your information and privacy without worrying about Big Tech mining and stealing your private data? Introducing Sekur—an encrypted instant messaging and secure email service hosted in Switzerland, where the world's strictest data privacy laws are applied. Take back your privacy and online security with Sekur, by going to Sekur.com.
Audio production by Ian Keyser Assistant production by Regan Taylor Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its highly anticipated report on global warming in early August, U.N Secretary-General António Guterres declared it "a code red for humanity," insisting that "the alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk."
Guterres' "code red" language was echoed by many reporters and activists, some of whom called humanity "guilty as hell" of "climate crimes." Others prophesied that the climate news was only going to get worse and that we faced a choice of immediately passing the Green New Deal or death.
Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, thinks such reactions are not only wrong but "irresponsible." Pielke believes that temperatures are rising in response to human activity, but he also argues that the alarmism dominating the climate discussion is counterproductive. "Nowhere does the IPCC report say that billions of people are at immediate risk," he says, stressing the gap between what's actually in the report and the highly politicized way we discuss climate change. themselves."
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The original line-up is back! Matt Welch is joined by Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie to discuss the U.S. exit from Afghanistan and the FDA's full approval of Pfizer's vaccine. All this and more, on The Reason Roundtable.
Discussed in the show:
1:33: The U.S. military's withdrawal from Afghanistan.
23:30: The FDA fully approves the Pfizer vaccine. Does that mean employers can mandate the vaccine?
36:32: Weekly Listener Question: Why so glum, chums?
51:03: Weekly media recommendations.
This week's links:
"America's Disastrous Drug War Is Finally Unravelling" (video) "George Hotz: From Self-Driving Cars to Robots That Cook and Clean" (video) "Plastic, Perfected," by Ronald Bailey "Impending Defeat for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," by Ronald Bailey
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Living in a digital age where your personal data are always under attack, your online privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Did you know there is a way to protect your information and privacy without worrying about Big Tech mining and stealing your private data? Introducing Sekur—an encrypted instant messaging and secure email service hosted in Switzerland, where the world's strictest data privacy laws are applied. Take back your privacy and online security with Sekur by going to Sekur.com. If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online.
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Was President Joe Biden's withdrawal of United States troops and personnel from Afghanistan a poorly planned mistake or a long-overdue decision?
Scott Horton says it's the latter. He's the head of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, and the host of The Scott Horton Show podcast. Based in Austin, Texas, Horton is also the author of the new book Enough Already: Time To End the War on Terrorism.
Nick Gillespie talks with him about Biden's defense of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, why U.S. foreign policy has been a bipartisan disaster for all of the 21st century, and how a libertarian approach to both domestic and foreign affairs would make people better off all over the globe.
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With our regular host on vacation, Peter Suderman takes the lead on this Monday's Reason Roundtable, joined by Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and special guest Eric Boehm. The Reasoners reflect on the latest in Afghanistan, discuss deficits and infrastructure, and answer your questions about vaccine mandates.
Discussed in the show:
2:06: A debrief on the situation in Afghanistan
24:08: Last week was Infrastructure Week! Now what?
38:48: Weekly Listener Question: "Like many libertarians, probably including yourselves, I'm a vaccinated person who is opposed to the idea of government mandates to get vaccines and other medical interventions, where 'mandate' implies 'get it willingly, or armed agents of the state will come strap you to a table to administer it.' That idea doesn't seem to be gaining real traction in the states yet, but a rash of recent government decrees has me wondering how much choice people are really being given. First, we have governments acting in their capacity as employers to tell public employees 'get jabbed or get fired.' Second, we have the beginnings in NYC and L.A. of barring unvaccinated people from much of public life and business by government decree. Am I crazy to think these are just backdoor vaccine mandates, and if they are, how can libertarians push back on the notion that the mere lack of armed enforcement makes them OK?"
55:16: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"In desperation, U.S. scours for countries willing to house Afghan refugees," by Idrees Ali, Humeyra Pamuk, and Jonathan Landay "The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill Is a Sham," by Peter Suderman "A Black Market in COVID-19 Vaccination Cards Was Inevitable," by J.D. Tuccille "Can Private Employers Mandate COVID Vaccines?" by Josh Blackman
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Imagine an app where you can get unlocked access to reliable news sites. An app that filters out fake news and clickbait but still shows you every story from multiple perspectives to counter bias. Where good news, as in positive stories, is highlighted—so you don't become despondent. And where journalists dig through news from around the world to find stories you wouldn't normally see. That's what an innovative Australian startup called Inkl has come up with. The service unlocks more than $12,000 of premium news for $100 a year. If you go now to inkl.com/podcast, they'll give you an additional 25 percent discount, so you can get a whole year's worth of headache-free news for just $75. Living in a digital age where your personal data are always under attack, your online privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Did you know there is a way to protect your information and privacy without worrying about Big Tech mining and stealing your private data? Introducing Sekur—an encrypted instant messaging and secure email service hosted in Switzerland, where the world's strictest data privacy laws are applied. Take back your privacy and online security with Sekur, by going to Sekur.com.
Audio production by Ian Keyser Assistant production by Regan Taylor Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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The United States may be a secular nation but Congress has begun every session since before there was a Bill of Rights with a prayer. In When Rabbis Bless Congress, Howard Mortman explores that weird tradition while paying special attention to Jewish religious leaders whose first appearance came in early 1860, when the pro-slavery, Swedish-born Morris Jacob Raphall addressed Congress weeks before Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president. Raphall's exotic garb and anodyne invocations of divine blessings were received warmly by both Southern members and The New York Times.
"This is a book for lovers of congressional history, for junkies of congressional history," says Mortman, who tells Nick Gillespie that the content of the prayers adds up to an interesting, off-kilter history of the nation. From slavery and the Civil War to the Depression and World War II to Vietnam and women's rights, the addresses made by religious leaders are "mirroring what we as a country are experiencing."
For the past decade-plus, Mortman has been communications director for C-SPAN, the cable network that provides live coverage of Congress and a variety of related programming. He got his start working for the former congressman, Housing and Urban Development secretary, and vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp, and was a producer at MSNBC's Hardball before the network's decision to go hard left. He also worked as a columnist and on-air host of an early web show for National Journal's Hotline.
In a discussion about the rise of the internet and decentralized news sources, he tells Reason that the past 25 years have seen constant change in legacy media and that The New York Times, NPR, and most cable news are rightly understood to be more biased than in the past. If outlets were more upfront about that and if they strove to be fair to views they disagreed with, he says, the loss of trust and confidence in media would be less worrisome. "If you're sleeping with elephants, you can't cover the circus," says Mortman, paraphrasing the old Times editor Abe Rosenthal. The rise of new voices and new perspectives is great, he says, but if you're going to build a strong reputation, you've got to be believed and respected especially by your opponents. Absent that, the result is cacophony and polarization rather than a vibrant public square of debate.
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The Reason Roundtable sounds various alarms at the Biden administration's capricious re-upping of the scientifically unsound, pragmatically bass-ackward, and philosophically rotten eviction moratorium. Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie also talk about the awfulness of vaccine passports, the permanence of "temporary" government programs, and other contemporary irritants.
Discussed in the show:
1:09: The eviction moratorium is bad, mmkay? We explain all the reasons why, while trying to limit instances of the word Constitution to like, seven.
32:15: Weekly Listener Question: I just heard about NPR's new ethics policy. My first thought was, they are throwing objectivity out the window. But my second thought was that they are just throwing out the illusion of objectivity that many of us didn't believe anyway. What say you, oh, Roundtablites?
43:23: Vaccine passports are bad, mmkay? We discuss the tech snafus, the privacy concerns, and the unrequited Blue State lust for lockdownery.
56:05: Weekly media recommendations.
This week's links:
"Biden Admits New CDC Eviction Moratorium Runs Counter to 'the Bulk of the Constitutional Scholarship,'" by Damon Root "After Claiming It Didn't Have the Power To Impose a New Eviction Moratorium, the Biden Administration Imposes a New Eviction Moratorium," by Christian Britschgi "The Third Amendment Lawyers Association (ÞALA) Opposes Eviction Moratorium," by Eugene Volokh "The Deeply Flawed Studies Behind the Eviction Moratoriums," by Aaron Brown and Justin Monticello "The Victims of the Eviction Moratorium," by Jim Epstein
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Living in a digital age where your personal data is always under attack, your online privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Did you know there is a way to protect your information and privacy without worrying about Big Tech mining and stealing your private data? Introducing Sekur—an encrypted instant messaging and secure email service hosted in Switzerland, where the world's strictest data privacy laws are applied. Take back your privacy and online security with Sekur by going to Sekur.com. If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online.
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In a world where workplace diversity sessions increasingly resemble Maoist struggle sessions, Chloé Valdary's Theory of Enchantment seminars seek to bring people together using popular culture to explore our common humanity and generate empathy rather than division.
The 28-year-old Valdary started a group to combat anti-semitism as an undergraduate at the University of New Oreans, and after a fellowship at the Wall Street Journal opinion page, she created Theory of Enchantment as an alternative to the antiracist programs of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, which she believes deepen the very resentments they seek to alleviate. Her program employs materials as varied as Disney's Lion King, music from Kendrick Lamar, and writings by James Baldwin and Cheryl Strayed.
Valdary spoke to Reason about how her life experiences inform Theory of Enchantment, why the demand for her program is growing, and why she's optimistic about the future of race relations and individualism.
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With two Reason Roundtable regulars on vacation, Reason's Liz Wolfe and Stephanie Slade join Katherine Mangu-Ward and Peter Suderman to discuss the latest disastrous moves in COVID-19 regulations and infrastructure talks.
Discussed in the show:
2:22: COVID-19 messaging from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and government leaders is all over the place. Do we need any of it?
34:22: Is bipartisanship hindering infrastructure?
47:03: Weekly Listener Question: Is it unfair to claim anarchists are just cynics trying to be cool?
52:09: Weekly media recommendations.
This week's links:
"It's Time to Rethink What the 'End' of the Pandemic Looks Like," by Jack Shafer "A Confusing Message," by David Leonhardt "Why Are There New Crypto Rules in the Infrastructure Bill?" by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Living in a digital age where your personal data is always under attack, your online privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Did you know there is a way to protect your information and privacy without worrying about Big Tech mining and stealing your private data? Introducing Sekur—an encrypted instant messaging and secure email service hosted in Switzerland, where the world's strictest data privacy laws are applied. Take back your privacy and online security with Sekur by going to Sekur.com. Imagine an app where you can get unlocked access to reliable news sites. An app that filters out fake news and clickbait but still shows you every story from multiple perspectives to counter bias. Where good news, as in positive stories, is highlighted—so you don't become despondent. And where journalists dig through news from around the world to find stories you wouldn't normally see. That's what an innovative Australian startup called Inkl has come up with. The service unlocks more than $12,000 of premium news for $100 a year. If you go now to inkl.com/podcast, they'll give you an additional 25 percent discount, so you can get a whole year's worth of headache-free news for just $75.
Audio production by Ian Keyser Assistant production by Regan Taylor Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
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Founded in 1971, the Libertarian Party was created to elect libertarians to public office, including the presidency of the United States.
Founded in 2001, the Free State Project is an effort to turn New Hampshire—the "Live Free or Die" state—into a libertarian paradise of minimal government, with the ultimate aim of electing a libertarian to the governorship.
Which is the more realistic path to creating a freer society? That was the question debated by Jeremy Kauffman, a member of the board of the Free State Project, and Angela McArdle, candidate for chair of the National Libertarian Party and current chair of the L.P. of Los Angeles County.
Kauffman defended the resolution, "The Free State Project is a more realistic path to liberty than the Libertarian Party," and McArdle took the negative.
The debate was moderated by Soho Forum director Gene Epstein and held in front of a live audience at the Free State Project's annual Porcupine Freedom Festival (Porcfest). It was an Oxford-style debate, so the audience voted on the proposition before and after the proceedings, with the winner being the person who moved more people to his or her side.
Narrated by Nick Gillespie.
Photo: Brett Raney
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The comedian and podcaster Dave Smith, a rising presence in Libertarian Party (L.P.) circles, says he's considering running for the party's presidential nomination in 2024.
Smith says a major reason he expects to run is that even though the 2020 nominee, Jo Jorgensen, got the second-highest vote total in L.P. history, he thinks she didn't push back hard enough on government lockdowns and overreach in its fight against COVID, which he sees as a missed opportunity to build a bigger libertarian movement.
A vocal opponent of wokeness and political correctness, Smith is quick to attack fellow libertarians whom he thinks are naive about how the state maintains its power. He's said that he'd "take a red-pilled leftie over a blue-pilled libertarian any day."
After the Biden administration revealed it was pushing Facebook to restrict accounts it says are spreading misinformation about COVID-19, Smith tweeted, "This administration has exposed the useful idiots who call themselves libertarians. Saying 'it's a private company' for the last few years, ignoring what is obviously the biggest threat to liberty. They unwittingly support the largest government in human history."
After that take was discussed on a recent Reason Roundtable podcast, Smith tweeted that my fellow panelists and I had misrepresented his views. So I reached out to him so he could clarify his views on the intersection of big government and Big Tech, and discuss the future of the L.P., why he has no plans to vaccinate himself or his young daughter, and why he believes libertarians should be more engaged in the culture war.
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The Reason Roundtable kicks this Monday off with a COVID-19 check-in: Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie cover everything from White House COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci's latest statement, bribing people to get the vaccine, and re-upping mask mandates.
Discussed in the show:
1:11: Fauci is warning that the U.S. is going in the wrong direction, and President Joe Biden has recommended masks for children under 12 years old. Where do we draw the line on government intervention for the sake of our health?
31:24: Weekly Listener Question: It's slowly eroding, but it's still common to refer to left progressives in America as "liberals." In the last podcast, for example, Suderman referred to the Democrat legislative agenda as comprising a "liberal" wish list. Given the accelerated retreat from the principles of liberalism on the left, even to the point of disdaining the word itself sometimes, isn't it time for classical liberals and libertarians to take the title, and certainly never grant the honorific to either extreme on the right or left. I know the pedantic idealism here is in tension with using pragmatic descriptions that most people will understand, but at some point the balance tips over.
45:06: Weekly media recommendations
This week's links:
"Breakthrough Covid, in Perspective," by David Leonhardt "New York will require city workers to be vaccinated or tested weekly by mid-September," by Emma Fitzsimmons and Sharon Otterman "Language: Liberating Liberal," by Nick Gillespie "America Is Getting Unvaccinated People All Wrong," by Ed Yong
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Living in a digital age where your personal data is always under attack, your online privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Did you know there is a way to protect your information and privacy without worrying about Big Tech mining and stealing your private data? Introducing Sekur—an encrypted instant messaging and secure email service hosted in Switzerland, where the world's strictest data privacy laws are applied. Take back your privacy and online security with Sekur by going to Sekur.com. If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online.
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"Freedom was the slogan of the times. The word was invoked to justify everything," writes Louis Menand at the start of his wide-ranging and endlessly fascinating history of post-World War II culture, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. After years of economic deprivation, mass slaughter in two world wars, and the continuing negative, repressive example of the Soviet Union, most of the "free world" was ready to bust out into something new and different.
The Pulitzer-winning author, Harvard professor, and New Yorker contributor discusses how major figures and movements such as Lionel Trilling and other literary and cultural critics, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, Andy Warhol and the pop art movement, James Baldwin and black protest artists, Betty Friedan and feminists, the Beatles and pop musicians pushed all sorts of boundaries in relentless attempts to express themselves and radically transform cultural, economic, and political life. He talks with Nick Gillespie about how those quests took on distinct but related forms depending on the backgrounds of the people involved, and how understanding them is essential to understanding contemporary America.
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This manic Monday The Reason Roundtable tackles President Joe Biden's wild accusations against Facebook, plus the larger debate around misinformation, social media, and government regulations. Join Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie to hear them discuss:
1:52: Facebook "killing people," and what to do about social-media misinformation
30:19: Weekly Listener Question: "In search for a single point of focus to stand in representation of the multiple reasons for my vaccine hesitancy I have failed many times. If there is an alternative and logically consistent hypothesis, blessed by the CDC, and accepted by those who oversee the mainstream narrative I would be glad to know what it is."
36:16: Biden administration's 3.5 trillion double plus new new deal.
48:24: Weekly media recommendations
This week's links:
"The Panic Pandemic," by John Tierney "The Government Should Stop Telling Facebook To Suppress COVID-19 'Misinformation'," by Robby Soave "Magical Thinking Abounds in New Budget Deal Discourse," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown "Biden Charges Facebook With Homicide, While His Surgeon General Recommends 'Legal and Regulatory Measures' To Suppress COVID-19 'Misinformation'," by Jacob Sullum
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Living in a digital age where your personal data is always under attack, your online privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Did you know there is a way to protect your information and privacy without worrying about Big Tech mining and stealing your private data? Introducing Sekur—an encrypted instant messaging and secure email service hosted in Switzerland, where the world's strictest data privacy laws are applied. Take back your privacy and online security with Sekur by going to Sekur.com. Imagine an app where you can get unlocked access to reliable news sites. An app that filters out fake news and clickbait but still shows you every story from multiple perspectives to counter bias. Where good news, as in positive stories, is highlighted—so you don't become despondent. And where journalists dig through news from around the world to find stories you wouldn't normally see. That's what an innovative Australian startup called Inkl has come up with. The service unlocks more than $12,000 of premium news for $100 a year. If you go now to inkl.com/podcast, they'll give you an additional 25 percent discount, so you can get a whole year's worth of headache-free news for just $75.
Audio production by Ian Keyser. Assistant production by Regan Taylor. Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve.
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U.S. national debt held by the public is at almost $22 trillion, or about $67,000 per citizen, surpassing the country's annual Gross Domestic Product for the first time since World War Two. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that it'll reach 102 percent of GDP by the end of 2021, to 107 percent by 2031, and hit 202 percent by 2051.
The federal government's "growing debt burden would increase the risk of a fiscal crisis and higher inflation as well as undermine confidence in the US dollar," the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concluded in its March 2021 Long-Term Budget Outlook.
If the world were to lose confidence in the dollar, what could replace it— another fiat currency, gold, or bitcoin? That was the topic of a recent Oxford-style debate hosted by the Soho Forum.
John Vallis, a financial consultant and host of the Bitcoin Rapid-Fire podcast, believes that bitcoin will eventually replace governments' fiat money as the preferred medium of exchange. He argues that bitcoin's global adoption is a matter of when not if.
Lawrence H. White, an economics professor at George Mason University, is skeptical of bitcoin's future as money. He believes it may have a future as a financial asset, but isn't suitable to become a global medium of exchange.
The debate was moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein and held before a live audience at the Porcupine Freedom Festival—better known as PorcFest—in Lancaster, New Hampshire.
Narrated by Nick Gillespie, audio production by John Osterhoudt
On July 11, thousands of Cubans in dozens of cities around the island nation took to the streets to protest the country's communist dictatorship and chronic shortages in food, energy, and medicine, all of which have been made worse by the pandemic. These are the biggest anti-government demonstrations in Cuba in decades, the size and scope of which suggest parallels to the Arab Spring from a decade ago.
The demonstrations have been enabled by social media and the internet, which only came to Cuba in a big way in late 2018 when President Miguel Diaz-Canel allowed citizens access to data plans on their cellphones.
To better understand exactly how Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and other social media platforms are connecting the Cuban people and undermining state control, Nick Gillespie speaks with Ted Henken, who teaches sociology and Latin American studies at City University of New York's Baruch College and is the co-editor of Cuba's Digital Revolution. He talks about the near-term, mid-term, and long-term implications of the recent protests, how the United States might respond, and the internet's potential (and limits) when it comes to challenging an authoritarian government that has held power for over 60 years.
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Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie break down why this weekend's private space flight is ultimately good for society, and then discuss President Joe Biden's executive order, the antitrust push, and social security. All this and more on this Monday's Reason Roundtable.
Discussed in the show:
1:00: Richard Branson's space flight.
22:23: Biden's executive order is trying to put nutritional labels on the internet (among other things).
34:21: Weekly Listener Question: If you look at the U.S.'s COVID response, the moralistic core was that those of very low risk from it (healthy people under 50, kids) were expected to have their lives derailed to protect those who were of higher risk (the unhealthy and old). This tradeoff came with significant consequences to the livelihoods and education of primarily younger Americans and largely went unquestioned in media. What lessons can we take from this as we stare down the barrel of entitlement insolvency? Will then unquestioned morality be the young must pay the taxes or higher interest rates to make sure retirees maintain their standard of living?
49:22: Weekly media recommendations.
This week's links:
"Joe Biden's Executive Order on 'Promoting Competition' Covers Everything From Farmers Markets to Net Neutrality," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown "Trump Can Win His Case Against Tech Giants," by Vivek Ramaswamy "Billionaires in Space: How Musk, Bezos, and Branson Could Save Humanity" (video) "Wally Funk, Trailblazing Female Pilot, Will Join Jeff Bezos on Spaceflight," by Isabella Grullón Paz
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Living in a digital age where your personal data is always under attack, your online privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Did you know there is a way to protect your information and privacy without worrying about Big Tech mining and stealing your private data? Introducing Sekur—an encrypted instant messaging and secure email service hosted in Switzerland, where the world's strictest data privacy laws are applied. Take back your privacy and online security with Sekur by going to Sekur.com. If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online.
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Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters was one of last year's most celebrated—and condemned—books. It showed up in year-end lists of top books but was also banned by Target and her publisher was disallowed from buying ads at Amazon.*
"Abigail Shrier's book is a dangerous polemic with a goal of making people not trans," wrote an American Civil Liberties Union attorney on Twitter. "We have to fight these ideas which are leading to the criminalization of trans life again."
A lawyer by training, Shrier says she fully supports the rights of adults to undergo gender-reassignment surgery. But she's concerned that teenage girls are making irrevocable changes to their bodies that in coming years they might wish they could reverse.
In a new paperback edition of Irreversible Damage, Shrier follows up on several of the women she spoke with and details her experiences of being deplatformed.*
Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Shrier about the controversy over her book, the Streisand effect, and the future of free expression in an increasingly polarized cultural landscape.
*CORRECTION: A previous version of this article mistakenly stated that Irreversible Damage had been banned at Amazon. The platform never stopped offering the book for sale but its publisher, Regnery, was not allowed to buy ads and other promotions for it on the site.
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Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie share their long weekend highlights and how they'd respond to mid-twenties melancholia on this week's Reason Roundtable.
Discussed in the show:
1:51: Last year, President Joe Biden said the goal was to have a Fourth of July with loved ones. Now we did! Kind of. How was your Fourth?
18:18: Mandated vaccines are (still) out and homeschooling is in.
33:52: Weekly Listener Question: I'm in a strange and difficult place in my life and I'm looking for some book recommendations to uplift my spirits. I'm a 25-year-old guy, my whole life and career have been upended by COVID, and I've been stuck in this difficult place of trying to put the pieces back together. I'm looking for books about freedom, individualism, and the pursuit of happiness. I'm interested in this more of a personal and less of a political sense. I am open to purely philosophical texts. But I'd prefer a story or biography of an individual pursing their own happiness and doing interesting things and less of a "story about some government dingbat historical figure" type of book.
54:11: Media recommendations for the week.
This weeks links:
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Imagine an app where you can get unlocked access to reliable news sites. An app that filters out fake news and clickbait but still shows you every story from multiple perspectives to counter bias. Where good news, as in positive stories, is highlighted—so you don't become despondent. And where journalists dig through news from around the world to find stories you wouldn't normally see. That's what an innovative Australian startup called Inkl has come up with. The service unlocks more than $12,000 of premium news for $100 a year. If you go now to inkl.com/podcast they'll give you an additional 25 percent discount, so you can get a whole year's worth of headache-free news for just $75. Living in a digital age where your personal data is always under attack, your online privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Did you know there is a way to protect your information and privacy without worrying about Big Tech mining and stealing your private data? Introducing Sekur—an encrypted instant messaging and secure email service hosted in Switzerland, where the world's strictest data privacy laws are applied. Take back your privacy and online security with Sekur by going to Sekur.com.
Audio production by Ian Keyser. Assistant production by Regan Taylor. Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve.
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Few figures in the bitcoin community are as controversial and visionary as Erik Voorhees, founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift.
Back when cryptocurrency was in its infancy and its conferences included lectures delivered to empty rooms, Voorhees was helping to popularize bitcoin's unique attributes with an unregulated online casino called SatoshiDice.
After he sold SatoshiDice, Voorhees was investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and was fined $50,000, observing that the investigators didn't seem to understand bitcoin. "As much as I hated government before," he recalled, "then I was like, 'man, this is what these people do, go around ruining innocent people's lives.'"
The son of libertarian businessman and writer Jacques Voorhees, he discovered bitcoin in 2011 while living in New Hampshire as a member of the Free State Project. Voorhees was employee number three at BitInstant, an early exchange backed by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and whose founder, Charlie Shrem, ultimately went to prison on charges of operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business.
Unlike bitcoin maximalists, who insist that bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency with any viable future, Voorhees maintains that other coins do serve a purpose.
In 2017, as fees on the network were climbing, he controversially backed an unsuccessful attempt to scale up bitcoin's ability to process transactions, which critics said would have weakened the network's security and decentralized structure.
At the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, Voorhees talked to Reason's Nick Gillespie about the immense growth not just in the market caps of cryptocurrencies but in their economic and cultural legitimacy, the ways they challenge central banks and political power, and why he believes in multiple coins and continuing innovation in digital currency.
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Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie tackle a suddenly-pervasive topic: critical race theory. Plus, tune in for the fine details of a debate brewing within the Libertarian Party (L.P.). All that and more on this Monday's Reason Roundtable.
Discussed in the show:
1:54: Some condolences are in order.
7:46: Breakdown and assessment of why critical race theory dominates headlines.
35:31: Weekly Listener Question: What are your thoughts on the ongoing civil war within the L.P. between pragmatists and the Mises Caucus, following the crackup at the New Hampshire L.P. and the resulting fallout? Do you think a Mises Caucus–led L.P. would bring new voters into the party or just alienate everyone who isn't an edgelord?
50:21: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"Getting the State Out of Marriage," by Steven Horwitz and Sarah Skwire "The Critical Race Theory Debate Wouldn't Matter if We Had More School Choice," by J.D. Tuccille "Battle Over Critical Race Theory," by Christopher F. Rufo "13 important points in the campus & K-12 'critical race theory' debate," by Greg Lukianoff, Adam Goldstein, Bonnie Snyder, and Ryne Weiss "Wesley Yang: Woke Protests Against 'White Supremacism' May Be the New Normal" (podcast) "Inside the Battle Over the Soul of the Libertarian Party," by Brian Doherty
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online.
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Can the Libertarian Party (L.P.) become "a major contender that consistently wins elections?"
If the organization's dismal, 50-year track record in winning elections isn't discouraging enough, now the L.P. is in disarray after its chairman and two members of its national committee resigned in the wake of an attempt to decertify the New Hampshire affiliate due to conflicts over its social media presence.
This episode has revealed an organization at war with itself over vision, tactics, and messaging.
To get a better sense of what's going on, Nick Gillespie spoke with former Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.), who finished his five terms in office as the first and only Libertarian to hold national office. He had been elected as a Republican, became an Independent, and affiliated with the L.P. for the last few months of his tenure. Amash flirted with a run for the L.P.'s presidential nomination in 2020 before choosing to drop out of consideration. Despite not holding an official position in the party's leadership, he is its best-known member.
In the wake of the recent scandal, he chastised the New Hampshire affiliate for its "horrible messaging" even as he said attempts to remove its leadership were illegitimate. "I'm committed to making [the L.P.] a major contender that consistently wins elections," he wrote. "We must work together to build a big-tent party that can take on the old parties and defend the rights of the people."
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During the 2008 presidential election, Vijay Boyapati quit his job as an engineer at Google to campaign for Ron Paul in New Hampshire. A few years after that, he discovered bitcoin, and in 2018 he published an essay on Medium titled "The Bullish Case for Bitcoin," which got widespread attention and was translated into more than 20 languages.
Boyapati, an Australian native who now lives in the Pacific Northwest, launched a fundraiser on Kickstarter to expand the essay into a book, and it was released at the star-studded 2021 Bitcoin Conference, which was held in early June in Miami.
Nick Gillespie caught up with Boyapati in Florida to talk about inflation, how bitcoin fits with the Austrian school of economics, his libertarian origin story, and what he thinks has to happen for bitcoin to finally become the new global monetary standard.
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Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie gather to discuss an unwarranted vape scare and the consequences of repealing the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). Hear their takes on this Monday's Reason Roundtable.
Discussed in the show:
1:54: What to know about the AUMF repeal.
21:14: Vaping isn't related to higher coronavirus infection rates—but Reason readers knew that.
31:36: Weekly Listener Question: Is it possible to be in favor of the public accommodations law and be in favor of the recent Supreme Court rulings that sided with private organizations?
42:51: New York's mayoral election.
48:21: Media recommendations for the week.
This weeks links:
"Cops Tased and Beat Teens While Enforcing a Local Vaping Ban," by Billy Binion "Repealing the 2002 AUMF Won't Be Enough To End Forever Wars," by Fiona Harrigan "Study Finds Vapers Not More Likely To Get COVID-19," by Guy Bentley "Don't Be Surprised When Stupid Laws Are Maintained With Force," by Billy Binion "The 9/14 Presidency," by Eli Lake "White House Unveils Strategy to Combat Domestic Extremism," by Zolan Kanno-Youngs
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
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Imagine an app where you can get unlocked access to reliable news sites. An app that filters out fake news and clickbait but still shows you every story from multiple perspectives to counter bias. Where good news, as in positive stories, is highlighted—so you don't become despondent. And where journalists dig through news from around the world to find stories you wouldn't normally see. That's what an innovative Australian startup called Inkl has come up with. The service unlocks more than $12,000 of premium news for $100 a year. If you go now to inkl.com/podcast they'll give you an additional 25 percent discount, so you can get a whole year's worth of headache-free news for just $75. Living in a digital age where your personal data is always under attack, your online privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Did you know there is a way to protect your information and privacy without worrying about Big Tech mining and stealing your private data? Introducing Sekur—an encrypted instant messaging and secure email service hosted in Switzerland, where the world's strictest data privacy laws are applied. Take back your privacy and online security with Sekur by going to Sekur.com.
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The Bitcoin 2021 Conference in Miami in early June wasn't just a celebration of the end of the pandemic and an opportunity for cryptocurrency and blockchain true believers to gather up close and maskless with more than 10,000 fellow travelers. It was a watershed moment for a technological and cultural movement whose goal is nothing short of the separation of money and state.
Bitcoin emerged just a dozen years ago, when a pseudonymous genius shared a nine-page paper on an obscure email list, and now it's the third-largest currency on the planet, according to Deutsche Bank. In another 12 years, we may look back on Bitcoin 2021 as the Woodstock of the crypto generation.
One of the biggest—and most surprising—breakout stars of the conference was Cynthia Lummis, a 66-year-old freshman Republican senator from Wyoming. From the stage and in an interview with Reason, Lummis forcefully made the case that bitcoin not only provides a legitimate alternative store of value and medium of exchange but would act as a check on the devaluation of the U.S. dollar and other currencies through the runaway creation of fiat money. She also believes that the growth of bitcoin—mistakenly assailed for its heavy use of electricity—is acting as a spur to create renewable energy in places such as Wyoming, and she extolled its privacy features in a world of increasing surveillance by governments and corporations alike.
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Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie are all about the IRS budget increases, taxes, and surveillance you've been hearing about—all about getting rid of them, that is. Tune in for their takes on the latest headlines on this week's Reason Roundtable.
Discussed in the show:
2:22: The Biden administration, Elizabeth Warren, and Janet Yellen want to increase the IRS budget. Here's why they want to, and why they shouldn't.
13:22: The mechanisms of tax compliance.
31:08: Gag orders and third-party snooping.
43:10: Weekly Listener Question: I'm a freelance writer who can do my work anywhere, and I'm planning on moving in the next year. What's the most libertarian U.S. state?
48:55: Media recommendations for the week.
This weeks links:
"Private Inequity: How a Powerful Industry Conquered the Tax System," by Jesse Drucker and Danny Hakim "Kiss Your Financial Privacy Goodbye," by Matt Welch "Elizabeth Warren's Plan To Close the 'Tax Gap' Doesn't Add Up," by Eric Boehm "ProPublica's Bombshell Tax Report That Wasn't," by Andrew Moylan and Andrew Wilford "Feds Seize CNN Reporter's Data, Then Gag CNN," by Matt Welch "Medicare Whac-A-Mole," by Peter Suderman "101 Cities Ranked on Just About Everything," by Radley Balko "Will Cities Survive 2020?" by Christian Britschgi
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"It took us four years just to identify the virus that caused AIDS in the '80s," says Steven Johnson. "Imagine COVID where it's four years before we even know what is causing the outbreak. That's what would have happened if we just shifted 20 years, 30 years earlier in terms of when this outbreak happened."
Johnson is the author of the new book Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer, which is also running as a series on PBS (watch online here). The rapid advance in vaccine technology, which is bringing an end to the COVID-19 pandemic, is best understood in the context of a series of innovations that more than doubled the life expectancy of the human race over the last 100 years. Extra Life explores how innovations in epidemiological statistics, artificial fertilizer, toilets, and sanitation systems, along with vaccines and other measures, have allowed billions of people to flourish until old age. By 2016, global life expectancy at birth had reached 72 years, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Johnson was a founder of the pioneering website Feed in the 1990s and has authored a shelf full of books about human progress, including best-sellers such as The Ghost Map, which recounted how doctors and researchers ended the threat of cholera in 19th-century London, and Future Perfect, which argues that the modern networked world is far more resilient than previous iterations.
He talks with Nick Gillespie about how we managed to massively increase our lifespans in the 20th century, and whether we can do even better in the 21st. And they talk about performance of the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration when it comes to Covd-19 and how those agencies might rebuild trust and confidence in the post-pandemic world.
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Nick Gillespie went to the Bitcoin 2021 Conference in Miami this weekend, which gives Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Peter Suderman a chance to ask about whether Bitcoin really poses a "threat." They also discuss homelessness and residual coronavirus-restriction absurdities, all on this Monday's Reason Roundtable.
Discussed in the show:
0:22: What coronavirus restrictions are extraneous or absurd at this point?
8:22: Nick describes the Bitcoin conference.
14:28: Peter discusses the G7 corporate tax agreement.
26:08: Elon Musk's weird relationship with Bitcoin.
34:47: Ransomware is not the new 9/11.
48:39: Weekly Listener Question: How does a Good Libertarian deal with the homelessness issue? People end up homeless for all sorts of reasons, and all present strong arguments for government intervention of one type or another. But oh, the costs! What say you?
56:16: Media recommendations.
This weeks links:
"5 Ways Elon Musk and Other Billionaires Get Welfare for the Rich" (video) "Trump calls Bitcoin a 'scam against the dollar' that needs to be 'very high regulated'," by John Bowden "Bitcoin Is A Trojan Horse For Freedom," by Alex Galdstein
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
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Andrew Doyle is an Irish journalist and writer best known as the creator of the Twitter personality Titania McGrath, a parody of an ultra-woke, 24-year-old, militant vegan who thinks she is a better poet than William Shakespeare. Though the 43-year-old Doyle describes himself as a left-winger, he is a fierce critic of cancel culture and a proponent of Brexit. He holds a doctorate from Oxford in early Renaissance poetry, is the host of the new nightly show GB News, and is a columnist for Spiked Online. (He's a previous guest on The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie.)
Doyle is also the author of the new book Free Speech and Why It Matters, a comprehensive, learned, and compelling argument in favor of unfettered debate and open expression. Nick Gillespie talks with him about why cancel culture is on the rise, how to combat it, and what Titania McGrath is up to as she approaches her quarter-life crisis.
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Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie are back from Memorial Day weekend and ready to dish on The Reason Roundtable about the presidential spending bill, vaccination requirements, and our pandemic progress.
Discussed in the show:
0:36: President Joe Biden presented his budget proposal and the Roundtable breaks it down.
35:09: Weekly Listener Question: There is a strong case to be made to prohibit cruises from requiring vaccine confirmation. As soon as you grant the premise that the CDC can boss you around unilaterally, we will never go back. I see no problem with Florida and other states mandating that businesses grow a spine and tell the CDC to fuck off. We cannot be governed by the CDC and other medical tyrants at any cost. Discuss.
52:00: Media recommendations for the week.
This weeks links:
"Covid's Deadliest Phase May Be Here Soon," by Zeynep Tufekci "Joe Biden's $6 Trillion Budget Proposal Will Hike Spending, Keep Deficits Near Record Highs," by Eric Boehm "Expanding tax credit ignores precedent," by Veronique de Rugy
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Born in 1981, Freddie deBoer is an English Ph.D., the author of The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, and the proprietor of one of the liveliest, most provocative, and most controversial publications at Substack.
He is also a third-generation Marxist who believes that individuals are innately different from one another (probably due to inherited differences in intelligence and physical capacity) and that many of his fellow Bernie Sanders-loving, progressive inhabitants of Brooklyn are hurting the poor when they insist that all K-12 students take college prep classes and have access to higher education. "Education is not a weapon against inequality; it is an engine of inequality," he writes, sounding like Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe when it comes to promoting well-paying but low-status trade jobs. What deBoer calls "the cult of smart"—the valorization of test-taking and a belief that all of us are blank slates who can be remediated through the right sort of instruction and environment—not only marginalizes the poor and "untalented," it ultimately blames them for their own condition.
His take on legacy media is equally acid, as when he tells critics of Substack, the controversial newsletter platform that has given a financially rewarding home to him and other writers who either left or never gained purchase at traditional journalistic outlets, "You don't like the writing that gets sold on Substack, cool, write better shit and sell it to more people."
Nick Gillespie talks with deBoer about his critiques of education, the mainstream media, and the contemporary left. They also wrangle over deBoer's call for "revolution, not evolution" and an end to capitalism, what it means to "want to live outside of exchange," and the surprising overlap between Marxists and libertarians when it comes to a range of current policy issues.
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A year since George Floyd's death launched the nation into a summer of protests and calls for police reform, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie reflect on changes to the criminal justice system since then, on The Reason Roundtable.
Discussed in the show:
0:26: Are we better off in criminal justice since George Floyd's killing?
27:42: The big conservative backlash against "critical race theory."
33:00: Weekly Listener Question: Let's say Justin Amash gets elected president in 2024. Who goes in his cabinet? What libertarians are out there with the policy expertise and political experience to hold high appointments like that?
45:52: Media recommendations for the week.
This weeks links:
"One year on, how George Floyd's murder has changed the world," by Deborah Douglas, Angelique Chrisafis, and Aamna Mohdin "14 Trump Voters on the Legacy of George Floyd," by Patrick Healy Sean Ono Lennon thread on political correctness "The Cult of Kiddie Danger," by Lenore Skenazy "Biden will host the Floyd family but will miss his police reform deadline," by Laura Barrón-López
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Despite Americans' reputation for cockeyed optimism, we have always been suckers for declension narratives—the idea that the Golden Age ended sometime in the past and we have the bad luck to live in a world that is uniquely awful, unfair, and corrupt. Donald Trump built a successful presidential campaign on making America great again and his successor Joe Biden routinely harkens back to a time when things were better and more on the level.
Three of today's most widespread declension narratives involve fertility rates, income inequality, and economic mobility. We have fewer children than ever, goes the popular story, because nobody—even the wealthy!—can afford them anymore. The spread between rich and poor has never been bigger and it's only increasing. Kids today will be the first generation in America to have a lower standard of living than their parents.
These stories resonate with us emotionally and have obvious political utility, but are they true? My guest today is Scott Winship, the director of poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He says that these declension narratives are misleading at best and outright wrong at worst. The reason families are getting smaller is because women have more control over their bodies and generally want fewer kids. When you factor in after-tax income and transfer programs, poor people are in fact doing better than ever. And his research shows that about 70 percent of us will make more inflation-adjusted income than our parents—a figure that hasn't changed in the past 50 years.
Winship has a doctorate in social policy from Harvard and, prior to joining the right-of-center AEI, he did stints at the Brookings Institution and Pew Research Center. Nick Gillespie talks with Winship about why we want to believe the world we live in is getting worse, how his thinking about social progress and ideology has changed over his career, and how he thinks we might make it easier for poor people to participate more fully in society. Winship also gives a defense of the much-maligned discipline of sociology as a vital way of understanding the world around us.
In this Monday's Reason Roundtable,Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie celebrate the latest freedom from COVID-19 restrictions and condemn the disaster that is "public health."
Discussed in the show:
1:25: Mask freedom: the capricious Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the masking rules we won't miss
33:15: Listener Question of the Week: "Why is it that no one seems outraged by the fact that the new CDC guidance for fully vaccinated people creates two fundamentally different classes of citizens: the fully privileged vaccinated and the indefinitely rights-suspended unvaccinated? Is the cultural stratification created by the new CDC guidance not as anti-libertarian as public policy gets?"
53:24: Media recommendations for the week
This weeks links:
"'I Feel Like I'm Just Drowning': Sophomore Year in a Pandemic," by Susan Dominus "This is a remarkable artifact of our times," a Twitter thread by Noah Rothman "Restore Pre-Pandemic Freedom, For the Children," by J.D. Tuccille
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On January 7, 2021, Facebook indefinitely suspended the account of President Donald Trump, saying he had violated the platform's "Community Standards" the day before by calling Capitol Hill rioters "great patriots" even as they were engaged in a violent demonstration. In another post on the same day, Trump also pushed "an unfounded narrative of electoral fraud and persistent calls to action" while pro-Trump rioters rampaged in the halls of Congress. Trump's account, which once boasted 35 million followers and was routinely one of the most popular pages at Facebook, has remained frozen since. (Trump was also banned from Facebook's sister app, Instagram).
Facebook's management immediately remanded its decision to the platform's Oversight Board, an independent group of 20 people who have the legal right to overturn any suspension on the site. On May 5, the board ruled that Facebook applied its standards correctly by suspending Trump's account but that it erred in making the suspension indefinite. "It is not permissible for Facebook to keep a user off the platform for an undefined period, with no criteria for when or whether the account will be restored," reads the decision. "In applying this penalty, Facebook did not follow a clear, published procedure." The board gave Facebook up to six months to explain why Trump will not be allowed back on the platform or to lay out the criteria by which he will be let back on.
John Samples is a political scientist and a vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute. He's also a member of Facebook's Oversight Board (go here for a list of all members). He tells Nick Gillespie how the group came to its conclusions and why he thinks the Oversight Board is an excellent example of private-sector governance of cyberspace. He also discusses his 2019 policy analysis "Why the Government Should Not Regulate Content Moderation of Social Media," casts a dark eye on attempts by liberal and conservative politicians to recast Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as common carriers subject to intense governmental oversight, and explains why a single standard of content moderation is both unwise and impossible.
"Despite the fact that I'm on Facebook's Oversight Board, I worry about a single unified set of content moderation [principles]," says Samples, who argues that a multiplicity of platforms and approaches to speech make more sense from a libertarian perspective. "You don't want one set of rules for the entire world, but you also may need different platforms, different kinds of entities providing these services. I wouldn't necessarily want to see what's good for Facebook to spread everywhere in exactly the same form."
On today's Reason Roundtable Matt Welch stokes Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie on natalist policies, public-school hesitancy, and gender disparities.
Discussed in the show:
1:16: How policies do or do not affect people's personal decisions re: baby-making. Plus, child subsidies, and universal basic income for parents.
21:31: Parents give pause to their children returning to public schools after 2020 proved public schools to be finicky and teachers unions to be nasty.
32:54: No, the high rate of unemployment and gender disparity in the recent Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report are not surprising.
41:19: Weekly Listener Question: I work with small business owners, many of whom are restaurant owners. Many are in the process of applying for the newly available Restaurant Revitalization Fund operated by the Small Business Administration. The program opens today (May 3). However, if you are not a woman, veteran, or socially or economically disadvantaged (read: from a certain race) business owner, you will not be considered for support from this program for 21 days, regardless of need. From a libertarian perspective, do you feel that this is a discriminatory or racist program, or is this a fair approach to supporting small businesses?
54:15: Weekly Media Recommendations.
This weeks links:
"Are Women Less Able to Fulfill their Fertility Goals?" by Scott Winship "I Became a Mother at 25, and I'm Not Sorry I Didn't Wait," by Elizabeth Bruenig "Schools Are Open, but Many Families Remain Hesitant to Return," by Dana Goldstein "The Small Business Administration Picks Losers Over Winners," by Adam Andrzejewski "Paycheck Protection Program Exclusion of Nude Dancing Establishments Upheld," by Eugene Volokh "Disaster Relief for Small Businesses Is a Disaster All Its Own," by Veronique de Rugy "New Jobs Report Shows the Government Gets the Unemployment It's Paying For," by Christian Britschgi "Covid Relief Funds Fueled a High-Performance Shopping Spree, Prosecutors Say," by Azy Paybarah
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If advocates of "wokeness," "critical race theory," and "anti-racism" seem to be acting like religious zealots who must crush all heretics, that's because they are, argued Columbia University linguist John McWhorter at a 2018 debate at the Soho Forum.
"Anti-racism as currently configured has gone a long way from what used to be considered intelligent and sincere civil rights activism to today [being] a religion," said McWhorter. "I don't mean that as a rhetorical thing. It actually is what any naive anthropologist would recognize as a faith."
The 55-year-old author first explored his idea of anti-racism as "Our Flawed New Religion" in a 2015 essay at The Daily Beast. He's expanding the concept into a book, due out next year, that he's serializing on Substack. Tentatively titled The Elect, it lays out his argument about the misguided fervor undergirding the anti-racist movement championed by people such as Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Meanwhile, McWhorter's latest volume to hit store shelves is Nine Nasty Words, a study of how curse words such as fuck became commonplace, unsayable, or something in between. Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with McWhorter about the shifting status of curse words and accusations of systemic racism in contemporary America.
This Monday, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie dish on their least favorite parts of President Joe Biden's State of the Union address and the messaging around the newest coronavirus guidelines. Plus, The Reason Roundtable answers a listener question about the ties between self-proclaimed libertarians and people against the coronavirus vaccine.
Discussed in the show:
1:36: Biden's SOTU address takeaways.
22:34: The government's newest coronavirus guidelines.
36:56: Weekly Listener Question: The current anti-vax sentiment within a significant portion of the libertarian world has me questioning everything. Weren't we the folks who, a mere couple of years ago, were saying "Get the FDA out of the way so big pharma can cure things?" That literally happened, and now a significant number of libertarians are kvetching about how quickly the vaccines were developed. How can I have faith in the rationality of libertarianism when there is a significant portion of the movement that is so breathtakingly wrong on vaccines?
48:52: Media recommendations for the week.
This weeks links:
"Exclusive: Coalition calls on Biden to form disinformation task force," by Ina Fried "Democrats, Here's How to Lose in 2022. And Deserve It," by Ezra Klein "The Last Pandemic," by Ronald Bailey
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In 1987, just two years before the collapse of the Berlin Wall would usher in the beginning of what Francis Fukuyama would later call the end of history, the rock band Guns N' Roses released Appetite for Destruction, an album that would go on to become the best-selling debut L.P. in the history of rock and roll.
Packed with hits such as "Welcome to the Jungle," "Sweet Child o' Mine," and "Paradise City," Appetite for Destruction wasn't just another record. It was a cultural milestone, at once the culmination of decades of trends in popular music and the closing out not just of the rock era but a society-wide flirtation with excess, fear, anger, and nihilism. For the next five years, Guns N' Roses and particularly the band's front man Axl Rose, would personify an America in rapid flux and change, desperate to move on from a worn-out, post-war consensus on national identity, gender roles, and global hegemony but equally terrified of wading into uncharted waters.
The new book Goodbye Guns N' Roses: The Crime, Beauty, and Amplified Chaos of America's Most Polarizing Band, by Art Tavana, is an extended essay on the cultural legacy not just of a band but of a period that informs contemporary debates on politics and culture even as it recedes from our memory.
Tavana, an LA-based former writer for Playboy and LA Weekly, talks with Nick Gillespie about the attraction of popular nihilism; Axl Rose as the dispossessed son of middle America; how the band's racist, xenophobic, and homophobic song "One in a Million" reflected national anxiety over coming political, social, and economic change; how the group's beef with Nirvana, another band that couldn't quite make it into the post-Cold War era, illustrates the limits of rock and roll; and what comes after the end of corporate mass culture.
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On this Monday's Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie compare standings on masks and D.C. statehood.
Discussed in the show:
1:24: Coronavirus check-in. Do we need to wear masks outside? Are we just doing this because everyone else is?
20:31: Weekly Listener Question: The rash of dangerous disinformation regarding all things related to the pandemic is making me waver on my maximalist commitment to free speech and to think that maybe we should censor just a few of the most dangerous voices. Please tell me where I'm wrong in thinking about this.
28:56: D.C. statehood: retrocession into MD, or stick to the status quo?
41:57: Biden's first 100 days.
51:12: Media recommendations for the week.
This weeks links:
"How To Talk to Your Young Kids About Weed," by Katherine Mangu-Ward "Americans give Biden mostly positive marks for first 100 days, Post-ABC poll finds," by Dan Balz, Scott Clement, and Emily Guskin "Decision to pause Johnson & Johnson vaccine causes public confidence in vaccine to sink," by Kathy Frankovic "An Interview With the Guy Who Yells 'Mortal Kombat' in the Theme for Mortal Kombat," by Matthew Dessem "The War on Free Speech Is About To Get a Lot Uglier," by Matt Welch "Much to Forgive," by John Tierney "Did Politics Ruin the Oscars?" by Peter Suderman
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"Socialism is preferable to capitalism as an economic system that promotes freedom, equality, and prosperity."
That was the proposition at an in-person Soho Forum debate held on Sunday, April 18 in The Villages, Florida.
Ben Burgis, a philosophy instructor at Georgia State University's Perimeter College and a contributor to Jacobin magazine, spoke in support of socialism. His long-term political goals include giving workers control of the means of production through labor cooperatives, redistributing wealth and power through direct democracy in the workplace, and prohibiting wage-and-salary labor.
Gene Epstein, director of the Soho Forum, former economics editor of Barron's, and a former senior economist for the New York Stock Exchange, argued against Burgis. He contended that free markets already allow for worker co-ops and that if they were popular and effective, they would be more widely adopted than they are currently. He also objected that Burgis' proposed ban on wage labor is a direct assault on individual rights and reveals the coercion behind socialist economic policy.
The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by Reason, conducts Oxford-style debates, meaning the audience votes yes, no, or undecided before and after the event. The winner is the debater who convinces the most people to switch sides. At the start of the event, 8.6 percent of the crowd agreed that "socialism is preferable to capitalism," 76 percent disagreed, and 15 percent were undecided. Sam Peterson of Libertas served as moderator.
Audio Production by John Osterhoudt, narrated by Nick Gillespie
Image: BP Miller on Unsplash
Jane Coaston is the new host of The Argument, a massively popular New York Times podcast that seeks to host civil and informed discussions about the most pressing issues of the day. A 33-year-old Cincinnati native, Coaston has worked at Vox, MTV, and the Human Rights Campaign, among other places. She's the daughter of a black father and a white mother, was raised as a devout Catholic, and identifies as queer.
She's also a registered Libertarian who is "especially distrustful of efforts by the state to get people to do things." She explains that "at some point, a regulation or a law with the absolute best of intentions will be wielded by people who may not have the absolute best of intentions."
Coaston tells Nick Gillespie that growing up in a liberal household in a conservative part of the country made her concerned about giving authorities a lot of power. Adding to that was a sense of being isolated because of her race and sexuality. "My libertarian sensibilities really came from a sense of, I know what it is like politically to always lose and to see what the winners look like," she says.
One of Coaston's goals for The Argument is to bring in a lot of new voices to debates about politics, partly to learn new arguments but also to model true pluralism. She says she is sick of performative politics in which people act out predetermined roles rather than actually engage with one another and she's wary of the idea that everything needs to be adjudicated at the national level. She also says that we the people—not the feds, or Donald Trump, or Joe Biden—are the ones politicizing every aspect of our lives. That's an individual decision, she insists, and people can make that decision or not.
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The original line-up of The Reason Roundtable is back! Matt Welch leads Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie through a discussion of shootings and police violence, coronavirus and security theater, and Joe Biden's immigration policies.
Discussed in the show:
01:43: Recent police shootings, gun violence, and the inevitable subsequent unfolding of protests, qualified immunity cases, and tighter regulations.
18:07: How the press covers protests and the coronavirus.
30:38: Biden's refugee cap is no different than Trump's, for now.
45:47: Weekly Listener Question: What should be my greater concern as a libertarian: denying would-be immigrants citizenship, or the ever-growing deficits from the welfare state?
49:37: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"Biden Called Trump's Refugee Cap 'Cruel and Shortsighted.' He's Keeping It in Place—for Now," by Billy Binion "More Than A Dozen States Are Trying To Nullify Federal Gun Control," by John Osterhoudt (video) "Congress Is Closer Than Ever to Ending the Federal War on Weed," by C.J. Ciaramella "Police in Minnesota round up journalists covering protest, force them on the ground and take pictures of their faces," by Adrianna Rodriguez "Florida's 'Anti-Rioting' Bill Gives the Government New Powers That Have Nothing to Do With Riots," by Scott Shackford
Send your questions by email to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
On October 2, 2018, respected Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. He was never seen alive again. From the Academy Award–winning director Bryan Fogel, The Dissident is now streaming on On Demand. If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online.
Audio production by Ian Keyser. Assistant production by Regan Taylor. Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve.
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Do you remember the "power pose" craze from about a decade ago? In the second-most popular TED talks ever, psychologist Amy Cuddy has told over 60 million viewers that they can change their lives by simply changing their body language.
If you grew up in the 1990s, you probably experienced classes devoted to boosting your self-esteem, independent of your actual achievements on tests or assignments.
Have you taken the Implicit Association Test or IAT, which claims to test your unconscious bias against minorities and other groups? It is routinely used in all sorts of diversity training programs and educational settings, from K-12 through college.
These are all examples of what science writer and podcaster Jesse Singal calls "quick fixes" that attempt to address pressing social issues based on fundamentally flawed research. In The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills, Singal looks at these and other attempts to change social policy based on bad or faulty science.
One of Cuddy's fellow researchers has said that their research doesn't prove anything in the real world. The K-12 curriculum that started the self-esteem boom was based on a misreading of Nathaniel Branden's work by a single powerful California politician. And the IAT is not only unreliable—the same individual will generate very different scores when they retake the test—it's not clear that "unconscious bias" is a major influence on how we act toward one another.
Singal, co-host of the popular podcast Blocked & Reported, tells Nick Gillespie his goal is to explain why we keep falling for ideas that psychologists say will fix society so we waste less time focusing on things that don't really help anyone.
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Senior Editor Robby Soave subs for Katherine Mangu-Ward on The Reason Roundtable this week, sitting in with Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie to discuss criminal justice reform at the federal and local levels, Biden's gun regulations, unions, and media bias.
Discussed in the show:
1:49: Minnesota's latest police shooting
21:54: Biden's effort to curb gun violence
31:01: A union drive fails at Amazon amid Biden's pro-union policies, and media bias surrounds the story
43:38: Weekly Listener Question: Explain to me how the left can find racism under every rock yet not recognize that the drug war, minimum wages, and gun control directly stem from racism?
47:19: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"Maryland becomes first state to repeal police bill of rights, overriding Hogan veto," by Ben Leonard "Kentucky Law Limits Use Of No-Knock Warrants, A Year After Breonna Taylor's Killing," by Rachel Treisman "New Mexico Abolishes Qualified Immunity," by Billy Binion "Schumer: Senate will act on marijuana legalization with or without Biden," by Natalie Fertig "Daunte Wright: Protesters Clash With Police Near Minneapolis After Deadly Officer-Involved Shooting," by T. Grant Benson "Biden set to accept fewest refugees of any modern president, including Trump, report says," by Amy Wang
Send your questions by email to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
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Chef Andrew Gruel just might be the patron saint of restaurateurs, small-business owners, and service workers during the pandemic. He's the founder and owner of Slapfish, a growing national fast-casual restaurant chain based in Huntington Beach, California. He's a widely recognized culinary innovator and familiar face on the Food Network and other cooking channels.
Over the past year, Gruel has also gained prominence as an unabashed critic of arbitrary rules that put business owners like him at the beck and call of hypocritical politicians such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Most famously, in an absolutely inspired rant that went viral on social media last December, Gruel listed all the ways in which California's ban on outdoor dining made no scientific or economic sense before concluding, "I'm not an asshole. The governor is."
Gruel, whose Twitter feed is addictive, is no slouch when it comes to helping food workers who have been displaced by the pandemic and lockdowns and ill-served by state welfare agencies too. He and his wife created a fund to help unemployed workers that's given out hundreds of thousands of dollars so far.
Nick Gillespie sat down to talk with Gruel about what it's been like to run a business with government at all levels arbitrarily flipping the on-off switch, why innovation is central to both capitalism and cuisine, and why he'll never open another franchise in California.
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The original editors of The Reason Roundtable are back this Monday. Matt Welch prods Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie on Georgia's voting laws and MLB boycotts, Biden's infrastructure plan, and COVID-19 vaccine passports.
Discussed in the show:
2:19: Baseball boycott, Georgia's new voting law.
18:18: Biden's infrastructure bill. Specifically: high-speed rails, unions, and solving racial injustice.
36:55: Weekly Listener Question: "With the continued rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, we've had more groups of people become available to take it. What are the levers that libertarians would pull or buttons libertarians would push to get people to take the vaccine?"
48:51: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"Biden's Infrastructure Plan Would Overturn 'Right-To-Work' Laws in 27 States," by Eric Boehm "Does National Debt Still Matter? America's Greatest Gamble," by Zach Weissmueller and Justin Monticello (video) "Joe Biden's $2 Trillion 'Infrastructure' Plan Doubles Down on Everything That Makes American Infrastructure Insanely Expensive," by Christian Britschgi "Bidenomics, explained," by Noah Smith "High-Speed Rail Advocates Should Pay Attention to California's Costly Disaster," by Paul Detrick
Send your questions by email to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
On October 2, 2018, respected Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. He was never seen alive again. From an Academy Award–winning director, The Dissident is now streaming on On Demand. If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online.
Audio production by Ian Keyser. Assistant production by Regan Taylor. Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve.
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After nearly 3 million deaths worldwide (and almost 600,000 in the United States), it looks like the end of the COVID-19 pandemic may be within sight as vaccines proliferate. In "The Last Pandemic," the cover story of the new issue of Reason, Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey argues that technological breakthroughs and policy progress mean humanity may never again have to endure such a disaster.
"The greatly speeded-up biomedical innovation provoked by the current global scourge has provided future generations with tools to keep subsequent viral invasions at bay," writes Bailey. "These include fast new vaccine production platforms, the development of better diagnostic and disease surveillance monitoring, and progress in the rapid design of therapeutics."
The main potential sticking point? The role of governments, which continue to hamper the ability of scientists and medical providers to deal quickly and effectively with diseases. Bailey tells Nick Gillespie that while Operation Warp Speed—through which the United States government incentivized pharmaceutical companies to develop vaccines with unprecedented speed—was wildly successful, bureaucratic inertia and turf wars still stand in the way of quicker, faster, more effective innovation.
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The Reason Roundtable mixes it up this week with the usual host, Matt Welch, vaccinated and vacationing. In his absence, Peter Suderman leads the weekly discourse with Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and a special guest, Senior Editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown. The group breaks down tech regulation, Georgia's new voting law, and weed.
Discussed in the show:
1:06: The government versus "big tech": Section 230, antitrust, content moderation.
29:35: Voting bills and voting rights.
47:00: Weekly Listener Question: "Is catcalling freedom of speech? Is it violence?"
52:17: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"Your Problem Is Not With Section 230, But The 1st Amendment," by Jess Miers "Biden's New Deal: Re-engineering America, quickly," by Mike Allen "The Republican Attack on Voting Rights," by Matthew Harwood "Georgia Republicans Aim To Restrict Voting by Mail," by Eric Boehm "Big tech CEOs face lawmakers in House hearing on social media's role in extremism, misinformation," by Gerrit De Vynck, Cat Zakrzewski, Elizabeth Dwoskin, and Rachel Lerman "Elizabeth Warren Wants To Break Up Amazon So It's 'Not Powerful Enough To Heckle Senators With Snotty Tweets'," by Robby Soave
Send your questions either by email to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Get an up-close look at the history of the Constitution with the Institute for Justice's new podcast, Bound by Oath. Available wherever you check out podcasts. On October 2, 2018, respected Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. He was never seen alive again. From Academy Award–winning director Bryan Fogel, The Dissident is now streaming on On Demand.
Audio production by Ian Keyser. Assistant production by Regan Taylor. Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve.
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Do U.S. presidents need fast-track authority or should their power be sharply curtailed? In order to save our democracy, says Stanford University political scientist Terry Moe, we have to make the U.S. government faster, more efficient, and more effective—and we can do that by expanding the power of the executive branch to use "fast-track" authority to approve all types of legislation. Moe, the co-author of Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy, wants Congress to have the power to approve or deny these laws through an "up or down" vote (but not to add amendments or filibuster their passage).
The Cato Institute's Gene Healy says that non-libertarians of all political persuasions suffer from a "dangerous devotion" to the "boundless nature of presidential responsibility." Healy, who's the author of The Cult of the Presidency, says that instead of giving the executive branch more legislative authority, presidential powers must be brought back to their constitutional limits.
At a Reason-sponsored Soho Forum debate held on March 17, 2021, and moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein, Terry Moe and Gene Healy went head-to-head on this issue. It was an Oxford-style debate, meaning the winner is the person who moves the most people in his direction.
Narrated by Nick Gillespie. Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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"Ideas have consequences. But so does silence," insists Melissa Chen, the New York editor for The Spectator and managing director of Ideas Beyond Borders, a nonprofit that translates new and classic texts about science, history, and liberal political philosophy into Arabic and distributes them as free e-books throughout the Middle East.
Born and raised in Singapore, Chen came to the United States to study genomics at Boston University and quickly established herself as a foe of groupthink, political correctness, and cancel culture in America while critiquing authoritarian regimes in China, her birth country, and elsewhere. A frequent guest on shows and podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience, Bridget Phetasy's Walk-Ins Welcome, and The Rubin Report, Chen maintains one of the liveliest feeds on Twitter, mixing long threads with sardonic comments on the news of the day. "I'd like to welcome the Arabs to the Schrödinger's White People Club. Signed, Asians and Jews," she wrote after some commentators claimed the reason that suspected Boulder, Colorado shooter Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, a Syrian Arab, was not killed by police was because he was "white."
Chen talks with Nick Gillespie about how an obsessive focus on identity politics led the media to keep insisting without evidence that the murder of massage parlor workers in Atlanta was a hate crime against Asian Americans, why Hollywood is changing its products to please censors in the Chinese government, and how the best way to counter radicalization is with speech and information rather than repression.
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In this week's edition of The Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie cover a gamut of topics, from our country's perception of sex to how Biden's trade and immigration policies compare to Trump's.
Discussed in the show:
1:58: How the Biden administration is handling the immigration crisis.
20:35: How the Biden administration is handling Trump's tariffs.
32:58: The Atlanta shootings and cultural perspectives on sex and the body.
48:33: Weekly Listener Question: Two common questions about military campaigns are "How do we define victory?" and "What is our exit strategy?" How would the Roundtablers each answer those with regard to the coronavirus?
Send your questions by email to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
FreedomFest, the summit for the liberty movement, is moving from Las Vegas—where it's been for almost 15 years—to South Dakota this year, July 21–24. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, with almost 1300 people already signed up for another stellar lineup under its 2021 theme "Healthy, Wealthy and Wise." Visit www.freedomfest.com for the complete lineup, and be sure to register before March 31. If you feel something interfering with your happiness or holding you back from your goals, BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist you can start talking to in under 24 hours, all online.
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Has anyone lived a more interesting, influential, and inspiring life than Stewart Brand?
Born in 1938 and educated at Stanford and by the United States army, Brand was a Merry Prankster who helped conduct Ken Kesey's legendary acid tests in the 1960s. His guerilla campaign of selling buttons that asked "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?" pushed NASA to release the first image of the planet from space and helped inspire the first Earth Day celebrations. From 1968 to 1971, he published The Whole Earth Catalog, which quickly became a bible to hippies on communes and techno-geeks such as Steve Jobs, who famously quoted its parting message: "Stay hungry, stay foolish."
Brand has rightly been called "the intellectual Johnny Appleseed of the counterculture." He helped shape early techno-culture and cyberspace by reporting on the personal computer revolution and interacting with many of its key figures early on. His ideas were instrumental in the creation of the Well, one of the earliest online communities and he helped found The Long Now Foundation, which seeks to lengthen and deepen the way we all think about the past and the future.
In a series of books on everything from the MIT Media Lab to how buildings learn to "eco-modernism," he has delineated a unique strain of ecological thought that embraces technology as a means of salvation and liberation rather than a destructive force that must be stopped. His current passion is Revive & Restore, an organization that is leading the "de-extinction movement" by using biotechnology to bring back plants and animals including the American Chestnut tree, the passenger pigeon, and the woolly mammoth.
Brand is the subject of the new documentary, We Are As Gods—a line from the first issue of The Whole Earth Catalog—which takes a long, critical look at his life and work. For today's podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with with Brand and the directors of the film, David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg, about his long, strange trip over the past 60 years that has taken place exclusively at the frontier of social and cultural change.
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The Reason Roundtable mixes up the regular crew as Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie are joined by Reason Reporter Eric Boehm, filling in for Peter Suderman.
Discussed in the show:
0:29: A debrief of Biden's coronavirus anniversary speech on March 12 4:01: Eric Boehm's expertise on the COVID bill's shortcomings 23:10: Katherine woo-hoos about vaccines 30:24: Cuomo has not resigned yet. Maybe that's a good thing? 41:33: Weekly Listener Question: I love the aesthetic of the magazine, especially in the early days. I don't know much about art and design, but I'd like to take that sort of vibe into my home decor. Is there a name of it? Are there a few artists you could tell me the name of that might give me some inspiration? 46:19: Media recommendations for the week
This week's links:
"Biden's 'Rescue Plan' Will Sic the IRS on Anyone Who Earns $600 in the Gig Economy," by Eric Boehm "President Joe Biden's speech on one-year anniversary of COVID-19" "Joe Biden Is No Moderate," by Peter Suderman "Lanny Friedlander: The Eccentric Genius Who Created Reason Magazine," by Matt Welch (video) "Cuomo's Other Victims," by Liz Wolfe
Send your questions either by email to roundtable@reason.com or by voicemail to 213-973-3017. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsor:
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Audio production by Ian Keyser. Assistant production by Regan Taylor. Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve.
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The American Rescue Plan Act is hurtling toward final passage, but only a few percentage points of its massive $1.9 trillion price tag is specifically geared toward, you know, addressing the pandemic. How little? House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) says just 9 percent of it goes "directly to toward Covid-19 relief." The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Budget puts the number even lower, declaring, "Only about 1 percent of the entire package goes toward COVID-19 vaccines, and 5 percent is truly focused on public health needs surrounding the pandemic."
Most of it is instead a pre-existing Democratic Party wishlist of increased spending on virtually every aspect of government, including bigger unemployment benefits, even more money for schools, a gigantic child tax credit, and subsidies for Obamacare insurance policies that would phase out only at a household income of more than $580,000. This legislation comes on the heels of the $4 trillion in coronavirus-related spending passed last year.
Peter Suderman, features editor at Reason, joins Nick Gillespie to discuss his cover story in the new issue of the magazine, which is titled "Josh Hawley's Toxic Populism," a deep dive into the anti-libertarian platform of the Missouri senator who is one of the Republican Party's rising stars. They also walk through the nearly $2 trillion of new spending—passed along strict party lines—that is about to be signed into law by President Joe Biden.
In today's Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie discuss the last year of pandemic life and what the next year may look like. They also break down the unprecedentedly large spending bill that just passed through the Senate.
Discussed in the show:
0:52: The Senate passed the largest spending bill in U.S. history.
20:39: Dr. Seuss is distracting the GOP from any intelligent debate about the largest spending bill in U.S. history.
33:49: Reflection on the one-year anniversary of coronavirus.
45:13: Weekly Listener Question: Is it more important to be principled or effective? What is the point of maintaining your "principles" if you lose literally every political battle?
49:14: Media recommendations for the week.
Audio production by Ian Keyser. Assistant production by Regan Taylor. Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve.
At each of Whole Foods Market's more than 500 American stores, managers ask every team member—from the meat clerks to the baristas to the janitorial staff—to orient their work around a shared purpose, which is to make natural and healthy food widely available. This goal, according to Whole Foods CEO and co-founder John Mackey, is in no way inconsistent with maximizing shareholder value, often seen as the essential purpose of a corporation.
As Mackey writes in his new book about leadership, "At the heart of Conscious Capitalism is a radical refutation of the negative perceptions of business, and a rejection of the split between purpose and profit." Mackey believes that this is the key to defending capitalism against those who condemn it for having no inspiring ideals.
At a Reason-sponsored Soho Forum debate held on February 18, 2020, Ayn Rand Institute Chairman of the Board Yaron Brook challenged this view. He believes that maximizing profit should always be the primary goal of companies, and it's that focus which explains why capitalism has lifted the broad masses out of poverty. That's the message businesses should be emphasizing, he said, and it's inspiring enough.
The debate, which played out in front of 200 people in The Villages, Florida, was moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein. It was an Oxford-style debate, meaning the winner is the person who moves the most people in his direction.
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Tech billionaire Elon Musk is known for creating bold new companies such as PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX, championing liberating technologies like Bitcoin, and hyping visionary plans to colonize Mars.
But with a net worth of around $200 billion, he's not just the planet's richest person. He's one of it's biggest welfare recipients, report Lisa Conyers and Phil Harvey, authors of Welfare for the Rich: How Your Tax Dollars End Up in Millionaires' Pockets—And What You Can do About It. By 2015, they write, companies led by Musk had gotten billions of dollars in subsidies, tax breaks, and other handouts. New York state even shelled out $750 million to build a solar panel factory for Musk's Solar City operation and said the company would pay no property taxes for a decade, saving another $260 million.
Musk is not alone say Conyers, a veteran journalist, and Harvey, a successful businessman who donates to many libertarian organizations, including Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this podcast. There are literally thousands of other immensely rich people who are constantly bilking governments at all levels for special perks, carve-outs, and handouts paid for by middle-class and poor people.
In exhaustively documented and perpetually enraging prose, Conyers and Harvey show how millionaire "farmers," billionaire team owners, and filthy rich oil-and-gas-and-wind-power barons lobby Congress, rewrite zoning laws, and plunder the public fisc like it's a bodily function. They also outline realistic and effective ways to fight back and level a playing field that benefits the people who need the least help from government.
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Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie gather on this week's Reason Roundtable to reflect with fresh fury on the latest bureaucratic bottle-necking and duty dereliction. And they find some bits of good news for you too.
Discussed in the show:
0:24: New York is…not well.
23:56: What's the takeaway of comparing Democrat- and Republican-run states in the face of pandemic management? (Look forward to a feature piece diving even deeper into this by Matt Welch.)
31:23: Weekly Listener Question: What does the Roundtable suggest to replace the current vaccine approval process?
46:45: Biden bombed Syria, and we're reminded that behind the "he's not Trump" hype, he's still just a "status-quo institutionalist."
49:13: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"The Twilight of the Anti-Trump Idols," by Ross Douthat "New York attorney general seeks to investigate Cuomo sexual harassment claims," by Richard Luscombe "Newsom appears to post TikTok inside restaurant, denies eating there," by Morgan Phillips "What Disney Can Teach Us About Covid-19: Lockdowns Fail" (video) "Thomas Sowell's Maverick Insights on Race, Economics, and Society" (video) "Cocktails with Suderman" "5 Pandemic Mistakes We Keep Repeating," by Zeynep Tufekci
Send your questions either by email to roundtable@reason.com or by voicemail to 213-973-3017. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Audio production by Ian Keyser. Assistant production by Regan Taylor. Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve.
Thomas Sowell is one of the most influential economists, syndicated columnists, and social critics of the past half-century, having authored provocative, best-selling books on everything from race relations to childhood development to, most recently, Charter Schools and Their Enemies. His masterworks include Knowledge and Decisions, which uses Friedrich Hayek's insights about distributed information to explain both how markets work and why intellectuals disdain markets; A Conflict of Visions, which explores the ideological origins of political struggles; and Basic Economics, a best-selling primer now in its fifth edition.
Sowell's inspiring life—he was born black and poor in North Carolina in 1930 and received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago at the age of 38—and expansive work are now the subjects of a new documentary, Common Sense in a Senseless World (watch here) and a forthcoming biography titled Maverick.
Nick Gillespie speaks with Jason L. Riley, the author of the film and the biography, about why even at age 90, Sowell is more relevant today than ever. A fellow at The Manhattan Institute and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, Riley tells me that Sowell's empirically driven research and his fearless engagement with even the most controversial topics are exactly what our world needs more of.
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On this weeks edition of The Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie detail just how little the Biden administration's COVID-19 relief bill has to do with COVID-19. Plus, a little warning against government power plays and a little optimism for mask-free living in the near future.
Discussed in the show:
1:15: What exactly is in that $1.9 trillion in the American Rescue Plan? 9:35: What about that $15 federal minimum wage? 20:12: What are the standards for post-vaccinated behavior? 32:51: Weekly Listener Question: "At what point is this no longer an issue of private corporations acting as they please, and more of a de facto government restriction on speech? Have we already crossed that line?" 44:45: Media recommendations for the week.
This week's links:
"Anthony Fauci Says Americans Might Still Need To Wear Masks in 2022," by Robby Soave "Biden's Coronavirus Relief Package Has Almost Nothing to Do With the Coronavirus," by Peter Suderman "Here's How We Could Double the Number of Americans Vaccinated Against COVID-19," by Ronald Bailey "CBO Says Raising Minimum Wage to $15 an Hour Would Kill Jobs, Because Obviously It Would," by Peter Suderman "Joe Biden Offers Bold Talk, Timid Action on Immigration," by David Bier
Send your questions either by email to roundtable@reason.com or by voicemail to 213-973-3017. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
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Audio production by Ian Keyser. Assistant production by Regan Taylor. Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve.
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To say that we live in a hyper-polarized, angry society is to state the obvious. Everywhere around us, but especially online, in politics, and in the media, we seem to be, with apologies to Matthew Arnold, trapped on a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night. It's impossible to avoid a continuous stream of stories, often erupting from prestigious institutions such as The New York Times and Ivy League universities, of people being canceled for real and imagined thought crimes, political hacks defending objectively awful policy failures, and charges of racism, sexism, and homophobia being launched like drone strikes on unsuspecting, innocent civilians.
Many in the media and the academy are questioning bedrock commitments to free expression and intellectual freedom. As the former head of the ACLU, Ira Glasser, told Reason recently, many activists, academics, and journalists believe that "free speech is an antagonist" to social justice.
One journalist who pushes back against all this is Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer at The Atlantic, who maintains one of the smartest and engaging Twitter feeds around, and publishes the newsletter The Best of Journalism, which "highlights exceptional nonfiction journalism." The 41-year-old Southern California native writes about criminal justice reform, the excesses of wokeness and political correctness on the right and the left, and the failure of government to effectively deliver many of the basic services it's supposed to provide.
"The biggest thing I'm interested in is, can we have a robust public discourse? Can we adjudicate truth propositions together?" Friedersdorf tells me in today's podcast. He cites Jonathan Rauch's influential 1993 book, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, which lays out the case for free and open dialogue in society, especially about contentious topics and ideas. (Go here for my interview with Rauch on today's cancel culture.). "It is a messy process of talking back and forth, and it's really important," says Friedersdorf. "We can get tremendous value from it in the future if only we allow it to happen. And I see more and more people not allowing it to happen with the advent of social media."
We talk about the case of New York Times reporter Donald McNeil, who was pushed out of the paper after colleagues learned he used a racial epithet in 2019 while on a trip with high-school students, calls by journalists to regulate conversations on the popular new audio-only social media platform Clubhouse, and the failure of the FDA and CDC to roll out vaccines as efficiently as possible. We also talk about how libertarians might effectively reach out to people on the left and the right who are increasingly exhausted by the orthodoxy demanded by progressives and conservatives.
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On this week's edition of The Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie shout about Trump's second acquittal, Biden's latest managerial pushes, and the CDC's flop of a school-reopening rollout.
Discussed in the show:
2:27 What did we learn from impeachment? 18:53 "Bidenomics." 42:02 School re-openings. 47:35 Weekly Listener Question: Should people be granted courtesies that they themselves are not willing to reciprocate? 50:50 Media recommendations for the week.
Today's sponsors:
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Audio production by Ian Keyser. Assistant production by Regan Taylor. Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve.
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Just three days after being sworn into Congress to represent Michigan's 3rd district, Republican freshman Peter Meijer found himself and colleagues trapped without security in the bowels of the Capitol building while a riot that ultimately claimed five lives raged all around him.
The following week, he was one of just 10 Republicans—and the only first-termer—to vote to impeach Donald Trump, a decision that led to a narrowly failed censure vote from his own state's GOP and immediate announcements that he will be primaried in 2022.
The 33-year-old Army veteran who served in Iraq didn't expect his first few days in Congress to be so chaotic, but he says his military training helps him stay steady as he fills the seat vacated by Libertarian Justin Amash. On the campaign trail, Meijer supported Donald Trump but says that the truculent behavior of the former president and many members of his own party after Election Day not only caused the January 6 riot but cost the GOP the Senate.
Meijer tells Nick Gillespie why he believes in limited government, economic freedom, and individualism; why he's against out-of-control stimulus spending and military adventurism; and how he plans to combat the craziness he sees both on the right and left in the House of Representatives. He also talks about what he's learned about business and public service from being the scion of the Meijer superstore chain, how generational fault lines may be every bit as important as partisan ones, and why he's committed to voting his principles rather than his constituents' will.
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Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie come together to discuss Biden administration's newest policies on this week's Reason Roundtable. After lamenting the latest examples of bad government behavior, the group contemplates what a opioid-legal world would look like.
Discussed in the show:
00:00: Bad Super Bowl jokes
02:22: Suderman on Biden's 1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill
22:43: Mangu-Ward on the possibility of student loan forgiveness
28:25: Gillespie on the possibility of high-speed rail
35:00: Why the latest irrational government spending left Mangu-Ward "dead inside"
40:50: Weekly Listener Question: Can societies handle legal opioids, or is it a bridge too far?
46:09: Media recommendations for the week
Audio production by Ian Keyser. Assistant production by Regan Taylor. Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve.
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An increasing number of corporations, universities, and other organizations hold anti-racism seminars in which participants are expected to acknowledge their own racism at the start of the meetings or to write "letters of apology to marginalized people whom they may have harmed."
Anthropologist and brand consultant Grant McCracken, who has taught at places such as Harvard Business School and worked with people such as Kanye West, says such imperatives are doubly bad. First, they don't acknowledge the changed nature of institutions over the past half-century toward inclusion and equality and second, they leave participants feeling defamed and diminished. There's never a good reason to say you are a racist, he writes, unless, of course, you are one.
McCracken's work will be familiar to Reason readers, both as a contributor to our pages and as an influence on the magazine's broad conception of culture as a dynamic, participatory process through which we all figure out who we are and what we want to become. His 1998 book Plenitude, in which he documents what he calls the "quickening speciation of social types," remains the essential starting point for understanding the relentlessly heterogenous world in which we live.
His new book is called The New Honor Code: A Simple Plan for Raising Our Standards and Restoring Our Good Names. It explores the seeming disappearance of honorable behavior from much of our personal, professional, and public lives. Sports heroes such as Lance Armstrong not only cheat to win but lie about it while accusing others of cheating. Medical professionals such as Larry Nassar abuse their position as the USA Gymnastics team doctor to assault hundreds of young, defenseless patients. Politicians ranging from Nancy Pelosi to Donald Trump to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Ted Cruz regularly defame and lie about their opponents without evidence or fear of reprisal.
What America needs, says McCracken, is a rebirth of honor that demands we insist on basic standards of behavior, especially from those in positions of power, and that we also treat others as we ourselves would like to be treated: with respect and compassion. The New Honor Code is a rich text, drawing from McCracken's academic research into Elizabethan England, his abiding curiosity about popular culture, and his work in corporate America. Few other thinkers can distill lessons for the future from figures as diverse as 16th-century English diplomat Thomas Elyot, Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and Canadian musician and Elon Musk partner Grimes.
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On the latest edition of The Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch steers Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie through School Choice Week reflections, the latest COVID-19 chaos, and Wall Street Bets.
Discussed in the show:
1:29 Reason didn't have to try hard to find stories highlighting National School Choice week. 21:27 Is being mistaken for a Trump supporter worth keeping schools closed? 23:42 A pulse check on the nation's reception of Gov. Cuomo. 29:01 Weekly Listener Question: Will it take a disaster for libertarian ideals to hold? 37:53 The federal response to Wall Street Bets: What should we worry about? 56:24 Media recommendations for the week.
Audio production by Ian Keyser. Assistant production by Regan Taylor. Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve.
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Nearly a year into ubiquitous school closings as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic—and even with a vaccine being rolled out—it's far from clear when most students will be going back to full-time, in-person classes.
How are the shutdowns affecting K-12 education and changing the way we think about public schools? Corey De Angelis, the Reason Foundation's director of school choice, tells Nick Gillespie that a historically large number of parents are leaving traditional residential-assignment schools and looking to take their education dollars with them. As student failure rates climb and dissatisfaction with distance learning increases, says DeAngelis, there's also mounting frustration with teachers unions for their continued opposition to reopening despite mounting evidence that schools are not a significant source of infection.
Over a dozen state legislatures are considering laws that would massively expand publicly funded school choice and De Angelis says that the pandemic ultimately may accomplish what decades of white papers have failed to deliver: a switch to a system in which parents rather than bureaucrats decide where their kids go to school.
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"There isn't an issue facing Black people today that doesn't find its origins in K-12 education," writes Chris Stewart, CEO of the education nonprofit brightbeam and a prolific writer and podcaster. "Without our own collective governance of our children's intellectual development, how can we win? Without Black self-determination in who teaches them, what they learn, where they learn, and how lessons are taught to them, what is the future of our freedom?"
A Christian and a libertarian, the Minnesota-based Stewart says that school lockdowns over the past year have forced parents to become more involved in and attentive to their children's education and may well lead to an exodus from traditional public schools. In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Stewart also talks about why he believes that the government shouldn't be in charge of curricula and why support for school choice will continue to grow despite efforts by teachers unions and education bureaucrats to maintain a failing status quo.
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In this week's installment of The Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie comment on the latest malfeasance at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and explain how COVID-19 highlights the importance of National School Choice Week.
Discussed in the show: 1:16: Policy news from California and the CDC 11:06: Are we "turning the corner" on COVID-19 cases? 16:54: COVID and National School Choice week. 24:13: Peter tells us exactly what public sector unions are about. 32:05: Email question of the week. 36:48: We had an inauguration last week. 51:32: Media recommendations for the week.
Audio production by Ian Keyser. Assistant production by Regan Taylor. Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve.
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Oren Cass, who is the former domestic policy director for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign and the founder and executive director of the think tank American Compass, believes that the U.S. government should intervene more aggressively in the manufacturing industry.
Cass participated in a recent Soho Forum virtual debate, held on January 13, 2021, arguing in favor of the proposition:
"To promote prosperity among all income groups, the U.S. government should adopt an industrial policy."
Arguing against Cass: Scott Lincicome, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He says that, in the real world, government interference has only hurt manufacturing. The problem with the economic nationalism favored by Cass is that it insulates companies from the discipline of profit and loss. In a free market, businesses learn from their mistakes. When the government is involved, they react by growing bigger as a way to cover for their failures.
It was an Oxford-style debate, and Lincicome prevailed by convincing 14.56 percent of the audience to switch to his side.
The Soho Forum, sponsored by Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series typically held at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village, but which has gone remote during the pandemic.
Narrated by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Regan Taylor, John Osterhoudt, and Ian Keyser.
Photo: Andy Star/Envato Elements.
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Even among proponents of drug legalization, Columbia University neuroscientist Carl Hart stands apart for his unflinching honesty.
"I am now entering my fifth year as a regular heroin user," the 54-year-old full professor writes in Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear. "I do not have a drug-use problem. Never have. Each day, I meet my parental, personal, and professional responsibilities. I pay my taxes, serve as a volunteer in my community…and contribute to the global community as an informed and engaged citizen. I am better for my drug use."
In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Hart makes the case that responsible adults should be free to buy, sell, and use whatever substances they want to and that policy discussions about drug use have been polluted by bad information and moral posturing. He marshals an impressive body of academic research showing that virtually all currently illegal drugs can be and are used safely by millions of people, that drug prohibition has little or nothing to do with public safety, and that the United States would be a better place if its citizens were allowed to consume a much broader set of substances for pleasure.
"The Declaration of Independence guaranteed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all of us, as long as we don't disrupt anybody else's ability to do the same," says Hart. "That means we get to live our life as we choose, as we see fit. Taking drugs can be a part of that and is a part of that for a lot of Americans."
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With inauguration less than 24 hours away, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch discuss what they would like to see happen in the new Biden administration vs. what will most likely transpire.
Discussed in the show:
1:21: Inauguration speeches and security theater.
17:31: Joe Biden's $1.9 Trillion COVID relief package and eviction moratoriums.
33:14: The $15 minimum wage
44:17: Trump's parting pardons
56:19: Media recommendations of the week.
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One of the few things that Donald Trump and Joe Biden agree on is their shared hatred of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives ISPs and website operators legal immunity from most user-generated content.
Donald Trump vetoed the defense spending bill in December because the legislation didn't include language "terminating" Section 230 and Joe Biden has said that "Section 230 should be revoked, immediately." Conservative Republicans such as Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Josh Hawley (Mo.) and progressive Democrats such as Sens. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) have called for its reform or repeal.
Sometimes called "the internet's First Amendment" and "the 26 words that created the internet," Section 230 is widely accused of, on the one hand, allowing Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social-media giants to squelch conservative voices and, on the other hand, fueling the spread of misinformation and disinformation that allowed Donald Trump to win the 2016 election. Critics also charge that Section 230 enables all sorts of social ills, from QAnon conspiracy-mongering to the global sex-trafficking of children.
Enter Mike Masnick, the 46-year-old entrepreneur and analyst behind the influential website Techdirt and the digital think tank the Copia Institute. Where others are constantly talking about how to restrict and regulate the internet and tech giants to conform to one ideological vision or another, he champions protocols and practices that he thinks would lead to a more-decentralized internet and culture, including expanding Section 230 immunity, the use of encryption, and the sorts of tools that give end users more power to control what they say and see online.
Nick Gillespie spoke with Masnick about what current debates over social media get drastically wrong, how free speech is simultaneously both empowered and imperiled by politicians here and abroad, and why a more-decentralized internet is not just possible but preferable to what we have now.
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These are the times that try libertarians' souls. (And everyone else's, too.)
So in the waning hours of Donald Trump's presidency, Reason Roundtable podcasters Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie debate the questions ripping through Washington and the rest of the country: Should Trump be impeached, removed, persuaded to resign, or endured? Is GOP sickness endemic to politics overall, or specific and acute in the host body? Should we be happy, sad, or indifferent at the sight of Planet MAGA being systematically deplatformed? And what kind of illiberal legislative and enforcement backlashes can we expect from the empowered Democratic Party?
That, plus some cultural recommendations and a listener question, is pretty much the whole show. (Speaking of the latter, please send your questions to roundtable@reason.com!)
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "Rhea" by Yehezkel Raz.
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Before his death from prostate cancer in 1993, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame member Frank Zappa spent time in jail for making an obscene recording requested by undercover cops, released 60 records in every genre imaginable, became one of the first modern musical artists to start his own company, testified before Congress that labeling music due to lyrical content was an attack on free speech, and inspired Vaclav Havel and others fighting Czechoslovakia's repressive communist regime. He packed a hell of a lot into 52 years, and made a lot of waves and enemies along the way.
Zappa is the subject of an eponymous new documentary by Alex Winter, whose previous films include Downloaded (a study of Napster and unauthorized file sharing), Deep Web (a look at Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road), and Trust Machine (an exploration of how blockchain technology decentralizes power; go here for a Reason interview with him about that film). "Zappa," says Winter, who is also well-known for his acting in the Bill & Ted series and other films, "matters because he was an extremely talented and composer but also because…was very anti-authoritarian, very anti-fascist, very pro–citizens' rights. He also saw the tech revolution coming. In all of these extremely interesting ways, Zappa was ahead of the curve." Although his politics, like his music, defy easy (or any, really) categorization, Winter says that Zappa's overriding beliefs in free speech, individualism, and entrepreneurship carried strong libertarian connotations.
Winter talks with Nick Gillespie about Zappa's life and legacy, including his internal contradictions regarding sexual freedom, his ultra-critical attitudes toward hippies and drugs, and other matters. Winter also discusses his own oeuvre as a documentarian and weighs in on a possible pardon for Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road whom President Donald Trump is reportedly considering for a pardon or commutation. Ulbricht, says Winter, bore the brunt of panics over both the internet and bitcoin, and was sentenced for far longer than his crimes deserve. "I think he should not be in jail anymore. Full stop."
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While the Internet was exploding Sunday over the leak of President Donald Trump's shameful, lawyer-laden phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Ben Raffensberger, a more orderly yet still significant transfer of power was taking place: Iraq vet and supermarket heir Peter Meijer (R–Mich.) was sworn into office, replacing five-term Republican-turned-independent-turned-Libertarian Justin Amash.
Amash, no stranger to Reason's pages and pixels, was perhaps the most incisive internal critic of congressional process, the biggest exemplar of vote-explaining transparency, and of course a big fat libertarian (metaphorically speaking), who went out the door introducing all kinds of libertarian-wishlist bills. So concludeth Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie on today's Reason Roundtable podcast.
The gang also squabbles over the import of the Trumpian election shenanigans, weighs in on the character vs. ideology debate, and responds to our first-ever non-Webathon listener mail. (Speaking of which, send your questions to roundtable@reason.com, pretty please!)
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "I Say" by Night Owl.
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So what did Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie learn about over these godawful last 12 months? Among the lessons confessed on today's Reason Roundtable podcast: that there's nothing noble about a "noble lie," that "personal responsibility" has more meanings than are evident upon first glance, that we have given teachers unions enough power for them to derail their own gravy trains, and that (more thankfully!) humans are resilient and resourceful creatures.
Other topics gnawed on in today's discussion: President Donald Trump's about-face on corona-stimulus, the yin and yang of Soul/Wonder Woman 1984, and whether we should abort baby L. Ron Hubbard in the woods.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "Nowadays" by Teo Laza.
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Charles Wininger has been a psychotherapist and "psychonaut"—a user of psychoactive substances ranging from LSD to marijuana to psilocybin—for decades. In his new memoir and practical guide, Listening To Ecstasy: The Transformative Power of MDMA, the 71-year-old New Yorker comes out of the "chemical closet" to talk about how MDMA has helped to revitalize his personal and professional life, what important lessons today's "psychedelic renaissance" has learned from the 1960s counterculture, and why "serious fun" that leads to both self-actualization and the revitalization of community is within our grasp.
As MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder enters Phase 3 trials for FDA approval and voters around the country legalize or decriminalize the use of psychedelics, Wininger believes that the time has come to have honest discussions of how best to use what the government calls illicit drugs to create a better world. One way we make that happen, he says, "is for those who can do so and who dare to do so to come out of the chemical closet and say, 'I am a user of these compounds, they do me a lot of good, and they help me function in a better way. They help me become more creative, more alive and more useful to society as a whole.'"
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Why did prescription opioids bring so much misery, addiction, and death to the small towns of post-industrial America? The media's standard narrative focuses on the role played by OxyContin, a powerful painkiller supposedly foisted on helpless rubes and naive doctors by cynical profiteers at Purdue Pharma, whose executives have already pleaded guilty to a number of crimes. In this telling, the opioid epidemic is a morality tale of capitalism run amok, regulation made toothless by anti-government zealots, and uneducated populations left behind by the knowledge economy.
Sally Satel has a vastly different, more complicated, and more accurate story to tell. She's a practicing psychiatrist who specializes in substance abuse, the author of a series of books on health care issues, and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. In 2018, she moved to Ironton, Ohio, a small, economically depressed town in Appalachian Ohio, and worked with patients and social service providers to better understand how opioids, heroin, and fentanyl became drugs of choice for people in a part of the country that have been using all manner of substances—from moonshine to marijuana to earlier versions of opioids—to escape both brutally demanding physical labor and the absence of jobs for decades if not centuries.
"The story of why pain relievers took root in Appalachia actually begins decades before the introduction of OxyContin," says Satel, and simply clamping down on prescriptions for painkillers will not only fail to solve the problem in places like Ironton, it will consign thousands of chronic-pain sufferers to excruciating discomfort.
In a conversation with Nick Gillespie, Satel explains what the standard narrative of the opioid epidemic gets wrong and discusses her heterodox theories of addiction that are laid out in her article "Dark Genies, Dark Horizons: The Riddle of Addiction," which appears in the new issue of Liberties: A Journal of Politics and Culture. "Despite popular rhetoric," she says, "addiction is not a 'disease like any other'" but a deeply human condition.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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"I like to say very bluntly: Our mission is to redistribute wealth," New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday while announcing the removal of entrance standards at public schools. "A lot of people bristle at that phrase; that is in fact the phrase we need to use."
It's rare to hear Karl Marx translated so faithfully by a 21st century American politician, but alas not rare at all these days to see Kurt Vonnegut's classic short story "Harrison Bergeron" treated as not dystopian but aspirational. From vaccine dispersal to wealth taxes, from education policy to Capitol Hill's latest COVID relief package, the blunt force of government is being used to pound away at reality until "equity" is finally achieved.
On today's Reason Roundtable podcast, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie talk at length about the Harrison Bergeronization of American political discourse and policymaking, including the startling real-world disconnect between rhetoric and reality. Along the way, the gang also breaks down in detail the new corona bill, encourages President Donald Trump to at least commute the sentence of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, and tries to unblock Mangu-Ward's Moby Dick problem.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "A Boy and His Dreams" by Hans Johnson.
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Should the COVID-19 lockdowns be replaced with a more targeted strategy?
On October 4, 2020, epidemiologists from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocates for ending the COVID-19 lockdowns and turning to a strategy of protecting elderly and vulnerable populations, while allowing everyone else to resume their normal lives.
Critics of the Declaration issued a counter-petition, called the "John Snow Memorandum," stating, "Any pandemic management strategy relying upon immunity from natural infections for COVID-19 is flawed. Uncontrolled transmission in younger people risks significant morbidity and mortality across the whole population."
In an online Soho Forum debate on December 13, Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard biostatistician and epidemiologist and coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration, debated Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California, Irvine, who signed the John Snow Memorandum.
It was an Oxford-style debate, and in this case, the contest ended in a tie: Both debaters convinced 5.56 percent of audience members to switch to their side over the course of the debate.
The Soho Forum, sponsored by Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series typically held at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village, but which has gone remote during the pandemic.
Narrated by Nick Gillespie; audio production by Regan Taylor
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Do immigrants bring with them the worst attributes of the countries and societies they are fleeing?
That fear motivates anti-immigrant sentiments from populists and nationalists such as President Donald Trump, who famously declared at the start of his campaign for the presidency that "when Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best." It also stokes anxiety from an influential group of mostly free market economists such as Harvard's George Borjas, Britain's Paul Collier, and George Mason's Garett Jones, who speculate that mass immigration from countries with illiberal political and economic cultures will undermine countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom.
In Wretched Refuse?: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions, Alex Nowrasteh and Benjamin Powell take an exhaustive look at the data and conclude that destination countries not only benefit economically from immigration but that many key markers of liberal democracy—such as support for the rule of law, belief in private property, and trust in government—improve when newcomers arrive en masse.
"One of the things we take a look at sort of in some detail in the book is whether immigrants have more trust in our institutions—whether they have more trust in the legal system, whether they have more trust in American businesses, whether they have more trust in the general sense of government and the way things are run here," says Nowrasteh, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. "Overwhelmingly they do. If it weren't for immigrants in the United States, trust in these institutions would be a lot lower."
Powell, an economist at Texas Tech who also heads up that school's Free Market Institute, points to the experience of Israel in the 1990s, whose population increased by 20 percent, largely due to Jews fleeing the former Soviet Union. "There was a massive flood of people coming from a country with a 70-year history of no rule of law and no economic freedoms [who] piled into Israel with immediate voting rights. Confidence in property rights didn't go down," notes Powell. "Confidence in property rights didn't go down, it went up. [So did] economic freedoms across board…Israel went from something like 90th in the world in economic freedom to 45th during a period of massive immigration from a communist country."
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Photo: Rrodrickbeiler | Dreamstime.com
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As in the movie Groundhog Day, a member of the Trump administration this morning woke up early, put on his work clothes, and started yammering about the "fraudulent election" and how some cock-eyed new scheme was going pull victory from the jaws of defeat.
Alas for Stephen Miller—and Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas), and the House Freedom Caucus, and at least 17 state attorneys general—the legal system in the United States has a higher evidentiary standard than the guy who tweets out deep thoughts like this:
"Swing States that have found massive VOTER FRAUD, which is all of them, CANNOT LEGALLY CERTIFY these votes as complete & correct without committing a severely punishable crime. Everybody knows that dead people, below age people, illegal immigrants, fake signatures, prisoners,...."
What do such untethered exertions—and their Democratic antecedents—augur for the future of the country and the political party of Abraham Lincoln? Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Dr. Nick Gillespie kick that question around at the top of today's Reason Roundtable podcast. Also discussed: the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, President-elect Joe Biden's latest round of allegedly "bold" appointments, and the music-killing secrets of the narwhal.
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In December 2019, The New York Times published The 1619 Project, an immensely ambitious, influential, and controversial reframing of American history.
The project's creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, won a Pulitzer Prize for her work while arguing that the nation's founding was based on a "racist ideology," and that the U.S. Constitution was a "decidedly undemocratic" document.
This idea has resonated with many Americans and The 1619 Project has been adapted into a high school curriculum that attempts to "reframe U.S. history by marking the year when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil as our nation's foundational date." Appearing just months before highly publicized police killings of African Americans such as George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, The 1619 Project informed much of the rhetoric of demonstrators who took to the streets to protest racially charged police brutality.
But Hannah-Jones' view of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence is at odds with that of Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the escaped slave, abolitionist, intellectual, and towering figure in American history.
In his new book A Glorious Liberty: Frederick Douglass and the Fight for an Antislavery Constitution, Reason Senior Editor Damon Root argues the contemporary debates over systemic racism and America's founding are replaying fights that took place in the middle of the 19th century. Far from seeing our country's Constitution as a morally ambiguous document that simply sanctioned white supremacism, Douglass extolled it as "a glorious liberty document" that justified the ending of slavery and other forms of race- and gender-based inequality. Douglass's message, says Root, is as vital to the current moment as it was in the 19th century.
Root is also the author of the influential Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court (2014). In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, he talks about recent changes at the Supreme Court and whether the three judges appointed by President Donald Trump (Neil Gorsuch, Bret Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) will be good from a libertarian perspective.
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Before we talk about the delicious/delirious content on the latest Reason Roundtable podcast, a quick reminder: It's the penultimate day of our annual Webathon. Challenge grants are afoot. We take still more listener questions in the pod below, but before you click the clicky…
WON'T YOU PLEASE DONATE TO REASON RIGHT ABOUT THE HELL NOW?
OK, long story short, the House of Representatives on Friday voted to, at long bloody last, end the federal war on marijuana. The winning 228–164 margin included just five Republicans—none of them named Thomas Massie, the libertarian-leaning Kentucky congressman who has been a past supporter of legalization efforts. Massie explained his position thusly:
"I wish @SpeakerPelosi was serious about repealing the federal prohibition on marijuana. I could cross the aisle to vote on it if it weren’t being used as a vehicle to pass new taxes and spending.
Give us a clean Bill or at least allow amendments to be heard."
In today's podcast, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch each take turns arguing against this logic, while also reflecting on the broader history of repealing prohibitions and the immediate challenges of convincing any major political party to reduce state power and expand individual autonomy. The gang also has acidic words for the Food and Drug Administration's foot-dragging on COVID-19 vaccines, kinder words for our own magazine (we like ourselves, we really do!), plus the usual pointless squabbling about the Star Wars universe.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "Endless Fields - Pizzicato Version" by Ian Post.
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How does Katherine Mangu-Ward deal with all the damn statists surrounding her at work? How does Peter Suderman imagine persuading people that more government control of health insurance is not the way to better outcomes? Why do none of Nick Gillespie's cultural references post-date 1965? WTF is going on with Matt Welch's hair?
These questions and more were flung, with affection and occasional bite, by the beloved listeners of our weekly Reason Roundtable podcast. Today, in a special midweek episode, we continue our tradition of answering them as part of Reason's annual webathon, in which we try to persuade you to make a modest (or immodest!) tax-deductible donation to the nonprofit foundation that publishes our work. Speaking of which…
PLEASE, BROTHER, COULD YOU SPARE A DONATION RIGHT THE HELL NOW? I mean, there's a $25,000 challenge grant and everything!
Here we are trying our level best to respond to your suggestions (no, we probably won't do a late-night weed podcast just yet), your quick-hit stumpers (favorite Twitter accounts; most libertarian sitcom characters), your fantasies about imaginary cocktail parties, and also your deep questions about COVID-19, libertarianism, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, artificial intelligence, Section 230, and much, much more. Enjoy!
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How much does President Donald Trump hate Section 230, the controversial law that gives internet service providers, website operators, and social media platforms broad immunity from legal responsibility for user-generated content? He's threatened to veto funding for the military unless Congress "completely terminates" the law, which also allows social media sites to moderate or ban speech they don't like.
Trump is joined in his contempt for Section 230 by President-elect Joe Biden, who earlier this year said the law should be "revoked immediately." Democrats argue that Section 230 allows hate speech and misinformation to proliferate and throw elections, while Republicans say that it's used to squelch conservative voices in the public square. What comes next?
Enter Ajit Pail, the chairman of the Federal Communication Commission. In October, after President Trump went on a tear about Twitter and Facebook restricting access to a New York Post story critical of Joe Biden's son Hunter, Pai said the FCC would be looking to clarify Section 230. Even though he's announced he's stepping down on January 20th and that Congress has ultimate responsibility for passing laws governing online speech, what Pai does in his final weeks could have a lasting impact.
Nick Gillespie spoke with him the day before the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this podcast, awarded Pai the Sixth Annual Savas Award for Privatization for his market-friendly policies, including facilitating the growth of 5G networks and ending FCC regulation of internet service providers commonly known as Net Neutrality. Pai discusses what sorts of reforms or revisions of Section 230 he supports, what he's most proud of accomplishing at the FCC, and whether he thinks free speech—especially online—has much of a future.
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As of today, the 10 million residents of Los Angeles County can no longer legally congregate with people outside of their immediate family, unless it's for the purposes of outdoor protest or religious gathering. Playgrounds—you know, those places in California's abundantly pleasant outdoors where children, who are disproportionately unlikely to contract, transmit, or suffer from COVID-19, can feel like human beings for brief respites—are once again banned, unless they are attached to schools (which are almost all shut) or day care centers. Restaurants cannot accept even outdoor customers.
All this despite the fact that L.A. County's seven-day positive-test rate for the novel coronavirus is at just 6.9 percent, which would rank around 38th in the country if the County of Angels was a state. The overall positivity rate in California is even lower, though that hasn't stopped Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state's largely Democratic political class from enacting some of the harshest clampdowns in the United States.
How did we get here, and how can we get out? Such forms the bulk of the debate on today's Reason Roundtable. Also up for discussion: media hysteria, President-elect Joe Biden's crappy Cabinet picks, and what Unorthodox can teach us about voice, exit, and coronavirus.
Speaking of plagues: Right the hell now is your final opportunity to submit questions for Roundtable podcasters Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward, to be addressed during our annual Webathon, which starts presently. Please email stumpers to podcasts@reason.com before December 1. You'll be glad you did!
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "government funded weed" by Black Ant.
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No journalist is more relentlessly iconoclastic than Glenn Greenwald, who shared a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Edward Snowden revelations.
Though unapologetically progressive, the 53-year-old former lawyer never shrinks from fighting with the left. A week before the 2020 election, he quit The Intercept, the online news organization he co-founded in 2014, because, by his own account, it refused to run a story unless he "remove[d] all sections critical of" Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Denouncing what he called "the pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality" that led him to be "censored" by his own media outlet, Greenwald railed that "these are the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left political organization, academic institution, and newsroom."
Like a growing number of refugees from more-traditional news organizations, Greenwald took his talents to Substack, a platform for independent content creators to earn revenue directly from their audiences. He wasted no time lobbing grenades, posting stories and videos with titles like "No Matter the Liberal Metric Chosen, the Bush/Cheney Administration Was Far Worse Than Trump" and "The Three Greatest Dangers of Biden/Harris: Militarism, Corporatism and Censorship, All Fueled by Indifference."
Nick Gillespie spoke with Greenwald via Zoom at Greenwald's house in Brazil, where he lives with his husband, two children, and numerous dogs. Among other topics, they discussed what Greenwald sees as a generational fight playing out in newsrooms, the challenge identity politics poses to free expression, and whether a coalition of libertarians and progressives can effectively push non-interventionist foreign policy, lifestyle liberation, and an end to corporate subsidies during the Biden presidency.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Photo: Marcelo Chello/ZUMA Press/Newscom
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Over the past 50-plus years, Charles Koch grew his family business, Koch Industries, into one of the largest privately held companies in America. At the same time, he played a leading role in creating or supporting the modern libertarian movement and some of its major institutions. Among them: The Cato Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Mercatus Center, and the Charles Koch Foundation, a nonprofit that supports many organizations, including Reason Foundation, which is the publisher of Reason magazine. Along with his brother David, a longtime trustee of the Reason Foundation who passed away last year at the age of 79, the 85-year-old billionaire became not only one of the most successful businessmen in the country but also one of the most controversial, with leftists blaming "the Koch brothers" for many of our contemporary problems.
Koch has just published Believe in People, a book that seeks to "offer a paradigm shift [that] calls for all of us to move away from the top-down approach to solving the really big problems" by instead "empowering people from the bottom up to act on their unique gifts and contribute to the lives of others."
In a conversation with Koch and his co-author, Brian Hooks, who is the chairman and CEO of Stand Together and the president of the Charles Koch Foundation, Reason's Nick Gillespie discusses the 2020 election, the successes and failures of the libertarian movement, and what Koch and Hooks see as the defining challenges and opportunities in the coming decade.
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It's been a bad few days for Donald Trump's lawyers, court cases, and political party. But has it been bad for the rest of us as well?
That's the question dominating the second half of this week's Reason Roundtable. The first 30 minutes are all about this year's COVID-tainted Thanksgiving—recipes, serving strategies, tips for sidestepping political conversations, and grisly family traditions (including a "Cranberry Man" you cannot unhear). We also describe what we're thankful for, in a very on-brand way.
Speaking of which: Got questions for Roundtable podcasters Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward? Please email them to podcasts@reason.com before December 1, and we will tackle them during our annual Webathon, which begins at the end of this month. You'll be glad you did!
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music "Pizzi Waltz" by Kadir Demir.
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The Electoral College is the best means of electing a president compared to any others that might be devised.
When Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016 even though 2.8 million more people voted for Hillary Clinton, everyone from Bill De Blasio, to Michael Moore, to Eric Holder and Bill Maher said that at long last we should abolish the electoral college. Then-California Senator Barbara Boxer introduced a bill to amend the U.S. constitution to do just that.
A Gallup poll from September of this year showed that 61 percent of Americans support abolishing the electoral college in favor of a national popular vote, although it's an issue that breaks along partisan lines. 77 percent of Republicans want to keep the electoral college, while 89 percent of Democrats said that we should get rid of it.
Is the electoral college the best system for electing a president? That was the subject of an online Soho Forum debate held on Wednesday, November 11, 2020. Richard Epstein, a law professor at New York University, defended the system against Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Harvard. Soho Forum director Gene Epstein moderated.
Lessig won the Oxford-Style debate by gaining 14.29 percent of the audience's support. Epstein lost 2.04 percent of his pre-debate votes.
Narrated by Nick Gillespie. Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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"From the moment we're born, we're surrounded by textiles," says Virginia Postrel, author of the new book The Fabric of Civilization. "It's not just our clothes, it's our blankets, it's our curtains. It's our bandages. It's our duct tape! There are more textiles than you can ever think about surrounding us. And we don't think about them very much."
A former editor of Reason, Postrel is also the author of The Power of Glamour, The Substance of Style, and The Future and Its Enemies. Her new book is a thick history of a technology that is absolutely central to our daily lives and yet one we take for granted. By focusing on fabric, she is able to tell a fascinating story about economics, politics, trade, industrialization, and centuries' worth of disruptive technology.
For instance, she notes that in 17th- and 18th-century Europe, countries banned the importation of super-soft, super-colorful cotton prints from India known as calicos because they threatened domestic producers of everything from lower-quality cotton fabric to luxury silks. "For 73 years, France treated calico the way the U.S. treats cocaine," she says. "There was this huge amount of smuggling, and they were constantly ratcheting up the penalties [so] that they got quite grotesque, at least for the major traffic." Some of "the earliest writings of classical liberalism are in this context, people saying not only is this not working, but…it is unjust to be sentencing people to the galleys in order to protect silk makers' profits."
"Human beings live in history and we inherit the legacies, positive and negative, of that history," says Postrel, discussing the large themes of her work. "All you can do is start from where you are and try to do better from where you are."
She tells Nick Gillespie why polyester is far cooler than its reputation, why she's frustrated with libertarians who "want to make the world be like a clean sheet of paper," and why, despite pandemics and threats to liberalism everywhere, she is optimistic about the future.
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So voters repudiate President Donald Trump yet refuse to embrace the Democratic Party, while also passing some freedom-friendly ballot initiatives. Meanwhile, the noisy center of American politics these past five years characteristically refuses to concede, and concocts increasingly implausible conspiracy theories attempting to explain away his loss. Where does that leave the modern GOP, and whatever vaguely libertarian muscle memory it may have buried somewhere?
That discussion takes up the second half of this week's Reason Roundtable. The front end is devoted to exploring the difference between Trump's and Joe Biden's COVID-19 policies, the wonderful news of another vaccine, and the less salutary news of widespread infection and hospitalization increases all around the country. The phrase "Gadsden Flag mankini" is invoked.
Speaking of which: Got questions for Roundtable podcasters Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward? Please email them to podcasts@reason.com before December 1, and we will try to get to each and every one of them during our annual Webathon, which begins at the end of this month. You'll be glad you did!
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "Day Bird" by Broke for Free
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Before George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, there was Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man who was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Brown's death inspired the fledgling Black Lives Matter movement, and "Hands Up. Don't Shoot," a line derived from accounts of Brown's final words, has been a rallying cry at protests against police violence ever since.
But Michael Brown probably never spoke those words. An exhaustive Department of Justice report later concluded that the claim that "Brown held his hands up in clear surrender" came from sources who later "acknowledged that they didn't actually witness the shooting, but rather repeated what others told them." And that account was "inconsistent with the physical evidence," which instead corroborated Officer Darren Wilson's claim that Brown attacked him and tried to grab his gun.
In contrast to other police killings that have energized Black Lives Matter and nationwide protests—including that of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, shot while wielding a plastic gun; of Eric Garner, who died while an officer held him in a chokehold; and of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor—there's no reason to believe that by shooting Brown, Wilson was acting unreasonably, concluded Barack Obama's Justice Department, because he was under attack.
Writer and filmmaker Shelby Steele went to Ferguson to investigate the meaning of Brown's death and the reaction that it inspired. His new documentary, a collaboration with his son Eli, is called What Killed Michael Brown?
Born in Chicago in 1946, Steele, a former college professor who specialized in Russian literature, is the son of a truck driver and the grandson of a slave. His views on how to correct America's racial injustices were deeply influenced by his experiences in the late 1960s and early '70s working in a poverty program in East St. Louis. Steele believes—provocatively—that what killed Michael Brown is the "liberalism that put him in public housing, that expanded welfare payments so that his family broke up, the fatherless home, the terrible education, terrible schools, terrible public housing, uh, the destructive school busing." In place of today's increasing focus on identity politics, Steele believes we need to emphasize citizenship and the experiences we have in common if we are to deliver fully on America's promise as a land of opportunity.
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Which weekend op-ed headline team are you on? "Libertarians Spoil the Election: Jo Jorgensen exceeds Biden's margin in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia," by Walter Block? Or "One Group Is Unreservedly Happy About the Election Results: Libertarians are pleased to have likely dodged the bullet of one-party government control," by Liz Mair? (As you know, there can only be two choices in American politics…)
The Reason Roundtable podcast, featuring as it does four small-l libertarians (Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward), has a range of views on the subject. On today's episode we discuss the promise and pitfalls of divided government, the worrying and soon-to-be-goosed trend toward pen-and-phone governance, the glass-half-full vs. glass-should-be-thrown-against-the wall interpretation of the Libertarian Party's Tuesday, and also the marvelous late-breaking news that a COVID-19 vaccine appears to be incoming.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "CGI Snake" by Chris Zabriskie.
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In four years as president, Republican Donald Trump has overseen massive spending increases. His Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, has laid out a spending plan that would add $11 trillion in new spending and institute the largest tax hike since the end of World War II.
Is this any way to run a country? Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at The Manhattan Institute who analyzes budget issues, walks Nick Gillespie through Trump's rotten fiscal record and Biden's insane wish list, explains how bipartisanship is just another word for more spending, and why even a divided government can't stop the red ink from flowing anymore. There are ways to cut spending and stabilize growth-killing national debt, says Riedl, but it's going to take a sea change in politics, rising interest rates, and a cold shoulder from the global economy to make them palatable.
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If governments don't completely eliminate fossil fuels by 2040, society is doomed, says Jeff Nesbit, author of This is the Way the World Ends.
That kind of apocalyptic rhetoric "costs us trillions, hurts the poor, and fails to fix the planet," says Bjorn Lomborg, author of False Alarm.
Are fossil fuels an imminent threat to human life, or are attempts to eliminate them more destructive? That was the subject of an Oxford-style online Soho Forum debate hosted on Sunday, October 18th, 2020.
Arguing in favor of the complete elimination of fossil fuels over 20 years was Nesbit, the executive director of Climate Nexus. He went up against Lomborg, the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. The debate was moderated by Soho Forum director Gene Epstein.
Narrated by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Ian Keyser. Intro by John Osterhoudt.
Music: "Under Cover," by Wayne Jones
Photos: Gina M Randazzo/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Sebastian Silva/EFE/Newscom; imageBROKER/Jim West/Newscom; Stefan Boness/Ipon/SIPA/Newscom
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Though 100 million of you have already cast your ballots, and there never really were many undecided voters to begin with this time around, let us not look this gift horse('s ass) of an election in the mouth. Today's Reason Roundtable podcast provides some last-minute shopping analysis of the two main candidates in our national elderly man contest.
On this episode, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward try our level best to say something nice about the existing presidency of Donald Trump and prospective presidency of Joe Biden, while of course perhaps spending a wee bit more time talking about the worst aspects of both. Along the way we discuss pre-election window-plywooding, post-election scenarios for weirdness, and our colleague Damon Root's excellent new book, A Glorious Liberty: Frederick Douglass and the Fight for an Antislavery Constitution.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: “Bring to Light” by Max H. https://artlist.io/song/9547/bring-to-light
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Very little will likely be decided on Election Day, says Stanford and Hoover Institution political scientist Morris P. Fiorina, and that's not simply because a historically high percentage of mail-in ballots means the final tally might not be known for weeks or even months.
Fiorina says we are in an extended age of what he calls "unstable majorities" because neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party is popular enough to get and hold enduring legislative power. The result is a historically rare period in which control of the White House and each house of Congress regularly flips back and forth between the two parties.
Fiorina says the main cause of such "electoral chaos" is the way that parties select candidates and platforms. Party activists are more ideological and less representative not simply of most Americans but even of the other members of their own parties. When they take control, the parties push extreme agendas at odds with popular opinion, resulting in regular turnover the next time there's an election. In 2008, for instance, Barack Obama and the Democrats won in a landslide before losing control of Congress two years later. Similarly, Donald Trump won the White House in 2016 and had a Republican Congress, only to lose the House two years later.
Fiorina, who describes himself as a "soft libertarian," expects Joe Biden to win next week and figures it's likely that the Democrats will win a majority in the Senate while keeping the House. But he also expects "electoral chaos" to characterize the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election because the underlying conditions that produce such unstable majorities haven't changed.
Despite deep discord stoked by COVID-19 lockdowns, economic collapse, and racial tensions, Fiorina is guardedly optimistic about the future. His work in books such as Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America shows that citizens actually agree overwhelmingly on many issues (including abortion, marijuana legalization, gay rights, and free trade) despite divisive political rhetoric. "There are big problems and no one seems to have a good idea of how to get a handle on them," he grants. But comparing the current moment to the late 1960s and early '70s, though, he says "we're not on the verge of civil war" and that today's violence is far less intense or extensive. "We somehow muddled through [the '60s]," he says, "and so I think we will probably as a country do that again, although it won't be pretty and it won't be quick."
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Did you notice at last week's final presidential debate that the candidates actually talked about concrete coronavirus-related policies for more than a half-minute there? The discussion was not without its head-scratchers, but at least the most pressing issue facing 2020 America got chewed on a bit. Though it didn't quite answer the question: What would a President Joe Biden do, exactly?
Such dominates the conversation on today's Reason Roundtable podcast, starring Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward. The gang digs into the former vice president's likeliest actions on COVID, education, health care, state bailouts, economic regulation, cancel culture, and much more. His opponent, ol' whatshisface, also comes up a time or two.
Audio production by Ian Keyserand Regan Taylor.
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Forty years ago, PBS (of all networks) gave the libertarian economist Milton Friedman hours in prime time for Free To Choose, an unapologetic defense of why capitalism was both morally and pragmatically superior to socialism. Over the course of 10 hourlong episodes, the Nobel Prize winner laid out the pitfalls of protectionism. espoused the virtues of school choice, and explained why spending, not taxes, is the real measure of the burden that governments put on their citizens.
Long before the internet and YouTube democratized discourse, Friedman showcased an assortment of relatively unknown radical thinkers such as economists Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell while subjecting popular left-wing intellectuals such as democratic socialist Michael Harrington, teachers union head Albert Shanker, and political scientist Frances Fox Piven to withering criticism of their ideas.
Free to Choose has been translated into two dozen languages and a companion book, co-authored by Milton and his wife Rose, became a New York Times bestseller. The show began life as a response to The Age of Uncertainty, a 1977 PBS series hosted by John Kenneth Galbraith, a Harvard professor who had served as ambassador to India and was a leading evangelist for big-government liberalism.
The visionary producer behind the series was Bob Chitester, a hardcore free marketer who ran the PBS affiliate in Erie, Pennsylvania, and wanted to bring libertarian ideas to mainstream audiences. "Age of Uncertainty was an attempt to begin to use storytelling as a way to reach people, but it was a dismal failure because Galbraith was terrible," the 83-year-old Chitester tells Nick Gillespie in a wide-ranging conversation. "The series just went into a black hole and disappeared. It's not like Free To Choose, which is just everywhere, even 40 years later."
In the 1980s, says Chitester, programs about free markets "were really muckraking attacks on what was perceived to be abusive and unsympathetic…capitalism, where profit was all that mattered." Free To Choose talked about capitalism in upbeat, positive terms, stressing how it helped individuals rather than exploited them and how it brought about cooperation in a way that benefitted the poor most of all. After Free To Choose, Chitester would go on to produce more shows and collaborate with figures such as broadcaster John Stossel, economist Johan Norberg, and federal judge Douglas H. Ginsburg. His project izzit.org has delivered videos and educational materials to hundreds of thousands of K-12 classrooms around the country.
Did Friedman make any mistakes in Free To Choose? His celebration of the free market miracle in Hong Kong is poignant to watch at the moment when the city's freedoms are under siege. But before his death in 2006, Chitester says Friedman came to question his famous axiom that economic freedom in autocracies such as China would inexorably give rise to political and cultural freedom. "In a discussion close to near the end of his life, he said, 'Bob, I made a mistake. I was wrong. You [also] have to have rule of law. You have to have law that applies equally to everyone,'" recalls Chitester. "And clearly that's what you see not happening in China."
Ailing from a long bout with cancer, Chitester is contemplating his own mortality and how American society has changed since Free To Choose first aired 40 years ago. He's proud that the program remains popular online but, like Friedman, feels its analysis is incomplete. "Power is really something we have to factor into our thinking…The desire of humans to tell other humans what to do—when you couple that with equality, boy, you've got a recipe for constant problems in defending a classical liberal society."
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"Once social media sites take on the responsibility of policing speech," David Harsanyi wrote at Reason in 2018, "they are transforming themselves into adjudicators of what ideas are tolerable on purportedly open platforms.
That's a precarious position moving forward." Boy howdy is it.
On today's Reason Roundtable podcast. Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and special guest star Stephanie Slade debate the appropriate responses both to Twitter's move to suppress a New York Post article about Hunter Biden, and also the reflex by too many politicians to retaliate by rewriting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The gang also talks about how to read the latest polls, what everyone learned from last week's presidential townhalls, and why Slade is even considering a vote for Joe Biden.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: Is That You or Are You You by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: http://chriszabriskie.com/reappear/ Artist: http://chriszabriskie.com/
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Ilya Somin, Angela McArdle, and Francis Menton refresh their cases for Biden, Jorgensen, and Trump.
In July, the Soho Forum hosted a three-way debate asking the question "Who should Libertarians Vote For in 2020?" George Mason law professor Ilya Somin made the case for Joe Biden, chair of the Libertarian Party in Los Angeles Angela McArdle argued for Jo Jorgensen, and Manhattan Contrarian blogger Francis Menton defended Donald Trump.
A lot has changed since July, and with the election now less than three weeks away, the Soho Forum hosted another event in which those same three libertarians updated their arguments for their preferred candidates.
None of the participants have changed their minds on who to vote for, but they all agree on one thing: The stakes have gotten higher.
Somin blogs at The Volokh Conspiracy and has written Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter and Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.
McArdle is the chair of the Libertarian Party of Los Angeles and the author of The Communist Cookbook: Delicious Dining for the Modern Marxist.
Menton blogs at Manhattan Contrarian and is a retired partner in the Litigation Department and co-chair of the business litigation practice group Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP in New York.
In 1977, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) went to court to defend the rights of American Nazis to march through the streets of Skokie, Illinois, home to many Holocaust survivors. The ACLU defended the Nazi's right to march and won the case on First Amendment grounds, but at a high cost: 30,000 members quit the organization in protest.
The Skokie case cemented the image of the ACLU as a principled, absolute defender of free speech. The following year, Ira Glasser would become the organization's executive director, a position he would hold for the next 23 years while leading the charge against government regulation of content on the Internet, hate speech laws, speech codes on college campuses, and more. Now Glasser is the subject of a new documentary, Mighty Ira, that celebrates his time at the ACLU and his legacy of protecting free speech.
Retired since 2001, Glasser tells Nick Gillespie that in an age of cancel culture and wokeness, he's worried not just about the future of free expression but the future of the ACLU, too. In 2018, for instance, a leaked memo offered guidelines for case selection that retreated from the ACLU's longstanding content-neutral stance, citing as a reason to decline a case "the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values."
The 82-year-old Glasser fears that in becoming more political and less absolutist when it comes to defending speech, the ACLU is shrugging off a hard-earned legacy. "There is no social justice movement in America that has ever not needed the First Amendment to initiate its movement for justice, to sustain its movement to justice, to help its movement survive," he says. "[Former Rep.] John Lewis said that without free speech and the right to dissent, the Civil Rights movement would have been a bird without wings. That's historically and politically true without exception."
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Last week featured a surprisingly taciturn Vice Presidential debate that was notable more for what the candidates didn't say than what they did. But make no mistake: Health care, the federal budget, infrastructure and energy are all going to be subjects of intense legislative wrangling over the next four years, no matter who wins in November.
Democrats in particular have a far-reaching agenda that they will attempt to enact should they win back control of the White House and the Senate, as election odds-makers now believe is likely. But are Democrats and Republicans really so far apart?
On this week's Reason Roundtable podcast, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Eric Boehm discuss what comes next if Democrats take the Senate, and President Donald Trump's plans for a second term. Also before the panel: Last week's debate, the fate of the filibuster, what to expect from the battle over Amy Coney Barrett's Supreme Court nomination, COVID-era baseball, and the decline of Saturday Night Live.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "government funded weed" by Black Ant.
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The lockdowns in response to COVID-19 have upended no part of our lives more than education, where virtually no K-12 schools are open for business with full-time, in-person instruction. The result is something approaching pandemonium for students, parents, and educators alike, all of whom are scrambling to make sense of a system that no longer seems capable of doing what it's supposed to do.
The one constant? Critiques of school choice—especially by wealthy, well-connected liberals such as Samantha Bee, the host of the popular commentary show Full Frontal on TBS. In a recent segment called "How The School Choice Debate Is Failing Our Public Schools," Bee took a dark view of alternatives to traditional public schools, warning that "private and charter schools can be especially problematic because some states have virtually no oversight over them."
As a matter of fact, Bee is wrong, especially about charter schools, which are always overseen by either local or state education officials. But her anxiety—and that of other defenders of the status quo—is understandable: The lockdowns and forced shift to mostly virtual learning are driving massive interest in alternatives to the residential-assignment public schools most Americans have attended for decades. Angry pushback from teachers unions about going back into classrooms and the desultory quality of learning via Zoom is activating parents in a way that white papers on school reform never did.
For today's podcast, Nick Gillespie speaks with Corey DeAngelis, the director of school choice for Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website and podcast. They talk about why COVID-19 will almost certainly spur long-lasting interest in school choice and the success of the new collection DeAngelis co-edited with Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute, School Choice Myths: Setting the Record Straight on Education Reform. In a wide-ranging conversation, they also discuss presidential contender and former Vice President Joe Biden's open antagonism toward school choice, especially charter schools, and whether President Donald Trump's warm embrace of choice is actually a mixed blessing for reformers.
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By the time you read these words, even more employees at the White House will have tested positive for COVID-19 than detailed in the already-lengthy list this morning from Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown. What, if anything, does that tell us about the patient-in-chief, his coronavirus polices to date, and the post–Election Day future?
There are vigorous differences of opinion on these questions in today's Reason Roundtable podcast. Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward debate tail risk, peaceful transfers of power, erratic behavior, media hyperventilation, local corona-bungling, congressional money-printing, endless lockdowns, and more. The gang also previews this week's vice presidential debate, explores the Sherlock Holmes–superhero connection, and talks about South Park's Pandemic Special.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: 'City Lights' by Audiobinger.
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Scott Barry Kaufman is a psychologist, podcaster, and the bestselling author of the new book Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, which updates Abraham Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs and his theories of personal fulfillment for a time of global pandemic, racial unrest, and polarized politics.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Kaufman discusses how self-actualization—fulfilling our personal potential and goals—intersects with contemporary debates about Black Lives Matter and racial strife, nastiness and bad-faith arguing in partisan politics, and rising rates of depression and anxiety during pandemic-related lockdowns. They also talk about how aspects of Maslow's thought map onto libertarian ideas about autonomy, individualism, freedom, and self-fulfillment.
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Asked about The New York Times' novella-length article analyzing his last 18 years of federal income tax returns, President Donald Trump said: "It's fake news. It's totally fake news. Made up, fake."
That hasn't stopped people from discussing Trump's inventive accounting, to a chorus of sputtered outrage by Trump's legion of critics, the vast majority of whom miss a simple point: The tax code is a big, complicated mess because major-party politicians—including those Republicans who insincerely promise to fit the entire form "on a postcard"—like it just fine that way, and voters do not punish them for perennially exacerbating the exasperating status quo.
So argue Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward on this week's Reason Roundtable podcast. The gang also previews tomorrow night's presidential debate (including those unfairly excluded from it), grapples with the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, and makes a number of editorially questionable sound effects.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: “Sentinel” by Kai Engel.
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"I used to tell people the Libertarian Party is the best of both sides. We take the economic freedoms from the right and the social freedoms from the left," says L.P. presidential nominee Jo Jorgensen. "I can't even say that anymore because Republicans aren't acting like Republicans and Democrats aren't acting like Democrats."
In a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, the 63-year-old Clemson psychology lecturer is pulling 5 percent, which might cover the final spread between Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden.
Jorgensen, who is on the ballot in every state, is preaching a message of self-empowerment and autonomy that she says attracts mostly independents and people who are getting politicized for the first time. Her constituents are "people who believe that they should be able to make their own decisions. People who believe that they should have a right to decide their child's education, which health care they want and which health care they don't want, [how] to control their retirement dollars, and that they should be able to make a choice of whether or not they wear a mask."
In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Jorgensen, who was the L.P.'s 1996 vice-presidential candidate, explains why she thinks Gen Z is very "live and let live," why the federal government should be half its current size, why she's optimistic about the future, and how Alan Dershowitz (!) would make a great Supreme Court justice.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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"We have the Senate," President Donald Trump said Monday morning, with we meaning the GOP. And that means, in contrast with Barack Obama's stymied 2016 attempt to fill a Supreme Court vacancy during a presidential election year, Republicans ready to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg "can sort of do what you want."
As a description of crude power politics, that's mostly true. (We shall see if more Republican senators pre-announce their intention not to vote on a SCOTUS nomination before Election Day.) But as power politics becomes more crude, is that good for the country on balance?
So begins the debate on this week's Reason Roundtable podcast, starring Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward. The gang discusses political hypocrisy, congressional irresponsibility, and the mutual degradation of norms (and Norms), as well as the latest in federal corona spending, Trump's ridiculously interventionist TikTok exertions, and prohibition baseball in quarantined California.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "Casual Desire" by Ugonna Onyekwe.
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"The latest in school segregation." That's how the headline of a recent New York Times op-ed described private "pandemic pods," in which parents of K–12 students hire an in-person teacher while public schools remain online-only due to COVID-19 lockdowns. The pandemic pods, says the writer, "will exacerbate inequities, racial segregation and the opportunity gap within schools."
Business Insider had a somewhat different take, claiming the pods are "inequitable and inevitable" and "a dream come true for the school choice movement."
Are pandemic pods just the latest tool by which "nice white parents" use their financial and political clout to separate out their kids, thus increasing segregation in education? And if so, is the solution to increase government spending on K–12 schools so that all parents will want to keep their kids in the public system?
That was the subject of an online Soho Forum debate held on Wednesday, September 16, 2020. The Soho Forum is a monthly series sponsored by Reason. The debates are done Oxford-style, which means the audience votes on the resolution at both the beginning and end of the event; the side that gains the most ground is victorious.
Arguing for more government spending was Jon Hale, a professor of education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Arguing in favor of pods and other parental innovations was Corey DeAngelis, director of school choice at the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website. Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein moderated the debate.
Photo credit: Photo 156402271 © Pojoslaw | Dreamstime.com
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Almost 70 years after a U.S.-backed coup deposed the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and replaced him with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the leader of Iran, relations between the two countries remain at a fever pitch. Just days ago, President Donald Trump, responding to unspecified intelligence reports, threatened that "any attack by Iran, in any form, against the United States will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!"
In the new documentary Coup 53, Taghi Amirani tells the story of how British and American secret agents overthrew Mossadegh after he nationalized the oil industry, starting a series of events that would lead to the rise of the autocratic, U.S.-hating Islamic regime that continues to reign to this day. Beyond its tragic effects on Iran and the Middle East, Amirani argues that the seemingly easy 1953 coup became the "playbook" for future U.S. covert actions in countries such as Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, and beyond, forever changing the face of global politics.
In a wide-ranging conversation about immigration, foreign policy, and filmmaking, Amirani tells Nick Gillespie that Trump's policies, like those of all U.S. leaders, are "the product of the military-industrial complex and that, ultimately, matters more" than whatever a president enters office thinking.
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What did Donald Trump know, and when did he know it? According to Bob Woodward's new book, Rage, and the interview tapes the veteran reporter released last week, the president acknowledged the seriousness of the coronavirus in private interviews much earlier than he did public. Are there times when presidents should tell what they perceive as noble lies to forestall panic? Or, as Woodward suggests, do those obfuscations simply prevent Americans from rallying around and solving serious problems together?
Regular Reason Roundtable podcasters Nick Gillespie and Katherine Mangu-Ward are joined by special guests Eric Boehm and Zach Weissmueller for a 20th-century-flashback episode to discuss whether epidemiology is politics, whether movies are politics, whether sports are politics, and whether all of those things have always been politics.
Plus Gillespie gets ratioed, Mangu-Ward gets literary, Weissmueller gets serious, and Boehm gets emo in their pop culture recommendations.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "Drizzle to Downpour" by Silent Partner and "Hide the Horror" by Asthmatic Astronaut.
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In the time of a global pandemic, soaring unemployment, massive wildfires, and racial strife, it feels like the world is going to hell.
It's not, says Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey, the coauthor (with HumanProgress.org's Marian Tupy) of Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting. "In 1820," Bailey tells Nick Gillespie, "84 percent of the world's population lived on [the equivalent of] less than $1.90 a day. It took 160 years for that to get down to only 41 percent. But since then, it's now below 10 percent…and we'll probably be 5% or less by 2030."
Bailey's new book also shows that forests are increasing in size, deaths from natural disasters are declining, and there are fewer autocratic governments than ever. He believes climate change will become a significant problem, but one that can be handled with technology and economic growth. The main reasons for massive and persistent progress are better ideas for organizing human society. "Basically," he says, "the Enlightenment happened." With that came the rise of representative government, property rights and markets, and especially a belief in free speech and open inquiry that are essential for technological and social innovation.
If improvements are so ubiquitous, why don't we recognize it more? Bailey argues that politicians and media outlets have vested interests in focusing on bad news and that humans have a "glitch" that leads us to take progress as a given. "We just take it for granted, he says. "What we're trying to do with this book is to not let people take it for granted and [remind them], this is what has happened. And look to the future. If we keep the same institutions that enabled this, then much more of it will happen in the future."
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"Democracy doesn't die in the darkness," writes Bridget Phetasy, "it dies when politics become team sports, in full view of a bloodthirsty, cheering electorate."
Phetasy is a popular podcaster, comedian, and writer who a year ago penned a great column titled "The battle cry of the politically homeless." She followed it up just a few days ago with an equally powerful piece called "Why I won't vote," which channels the frustration felt by the 41-percent plurality of us who are political independents. "This is the best we've got," she says of presidential contenders Joe Biden and Donald Trump. "Do I poke out my left eye? Or my right eye?"
Nick Gillespie speaks with Phetasy about what she thinks has to happen for politics to improve. A former heroin addict and recovering alcoholic, she says that Democratic and Republican hyper-partisans would benefit from some of the lessons about personal responsibility and optimism taught by Alcohol Anonymous; she even offers her own 12-step program for electoral independence and recovery. She also talks about whether Generation Z is completely post-gender, how new platforms continue to create new ways for creators and audiences to circumvent legacy media, and why things are generally getting much better culturally even if politics are getting much worse.
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President Donald Trump has been making some libertarian noises lately, and also some noises about libertarians. In the latter category, POTUS declared himself in an interview last week to be "somewhat libertarian," and a likely recipient of ex-Libertarian votes.
"Jill Stein took, what? Half a percent?" Trumped mused innumerately to Fox News Channel's Laura Ingraham. "Well, I have a Libertarian—I'm somewhat libertarian; I have to be honest with you; Rand Paul will tell you that—I have a Libertarian candidate on last time that got, what? Four and a half or so percent? Those are all Republican voters. They're wasting their vote, because—they have to vote for us."
Well, no, but that doesn't mean we can't talk about some of Trump's most libertarian noises, such as calling out military brass and their enablers for backing "endless wars." On today's Reason Roundtable podcast, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward discuss the president's actual record on policies dear to libertarian hearts; critique Joe Biden on same, and also spend time on school reopening, teachers unions, Christopher Nolan's filmography, and the true meaning of Labor Day.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "Noisey" by ELPHNT.
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The next two months are going to be dark, people. Good luck finding a corner of American life that won't be co-opted into the great national binary of Donald Trump vs. Joe Biden, a struggle (we'll be told) where civilization itself hangs in the balance. People you once found sane will show up in your driveway, eyes bulging like Marty Feldman's, ranting about the dark forces on the verge of unleashing a thousand-year reign of terror. It's guns and guillotines all the way down.
Or maybe not? Today's Reason Roundtable podcast, featuring Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward, ping-pongs between pessimism and psychotic breaks, as the gang discusses Portland, Kenosha, Minneapolis, Trump, Biden, the RNC, the DNC, federalism, media, coronavirus, basketball, and modern love, more or less in that order.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "Night Driver" by The Whole Other.
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What's behind the monthslong violent protests in Portland, Oregon, and are they coming soon to a city near you?
Since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May, demonstrators in Portland have taken to the streets every night, often smashing windows, setting buildings on fire, and scuffling with local and federal law enforcement as well as fellow city dwellers. Lately, protesters have been entering residential neighborhoods in the early morning hours, shining lights into windows and telling people to literally and figuratively "wake up" to a world the protesters say is made intolerable by racism, income inequality, the presidency of Donald Trump, and more.
Veteran journalist Nancy Rommelmann has been covering the Portland protests for Reason. She knows Rose City like the back of her hand, having lived there for 15 years. Nick Gillespie spoke with her about the roots of the unrest in Portland, what she's learned by talking with the protesters and authorities, and what might be coming next. Rommelmann paints a disturbing picture of mostly young demonstrators who are becoming increasingly restive, prone to violent rhetoric, and unfocused in their demands.
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It's the first day of the Republican National Convention, which means that things are already getting pear-shaped. In other words, it's a fitting follow-up to what the Democrats did (and didn't) do last week.
On today's Reason Roundtable podcast, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward break down the lowlights and strain for some highlights from last week, while previewing the American carnage and straining for upcoming attractions in this week's. The gang also talks about Portland protests, New York City backsliding, school reopenings (and lack thereof), and (of course!) superhero movies.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
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The COVID-19 pandemic makes it all the more urgent for the U.S. to install a system of Medicare for All.
That was the topic of an online Soho Forum debate held on August 19, 2020. Arguing in favor of the proposition was Gerald Friedman, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts and the author of the book, The Case for Medicare for All. He went up against Sally Pipes, president of the Pacific Research Institute and author of False Premise, False Promise: The Disastrous Reality of Medicare for All. Soho Forum director Gene Epstein moderated.
The Soho Forum runs Oxford-style debates, meaning the audience voted on the proposition before and after the presenters' remarks. The winner is the person who moves more votes in his or her direction. At the start of the evening, 20 percent of the Zoom audience agreed that the pandemic furthered the case for Medicare for All, 60 percent were against, and 20 percent were undecided. At the end of the debate, 27 percent agreed with the proposition, 73 percent disagreed, and no one was left undecided. Because she gained the most votes, Sally Pipes was declared the winner.
The Soho Forum, sponsored by the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village. Debates will remain online until New York allows public events again. For information on how to watch and vote in the next online Soho Forum debate, go here.
Produced by John Osterhoudt.
Photo: Molly Adams/Flickr.
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In a world where Facebook recognizes more than 70 sexual identities, are we really witnessing what author Debra Soh calls The End of Gender?
The Toronto-based sex researcher's new book is subtitled "debunking the myths about sex and identity in our society" and she tells Nick Gillespie that scientific rigor is being tossed aside in the name of political activism when it comes to talking about gender differences and flashpoint issues such as allowing pre-pubescent children to transition sexually. Unapologetically "sex-positive" and in favor of letting consenting adults do whatever they want with their bodies, Soh worries that a new form of science denialism mostly on the left will ultimately undermine all sorts of social progress.
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On the latest episode of the Reason Roundtable: conventions and conspiracy theories.
Less than a week after announcing that Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) would be Joe Biden's running mate, Democrats are about to hold their first fully virtual political convention—a party-run Zoom conference direct from their living rooms to yours. No one knows exactly what to expect, but it's definitely going to be weird.
Speaking of weird: Republicans in Georgia just nominated a Q-curious candidate for Congress, and she's likely to win her race. So just how strange are things going to get in this already deeply weird year?
Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and special guest Jesse Walker discuss the strangeness of an all-online political convention, what the selection of Harris says about the future of Democratic Party politics, and the many misunderstandings about QAnon and its place in American politics.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "Odd News" by Twin Musicom.
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For years, Greg Gutfeld has entertained and edified audiences by hosting Fox News shows such as Red Eye, The Five, and The Greg Gutfeld Show and by authoring best-sellers such as How To Be Right: The Art of Being Persuasively Correct, Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You, and The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage.
Now the 55-year-old punk-rock obsessive has published The Plus: Self-Help for People Who Hate Self-Help, a funny yet serious book about becoming a better person. In a wide-ranging conversation with Reason's Nick Gillespie, Gutfeld explains why he thinks Americans have so many problems controlling our worst impulses, how we will eventually emerge better off from the COVID-19 lockdowns, and why we will reelect President Donald Trump in November.
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What do you call a 21st century president who uses executive orders to work around a stalled Congress and wants to suspend payroll taxes in the face of an economic calamity? A 21st century president, that's who. Like, all of them.
On today's Reason Roundtable podcast, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and a returning Katherine Mangu-Ward try to elevate policy over media gotchas, principle over opportunism, and plusses over minuses. But it's hard, Manny, it's real hard.
The gang talks about Joe Biden's vice presidential shortlist, ponders just how much larger the coronavirus-related changes to life are than our ability to process them, and spends probably too much time talking about Gerald Ford and dystopian train movies.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "Back and Forth" by Silent Partner.
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Cliff Maloney, the president of the libertarian student group Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), is hopping mad. Just three days before YAL's Mobilize 2020 conference—an event with 1,400 attendees from all over the country—the city of Dallas pulled the plug on the meeting, citing worries about the spread of Covid-19.
"We had been working hand in hand with the Omni Hotel, which was our host, and the city of Dallas," says Maloney, who explains that his group had agreed to abide by a host of conditions insisted on by health officials, including the wearing of masks, social distancing, and serving box lunches. Though the group received a refund from the hotel, Maloney estimates YAL is out around $200,000 for other vendor and non-refundable travel fees.
He's especially irked that months ago, he switched the location from Austin to Dallas on the assumption that the latter would be more business-friendly and that COVID-19 hospitalizations are declining in the Dallas metro area. "The fire marshall approved all of our plans a week and a half ago [and] nothing has changed in the state" in terms of new lockdown orders, says Maloney. Though he has no evidence for it, he claims that politics played a role in the last-minute cancellation, citing Mayor Eric Johnson's praise for large police-reform rallies.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Maloney talks about YAL's focus on state-level races in the November election and why he is optimistic about electing a slate of "liberty legislators" who will help shrink the size, scope, and spending of government at the state and local levels. He's also keen on outreach to younger Americans, saying that Millennials and Gen Z are particularly interested in ending wars and protecting civil liberties. "The issues of civil liberties and peace are typically where we get people to open the door for conversation," Maloney tells Nick Gillespie.
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Rountablists Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and special guest star Eric Boehm bounce from there to last week's godawful congressional grilling of Big Tech execs, President Donald Trump's election-delay trial balloon, the logistic headaches of counting mail-in ballots, the great TikTok wars, competing proposals for the next federal corona-package, and the deeply weird return of professional sports.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "Wicked Things" by Quincas Moreira
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Garrett Foster, an AK-47-carrying libertarian who joined Black Lives Matter protesters against police abuse, was shot and killed in Austin, Texas, Saturday night after an altercation with a motorist. The facts of the case are murky and disputed, but one overall snapshot of America is clear: Just past the midpoint of this annus horribilis, summer in too many cities is devolving into riots, police crackdowns, and the politics of violence.
All of these trace their origins to local, state, national government failures. The local police and city halls have given up on protecting property; the federal government has given up on law-enforcement federalism; officials have failed to accomplish such basics as enabling speedy test results for a deadly virus.
So argues today's Reason Roundtable podcast, featuring Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and special guest stars Stephanie Slade and Zach Weissmueller. The gang discusses teachers unions that want to keep schools closed and competition stifled, politicians and partisans who want to keep conflicts escalating, polls that show Joe Biden stomping Donald Trump, and whether Iron Man 2 is the most libertarian movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
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What will the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown of our society mean for the hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, refugees, and asylum seekers who apply annually to become Americans? Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016 in part by vowing to "build a wall," deport all unauthorized residents, and greatly reduce the number of people welcomed here legally.
COVID-19, which has its origins in China, may help the president to deliver on his campaign promises. Is the mythology of America as a nation of immigrants coming to an end?
A deputy national editor at The New York Times, Jia Lynn Yang is the author of the timely new book, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924–1965. The book begins at another dark moment in American immigration policy, when a restrictive law ended a long period of relatively open borders and effectively stopped mass movement to the United States for the next 40 years. It tells the story of the decades-long battle that led the U.S. to begin accepting foreigners once again. And yet almost nobody involved in that fight foresaw the extent to which the 1965 law signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson would open the door once again to large numbers of new immigrants—including Yang's family, who came here from Taiwan in the 1970s.
Nick Gillespie sat down with Yang first in March and then again in May, after signs that COVID-19 pandemic could have a major effect on U.S. immigration policy, including Trump's executive order temporarily halting legal migration, a delay in asylum hearings on the Mexican border, and a federal order blocking entry of migrant children that invokes a 1940s-era law.
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Should libertarians vote for Biden, Jorgensen, or Trump in the next presidential election?
That was the topic of an online Soho Forum debate held on Wednesday, July 22, 2020. It featured George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin; Angela McArdle, the chair of the Libertarian Party of Los Angeles County; and Francis Menton, a retired attorney who blogs at Manhattan Contrarian. The debate was moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein.
Arguing that libertarians should vote for Joe Biden was Somin, whose books include Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter and Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.
In support of Libertarian Party candidate Jo Jorgensen was Angela McArdle, author of The Communist Cookbook: Delicious Dining for the Modern Marxist.
Francis Menton made the case that libertarians should help to re-elect Donald Trump. Menton is a retired partner in the Litigation Department and co-chair of the Business Litigation Practice Group of Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP in New York.
Voting for this online debate was exclusive to the live Zoom audience. McArdle won by convincing 32.5 percent of the audience to change their minds and support Jo Jorgensen. Support for Trump increased by 3 percent, while Biden lost 4.8 percent.
The Soho Forum, sponsored by the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village.
Produced by John Osterhoudt.
Full Text and links: https://reason.com/podcasts/who-should-libertarians-vote-for-in-2020-a-soho-forum-debate
We live in a world where a Boeing executive was forced to resign over a 33-year-old article opposing the idea of women in combat and a respected art curator was pushed out of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for saying he would "definitely still continue to collect white artists." The editor of The New York Times opinion page left his job after publishing an article by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) and TV host Nick Cannon was fired by ViacomCBS after voicing anti-Semitic comments on his podcast.
What is driving such instances of what many call "cancel culture"? To answer that question, Nick Gillespie turned to Jonathan Rauch—a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a contributing writer to The Atlantic, and a signatory to the recent open letter in Harper's warning that "the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted."
In 1993, Rauch wrote Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, an influential defense of free speech and open inquiry that was excerpted in Reason. Is free thought under unprecedented attack? And if it is, what's driving the repression? Rauch, who is currently working on a book tentatively titled The Constitution of Knowledge, answers those questions and discusses the best way to engage censors and cancelers.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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"It's nice," Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote this morning in a long piece about the federal police crackdown in Portland, Oregon, "to see some lawmakers actually attempting to use their power to stop this, instead of simply trying to score Twitter points with spurious allegations that libertarians aren't freaking out enough."
That hyperlink takes you to this tweet, from Sen. Brian Schatz (D–Hawaii).
The senator's legislative track record on the relevant issues certainly contains some schatz of its own (on which there will be a story here that I will hyperlink), but on today's Reason Roundtable podcast, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch do their level best to unpack the legality and propriety of local and federal government action (and sometimes inaction) regarding street scuffles and property destruction, and how the White House is reportedly poised to roll out Portland-style intervention across several American cities.
The team also breaks down the latest breakdowns of how federal Coronavirus responses broke down, tiptoe into the mask-policy wars, and build extended metaphors out of the movie Brazil.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "Fog Mist" by TrackTribe
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Kmele Foster is the co-founder of Freethink, a media company that showcases social and technological innovations, a co-host of The Fifth Column podcast, and an outspoken libertarian critic of Black Lives Matter, cancel culture, and political orthodoxy.
In a wide-ranging, in-depth conversation with Nick Gillespie, Foster explains why he signed the Harpers letter on cancel culture, why he thinks that racism is not the primary factor for most African Americans' success or failure, and why libertarians need to be pushing individualism now more than ever. He also talks about his video documentary company Freethink (which he co-founded with former Reason videographer Dan Hayes), which he says highlights the sorts of innovations that will "matter in a thousand years."
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made the chat-show circuit on Sunday to argue that the federal government should withhold money from public K–12 schools that don't fully reopen in the fall.
"There's nothing in the data that suggests that kids being in school is in any way dangerous," DeVos told Fox News host Chris Wallace. "We know that children contract and have the virus at far lower incidence than any other part of the population, and we know that other countries around the world have reopened their schools and have done so successfully and safely, and kids there are going back to school every day. And so that has got to be the posture here. Parents are expecting that this fall, their kids are going to have a full-time experience with their learning and we need to follow through on that promise."
Is the Trump administration right on the science? The policy? The federal government's role thereof? These are among the questions bandied about on today's Reason Roundtable podcast. Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch also debate President Donald Trump's commutation of Roger Stone's sentence, Charlize Theron's action-star chops, and, of course…The Letter.
Audio production by Ian Keyser Regan Taylor.
Music: "The Great Unknown" by Audionautix.
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If there's one consistent message coming from activists and politicians pushing the Green New Deal and massive new subsidies for renewable energy it's that if we don't take radical action now, life on Earth as we know it will soon be irreversibly destroyed. Greta Thunberg, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden all have claimed that we have less than a dozen years left in which to save the planet.
Such fear-mongering is flat-out misleading and the findings of the scientists studying global warming don't support such alarmist claims, according to the new book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. Michael Shellenberger argues that deforestation and deaths from extreme weather are actually declining, and concerns about environmental damage from plastics are fundamentally misplaced.
Shellenberger, who began his career as an advocate for more government spending on wind and solar, was eventually disillusioned after witnessing the failure of subsidies to fix the inherent drawbacks of renewables. Named a "Hero of the Environment" by Time magazine in 2008, he is an "expert reviewer" for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose 2018 report has been widely misinterpreted as saying we had just 12 years to stave off catastrophic climate change. Shellenberger also appeared in the 2013 documentary Pandora's Promise, which was shown at Sundance, and featured several prominent environmentalists who have come around to see the virtues of nuclear power.
Nick Gillespie interviewed Shellenberger about Apocalypse Never and why he believes that environmentalism has become a replacement for religion in an increasingly secular world.
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President Donald Trump, in the shadow of Mt. Rushmore, warns of the "merciless campaign to wipe out our history." Joe Biden, from his secure location, urges America to finally live up to the Declaration of Independence. As the Statue Wars enter month two, coronavirus cases increase, and the nation's couch potatoes flock (shhhh) to the Disney Plus showing of Hamilton, it can be hard to make sense of the mixed up state of summer 2020.
That's why Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch spend a good chunk of today's Reason Roundtable podcast brainstorming new malignancies that America should henceforth declare independence from, in this our wobbly 244th year. Starting with pants.
The gang talks fireworks, patriotic gadgetry, men's hair fashion, the fragrance of space, and so very much more.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "Deep Mind" by Jeremy Black.
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Wesley Yang is the author of the widely praised essay collection The Souls of Yellow Folk and proprietor of one of the liveliest Twitter feeds around. In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, he discusses the cultural impacts of the coronavirus lockdown and protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd; racism against black people, Latinos, Asians, and white ethnic people in American history; and how a totalizing and misguided attack on "white supremacism" came to replace a focus on ending specific racist policies and attitudes in recent years. "Wokeness" and "anti-racism" are forming a new elite consensus, Yang says, that may well undermine traditional American beliefs in a prosperous, innovative, and better future.
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America might want to be done with the coronavirus, but the coronavirus isn't done with us.
Despite promises from Vice President Mike Pence that new cases had stabilized around 20,000 daily, new case numbers surged nationally last week, with 45,255 new cases on Friday, beating daily case counts from April, which hovered around 30,000.
In response to the spike in cases, governors in Florida, Texas, and California have rolled back re-opening plans, closing bars and warning residents to stop partying and stay home. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, meanwhile, have both backed national mask mandates.
Were states too quick to re-open bars and other businesses? Is testing to blame? What about schools? And how is all of this affecting the 2020 presidential election? On today's Reason Roundtable podcast, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and special guest Robby Soave discuss all of this and more.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "Gain" by Text Me Records / Grandbankss.
Photo: KEVIN DIETSCH/UPI/Newscom.
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"There is overwhelming evidence that the criminal justice system is racist."
That was the resolution of an online Soho Forum debate held on Wednesday, June 24, 2020. It featured The Washington Post's Radley Balko and the Manhattan Institute's Rafael Mangual. The debate was moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein.
Arguing that America's criminal justice system is, in fact, racist was Radley Balko, an opinion writer for The Washington Post. A former editor at Reason, Balko is also the author of Rise of the Warrior Cop and co-author of The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist.
Defending America's criminal justice against the charge of racism was Rafael Mangual, the deputy director of legal policy at the Manhattan Insitute, who is also a contributing editor for City Journal. Mangual's writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, the New York Post, the Boston Herald, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
The Soho Forum, sponsored by the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village.
Update: Voting on this debate ended on Tuesday, June 30, 2020, at noon EST. Radley Balko won by convincing 21.62 percent of the audience to change their minds. Rafael Mangual convinced 10.81 percent.
Produced by John Osterhoudt.
In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, protests have erupted around the country, calling attention to racial disparities in the way that black people are treated by the criminal justice system and by American society more generally.
Brown University's Glenn Loury has emerged as one of the most vocal and outspoken critics of Black Lives Matter and other groups arguing that systemic racism is at the center of the African American experience in the United States today. Loury worries that our institutions are failing "to affirm the primacy of reason over violence in calibrating our reactions to the supposed 'oppression,'" as he wrote in response to an open letter from his school's administrators that highlighted "anger" at what they called an "ongoing epidemic of racism."
The 72-year-old professor—the first African American to be granted tenure in Harvard's economics department back in the 1970s—talked with Reason via Zoom about how the U.S. has changed for the better over his lifetime, why understanding history is vital to social change, and whether rational discourse has any purchase in social and political debates.
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Let's see: Nathan Bedford Forrest, Robert E. Lee, Teddy Roosevelt, (checks notes), uh, George Washington? Ulysses Grant? Francis Greenleaf freakin' Whittier? Sometimes it's protesters, sometimes it's the museum, sometimes it's a tagger, sometimes it's a Twitter troll—by whatever form, America in monthus bizzarus of June 2020 is suddenly having a convulsive conversation about iconography.
On today's Reason Roundtable podcast, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch nominate statues to protect, remove, and erect, while chewing over just where this tumult is heading, whether symbolically or concretely, policy-wise. The quartet also talks about President Donald Trump's weird Tulsa performance, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's weird final coronavirus presser, and which precise character Gillespie's haircut is ready to play in All the President's Men.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "Atlantis" by Audionautix.
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In today's podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal, two controversial, heterodox journalists in their late 30s who have been "canceled" multiple times for writing articles that have inflamed trans activists (go here and here), defended young adult novelists from would-be censors, and blamed Elizabeth Warren (rather than sexism) for the failure of her presidential campaign.
Though Herzog lives in Washington state and Singal in New York City, the pair produces the popular new show Blocked and Reported, "a podcast about internet nonsense." In a wide-ranging conversation with Gillespie, they talk about the growing repression of speech among progressives, the roots of and fixes to "cancel culture," how identity politics stifles open inquiry and honest disagreement, and surviving the collapse of alt-weeklies. They also talk about the liberating effect of Patreon, the online platform that allows creators to generate subscription revenue directly from fans (Blocked and Reported currently raises more than $8,000 per month from over 1,400 supporters).
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The People Who Always Like to Argue Viciously About Stuff (PWALAVAS) are busy this week debating whether the slogan "defund the police" is or is not a net positive in the push for reforming America's criminal justice system. Meanwhile, on Planet Non-PWALAVAS, policy changes and experimentation are proceeding apace.
So contend the participants in the latest Reason Roundtable podcast: Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch. The gang also talks about the latest in institutional liberalism's civil war, Spike Lee's new joint, and how rooting out werewolves might just be the necessary palliative for fraying familial nerves.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "Search and Rescue" by Dan Lebowitz
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George Floyd's death at the hands of the Minneapolis police has sparked nationwide protests against police brutality. A new consensus is forming around the urgent need for criminal justice reform.
Six years ago, after the police killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, just 43 percent of Americans believed that such incidents indicated a systemic problem. Now, though police killings have remained level since 2014, 69 percent of Americans agree that "the killing of Floyd represents a broader problem within law enforcement."
To better understand this shift and to get a sense of what changes would be most effective, Nick Gillespie sat down with Washington Post opinion writer Radley Balko, a former Reason reporter who covers police abuse, the drug war, and criminal justice reform. His Reason coverage of Cory Maye, a black man in Mississippi put on death row for killing a police officer during a no-knock raid, helped bring about Maye's acquittal, and his books Rise of The Warrior Cop and The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist document widespread problems with law enforcement, expert testimony, and media coverage of crime.
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With unemployment around 13 percent and talk of recession—or even depression—in the air, libertarian ideals of free minds and free markets need champions now more than ever.
Rory Sutherland, the vice chairman of the legendary global advertising agency Ogilvy UK, may seem like an unlikely defender of capitalism, but he is one of its most persuasive and engaging.
Sutherland calls the stentorian Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises his hero and celebrates not capitalism's ruthless efficiency and capacity to outproduce a command economy but its ability to create seemingly trivial products such as Red Bull and to transform the disgusting-sounding Patagonian toothfish into the delicacy known as Chilean sea bass.
Fittingly enough, Sutherland's latest book is called Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life. It explains why the real genius of capitalism isn't maximizing output but the ways in which creative destruction fulfills desires we never knew we had, allowing us to become whatever we want to be. He's a critic of economistic thinking on the right and the left that reduces all human activity to mere utility and material considerations.
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It's early yet, but last week may go down as the week that the journalism industry lost its damn fool mind. You've heard (too much!) about the exhaustive WTFery at The New York Times, but here are some other cases making the news:
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Philadelphia Inquirer Editor Stan Wischnowski resigned Saturday after a staff revolt stemming from an opinion piece headlined "Buildings Matter, Too."
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Variety Editor-in-Chief Claudia Eller was placed on administrative leave after she (a) wrote a self-critical column about not doing enough to diversify her newsroom, then (b) called one of her subsequent you're-still-not-doing-enough critics "bitter."
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Several news organizations, after tweeting or sending out messages of support for the protests and/or Black Lives Matter, were met with "name and shame" campaigns for not doing enough.
So provides the backdrop for this week's Reason Roundtable, featuring Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch. The gang talks about the original (bad) idea behind Tom Cotton's New York Times op-ed, the federal government's heavy-handed use of force against D.C. protests, blatant epidemiological hypocrisy, and more media skedaddling than you can shake whipping stick at.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "Incoming Transition" by The Whole Other.
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"The lockdown has saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives and spared American hospitals the horrors of rationing care."
That was the resolution of a public debate hosted via Zoom by the Soho Forum on Monday, June 1, 2020. It featured Marty Makary, a surgical oncologist at Johns Hopkins, and Knut Wittkowski, former head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at The Rockefeller University.
The Soho Forum typically hosts Oxford-style debates, in which a live audience votes before and after the event, and the debater who swayed the most people wins the contest. Because this debate took place over Zoom, we did things a little differently. The online audience was asked to vote before the debate. If you voted before the debate, please go to sohovote.com after you listen to the podcast and cast your final vote. But if you didn't register your initial vote before the debate started on Monday evening, your final vote won't be counted.
Arguing for the affirmative was Marty Makary, a surgical oncologist at Johns Hopkins and the author of the 2019 book The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care—and How to Fix It.
Knut Wittkowski argued for the negative. Wittkowski is the CEO of ASDERA LLC, a company discovering novel treatments for complex diseases from data of genome-wide association studies. Wittkowski also served for 20 years as head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at The Rockefeller University in New York City.
The Soho Forum, sponsored by the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village.
Update: Voting on this debate ended on Monday, June 8, 2020, at noon EST. Knut Wittkowski won by convincing 11.43 percent of the audience to change their minds. Marty Makary convinced 8.57 percent.
Audio production by John Osterhoudt. Photo: Maria Khrenova/ZUMA Press/Newscom
In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, protests have erupted around the country. Some of these have turned violent and resulted in injuries to citizens and police as well as looting and property damage.
Cities have implemented curfews and other restrictions on movement, further stoking tensions that were already present due to the coronavirus lockdown, the start of summer, and a 15 percent unemployment rate.
The last time the nation faced this level of social unrest was 1968, the year that Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated.
To help us make sense of the current moment and figure out where it could lead, Nick Gillespie spoke with Omar Wasow, a political scientist at Princeton, who has studied how protests of the 1960s affected public opinion, social discourse, and voting patterns.
Will today's protests make policing reform more or less likely? Is it possible that violence in the streets will boost Donald Trump's reelection chances—just as events in 1968 helped put Richard Nixon in the White House?
Wasow's research also looks at the nature of police misconduct, analyzing whether headline-grabbing incidents such as the horrific killings of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice are the result of a few bad apples or a systemic problem with law enforcement in minority communities.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Photo: Joi Ito
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Apparently the deadly plague and economic depression weren't nearly enough, so the murder-hornet season known as spring 2020 has added widespread rioting (including rioting by the police) into the mix. Reason Roundtable co-conspirators Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch talk about criminal justice reform, class warfare, and the views from their own smoldering towns.
Also coming under discussion: space rockets, Section 230 idiocy, and the graphic novels of Raina Telgemeier.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "The Woods" by Silent Partner.
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In 2013, Barton Gellman of The Washington Post started publishing stories about what he called the "surveillance-industrial state" based on documents given to him by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. Along with work done by filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald, Gellman's exposés laid bare an extensive and previously unacknowledged network by which the federal government systematically and illegally spied on American citizens and routinely circumvented checks on its power.
Gellman has just published Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State, which tells the story of his interactions with the whistleblower, bureaucrats, politicians, and the media as he helped reveal one of the biggest secrets in U.S. history. Nick Gillespie spoke with him about his new book and earlier, Pulitzer Prize-winning work that revealed how Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and others in the Bush administration exceeded constitutional limits in the name of prosecuting the war on terror.
They also discuss national surveillance in light of the two major-party presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Former heads of intelligence services are "much less sanguine about the government accumulating this enormous machinery of surveillance" with Trump in the White House because they openly acknowledge "it is subject to horrific potential abuse," says Gellman. At the same time, he stresses that Biden, who served in the Senate for decades and eight years as vice president under President Barack Obama, "has not been an apostle of transparency in the national security world. He was a strong backer of the prosecution of whistleblowers and leakers in the Obama administration and there were more prosecutions with charges of espionage against people who talked to journalists during the Obama administration than in all previous administrations combined, which had a chilling effect on national security reporting."
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Today the United States is likely to pass a grim milestone: 100,000 estimated deaths from COVID-19. To mark the occasion, and also to provide a snapshot of New York/Washington, D.C. life in these tentatively de-quarantining times, Reason Roundtable podcasters Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch deliver a series of faulty metaphors including but not limited to: "I, Pencil," on-campus sexually transmitted diseases, government hole-digging, and probably something having to do with Spider-Man.
The gang also discusses the Libertarian Party's busy nominating weekend, Sputnik Sweetheart, and Suderman's new splattercore band Viral Death Radius.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music credit: "Chasin' It" by Audionautix
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"I'm running for president because I want to live in a free society," says Jacob Hornberger, the founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation. With Michigan Rep. Justin Amash's withdrawal from the race for the Libertarian Party (L.P.) presidential nomination, Hornberger is the front-runner as the voting process gets underway on Friday, May 22.
Born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and a lawyer by training, Hornberger's platform is straightforward, concise, and doctrinaire: He unapologetically stands for open immigration, free trade, an end to non-defensive military interventions and what he calls the national security state, the legalization of all drugs, and the replacement of the income tax and the IRS with voluntary payments to fund the government. In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Hornberger also discussed some of his outlier beliefs—he believes that Franklin Roosevelt goaded Japan into bombing Pearl Harbor so the United States could enter World War II and that Lee Harvey Oswald was "framed" for the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He also goes into detail about how his Catholicism informs his policy positions (he is anti-abortion, but says the federal government has no jurisdiction in the matter and favors suasion over laws to reduce its occurrence).
At 70 years old, Hornberger would be the youngest nominee for president among the country's three biggest parties. He says his campaign will not only be boldly and unapologetically libertarian but focused on younger Americans. "My message," says Hornberger, "is I trust you, I trust you with your freedom. Right now, the government is taking out of your paychecks $2 trillion a year just for Medicare and Social Security. What they're saying to you by taking this money out of your paycheck is: 'You're bad people. You cannot be trusted to handle your own money. You'll turn your backs on your parents, you'll turn your backs on the needy.' I'm saying, bull! Keep your money, cut out the middleman…I trust you to handle this on your own."
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Last night on 60 Minutes, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was asked whether it's fair to characterize the central bank's coronavirus responses as having "simply flooded the system with money." Powell replied: "Yes. We did. That's another way to think about it. We did."
Then the money printer really did go brrr:
"Pelley: Where does it come from? Do you just print it?
Powell: We print it digitally. So as a central bank, we have the ability to create money digitally. And we do that by buying Treasury Bills or bonds for other government guaranteed securities. And that actually increases the money supply. We also print actual currency and we distribute that through the Federal Reserve banks.
Pelley: In terms of size, Mr. Chairman, how does what the Fed is doing right now compare to the unprecedented action it took in 2008?
Powell: So the things we're doing now are substantially larger. The asset purchases that we're doing are a multiple of the programs that were done during the last crisis."
Are we all Modern Monetary Theorists now? So ponder Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch on today's Reason Roundtable podcast. The gang also discusses Democratic coronavirus proposals, what the Libertarian Party presidential race looks like now that Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.) has dropped out, and whether you should quaff a CBD drink called "Sweet Reason."
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
'Nadie Es Illegal' by Ashley Shadow.
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Have you ever wondered what it's like to trip on LSD, magic mushrooms, peyote, or other hallucinogenic drugs? Have you ever wondered what it's like for Sting to trip?
The new documentary Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics, features the former Police frontman, Sarah Silverman, Carrie Fisher, Anthony Bourdain, Ben Stiller, and many other creative people talking about their good, bad, and ugly experiences with drugs such as LSD, magic mushrooms, peyote, and MDMA.
The film is hosted by Nick Offerman and includes commentary by UCLA's Charles Grob, one of the world's leading experts on growing efforts to use hallucinogens in therapeutic settings.
Director Donick Cary won an Emmy for his work as a writer on Late Night Night with David Letterman and has produced and written for shows such as The Simpsons, Silicon Valley, and Parks and Recreation.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, he talks about his own history with psychedelics and the need for serious, open, and well-informed conversations about substances that are routinely described as life-changing.
Have a Good Trip is a fascinating look at the past, present, and future of mind-expanding drugs and anyone interested in—or worried by—the neo-psychedelic movement can watch it now on Netflix.
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At the very end of today's Reason Roundtable podcast, a rare bit of happy news flashed across the series of tubes: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that the Empire State will slowly begin to reopen on May 15. Thank God for that, given that the previous 50-plus minutes of the 'cast was filled with phrases like "threshold of doom," "sobbing face-first in a parking lot," and (shudders) "backdoor UBI caucus." Two months of lockdown has been good for neither fiscal nor mental sanity.
At other points in this episode, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch engage in what are now weekly discussions on psychedelics, Libertarian Party presidential politics, and weird Zoom activities.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
'Reese Peace Riddim' by Konrad OldMoney
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Five-term Michigan Congressman Justin Amash has announced that he's running for the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination, which will be decided in late May. The 40-year-old son of Middle Eastern immigrants took office in 2011 as a Republican but left the party last July, saying he didn't want to be part of a partisan death spiral. He has consistently voted against corporate bailouts, increases in debt-financed government spending, overseas military interventions, and the prosecution of the federal drug war.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Amash has castigated federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration, first for botching containment efforts and then for asserting monopoly control over testing. He was one of a mere handful of no votes on the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, arguing that all relief payments should go directly to individuals and households rather than corporations, nonprofits, or government agencies.
Republican and Democratic loyalists are lashing out at Amash as a quixotic potential spoiler with no chance of being elected and calling for him to step aside.
Nick Gillespie talked with Amash about why he thinks Donald Trump is too erratic to be given a second term, why Joe Biden is too old for a first term, and why he believes his vision of a freer country will take him to victory in November.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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"The current pandemic makes it all the more necessary for the federal government to tighten restrictions on immigration."
That was the resolution of a public debate hosted via Zoom by the Soho Forum on Wednesday, May 6, 2020. It featured Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, and Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University. Soho Forum director Gene Epstein moderated.
The Soho Forum typically hosts Oxford-style debates, in which a live audience votes before and after the event, and the debater who swayed the most people wins the contest. Because this debate took place over Zoom, we did things a little differently. The online audience was asked to vote before the debate. If you voted before the debate, please go to sohovote.com after you watch the video and cast your final vote. But if you didn't register your initial vote before the debate started on Tuesday evening, your final vote won't be counted.
Arguing for the affirmative was Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies and author of The New Case Against Immigration.
Bryan Caplan argued for the negative. Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University and the author of Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration.
The Soho Forum, sponsored by the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village.
Update: Voting on this debate ended on Tuesday, May 12, 2020, at noon EST. Bryan Caplan won by convincing 21.88 percent of the audience to change their minds. Mark Krikorian convinced 15.63 percent.
Produced by John Osterhoudt. Image by Lex Villena
Illustration: 82001983 © Topgeek - Dreamstime.com Photo: 177972613 © Wisconsinart - Dreamstime.com
One of the most promising ways to end the lockdowns that have been instituted due to the COVID-19 pandemic is for you to know if you've been exposed to the virus so you can either be tested or enter quarantine. And one of the most promising ways to know whether you've been exposed is through smartphone apps that will notify you automatically if you've had contact with infected people.
But these apps also pose serious questions about efficacy and privacy—will they work and, even more importantly, how do we make sure they don't become the pretext for authorities to trace our every step?
Tina White thinks she has a solution. She's a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at Stanford, a self-described libertarian, and the head of a group called Covid Watch, a new nonprofit that released the first ever open-source protocol for a voluntary app that uses anonymous, decentralized data to give all of us more information about the disease that has shuttered the global economy.
In a wide-ranging conversation, White tells Nick Gillespie about Covid Watch's origins; why it insists on voluntary, open-source, and privacy-enhancing standards; and when we're likely to see the app in the real world.
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How should we think through the sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden? Turns out it's damned hard to without running smack into not just with Biden's own situational ethics when it comes to believing women but the entire intellectually corrupting two-party mindset that poisons politicians and journalists alike.
So conclude panelists Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch on today's Reason Roundtable podcast. The group tackles thorny issues of due process and double standards, and it also gets into some discussion about the nascent presidential campaign of non-accused Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.) before debating the best personal strategy for coping with coronavirus: buying a car, learning to cut hair, or just dropping a bunch of MDMA in Central Park.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music Credit: 'Ether Oar' by The Whole Other.
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Over the past few months, virtually all medical care in the country has been focused almost exclusively on treating the novel coronavirus. Fearing a surge of cases, authorities told patients to stay away from hospitals and doctor's offices unless they thought they had COVID-19 and many states banned non-emergency surgeries and diagnostic care.
The good news is that many places never experienced overload. The bad news is that many hospitals and medical systems are actually laying off doctors and nurses due to overall flagging demand.
Physician Jeffrey A. Singer tells Nick Gillespie that the understandable focus on coronavirus is hurting patients whose care for heart disease, cancer, and other ailments has been delayed or foregone. A surgeon and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, where he writes frequently on health care and drug policy issues, Singer also talks about how many medical regulations that have been temporarily suspended should never be reinstated and the ways in which telemedicine will likely flourish in the post-pandemic era.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Singer also notes that there has been a subtle but unmistakable change in the focus of public health since shelter-in-place orders were put in place. At first, he says, the idea was "flattening the curve," or slowing the rate of infection so medical providers were not overwhelmed by the number of cases. Now, he says, the discussion is about making sure no one gets infected, an unrealistic goal for a viral infection in the absence of a vaccine.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan has announced his campaign for the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination, which will be decided at the L.P.'s convention in May. Originally elected as a Republican in 2010, Amash left the GOP last July and became an independent. By dint of his new party affiliation, he has also become the first Libertarian member of Congress.
On today's podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with his Reason colleagues Matt Welch, who interviewed Amash just hours after his announcement, and Brian Doherty, who talked with his L.P. rivals shortly after the news of Amash's campaign became public. They discuss Amash's platform, his likely reception among L.P. activists, and what sort of impact the congressman's presence is likely to have on the 2020 presidential race. They also each suggest a possible campaign song for the 40-year-old Grand Rapids native.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Let's face it, we're all going a bit goofy around the gills in these COVID-cursed days. And by "we," we mean Peter Suderman, who apparently can no longer process any information—about, say, the health-policy components of federal coronavirus packages, or the medium-term insolvency of Social Security—without comparing it to the 23-movie slog known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
On today's Reason Roundtable podcast, Suderman and fellow regulars Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch grapple with the latest corona-controversies: how and when to reopen, the piss-poor impact on existing government debacles, and above all the tension between the federal government and the states. It's country mice vs. city mice all the way down, with a jumble of Greek/Roman metaphors to spice up the comic-book world we apparently live in.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music Credit: 'Lone Wolf' by Dan Lebowitz.
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The US economy should be liberated from the governments' lockdowns right away.
That was the resolution of a virtual debate hosted by the Soho Forum via Zoom on Tuesday, April 21, 2020. Arguing for the affirmative was David Henderson, an economist and research fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and for the negative Justin Wolfers, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan. Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein moderated.
The Soho Forum typically hosts Oxford-style debates, in which the live audience votes before and after the event, and the debater who swayed the most people wins the contest. Because this debate took place over Zoom, we did things a little differently: The online audience was asked to vote before the debate…if you did so, go to sohovote.com after you watch and cast your final vote. However, if you didn't register your initial vote before the debate started on Tuesday evening, your final vote won't be counted.
Henderson is also the author of the recent article, "Liberation from Lockdown Now." He was a senior economist for health policy with President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. Wolfers also serves as a member of the Congressional Budget Office Panel of Economic Advisers.
The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series that's usually held at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village. This debate, however, was conducted via Zoom.
Audio production by John Osterhoudt.
Photo: Pacific Press/Sipa USA/Newscom
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How do we reopen American society in a way that keeps people safe but also puts them back to work and school?
One of the most realistic and workable plans comes from a team of policy analysts led by Avik Roy, the president of the Austin, Texas-based Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. Even without widespread testing, a vaccine, or a cure, they argue that we should reopen schools and allow healthy, younger employees to go back to work because COVID-19 kills mostly older people who can be protected without shutting everything down.
Roy tells Nick Gillespie that the "massive expansion of government creates a further drag on the economy" that is mostly invisible to D.C. bureaucrats and commentators. "The more we lock down the economy, the more we harm those individuals who are most vulnerable, who don't have the cash cushions or the white-collar jobs that allow them to keep going," he says, even as he remains hopeful that many regulations that have been suspended during the pandemic will never return.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Photo credit: Bastiaan Slabbers/ZUMA/Newscom
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Since Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.) announced Wednesday that he has been "carefully consider[ing] a presidential run," presumably with the Libertarian Party, there have been three bits of interesting news:
1) An April 14-16 Morning Consult national poll of 1,992 registered voters, the first of its kind in seven months, had the libertarian congressman at just 1 percent, compared to Joe Biden's 46 and President Donald Trump's 42 (5 percent said "someone else" and 6 percent said they would not vote). Removing Amash's name from the options did not change the point-spread between the two leading candidates.
2) First-quarter fundraising numbers came in from Amash's 3rd Congressional District in Michigan, and—unsurprisingly, given his announcement that he stopped campaigning actively in mid-February while pondering his presidential future—the independent incumbent finished in fourth place for January-March numbers, with $97,000, after having led the field the previous quarter. Republican supermarket magnate Peter Meijer, who this week won the endorsement of the influential former Amash backers in the DeVos family, raised $353,000, including a $150,000 loan to himself; state Rep. Lynn Afendoulis (R–Grand Rapids) raised $190,000, and Democrat Hillary Scholten raised $152,000. Amash still has a slight lead in cash on hand, with $645,000, compared to $634,000 for Meijer, $259,000 for Scholten, and $248,000 for Afendoulis.
3) As mentioned in this morning's Reason Roundup, the coronavirus is hammering crucial signature-gathering exercises for third parties, potentially preventing the Libertarian Party from reaching its previously expected goal of being on the ballot in all 50 states.
So at this late date, one month out from the party's scheduled (if physically uncertain) nominating convention, should Amash throw his hat into the ring? The reaction is mixed on the new Reason Roundtable podcast, featuring Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch. The quartet also, as you would imagine, discusses the coronavirus response, particularly the reopening debate, protests thereof, and the never-ending bailout/stimulus/printer-go-BRRRRing.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music Credit: 'Late Night Drive' by Nat Keefe & BeatMower.
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What's it like serving on the front lines of the response to the coronavirus pandemic? And what have the federal, state, and local responses to COVID-19 gotten right and wrong so far?
To answer those and other questions, Nick Gillespie turned to Dr. Jeremy S. Faust of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, where he trains emergency room doctors and is pulling daily shifts treating patients who have COVID-19.
Faust stresses that attempts to reopen businesses, schools, and other parts of everyday life will need to based on local conditions and that effective containment has to rely on the voluntary participation of people who are given reliable information rather than bullied by political and medical authorities. "It's not a weather system that we can track beginning, middle, and end," says Faust. "We make the weather. If people believe in what their participation is, it's a hell of a lot easier to achieve [containment] than through some sort of draconian enforcement."
Faust also co-hosts the FOAM Podcast about ER and coronavirus issues, and writes for Brief19, a daily review of COVID-19 research and policy.
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When The New York Times launched its 1619 Project last year, it sought to "reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative." What began as a series of articles and commentaries in the Times magazine morphed into a collection of lesson plans for elementary and high school students and provoked an immediate controversy.
Five of the nation's most eminent academic historians co-signed a letter to the Times describing the project as "partly misleading" and containing "factual errors." And Northwestern University Professor Leslie M. Harris revealed that she had been a fact-checker on the series and that her warnings of a major error of interpretation had been ignored. But Harris also took "detractors of the 1619 Project" to task for "misrepresent[ing] both the historical record and the historical profession," writing that the "attacks from its critics are much more dangerous" than the Times' "avoidable mistakes."
Enter Phillip W. Magness, an economic historian, a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, and the author of a new collection of essays on the project. Magness praises aspects of the series but he says that the project's editor, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is guilty of blurring lines between serious scholarship and partisan advocacy. And he has called for the retraction of an essay in the series by Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, which was headlined, "In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation."
Nick Gillespie spoke with Magness from his office in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, about what the Times gets right and wrong about U.S. history, capitalism and slavery, Abraham Lincoln's contested legacy, and why our interpretation of American history matters to contemporary society.
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Once-a-century pandemics may place the most acute stress on the infected and those who care for them, but every sector of government and civil society come under strain too. So how has the Fourth Estate performed during these nationally and personally challenging times? The record is decidedly mixed, argue Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch on the new Reason Roundtable podcast.
So is the record of the government that those journalists cover. The gang discusses zero-tolerance enforced-distancing madness from Michigan to Mississippi, from Pennsylvania to the beaches of southern California. They also take a peek at proposed post-lockdown surveillance states to come. At least we all have time to read dystopian fiction about pandemics while watching The Prisoner!
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
'Over Time' by Audionautix is licensed under CC BY 4.0
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When psychedelic drugs finally become legal in the United States and elsewhere around the world, the lion's share of the credit will go to Rick Doblin. Since founding the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in 1986, Doblin has argued forcefully for the benefits of frequently demonized substances such as MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, and ibogaine in helping people cope with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, and other debilitating problems.
MAPS is currently sponsoring phase three clinical trials of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy as a treatment for PTSD. Within the next few years, if all goes well, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to approve MDMA—which the federal government banned in 1985 as a dangerous party drug then known as ecstasy—for use by prescription as a psychotherapeutic catalyst. Further down the line, psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin, which the FDA has recognized as a "breakthrough therapy" for depression, could undergo a similar legal transformation.
Although MAPS is doing everything by the book in seeking approval of MDMA as a prescription drug, Doblin's vision goes beyond such doctor-approved uses. He aspires to a world in which people can use psychedelics responsibly without permission from physicians or priests. "Psychedelics are tools," Doblin says. "They're not good or bad in and of themselves. It's how they are used. It's the relationship you have with them…People should have the fundamental human right to change their consciousness."
Because of his busy schedule, Doblin spoke with Reason Editor at Large Nick Gillespie in late February in the back of an Uber headed to John F. Kennedy Airport. The unconventional setting seemed the perfect place to catch up with a guy who is doing so much to radically change our way of thinking about how we deal with the world.
Audio production by Regan Taylor and Ian Keyser.
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Was it really only five weeks ago that we began talking in earnest about the coronavirus on the Reason Roundtable podcast? And what, exactly, have Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch learned about their country—and themselves—since then?
So begins today's episode, in which we learn that Suderman recommends the medical benefits of coating the lungs with whiskey steam, Gillespie confesses to generationcidal tendencies, Welch muses on the authoritarian impotence of the "common-good constitutionalists" or whatever the hell manifesto-cons are calling themselves this week, and Mangu-Ward forces the entire staff to take a ridiculous if Gillespie-accurate personality/fictional-character quiz. Which, if nothing else, confirms that Robby Soave is a moral monster.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
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As the COVID-19 pandemic prompted shoppers to clear out supermarkets of toilet paper, rice, and canned vegetables, two brothers set out on a 1,300 mile road trip through the back roads of Kentucky and Tennessee. Matt and Noah Colvin loaded up a U-Haul with all the hand sanitizer and antibacterial wipes they could find and attempted to resell the goods on Amazon at a massive markup. Then the online retailing giant banned the practice, state attorneys general started cracking down, and the Colvins were shamed in the media. They ended up donating the items.
But is so-called price gouging a bad thing? Michael C. Munger, who teaches economics, political science, and public policy at Duke University, argues that prices contain vital information about supply and demand. When governments attempt to mandate cheap goods, he says, they end up causing more shortages than they solve. And this is especially true during a crisis.
Nick Gillespie spoke with Munger via Zoom about how the 21st century is testing libertarian ideas about limited government and individual freedom.
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Matt Ridley is one of the best-selling—and best-regarded—science writers on the planet. He wrote recently that in the face of the coronavirus pandemic "we are about to find out how robust civilisation is" and that "the hardships ahead will be like nothing we have ever known." Given that Ridley's best-known book is The Rational Optimist, this is bracing stuff.
Nick Gillespie spoke with Ridley from his home in northern England. His next book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, will be published in May. They discussed why the coronavirus caught Ridley by surprise, when he thinks we'll be able to reopen the world economy, why Brexit is good for Europe, and whether he believes that sustained innovation and progress can take place in authoritarian countries such as China.
"I'm afraid it is necessary to be pretty draconian when you're in the middle of a pandemic," says Ridley, who nonetheless believes that limited government and individual liberty are essential bulwarks to creating a rich and prosperous society. "If you want to preserve freedom…you need to unleash the freedom to innovate, to solve the problem in good times."
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Last week, Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) became the most-hated man in Washington when he unsuccessfully tried to force a recorded vote in the House of Representatives on the $2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) denounced him while President Donald Trump called him "a third rate Grandstander." Seconding Trump's characterization on Twitter, former secretary of state and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry averred, "Congressman Massie has tested positive for being an asshole."
In an exclusive interview with Reason, Massie, a libertarian-leaning Republican who entered Congress in 2012 with the backing of the Tea Party movement, explains his insistence that House members should have cast on-the-record votes on the single-biggest spending bill in U.S. history and calls out his critics. Referring "to John Kerry's tweet that I tested positive for being an a-hole," Massie tells Nick Gillespie, "I would just say at least I haven't been symptomatic since birth."
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Believe it or not, we're still in the month of March. On March 1, New York City recorded its first positive case for the novel coronavirus. On March 2, Mayor Bill de Blasio—with future "Love Gov" Andrew Cuomo at his side—said "We have the capacity to keep this contained." On March 10, de Blasio told MSNBC, with reckless inaccuracy, that "If you're under 50 and you're healthy, which is most New Yorkers, there's very little threat here. This disease, even if you were to get it, basically acts like a common cold or flu. And transmission is not that easy." By March 15, with great reluctance, Hizzoner finally joined the rest of big-city America in closing public schools. On March 16, he worked out at the Park Slope YMCA.
Now near the end of the month, New York City is the American epicenter of the deadly virus, with more than 36,000 positive tests and 750+ deaths, and de Blasio has gone from reluctant institutions-shutterer to someone who has threatened churches and synagogues with "potentially closing the building permanently" if they don't keep their doors closed during the upcoming holidays.
Plague-life comes at you fast, exposing some of the worst pathologies of governance and politics. An examination of such begins today's Reason Roundtable podcast, featuring Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch. We discuss the catastrophe of slow testing, the mixed messaging on masks, the gargantuan bailout/stimulus, and—of course!—what to watch and listen to during the long days of quarantine.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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How many people are infected with the coronavirus, what will it mean for our hospitals, and how many will die? Those are the questions at the front of everyone's mind. To get the best possible sense of things, Nick Gillespie talks with Reason's science correspondent, Ronald Bailey, about the constantly changing, often contradictory information coming from official channels.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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The U.S. government's response to the coronavirus has been nothing less than catastrophic, with weak, delayed, and incompetent actions by its two main public health agencies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Alex Tabarrok, a professor of economics at George Mason University and one of the co-founders of the popular blog and online university Marginal Revolution, is an outspoken critic of the government's actions, including the FDA's refusal to allow for home testing of the coronavirus. Reason spoke with him about official responses to past pandemics, which countries are doing things right, and how the government can get a better handle on stopping the spread of this novel coronavirus.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Before we launch into the long, grim coronavirus discussion on today's Reason Roundtable podcast, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch offer some remembrances of the great anti-war libertarian Jon Basil Utley, who passed away this Friday after living one hell of a life. The Reason family offers condolences to Utley's family, and gratitude for having known and worked with such a sweet and tireless friend of liberty.
For the rest of the show, the gang (including Peter Suderman) spend a lot of time probing the forgotten policymaking lessons that should have been learned after the previous two catastrophes of the 21st century: 9/11 and the financial crisis of 2008. Are we overreacting? Is there any meaningful cost-benefit analysis being done on the impact of shutting down whole swaths of the economy? Are politicians stuffing must-pass bills with special-interest giveaways and ideological hobby horses? Some questions probably answer themselves…
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music credit: 'Open The Box' by Geographer.
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Antitrust should take the initiative to control the size of big tech companies.
That was the resolution of a public debate hosted by the Soho Forum in New York City on March 9, 2020. It featured Tim Wu of Columbia University Law School, and Richard Epstein of New York University Law School. Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein moderated.
It was an Oxford-style debate, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. Richard Epstein prevailed in the debate by convincing 17.48 percent of audience members to change their minds. Wu convinced 2.91 percent.
Wu, who was arguing for the affirmative, is the Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science, and Technology at Columbia Law School. He is also the author of The Master Switch, The Attention Merchants, and The Curse of Bigness.
Epstein is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University Law School, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. His most popular titles include The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government, Why Progressive Institutions are Unsustainable, and Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain.
The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village.
Produced by John Osterhoudt.
Photo: Brett Raney.
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From the available data, says New York University law professor Richard Epstein, "it seems more probable than not that the total number of cases worldwide will peak out at well under 1 million, with the total number of deaths at under 50,000…In the United States, if the total death toll increases at about the same rate, the current 67 deaths should translate into about 500 deaths at the end."
In the latest Reason Interview podcast, Epstein, who is also a fellow at the University of Chicago's Center for Clinical Medical Ethics and a podcaster and columnist at Ricochet, explains his math, which draws on his work dealing with the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and '90s. He also tells Nick Gillespie that the stimulus plans being floated are unlikely to help the economy in the short run and cause major problems in the long run, why he thinks local and state governments are overreacting by shutting down businesses and schools, and why he expects the crisis to ease up in a few months.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Photo credit: Richard Epstein speaks during the Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty, Niklas Halle'n/Newscom
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Sure, people say sometimes that the past is a different planet. But the past week?
Yet here are, the world shutting down all around us, anxiously comparing coronavirus growth curves to Italy and South Korea, retreating to four-way remote podcasting set-ups, trying to make sense of a story that changes seemingly by the hour. On today's Reason Roundtable, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch offer different perspectives in the teeth of a pandemic.
What part of today's clampdown is with us for the long haul? What does this once-a-century challenge tell us about comparative health policies? Are we comfortable with mayors and governors shutting down entire swaths of the economy? Did Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders recalibrate their presidential pitches even a little bit? And how will Nick tie this all back in to some 1970s Charlton Heston movie? These are among the questions that you can listen being addressed right here.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music credit: 'Ninja Tortoise' by Verified Picasso
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How should the United States government and the rest of us respond to the coronavirus, which the World Health Organization has just declared a global pandemic?
Balaji Srinivasan, who was on a short list to run Donald Trump's Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has some strong opinions on the matter. Srinivasan is a former venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz and a serial entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. The genetic testing company he co-founded, Counsyl, helped change the way millions of people prepare for parenthood; his cryptocurrency startup, Earn.com, was acquired by Coinbase, where he served as chief technology officer.
In his prescient and lively Twitter feed, Srinivasan has been ahead of the curve in noting the coronavirus's potential to cause a global public health crisis and to disrupt our economic and social lives. During a conversation conducted via Skype, he talked about why he thinks the coronavirus may have as big an impact on our way of life as the 9/11 attacks, how the United States government—especially the FDA he once might have headed—has fumbled its response, and why we're likely looking at mandatory quarantines at the national level.
At the same time, Srinivasan believes that private-sector and nonprofit actors are conducting a "digital Dunkirk" rescue operation that could not just save countless lives but accelerate positive forms of decentralization in our political, economic, and personal lives.
Photo credits: Balaji Srinivasan speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017, Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch
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As cases exponentially spread, financial markets swoon, and various institutions shut down (despite the president's insistence today that "Nothing is shut down"), Reason Roundtable podcasters Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch give a progress report on their own levels of PANIC and DOOM from inside the infectious zones known as New York City and the District of Columbia. Regular listeners will not be surprised to learn that there are vigorous levels of disagreement.
Also under discussion: the eternal return of Joe Biden, the looming knockout blow to the democratic socialist presidential candidate (if not quite to his policies), the problem of using statistics in conversation, and the dark right-wing past of the inventors of the Boysenberry.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music credit: 'Assembling' by Asher Fulero
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If you're freaked out by the coronavirus—the growing pandemic that is shutting down travel from China, Iran, Italy, and elsewhere and has been the cause of at least nine deaths in Washington state—stop what you're doing and listen to the new Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. It's 30 minutes that will give you peace of mind.
Ronald Bailey, Reason's science correspondent, provides comprehensive information about the origins and extent of the coronavirus (also known as COVID-19), which steps are being taken to slow its spread, and whether the United States, President Donald Trump, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are up to the task of battling a sickness that has already disrupted global trade and travel. The short version: COVID-19 is a serious problem, especially for older, sicker people with pre-existing medical problems, but its ultimate effects will be "like a particularly bad flu season, with a case-fatality rate somewhere between 0.2 and 0.5 percent."
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) has rocketed to the top of the Democratic presidential primary field by proposing a massive expansion of government: single-payer health care, free public college tuition, student loan forgiveness, universal pre-K, and more.
His plans could cost as much as $60 trillion dollars over the next decade, more than doubling the federal budget.
More than any single policy, however, Sanders has run on an idea: Democratic socialism, with the economies of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden as models.
At times in his life, however, he's also had kind words for socialist revolutionaries and regimes that are more authoritarian—although he has also condemned their harshest practices.
So what is Sanders' vision of democratic socialism? And what would it mean for the country? To find out, Reason Features Editor Peter Suderman spoke with Jim Pethokoukis. He is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog.
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People say a lot of things about the coronavirus. For instance, that the United States should "lock down our borders" in response, or that the Trump administration has recklessly "gutted" the Centers for Disease Control, or that the rubes have foolishly stopped drinking Corona for health reasons instead of taste reasons.
Nonsense cubed, argue Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch on a particularly metaphor-crazed Reason Roundtable podcast today. What is the "libertarian response to pandemics"? You'll have to listen to find out. Other topics coming up for discussion: the unbearable oldness of the Democratic presidential field, the increasing sourness of sci-fi legend William Gibson, and whether baseball, Batman, or The Omega Man provide the surest blueprint for our times.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music credit: 'What It Is' by Silent Partner.
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Do you know the phrase OK, Boomer? It's an increasingly popular put-down voiced by younger people toward older people whom they see as out of touch or unworthy of serious engagement.
If you've heard the saying—or used it—the likely reason is because of today's guest, Taylor Lorenz, who covers technology and internet culture for The New York Times. Last fall, Lorenz popularized the term in a story declaring "the end of friendly generational relations" online. More recently, she's exposed how former New York City mayor and current Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg is spending millions of dollars on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media services to suddenly look cool, hip, and happening. She's also explained why viral vids shot in bathrooms outperform those shot in less private parts of the house.
If you want to know what's happening online, especially among Millennials and Gen Z types, you've got to read Lorenz, who joined the Times after stints at places such as The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and Buzzfeed.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Lorenz talks about how TikTok, the ultra-short video platform out of China, enhances self-expression, why government regulation of online speech is always ultimately doomed to fail, and how the future depends on all of us developing media literacy in a hurry.
Audio production by Regan Taylor and Ian Keyser.
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Could we really be just eight days away from an eight-month dirge of Bernie vs. Trump? Probably not, but that's no reason for political/media professionals not to panic over the Democratic frontrunner's purported Castro apologetics, coercive economics, Trump similarities, popularity ceilings, down-ballot jeopardizing, and even Russian stoogery.
All of which and more are analyzed and occasionally mocked on today's Reason Roundtable podcast, featuring Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, and a pinch-hitting Elizabeth Nolan Brown. Also discussed: California's idiotic public policies, President Donald Trump's loyalty purges, the difference between Russian "interference" and "influence," and Midwestern canned clam dip. You can take the gal out of Ohio (or Minnesota), but…
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music credit: 'Sneaky Bass Latina' by Jimmy Fontanez/Doug Maxwell/Media Right Productions
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"What sets the Trump era apart is the rank incompetence of the people looking to cash in on [self-serving] opportunities," write Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng in their new book, Sinking in the Swamp: How Trump's Minions and Misfits Poisoned Washington. "That's great for us reporters. But it doesn't inspire confidence in the administrative abilities of our present leaders that Trumpworld can't even seem to do corruption right."
Markay and Suebsaeng cover Washington and the White House for The Daily Beast and they dish on how Trump associates, appointees, and apparatchiks such as Corey Lewandowski, Lynne Patton, and Rudy Giuliani are constantly working to enrich themselves while desperately trying to stay in the president's good graces. In a wide-ranging interview with Nick Gillespie, they also talk about Hillary Clinton's own brand of incompetence, the deeper forms of D.C.-based corruption that result in Joe Biden's son Hunter pulling down make-work jobs in foreign countries, why they think Donald Trump will win re-election, and their previous jobs at publications on the right and the left.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) squeaked out a victory in last week's New Hampshire primary, but now he has a new threat to contend with: former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose formidable pocketbook has helped put his campaign near the top of national polls. Is Bernie's vision of Democratic socialism the future? Or will Bloomberg's blend of technocratic competence and paternalism win out?
Here to discuss the latest wave of Democratic party infighting on this week's Reason Roundtable are special guests Robby Soave and Stephanie Slade, along with Nick Gillespie. Peter Suderman fills in for Matt Welch as host.
Also up for debate: Is Bill Barr Trump's hatchet man? Does President Trump think he's above the law? What's Roger Stone got to do with any of this? And what's with Trump's big new budget plan?
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: 'The Plan's Working' Cooper Cannell
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Rob Long has been a writer and co-executive producer of the classic sitcom Cheers and other TV shows. A liberal who voted for Walter Mondale back in 1984, he became a conservative after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union and started writing for National Review in the early 1990s. He now provides commentary for Washington Examiner, Commentary, and the NPR station KCRW, and is a regular guest on Fox News' The Greg Gutfeld Show and other programs. In 2010, he co-founded the right-of-center podcast and blogging empire known as Ricochet.
The New York City resident talks with Nick Gillespie about all that, plus Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Mike Bloomberg, and the 2020 election. And he explains why he thinks psychedelic drugs such as LSD, MDMA, and Ayahuasca should be taken seriously—and on a regular basis.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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While President Donald Trump gleefully consolidates both power and popularity (the latter if graded on a curve), the men and women who aim to replace him are having themselves a time. On today's Reason Roundtable podcast, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch talk about the Iowa caucus debacle, Joe Biden's ongoing face-plant, the identity politics wipeout, Pete Buttigieg's tenuous deficit hawkery, and so much more.
Along the way, the gang manages to argue about—surprise!—Trump, Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah), The Irishman, the economy, and the potential meanings of "lying, dog-faced pony soldier." And yes, we go to the Oscars, in terms of both speechifying and merit. A fun time for the whole family!
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: 'Black Moons' by the 126ers.
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President Trump's trade-related initiatives against China deserve broad public support.
That was the resolution of a public debate hosted by the Soho Forum in New York City on February 4, 2020. It featured Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation and Gene Epstein of the Soho Forum. Comedian Dave Smith moderated.
It was an Oxford-style debate, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event; the side that gains the most ground is victorious. Moore prevailed by convincing 21.51 percent of audience members to change their minds. Epstein convinced 13.98 percent.
Arguing for the affirmative was Stephen Moore, distinguished visiting fellow for the Project for Economic Growth at the Heritage Foundation. Moore is also a senior economic contributor for FreedomWorks and the founder of the Club for Growth.
Gene Epstein argued for the negative. Epstein, former economics editor of Barron's, is co-founder and director of the Soho Forum.
The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village.
Produced by John Osterhoudt. Photo: Brett Raney
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Titania McGrath is without question the fiercest social justice warrior (SJW) on Twitter, blasting out sentiment such as"there are now more Nazis living in modern Britain than even existed in 1930s Germany," and "say what you will about ISIS but at least they're not Islamophobic."
Based in London, McGrath burst onto social media in 2018 and describes herself as a "radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice and armed peaceful protest." She identifies as "non-binary," "polyracial," and ecosexual" and claims to"teabag the foes of justice with a gender-neutral scrotum." She is the author of the new book Woke: A Guide to Social Justice, which is climbing the charts in both the United Kingdom and the United States.
As you might have surmised, Titania McGrath is not a real person but a spoof brilliantly pulled off by Andrew Doyle, a writer and comedian whose work has appeared on the BBC, at the Fringe Festival, and Spiked, the heterodox site edited by friend of Reason Brendan O'Neill. Doyle, who identifies as a socialist, says he created Titania to spoof identity politics, which he avers is "a collectivist ideology. It does not value an individual for the content of his or her character, but instead makes prejudicial assessments on the basis of race, gender and sexuality. In the name of anti-racism, identity politics has rehabilitated racial thinking."
In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Doyle discusses Brexit (which he favored), some of the very funniest lines from Titania McGrath's Woke, and how we might get past the current moment of ultra-politically correct insanity.
Audio production by Regan Taylor and Ian Keyser.
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Let's see, Super Bowl, then the Iowa caucuses, various Democratic presidential debates, impeachment endgame, and…the State of the Union address? Is Dry January destined to be replaced by Binge-Drunk February, at least among people who can't pry themselves away from C-SPAN?
Such are the questions on today's episode of the Reason Roundtable podcast, in which Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch share coping strategies, deliver their own private State of the Union addresses, and confess to rooting interests (or lack thereof) in tonight's big Democratic vote. Also discussed: Shakira's hips, Joe Biden's sins, and Katherine's retracted endorsements.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: 'Tango de la Noche' by Wayne Jones
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Today's guest, the author and school choice activist Andrew Campanella, is angry but energized.
"I just wish people who opposed school choice would come out instead of trying to gaslight everybody and tell people that choice doesn't work for any number of reasons," he tells Nick Gillespie in today's podcast. "I wish people who oppose school choice would argue [that they do] not trust families to make decisions for their kids."
Campanella is the author of the new book The School Choice Roadmap: 7 Steps to Finding the Right School for Your Child, which provides a history and overview of the choice movement and practical advice on how to match children with schools at which they'll flourish. He is also the president of National School Choice Week, an organization that runs the largest annual public awareness effort to promote student and parental choice in K-12 education. National School Choice Week started on January 26 and runs until February 1 this year. Over 53,000 events around the country showcase the benefits of letting kids choose where they go to school—whether via public charters, tax credits and vouchers for private schools, magnet schools, homeschooling, or other options.
"We expect people to make every other choice in their life, but we are not going to…allow them to choose schools their kids attend," says Campanella in a wide-ranging conversation that details the massive growth in school choice over the past 50 years. "Not giving people options, not giving people choices, not giving them that freedom…It doesn't make any sense. It is actually not a concept that really fits well with who we are as a country."
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
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Now that John Bolton's pick me! exertions have gotten so loud that even Republican senators are saying that they might consider issuing a subpoena to a materially relevant witness in the impeachment trial, some natural follow-up questions tumble forth, such as: Should the mustachioed former national security advisor be summoned to testify? Does his account, however disputed, change the way people interpret the Trump administration's 2019 actions vis-à-vis Ukraine? Does any of it excuse the attempt by the lead House manager, Rep. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.), to justify not subpoenaing Bolton in the first place by saying that they needed to stop Trump before he could election again?
These questions and more lead today's episode of the Reason Roundtable podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch. The roundtablists also volunteer their biggest critiques of suddenly re-rising presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), try to dampen the panic about the latest global coronavirus, and discuss the bountiful local goings-on of National School Choice Week. And yes, Kobe Bryant gets a mention.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "Here Come The Raindrops" by Reed Mathis
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"I don't think you should do Twitter if you think you're better than Twitter," says Molly Jong-Fast in a wide-ranging interview with Nick Gillespie.
Molly Jong-Fast is a journalist, novelist, and memoirist who is an editor at large for The Daily Beast, where she writes frequently about President Donald Trump (she doesn't much like him) and the Democratic presidential hopefuls (she will vote for whoever wins the nomination but isn't excited by them). She's also a contributor to Playboy, The Independent (U.K.), and The Bulwark, a website started up by some folks left homeless when The Weekly Standard bit the dust a while back.
Just after the first day of the Senate impeachment trial concluded, she sat down to talk with Gillespie about the 2020 election, what it's like to grow up with famous relatives (her mother Erica Jong wrote Fear of Flying, her father is a well-respected author, and her grandfather Howard Fast was a massively popular novelist who wrote Spartacus and received the 1953 Stalin Peace Prize), and why she thinks Twitter (follow her at @mollyjongfast) is a great leveling force in contemporary media. Jong-Fast also has kind words for Bret Easton Ellis, whose 2019 book White she trashed, and explains why as a liberal Democrat she has a lot of overlap with libertarian beliefs about free trade, capitalism, and the legalization of vices.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Will the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump already be over by the time you listen to this week's Reason Roundtable podcast? Not quite, though who the hell knows what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) and his caucus have up their sleeves? So, to mark the occasion 33 months after President Trump canned FBI Director James Comey, thus kicking off the first real talk of the I-word, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and I hand out our awards for Best and also Worst impeachment-related actor to date. Hint: Lotta libertarians among the former, not so many in the latter.
Because that's not fraught enough, the gang also bandy about Hillary Clinton's spectacular contribution to the Democratic gender wars over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), dissect Joe Biden (and conservative) anger-bearing over Big Tech and Section 230, and point out that Sanders is pretty freaking weird because HE'S A SOCIALIST.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Hidden Agenda by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1200102 Artist: http://incompetech.com/
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Robotics will soon lead to widespread joblessness and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.
That was the resolution of a public debate hosted by the Soho Forum in New York City on January 6, 2020. It featured New York Times bestselling author Martin Ford, arguing the affirmative, versus Antony Sammeroff, spokesperson on economics and environment for the Scottish Libertarian Party. Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein moderated.
It was an Oxford-style debate, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, with many "undecided." The side that gains the most ground is victorious. Sammeroff prevailed in the debate by convincing 19.64 percent of audience members to come over to his side. Ford picked up 2.68 percent.
Ford is the author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, Architects of Intelligence: the Truth about AI from the People Building It, and The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology, and the Economy of the Future.
Sammeroff, who argued for the negative, is the author of Universal Basic Income: For and Against and co-host of the Scottish Liberty Podcast.
The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village.
Produced by John Osterhoudt.
Photo: Right robot, Photo 144080417 © Boris Medvedev - Dreamstime.com
Photo: Left robot, Photo 141519784 © Kittipong Jirasukhanont - Dreamstime.com
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In a 1964 speech delivered at the University of Michigan, President Lyndon Johnson announced his plans for what he called "the Great Society," a sweeping set of programs that marked the most ambitious expansion of the federal government since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.
Johnson declared war on poverty, jacked up federal spending on education, and pushed massive new entitlement programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, which promised to deliver high-quality, low-cost health care to the nation's elderly and poor. When Republican Richard Nixon succeeded Johnson, a Democrat, as president after the 1968 election, he continued and even expanded many of the Great Society programs despite being from a different political party.
But did the Great Society achieve its goals of eradicating poverty, sheltering the homeless, and helping all citizens participate more fully in the American Dream? In Great Society: A New History, Amity Shlaes argues that Lyndon Johnson's bold makeover of the government was a massive failure despite the good intentions of its architects and implementers.
Shlaes, who is the author of The Forgotten Man, a best-selling history of The Great Depression (read her interview with Reason), and the chair of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, says remembering the failure of the Great Society is especially relevant in an election year when presidential candidates are promising to spend huge amounts of money on all sorts of new government programs. "Once again, many Americans rate socialism as the generous philosophy," writes Shlaes. "But the results of our socialism were not generous. May this book serve as a cautionary tale of lovable people who, despite themselves, hurt those they loved. Nothing is new. It is just forgotten."
Nick Gillespie sat down to talk with her about the origins of the Great Society, its failure, and what it all means for 21st century America.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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This week's Reason Roundtable podcast picks up where last week's left off: Iran. Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss the administration's ever-shifting storyline, flickers of principled opposition/oversight in Congress, and playground-style argumentation for war.
Then, straight oughtta this morning's headline, the gang assesses the import of Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) leaving of the presidential race and the possible meanings of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) continuing to rise in the polls ahead of Tuesday night's debate. There are also mentions of the Academy Award nominations, "hand-wavy pay-fors," and the passing of Rush drummer/lyricist Neil Peart.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music credit: "Lurking" by Silent Partner
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Last week, the United States military took out Iran's top military leader, Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Iran has responded by raining down missiles on two American bases in Iraq (no casualties were reported) and with promises to do much, much more. "We promise to continue down martyr Soleimani's path as firmly as before with help of God, and in return for his martyrdom we aim to get rid of America from the region," vowed Esmail Ghaani, who now leads Iran's military.
Are we going to war with Iran? Is the flare-up a sign that President Donald Trump, who as a candidate said previous administrations "got us" into Iraq "by lying," charting a bold, new course in the Middle East or following the failed footsteps of Barack Obama and George W. Bush?
To answer these questions—and define what a uniquely libertarian foreign policy should look like—Nick Gillespie talks with Christopher A. Preble, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. From 1990 to 1993, Preble served as an officer in the U.S. Navy on the USS Ticonderoga and he holds a Ph.D. in history from Temple University. He's the co-author of Fuel to the Fire: How Trump Made America's Broken Foreign Policy Even Worse (and How We Can Recover) and the author Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy.
Preble says that two decades of failed wars pushed by Republican and Democratic presidents in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen have rightly made Americans, especially younger people, skeptical of the use of force abroad to secure the safety and interests of the United States. Increasingly, people want a foreign policy that is "skeptical of the bipartisan consensus" and predicated upon "peaceful global engagement through which [the United States] trades with the rest of the world, engages diplomatically with the rest of the world, and uses our cultural influence in a positive way." Preble also ranks the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates in terms of foreign policy, evaluates the foreign policy legacies of Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, and praises recent revelations about internal military dissent over the war in Afghanistan.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Some regular listeners of the Reason Roundtable podcast have been attempting to give me credit for predicting in last week's episode that the 2020s would feature a conventional war between two countries with populations larger than 40 million.
But as too many journalists already seem to be missing in the reaction to the U.S.'s drone-assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guard leader Qassim Sulemaini, this act of war on third-party soil—which comes after years' worth of Sulemaini-directed war-acts against American and allied personnel, also on third-party soil—nonetheless does not pit conventional army vs. conventional army on the territory of the combatants. At least not yet. What's more, President Donald Trump has rhetorically ruled out "regime change" war against Tehran, and he claimed with a straight face that his escalatory act of violence was "defensive."
In today's podcast, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and I debate a series of questions over Trump's most notable military action as president. Was it legal? Constitutional? Precedented? Deliberated? Sensible? Impeachable? We also nominate some of the more noteworthy new laws that went into effect January 1, expend yet more oxygen praising Watchman, and touch briefly on the welcome Golden Globes comedy of Ricky Gervais.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music credit: "From Russia With Love" by Huma-Huma
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Every week seems to bring a new story about how vaping is really, really, really bad for you. Only a few years ago, electronic cigarettes were hailed as a new and healthier way for people to consume nicotine and pot; the number of vapers worldwide has grown sevenfold since 2011, to an estimated 41 million users. But now vaping is being attacked as a deadly habit that might be as bad for you as traditional smoking.
Reports of vaping-related deaths and respiratory illnesses appear daily on cable news shows, in newspapers, and online. The FDA is considering a ban on flavored e-cigarettes, and many states have already instituted strict regulations on vaping sales and use. Congress has voted to change the age for legal tobacco and e-cigarette sales to 21, up from 18. President Donald Trump signed the legislation into law just before Christmas.
Is vaping bad for you? Should we be panicking? What sorts of policies should govern the use of electronic cigarettes for nicotine and marijuana? To answer these and other questions, Nick Gillespie sat down with Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum, who has spoken extensively and authoritatively about the issue for years. Sullum argues that the current anti-vaping freakout is a classic case of moral panic, and that it is in fact making it harder for current smokers to transition to a safer method of getting nicotine or to quit altogether.
It's not just in your head: When it comes to how we all experience life, "Bad is generally stronger than good."
We remember trauma more than joy, we're brought down by criticism more than we're elevated by praise, and we pay more attention to bad news than good.
A new book called The Power of Bad, by journalist John Tierney and psychologist Roy F. Baumeister, explores "the negativity effect," or the "universal tendency for negative events and emotions to affect us more strongly than positive ones." The negativity effect shapes everything we do, from our personal relationships to our careers to how we vote to what media we consume.
But The Power of Bad isn't one more cause for despair. Its subtitle is How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It, and it offers practical tips on all sorts of ways to approach life so that we can be happy, productive, and well-adjusted.
Nick Gillespie sat down with Tierney, a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal and a former New York Times columnist and reporter, to talk about the root causes of the negativity effect and how to combat it.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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The closing of a decade is an appropriate time for a little ritual self-criticism, so a thick chunk of today's Reason Roundtable podcast features Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, and special guest star Robby Soave talking about predictions and interpretations they botched in 2019, and in some cases are doubling down on for 2020! The Roundtablistas also discuss how their beats have changed since 2009, why the twin rises of right-populist nationalism and left-populist socialism are skeeving them out, and which countries will be at war in the Groaning '20s.
First, though, the gang tries to sort through the context and trends (and/or lack thereof) of anti-Semitic violence in New York and the rest of the United States, always a fraught conversation. Other items under review: Mayor Pete Buttigieg's welcome comments about decriminalizing all the drugs, the less-welcome developments in the Star Wars universe, terrific progress in the private space industry, and, as ever, Robby's access to blow dryers.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music credit: "Confliction & Catharsis" by Asher Fulero
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Though it sometimes feels here at Reason like every day is Festivus—at least the Airing of Grievances part, if not quite the Feats of Strength—it is also true that the Seinfeld-concocted holiday comes every December 23. That means two things: 1) the annual tweet-storm from Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) and, if it falls on a Monday, 2) a Festivus-themed episode of the Reason Roundtable podcast.
Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch huck darts at, among many other targets, last week's "bucket of garbage" budget deal, our brand new Space Force, Democratic presidential candidates, cigarette prohibitionists, presidential cultists, trade warriors, governor sons of governors, nu-trad-con manifesto writers, would-be campaign-finance regulators, politicians who can't stop yammering about baseball, and whichever alien force lives inside Nick Gillespie's mouth robotically dispensing Zardoz references. There's even a shocking twist or two near the end, so be here now until the final second, if time even exists.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music: "Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairies" by Tchaikovsky
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While a pregnant woman should be legally required to help the fetus survive outside of her body whenever that is possible, she should retain the legal right to evict the fetus at any time during her pregnancy.
That was the resolution of a public debate hosted by the Soho Forum in New York City on December 8, 2019. It featured Walter Block arguing for the resolution and Kerry Baldwin arguing against it. Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein moderated.
It was an Oxford-style debate. That means the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground—mostly by picking up votes from the "undecided" category—is victorious. Block prevailed by convincing 13.85 percent of audience members to change their minds. Baldwin was not far behind, picking up 12.31 percent of the audience.
Block is the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics at Loyola University New Orleans, and a prolific author on Austrian economics and libertarian theory. He's the author of Defending the Undefendable I and II, among many other books.
Kerry Baldwin is an independent researcher and writer with a B.A. in Philosophy from Arizona State University. Her work can be found at MereLiberty.com and at the Libertarian Christian Institute.
The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village.
Produced by John Osterhoudt. Photo credit: Brett Raney.
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"I'd become an ex-black man…not because I'd ceased loving what I've been taught to call "black," or because I…wished my daughter to blend in to what I'd been taught to call "white," but simply because these categories cannot adequately capture either of us—or anyone else, for that matter. I had no guilt about it anymore because blackness, like whiteness, isn't real."
That's a passage from the new memoir Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, by Thomas Chatterton Williams. In a world that is increasingly embracing identity politics that sort people along racial and ethnic lines, Chatterton Williams is moving in a radically different direction. His book is an explicit call to "unlearn race" and embrace individual diversity.
The 38-year-old Chatterton Williams is the author of a previous memoir, Losing My Cool. He is biracial himself and grew up in New Jersey identifying as black. He is married to a white French woman, lives in Paris, and describes how the birth of his first child—a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl—forced him to interrogate and ultimately discard ideas about identity that he and the rest of us have long taken for granted.
In a wide-ranging discussion, Chatterton Williams and Nick Gillespie talk about race relations in 21st century America; how class and gender intersect with ethnicity; and whether it's really possible to "unlearn race" in a country that has spent so much time and energy defining national character along racial lines.
Audio production by Regan Taylor and Ian Keyser.
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Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) made headlines Sunday answering skeptical questions about his anti-impeachment approach from CNN's Jake Tapper. Paul's friend Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.) also made headlines Sunday after The Washington Post reported that Democrats are seeking his pro-impeachment counsel for when impeachment goes to the Senate for trial. It's not the first time the two libertarian-leaners have been on opposite ends of the I-question, but…well, can you imagine the theatrics? And what does this tell us about libertarian conflict over the process?
Thus begins today's Reason Roundtable podcast, with editors Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch, though not before immediately veering down a Philip K. Dick rabbit hole which feels strangely apt for our times. The Podcastic Four also chew on last week's British elections, the upcoming Democratic presidential debate, Washington's bipartisan orgy of deficit spending, and kids doing Dungeons & Dragons stuff on TikTok, because we have a brand to protect.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Backed Vibes Clean - Rollin at 5 by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license
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A leading architect of Brexit is warning that the selection of Jeremy Corbyn as British prime minister could plunge his country into could lead to a Venezuelan-style descent into authoritarian neo-socialism.
Tomorrow's U.K. election pits the ruling Conservative Party, led by current prime minister Boris Johnson, against the Labor Party, led by Corbyn, who has called for large tax hikes, new regulations and controls on business, and massive increases on spending.
"I don't think it's a figure of speech" to suggest Corbyn's rise to power could lead to the economic and civic decline of England, says Daniel Hannan is a Conservative politician who represents Britain in the European Union's parliament. He's one of the leading architects of Brexit and the author of books such as The New Road To Serfdom and Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World.
"When I was growing up in Peru," says the 48-year-old Hannon, who was born in Lima, "Venezuela was a country that people immigrated to, uh, in the 1950s…. The idea that it couldn't happen here, which is dangerously complacent and recurrent theme in both British and American politics, I just don't think is borne out."
In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Hannan explains why British libertarians voted overwhelmingly in favor of Brexit, the urgency of honoring the results of the 2016 referendum in which 52 percent of voters called for leave, and the global rise of "Bannonism and Bernie-ism," or right-wing and left-wing populism.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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You may have been minding your own business the past 72 hours, but our illiberal-con friends certainly were not. On Friday, four members of Congress sent a hysterical letter to Attorney General William Barr asking him to "declare the prosecution of obscene pornography a criminal justice priority," and "bring prosecutions against the major producers and distributors of such material." Then conservative commentator Matt Walsh spent the whole damn weekend demanding jail sentences and denouncing libertarians for being all libertarian-y.
On today's Reason Roundtable podcast, editors Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch unpack the porn prohibitionists' phony statistics and openly big-government philosophies, while introducing some pragmatic considerations that hobbled previous conservative crackdowns during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. We also talk about lessons from today's big Washington Post "Afghanistan Papers" project, field still more listener questions (because of our annual Webathon, which you should totally donate to before it's too late!), and explore the deepest ocean cracks with James Cameron and Randy Newman.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
'Infados' by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under CC BY 4.0
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What have we learned after the second week of the House impeachment inquiry, aside from the fact that President Donald Trump abuses power and says crazy things while pretty much everybody else rationalizes one way or the other? One persistent peculiarity, argue Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch on the Reason Roundtable podcast, is that so, so many of the president's greatest antagonists are—like many in the permanent foreign policy apparatus—more interventionist on foreign policy than your average Joe. So how exactly should that color our opinion of the proceedings?
In addition to disagreeing about that, the quarrelsome quartet bickers over best and worst in the Democratic presidential field, discusses the origin-story theology of The Fantastic Four, makes an uncomfortable menstruation metaphor, and ponders just how many of Sacha Baron-Cohen's anti–social media ideas should be thrown down the well.
SPEAKING OF HOLES: A final reminder that with our annual Webathon lurking around the corner, The Reason Roundtable is soliciting your questions, queries, praise, and abuse, for the purpose of a special bonus Webathon AMA episode. Email your queries to podcasts@reason.com, por favor!
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music credit: 'Russian Dance' by Joey Pecoraro
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We have many fun traditions that have arisen during the decade-plus of running annual Reason webathons, none funner than having our editorial brass respond directly to the brain-tickling queries, insults, and philosophical problems posed by you, our very favorite audience. How many other magazines of opinion allow not only for an open comments section (legal exposures notwithstanding), but annual AMAs? Not bloody many, I'd wager.
Won't you please encourage such responsiveness by donating to Reason right the hell now?
Well, this year we asked for questions as part of our weekly Reason Roundtable podcast, featuring Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch, and man, did you people deliver. In a special bonus Webathon dispatch that tests the outer limits of the Non-Agression Principle by taping in the same room, your humble Roundtableists give their own reasons for the giving season, then tackle all the important, listener-generated questions. Such as:
Which editor can fire the others? How many black leather jackets does Nick own? What's the best outcome for impeachment? What are recommended books, recommended political strategies for Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.), and recommended cocktail ingredients from Suderman? Why does Katherine hate ownership, why does Nick hate libraries, why does Reason hate people who talk to Richard Spencer? When are we going to get our fancy debt crisis and why don't people talk more about New Zealand? What is the most libertarian musical genre? Which fictional character would make the best president? And most importantly, who is the best baseball player who does not belong in the Hall of Fame?
Those are just some of the questions you can listen to us try to answer below, from around the ping pong table of Reason's D.C. office. Enjoy! Then remember to subscribe to Reason podcasts, and of course…donate to Reason right the hell now.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Today's podcast is a "very special episode," though not in the way old TV shows did very special episodes, like when a character we'd never heard of would be introduced and then immediately die tragically, or we'd learn about a terrible new disease such as AIDS, or when Nancy Reagan or Michelle Obama would guest star just to bring everyone down.
No, The Reason Interview's very special episode is a two-part cross-over conversation with Jonah Goldberg, the former longtime National Review editor and bestselling author of Liberal Fascism and Suicide of the West. The first part appears here and the second part will appear on Goldberg's podcast, The Remnant, on Thursday, December 5.
Goldberg is a prominent conservative critic of Donald Trump and just a few months ago announced his departure from National Review, where he worked for over two decades. He now hangs his hat at a new media venture called The Dispatch, which involves another prominent conservative, the former editor in chief of The Weekly Standard, Stephen Hayes, and another National Review refugee, David French (go here for The Reason Interview with French, which came out earlier this year).
Nick Gillespie talks with Goldberg about the reasons why he left the flagship publication of the American right wing, why he has little-to-no respect for right-wingers like Fox News host Sean Hannity and former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka, why he's moving in a libertarian direction, and what he, Hayes, and French hope to achieve with The Dispatch. To listen to the second half of this very special podcast when it drops on The Remnant on Thursday, go to jonahgolberg.com, Apple podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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The Reason Roundtable podcast quartet of Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward are taking your questions for a special bonus-cast to be aired during our annual Webathon, which begins tomorrow. Please email any/all queries, for the group or for an individual, to podcasts@reason.com, and we shall do our best to address them.
Addressed on today's edition: President Donald Trump's latest tariff lunacies vis-à-vis Brazil and Argentina, and what they tell us about the current and previous administrations, as well as the broader currents in global opinion about trade, immigration, and multilateral institutions. As is the custom, the co-hosts have…different opinions. Other questions discussed: Which Democratic presidential candidate will drop out next? Is Ted Cruz's beard hot or not? How many four-letter words can one fit in a negative review of The Irishman?
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Music credit: "White Hats" by Wayne Jones
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"The Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee have unearthed enough evidence, in my opinion, to justify about three or four articles of impeachment against the president," Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst Andrew Napolitano tells Nick Gillespie in a wide-ranging podcast.
Since joining Fox News in the early 2000s, no cable news personality has been more uncompromisingly libertarian than Andrew Napolitano, a former New Jersey Superior Court judge and best-selling author who now serves as senior judicial analyst at Fox and host of the Liberty File on the streaming service Fox Nation. During the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the judge inveighed against the growth of the federal government and overreach by the executive branch. Now, Donald Trump has earned Napolitano's ire.
The allegations are not "enough to convict [the president] of bribery" in a court of law, Napolitano says, "but it's enough to allege it for the purpose of impeachment" since impeachment is "not legal [but] political." The judge adds that while he thinks impeachment is "absolutely constitutional," it is also "probably morally unjust." Besides bribery, he lays out four more likely articles that he thinks House Democrats will bring against Trump.
"The second charge will be high crimes and misdemeanors, election law violation," says Napolitano. "The third crime will be obstruction of justice. The fourth will be interference with a witness and the fifth may be lying under oath."
Over the past few months, Napolitano has emerged as one of Trump's harshest critics, claiming back in May that the Mueller Report demonstrated that the president had clearly obstructed justice. In response to the judge's comments, the president issued a series of angry tweets accusing Napolitano of seeking a seat on the Supreme Court and personal favors (the judge denies all claims in this exclusive Reason interview).
Though he thinks the recent House hearings provide grounds for impeachment, the judge finds it unlikely that the Republican-controlled Senate will vote to remove the president—and that the bigger problem is the way federal government continues to arrogate power to itself.
"No American president in the post–Woodrow Wilson era has stayed within the confines of the Constitution," says Napolitano. "And each president has more authority than his predecessors, for the simple reason that Democratic Congresses give power to Democratic presidents and Republican Congresses give power to Republican presidents. That power stays in the presidency. So Donald Trump actually has more authority than Barack Obama did, who had more authority than George W. Bush did, etc."
Napolitano argues that the federal government stays in power by "bribing" states and individuals with giveaways. The result, he says, is unsustainable debt that will ultimately undermine the economy and with it, social order. "The decline of certain types of cultural gatekeepers that said no [to] certain lifestyles obviously is liberating," notes Napolitano. "But the same technology which lets me put the works of Thomas Aquinas in my pocket also lets the government follow me wherever I go and record whatever conversation I have with Gillespie or whoever I'm talking to, the Constitution be damned."
Make sure to subscribe to this podcast by using the buttons to the right.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Dan Carlin is the host of the popular podcast Hardcore History and author of the new book The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses.
Hardcore History is notable not only for its immense audience (millions of people listen to it) but the length of its episodes. The most recent episode, part of a sequence about Imperial Japan in the 20th century, stretches over four hours.
The 54-year-old Carlin, who has been described as a "social libertarian" and always stresses that he is an amateur historian, talks with Nick Gillespie about what motivates him to go so deep on topics in a moment when we're constantly being told we all have short attention spans, whether he's optimistic or pessimistic about the present and especially the future, and why we haven't yet had a world-ending nuclear catastrophe.
Along the way, Carlin and Gillespie talk about how the media landscape has changed radically (and mostly for the better) over the past 30 years, the deep lesson we should all learn from the original Planet of the Apes movie, and whether, as Carlin puts it in his new book, "the idea of progress is not without bias."
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
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Who's ready for Week Two of the impeachment show (not to be confused with The Impeachment Show)? Well, ready might be a strong word, but the Reason Roundtable quartet of Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward have many thoughts about comparative presidential corruption, the Sixth Amendment, how politics keeps getting stuck in our government, and whether "bribery" is the right word for the job. The important thing is that it's all going to get worse.
Speaking of which, so are the Democrats' semi-phony yet heartfelt Centrism Wars, which get a thorough examination on the podcast as well. Is Pete Buttigieg a blank slate for the politically gullible? Does Michael Bloomberg's understanding of capitalism outweigh his enthusiasm for regulation? Is it time to blow the whole thing off and spend the weekend tripping balls on ayahuasca? All, and much more, are discussed.
SPEAKING OF DISCUSSION: Ever feel like harassing the Reason Roundtableists with individual or group questions? With our annual Webathon around the corner, the time to do so is right the hell now. Email your queries to podcasts@reason.com, and we shall do our best to answer them in a forthcoming video release during the Webathon.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
'Confused State' by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under CC BY 3.0
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When Errol Morris debuted American Dharma, his documentary about Stephen Bannon, last year at the Venice Film Festival, he received an ovation. But after early reviewers accused the Oscar-winning director of letting the former Breitbart.com head and adviser to President Trump "off the hook," Morris found it impossible to get a distribution deal in the United States.
It was the first time in decades that the acclaimed director of The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War couldn't get a movie into theaters. "The experience was so damn weird," Morris tells Reason. "People became so angry with me and with the movie, they certainly wanted to deplatform not just Bannon, but they wanted to deplatform me."
But now his film, American Dharma, is finally in theaters.
Nick Gillespie sat down with the 71-year-old Morris, whom Roger Ebert called "as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini," for a wide-ranging conversation about the censorious first reactions to his new film, his history with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, and what he learned—and didn't learn—about Steve Bannon's philosophy. He also talks about why he thinks we're in a golden age of documentary filmmaking, his heated grad-school confrontations with philosopher Thomas Kuhn (detailed in his recent book The Ashtray: Or the Man Who Denied Reality), and Wormwood, his 2017 Netflix docudrama series about the CIA's notorious MKUltra mind-control program.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) tells Amy Goodman that "Markets without rules are theft." Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) tweets that "billionaires should not exist." The conversation gets people so excited that soon former cabinet secretaries are tweeting that there are no honest ways to accumulate a billion dollars, commentators are warning that "these fortunes will destroy our democracy," and The New York Times is publishing entire news articles taking at face value the numerical fantasies of Warren's economic advisers.
It was just another week in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, in other words, albeit with one main exception—the race saw the entrance of a brand new (though also old) billionaire! All of which gets a thorough round of yakking from Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward on today's Reason Roundtable podcast. The gang also talks about the latest impeachment dramedy, the best arguments in favor of capitalism, and the life well lived of the late libertarian philanthropist and financial-markets investor Don Smith.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
'Amazing Plan - Distressed' by Kevin Macleod is licensed under CC BY 3.0
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Socialism is preferable to capitalism as an economic system that promotes freedom, equality, and prosperity.
That was the proposition debated on November 5 in New York City at The Soho Forum, the monthly debate series sponsored by Reason. Arguing in favor of the proposition was Richard D. Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts and author, most recently, of Understanding Marxism. Arguing against the resolution was Gene Epstein, the co-founder and director of The Soho Forum and the former economics editor of Barron's. Reason's Nick Gillespie served as moderator.
It was an Oxford-style debate, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. It was a packed house, with about 450 people in attendance. The pre-debate vote found that 25 percent of the audience agreed that socialism was preferable to capitalism; 49.5 percent thought that capitalism was the better system; and 25.5 precent were undecided. Despite a technical problem at the event itself, we were able to recover the final vote totals, which saw support for socialism drop by half a percentage point and support for capitalism increase to 71 percent.
Subscribe to this podcast by clicking on your preferred service listed on the right. Subscribe to Reason's two weekly podcasts—The Reason Roundtable and The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie—by going here now.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Nick Gillespie goes deep with Greg Gutfeld, the best-selling author who is the host of The Greg Gutfeld Show and a co-host of The Five, both of which appear on Fox News Channel.
Gutfeld is a very funny, contrarian, iconoclastic voice with libertarian leanings. The discussion covers Donald Trump and the 2020 election, Gutfeld's early days in the print media (at various points, he edited magazines such as Men's Health and Maxim UK), his time writing at The Huffington Post and his friendship with the late alternative media kingpin Andrew Breitbart, his abiding interest in all sorts of music, and why he's increasingly interested in taking psychedelic drugs. It's a wide-ranging, laugh-out-loud conversation that covers a hell of a lot of territory.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), the Democratic presidential contender, used the following words over the weekend to defend her plan to pay for Medicare for All: "It doesn't raise taxes on anybody but billionaires….Understand this. This is no increase in taxes for anyone except billionaires….Period. Done." Non-billionaires will not pay "a penny more."
This claim is a straight-up lie, says Reason features editor and resident health care policy specialist Peter Suderman in today's Reason Roundtable podcast. Co-roundtableists Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward dive into the weeds of Medicare policy and politics, jump into the fray of the latest social media panicking, and leave time enough for Ed Clark references and a bit of Libertarian Party presidential news.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music credits:
'Evil Plan' by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under CC BY 3.0
'ok boomer w/jedwill' by Peter Kuli
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Except for laws prohibiting the sale of drugs to minors and driving while impaired, all laws that penalize drug production, distribution, possession, and use should be abolished, along with special "sin" taxes on drugs.
That was the resolution of a public debate hosted by the Soho Forum in New York City on October 7, 2019. It featured Jacob Sullum, a senior editor at Reason magazine, and former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson. Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein moderated.
Arguing for the affirmative was Sullum, who is the author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use (2003) and For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health (1999). He was the 2004 recipient of the Thomas S. Szasz Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Civil Liberties.
Berenson, who argued for the negative, is the author most recently of Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence (2019). Berenson is also a best-selling spy novelist. His popular titles include The Deceivers, The Silent Man, and The Ghost War.
It was an Oxford-style debate, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. This was the Soho Forum's first tie, with each debater convincing exactly 9.76 percent of the audience to come over to his side.
The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by Reason, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture theater in Manhattan's East Village. To watch video versions of Soho Forum Debates, go here.
Produced by John Osterhoudt.
Photo credit: Brett Raney.
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"If 2018 was the year that the concept of 'cancel culture' went mainstream," writes Meghan Daum near the beginning of The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars, "then 2019 may be the year that cancel culture cancels itself."
A journalist who has authored a novel and two well-received essay collections, the 49-year-old Daum has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Vogue, GQ, Harper's, and is featured columnist at Medium (check out her personal website). In her new book, she contends that "By framing Trumpism as a moral emergency that required an all-hands-on-deck, no-deviation-from-the narrative approach to cultural and political thought…the left has cleared the way for a kind of purity policing—enforced and amplified by social media—that is sure to backfire." She also celebrates the much-maligned Gen X for its ethos of "toughness."
The Problem with Everything is her clarion call for all of us to chill out a bit and allow people to be more complicated, contradictory, and human. She is a writer who is both intensely curious and consistently contrarian, two qualities evinced by her recent Medium column: "The Perverse Seductions of 'The Handmaid's Tale': American women have never been freer. So why are we drawn to depictions of our own repression?"
Audio production by Regan Taylor and Ian Keyser.
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In September 2014, in the wake of the beheading of two American journalists by the Islamic State, the usually intervention-skeptical Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), then preparing a run for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, came out in favor declaring war to "destroy ISIS militarily." This was, to put it mildly, controversial among libertarians, particularly though not only those who are fans of his famously anti-interventionist father. More hawkish libertarians, meanwhile, were still going on about Paul's allegedly "fatal pacifism." (Reason's interview with the senator at the time is at this link.)
Many have argued that Paul's tiptoeing through the political minefield created by the alarming rise of ISIS was central to his candidacy's failure to launch, thus clearing the way for another, albeit far less consistent, intervention skeptic to eventually win the nomination in an otherwise typically hawkish GOP field. But now that the U.S. has, well, destroyed ISIS military (or come as close as you can) while also refraining from launching big new interventions in Syria or elsewhere, is this at least a partial vindication for a thoroughly unloved Rand Paul straddle?
So begins today's Reason Roundtable podcast, featuring Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward. The gang also argues about impeachment, the deficit, bad metaphors, and the new Yeezy. The usual, in other words.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music credit: "March to Victory" by Silent Partner
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Over the past four decades, British musician Billy Bragg has carved out a singular position as a modern-day troubadour who takes popular music and politics equally seriously.
Early albums such as Talking with the Taxman about Poetry (1986) and The Internationale (1990) merged concerns with the poor and the powerless while updating and reinvigorating older folk forms with punk sensibilities. At the turn of the century, Bragg partnered with the members of Wilco to release new songs using previously unheard lyrics by Woody Guthrie. The Mermaid Avenue recordings occasioned rave reviews and, in Bragg's own telling, were designed to humanize Guthrie, to transform a left-wing legend back into a real person with physical wants, desires, and needs.
For Bragg, like Guthrie, the personal and the political are never exactly separate. In August, Bragg released a full-throated polemic against rising populism and free market globalism, which he denounces as neo-liberalism. In The Three Dimensions of Freedom, Bragg writes, "Freedom has been repackaged as the right to choose, but genuine choice—in housing, in the workplace, at the ballot box—is hard to come by."
Nick Gillespie sat down to talk with Bragg about British and American politics, Donald Trump, Brexit, and his idea that we need to embrace "freedom" in what he says are its three dimensions: liberty, equality, and accountability. Apart from strongly supporting free speech, Gillespie and Bragg didn't agree on much, especially about whether living standards and individual freedom have increased in the 21st century and whether economic liberalization and globalization have helped the average man and woman.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Is there something kind of, I dunno, off about Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii)? Certainly the can't-quit-us Clinton Machine thinks so, as do some supposedly skeptical news organizations. People a tad more serious, like former Reasoner Kerry Howley, have grappled honestly with Gabbard's unusual personality, life history, and issue set (including some off-putting enthusiasms for aggressive nationalists like Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi). Check out John Stossel's full interview with Gabbard right here, and see for yourself.
Regardless of whether Gabbard floats their particular boats, the Reason Roundtable crew of Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and special guest star Stephanie Slade have some withering things to say about this latest Hillary World attempt to smear U.S. foreign policy dissenters (including two-time Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein) as Rooskie "assets" or as the witting recipients of "grooming." The gang also gives some takeaways from last week's Democratic presidential debate, including the long, bad sections about regulating political speech and the companies providing platforms thereof. And there are the usual references to Nick Cave, Peter Criss, Norm MacDonald, the Adverts, and so on.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
Music credit: "The Gunfight" by Everet Almond
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At the 2000 Republican National Convention, the country got one of its first glimpses of a new type of public charter school. The claim was that with enough rigor, devotion, and "no excuses" discipline, such schools could close the achievement gap between poor minorities and their wealthy white counterparts. The shining example was the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP. Skeptics pointed out that the families showing up at KIPP and other no-excuses charters were self-selected.
In 2006, a combative former New York City council member named Eva Moskowitz co-founded a new charter school network with the same approach. Success Academy was KIPP on steroids, trouncing many public schools in wealthy neighborhoods on the annual state exams.
Enter the education writer and former public school teacher Robert Pondiscio, who spent a year embedded at a Success Academy in an effort to figure out just how these schools do it. In his widely praised new book, How The Other Half Learns, Pondiscio reports that the critics were right: Not only is the very act of applying to the lottery self-selecting, but Success Academy makes such rigorous demands on parents that it disproportionately retains only the most highly motivated families.
The result is that an applicant's chances of winning a seat at a Success school in its annual high stakes lottery aren't as competitive as many had claimed. Pondiscio found that there are about six applicants for every spot. However, because so many families drop out, the chances of getting offered a spot are actually closer to 50 percent.
But for those that make the commitment, the impact is absolutely transformative. And he argues that these kids deserve the same access to excellent public schools that upper-middle-class parents finagle for their children, even if it means leaving the rest of their communities behind.
Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Pondiscio to discuss why he believes motivated families deserve the opportunity to exit their traditional district public schools—which a New York Times reviewer called "a morally disturbing conclusion" to his "unsparingly honest book"—and his challenge to both supporters and detractors of the school reform movement.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Who ya gonna believe when it comes to the omni-faceted NBA/China/Hong Kong/censorship/whatever controversy, Gregg Popovich, Donald Trump, Steve Kerr, South Park, or…Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Tex.)?
That's the first of a seemingly endless number of perhaps unanswerable questions on this week's Reason Roundtable podcast, featuring Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch. Other queries include: Does Red China's exportation of censorship disprove the hypothesis that trade and capitalism make people freer? Is President Trump's abandonment of the Syrian Kurds a welcome clarifying agent to the U.S. body politic or a haphazard atrocity-enabler cloaked in the insincere language of imperial withdrawal? Which Democrats are most set to embarrass themselves in this week's debate? Are Tom DeLay's hips capable of lying? And can Nick's enthusiasm for Columbus Day be contained, let alone stopped?
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
'Duet Musette' by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under CC BY 4.0
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Few stories are generating as much as heat and interest as the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, where mostly young demonstrators are taking to the streets to call for democracy, autonomy, and privacy from authoritarian leaders in Beijing. In just the past week, the general manager of the Houston Rockets basketball team caused an international incident when he tweeted support for the protesters. This was a big deal because the NBA is huge in China—in fact, there are more NBA fans in China than there are people in the United States! The Rockets' team owner and NBA leadership quickly apologized but not before the network carrying basketball in China announced it would not show any Rockets games this season.
The creators of South Park took a different tack: When an episode of their show mocking government censorship was shut down by the regime, Matt Stone and Trey Parker issued a caustic fake apology that read in part, "Like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts….We too love money more than freedom and democracy."
A month ago, Reason TV producer Zach Weissmueller traveled to Hong Kong to document exactly what's happening in the streets of a place long known for nearly unbridled capitalism (watch his videos at Reason.com or YouTube). In today's Reason Interview, Zach tells how the protesters are using both high-tech and low-tech means to get their message out, why they're inspired by the old Bruce Lee saying "be like water," and whether they're likely to achieve their goals of securing democratic, representative rule and privacy from the government that is perfecting the surveillance state in the 21st century.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
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As the nation gets more paranoid about vaping, we bring in e-cigarette expert Jacob Sullum to talk us down. Sullum digs into the real risks of vaping versus smoking, what teens who like cotton candy have to do with the recent deaths associated with vaping, and whether you should toss those vape cartridges you have sitting around.
He joins the usual Reason Roundtable crew of Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Peter Suderman for an in-depth chat about tainted THC, flavored nicotine, and more. We also sprint through this weekend's impeachment, corruption, and treason-accusation news (which is now breaking at a faster rate than we can podcast about it), and we round out our chat with an inquiry into why banning porn is so hot again on the right. Reason editors also have some thoughts about Joker and Frederick Douglass. (Because of course we do.)
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Music credit: 'Touch Tone' by Mini Vandals
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It's a rare week when a major politician doesn't threaten social media with censorship or other legal action. President Donald Trump regularly inveighs against Facebook and Twitter, claiming that such platforms minimize the reach and influence of posting by him and conservatives. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has promised to break up tech giants using antitrust law if elected president. Meanwhile, talking heads and experts routinely blame social media for mass shootings, rising suicides, and all sorts of social maladies.
Is any of this true? If it is, what should we do about it? And if it isn't, why are we so freaked out? On today's podcast, Nick Gillespie interviews Mike Godwin, whose new book, The Splinters of our Discontent: How to Fix Social Media and Democracy Without Breaking Them, is a richly researched and remarkably panic-free discussion of how Facebook, Twitter, and other social media actually operate and influence public discourse, including elections. Currently a "distinguished senior fellow" at the think tank R Street, Godwin has a long and legendary history when it comes to cyberspace. Back in the 1990s, he was the first staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and helped craft the legal arguments that ultimately struck down government control of online speech in The Communications Decency Act of 1996. He also codified what's become known as "Godwin's law," which holds that the longer an online discussion continues, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis, Adolph Hitler, or the Holocaust approaches 100 percent. Godwin has served as general counsel for Wikimedia Foundation, is the author of Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age, and longtime Reason contributing editor (read his Reason archive here).
Social media, argues Godwin, isn't broken at all, although both tech companies and users need to clarify their terms of engagement. On the other hand, he says, democracy is in deep disarray, for reasons that go back to the very founding of the United States.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) says it's a "fake witch hunt" ("BASTA!"). Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.) is in the same "impeachable conduct" camp he's been in since May; adding such recent commentary as "Nearly every Trump ally's defense has been an effort to gaslight America." And now-retired Rep. Jeff Flake (R–Ariz.), from the much-hated temperamental center, has in this morning's Washington Post charted out a third way between those two poles, arguing that "the president's actions warrant impeachment," but that Flake still has "grave reservations" about launching those proceedings, so instead wants elected Republicans to not endorse the president's re-election because Trump is "manifestly undeserving of the highest office that we have."
So which of these libertarian-leaning legislators, current and former, has the better argument? That's the subject of this week's editors' roundtable edition of Reason Podcast, featuring Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch. Is it possible or meaningful to separate out impeachment proceedings from articles of impeachment from a Senate conviction thereof? Are there important differences between Trump's conduct and that of previous administrations? What is the role/position/rooting interest for those outside of the two corners? We talk through all of this and more, while fighting a losing battle against profanity, invoking Inception, and explaining how all art is basically a primer on management.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
'Rocking Forward' by XTaKeRuX is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Relevant links from the show:
"Trump's Civil War Tweet Is Bad. This Other Tweet May Be Unconstitutional." By Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"Whether Trump Stays or Goes, We Need To Rein in Presidents and Congress," by Nick Gillespie
"Did Trump Commit a Crime by Seeking a Ukrainian Investigation of Joe Biden? And Does It Matter for Impeachment Purposes?" By Jacob Sullum
"Evidence Increasingly Indicates Trump's Ukraine Pressure Tactics Usurped Congress' Power of the Purse—and that he may have Committed a Federal Crime in the Process," by Ilya Somin
"Did the President Commit Witness Tampering?" By David Post
"Is Impeachment a 'Constitutional Duty'?" By Keith Whittington
"Trump's Ukraine Call Was an Abuse of Power—and This Time, He Can't Claim Ignorance or Inexperience," by Peter Suderman
"John Yoo Warns That Impeachment Would Undermine Presidential Power. That's the Point." By Jacob Sullum
"Whistleblower Report Alleges Trump Used Presidential Power for Personal Gain," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"Congress Should Not Be Satisfied With Ukraine Call Transcript, Given the Trump White House's History of Fiddling With Records," by Eric Boehm
"Nancy Pelosi Announces Trump Impeachment Inquiry Over Ukraine Scandal," by Billy Binion
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Editor at Large Matt Welch speaks with former Republican congressman and talk show host Joe Walsh, who is currently mounting a long-odds primary challenge against President Donald Trump. Walsh, who served one term in the House representing Illinois' 8th District, used to be a Trump supporter. Now he says the president is a liar, a bully, and a racist who is completely unfit for office. The one-time Tea Party favorite called for Trump's impeachment after the Mueller report came out earlier this year.
Walsh confesses to his role as a hype man for Trump and to his own past racist comments about Barack Obama. He also talks about the decline of the Tea Party as a political force and the need for the GOP, which has gone astray on such issues as trade, debt, and spending, to embrace libertarian ideas.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
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It's hard to think of a time when political and cultural discourse has been more polarized. These days, it seems as if even casual conversation has become tougher to navigate than a World War II minefield. Everyone from prospective Saturday Night Live cast members to college professors teaching books on racism to social media folk heroes have been canceled for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and holiday dinners occasion endless columns about surviving political discussions. In today's world, "Can we all just get along?"—the phrase famously attributed to Rodney King after he was almost beaten to death by members of the Los Angeles Police Department in 1991—seems like it's from a totally different universe.
Today's guest, Peter Boghossian, hopes to remedy at least some of today's toxic atmosphere. He's an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University and the co-author, with James Lindsay, of the new book How To Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide. Their aim is to give us all advice on how to have "effective, civil discussions about today's most divisive issues."
Boghossian talks with Nick Gillespie about strategies to bring people who disagree into useful, productive engagement with one another. They also discuss how Boghossian, Lindsay, and a third scholar, Helen Pluckrose, pulled off the "grievance studies" hoax, one of the biggest and most controversial academic controversies in recent memory. The trio authored 20 fake articles that they say exemplify how political correctness has trumped serious intellectual inquiry in many academic disciplines. These were not subtle satires: One talked about canine "rape culture" at dog parks and another appropriated aspects of Hitler's Mein Kampf in the service of a feminist critique of patriarchy. They submitted the papers to academic journals, with seven being accepted for publication and four actually coming out when they were exposed by The Wall Street Journal.
Is there a contradiction between pulling off the hoax and writing a book about bringing ideological opponents together? And what punishment at Portland State does Boghossian still face as a result of his role in the hoax? Those are some of the questions raised in this wide-ranging conversation about politics, polarization, and intellectual inquiry.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Forget mere impeachment, let's talk treason! Punishable by execution!
That's where longshot GOP presidential challenger Bill Weld found himself on Morning Joe this morning, and it's more or less where we start this week's Editors Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, which features Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch. Have we learned nothing from the past two-plus years? Is the tension between legislative-branch duty and political needs resolvable? Are either President Donald Trump or Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden even capable of not acting like jackasses, and is asking the question that way part of the problem? These are among the questions.
Also discussed: The super-terrible national rent control proposal from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), the lengths Mitt Romney went to as presidential candidate to never propose cutting any piece of government, and what reading 1990s issues of Seventeen can tell you about "sluts." Don't say you haven't been warned.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Music credit: 'TipToes' by Myuu
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The Libertarian Party should never again put up national candidates whose views are similar to those of Gary Johnson and Bill Weld.
That was the resolution of a public debate hosted by the Soho Forum in New York City on September 10, 2019. It featured comedian and podcast host Dave Smith and Nicholas Sarwark, the chairman of the Libertarian National Committee. Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein moderated.
It was an Oxford-style debate, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. Smith won the night by convincing 20 percent of the audience, while Sarwark convinced 16.8 percent.
Arguing for the affirmative was Dave Smith, host of the popular libertarian podcast Part of the Problem, and a co-host of Legion of Skanks.
Nicholas Sarwark argued for the negative. Sarwark is currently serving his third term as chairman of the Libertarian National Committee, which is the executive body of the Libertarian Party of the United States.
The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village.
Produced by John Osterhoudt.
Photo credit: Brett Raney
So what fresh hell is this "locked and loaded" nonsense? That's what kicks off this week's Editors Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, featuring Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch. The quartet also discusses highlights and lowlights from last week's Democratic presidential debate, rages against the dying of the vape, and tries to fix Katherine's bad movie-watching instincts.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Music credit: 'Complicate Ya' by Otis McDonald
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Few organizations elicit more polarized responses than the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Supporters of the FBI claim that it has played an essential role in protecting the United States from all sorts of criminal activity and existential threats since its origins over a century ago as the Bureau of Investigation. Critics say the FBI routinely breaks the very laws it seeks to enforce and has often been a force of state-based repression.
Today's guest on The Reason Podcast is a former FBI agent who nonetheless is a vocal critic of the bureau. Mike German served in the FBI for 16 years, many as an undercover operative who infiltrated white supremacist groups. He left the bureau in 2004 as a whistleblower who told Congress his former colleagues had grossly mishandled a variety of counter-terrorism cases and falsified evidence. Since leaving the bureau, he's worked at the ACLU and published a memoir titled Thinking Like a Terrorist: Insights of a Former FBI Undercover Agent. He now hangs his shingle at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, where he focuses on how the war on terror affects civil liberties.
He is also the author of the new book, Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Democracy, a searing indictment of the agency he once worked for. According to German's in-depth, insider's account, the FBI routinely protects its own malefactors and mistakes at the cost of letting white supremacists, terrorists, and foreign agents go free.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Last night's Democratic debate was the first to feature all the major contenders on a single stage. They spent much of the evening sparring over health care issues, before moving on to talk about gun control, the environment, immigration and more.
Despite the presence of former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Ca.), it was tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang who made the biggest impression. Reason's Austin Bragg, Peter Suderman, and Eric Boehm talk about the evening, and what it means in a special post-debate podcast.
Photo credit: Heidi Gutman/ZUMA Press/Newscom
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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When Stan Lee, the legendary head of Marvel Comics for decades and the co-creator of iconic comic-book titles such as The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and Spider-Man, died last November, he wasn't quite done producing content. His final work, A Trick of Light, was released earlier this year as an audio book and the print and e-book versions come out next week, on September 17.
Co-authored by Kat Rosenfield, A Trick of Light is a complex and compelling story that follows the adventures of Cameron, a high-school senior and would-be YouTube star who gains superpowers after a freak accident on Lake Erie, and Nia, a teenage hacker shrouded in mystery. It's a meditation on virtual and augmented reality and how the internet has in many ways failed to deliver on its promise of connecting us in new and more profound ways. "The amazing (and also terrible!) thing about the internet is that it's changing the way we relate to each other, even to the point of warping our own sense of who we are," Rosenfield told Teen Vogue when the audio book came out. "Cameron and Nia are struggling with the same questions and anxieties that we all experience as a result of inhabiting digital spaces, where identity and reality become malleable."
For today's Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with Rosenfield, the author of the highly acclaimed young-adult novels Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone and Inland, a former reporter for MTV News, and a contributor to New York magazine, Wired, and Playboy (follow her on Twitter and Instagram). She talks about working with Stan Lee, how online culture has changed the way we relate to one another for both good and bad, and why pernicious forms of "cancel culture" and identity politics are flourishing in literary culture.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.
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Judging by last week's six-hour CNN presidential candidate town hall on climate change, the rough Democratic consensus is that we've got 12 years until DOOM—and that we should probably ban the greenhouse-gas-reducing energy technologies of nuclear power and hydraulically fractured natural gas. Nonsense on stilts, argue Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch on the latest Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast.
The gang previews this week's Democratic presidential debate, notes the tension between an increasingly crowded Republican race and the GOP's decision to call off state primaries, analyzes President Donald Trump's move to call off withdrawal talks with the Taliban, and gives the moderator an earful about his WrongThink on West Side Story.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Music Credit: 'Song of Mirrors' by Unicorn Heads
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What a difference a decade makes! Ten years ago, everyone loved big tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Twitter. They were bringing low, low prices and vast selection to consumers, allowing us to connect and build community in new and powerful ways, and helping the least-powerful among us speak up against power and even start revolutions.
Nowadays, those same corporations are favorite targets of politicians all across the political spectrum. Congress demands their executives testify before the House and Senate, President Donald Trump rarely goes a day without inveighing against tech giants for allegedly screwing with his popularity and reelection chances, and Democratic presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren have promised to break up companies they say have too much cultural, economic, and political power.
Lurking behind the new attacks on big tech is a novel interpretation of antitrust law known as "hipster antitrust" because it's being touted by a new, younger generation of legal scholars. Law professors such as Lina Khan and Tim Wu are inspired by Louis Brandeis (1856-1941), the Harvard Law professor and Supreme Court justice who warned against "the curse of bigness" and defended small, local firms against national behemoths like Standard Oil and A&P.
In the cover story for the October 2019 issue of Reason, Clemson economist Thomas W. Hazlett delves into the ideas and analysis of hipster antitrust and the new push to break up the tech giants. He says that the hipster antitrusters, Warren, and Trump have got it almost all exactly wrong and that companies such as Amazon actually are massively benefiting consumers. On today's Reason podcast, Hazlett tells Nick Gillespie about the checkered history of past antitrust actions and what proponents of hipster antitrust get wrong about today's (and tomorrow's) tech sector. Hazlett's story is currently available only to subscribers of Reason magazine. Subscribe now for as little as $14.97 and then read the story here.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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As has been the case with the Trump administration after a mass shooting event, the president and key legislative leaders are discussing in the wake of Saturday's Odessa, Texas, shoot-out a series of possible measures, including expediting the death penalty. As is also the case during a long presidential primary season, Democratic candidates are one-upping one another with gun-control proposals, with Texan Beto O'Rourke and Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) both suggesting "mandatory buy-backs" of "weapons of war." So what will and should actually be done?
So kicks off a lively discussion on the latest Editors Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, feauring Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch. Other topics include: Reflections on back-to-school week and the state of education policy/politics, ideas from both the Trump administration and the Democratic presidential field about getting U.S. troops the hell out of Afghanistan, plus the latest social-commentary comedy from Dave Chappelle
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Scapes' by Steve Combs is licensed under CC BY 4.0
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For most of its existence, Backpage.com was mired in legal and political controversy. The website, which hosted online classified ads much like Craigslist, was accused of facilitating child sex trafficking, and was targeted by state attorneys general who said Backpage "exploited women and children."
Founders Michael Lacey and James Larkin were hauled in front of the U.S. Senate where an official report claimed they "knowingly facilitated the criminal sex trafficking of vulnerable women and young girls." Eventually, federal agents shut down the site and raided their homes.
The founders are now forced to wear ankle bracelets and are prohibited from leaving Maricopa County, Arizona, where they await their 2020 trial.
But as it turns out, the government's case was built on bad faith and bogus arguments. As Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown reported, a pair of secret government memos from 2012 and 2013 undermine nearly every aspect of the case against Backpage and its founders.
Brown talks with Reason Features Editor Peter Suderman about the case against Backpage, the contents of the memos, and what the story means for the ongoing legal and political arguments around sex trafficking and online speech.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Photo credit: Hector Amezcua/TNS/Newscom
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"Congress has given us $22 trillion in debt, the longest war in American history, a broken health care system, a broken immigration system, a tax code written by lobbyists, and an explosion of money in politics. Worst of all, too few here have the courage to address these problems because the only focus is on reelection."
That's a quote from the June Senate testimony of Nick Tomboulides, the executive director of U.S. Term Limits, a group that believes the last, best hope for shrinking the size, scope, and spending of government is kicking senators out of office after a maximum of two terms and House members after three.
In today's Reason Podcast, Tomboulides tells Nick Gillespie that over 80 percent of voters (including former President Barack Obama, President Donald Trump, and former Rep. Beto O'Rourke) support term limits, that shortening political careers will lead to better candidates running for office, and that a grassroots movement is pushing state legislatures to amend the Constitution to include term limits. The 30-year-old Tomboulides also recounts his journey from a traditional Republican political operative to a libertarian activist in the wake of both the disastrous Iraq War begun under George W. Bush and the presidential campaigns of former Rep. Ron Paul.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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One-term Tea Party congressman and current political talk show host Joe Walsh announced Monday that he will challenge President Donald Trump in the Republican primaries. The policy component of Walsh's pitch is about debt, deficits, and tariffs, though the main thrust is about Trump's deficient character and fitness. So, uh, about that.
Well, now Walsh confesses that "I said some ugly things about President Obama that I regret," and that "I think that helped create Trump." Can a reformed blowhard make a dent in the unreformed fella sitting in the Oval Office? So begins today's Editors Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, feauring Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch.
The gang also discusses the rest of the #NeverTrump primary field, the president's latest trade bleatings, the chaotic G7 meeting in France, the Amazon forest fires, the passing of David Koch, and plenty besides.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Bitcoin is poorly suited to the purpose of becoming any nation's main medium of exchange.
That was the topic of a public debate hosted by the Soho Forum in New York City on August 12, 2019. It featured George Selgin, director of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute, and economist Saifedean Ammous, author of The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking (2018). Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein moderated.
It was an Oxford-style debate, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. Ammous prevailed in the debate by convincing 23 percent of audience members to change their minds.
Arguing for the affirmative was Selgin, whose books include Less Than Zero: The Case for a Falling Price Level in a Growing Economy (2018) and Floored! How a Misguided Fed Experiment Deepened and Prolonged the Great Recession (2018).
Ammous argued for the negative. An associate professor of economics at Lebanese American University, Ammous is also teaching an online course in bitcoin and Austrian economics.
The Soho Forum, which is partnered with the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village.
Music: "Modum" by Kai Engel is licensed under a CC-BY creative commons license.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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David Koch, the billionaire free market philanthropist, has died at the age of 79.
Born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1940, Koch was a longtime member of the board of trustees of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this podcast, and a major force in the modern libertarian movement. He was also, along with his older brother Charles, one of the "Koch brothers," who are regularly invoked on the left as a primary cause of all that is bad in American politics.
Such lazy demonization belies a life and fortune spent trying to build a better world through business, politics, and culture, one in which people are not only more prosperous and tolerant but free to run their own experiments in living.
In 1980, Koch was the vice presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, whose platform that year endorsed the then-radical notions of legalizing drugs, ending penalties for victimless crimes, and full acceptance of gays and lesbians. The platform also called for the abolition of the CIA and FBI in the wake of the Church Commission findings of widespread abuse. In 1987, he told Reason, "Pursuing a very aggressive foreign policy…is an extremely expensive endeavor for the U.S. government. The cost of maintaining a huge military force abroad is gigantic. It's so big it puts a severe strain on the U.S. economy, creating economic hardships here at home." Not surprisingly, he was a critic of the Iraq War and other 21st-century interventions.
He gave widely to libertarian organizations such as Americans for Prosperity and also to cancer research and the arts. In today's podcast, Nick Gillespie speaks with Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty, the author of Radicals For Capitalism, a history of the libertarian movement, about the life and legacy of David Koch.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Since launching a decade ago, the decentralized, peer-to-peer cryptocurrency bitcoin has been lauded (and denounced) for its potential to route around traditional state-based monetary systems and allow individuals to trade directly with one another.
Much of the discussion has understandably focused on how it is transforming economic exchange. But Alex Gladstein, the chief strategy officer of the Human Rights Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes and protects civil liberties in closed societies, is interested in how it empowers people in autocratic countries to escape government control. Only about 8 percent of global transactions use cash and the switch to digital payments means that authorities can track what individuals are up to with greater ease than they used to.
Bitcoin, its underlying blockchain technology, and the emerging Lightning payment network are allowing people to escape surveillance, says Gladstein, who has co-authored a brand new book on the subject, The Little Bitcoin Book: Why Bitcoin Matters for Your Freedom, Finances, and Future.
In today's Reason Podcast, he tells Nick Gillespie how bitcoin is changing the way people live and transact in places such as China, India, Iran, and Venezuela. He also explains how in an increasingly cashless America, cryptocurrency is helping us to escape what's been called "surveillance capitalism," why Human Rights Foundation's annual Oslo Freedom Forum is more important than the World Economic Forum in Davos, and how bitcoin and associated technologies will "really bankrupt the ability of authoritarian regimes to do what they do and basically force their hand to reform."
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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It has been a helluva weekend for national conversations about race. There was the Proud Boys vs. Antifa street theater in Portland. There was a campaign-pivoting Beto O'Rourke declaring that "Our country was founded on racism—and is still racist today." There was Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), in the midst of unveiling a sweeping new criminal justice plan, offering this vow: "We will go to war against white nationalism and racism in every aspect of our lives." And as always, there was a Trump tweet.
What was the president referring to? Perhaps the Paper of Record's sweeping and controversial new 1619 Project, which aims "to reframe American history, making explicit how slavery is the foundation on which this country is built." In the back half of today's Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch offer a mixed preliminary verdict about the package, praising its ambition, agreeing with the importance of the topic, and disagreeing strenuously with its King Cottonesque take on capitalism.
Other items that come up for discussion: the potential impending global recession and its perceived culprits, where Democrats are at on trade, how ancient aliens did the prehistoric cave-paintings, and which podcaster has two thumbs and watched the key-changingest Ron Paul supporter this weekend (hint: this guy!!!).
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Railroad's Whiskey Co' Jahzzar is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
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Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign by warning that America had become a "dumping ground" for immigrants, and that Mexico in particular was sending criminals and people with "lots of problems." His presidency has been marked by anti-immigrant rhetoric.
In the summer of 2019, President Trump previewed sweeping immigration raids, tweeting that "Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States."
The Trump administration, like the Obama administration before it, had already conducted raids targeting undocumented immigrants, but Trump was promising a series of actions that were intended to at least create the impression of a step-up in immigration enforcement around the country.
That culminated in early August, when Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents conducted one of the largest worksite immigration raids in U.S. history, arresting nearly 700 chicken plant workers in Mississippi on suspicion of working illegally. The raids, which were conducted jointly with the Department of Justice, left young children separated from their parents.
The Trump administration has defended the raids, saying they had been in the works for over a year—and arguing that the workplaces were exploiting undocumented workers.
Are these raids just for show? Does Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric actually encourage asylum seekers? And what's the connection between the Obama-era raids and Trumps? Reason's Peter Suderman sat down with ProPublica reporter Dara Lind to discuss these questions and more.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Bottom Feeders' by Audiobinger is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
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The horrific mass killings in El Paso and Dayton have understandably inspired terror in America and calls for expanded gun control, predictive policing, and mental health interventions designed to reduce violence.
But Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, the leading researcher on the topic for the past 35 years, tells Reason, "There is no evidence that we are in the midst of an epidemic of mass shootings." The number of incidents and casualties are simply too small to make such claims and, he stresses, the media coverage of shootings often ends up creating a false sense that gun violence—which is at or near historic lows—is ubiquitous and growing.
In a wide-ranging interview with Nick Gillespie, Fox explains the common characteristics of mass killers, why violent crime involving guns has declined over the past several decades, and how cable TV and social media contribute to a false sense of panic.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Is absolutely everything politics now?
Anti-Trumpers are boycotting pricey stationary bike rides at Equinox-owned SoulCycle after major Equinox investor Steven Ross held a fundraiser for Donald Trump. "Steve Ross got into a little bit of trouble this week," Trump joked. "I said, 'Steve welcome to the world of politics!'"
Regular Reason podcasters Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillepsie are joined by Elizabeth Nolan Brown to discuss the morality of boycotts and campaign finance disclosure laws, plus conspiracy theories, sex trafficking, political photo ops gone awry, and much more.
The hashtags #ClintonBodyCount and #TrumpBodyCount were both trending after disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in jail on Saturday, and both sides claimed victory in a large immigration raid on a Mississippi meat processing plant that rounded up more than 600 alleged illegal immigrants and left their children weeping in the streets after their first day of school.
As usual, the podcasters make recommendations for stuff to read, watch, and listen to, plus Mangu-Ward asks whether she should take a mysterious red pill with an "X" on it that she found on her desk this morning.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Songe D'Automne' by Latche' Swing is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 FR
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In 2016, the website The Babylon Bee appeared as "Your Trusted Source for Christian News Satire." If you're not a believer, that may strike you as a dubious proposition, but The Babylon Bee absolutely delivers the goods when it comes to comedy, regularly skewering liberals, conservatives, and Christians as a sort of theologically sophisticated version of The Onion.
Recent headlines include "Trump Is Being Influenced by The Russians, Screams Communist!" and "Woke Polar Bear Apologizes for Being White." Classics include "Trump Proves He's Not A Racist By Showing His Rejection Letter From The KKK" and "Local Christian Would Do Anything For Jesus Except Believe Things That Are Unpopular."
A few weeks ago, the site ran a story titled "Georgia Lawmaker Claims Chick-Fil-A Employee Told Her To Go Back To Her Country, Later Clarifies He Actually Said 'My Pleasure.'" The piece generated a lengthy reply from the fact-checking site Snopes.com, which charged the satire site with misleading serious news readers despite many disclaimers (the signup for Bee's newsletter boasts, "Fake news you can trust, delivered straight to your inbox"). Out of concern for being deplatformed by Facebook and other services, the Bee is actually threatening legal action against Snopes (learn more about that here).
On today's Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with The Babylon Bee's Editor in Chief Kyle Mann about the origins of the satire site, its goals, and what it means to be taken literally when being absurdist about politics and culture.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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A pair of horrific mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, this weekend left at least 30 people dead. Politicians are jockeying to place the blame on everything from immigrants to guns to the news media.
What should politicians do when these awful events when they occur? Why have mass shootings increasingly led to people raising First Amendment issues as well as Second Amendment questions? And how do libertarians react to both the events themselves and the misguided policy responses that inevitably result?
On the latest Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Katherine Mangu-Ward are joined by special guest Eric Boehm to discuss all of these questions, as well as last week's Democratic presidential debates, the no-good-very-bad budget deal, and the latest front in the trade war. Plus: a special China-focused recommendations segment, featuring Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, The Farewell, The Three-Body Problem, and more from the Bobiverse.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Ghosts I, 02' by Nine Inch Nails is licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0
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"I have never in my life seen an economy like this. This is even better than the '60s. It is phenomenal. And I think [it's] primarily because of deregulation, not tax reform. My companies in California, in Texas, in Florida, in Illinois…have been set free."—Kevin O'Leary
For the past 10 years, the reality TV show Shark Tank has entertained and edified millions of viewers by dramatizing how entrepreneurs pitch venture capitalists. And none of the "sharks"—the investors who compete with each other to fund businesses they think will be successful—is more entertaining or edifying than Kevin O'Leary, whose signature insult to unsuccessful contestants—"You're Dead To Me"—has become a pop culture catchphrase.
But O'Leary isn't just a small-screen blowhard. Born and raised in Canada, the 65-year-old investor got rich by developing educational and family-oriented computer software in the 1980s and '90s and holding firm to a gospel of thrift, savings, and reinvestment that he's outlined in best-selling books such as Cold Hard Truth on Men, Women, and Money. Over the years, he's diversified his investments into vineyards, storage facilities, and more, and he's dabbled in politics, too, briefly considering a run in 2017 to head the Conservative Party in Canada. His brash nature earned him easy comparisons to Donald Trump but O'Leary, who lives in Boston, is openly free trade and pro-immigration. He's long been in favor of marijuana legalization and gay rights and opposed to military interventionism.
Nick Gillespie sat down with O'Leary at FreedomFest, the annual gathering of libertarians in Las Vegas. They talked about why Shark Tank is so popular, why Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is so bad, and whether "democratic socialism" is really a threat to the free market capitalism that O'Leary says makes us richer and happier. They also discussed why O'Leary thinks Donald Trump has been great for the economy despite a personal style so many, including O'Leary himself, find unappealing.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
In 2018, the journalist Kevin Williamson was hired away from the flagship publication for the conservative movement, National Review, by one of the oldest and most-prestigious magazines in American history, The Atlantic. The editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, explained that Williamson's hire was done to help bring ideological diversity to the pages of a publication that skewed liberal or left on most things.
Williamson's first piece for The Atlantic—a column declaring that "The Libertarian Moment" heralded by Reason was deader than a doornail—appeared on April 2, 2018. He was fired on April 5, after a years-old tweet had come to light, one in which the pro-life Williamson argued that women who have abortions should not only be charged with homicide but executed, preferably by hanging. It's worth pointing out that Williamson was joking, at least about the hanging part, because he's generally against capital punishment.
Williamson rejoined the staff of National Review, where he continues to author a mix of heavily reported articles from the backroads of America and opinion pieces that are always incredibly well-written and challenging to libertarian sensibilities—many of which the 46-year-old Texan shares. He's also just published The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics, which he had actually started writing before he got fired by The Atlantic.
Nick Gillespie spoke with Williamson at FreedomFest, the annual gathering of libertarians in Las Vegas, about his brief, tumultuous experience at The Atlantic, why he thinks Trump supporters are often just as bad as left-wing ideologues when it comes to shutting down divergent opinions, and how America might actually start encouraging people to think for themselves again.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Poor Mick Mulvaney! Just kidding—the White House chief of staff (and director of the Office of Management and Budget) is, according to Nick Gillespie, a bald-faced and balding "liar." And that was just within the first 10 minutes of today's Editors Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast.
Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch take swings at bipartisan budget awfulness, Federal Reserve debt monetization, David Simon grumpiness, and—yes!—President Donald Trump's swipes at Rep. Elijah Cummings (D–Md.), the City of Baltimore, and its residents. The editors also discuss what they learned on their summer vacations, tiptoe into the bi/trans wars, and even say nice things about you, the listening public!
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Temptation March by Audionautix is licensed under CC BY 4.0
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Postmodernism is necessary for a politics of individual liberty.
That was the topic of a public debate hosted by the Soho Forum in New York City on June 17, 2019. It featured Stephen Hicks, a professor of philosophy at Rockford University, and author Thaddeus Russell. Soho Forum director Gene Epstein moderated.
It was an Oxford-style debate, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. Hicks prevailed in the debate by convincing 34 percent of audience members to change their minds.
Arguing for the affirmative was Russell, whose 2011 book, A Renegade History of the United States, argues that cherished American freedoms come from the selfish desires of ordinary people. Renegade University, founded by Russell, offers courses on diverse subjects from postmodernism to the history of martial arts.
Hicks argued for the negative. He's the executive director at The Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship. He is the author of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (2011) and Nietzsche and the Nazis (2010).
The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village.
Produced by Todd Krainin.
'Modum' by Kai Engel is licensed under CC BY 4.0
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When Michigan Rep. Justin Amash declared his independence from the Republican Party on July 4, he instantly became one of the most controversial politicians in America. Donald Trump immediately took to Twitter to denounce Amash as a "total loser" and "one of the dumbest & most disloyal" members of the GOP.
Whether or not you agree with the five-term congressman's choice to leave the Republican Party, he's anything but dumb and unprincipled. Amash has been the most consistently libertarian member of Congress since taking office in 2011, repeatedly voting to reduce the size and spending of the federal government, to stop mass surveillance of American citizens, and to end wars that he believes lack constitutional authorization.
Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Amash, the 39-year-old son of Middle Eastern immigrants, to talk about what it feels like to be independent, why he won't be joining Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's social-justice "squad" anytime soon, whether he thinks Donald Trump is racist, if he's going to run for president as a Libertarian, and why he believes we need to talk more about love in national politics.
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Ian Keyser.
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"Today we declare independence…from neoliberalism, from libertarianism, from what they call classical liberalism. From the set of ideas that sees the atomic individual, the free and equal individual, as the only thing that matters in politics," said Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism and chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C. The conference also featured Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, and Sen. Josh Hawley (D–Mo.).
But do libertarians really view atomized individuals as the "only thing that matters in politics"? This week's roundtable of Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Eric Boehm, and Zach Weissmueller try to grapple with that question and discuss the increasingly common tendency on the right and left to accuse one's political opponents of being anti-American, whether it's Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller telling Fox News that Democrats will turn the U.S. into Venezuela or it's #RandPaulHatesAmerica trending on Twitter after the Kentucky senator questioned the budgeting specifics of a 9/11 compensation program. They also discuss the trade war, Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax, Peter Thiel's suggestion that the FBI probe Google for possibly providing material support to the Chinese military, and the enduring wisdom of Albert O. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Music Credit: Kaiser Friedrich March played by the United States Marine Band
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"It's time for a revolution in higher education. It's time for a renegade university."
That's the sales pitch for Thaddeus Russell's Renegade University (RU), a radical, innovative experiment in higher education that is inspired by his 2010 book A Renegade History of the United States. Russell argues that it wasn't the Founding Fathers, straight-laced business tycoons, or moral crusaders that made America great, but runaway slaves, ladies of the evening, bootleggers, and assorted other dropouts and discontents who defined and created our freedom. In online courses and events held around the country, Russell, a Columbia-trained historian, who has taught at Barnard, Occidental, and other colleges, and his faculty offer bracing, engaging alternative takes on U.S. history, political philosophy, postmodernism, the war on terror, and more. Russell also hosts the Unregistered Podcast.
He spoke with Nick Gillespie while visiting New York to participate in a Reason/Soho Forum debate about postmodernism and libertarianism.
To read Thaddeus Russell's Reason archive, go here.
Last fall, he debated legal blogger Ken White at a Reason event about censorship and social-media platforms.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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We are in the grips of anti-individualist politics, right and left, lament Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch on today's Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, and there are real-world, freedom-constricting implications on current and possible future federal policy. The Reason squad also discuss Obamacare litigation, the state of the Libertarian Party presidential campaign, and the eternal Butch Vig vs. Steve Albini debate.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Somnolence' by Kai Engel is licensed under CC BY 4.0
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Given Social Security's nearly $3 trillion trust fund, the system cannot add to the federal deficit.
Today's podcast features a public debate hosted by the Soho Forum in New York City on June 17, 2019. It featured Teresa Ghilarducci, a labor economist at the New School for Social Research, and Gene Epstein, the director of the Soho Forum. Reason's Nick Gillespie moderated.
It was an Oxford-style debate, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. Epstein prevailed in the debate by convincing 35 percent of audience members to change their minds.
Arguing for the affirmative was Ghilarducci, whose 2018 book, Rescuing Retirement, advocates individual guaranteed retirement accounts for workers. Ghilarducci's 2015 book, How to Retire With Enough Money, is a practical guide to financial security in retirement. Ghilarducci is the director of The Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, a think tank that studies the government's role in the economy.
Epstein argued for the negative. Epstein is the Soho Forum's director and the former economics and books editor of Barron's. His last published book was Econospinning: How to Read between the Lines when the Media Manipulate the Numbers. He has taught economics at the City University of New York and St. John's University, and worked as a senior economist for the New York Stock Exchange.
The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village.
Music: "Modum" by Kai Engle is licensed under a CC-BY creative commons license.
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Are you old enough to remember who Louise Brown is? In 1978, she became the first person born through in vitro fertilization, or IVF. She was called a test-tube baby and the technology that allowed her to exist scared the bejeezus out of everyone. Now it's a completely accepted way of making babies.
Maybe you're old enough to remember when the Walkman was introduced in 1979 as the first truly portable, immersive, individualized sound system. Its success led to a spate of panicked stories about how it would destroy communal music and even to laws banning its use while walking.
Or maybe you're old enough to remember the panic over rock lyrics in the mid 1980s, when Sen. Al Gore (D–Tenn.) helped orchestrate hearings starring his then-wife Tipper, who railed against songs by Cyndi Lauper and other depraved musicians and warned that Dungeons & Dragons was a "deadly satanic game."
If you're interested in past panics about new technologies and forms of expressions, you'll be interested in the podcast Pessimists Archive, which is dedicated to exploring "why we resist new things." Host Jason Feifer delves into historical moments of panic over everything from novels to elevators to chain stores to that once unforgivably dirty dance, the waltz. He is also the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine, host of a business-oriented podcast called Problem Solvers, and a novelist.
In today's Reason Podcast, he tells Nick Gillespie why new technologies and forms of culture reliably freak us out, how we can deal better with things, and what are some of the current threats that we should relax about.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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He came, he saw, he did stuff, he formed the Freedom Caucus, he called for impeachment proceedings, he left the Freedom Caucus, he left the Republican Party, and now he's making the media rounds amid speculation about his electoral possibilities for 2020. So was Justin Amash's declaration of independence on balance a good thing?
Yes is the consensus on today's Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, though not without some bleak real-talk about the near-term viability of libertarian electoral politics. Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch engage with the critiques that libertarians don't meaningfully exist, that libertarianism without populism is DOA, and that yet somehow libertarians have run economic policy for far too long. The group also discusses the Trump administration's Census-citizenship gymnastics, the latest Nancy Pelosi/AOC flap, and what we can learn from revisiting the Tom Cruise flick Cocktail.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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In the beginning, there was the Foundation for Economic Education.
Founded in 1946 by Leonard Read, FEE is the oldest free-market think tank in the United States and one of the most storied. Its long-running publication The Freeman introduced generations of high-school and college students to the ideas of capitalism, classical liberalism, and libertarianism. FEE published the massively popular essay "I, Pencil," which explained how capitalism coordinated all the disparate activities necessary to bring complex goods to market, and gave voice and support to economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman at crucial points in their careers.
On today's Reason podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with Zilvinas Silenas, who recently became the 11th president of FEE. A native of Lithuania, he formerly served as the head of the Lithuanian Free Market Institute, whose successes included creating an economics textbook currently being used by 80 percent of Lithuanian high schoolers. Silenas talks about his childhood growing up during the tail end of the Cold War, his plans for FEE, and what he sees as the primary challenges for libertarians in the 21st century.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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One of the most interesting and unconventional forms of school choice doesn't just reject traditional K-12 public and private classrooms but also rejects even homeschooling using conventional curricula.
The "unschooling" movement is a radical departure from a conventional wisdom that says kids need structure and direction in order to learn. Proponents of unschooling—coined by educational theorist John Holt in the 1970s—even believe that kids are able to teach themselves how to read and do math and should be given as much room to wander and grow as they want.
It's a radical notion even for those of us who believe in robust school choice and grew up in a world where popular culture such as Pink Floyd's The Wall and movies such as The Breakfast Club, Heathers, and Mean Girls vilified schools as factories of oppression, conformity, and violence.
Today's guest is Kerry McDonald, a senior education fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), a board member of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education, and the author of the new book Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom. It's a fascinating read, filled with insights both from academic research and her experiences unschooling her own children. She talks with Nick Gillespie about the origins of the unschooling movement, its intellectual underpinnings, and why it's good for parents as well as children.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Dave Barry is the author of approximately eleventy billion books and the recipient of exactly one Pulitzer Prize. For four decades he wrote a weekly column, syndicated from his home base at the Miami Herald, and he is the author of an annual, despairing, hilarious "Year in Review."
Barry's books formed the basis for a short-lived show about his life, Dave's World, and his novel Big Trouble was made into a film of the same name. It's the story of a group of miscreants who wind up inadvertently stealing a nuclear suitcase and hijacking a plane due to their own incompetence. The film was set to be released—inauspiciously—on September 12, 2001.
In June, Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Barry to talk about his new book, Lessons from Lucy, America's strategic helium reserve (which Barry last discussed with Reason in 1994), jokes he can't tell anymore, and his perennial vaguely libertarian campaign for the presidency.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Vox Bubble Rumba' by Podington Bear is licensed under CC NC-BY 3.0
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Who had school busing in the betting pool for poll-moving Democratic presidential debate controversies? And yet here we are.
Well, if it's racial discord and school choice that you want to talk about, then that's exactly what you'll get on today's Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast. Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch talk about their own personal histories with school integration, preferred remedies for helping disadvantaged students receive a better education, and what these debates mean for the modern Democratic Party.
Also under discussion today are shake-ups to the Beltway foreign policy consensus, the beating of Quillette writer Andy Ngo, whether it's healthy for restaurants to deny service to Trumpites, and why Yoko Ono was the most underrated Beatle.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Forgiven not Forgotten' by Jahzzar is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
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Denise Ho is a problem for Chinese and Hong Kong authorities. The 42-year-old celebrity musician became a public face for dissent after Hong Kong police arrested and detained her for participating in the 2014 "umbrella movement," a large-scale protest demanding universal suffrage. The Chinese government subsequently banned her from performing in mainland China.
Ho is now a prominent figure in the Hong Kong protests, which started in early June after the administrative region's executive council proposed a new law that would make it easier to extradite suspects to China—a change that many Hong Kongers fear would lead to the persecution of political dissidents.
Reason's Zach Weissmueller spoke with Ho about the on-the-ground reality for protesters, what it's like being a political dissident in the shadow of the Chinese surveillance state, the politics of her "Cantopop" music, what she foresees for the immediate future of Hong Kong's "one country, two systems" arrangement with China, and why the protesters' fight to maintain Hong Kong's autonomy should concern Americans.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Before Donald Trump took office, it was hard to find a tougher critic of him than Patrick Byrne, the libertarian CEO of the online retailer Overstock.com. He called Trump a "disgrace to America" and rebuked the reality TV star for his comments about Mexican "rapists" and Sen. John McCain being captured during the Vietnam War.
"I don't consider Donald Trump a businessman," Byrne told Reason in October 2016. "[He] inherited $300 million and ran it all the way up to zero, went bankrupt four times…shafted bondholders…He's a fake capitalist and fake businessman." (To be fair, Byrne, who endorsed Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and bankrolled a documentary critical of the two-party system, was equally outspoken against Hillary Clinton, whom he said "should be in an orange jumpsuit."
But now Byrne has reconsidered his views on President Trump, who he says is dismantling the administrative state and deregulating the economy in powerful ways. Byrne, who wrote his Stanford doctoral dissertation on the limited-government philosophy of Robert Nozick, even says that Trump is right to challenge China on trade and that libertarians need to be willing to confront places where the world is more complicated than our theories allow. He says that while there are still many things that bother him about the president—especially his rhetorical style—it's time to realize Trump is not only a far better president than Hillary Clinton would have been, but has moved things forward on issues such as tax reform, criminal justice reform, and school choice.
Often mentioned as a potential presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party, Byrne tells Reason's Nick Gillespie he will not be pursuing the nomination.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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We don't know what will happen next in Iran. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo today is in Riyadh—rarely a happy portent for U.S. foreign policy—talking up a "global coalition" against Iran, as President Donald Trump vows to enact new "hard-hitting" sanctions and, you know, warns of "obliteration like you've never seen before."
And yet! Trump last week did what too few U.S. presidents do, which was a) call off a military strike, b) do so in the name of disproportionality, and c) say as much in public. And so the first chunk of today's Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch, includes praise and analysis of the president's reticence. The gang also foreshadows the staggering amount of check-writing that will be promised in this week's opening round of Democratic presidential debates.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Ghosts, 18' by Nine Inch Nails is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Three years ago this month, George Will, America's foremost conservative newspaper columnist, officially quit the Republican Party over its acquiescence to Donald Trump. "This is not my party," he said then. It's even less so now.
Yet the erudite author and television commentator is not ready to give up on conservatism just yet. In his career-punctuating new book The Conservative Sensibility, Will makes the forceful argument that the natural rights-based classical liberalism of James Madison is the antidote to authoritarianism found on both the Trumpian right and progressive left.
In an interview with Reason's Matt Welch, Will talks about the importance of rehabilitating America's withered constitutional architecture, ponders what the punditry class got wrong in 2016, and reminisces about what it was like for a conservative columnist to criticize an erratic Republican president way back in 1973.
'Running Waters' by Jason Shaw is licensed under CC BY 3.0
Photo Credit: Brian Cahn/ZUMA Press/Newscom
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Donald Trump has seriously altered the ways in which we talk about politics. While conversations about politics and ideology have never been particularly civil or uplifting, these days they tend to be downright nasty, and especially among groups who are mostly on the same side of things.
This is nowhere more clear than on the Republican friendly right wing, where the division between pro-Trump and "Never Trump" conservatives is creating more friction than Stormy Daniels on a stripper's pole. Today's guest is David French, a senior writer for National Review and a columnist for Time. He's one of the most prominent Never Trump conservatives in the country and he recently has been attacked by fellow right-wingers for—get this—being just too nice a guy.
French's conservative bona fides are sterling: He's a devout evangelical Christian who writes about how religion is central to living a flourishing life. He's written critically of high levels of immigration. He's resolutely anti-abortion and pro-military intervention and even served during the Iraq War. He believes that young men today are being stripped of their traditional masculine identities by feminism and he's written critically of trans people.
So why are some on the right attacking David French and why should his travails be of interest to libertarians?
French is being attacked because he believes in the classical liberal ideal of a marketplace of ideas, where people civilly argue over ideas and agree to abide peacefully by the outcomes of elections. He mostly believes in the power of persuasion rather than coercion. Unlike a growing number of conservatives and Republicans, he thinks that social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube have the right to kick off whomever they want, even if that leads to fewer conservative voices. And he's a resolute civil libertarian who remains skeptical of government power, even or maybe especially when his own side is wielding it.
He talks about all that, and also about a recent court decision finding Oberlin College "guilty of compensatory damages for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and intentional interference with business relationships" in relation to statements its officials made in relation to a local Ohio bakery. French is the former president of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in education, the nation's premier outfit fighting for free expression on college campuses, and he thinks the Oberlin verdict may be a turning point when it comes to political correctness in higher education.
French sat down to talk with Reason's Nick Gillespie while both were at FEECon, the annual conference organized by the Foundation for Economic Education.
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Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) gave a long-awaited speech about the meaning and import of his preferred ideological label, "democratic socialism." Also last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) began eclipsing Sanders in some polls, Joe Biden and other presidential candidates stepped up their critiques of President Donald Trump's trade policies, and the Democratic National Committee announced the 20 participants in the campaign's first debate. So what does that tell us about the beating heart of the country's major left-of-center political party?
Lots of different things, argue Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch on today's Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast. The ensuing discussion covers trade, immigration, minimum wage laws, Social Security, and Suderman's new Unitary Theory of Health Care Politics. The podcast also chews on Robby Soave's new book, the awfulness of Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.), and the awesomeness of Martin Scorcese's new Bob Dylan sorta-documentary.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Rags 2 Riches Rag' by Audionautix is licensed under CC BY 4.0
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Reason's Robby Soave has been writing about culture, free speech, due process, and moral outrage on campus since joining the magazine in 2014. Next week will see the release of his first book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, which examines the ascendancy of the intersectional left and the identitarian right.
Soave was one of the first reporters to question the veracity of a Rolling Stone article that accused several fraternity brothers of a horrific gang rape at the University of Virginia—a story that the magazine later retracted because of insufficient evidence. Earlier this year, when a clip of MAGA-hat-wearing high school students appearing to intimidate a Native American man went viral, Soave was one of the first journalists to carefully scrutinize the raw video, discovering that the interaction was more complicated than the initial outraged reports had claimed. Major media organizations later looped back to acknowledge that they had erred in their reporting.
Reason's Zach Weissmueller talked with Soave in front of a live audience at Reason's L.A. office about his experience reporting and writing the book, today's political climate on campus, and why he thinks the college activists' emphasis on identity is misplaced.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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All around the globe today, voters in democratic countries are electing populist leaders rather than presidents and premiers who pledge loyalty to the international community and global institutions. In significant ways, Brexit in England, the yellow vest movement in France, the rise of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and the election of Donald Trump in America represent the triumph of nationalism and populism over globalism. Many people in advanced economies feel as if they are falling further and further behind while people at the top of society get more and more money, prestige, and opportunity.
Donald Trump invoked these concerns as a candidate and is acting on them as president. Globalists, he says, are elitists who care more about their own well-being and international institutions such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and NATO than they do about their fellow citizens who are being left behind. Globalists believe in open borders and free trade because their quality of life isn't threatened by low-wage migrants or cheap goods produced overseas. Nationalists such as Trump say they care first and foremost about taking care of their countrymen. They show their commitment to this by pulling out of international accords they believe don't serve American interests and limiting the type and number of people who can come to the United States. Since taking office, Trump has stuck to his nationalist guns by withdrawing from international agreements such as the Paris Climate accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the Iran nuclear deal, as well as by restricting immigration and laying tariffs on Chinese goods.
Today's guest says it's absolutely imperative not only to understand this, but also to empathize with the concerns of nationalists and populists in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. A political scientist by training, Ian Bremmer heads up the Eurasia Group, the world's largest political-risk consultancy. He's also the host of the weekly PBS show GZERO World, which investigates how economics and politics are playing out in a world in which the United States is retreating in significant ways from the global stage. His most recent book is Us vs.Them: The Failure of Globalism—a bracing, provocative analysis of why political polarization is growing and how we might best address the anger and alienation that is fueling nationalist and populist sentiments around the globe.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Criminal defense attorney Mike Chase, the man behind the popular @CrimeADay Twitter feed, has a new book titled How to Become a Federal Criminal: An Illustrated Handbook for the Aspiring Offender. It chronicles government power at its most arbitrary and absurd.
Reason's Todd Krainin sat down with Chase to learn the roots of his obsession with laws against improperly shaped cheese, whistling on a CB radio, and making unreasonable gestures to a passing horse.
Music: "Law and Order," by Lloyd Rodgers under a Public Domain Mark 1.0 License.
Produced, written, and hosted by Todd Krainin.
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Donald Trump's latest tariff brinksmanship has ended more with a set of whimpers than with a bang, for which those of us who favor and participate in mutual gains from trade can breathe a sigh of relief, if only temporarily.
But what have we learned from this most recent round of applied mercantilism, and how does it overlap with the ongoing Deplatforming Wars, Tucker Carlson's crush on Elizabeth Warren, and the nationalist/classical-liberal spat on the right? Such are the topics on today's Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch. Along the way we also discuss reclaiming the word "liberal" (really!), Late Capitalism's learned helplessness, and the many prophecies of Neal Stephenson.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…
Those are the opening lines to Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (1955-56), a poem which helped kickstart both a major cultural and legal transformation in America, one that made our country looser, hipper, and much more at peace with all sorts of alternative lifestyles, libertine sexualities, and, perhaps most important, speech that was profane, raucous, inventive, and unrestrained—what Ginsberg's fellow Beat Jack Kerouac called "spontaneous bop prosody."
Immediately upon the debut of "Howl" in print, Ginsberg's publisher—Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books—was hauled into court on obscenity charges in San Francisco, a town that was at the time known to be particularly uptight and conservative. The trial, which ended in a surprising verdict of not guilty, helped to usher in a new era of free speech in America.
But is the era of free speech ending? Everywhere we look, it seems, there are more and more attempts to shut down offensive and provocative speech. Sometimes, this is done in the name of protecting kids or the sensibilities of marginalized ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. Other times, calls for censorship are made in the name of protecting the political process from "dark money" or foreign influence, or in the name of national security.
On today's podcast, Nick Gillespie speaks with Ronald K.L. Collins, a lawyer and scholar at the Newseum's First Amendment Law Center, and the author of a weekly blog called First Amendment News. He's also the co-author with David M. Skover of The People v. Lawrence Ferlinghetti: The Fight to Publish Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," a fast-paced history of the obscenity trial that ended in a watershed victory for free expression. A poet in his own right—his A Coney Island of the Mind has sold over one million copies—Ferlinghetti remains at 100 years old an amazing character: a World War II battle veteran turned pacifist, a civil libertarian, and a socialist. Gillespie talks with Collins about the enduring relevance of Ferlinghetti's trial to contemporary attempts to shut down speech and expression that some people find offensive.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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If you printed out and stacked up every piece written about the dispute between First Things contributor Sohrab Ahmari and National Review writer David French, it wouldn't quite go up 68,000 miles—that would be the $22 trillion national debt, stacked by ones—but it would be towering nonetheless.
Since libertarianism is often an indicted co-conspirator during the nationalist right's never-ending season of irritable manifestos, we felt it appropriate to dedicate most of this week's Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch, to the conservative crack-up and related subplots. (And yes, that includes, hilariously, Game of Thrones.) There are David Brooks sightings, disputes over Trumpism's policy content, and usage-disquisitions on classical liberal and libertinism.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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There is little or no rigorous evidence that vegetarian/vegan diets are healthier than diets that include meat, eggs, and dairy.
That was the topic of a public debated hosted by the Soho Forum in New York City on May 13, 2019. It featured Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise, and David Katz, the founding director of Yale University's Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center. Soho Forum director Gene Epstein moderated.
It was an Oxford-style debate, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. Katz prevailed in the debate by convincing 13 percent of audience members to change their minds.
Arguing for the affirmative was Nina Teicholz, whose 2014 book, The Big Fat Surprise, challenged the conventional wisdom on dietary fat. Teicholz's writing has also been published in The BMJ, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Independent, The New Yorker, and The Los Angeles Times among others. Teicholz is the Executive Director of The Nutrition Coalition, a non-profit group that promotes evidence-based nutrition policy.
Reason's Alexis Garcia interviewed Teicholz in 2018.
David L. Katz, MD argued for the negative. He's the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, which practices community and alternative medicine, and is founder/president of the True Health Initiative, a non-profit organization established to promote a healthy diet and lifestyle. The holder of five U.S. patents, Katz has authored roughly 200 peer-reviewed publications and 16 books to date, including textbooks in both nutrition and preventive medicine.
The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village.
Music: "Modum" by Kai Engle is licensed under a CC-BY creative commons license.
Produced by Todd Krainin.
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In the beginning, there was Instapundit, one of the web's first great aggregator and commentary sites. Launched in August 2001, the site became massively popular after the 9/11 attacks, when it acted as a clearinghouse for information and commentary from all over the world about what the hell was going on.
The founder of Instapundit is Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee who came to be known as the "blogfather" to many of us then toiling on the border between print and pixels. Always a future-oriented writer and scholar, he called himself a libertarian transhumanist and his optimistic view on cyberculture is summed up by the title of his 2006 best-selling book, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths.
That was then. Reynolds' new book is called The Social Media Upheaval. In it, he makes the case that the federal government should use antitrust law to curtail the cultural, market, and political power amassed by Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other tech companies. In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Reynolds talks about why he quit Twitter last year, how his thinking has changed regarding the internet, and what he hopes will come next online and elsewhere. He also recounts the earlier, Wild West days of online communities in the 1980s, how a photoshopped joke image kept showing up on his Wikipedia page, and why libertarians seem to gravitate to unconventional diets.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Yesterday, President Donald Trump warned that tariffs on Chinese imports may still go up "very substantially" while continuing to insist that China is paying the tariffs. That's…not accurate, as Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and special guest star Eric Boehm discuss in today's podcast. We also check in with Congress' lonely libertarian Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.), who is positioning himself as the not-so-loyal Republican opposition. We ask whether anyone can even trust their eyes anymore as the president calls off infrastructure week in a fit of pique over a standoff with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) and tweets a doctored video. And we wonder what the E.U. election results mean for the future of populist authoritarianism.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Denver voters shocked the world this month by narrowly passing a ballot initiative decriminalizing psilocybin mushrooms by a single percentage point.
Kevin Matthews, an Army veteran who says the psychedelic effects of psilocybin mushrooms helped cure his depression, ran the campaign Decriminalize Denver, which was responsible for crafting the initiative and getting it on the ballot.
Matthews spoke with Reason's Zach Weissmueller, who provided video coverage of the historic vote, about his reaction to the surprising come-from-behind win, why the campaign chose decriminalization over all-out legalization, what the likely effects of the change in Denver's law will be, and what he believes other drug decriminalization advocates might learn from his campaign strategy.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Photo credit: Frank Roeder/Newscom.
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When Donald Trump claimed in 2015 that Mexican immigrants will ravage our women, destroy our neighborhoods, and taint our ethnic and cultural purity, he entered into a longstanding, well-cultivated American tradition of xenophobia and fear-mongering.
In the late 19th century, poet Emma Lazarus celebrated the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" and "the wretched refuse" who came to America for a better life. But Prescott F. Hall, co-founder of the powerful Immigration Restriction League, offered a rebuttal verse:
Enough! Enough! We want no more Of ye immigrant from a foreign shore Already is our land o'er run With toiler, beggar, thief and scum.
After over a century of mostly open borders, in which tens of millions of European immigrants became Americans, members of the WASP establishment decided in the 1920s that the United States could no longer accept what they denounced as "beaten men from beaten races." In terms that will sound familiar today, they claimed Jews, Italians, and others were incapable of assimilating into a country based on private property, limited government, and hard work.
In 1924, the restrictionists won a massive and long-lasting legislative battle with passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, which completely prohibited immigration from Asia and sharply limited immigration from Europe based on the country of origin. Under the new law, for instance, just 4,000 Italians were allowed to enter the country each year, down from an average well over 200,000 in each year of the preceding decade. National origins would remain the basis of U.S. immigration law until 1965.
The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America, a new book by Daniel Okrent, looks at the ways xenophobia and pseudoscience combined to fundamentally alter immigration policy at the start of what became known as the American Century. Okrent was the first public editor of The New York Times and is the author of Last Call, a history of Prohibition. He sat down with Reason to talk about how old debates over immigration and America's national character are newly relevant to contemporary politics.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Modum,' by Kai Engel is licensed under CC By 4.0
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How bad is the plan to ban for-profit charter schools, released Saturday by second-place presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)? Bad enough to draw this New York magazine headline from Jonathan Chait: "Bernie Sanders Wants to Destroy the Best Schools Poor Urban Kids Have."
We talk about the Democratic war on charters—sadly not limited to Bernie Sanders!—on this week's Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch. Also discussed: Last night's television finale, last week's weirdly DOA Trump immigration plan, and of course the weekend's biggest news in libertarian politics, namely the tweetstorm from Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) about the "impeachment threshold" behavior by the president.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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In this special episode of the Reason Podcast, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Robby Soave pre-game this Sunday's Game of Thrones finale and look back on the series. The Reason editors gloat (a little) about having correctly predicted Daenerys' turn—unlike presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren. We also celebrate the penultimate episode's anti-war message, and we try (and fail) to avoid the phrase "Well actually in the books…" We wrap up by speculating about why it's so hard to create a satisfying ending to a beloved TV series.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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When you woke up today, did you weigh yourself? At work, did you check any performance measures for yourself or your colleagues? When you got home, did you check your kids' grades on ProgressBook or some other form of online tracking service? Did you get your 10,000 steps in today, or are you waving your arms on the couch right now, trying to goose your daily total before turning in for the night?
We live in an intensely and increasingly measured world. Virtually everything we do yields data, numbers, and information that we think will improve our performance, help us hit target goals, or figure out if we're doing things right. Even just a few decades ago, this would have struck most of us as nuts, but now we take it for granted—at home, at work, at play.
In The Tyranny of Metrics, just out in paperback from Princeton University Press, historian Jerry Z. Muller explains how we got to a place where we're constantly measuring everything we do—and why much of the time we're not just wasting our time but making things objectively worse. While acknowledging that "the attempt to measure performance is…intrinsically desirable," he nonetheless contends that most metrics we use exemplify what Friedrich Hayek disdained as "scientism" or a "pretense to knowledge" that is false and misguided.
In chapters examining the use of numbers in education, policing, banking and finance, war, and other areas, Muller demonstrates how what he calls "metric fixation" often goads us into bad, counterproductive behavior. For instance, when surgeons were forced to participate in mandatory public "scorecards" that charted their patients' outcomes, Muller writes, doctors responded by refusing to treat the highest-risk people. "Anything that can be measured and rewarded will be gamed. We will see many variations on this theme."
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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The debate over the "heartbeat bill" signed into law in Georgia last week has been both hyperbolic and vitriolic. Of course, stakes are high in the debate over the legality of abortion and the potential for reconsideration of the Supreme Court precedent set in Roe v. Wade (1973).
But at Reason, we believe calm, rational discussion is possible even between people who strongly disagree. So Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Managing Editor Stephanie Slade, who is pro-life, and Associate Editor Liz Nolan Brown, who is pro-choice, to talk about the present state of abortion politics and the ways in which reasonable libertarians can disagree on this issue.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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The political/culture wars are once again at full throttle as Georgia becomes the latest in a series of states to enact serious abortion restrictions, in this case a ban on the procedure when a fetal heartbeat can be detected. Is the longstanding legal/cultural consensus (or political standoff) about abortion—that it should be legally available during the first trimester—giving way to a more extreme agenda by polarized advocates on each side? That's the thorny question underlying this week's Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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What will American drug culture look like once prohibition is finally over and we can start to use more drugs in more settings?
No one is better situated to start that conversation than Hamilton Morris, the 32-year-old host of Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, a show that explores what sorts of drugs are available, how they work, and how we might best use them to fulfill our hopes and dreams.
In one early episode, Morris confounds the conventional wisdom by telling "a positive story about PCP," a drug that even legalizers typically have nothing good to say about. He visits with Timothy Wyllie, an artist and visionary who uses the drug as part of his creative process. In another, he travels to the Brazilian Amazon, where locals get high on a drug taken from frogs. In a third, he gains access to an abandoned laboratory in a volcano that was once central to the production of MDMA.
Morris also does laboratory work at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, where he and his collaborators create new drugs for testing and research trials. He sat down with Reason to talk how the drug war has warped the discussion about legal and illegal drugs and what the post-prohibition landscape will look like.
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What has been the worst reaction to Facebook's decision last week to permanently ban Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, Milo Yiannopoulis, Louis Farrakhan, and others for their "dangerous" speech? Hard to say, though the president of the United States, per usual, is in the running.
Intersecting as it does the diverging cultural and legal parameters of free speech, while also portending of a more serious regulatory clampdown-capture exercise to come, the move sparks some vigorous debate in this week's Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast. Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch differ on whether the ban is bad or fine, whether speech is expanding or contracting, and whether '90s Net Triumphalists are doomed to become old men shaking their fists at clouds.
Other podcast topics include: Trump's latest trade threats, three new entrants in the 2020 Democratic presidential race (no peeking!), and that costume drama with the diphthongs.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Boulevard St Germain' by Jahzzar is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
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Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News has long argued for libertarian positions on the nation's largest cable news network, consistently holding George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump accountable for alleged abuses of power.
In Napolitano's analysis, the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 election lays out multiple instances in which President Trump attempted to interfere with the investigation, thus making him guilty under federal laws governing the obstruction of justice.
The president responded with a series of hostile tweets claiming, among other things, that Napolitano had asked to be named to the Supreme Court and requested a pardon for a mutual friend.
Napolitano sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to defend his name, lay out his case against the president, explain why Attorney General William Barr has been bad since his days in the George H.W. Bush administration, and put Donald Trump's presidency in a historical and constitutional context.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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"The Satanic Temple is a new religious organization that was founded in 2013, kind of as a prank, but very quickly gained a huge amount of authentic followers," says Penny Lane, director of Hail Satan?, a documentary premiering at select theaters this week.
Headquartered in Salem, Massachusetts, the Satanic Temple began by organizing theatrical stunts designed to shock people. As its membership grew, political activism became central to the Temple's mission. It challenged Christian monuments on public land and opposed the teaching of religion in public schools, making enemies of politicians, television pundits, and pastors across the country.
So what do followers of the Satanic Temple believe? "You do find a range of political views within this religious organization," Lane says. "But when your religious tenets are about rebellion against authority, checking your beliefs against our best evidence…autonomy, freedom, liberty—yeah, you certainly see a large overlap with a libertarian point of view."
In this interview, Lane talks about what makes the Satanic Temple tick and what its struggles with Christians, politicians, and the mainstream media say about religion in America today.
Produced, hosted, and edited by Todd Krainin.
Music credit: 'Unusual Habitat' by Silent Partner
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Since last the Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) announced a massive new student-loan forgiveness proposal, Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) said she'd like to ban right-to-work laws, Beto O'Rourke unveiled a $5 trillion climate change plan, Joe Biden officially began his campaign/apology tour, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) yet again declined an invitation to disavow his prior support for nationalizing the major means of production. Is anyone else sensing a pattern?
Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch discuss the leftward bent of Democratic economics, drilling down particularly hard into the bucket of higher education (ed note: the mixed metaphor makes even less sense in the podcast), while also getting into Social Security insolvency, long-term fiscal unsustainability, conversations about conversations, and—yes!—the HBO/Marvel Studios programming y'all were consuming over the weekend.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Fluffing a Duck' by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under CC BY 3.0
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In May of 2018, President Donald Trump signed a new law allowing patients with life-threatening conditions to access experimental medications without obtaining FDA approval.
In our latest podcast, Reason's Zach Weissmueller sits down with Christina Sandefur, executive vice president of the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, which played a key role in getting the law passed in 41 states before it arrived on the president's desk.
For more on the topic, watch Weissmueller's video documentary on subject. In this conversation, he and Sandefur delve deeper into the details of the new Right to Try law, why it matters, how it got it passed, some criticisms of the legislation, and what more needs to be done to bring down prescription drug costs and spur innovation.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Emily Oster is the parenting guru nerds have been waiting for. In her previous book, Expecting Better, Oster blew up the conventional wisdom around pregnancy using her training as an economist to dig into the academic literature on questions about what pregnant women can safely eat and drink, along with a variety of other hot-button topics. She was hailed (and occasionally vilified) for her finding that the occasional glass of wine or order of sushi did not pose a mortal danger to most uterus-dwellers.
In her new book, Cribsheet, the Brown University economist examines the evidence on best practices for babies and toddlers. Her advice for parents of the 0–3 crowd on breastfeeding, swaddling, toddler discipline, and more offers the same level of data-driven chill her fans have grown to expect.
In a wide-ranging podcast with Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward, Oster explains how to tell a good study from a bad one and why she thinks it's important to help people make the best decisions for their families rather than assume there's a single right answer.
As a bonus, she also breaks down that much-publicized study about eggs and offers some reassuring evidence that it's OK to keep having those omelets for breakfast, no matter what you might have heard.
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Psst…do you want to know the 26 words that, in the opinion of today's guest on the Reason Podcast, "created the internet?"
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
That's part of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a federal law that was passed in 1996, as part of a larger piece of legislation updating telecommunications regulations. Section 230 grants broad immunity to websites and internet service providers from legal actions such as being sued for libel and defamation. It's the reason why Reason can't be sued for libelous or defamatory content posted in our comments section (though the authors of such comments can be).
Section 230 is the law that has enabled the internet to become driven by user-generated content, from YouTube videos to Yelp reviews to basically all of Twitter. You get rid of Section 230 and all that—and much more—is toast. In its first decade, Section 230 was mostly celebrated for allowing free expression and new economic models, but these days it is under attack from conservative Republicans such as Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and from liberal Democrats such as Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, all of whom have expressed interest in ripping up Section 230 and regulating social media.
Today's guest Jeff Kosseff is sweating bullets over all this. A former journalist who has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he teaches law and cybersecurity at the United States Naval Academy and is the author of the urgent new book, The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet. In a wide-ranging conversation, Kosseff tells Nick Gillespie about the unlikely partnership between a conservative Republican (former Rep. Chris Cox of California) and a liberal Democrat (future Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon) in the mid-1990s that gave rise to Section 230; why today's internet is "unimaginable" without it; how the European Union's approach to online speech is incompatible with America's; and why we might be witnessing the death not just of Section 230 but of the free speech ethos of the internet and World Wide Web. Kosseff tells Gillespie that he started out writing "a biography" of Section 230 but is now worried that he in fact has written "an obituary" for it.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Now that the smoke has cleared from the Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Donald Trump's suspected (and now-disregarded) criminal conspiracy with Russia and his potential obstruction of the investigation thereof, there are many questions that still remain, including: Should we be alarmed by the role that counterterrorism-investigation leaks played in kickstarting this investigation? Are there specific trims to government power that this whole episode suggests, and if so why aren't they being discussed? Is it useful to have conversations about having conversations about conversations?
All of these riddles and more are hotly debated on this week's Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, betwixt Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch. The episode also features a name-that-Democratic-candidate pop quiz, a quick round of Biden-kicking, and—yes, nerds (sigh)—some discussion of that television show from last night.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Lies Rise' by Cullah is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
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With the rise of legal recreational marijuana across the country and an unwinding of the drug war on the horizon, more and more people are thinking about how best to shape America's post-prohibition drug culture. What sorts of institutions, attitudes, and practices will help us figure out which chemicals we want to ingest to make ourselves happier, more productive, and more fulfilled? How do we best educate ourselves about the risks and rewards of better living through chemistry when everything from acid to Zoloft is legally in our home medicine cabinets?
Today's guest is working to stage that conversation. Sarah Rose Siskind, who was the head writer on the Reason TV series Mostly Weekly, hosts a monthly show called Drug Test at New York's Caveat theater. Each episode features a different drug—magic mushrooms, most recently—and scientists, researchers, and counselors discussing a particular substance's chemistry, history, and associated rituals. There's also footage of a "VIP" or "very intoxicated person" who performs a variety of mental and physical tests before and after ingesting the drug in question. The result is a frank, smart, and fun discussion of how we might all navigate the world after the drug war.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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One of the most amazing aspects of the 2020 presidential race is that virtually all candidates, including President Donald Trump, have indicated they favor letting individual states decide the legal status of marijuana. That position was unthinkable even a few years ago, Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum tells Nick Gillespie in the latest Reason Podcast.
Sullum, the author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use (2004) and an award-winning writer on drug policy, also discusses the difficulties in measuring what comprises "stoned driving," whether smoking pot leads to opioid use, the places in America where you can still get locked up for possessing weed, and which southern state will be the first to legalize recreational marijuana.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) is engaging in some mildly awkward conversations about being a millionaire while constantly seeking to soak the rich. Which on this Tax Day, is kind of hilarious, so it's how we start this week's Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch.
The gang talks this year's tax-refund confusions, Democrats' fuzzy tax math, Uncle Milty's greatest #fail, presidential-candidate tax disclosures, the gruesomely intrusive Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), and much more. Also under discussion: the forthcoming Mueller Report drop, Julian Assange's beard, Raymond Chandler's vocabulary, Reason's schmancy new website, and how all the nerds in Washington were watching Game of Thrones last night.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Mozart - Eine Kleine Nachtmusik allegro' by Advent Chamber Orchestra is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
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On Sunday night at 9 p.m., Game of Thrones returns to HBO. And here at Reason, we are ready.
Join Reason editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Robby Soave as we rip apart the first seven seasons of Game of Thrones like a hungry baby dragon snacking on a sheep. In this very special episode of the podcast, Reason's resident draconologists ask what Game of Thrones teaches us about political power.
Robby Soave reveals why he's a Daenerys hater, Peter Suderman has some ideas about fiscal discipline in Westeros, and I get excited about what's for dinner in King's Landing. We also shamefully give in to the temptation to draw parallels between 2020 American politics and a quasi-medieval fantasy world invented by George R.R. Martin in the 1990s. What does their wall in the North mean for our wall in the South? Is Pete Buttigieg actually Peter Baelish? Are the white walkers global warming? And does Varys have an office on K Street?
In the end, we drink, we know things, and all agree that we're moving to Braavos.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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When actor Jussie Smollet lied about being attacked by racist, MAGA-hat-wearing Trump supporters, Columbia University linguist John McWhorter actually interpreted it as a sign that "we have come further on race than we are often comfortable admitting."
"Only in an America in which matters of race are not as utterly irredeemable as we are often told," he wrote in The Atlantic, would someone "pretend to be tortured in this way…[because] playing a singer on television is not as glamorous as getting beaten up by white guys."
The unwillingness of both blacks and whites to acknowledge progress on racial equality is a long-running theme for McWhorter, who in 2000 published Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, which argued that "in most cases, [racism] is not an obstacle to people being the best that they can be."
In an influential 2015 essay, McWhorter argued that "Antiracism" had become a new secular religion in America, complete with "clergy, creed, and also even a conception of Original Sin."
"One is born marked by original sin," he wrote. "To be white is to be born with the stain of unearned privilege." Black people, he continued, "will express their grievances and whites will agree" that they are racist. On the right, McWhorter observed, there is a growing sense of hostility on racial issues and, according to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who agree that black-white relations are good is at a 20-year low. And for the first time since the pollster has asked the question, a majority of blacks rate race relations as bad.
Nick Gillespie sat down with the 53-year-old McWhorter—the author or editor of 20 books—to talk about his upbringing in a mixed-race part of Philadelphia, his academic focus on Creole language, and the unmistakable signs of racial progress that an increasing number of Americans seem unwilling to acknowledge.
Edited by Ian Keyser. Intro by Todd Krainin.
Photos by Jim Epstein.
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The past 24 hours have seen two unrelated events tethered to America's ever-contentious immigration debates: (1) President Donald Trump reportedly forcing out Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, on the grounds that she somehow wasn't tough enough, and (2) the launch announcement by pals o' Reason Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith of their new graphic nonfiction paperback Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. (Pre-order here!)
So what happens if you mash up these two events? Well, if you're the Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, you get into a spirited debate over whether the phrase "open borders" actually describes your immigration worldview, let alone is an effective way of selling it. Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch argue about that, plus President Donald Trump's interest in increasing family separations, whether the phrase "military-industrial complex" is for hippies, and how a show with a name like Love, Death & Robots could have managed to escape Katherine's attention.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'When You're Gone' by Bombay Laughing Club is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
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In 2015, an angry confrontation at Yale over how to dress up on Halloween caused a national sensation. Protesting students called for the university to fire Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist and physician, because they felt he and his wife, also teaching at Yale at the time, did not protect them from possible psychic injury.
The conflict started a week earlier, when the school's Intercultural Affairs Council sent an email encouraging members of the community to be careful not to offend their fellow students with culturally and racially insensitive costumes. Christakis' wife, Erika—an expert in early childhood education—responded with her own thoughts. "Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious...a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive," she wrote. From her perspective, American universities had "become places of censure and prohibition."
Students said that by sending her email, Erica Christakis had failed to create a safe space at Yale's Sillman College, where she served as associate master. Nicholas Christakis jumped into the fray, defending his wife's email, and he tried to engage in a dialogue with protestors in a courtyard. Scenes of students shouting at Nicholas and calling for his firing went viral.
Christakis not only held on to his tenured professorship, but three years later he was awarded the Sterling Professorship, Yale's highest faculty honor. And his confrontation with students kicked off an ongoing national debate about freedom of speech, political correctness, and sensitivity on college campuses.
As a sociologist, the 56-year-old Christakis is no stranger to highly charged group interactions. His new book is Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, which argues that our genetic makeup predisposes us to favor peaceful interaction and respectful co-existence over angry and violent mob rules.
Nick Gillespie sat down with Christakis to talk about his theory that what unites as humans is stronger than what divides us, the power of evolution as an explanatory system for society, and whether Enlightenment values such as civil discourse and intellectual freedom are still respected in our nation's colleges and universities.
Edited by Ian Keyser. Intro by Todd Krainin. Cameras by Jim Epstein and Kevin Alexander.
Music credit: 'Voyeur' by Jingle Punks
Photos by Ragesoss and Sibjeet, under a creative commons license.
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Just when you might have thought that economics was played out as a way for us to understand the world, along comes Allison Schrager, a Ph.D. economist who writes for Quartz, teaches at New York University, and is the co-founder of LifeCycle Finance Partners, a risk-advisory firm.
She's the author of the provocative new book, An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places To Understand Risk. In the opening chapter, Schrager describes spending time at Nevada's famous Moonlite Bunny Ranch and learning how both sex workers and customers pay a premium to minimize and manage all sorts of risks involved in legal prostitution (the prostitutes don't have to worry about screening potential customers or being arrested, for instance, and the johns don't have to worry about being ripped off, blackmailed, or catching a disease). She hangs out with paparazzi who stalk celebrities for high-value candid photographs worth tens of thousands of dollars but more often end up with no pictures at all. She attends an annual conference where big-wave surfers share information and new ideas about minimizing potentially deadly risks inherent in their sport. Other chapters cover professional poker players, horse breeders, a major battle in the 1991 Iraq War, and more.
Schrager combines an economist's analytic framework with a journalist's eye for detail and narrative, resulting in a book that is both difficult to put down and helpful when it comes to managing the risks we face every day, from planning for retirement to switching jobs to thinking about romantic relationships. An Economist Walks Into a Brothel also carries with it an implicitly—and at times explicitly—libertarian message about intentionality and responsibility when it comes to living life to the fullest. Schrager notes that there's no way to fully eliminate risk in our lives but that by using tools provided by financial economics, we "can make better choices and reduce risk."
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"Joe Biden Is Probably Running for President," runs the first half of a Christian Britschgi headline from two weeks ago. "He's Got a Lot of Baggage."
Does he ever.
A good rule of thumb is that you don't want to pre-launch your presidential campaign with Associated Press headlines about how you "never meant to make women feel uncomfortable," but that's where the former vice president and longtime U.S. senator from Delaware finds himself this week. But let's not sleep on a decades-long career of not just talking real funny about Others and plagiarizing a dog's breakfast of material, but also backing some of the worst federal policies the late 20th century Democratic Party could concoct. Or so argue Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch on today's Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast.
Also up for discussion: President Donald Trump's potentially calamitous threat to close the southern border, Mark Zuckerburg's potentially calamitous suggestions for regulating the internet, and Peter Suderman's definitely calamitous obsession with Blade Runner.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Music credit: 'Viva Mexico - Viva America' by Pedro Galindo; El Mariachi Tapatio Marmolejo
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"To resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel must first achieve defeat of the Palestinian movement."
That was the topic of a debated hosted by the Soho Forum on March 18, 2019. It was an Oxford-style debate, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious.
For the affirmative, Elan Journo, a fellow and director of policy research at the Ayn Rand Institute, argued that the Palestinian movement is irreedemably corrupt and must be defeated as a necessary condition to achieve peace. The P.L.O. and Hamas have a long history of inciting terrorism and suicide attacks, and they aremore concerned with destroying Israel than with winning justice and prosperity for the Palestinian people, he argued. The defeat of the movement will require a coalition of governments to wage a sustained campaign of economic, diplomatic, and military efforts.
Danny Sjursen, a U.S. Army strategist and former history instructor at West Point, rejected Journo's characterization of the Palestinian movement. He argued that most Palestinian organizations, including Hamas, are more willing than ever to make reasonable compromises for peace, accept a two-state solution, and at least tacitly recognize Israel's right to exist. The only way to achieve a lasting solution to the middle east crisis is to treat the Palestinian leadership as potential negotiating partners.
Sjursen prevailed by convincing about 14 percent of audience members to change their minds.
'Modum' by Kai Engel is licensed under CC BY 4.0
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About the only time that love is mentioned in conversations about politics is when a lawmaker gets caught in a sex scandal. Suddenly, the perp starts gushing about how much he loves his spouse, his kids, his constituents, and his country. The guest on today's Reason Podcast wants to change that.
Arthur Brooks' excellent new book is called Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America From the Culture of Contempt. It's a call to arms for individuals to change how they approach the sorts of increasingly vicious political disagreements that he argues are tearing apart the country. Brooks talks with Nick Gillespie about his decade-long leadership of the American Enterprise Institute, arguably the nation's most-influential conservative think tank, and the places where conservatives and libertarians overlap and continue to disagree. In a wide-ranging conversation, Brooks and Gillespie discuss his decision to step down as AEI's president and join the faculty of Harvard.
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"While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime," Robert Mueller's long-awaited homework stated, according to Atttorney General William Barr, "it also does not exonerate him." To which Donald Trump has predictably responded: "Total exoneration!"
The president may stand out from the crowd in the amount of power he wields, but he's hardly alone in talking bollocks about the Trump/Russia investigation, as we discuss on today's Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast. Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and special guest star Elizabeth Nolan Brown each make their own nominations for the Mueller media Hall of Shame, track how the #Resistance goalposts keep shifting, and ding the president's own (non-criminal) behavior. Along the way, we hear the latest in the non-sex-trafficking case of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, do a little oh-yeah-that about the record-breaking budget deficit, and dissect the C.H.U.D.ian subtexts of Us.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'See You Soon' by Borrtex is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
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Today's Reason Podcast conversation is with Michael Solana, a vice president at the venture capital firm Founders Fund. The firm, which is worth upwards of $3 billion, founded by Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder Luke Nosek, former PayPal CFO Ken Howery, and Sean Parker of Napster and Facebook fame.
Some of the fund's investments include SpaceX, Airbnb, Lyft, and Oculus, as well as variety of lesser-known companies in the realms of aerospace, biotechnology, energy, and internet technology.
Reason's Zach Weissmueller spoke with Michael about the future, which he thinks about a lot both as an investor in emerging technologies and as host of the official Founders Fund podcast Anatomy of Next, the latest season of which explores the ways technological advancements in rocketry, materials science, augmented reality, fertility science, and artificial intelligence will get humanity to Mars and beyond.
But Solana and his colleagues also believe that Silicon Valley is mired in groupthink and susceptible to the false promises of socialism. In this conversation, we talk about what Founders Fund is doing differently, why Solana believes capitalism is necessarily the engine of growth and innovation, the promise and perils of privatizing government functions, and what he's learned from the famously contrarian Peter Thiel about what it means to be an independent thinker.
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Forty years ago, one of the most momentous events in the history of politics and television took place: C-SPAN started broadcasting live, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the United States House of Representatives.
Long before reality TV shows like Real World, Survivor, Real Housewives, Big Brother, and Sober House, C-SPAN gave Americans direct access to one of the most powerful groups of people on the planet. For the first time in history, we could see our elected representatives debating, wheeling and dealing, freaking out, and occasionally falling asleep while debating government spending, foreign policy, and more.
Over the years, C-SPAN has expanded to include coverage of the Senate; daily public affairs shows featuring policy experts, activists, journalists, and lawmakers; long-form interviews with authors and other influential people; and coverage of events all around the country. In a world in which elite decisionmakers want to shield themselves from all forms of scrutiny and observation, C-SPAN performs the radical intervention of putting a camera on them while also engaging them in thoughtful, frank, and fair conversation.
For today's Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talked to C-SPAN's founder Brian Lamb, who has managed to shine a bright light on the political process while simultaneously creating a model of civil discourse that is unmatched in cable news. The 77-year-old Indiana native tells me how working in the Pentagon during Vietnam inspired him to push for "openness" in government, why he's still pushing for cameras to cover oral arguments in the Supreme Court, and how C-SPAN expects to weather its next 40 years.
Photo credit: CHUCK KENNEDY KRT/Newscom
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Reason editors debate whether private concentrations of power in the tech industry, which Sen. Elizabeth Warren rails against, are worrisome enough to warrant government intervention.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Ragtime Dance' by Scott Joplin is licensed under Public Domain.
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In 2016, Clint Bolick became an associate justice on the Arizona State Supreme Court, making him one of the most influential—and consequential—libertarians in today's legal world.
That appointment is merely the most recent career highlight for the 61-year-old activist, author, and policy wonk. Bolick worked under Clarence Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the 1980s before moving to the Justice Department. While he was there he published his first book, which argued that the civil rights movement should focus on removing government barriers to economic opportunity.
In 1991, Bolick and Chip Mellor founded the Institute for Justice, the country's premier libertarian public-interest law firm. In 2007, he became vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute, Arizona's leading free-market think tank, where he took on restrictive licensing, zoning, and business regulations—and became a nemesis to Joe Arpaio, the self-proclaimed "toughest sheriff" America.
Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Bolick in Phoenix to talk about his legal philosophy, the politics of immigration, the most interesting case he's encountered on the bench so far, and why he sports a scorpion tattoo on what he calls his "typing finger."
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"I am a capitalist," says Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who is also a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination. "I believe in markets."
She's got a funny way of showing her faith. Last week, she unveiled her plan to break up tech giants such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple. She's called for a "wealth tax" that would target households with over $50 million in assets and introduced the Accountable Capitalism Act, which would force corporations with over $1 billion in annual revenue to get a national charter and give employees the right to vote in 40 percent of a company's board of directors. She was also the driving force behind the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an Obama-era agency that was widely assailed by free-market analysts as overly intrusive and unaccountable.
To get a sense of where Warren's ideas come from, Nick Gillespie talked with Todd Zywicki, a longtime critic of Warren. Zywicki teaches law at George Mason University and is the former director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission. Zywicki says Warren is a direct ideological descendant of Louis Brandeis, the Progressive Era lawyer and Supreme Court justice who attacked what he called "the curse of bigness" in business and pushed for a massively regulated economy. Warren, says Zywicki, has thoroughly absorbed Brandeis's distrust of large firms, as well as his belief that "disinterested" bureaucrats can smooth out any and all issues with free markets. What she doesn't understand, he says, is that the regulatory agencies championed by Brandeis were routinely captured by the businesses they regulated or diverted by the idiosyncratic whims of commissioners, leading to the increasing ossification of the U.S. economy through much of the 20th century until deregulation took hold first during the Carter years and later under Ronald Reagan. More recently, notes Zywicki, the Dodd-Frank laws passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to limit the power of banks have actually increased concentration in the financial sector.
Photo credit: Alex Edelman/picture alliance / Consolidated/Newscom
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The kids are trending "socialist," presidential candidates are disgorging mega-proposals like popcorn, and Republicans aren't governing like they worry about this stuff, so what's a libertarian to do except reach for the orange saffron diaper?
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'IMF' by DOt is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 30
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In today's Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with Coleman Hughes, a 23-year-old junior at Columbia University who has emerged over the past year as one of the most prolific and insightful commentators on race and class in the United States.
He's analyzed the relatively forgotten legacy of the gay, socialist, anti–affirmative action civil-rights activist Bayard Rustin for The New York Times, discussed the "colorblind legacy" of Martin Luther King, Jr., in The Wall Street Journal, and published a growing list of articles on everything from Kanye West's conservatism to the racial wealth gap at the heterodox website Quillette.
Hughes talks about his childhood in New Jersey, the climate for free speech on today's campuses, playing trombone in a Charles Mingus tribute band that plays Mondays in New York, and more.
Photo credit: Coleman Hughes.
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In the new issue of Reason (subscribe now for as little at $14.97 a year!), legendary comics artist Peter Bagge contributes "Immigration Grunts," a four-page cartoon essay about people trying to help refugees and asylum-seekers stuck in a federal immigration facility in Tacoma, Washington.
Bagge's career started in the 1970s and he is probably best-known as the creator of Hate, an underground comic that helped to define alternative culture in the 1990s. He has been drawing for Reason for almost 20 years (his Reason archive is online here and his 2013 collection of Reason work, Everybody Is Stupid Except for Me, is available at Amazon).
On today's Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with Bagge about his new Reason essay, how he chooses topics to draw, and what it's like to be working in a medium that was once considered unserious but is now heralded as a legitimate art form. We also talk about his forthcoming graphic novel, Credo: The Rose Wilder Lane Story, which tells the life story of one of the founding figures of the modern libertarian movement who also helped craft her mother's stories about her frontier childhood into the beloved Little House on the Prairie books.
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Who does the best insult comedy about the Green New Deal? Well, President Donald Trump, of course, but let's not leave out of the conversation Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.), who famously referred to it as "the green dream or whatever they call it."
Pelosi gets some surprising shout-outs on the new Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast (featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch), over her stiff-arming progressive fantasia and opposition to the president's emergency declaration, in which she was joined by a lonely libertarian-leaning congressman and senator. The gang also has a good long talk over the contemporary political meaning of "socialism," the ideological content (such as it existed) of the Conservative Political Action Conference, and why you should stop what you're doing and check out this great new Claypool Lennon Delirium video about weirder-than-life rocketeer/cultist Jack Parsons.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Keymonica' by Pietnastka is licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0
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"How do I prepare my children for a future I can't imagine?"
Adults project their fears onto children—our own or other people's—and especially tend to view new technologies (the internet) and cultural products (video games) as mortal threats to the way things have always been and should always be. That leads to a lot of really bad policies and ridiculous urban legends (Momo Challenge, anyone?). And constantly being in a state of panic over change makes life pretty sucky for kids and grown-ups alike.
Nick Gillespie's guest today is Jordan Shapiro, author of The New Childhood: Raising Kids To Thrive in a Connected World. Unlike virtually any other book about kids and digital culture published in recent years, The New Childhood doesn't begin from the presumption that smartphones, tablets, and online gaming are making kids dumber, less focused, and unhappy. Shapiro, a psychologist who teaches at Temple University, has produced a thoughtful analysis of the benefits of new media for younger people. As important, he shows how adults need to understand the uniquely interconnected world in which their children now live. This deeply researched, historically conscious, and powerfully argued book blends academic rigor with personal experience and practical advice. In it, Shapiro takes free-range parenting into the cloud.
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Was the 2008 financial crisis caused by market distortions or market failure?
That was the topic of a public debated hosted by the Soho Forum in New York City on February 20, 2019. It featured John Allison, former CEO of BB&T Bank and former CEO and president of the Cato Institute, and Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody's Analytics. Allison argued that market distortions led to the financial crisis, and Zandi attributed the crisis to market failure. Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein moderated.
It was an Oxford-style debate, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. Allison prevailed by convincing about 10 percent of audience members to change their minds.
Today Allison is an executive in residence at the Wake Forest School of Business. He's author of The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism is the World Economy's Only Hope (McGraw-Hill, 2012). Zandi is the author of Financial Shock: A 360º Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis.
The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village.
Music: "Modum" by Kai Engle is licensed under a CC-BY creative commons license.
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On last week's Editors' Roundtable episode of the Reason Podcast, guest star Stephanie Slade argued near the end that the racial-reconciliation movie Green Book feels a bit out of step with where America's cultural conversation has moved these past few years. Boy howdy, judging by the torrential response to the movie's Best Picture victory at last night's Academy Awards. So let's pick a fresh scab, courtesy of returning Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward, who wrote a provocative piece in this weekend's New York Times under the headline, "Stop Counting Women: Quotas and tallies won't bring real progress on gender parity."
Mangu-Ward and the rest of the gang (Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch) have an extended conversation on representation, audience-growing, opinion journalism, the malleability of Spider-Man, and related controversies, including (natch) some of the greatest libertarian movies in history. Also coming under discussion are Venezuelan war-mongering, mixed metaphors, and the expansion of "Selective" Service registration to include lady-folk.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Songe D'Automne' by Latche Swing is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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Kurt Loder is a cultural omnivore who started out writing for rock magazines in the 1970s, ending up at Rolling Stone. He co-authored Tina Turner's best-selling memoir (the basis for the movie What's Love Got To Do With It?) before moving on MTV, where he served as news anchor. Outside of Reason, the best place to find Loder these days is SiriusXM, where he hosts True Stories, a weekly interview show featuring famous rock musicians telling tales out of school, and Twitter, where he comments on a wide variety of topics.
Today, Nick Gillespie talked to Loder about the films, directors, and actors he thinks are most deserving. (He's especially high on Lady Gaga's performance in A Star Is Born, which he also thinks should win Best Picture.) We also discussed whether it's time for big, bloated, self-congratulatory awards shows such as the Oscars to sink into the ocean like good old Mr. Norman Main, whether we're in a golden age of popular culture (yes, but...), and what music and novels are capturing Loder's attention these days.
Photo credit: SiriusXM, Facebook.
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Few topics inspire more anxiety, anger, and confusion than sex differences between men and women. If you believe in evolution, you believe that sex differences between men and women are real and persistent. If you believe in libertarian values of individualism and freedom, you want everyone to be treated equally under the law, in the workplace, and in social settings.
On today's Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with Christina Hoff Sommers and Debra Soh about our constantly evolving understanding of gender roles, how biology and culture shape our expectations, the successes and excesses of contemporary feminism, what today's sexism looks like, and how best to measure progress. Both were in New York to speak at a panel titled "Who's Afraid of Sex Differences?" organized by the Independent Women's Forum.
Sommers is a resident scholar at Washington, D.C.'s American Enterprise Institute, the author of such well-known books as Who Stole Feminism and The War Against Boys, and co-host (with Danielle Crittenden) of the Femsplainers podcast. Soh is a Toronto-based psychologist who writes frequently on gender and science issues for The Globe and Mail and Playboy, and co-hosts (with Jonathan Kay) a podcast called Wrongspeak for the website Quillette.
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Reason editors Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, and Stephanie Slade assess the Bernie Sanders candidacy for president.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Mark McDaniel.
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"The American Dream is dead," declared Donald Trump in 2015 when he announced he was running for president. "If I get elected president, I will bring it back bigger and better than ever before."
One of the most interesting outcomes of the 2016 election is that about 10 percent of people who voted for Barack Obama ended up voting for Trump. Such switch voters, many of whom lived in rural parts of contested states in the Midwest, helped him eke out a victory. They voted for Obama in 2008 because they wanted change they could believe in. In 2016, they were still looking for change, this time from a New York billionaire.
Timothy P. Carney does a deep dive on many of the places that voted first for Obama and then for Trump. It's a powerful, provocative, and deeply reported look at a contemporary political and social landscape in which much of the traditional social fabric of marriage, family, and work has been worn away and replaced by distant, "overcentralized" bureaucrats and businesses.
For today's Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with Carney, commentary editor for the Washington Examiner, about the causes of social breakdown, the policies that can help struggling people, and the limits of any president's power to revive the American dream.
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"The American tradition of political idealism, writes Noah Rothman in his new book Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America, "is imperiled by a growing obsession wit the demographic categories of race, sex, ethnicity, and sexual orientation—the primary categories that are now supposed to constitute 'identity.'"
While phrases such as social justice and identity politics are usually identified with the progressive left, Rothman, an associate editor at Commentary and a contributor to MSNBC argues provocatively that rise of Donald Trump shows that claiming "victimization has bipartisan appeal."
In today's Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talk with the 37-year-old journalist about the roots of identity politics, the rise of street violence among alt-right and antifa types, and how we might restore belief in an inclusive, forward-looking America built around common ideals rather than bitter enmity.
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Is it kind of missing the point to talk about what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's (D–N.Y.) Green New Deal (GND) actually contains? That's the meta-question lurking just under the surface of the new Editors' Roundtable version of the Reason Podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, and Peter Suderman.
The Reason editors talk about the GND's contents, its role in Democratic Party ideological positioning, and how it reflects an increasingly utopian, fact-untethered age of political discourse. Along the way, they also assess recent exertions by possible 2020 presidential candidates Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D–Texas), and former Libertarian Party vice presidential candidate Bill Weld.
Audio production by Mark McDaniel. Drop of Water In the Ocean by Broke For Free is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
In her blockbuster exposé "Are You a Woman Traveling Alone?," Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown does a deep dive on the Department of Homeland Security "Blue Campaign." This campaign pushes the hospitality industry, air travel companies, and other businesses to call the feds if they suspect customers are involved in "trafficking"—an increasingly loose term that covers everything from slavery to traditional prostitution. The Marriott hotel chain, for instance, recently tweeted that all of its 750,000 employees worldwide are "being trained to help spot sex trafficking in our hotels."
For today's Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with Brown about her story. More often than not, she writes, crackdowns on trafficking translate into rousting women sitting alone in bars and other common areas, snooping on fathers traveling with teenage daughters, or calling federally funded tip lines on guests who have "too many" condoms. In several recent high-profile cases involving airlines, "staff trained to 'spot traffickers' have harassed interracial couples and families. When people are asked to use gut instinct to stop real but rare horrors, relying on racial stereotypes and other biases tends to rule." Brown also documents the role of Polaris Project and ECPAT-USA, nonprofits that operate tip lines and provide training on spotting trafficking, in promoting these fears.
Whatever the intentions behind the Blue Campaign, and despite Donald Trump's promise in his State of the Union address to crack down on traffickers smuggling women across "wide-open areas" on the U.S.-Mexico border, there is no evidence that sexual slavery is on the rise in the United States. The result, Brown argues, is that consensual sex work is being redefined as trafficking and the privacy of all Americans is taking another hit.
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Immediately after President Donald Trump stepped down from the dias at his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, Reason editors Katherine Mangu-Ward and Peter Suderman grabbed their podcasting mics to talk rockets, socialism, American greatness, alliteration, uteruses, and Nazis.
We give props to some high points in the speech ("Great nations do not fight endless wars.") We note some encouraging hints about Trump's possible legacy as a criminal justice reformer ("Alice's story underscores the disparities and unfairness that can exist in criminal sentencing—and the need to remedy this injustice.") We also ponder the possibility of a massive new entitlement ("I am also proud to be the first president to include in my budget a plan for nationwide paid family leave—so that every new parent has the chance to bond with their newborn child.") And we ultimately fret about a vision of national greatness that relies on illegal immigrants and nations who want to sell us cheap stuff as the enemies that will bind us together.
Audio production by Mark McDaniel.
Body Language by Asthmatic Astronaut is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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This past weekend gave witness to one of the most unimaginable political scandals of the 21st century, as yearbook photos from 1984 of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam in either blackface or a KKK costume surfaced. Northam, 60, first apologized for the pictures and then denied he was in them. But he acknowledged that he had used blackface during a Michael Jackson dance competition in his twenties, and he seemed like he might be about to demonstrate his moves at a press conference until his wife told him not to. According to Big League Politics, the site that published the photo, a medical school classmate leaked it because of Northam's support for a bill that would have lessened restrictions on late-term abortions.
On today's Reason Podcast, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Nick Gillespie discuss whether Northam will survive and the changing politics of race. We also talk about Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.), the latest Democrat to announce a presidential bid, and his shift away from school choice, which he supported heavily as mayor of Newark; why Medicare for All has no chance of happening; and why baby-boom icons dominated Super Bowl ads. We also preview President Trump's State of the Union Address, which takes place on Tuesday, February 5, at 9:00 P.M. ET.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Railroad's Whisky Co' by Jahzzar is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
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Desperate after years of economic disaster and political repression, Venezuelans are protesting in ever-greater numbers against the regime of President Nicolás Maduro, who was re-elected to a second six-year term last year in elections widely denounced as fraudulent.
In January, the Lima Group, an ad hoc consortium of 11 Latin American countries and Canada, refused to recognize Maduro as president. At the same time, Juan Guaidó, the president of the National Assembly, took an oath to serve as interim president of the country. His government has been recognized by members of the Lima Group as well as the Trump administration, which also levied sanctions on Venezuela's oil sector. At the same time, The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump administration is also pursuing an ambitious "a plan to reshape Latin America," causing many to wonder if a return to a historically disastrous gunboat diplomacy is in the offing.
For today's Reason Podcast, I spoke with José Ignacio Guédez, a member of the opposition party La Causa R, about the dire state of economic and political disaster in Venezuela, why it's important to remove Maduro from power and have a free and fair election, and why the troubled history of American intervention into Latin America complicates the way forward to a peaceful transition of power.
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On Sunday, February 3, the New England Patriots will play the Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl LIII, one of the year's biggest sporting events.
For today's Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with fellow Editor at Large Matt Welch, who has written in depth about how the cultural, political, and economic aspects of sports often mirror and influence the direction of society. In a wide-ranging conversation, Gillespie and Welch speak about how the Super Bowl has changed since its first iteration in 1967, how the relationship between fans and athletes in many sports developed since free agency, why politicians and team owners remain remarkably successful in bilking taxpayers out of money for stadiums, the gender dynamics of a sports-crazy father raising two daughters, and more.
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Reason editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch assess Elizabeth Warren’s ‘tippy-top’ tax, Howard Schultz’s presidential candicacy, Donald Trump’s shutdown-shutdown, and more.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'The 3rd' by Anitek is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
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National School Choice Week, an annual event that coordinates thousands of events nationwide designed to bring attention to alternatives to traditional public K-12 education, runs through Saturday, January 26 (go here for more information). For today's Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie spoke with the group's president, Andrew Campanella, about the remarkable growth of school choice over the past few decades, especially since the introduction of charter schools in the mid-1990s.
About 10 percent of the nation's 50 million K-12 students attend a school they choose rather than the traditional method of residential assignment, says Campanella, who notes that the trend is getting stronger every year. In a wide-ranging conversation about the different forms of school choice, he argues that school choice is part of a wider societal movement toward increasing personalization in many goods and services and a reflection of the recognition that education is one of the central ways for people to realize their potential.
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"Racial segregation in America was, to a large degree, engineered by policy makers in Washington," writes the Economic Policy Institute's Richard Rothstein in the February 2019 issue of Reason, in an article adapted from his book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America (2017).
The Manhattan Institute's Howard Husock agrees, calling Rothstein's book an "admirable work" in a 2017 review. But the two part company over Rothstein's confidence "that government today is the appropriate instrument to effect housing integration" and his dismissal of the idea that "the private housing market, guided by rigorously enforced antidiscrimination laws, offers African-American buyers the surest route to wealth accumulation and upward mobility."
On January 14, 2019, the Soho Forum hosted a debate between Rothstein and Husock. The resolution read: "Since the federal government fostered housing segregation in the 20th century, the government should foster housing integration in the 21st."
The Soho Forum, which is partnered with the Reason Foundation, is a monthly series held at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village. It hosts Oxford-style debates, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious.
Comedian Dave Smith, host of the podcast Part of the Problem, was the opening act.
Edited by Todd Krainin.
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How our social media wars turns Covington, Buzzfeed, and everything it touches into a garbage fire.
Audio production by Ian Keyser and Mark McDaniel.
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Journalists Nancy Rommelmann and Leah McSweeney make no apologies for critiquing what they call the "toxic femininity" of Asia Argento and the anti-Semitism of some of the leaders of this weekend's Women's March in Washington, D.C.
Argento, they tell Nick Gillespie in a new Reason podcast, acted like Harvey Weinstein when it came out that she had slept with a 17-year-old boy she had known for a decade. She denied it, attacked the credibility of her accuser, and paid him hush money. In a blockbuster December story for Tablet co-authored with Jacob Siegel, McSweeney documented that top organizers of this Saturday's Women's March, which began as a protest against sexism and Donald Trump, "claimed that Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade" and pushed Jewish women out of leadership roles. The story was picked up by The New York Times and other outlets and has led to a number of high-profile supporters and organizations pulling their support for the March, especially after the organizers refused to denounce Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, the source for much crackpot history regarding Jews and the slave trade. After the two created a YouTube channel called #MeNeither, where they critique aspects of contemporary feminism and talk about contemporary call-out culture, an outraged viewer started a campaign against Ristretto Roasters, the Portland-based coffee-shop chain owned by Rommelmann's husband.
McSweeney, who is the founder of the punk-influenced clothing line Married To the Mob (sample t-shirt: "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Bleeding"), and Rommelmann, author of 2018's To The Bridge: A True Story of Motherhood and Murder and a Reason contributor, tell me they are feminists who believe in equal opportunity and legal treatment for women but recoil from the excesses of current identity politics. It's a wide-ranging, foul-mouthed, and frank conversation about contemporary sexual mores.
Photo Credit: R Barnswell.
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Philip K Howard burst on the scene over 20 years ago with his best-selling book, The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, which argued that out-of-control lawsuits and and rules and regulations were choking off vitality, innovation, and common decency. In 2002, he founded Common Good, a nonprofit whose credo is "simplify government, put humans back in charge, and cut mindless red tape." In 2014, Nick Gillespie interviewed Howard about his book The Rule of Nobody.
Photo Credit: Common Good
A lawyer by training and profession, Howard's new book is Try Common Sense: Replacing Failed Ideologies of Left and Right. Gillespie spoke with him about how Americans might route around the federal government and get on with their lives.
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Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch discuss whether immigration is an "emergency," whether shutdowns are good for libertarians, and why Tulsi Gabbard is driving people crazy.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Hallon' by Christian Bjoerklund is licensed under CC BY NC SA 3.0
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"The conservative [movement] needs to be rethought in a variety of ways," says Charlie Sykes, the editor in chief of The Bulwark, the conservative website started in part by William Kristol in the wake of the demise of The Weekly Standard. "There's no question that Trumpism represents a repudiation of much of the conservative tradition, but we're not going to be able to simply turn the clock back."
A longtime radio host and best-selling author based in Milwaukee and early critic of Donald Trump, Sykes says that The Bulwark, whose motto is "conservatism conserved," is a place where the broadly defined right, including libertarians, can go to think through what happened to the Republican Party and what might come next in American politics. Calling Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk an opportunistic "grifter," Sykes tells Reason that "to the extent that Republicans lash themselves to the mast of Trumpism...they make it more possible that we're going to have President Bernie Sanders and fully nationalized health care."
Photo credit: St. Martin's Press.
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"We are fighting for free speech every single day," says Students for Liberty's CEO Wolf von Laer, who also contends that college campuses around the world are "breeding grounds for socialism."
Nick Gillespie spoke with Laer, who has a Ph.D. in political economy from King's College (London), and David Clement, director of external relations, about SFL's upcoming LibertyCon, which takes place in Washington, D.C., January 17-20, and pulls together 2,000 students, activists, and libertarians from all over the world.
Reason is a sponsor of LibertyCon and folks such as Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Robby Soave, and Elizabeth Nolan Brown will join Libertarian Party Vice Presidential nominee Bill Weld, FCC head Ajit Pai, legal giants Randy Barnett and Alan Dershowitz, and others for the conference. During lunch on Saturday, Reason will present a "live" version of the magazine, featuring some of your favorite journalists, the musical styling of Remy, and the comedy of Andrew Heaton and Austin Bragg.
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Tucker Carlson delivered a memorable monologue last week telling conservatives why they should stop worshiping the market, and instead use government to help save the American family. Here's why he's wrong.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Valse in D-flat major "Minute Waltz" by Chopin, played by Muriel Nguyen Xuan is licensed under CC BY SA 4.0
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In 1946, the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand started writing Textbook of Americanism, a series of brief and accessible essays that she felt would define the essential ideas and character of her adopted homeland. Publishing them in a small magazine called The Vigil in the form of answers to basic questions, Rand only completed nine sections, which ranged from "What is the basic issue in the world today?" to "What is the basic principle of America?" to "What is the proper function of government?"
Over 70 years later, Rand's dream sees its completion in A New Textbook of Americanism, a collection edited by Jonathan Hoenig, a Rand devotee who founded the investment fund Capitalist Pig and appears regularly on Fox News, where he's one of the few guests to call out Donald Trump for his protectionism, cronyism, and anti-immigrant stances. The new volume reprints Rand's original contributions while adding fresh new material from a host of contemporary writers associated with the Ayn Rand Institute, including Leonard Peikoff, Yaron Brook, Amy Peikoff, Andrew Bernstein, and others. The new essays are wide-ranging and provocative, answering such questions as "How to Recognize a Nazi," "How Are Fortunes Made in a Capitalist System?," and "What Should a Distinctively American Foreign Policy Do?"
For today's podcast, Nick Gillespie spoke with Hoenig about what Rand meant by Americanism, why that's important, and whether he's optimistic about a country that he himself says is growing more collectivist on both the right and the left. We also talked about the fault lines between Rand's Objectivism and the modern libertarian movement, Rand's argument for complete abortion rights and her thoroughgoing secularism, and what it will take to revive the sort of individualism that Hoenig, like Rand, says is the essential foundation of America.
Photo courtesy of Jonathan Hoenig.
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Mitt Romney's critique of Donald Trump mixes a call for tonal civility with foreign-policy hawkishness and immigration amnesia, say editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, in the latest Reason Podcast
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Michael Shermer, Ron Bailey, and Jim Epstein talk poverty-eradication, genomics, and blockchain at Reason’s 50th anniversary celebration
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What happens when consumers control the means of production? J.D. Tuccille talks weaponry, Rob Long media/Hollywood, and Lisa Snell education, in a podcast recorded at Reason's 50th anniversary.
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Reason editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch talk about the best and worst of 2018, starting with President Trump's troop-drawdown from Afghanistan
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Peter Suderman, Len Gilroy, and C. Boyden Gray diagnose the country's many fiscal woes, and offer some solutions, at Reason's 50th anniversary celebration.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Photo credit: Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA/Newscom
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On the one-year anniversary of the death of Net Neutrality, Reason editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch take stock of the bipartisan urge to regulate the Internet.
We delve into social media hearings, Section 230 semiotics, and (sadly!) stupid Donald Trump tweets. The gang also gets in a bit of contentious funerealism over the demise of The Weekly Standard, so do stick around until the end.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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"Governments of the advanced industrial economies should phase out the use of paper money in the form of large-denomination notes and sharply restrict the use of cryptocurrencies."
That was the resolution at a public debate hosted by the Soho Forum on December 3, 2018. Arguing the affirmative was the Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. Lawrence H. White, a professor of economics at George Mason University and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, argued against the resolution. Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein moderated the debate.
The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, hosts Oxford-style debates in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event—yes, no, or undecided—and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. In a close finish, White prevailed by convincing five percent of audience members to come over to his side. Rogoff picked up two percent.
Rogoff's book 2016 book The Curse of Cash (2016) argues that the U.S. government should phase out most paper currency. His monthly syndicated column on global economic issues is published in over 50 countries. White, a leading theorist on free banking, is the author most recently of The Clash of Economic Ideas (2012).
Comedian Dave Smith, host of the podcast Part of the Problem, opened the program.
Edited by Todd Krainin
Photo Credit: Brett Raney
"Divider" by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Attribution License.
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Today, we've got a special podcast: The speech that Mitch Daniels, the former two-term governor of Indiana and the current president of Purdue University, gave at Reason's 50th anniversary celebration, held in Los Angeles in early November.
A thinking man's politician, Daniels' achievements as governor included leasing the money-losing Indiana toll road for $4 billion, passing a universal school voucher program, and making Indiana one of the most economically free states in the country. At Purdue, he's managed to keep tuition costs down while also emphatically backing free speech and academic freedom. In his remarks, he told the audience that Reason has "with nearly unique persistence and unique fidelity to principle, upheld our liberties, constantly innovating and advocating measures to guard and extend them….With you on freedom's ramparts, America's tomorrow's will always dawn brightly."
Photo credit: Javier Rojas/Pi/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom
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Psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs are enjoying a revival—as agents of personal pleasure, mind expansion, and conventional medicine. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently designated psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, as a "breakthrough therapy" for treatment of depression. MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, has been similarly designated as a breakthrough therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Earlier this year, two major books about psychedelics came out. Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence is a relatively conventional history and memoir that drew praise from Reason's Jacob Sullum for recovering the history of "psychedelics' potential for facilitating psychotherapy, promoting the rehabilitation of addicts, and relieving end-of-life anxiety" before Timothy Leary and others promoted such drugs as the stuff of total political and cultural revolution. "Psychedelics have been politicized, medicalized, and spiritualized," asks Sullum in his review. "Will they ever be personalized?"
Which brings us to that second book, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change, written by acclaimed novelist Tao Lin. Born in 1983 to immigrants from Taiwan and raised in Florida, Lin is a critical darling of the contemporary literary scene (Bret Easton Ellis has declared him to be "the most interesting prose stylist of his generation"). His books Taipei, Richard Yates, Shoplifting from American Apparel, and others are populated by disaffected young people who take copious amounts of drugs, especially downers such as Xanax and prescription opioids. Trip is an excruciatingly personal non-fiction account of the author's use of psychedelics as part of a "sustained, conscious effort...to not drift toward meaninglessness, depression, disempowering forms of resignation, and bleak ideologies like existentialism." "Weird is the compass setting," writes Lin at one point, quoting Terence McKenna (1946-2000), who helped popularize magic mushrooms and inspire rave culture. Trip is certainly weird, but like the most-potent drugs, also wonderful. Interview by Nick Gillespie.
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Is Sen. Rand Paul right about special-prosecutor investigations being "banana republic"-style attempts to pin a crime on a president? Reason editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch debate.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Without a doubt, one of the biggest policy wins for Reason since our debut in 1968 has been the legalization of marijuana in the United States.
Currently, 10 states and the District of Columbia allow use for recreational purposes and another 33 allow its use as medicine. Donald Trump has even indicated that he'd sign legislation turning control of pot over to the states.
So when Reason celebrated its 50th anniversary in November, we put together a panel devoted to talking about how drug policy has changed over the years, the difficulties in actually implementing legalization, and how drugs the government still considers "illicit"—LSD, MDMA, psilocybin, and more—are now being talked about not simply as ways to get high but as means to increase mental health, happiness, and well-being.
The panelists included:
Adrian Moore, Ph.D., who runs the research division of Reason Foundation and consults with cities and states that are implementing marijuana legalization
Dana Rohrabacher, a longtime Republican member of Congress who consistently pushed to end the federal war on pot
Jacob Sullum, a Reason senior editor who has written about drug policy for years and is the author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use
Reason's Nick Gillespie moderates.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Hard Boiled' by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under CC BY 3.0
Photo Credit: RICK WILKING/REUTERS/Newscom
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Raise your glass, folks! Today is Repeal Day, which marks the anniversary of the end of federal alcohol prohibition in the United States.
To celebrate the occasion, Peter Suderman interviewed Jarrett Dieterle, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute and the author of a new report on "America's Dumbest Drinking Laws," about how Prohibition came about, what forces were empowered when alcohol was illegal, how alcohol laws changed after repeal, and the many ways in which the effects of Prohibition still linger today.
I'm a fan of cocktails and spirits, and Dieterle is an expert on both the history and current state of alcohol policy in the United States, so naturally the conversation turned to the many ways the two are, and have always been, intertwined.
What was the link between the temperance movement and anti-immigrant sentiments? How did drinks and drinking change during Prohibition? What are some of the bizarre and pointless ways in which states are still making it difficult to buy, mix, and consume alcohol? And—maybe most importantly—what should you be drinking tonight to celebrate Repeal Day?
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Photo Credit: ID 87700464 © Nomadsoul1 | Dreamstime.com
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What else can we say about the departed George H.W. Bush, other than that he wasn't the worst president in our lifetimes but otherwise left little for libertarians to cheer about aside from not freaking out while communism collapsed? On the latest editors' roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, Katherine Mangu-Ward and Peter Suderman add their contributions to the pool already populated by co-podcasters Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. Hint: involves supermarket scanners.
Also discussed: Last week's huge volume of news on all things Mueller/Trump/Russia, the multi-administration follies of Government Motors, the technologic inadequacies of certain podcast participants, and of course the Reason Webathon (Donate right the hell now!).
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Fishing' by David Szesztay is licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0
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Has the message of anti-racism become as harmful a force in American life as racism itself?
That was the resolution at a public debate hosted by the Soho Forum on November 14, 2018. It featured John McWhorter, associate professor of English at Columbia University, and Nikhil Singh, professor of social and cultural analysis and history at New York University. Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein moderated.
It was an Oxford-style debate in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. In a close finish, Singh, arguing the negative, prevailed by convincing nearly 13 percent of audience members to come over to his side.
Singh is the author of Race and America's Long War (University of California Press, 2017), and Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2004).
McWhorter, who is a regular columnist for Time and CNN, is the author most recently of Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America's Lingua Franca (2017)
Comedian Dave Smith, host of the podcast Part of the Problem, opened the program.
The Soho Forum, which is partnered with the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village. On Monday, December 3, economists Kenneth Rogoff and Lawrence H. White will debate whether governments should phase out cash.
Edited by Todd Krainin.
Music: "Voyeur," by Jingle Punks.
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Join Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch for a live webathon edition of the Reason Podcast. Post your questions in the comments here at Reason.com, YouTube, or at Facebook—we'll answer as many as we can during the show.
Do you want to know what Reason's top editors really think about U.S. foreign policy, the national debt, net neutrality, Donald Trump, and personal drug use? Then this is your time, kind readers. Put questions in the comments here. The show will also be livestreamed at Reason's Facebook page and YouTube channel.
We did this last year with Matt, Katherine, and Nick, and it was a good time, filled with insight, laughter...and just the right tinge of bitterness. With Peter joining us, it will better still.
So tune in. And remember, this is Reason's annual webathon week, when we ask readers to support our efforts to bring you news, politics, culture, and ideas from a uniquely libertarian perspective. The world is in many, even most ways an infinitely better place than when Reason debuted in 1968, but we've all got miles to go before we sleep when it comes to creating a freer, fairer, and more fun world. Your tax-deductible contributions entitle you to some great swag but, more important, will help us to keep being your voice in fights over "Free Minds and Free Markets."
'Hard Boiled' by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under CC BY 3.0
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Since 2015, when Reason first sat down with Adam Conover, host of TruTV's hit show Adam Ruins Everything, a new president has taken office, a new media landscape has emerged, and some would say we're inhabiting a new reality.
What's it like to make a show that seeks to uncover hidden truths in the "post-truth era"?
"I guess what's happened is that I've a little bit let go of the idea that we can reach everybody," says Conover, who's about to go on a live tour and is gearing up for the premiere of his show's third season. "Certain people...the informational world they live in, it's so distorted that it's hard to get through."
But most people still have a "deep down desire to learn, to know the truth," he says.
In a wide-ranging interview with Reason's Zach Weissmueller (full disclosure: Weissmueller is married to the show's casting director), Conover shares his thoughts on the "response videos" to his work proliferating on YouTube, how he contends with the psychological defense mechanisms that prevent viewers from changing their opinions, the "de-platforming" of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and how big tech companies are changing our perceptions of reality.
The new season of Adam Ruins Everything premieres on November 27, 2018, and his live tour starts on November 28.
Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Paul Detrick, Justin Monticello, and Alexis Garcia.
"Happy Whistle" by Scott Holmes is licensed under an Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) Source: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Holmes/Happy_Music/10_Happy_Whistle Artist: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Holmes/Happy_Music/10_Happy_Whistle
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(Republican) president from 1981 to 1989, during a 1980 debate: "Open the borders both ways."
(Republican) president from 2017 to the present, this morning: "We will close the Border permanently if need be."
Latest Reason Podcast, editors' roundtable edition: Let's talk about all this and more!
Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch today tackle some of the thorniest questions in our country's never-ending immigration debate: Does President Donald Trump have a point about the 1,700 percent jump in asylum seekers? Does Hillary Clinton have a point about the left abetting the populist right through failures of both policy and engagement? Do high immigration levels lead to the very degradation of social trust that certain people (cough, cough) keep yammering on about?
Along the way we also discuss balloon murder, Steven Pinker's hair, and our own insufferable Thanksgiving political conversations.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Hide the Horror' by Asthmatic Astronaut is licensed under CC BY NC SA 3.0
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A few weeks ago in Los Angeles, Reason celebrated its 50th anniversary. To mark that milestone, we hosted a series of discussions taking the measure of how far the world has come since 1968 in relation to a bunch of topics that we've long been interested in. I'm happy to share with you a panel titled "The First Amendment in the 21st Century."
Arguably, nothing is more fundamental to Reason's commitment to a libertarian world of "Free Minds and Free Markets" than the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment: freedom of speech, assembly, religion, and redress. Yet today's world seems to be filled with paradoxes when it comes the First Amendment: Thanks to technology and the breakdown of gatekeeper institutions, we're freer than ever to say what we want, yet expression everywhere seems haunted or blocked by hate-speech laws and formal and informal codes. Recent attempts by different levels of government to force businesses to provide birth control or wedding cakes in ways that run counter to the faith of owners have been rebuffed, but in the narrowest of terms. Is the First Amendment flourishing or floundering?
What follows is a wide-ranging and freewheeling conversation about all that and more, featuring a slugger's row of participants and moderated by me. The participants included:
Nadine Strossen, a professor at New York University Law School, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the author most recently of Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship; Stephanie Slade, the managing editor of Reason magazine, who writes frequently about religious liberty, and; Eugene Volokh, a professor at UCLA's law school, a frequently citied First Amendment scholar, and the creator of the popular law blog, The Volokh Conspiracy.
We'll be releasing more podcasts from Reason's 50th anniversary over the coming weeks.
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Can you imagine a lawsuit called Rand v. Reason, pitting the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged against the nation's only magazine of "Free Minds and Free Markets"? Well, it almost happened in the 1970s.
In the latest Reason Podcast, one of our founding editors, Manny Klausner, tells Nick Gillespie that tale, along with many stories of the early days of Reason and the libertarian movement. Attending New York University law school in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Klausner studied with Ludwig von Mises, represented the libertarian wing of the fledgling Conservative Party, and came under the influence of firebrand economist Murray Rothbard as well. While working at Reason, Klausner (archive here) produced memorable interviews with the likes of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, economist Thomas Sowell, '70s self-help guru Robert Ringer, and future President Ronald Reagan.
Founded in 1968 by Lanny Friedlander (1947–2011), Reason is celebrating its 50th anniversary by hosting a series of in-depth conversations with past editors about how the magazine has changed since its founding, what we've gotten right and wrong over the years, and what the future holds for believers in "free minds and free markets."
Along with Poole and Tibor Machan (1939-2016), Klausner was one of the principals of Reason Enterprises, which bought the magazine from the Friedlander in 1971. He was also a co-founder of the nonprofit Reason Foundation, established in 1978, which continues to publish this website and podcast. As an attorney, Klausner participated in Bush v. Gore, the case that settled the 2000 election, and successfully defended Matt Drudge in a defamation suit brought by Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Photo credit: Jim Epstein.
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Beloved Reason Editor-in-Everything Katherine Mangu-Ward had a piece in this weekend's New York Times headlined "Trump and Acosta: When Showboats Collide." Given the nonstop borgledy-fraggle of news within the Trump vs. media vs. Trump Möbius strip of blather, we start the latest editors roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast with an extended rumination on the meta-meanings (and lack thereof) of this eternally recurrent combat.
Other topics of note discussed by Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch include the president's prickly relationship with the military, his sometimes-coherent foreign policy doctrine, the off-again/on-again FIRST STEP Act, plus (for some reason) bidets, Rand Paul prospectively barfing on Mitch McConnell's desk, and whether ladies who dye their hair blue and purple are basically poisonous tree frogs.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Superator' by Pietnastka is licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0
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Should social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube only remove users who make true threats or incite violence? Or do they have an ethical obligation to hold their users to a higher standard?
That was the topic of a recent public debate hosted by Reason—a West Coast version of the popular New York City-based debate series, The Soho Forum—pitting Thaddeus Russell, author of A Renegade History of the United States and host of the Unregistered podcast, against Ken White, an attorney at Brown, White & Osborn, author at the legal blog Popehat, and co-host of the podcast All the President's Lawyers.
Russell argued that corporations that accept tax breaks and public subsidies should be more accountable to the public. White held that social media sites deserve the same set of speech rights and limitations as ordinary citizens.
Both speakers agreed with the broader libertarian point that private websites have the legal right to do what they want. The debate hinged on a broader point: What should the culture of free speech, free expression, and ownership look like on our social media platforms?
It was an Oxford-style debate, in which the audience votes on the resolution before and after the event, and the side that picks up the most votes wins. White won the debate by picking up 20 percent of the votes.
The debate was held on November 1, 2018, at Reason's Los Angeles studio.
Edited by Ian Keyser.
'Machinery' by Kai Engel is licenced under CC BY-NC 4.0
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In 2004, Michael Bell's 21-year-old son was killed by police during a routine traffic stop in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Within three days, local law enforcement declared it had fully investigated the matter and announced that police had acted properly throughout. Pushing through his grief, Bell also pushed for change, beginning a decade-long campaign to legally mandate truly independent investigations into deadly use of force by police. He succeeded in Wisconsin and, to date, seven other states to pass such legislation.
Bell's crusade is the subject of a recent video by today's podcast subject, Kmele Foster of Freethink Media, an online video platform founded in 2011 to tell stories about human perseverance, inspiration, and progress. Foster is also the former co-host, with Kennedy and Reason's own Matt Welch, of the Fox Business show The Independents, and a current co-host of the popular podcast The Fifth Column, a free-wheeling, boozy deep-read of news and popular culture.
Born in 1980 and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, I talk with Foster about how the Michael Bell story exemplifies what Freethink Media is trying to accomplish, what it was like growing up in an immigrant household (his mother is Jamaican), why libertarianism is underrepresented among racial and ethnic minorities, how he came to his anarcho-capitalist beliefs, and what his hopes are for his 1-year-old daughter.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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One of the best things about divided federal government, Nick Gillespie reminds us on the new editors' roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, is that at least it's not unified. Which is to say, there's less chance of unfunded entitlement expansions, big new overseas military commitments, and all the debt/deficit that they bring.
Fellow podcasters Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch weigh in with dramatic Congressional Budget Office readings, tales from post–World War II governance, and grim assessments of almost all politicians who hold elected office. Also debated: voter fraud fantasia, President Donald Trump's reading comprehension issues, and this delightful Isaac Asimov roundtable discussion from the 1970s.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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In a career spanning 30 years, Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum has been one of the most insistent voices in favor of "pharmacological freedom," the right of individuals to use whatever substances they want to control, modulate, and change their mind, emotions, and moods. In the latest issue of Reason, Sullum reviews Michael Pollan's popular new book on psychedelic drugs and boldly asks the question, "Who Controls Your Cortex?" The answer, he says, is the individual.
In a wide-ranging and personal conversation, Nick Gillespie talks with Sullum about the immense changes in drug policy over the past quarter-century, why the marijuana legalization movement has succeeded, and what the future holds for less-popular and more-potent substances such as MDMA (ecstasy) and psilocybin as they gain various forms of government approval as "legitimate" medicines. Sullum and Gillespie talk frankly about our own experiences and how, as parents, we talk about legal and illegal drug use with our children. Sullum is the author of 1998's For Your Own Good, a history of the anti-smoking movement, and 2004's Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Political attention has already migrated to Acostagate, the sacking of Jeff Sessions, and that insane press conference from yesterday, but there was an actual election of some note on Tuesday, and much to talk about from a libertarian perspective. So we convened an irregular assembly of the Reason Podcast, editors' roundtable edition, to deliver some preliminary findings.
Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch debate the permanent hysteria of presidential politics, the electoral role and legislative future of health care policy, third-party sadnesses, and some happy news peeking through the usual woe.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Are you ready for the next 30 hours or so of political hysteria, spoiler-hunting, and supremely confident innumeracy? Then you're in the right place! Today's editor-roundtable midterms-preview edition of the Reason Podcast includes, thank Jeebus, Managing Editor Stephanie Slade, who has forgotten more about polling than most of us will ever know. Slade leads us in walking through the numbers and potential meanings of massive early-voting turnout, shaky state-level polls, and the built-in uncertainty of (justifiably!) basing this year's election forecasts on last cycle's voter behavior. It's unknowable out there, kids, so don't fall for early exit polls.
The usual crew of Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch also pick out races of note, discuss the implications of President Donald Trump's hard pivot to caravan/immigration politics in the homestretch, talk smack about Daylight Saving Time, and in open defiance of Slade make a series of probably disastrous predictions for Election Day.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Blockchain, the decentralized, incorruptible ledger system that undergirds bitcoin, "gives you an actual power to affect change in the world," says hacker Lauri Love. "It's gonna scare the shit out of some very powerful people."
Love is one of the people featured in actor and filmmaker Alex Winter's new documentary, Trust Machine, which explains how blockchain works and how businesses are using it to reinvent power grids, music distribution, and even grocery stores. For today's Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with Winter, whose previous documentaries include Downloaded, which looked at how Napster and other file-sharing services disrupted the music industry, and Deep Web, a sympathetic portrait of Silk Road and similar websites, about the potential for blockchain to change how governments—and corporations—go about their business.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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One week ago, the editor-roundtable version of the Reason Podcast included some robust discussion about whether we are indeed living through an ominous time of heightening political violence. Since then, we've had the killing of two black people in Kentucky by a white man alleged to have tried first targeting a black church, then the arrest of a #MAGA-memer in the sending of (unexploded) pipe-bombs to a dozen or so leading Democrats, and then this weekend's anti-Semitic murder rampage in a Pittsburgh synagogue by an alleged anti-immigrant social-media nut.
So Reason editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch pick up the conversation where it left off, trying to see whether we've turned a dark new corner, what can be said about President Donald Trump's predictably awful response, how Gab's role fits into our pre-existing anxieties about social media and the culture of free speech, and—obviously—whether we'd be better off being self-aware about living through Elon Musk's drug-induced simulation.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Is socialism more effective than capitalism in bringing freedom to the masses?
That was the resolution at a recent public debated hosted by the Soho Forum on October 15, 2018. It featured Bhaskar Sunkara, the founding editor and publisher of Jacobin magazine, and Gene Epstein, the Soho Forum's director and former economics and books editor of Barron's. Naomi Brockwell moderated.
It was an Oxford-style debate in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. Epstein, arguing the negative, prevailed by convincing about 11 percent of audience members to change their minds.
Sunkara is also the author of the forthcoming The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality, which will be published by Basic Books in 2019.
Comedian Dave Smith, host of the podcast Part of the Problem, opened the program.
The Soho Forum, which is partnered with the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village. At the next debate, which will be held on November 14, 2018, Columbia professor John McWhorter will debate NYU's Nikhil Pal Singh on whether "the message of anti-racism has become as harmful a force in American life as racism itself." Buy tickets here.
Music: "January" by Kai Engle is licensed under a CC-BY creative commons license.
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Over the past 20 years, arguably no libertarian thinker has cut a broader or deeper swath than Tyler Cowen, who holds the Holbert L. Harris Chair in economics at George Mason University and acts as chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center. Co-founder of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution, the 56-year-old New Jersey native is a regular contributor at Bloomberg and for years wrote an "economic scene" column for The New York Times. He is the host of Conversations with Tyler, a podcast series that includes interviews with people as diverse as Martina Navratilova, Paul Krugman, and Dave Barry, and the author of a shelf full of books, including 2000’s In Praise of Commercial Culture, 2007’s Discover Your Inner Economist and last year’s The Complacent Class.
His work is at once intellectually serious, concise, and engaging, and his unique perspective yields fascinating analyses of activities and subjects that most economists ignore—everything from the literal and figurative prices of fame to how globalization empowers Mexican folk artists to whether public funding for the arts has been more successful than most free-marketers would grant. A recurring theme over the past decade is a fear that America and much of the West may have entered a period he calls "the great stagnation," in which technological innovation and economic growth have slowed even as risk-taking and moonshot-type ventures are demonized or ignored altogether.
Nick Gillespie sat down to talk with Cowen about his newest book, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals. It’s an unapologetically libertarian argument for what he calls long-term sustainable economic growth and, more importantly, intellectual and cultural attitudes that are unabashedly devoted to freedom and prosperity. It’s a provocative, powerful argument for an America in which government does less, individuals do more, and the future becomes the object of our dreams rather than a repository of our fears.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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From phony Beto-mania to predictable Cruz-baggery, from Medicare-for-all to protecting Medicare, the midterm elections coming two weeks from now are enough to drive a sober man into A.M. tequila shots. So in this era of negative polarization and left/right mob mentalities, perhaps the most fitting question to ask yourself is: Who do you want most to lose?
That's what kicks off this week's editor-roundtable version of the Reason Podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch. We name names (including those few candidates we'd like to see win), talk issues (and lack thereof), and laugh mordantly, since that's preferable to the alternative.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'realest year 9' by Black Ant is licensed under BY NC SA 3.0
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"We often hear the term 'gun culture' being thrown around as invective, says David Harsanyi in his new book, First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun. But "'gun culture' is no less part of American life than 'religious culture' or 'speech culture.' As our history unambiguously illustrates, gun culture is inextricably tied to American culture. One cannot exist without the other."
Harsanyi's meticulously documented and fluidly written history tells the story of how guns first showed up in the New World and the roles they played not just in fighting wars and settling the frontier but developing all sorts of industrial and commercial breakthroughs in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the latest Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie also talks with him about current battles over gun control and why calls for greater restrictions on ownership and the ability to carry often come when gun violence is ebbing rather than increasing.
Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a syndicated columnist, and the author of several previous books, including The People Have Spoken (and They Are Wrong): The Case Against Democracy and Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and other Boneheaded Bureaucrats are Turning America into a Nation of Children.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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When Lesley Stahl asked President Donald Trump how he would punish Saudi Arabia if the oil-rich dictatorship was found to have murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, the president quickly turned the conversation toward the importance of arms sales to American jobs. Was that the right answer?
No it wasn't, argue editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch on the Monday editor-roundtable version of the Reason Podcast. But maybe, they add, that's an argument for re-examining whether government should have any role in limiting commerce between U.S. companies and far-flung baddies. The discussion then ranges from the ethics of dictatorship junkets to seasonal Saudi-bashing syndrome to Trump's ongoing presidency-demystification project, before moving on to the politics of anti–political correctness and the trauma-absorbing qualities of Mr. Rogers.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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With populism on the rise, capitalism under attack, and socialism back in vogue, the work of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) is more relevant than ever. Hayek started his career as a wunderkind professor, joining the faculty of the London School of Economics in his early thirties, and was a central figure in the debates that consumed the profession during the Great Depression. He would go on to spend most of his seven-decade long career as an outsider, his work diverging from the mainstream following the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s and '40s. Eventually the world circled back to Hayek's ideas, and he was one of two recipients of the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.
Today, Hayek is best known for his enduring insights on emergent order, for his critique of central planning, and for his argument that all knowledge in society is decentralized and that a modern economy thus relies the coordinating role of prices and private property. In his final book, The Fatal Conceit, Hayek attacked wrote that "the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."
Hayek's enormous body of work is the subject of a new book by the George Mason University economist Peter Boettke, which takes a deep dive into Hayek's writing and serves as a rousing call for a serious rethinking of libertarian and classical liberal thought.
"Liberalism is in need of renewal," writes Boettke, who started his career as an expert on post-communist economics in the former Soviet Union. "Too much time and effort has been put into repackaging and marketing a fixed doctrine of eternal truths, rather than rethinking and evolving to meet the new challenges." Even Hayek, Boettke notes, made mistakes late in his career, such as his kind words for the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Hayek's great legacy is his understanding of economics and liberal political theory as a process for creating a world in which individuals and society could become more free, equal, and prosperous over time.
In this Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with Boettke about the historical and intellectual context of Hayek's thought, the influence of Hayek's mentor Ludwig von Mises on his work, and how libertarians can follow Hayek's dictum that "we must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage."
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Tom Woods stands accused of many things, but laziness is not one of them.
A senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Woods is the author of a dozen books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. He's written curricula for the Ron Paul homeschool program; he co-hosts, along with economist Robert Murphy, the weekly Contra-Krugman podcast, which dissects columns by New York Times Nobel laureate Paul Krugman; and he posts a new episode of the popular Tom Woods Show every day.
A champion of the Austrian School of economics and a devotee of Murray Rothbard, Woods didn't exactly start out as a radical anti-statist. He was, he says, a "moderate Republican," happy to lavish government spending on domestic programs and to launch bombs at evildoers abroad. It was the 1992 presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan, who was against the Gulf War and opposed to new military adventures abroad, that began the transformation. Now, Woods is one of the leading antiwar voices in the libertarian movement.
Never one to shy away from a social media scrap, Woods got into an epic Twitter feud last summer with the leadership of the Libertarian Party. One side called the Mises Institute a gateway drug to white nationalism and the alt-right, while Woods and his allies mocked the Libertarian National Committee as a bunch of "social justice warriors." Then something curious happened: After the L.P.'s Mises Caucus failed to dislodge party chair Nicholas Sarwark at this year's national convention, Woods and his friends redoubled their efforts to transform the party from within.
Matt Welch sat down with Woods recently to talk about his ideological journey, his plans with the Libertarian Party, his past associations with such controversial entities as the League of the South, and his assessment of Donald Trump, among many other topics.
Edited by Mark McDaniel and Todd Krainin.
Oxygen Garden by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Attribution License.
Photo credit: George Skidmore. (CC BY-SA 2.0.)
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The bruising fight over the narrow confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is not going away. Republicans are gloating, Democrats are trial-ballooning impeachment and re-thinking the American structure of government, and both sides are claiming increases in voter enthusiasm. Just maybe, argue Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch in the Monday editor-roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, this is the market for political combat at work.
Besides chewing over the many post-confirmation arguments, the quartet also discusses the 17th anniversary of the Afghanistan War and other grim policy fails that few can hear under all that shrieking. Also: Scooters!
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Here's some really good news: Median household income in the United States is at a record-high, inflation-adjusted $61,372. When you factor in that today's households contain fewer people, the news is even better. In 1975, for instance, average income per person per household was just $19,500. Now it's $34,000 (all figures in 2017 dollars). And get a load of this: Since the 1990s, there is no evidence that income inequality is growing or the ability to move up and down the income ladder is shrinking. More people than ever live in households pulling down $100,000 (again, adjusted for inflation) than ever. Fewer households make less than $35,000 (adjusted for inflation).
All of this comes courtesy of U.S. Census that's compiled and analyzed by economist Mark J. Perry, who works at the American Enterprise Institute and University of Michigan (Flint), and runs the Carpe Diem blog.
Do you feel happy yet? On today's Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with Perry both about his findings and why we don't feel richer, happier, or more secure than we do. Perry isn't a Trump booster by any means, but he suggests that some of the president's policies—particularly the tax cuts and deregulatory moves in many parts of the economy—are helping to keep an economic expansion that started under President Obama moving along. At the same time, he worries over accumulating debt and trade wars that can raise prices and, more important, introduce wild uncertainty into the economy. When investors "see that there's uncertainty about policy that starts to distort decision making and capital spending."
Perry suggests one reason we don't feel more satisfied with economic improvements is that they are a feature and not a bug of a free enterprise system. "The benefits of a market economy and the march of progress are so constant and so gradual that either we don't appreciate it or don't notice it," he says. "So we have an under-appreciation of how much better things get all the time. If it happened all at once, we'd probably just be amazed."
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Is Brett Kavanaugh lying about boofing, the Ralph Club, and the Devil's Triangle? And if so, should that be disqualifying for the Supreme Court, even if the process that led to such cross-examination was grotesquely cynical and partisan? Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch are split on these and other questions in this moment of national anger and anguish, as you can hear on the Monday editor-roundtable version of the Reason Podcast, but they do agree on one thing: To quote Robby Soave, "at this lowest of moments for political discourse," it's worth remembering that "the libertarian vision for society is one in which politics plays a much smaller role."
The editors also discuss Sen. Jeff Flake (R–Ariz.) and the hated temperamental center, the latest poll numbers about political self-affiliation, the great reasonminus50 Twitter feed, and more.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'The Life and Death of a Certain K. Zabriskie, Patriarch' by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under CC BY 4.0
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For the last 45 years, no writer has taken a bigger blowtorch to the sacred cows of American life than libertarian humorist P.J. O'Rourke.
As a writer at National Lampoon in the 1970s, he co-authored best-selling parodies of high school yearbooks and Sunday newspapers. For Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and other publications, O'Rourke traveled to war zones and other disaster areas, chronicling the folly of military and economic intervention. In 1991, he came out with Parliament of Whores, which explained why politicians should be the last people to have any power. Subtitled "A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government," this international bestseller probably minted more libertarians than any book since Free to Choose or Atlas Shrugged. More recently, O'Rourke published a critical history of his own Baby Boomer generation and How The Hell Did This Happen?, a richly reported account of Donald Trump's unexpected 2016 presidential victory.
O'Rourke's new book, None of My Business, explains "why he's not rich and neither are you." It's partly the result of hanging out with wealthy money managers and businessmen and what they've taught him over the years about creating meaning and value in an ever richer and crazier world. It covers everything from social media to learning how to drink in war zones to why the Chinese may be more American than U.S. citizens. He also explains why even though he doesn't understand or like a lot of things about modern technology, he doesn't fear Amazon or Google, especially compared to people who are calling for Socialism 2.0.
I sat down with O'Rourke to talk about all that, the good and bad of Donald Trump, and why being an "old white man" just isn't what it used to be (and why he's OK with that).
Edited by Ian Keyser.
"Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar used under a Creative Commons license.
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For a quarter of a century, Gene Epstein was the economics editor and a columnist at the business magazine Barron's. Before that, he served as an economist for the New York Stock Exchange. Now, he runs The Soho Forum, a monthly Oxford-style debate series held in New York that covers topics of special interests to libertarians. (As a co-sponsor, Reason records and releases audio and video versions of each debate. Go here for a full archive).
Epstein has just published a major essay in City Journal, the magazine of the Manhattan Institute, about the long and error-prone career of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, whom he calls "continually mistaken" but "chronically admired." Stiglitz, writes Epstein, is the apotheosis of "elite myopia" when it comes to trusting government over free markets to improve the lives of the poor. Read the article here.
In the latest Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with Epstein about the continuing influence of Stiglitz, a former adviser to Bill Clinton and chief economist at the World Bank who is a favorite of progressive Democrats such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.). We also talk about Epstein's upcoming October 15 debate in New York with Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor and publisher of the left-wing Jacobin magazine, about whether socialism or capitalism is the better system for making people more free and prosperous. To buy tickets, which must be purchased in advance, go here now.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Since the publication of his 1989 essay "The End of History?," no political scientist has been more influential in discussions of global democracy than Francis Fukuyama. In the years since then, the Stanford professor has authored a shelf full of prescient and commanding texts, including The End of History and the Last Man, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creaton of Prosperity, and Our Post-Human Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution.
Once a neoconservative who staunchly believed in military intervention and nation building, Fukuyama has been chastened by the failure of U.S. foreign policy since 9/11 and has renounced his early support for the invasion and occupation in Iraq. In his new book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, he argues that the rise of populism, nationalism, and grievance cultures based on racial, ethnic, and gender identity both here and abroad are undermining the basis of liberal democracy and threaten economic prosperity and peace. "Every single one of these struggles is justified," Fukuyama told The Chronicle of Higher Education recently. "The problem is in the way we interpret injustice and how we try to solve it, which tends to fragment society."
Nick Gillespie spoke with Fukuyama about Identity, whether it's possible to create a national identity that is capable of bringing Americans of all sorts together without becoming oppressive and stultifying, and why he believes that a Democratic win in the midterm elections is essential to checking what he sees as the authoritarian tendencies of Donald Trump.
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Does defensive gun use stop crime? Would more gun control save lives? Those were the topics of a public debate recently hosted by the Soho Forum, featuring Gary Kleck, a criminologist from Florida State University, and Paul Helmke, the former president and CEO of the Brady Center/Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence as well as the former mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Kleck argued that there are at least four times as many defensive gun uses by potential victims as there are by criminals, and that new gun controls would reduce the defensive uses far more than the criminal ones. Helmke questioned Kleck's take on the data.
The debate was held on September 13, 2018, at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village. Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein moderated.
The full resolution read: While laws that prohibit gun ownership would reduce crimes perpetrated by criminals, that benefit would be more than offset by the foregone opportunities for defensive gun use by victims of crime.
It was an Oxford-style debate in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. Kleck, arguing the affirmative, prevailed by convincing about six percent of audience members to change their minds.
All Soho Forums are turned into Reason videos and podcasts. Go here for a full archive.
Kleck's research has focused on the impact of firearms and gun control on violence, deterrence, and crime control. He is the author of Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, which won the 1993 Michael J. Hindelang Award of the American Society of Criminology. He also wrote Targeting Guns (1997) and, with Don B. Kates, Jr., The Great American Gun Debate (1997) and Armed (2001), and, with Brion Sever, Punishment and Crime (2017).
Helmke is a professor of practice at Indiana University's School of Public and Environmental Affairs, and he is the founding director of the Civic Leaders Living-Learning Center in Bloomington, IN.
Edited by Todd Krainin.
"Modum" by Kai Engle is licensed under a CC-BY creative commons license.
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Over the weekend, The New Yorker published explosive new allegations of sexual impropriety by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, this time involving an alleged incident from his freshman year at Yale in the early 1980s. Since then, Kavanaugh has flatly denied everything, President Trump has said he stands with the judge, and The New York Times has questioned the veracity of the new story. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hear testimony from Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, the judge's earlier accuser, on Thursday.
In today's Reason Podcast, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie discuss the fallout of the Kavanaugh hearing not just as it relates to the future of the Supreme Court but to journalistic norms and public discourse. We also talk about the uncertain fate of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who may be out from his role of overseeing Robert Mueller and the federal probe into Russian influence in the 2016 election. And we talk about what we've been reading, watching, and listening to.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Imagine growing up in Baghdad and seeing your brother and cousin killed by Al Qaeda and other sectarian forces. Imagine getting death threats from groups such as the Madhi Army, a religious militia that once controlled large parts of the U.S.–occupied Iraq.
That's some of what 27-year-old Faisal Saeed Al Mutar faced during his childhood. Born into a family that prized analytical thinking and independent thought, he wrote critically of Islam and lived a secular lifestyle, making him a target for radical groups. Mutar fled to the U.S. five years ago.
Here he heads Ideas Beyond Borders, a nonprofit that promotes freedom of expression in authoritarian countries. I sat down with Mutar to talk about his life, his personal experience with radical Islam, and Ideas Beyond Borders' latest project: translating into Arabic the works of secular Enlightenment thinkers such as Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and distributing them to readers in North Africa and the Middle East.
Edited by Todd Krainin.
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Earlier this year, Rachel Goldsmith became executive director of the Free State Project, which describes itself as "a mass migration of more than 20,000 people who have pledged to move to New Hampshire." By concentrating themselves in one state, the Free Staters plan to become a bloc pushing New Hampshire toward more libertarian policies.
In the latest Reason Podcast, Goldsmith, an MBA originally from Albany, New York, tells Reason's Nick Gillespie that the number of year-over-year "movers" to New Hampshire has doubled, and that many of the people associated with the movement who have run in the state's primaries have won. While the Free State Project doesn't endorse specific candidates or pieces of legislation, more than a dozen current legislators are allied with the group. "It's been pretty inspiring," she says. "We're definitely in the 'family wave' of things. We have a lot of folks with kids and young professionals who are considering having kids coming to our events."
In a wide-ranging conversation, Goldsmith also previewed the group's annual winter event, Liberty Forum. To be held February 7–9 of next year in Manchester, the gathering will be keynoted by Cody Wilson, head of Defense Distributed, a nonprofit that develops and publishes open-source gun designs suitable for 3D printing and digital manufacture.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Should a late-breaking, single-sourced accusation about a drunken teenaged assault 35 years ago be enough to scuttle a Supreme Court nomination? That's the super-charged political debate the United States is having right now, and it definitely split the room on the Monday editor-roundtable version of the Reason Podcast.
Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch each have their own ideas about what could and should happen next with the Senate confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, now that Christine Blasey Ford has forward publicly to accuse him of drunkenly pinning her down, covering her mouth, and trying to rip off her clothes when they were high school students in the '80s. We also lay blame for our current deficit-tastic political moment, and we give away way too many spoilers (well, Suderman does, anyway) to a new movie out in theaters.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Geometric Dreams' by Asthmatic Astronaut is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
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Should America be more like Sweden? Have the Swedes figured out how to combine a cradle-to-grave welfare state with a prosperous, modern economy? Swedish author Johan Norberg stars in a new documentary that debunks outdated utopian myths, making a case that the nation that gave us Ingmar Bergman and IKEA has a lot to teach the U.S.—though not for the reasons that most people think.
Norberg's grand tour of his homeland reveals a country steeped in classical liberalism. Americans will be surprised to learn that Sweden's experiment with socialism was a relatively brief flirtation, lasting about 20 years and ending in disillusionment and reform.
Sweden began rolling back government in the early 1990s, recapturing the entrepreneurial spirit that made it a wealthy country to begin with. High taxation and a generous array of government benefits are still around. Now it's a nation of school vouchers, free trade, open immigration, light business regulation, and no minimum wage laws.
Sweden: Lessons for America can be seen on public television stations starting tomorrow.
Interview by Todd Krainin. Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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There has been a staggering reduction in global poverty over the last four decades. In China, sustained rates of economic growth have lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty. Ethiopia, a country once synonymous with famine, has grown faster than China while nearly halving its poverty rate over the last 15 years. Across the planet, developing countries large and small, from India to Ghana, have seen astonishing successes in alleviating poverty, exceeding even the most optimistic economic forecasts.
How did this extraordinary shift happen? Do poor countries need more markets, or more government?
Two of the world's best-known development economists, Joseph Stiglitz and William Easterly, met on August 27, 2018, at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village to debate these questions. The event was sponsored by the Soho Forum, a monthly debate series partnered with Reason. Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein moderated.
Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former chief economist of the World Bank, is a professor at Columbia University. He credits thoughtful and aggressive government intervention for the rising fortunes of China and Ethiopia. In his view, markets are a tool to stimulate economic growth—but not always the most effetive one. "You always are going to have a mixture of governments and markets," he says. "And the only success is going to be where you get the right mixture."
Easterly is a professor of economics at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He argues that China only achieved stellar growth rates after the Communist Party started to recede from economic life and created a space for markets to thrive. Likewise, Ethiopia prospered only after the disintegration of a repressive Communist regime, known as the Derg, paved the way for widespread privatization of industry and commerce.
Produced by Todd Krainin.
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Did you see Barack Obama's big get-back-in-the-ring speech last week? Here's the whole kaboodle; here's a five-minute highlight reel. The former president said stuff like "I complained plenty about Fox News, but you never heard me threaten to shut them down, or call them enemies of the people," warned about relying on rogue White House bureaucrats to sometimes do the right thing, and extolled voting as the number-one method for counter-acting his successor.
To the surprise of no one, that latter suggestion in particular irked Katherine Mangu-Ward during our Monday editor-roundtable version of the Reason Podcast, also featuring Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch. The discussion quickly broadened out to the importance/veracity of Bob Woodward's new book, the possible identities and purpose of the anonymous New York Times White House resister, the political garbage-fire of last week's Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, last week's social media hearings on Capitol Hill, and more.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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"It's been a circus," says Reason Senior Editor Damon Root of the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Even before the hearings officially commenced, Democratic senators called for a halt to the proceedings. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) released confidential documents and likened himself to Spartacus, a self-promoting act of "civil disobedience" that mostly earned the likely 2020 presidential candidate tons of Twitter abuse.
In the latest Reason Podcast, Root, the author of Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court, regrets the lack of smart questions from senators and candid answers from Kavanaugh. Root says the D.C. Circuit judge has at times ruled as a strict majoritarian, which is troubling from a libertarian perspective. A former member of the Bush administration, Kavanaugh has also written positively of wide-ranging executive privilege in ways that are especially disturbing during a presidency as embattled as Donald Trump's. Root talks to Nick Gillespie about all that, plus the history of confirmation hearings and why they are now so heavily scripted rather than open-ended conversations about judicial philosophy and temperament. Root expects Kavanaugh to be confirmed along strictly partisan lines.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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In 2015, psychology professor Jonathan Haidt and free-speech activist Greg Lukianoff published "The Coddling of the American Mind" in The Atlantic. It argued that speech codes, trigger warnings, and safe spaces on college campuses are "disastrous for education—and mental health." It quickly became the most-read article in the history of the magazine.
Now they've expanded it into a new book with the same title.
Lukianoff, a lawyer by training, heads FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which fights for free speech on campus. Haidt teaches at New York University and is a co-founder of Let Grow, the free-range parenting advocacy organization, and Heterodox Academy, which promotes intellectual diversity among faculty.
Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with them to talk about why they believe that, as their book's subtitle puts it, "good intentions and bad ideas" about the supposed fragility of young people is "setting up a generation for failure."
Edited by Alexis Garcia. Intro by Todd Krainin.
Photo Credits: Gage Skidmore/Flickr, picture-alliance/dpa/NEWSCOM
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The New Yorker invites Steve Bannon to its festival, then doesn't. California Democratic Party Chairman Eric Bauman demands a boycott of In-N-Out Burger over political contributions, then doesn't. A wave of sports-apparel self-destruction greets Nike's new advertising campaign starring anthem-kneeler Colin Kaepernick. Or does it?
Could it be that people are just performatively overreacting to the funhouse partisan mirror that is social media? That question—including President Donald Trump's use of the format—dominates today's editor-roundtable version of the Reason Podcast, featuring Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch. Other topics include the awfulness of Congress, the loneliness of centrism, the awesomeness of Reason's latest great-debates issue, and the blatant Johnson-blocking being engineered by the Democratic Party of New Mexico.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Zachary R. Wood came to national attention when, as a undergraduate at ultra-liberal Williams College, the student group that he helped lead was pressured to cancel its invitation to Suzanne Venker, a conservative author and critic of feminism.
Activists accused him of "causing actual mental, social, psychological, and physical harm" to his fellow students, and "paying for...the continued dispersal of violent ideologies that kill our black and brown (trans) femme sisters." After he invited the former National Review writer John Derbyshire to speak, the university president unilaterally shut the event down.
The self-described "liberal Democrat" and Hillary Clinton supporter says his commitment to open dialogue comes from dealing with his mother's mental illness, his frequent moves as a child, and being a black scholarship student at mostly white, wealthy schools. "I was coming from a disadvantaged community and going to a school in a more affluent community and that meant I had to be open and making friends with peers from very different backgrounds." He notes that he and his new schoolmates were quick to project both negative and positive stereotypes on one another. "Part of what that experience challenged me to do was to assess those stereotypes and resist the inclination to make them."
In Uncensored: My Life and Uncomfortable Conversations at the Intersection of Black and White America, Wood writes about the urgent need for civil discourse and open debate, especially on college campuses. The recent graduate talked with Reason about how administrators are as much or more to blame as student activists for the repressive atmosphere at universities, and why he looks forward to exploring issues of class mobility and how school choice can benefit low-income minorities in his work as a journalist.
Edited by Ian Keyser.
'Machinery' by Kai Engel is licensed under CC BY NC 4.0
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“There’s been a massive effort by both the federal government and now the state governments to stop Cody from putting information on the internet,” says Josh Blackman, attorney for Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson, the self-described “anarchist” fighting for the right to post downloadable instructions for 3D-printed guns online.
“The efforts to silence people always fall on those who are outside the mainstream, those pushing the boundaries. And that’s precisely what the First Amendment ought to protect,” says Blackman, who joined Wilson’s legal team in 2015 and also teaches constitutional law at the South Texas College of Law Houston. “The mere fact that this is code doesn’t make it not speech.”
Reason Senior Editor Damon Root recently spoke with Blackman about the current state of Wilson’s case and about the fundamental constitutional questions it raises. In a wide-ranging conversation, Root and Blackman talked speech, guns, “Lochner-izing the First Amendment,” and why Blackman thinks “the ACLU has been MIA” from the legal fight over 3D-printed guns. “If this case involved banning the posting of blueprints to 3D-print sex toys,” Blackman says, the ACLU “would be fighting to the teeth. But when it comes to guns, they’re just not there.”
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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This being 2018, the national political discussion at this very moment is about President Donald Trump's insufficiently lowered flag mast following the death of the longtime senator, former prisoner of war, and noted Trump foil John McCain. It's a momentary skirmish in a week-long battle over funeral manners in the wake of a powerful person's death, and so yes we go there on today's editor-roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast.
You will also hear in this episode a spirited argument between Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch over whether Trump should fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whether Reason will become the president's biggest defender if he's run up on campaign finance charges, and whether the "Bill Clinton" option of impeachment is the best case for the country.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Aspirato' by Kai Engel is licensed under CC BY NC 4.0
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As the eponymous host of The Greg Gutfeld Show, which airs Saturday evenings on Fox News, as co-host of the network's hugely popular afternoon talk show The Five, and as the creator of the now-defunct path-breaking late-night show Red Eye, Greg Gutfeld is one of the most ubiquitous presences on cable news.
He's also one of the sharpest and funniest. A prolific writer and former editor of Maxim and Stuff, Gutfeld has a new book out, The Gutfeld Monologues: Classic Rants from The Five, which features annotations and corrections by the author of past mistakes.
I sat down with the libertarian-leaning conservative to talk about his book, the origins and persistence of punk rock attitudes, the exaggerated death of print media, and just how great it would be if Rosie O'Donnell challenged Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
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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.
Lacey and Larkin also made more than than few powerful enemies, including Arizona Sen. John McCain (they exposes his ties to Charles Keating, a central figure in the savings & loan debacle), his wife Cindy (they exposed her habit of using a children's philanthropy to supply herself with prescription drugs), Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio (whose extraconstitutional activities they reported on endlessly), and current California senator and former state attorney general Kamala Harris (who accused the pair of abetting pedophiles and pimps). 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. The two men wear ankle monitors while awaiting trial in 2020 on charges of money laundering, conspiracy, and violating the Travel Act.
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.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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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.
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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.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Smooth Actor' by Podington Bear is licensed under CC BY NC 3.0
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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.
Photo credit: Jim Epstein, Reason
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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
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"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.
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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.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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"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.
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"When we buy into this narrative that free speech is a conservative value and censorship is a liberal value, we basically invite this chasm where the First Amendment and free speech values steadily get less and less support," says attorney Ken White, who's the proprietor of the legal blog Popehat, the host of the Make No Law podcast, and a contributing editor at Reason. "Saying that the First Amendment is conservative is historically completely illiterate. It's [protected] mostly progressives from being suppressed through most of the twentieth century."
Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with White, who spends his days as a criminal defense attorney at Brown White & Osborn in Los Angeles. They talked about Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court, the dismissal of director James Gunn from the Guardians of the Galaxy series, what limits should be put on employee speech inside and outside the workplace, and his libertarian views on law and society.
Government is the "giant, vicious dog you bring in to protect you from robbers," says White, and it "traditionally ends up protecting the interests of the moneyed, the connected, and the powerful."
Produced by Paul Detrick. Edited by Lorenz Lo.
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Over the weekend, Donald Trump tweeted that "tariffs are working big time" and said that his trade war would help us pay down the national debt. On today's Reason Podcast, special guests Eric Boehm and Robby Soave join Katherine Mangu-Ward and Peter Suderman to talk about the latest escalations in Trump's trade war and how Trump's bad trade policies are enabling cronyism.
Also on this week's podcast: Medicare for all costs how much? Will 3D-printed guns doom us all? And what are we supposed to make of The New York Times hiring technology writer Sarah Jeong, even with a history of controversial tweets? As always, we end with recommendations for books (Manhattan Beach), television (The Affair), and a video game (Wolfenstein II: The New Colussus).
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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In Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia, Michael Shermer seeks to explain why so many of us are deeply invested in the idea of a world beyond the one we're already living in. Shermer isn't just talking about religious believers. He also chronicles the ways socialists and others have tried to create paradise now, and the obsessions of transhumanists trying to create a secular version of immortality.
One of the world's best-known "skeptics," Shermer teaches at Chapman University, is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, writes a column for Scientific American, and has penned a shelf of best-selling books on such subjects as evolution, the brain, and the morality of capitalism.
In a wide-ranging conversation taped at FreedomFest, an annual gathering of libertarians held each July in Las Vegas, Nick Gillespie asked Shermer about his long association with libertarian ideas, including his involvement with Andrew Galambos, an idiosyncratic self-help guru whose ideas about intellectual property were famously parodied in Jerome Tuccille's underground classic, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand. They also discussed the welcome return and explicit defense of Enlightenment values of rationality, evidence, disinterestedness, and progress—in his work, and in the work of such figures as Matt Ridley, Deirdre McCloskey, and Steven Pinker.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Reason magazine was founded 50 years ago, in 1968, by Lanny Friedlander (1947-2011), who was then a student at Boston University. As part of Reason's ongoing 50th anniversary celebration, I've been interviewing past editors of the print magazine for the Reason Podcast. Previous episodes include conversations with Robert W. Poole, Marty Zupan, Virginia Postrel, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward.
A few weeks ago, it was my turn to be interviewed about my time at the top of the mast. I joined the staff in 1993 as an assistant editor and served as editor in chief of the magazine and website from 2000 to 2008. Then I became editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason TV, a dual position I held until earlier this year, when I became an editor at large.
Katherine Mangu-Ward conducted the wide-ranging interview at the center of today's episode. She zeroed in on a 1999 cover story of mine, "All Culture, All the Time," as illuminating many of the themes that Reason would explore under my stewardship. The story celebrated what I called "cultural proliferation" and the breakdown of single standards of greatness, quality, seriousness, legitimacy, you name it. Just as the economic sector had been deregulated and liberalized in key ways during the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, the cultural sphere of our lives was finally deregulated. Let a 1,000 websites bloom! I likened what was happening at the turn of the century to the breakdown of state religion in 17th-century England.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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The late Jonathan Gold wrote about food in Southern California with an intimacy that brought readers closer to the people that made it. The Pulitzer Prize–winning critic visited high-end brick-and-mortar restaurants as well as low-end strip malls and food trucks in search of good food wherever he found it. Gold died of pancreatic cancer last month, but he still influences writers like Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times columnist and author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.
Arellano sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to talk about Gold's legacy, political correctness in cuisine, and why Donald Trump's love of taco salad gives him hope in the midst of all of the president's anti-Mexican rhetoric. The interview took place at Burritos La Palma, named by Gold as home to one of the five best L.A. burritos.
Produced and edited by Paul Detrick.
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By the time she arrived last year at The New York Times to help write and edit its Opinion section, 34-year-old Bari Weiss had already done stints at the online magazine Tablet and The Wall Street Journal. She had also made a number of enemies who accused her of being a narrow-minded, right-wing, pro-Israel, anti-Arab bigot. Far from bringing some fresh ideas to The Gray Lady's leftish commentary section, her hire, wrote The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald, emodied the paper's "worst failings—and its lack of viewpoint diversity."
In Greenwald's reading, Weiss "has churned out a series of trite, shallow, cheap attacks on already-marginalized left-wing targets that have made her a heroine in the insular neocon and right-wing intelligentsia precincts." Her widely read pieces about the identity-politics excesses of a lesbian march in Chicago and of the #MeToo Movement, and her chronicling of the "intellectual Dark Web" didn't represent anything new, just more of the same. Greenwald wrote an attack on Weiss's student days at Columbia, claiming that she defamed anti-Israel professors as racists and tried to silence them academically. That charge prompted National Review's David French, who in a previous life was the president of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), to write that Greenwald and others were "sliming" Weiss.
I sat down to talk with Weiss at FreedomFest, the annual gathering of libertarians held every July in Vegas. She was in town to attend the Reason Media Awards because she was a finalist for the Bastiat Prize which "honors writing that best demonstrates the importance of freedom with originality, wit, and eloquence. Indeed, she took home the top prize, besting finalists Jake van der Kamp of South China Morning Post, Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic, Gustavo Arellano of The Los Angeles Times; and Bonnie Kristian of The Week. We talked about Israel and Jewish identity in America and her work, why she considers herself a liberal (among other things, she's pro-marriage equality and abortion), how to avoid becoming the cartoon version of your most-outspoken critics, and more. She's no libertarian, but she's also nobody's conventional liberal or conservative either.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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President Donald Trump's current lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, spent the weekend calling Trump's previous lawyer, Michael Cohen, a liar, while Trump continued to make false statements about the Russia investigation. On today's podcast, Reason's Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Christian Britschgi try to sort out who and what, if anything, we should believe. In the moderator's chair, Peter Suderman—that's me!—fills in for Matt Welch, who is still on vacation.
Later on, the gang discuss the latest twists and turns in the Trump trade war drama, Britschgi's groundbreaking reporting on plastic straw bans, and why everyone is talking about socialism. As always, this fun-filled and freewheeling hour of news and opinions ends with staff recommendations: for board games (Secret Hitler), documentaries (Far From the Tree), books (To the Bridge), and TV shows (Sharp Objects).
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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When President Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Randy Barnett—a libertarian legal scholar, Georgetown Law professor, and Volokh Conspiracy blogger—praised the choice, writing that "Kavanaugh's appointment would move the Court in the direction of textualism and originalism. He's very interested in the separation of powers in general and with respect to the administrative state in particular."
In a new Reason Podcast recorded at FreedomFest, the annual gathering of libertarians in Las Vegas, Barnett fleshes out his assessment of Kavanaugh, including areas in which the judge is not so good from a libertarian point of view (think Fourth Amendment). Barnett also talks about the history of Supreme Court confirmation hearings and the radical departure things took with the nomination of Robert Bork to the high court in 1987.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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The Pulitzer-winning columnist George Will has been in Washington, D.C. since the 1970s and he's basically seen it all. But at a special Reason Podcast recorded at FreedomFest, the annual gathering of libertarians held every July in Las Vegas, he admits to be being frightened of what he's calling "the Big Flinch" or "a recoil against the churning of an open society, against the spontaneous order that is the alternative to statism, against the frictions of economic growth that becomes more necessary as the entitlement state becomes more rickety. Meanwhile, the fatal conceit—the abandonment of [Friedrich] Hayek's epistemic humility—is everywhere, particularly in the Republican Party's embrace of protectionism."
On the latest Reason Podcast, I talk with baseball fanatic Will about the causes and consequences of the Big Flinch, what it's like to be completely let down by the GOP's leadership, the unquestionably positive dimensions of Donald Trump's presidency (think federal judiciary), and the really odd am-I-having-a-stroke-or-not experience not just of the Chicago Cubs finally winning a World Series but the Houston Astros snagging a world championship too...but for the American League.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) is a thorn in the side of the GOP establishment. He has voted against so many bills, including measures championed by his own party, that in 2013 Politico dubbed him "Mr. No."
Elected to Congress in 2012 at the height of the Tea Party movement, Massie is an MIT-trained engineer with 24 patents to his name. He founded SensAble Technologies, a pioneering tech company specializing in 3D scanning and touch computing.
He drives an electric car and lives with his family in an off-the-grid farmhouse, the subject of a new documentary produced by Free the People. But while Massie considers himself an environmentalist, he co-sponsored legislation last year to disband the Environmental Protection Agency. Solar panels may be the energy source of the future, he says, but that doesn't mean we have to mandate or subsidize their use.
Reason sat down with Massie at FreedomFest in Las Vegas to discuss his battles with the Republican establishment, how Trump's tariffs are breeding cronyism, why federal marijuana prohibition will come to an end, and the impact that he and his fellow libertarians in Congress are having on policy. A member of the GOP, Massie also explains why he won't be switching over to the Libertarian Party anytime soon.
Edited by Justin Monticello. Music by The Grand Affair.
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"Yeah, gigantic deficits are not good," says director of President Trump's National Economic Council Larry Kudlow in a clip at the top of today's Reason Podcast, before he goes on to make ridiculous excuses for gigantic deficits. Matt Welch is somewhere in a French chateau, so today's pod features special guest star Managing Editor Stephanie Slade, plus the usual gang of Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and yours truly.
After digging into the deficit darkness, we turn our thoughts to the latest revelations in the Trump Russia imbroglio, as well as the politics of criticizing socialist Democratic candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. We wrap up, as usual with our recommendations for stuff to read or watch or put in your face holes, which this week includes the new Mission:Impossible movie and some fancy booze from France.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Reason's Nick Gillespie, Robby Soave, and Mike Riggs debate whether Mark Zuckerberg's should de-platform haters to improve the user experience at the world's largest social-media service.
Congress is "given a pile of papers, sometimes a couple thousands pages long, a few hours before the expiration of a spending deadline," says Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). "When there's no opportunity for debate, for discussion, for amendment, for individual members to improve [legislation], you've effectively disenfranchised almost 300 million Americans."
Since toppling longtime incumbent Bob Bennett in a 2010 primary and then riding the Tea Party wave to become the junior senator from Utah, Lee has been one of the most careful and liberty-friendly legal minds in public office.
As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he'll participate in the upcoming confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. But he was almost in the hot seat himself: Lee was one of the seven finalists Trump considered to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy.
Lee talked with Reason about the Supreme Court selection process, Kavanaugh's Fourth Amendment views, and the senator's longstanding goal to get a sentencing reform bill on President Trump's desk.
Edited by Paul Detrick.
Photos of Sen. Mike Lee, Credit: Jeff Malet Photography/Newscom
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On July 2, 2018, Reason and The Soho Forum hosted a debate between Erik Voorhees, the CEO of ShapeShift, and Peter Schiff, CEO and chief global strategist of Euro Pacific Capital.
The proposition: "Bitcoin, or a similar form of cryptocurrency, will eventually replace governments' fiat money as the preferred medium of exchange."
It was an Oxford-style debate in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. Voorhees won by changing the minds of 15 percent of attendees.
The Soho Forum is held every month at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village. At the next debate, which will be held on August 27, William Easterly, professor of economics at NYU, and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize Winner in economics and professor at Columbia, will discuss whether free markets or government action is the best way to eliminate global poverty.
Produced by Todd Krainin.
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No legal commentator on cable news is more energetic, constitutionally minded, or libertarian than Andrew Napolitano, who has served as Fox News' senior judicial analyst for nearly two decades. A former New Jersey Superior Court judge, Napolitano is a nationally syndicated columnist—you can read him at Reason—and the author of a shelf full of books about law, history, and race in America.
Reason caught up with the judge at FreedomFest, the annual event held every July in Las Vegas. We talked about Donald Trump's ongoing makeover of the federal judiciary, whether Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will be good for libertarians, what it's like to be an ex-Republican, and the imminent return of Freedom Watch, the popular and controversial show that Napolitano hosted on Fox Business from 2006 to 2010.
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Garcia, Paul Detrick, & Jim Epstein. Graphics by Austin Bragg.
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Photo Credits: Gage Skidmore/Flickr, Pat Benic/UPI/Newscom, Joshua Roberts/REUTERS/Newscom
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"The huge standoff between the Republican and Democratic Parties, both of them being extreme right or extreme left,...make it more likely than it's ever been that a third party...will win the presidential election in 2020," says former Massachussetts governor (and former Republican) Bill Weld.
In a special podcast hosted by Matt Welch and me and taped last week at FreedomFest, the Libertarian Party's 2016 vice-presidential candidate waved off speculation that he's running for the party's presidential nomination. The election is too far away and too many unpredictable things could happen, he told us with a smile, even as he talked about all the party's candidates he's been helping out. Weld has already won over another lapsed Republican, Washington Post columnist George Will, who recently wrote that Weld incarnates "what a broad swath of Americans say they favor: limited government, fiscal responsibility, free trade, the rule of law, entitlement realism and other artifacts from the Republican wreckage." At the recent Libertarian convention in New Orleans, Weld impressed a good share of the party faithful too. His Twitter feed is filled with shout-outs and endorsements of Libertarian candidates such as Larry Sharpe and calls to "Stop the Duopoly."
In a wide-ranging conversation, Welch and I grill Weld about the ideological fissures within his party, whether he endorsed Hillary Clinton in the waning moments of the 2016 campaign, and how he would sell a message of principle in a nation that is getting more tribalistic by the minute.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has been taking his lumps in the media and other sectors of the anti-Trumposphere for these comments on CNN Sunday about Russia's hackery into the 2016 presidential campaign: "If we have proof that they did it, we should spend our time protecting ourselves instead of having this witch hunt on the president. I think we need to be done with this so we can protect our election....We all do it. What we need to do is make sure our electoral process is protected. They are not going to admit it in the same way we're not going to admit we were involved in the Ukrainian elections or the Russian elections." To which Mother Jones D.C. Bureau Chief David Corn tweeted simply: "Traitor."
This is one of several often-hysterical Trump/Russia-related controversies tackled today on the editor-roundtable version of the Reason Podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and me. Is the U.S. president's seeming equivalence of Russian and American interference in other countries' domestic elections accurate, and/or inappropriate? What does it mean (and is it meaningful) that Trump calls the European Union, China, and Russia "foes"? Is it proper for the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania to express clear preferences in the politics of its allies? These and other questions come under vigorous, if world-weary, debate.
Audio production by Ian Keyser. 'Day Into Night' by Rho is licensed under CC BY NC 3.0
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In the spring of 1989, Chinese students occupied Tiananmen Square, erected a replica of the Statue of Liberty, and called for democracy and individual rights. By the fall, people living in East Germany took hammers and chisels to the Berlin Wall, unleashing a wave of revolutions that ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was an auspicious year for human freedom.
Nineteen eighty-nine was also the year that Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto published The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in The Third World, which radically challenged conventional wisdom about the underlying cause of persistent poverty in the post-colonial landscape. Drawing on his extensive field work with the Peruvian-based think tank the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, de Soto argued that people were pushed into the black market and wider informal economy because governments refused to recognize, document, and promote legal ownership of land and other assets.
Without clear title and the right to transfer property, common farmers understandably refused to invest much in the land they tilled, and they couldn't use it as collateral. This created what de Soto later called "citadels of dead capital" with value that could never be fully accessed.
No one, he argued, would plan for the future if everything they accumulated could just be taken away. As much an activist as an intellectual, De Soto has been called "the world's most important living economist" by former President Bill Clinton. He is credited with changing policy in Peru and elsewhere by pushing governments to create property regimes that are public, transferable, and secure. His latest endeavor is a partnership with Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne and others to use blockchain technology and social media to create totally public and perfectly transparent records of ownership.
Reason's Nick Gillespie caught up with de Soto in Washington, D.C. in June, where he received the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Julian L. Simon Memorial Award, named for the late free-market economist who believed that "mankind is the ultimate resource."
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President Donald Trump's new nominee to serve on the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, is "supremely qualified" for the job, says Case Western Reserve University law professor and Volokh Conspiracy blogger Jonathan H. Adler.
In most ways, he continues, Kavanaugh is a good pick from a libertarian perspective. He's been a widely respected judge on the D.C. Circuit for a dozen years, he's an "originalist" when it comes to the Constitution (meaning he believes the text and meaning of laws when they are passed are central to their application), and he's a principled critic of the administrative state (rule by agency bureaucrats rather than by Congress).
So what's not to like if you're libertarian? Adler, who also writes for National Review, says that Kavanaugh is a cipher on issues surrounding the rights of criminal defendants. And when it comes to the procedural rights of enemy combatants, to national security measures, and to certain aspects of executive power, the 53-year-old D.C. native may be more deferential than most libertarians would want.
In a wide-ranging conversation about the shifting balance of power on the Supreme Court, confirmation-hearing hypocrisy from Democrats and Republicans, and fact-free attacks on the Federalist Society as a secretive king-making group, Adler talks about the future of abortion and same-sex marriage and the likely outcome of Kavanaugh's nomination.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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"We're looking at a destruction of the Constitution of the United States" if Donald Trump gets to pick Supreme Court justices, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) told MSNBC recently. A couple more appointments to the top court, she said to Chris Matthews, and you can kiss abortion rights, integrated schools, and more goodbye.
That completely deranged point of view is reaching a fever pitch today, the day that the president will announce his replacement for retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. On today's Reason Podcast, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and I talk about Trump's Supreme Court shortlist, just how much the Supreme Court matters in the long run, and whether The Donald is a net positive or negative for libertarian-minded Americans. On the one hand, he is deregulating certain aspects of the economy and the administrative state, and he's been less aggressive than George W. Bush or Barack Obama when it comes to sending troops overseas.On the other hand, he just started a global trade war, acts despicably toward immigrants, and has yet to actually cut spending.
Matt Welch also gives a first-hand report on what he saw at the Libertarian Party convention in New Orleans, and we talk about the legacy of Steve Ditko, the co-creator Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, and other more-popular-than-ever superheroes. An ardent Objectivist and Ayn Rand fan, Ditko contributed two comics to Reason in 1969, each of which took aim at "neutralists" who were willing to "compromise" with evil and thus become evil themselves (that's a rough paraphrase).
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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"I was a college student during the Vietnam War era, but I was putting myself through college and was way too busy with that to be one of those students... When I landed with Reason... I didn't know what 'Berkeley' was... I didn't know who Goldwater was," says Marty Zupan, who started writing for the magazine in 1972. "But when I encountered libertarian or classical liberal ideas...they just resonated with me."
Zupan became editor in chief in 1984, helming it during its move from Santa Barbara, California to Los Angeles. In 1989, she left Reason and the West Coast to take a job at the Institute for Humane Studies, where she would become president in 2001 before retiring in 2016.
Founded in 1968 by Lanny Friedlander (1947–2011), Reason is celebrating its 50th anniversary by hosting a series of in-depth conversations with past editors in chief about how the magazine has changed since its founding, what we've gotten right and wrong over the years, and what the future holds for believers in "free minds and free markets."
In this Reason Podcast, Zupan talks with me about her experiences and growth in the libertarian movement and focuses on the unique role that the magazine of "Free Minds and Free Markets" has played over the past half-century. "One of the virtues of Reason was that it drew on the multiple strands within the libertarian, classical liberal world out there," she says. "Reason would publish a debate, say, between a non-interventionist and a, 'No, really the Soviet Union and its empire is an existential threat to the US and we need to do something about it.' We had the internal debates."
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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In his new book, Suicide of the West, National Review's Jonah Goldberg talks about what he calls "the Miracle"—the immense and ongoing increase in human wealth, health, freedom, and longevity ushered in by the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. At turns sounding like Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, and economist Deirdre McCloskey, Goldberg writes, "In a free market, money corrodes caste and class and lubricates social interaction….Capitalism is the most cooperative system ever created for the peaceful improvement of peoples' lives. It has only a single fatal flaw: It doesn't feel like it."
As his book's title suggests, Goldberg isn't worried the world is running out of resources. He's troubled by our unwillingness to defend, support, and improve customs, laws, and institutions that he believes are crucial to human flourishing.
"Decline is a choice," he writes, not a foregone conclusion. While he lays most of the blame for our current problems on a Romantic left emanating from Rousseau, he doesn't stint on the responsibility of his own tribe of conservative fearmongers and reactionaries.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Reason, Goldberg talks about his new book, his persistent opposition to Trump, how his thinking has evolved on a number of culture-war issues, and why he can't just admit once and for all that he's becoming a libertarian.
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alexis Garcia and Austin Bragg.
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For all the student speech that's being squashed on college campuses these days, higher education faces an even-more serious threat: intellectual conformity among professors, researchers, and scholars. Over the past 25 years, for instance, the "American academy went from leaning left to being almost entirely on the left. Similar trends and problems are occurring in the UK and Canada."
Enter Heterodox Academy, a group of academics and scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and research sciences that has its origins in a blog started in 2015 by New York University's Jonathan Haidt. The group currently claims over 1,800 professors and graduate students as members whose mission is "to improve the quality of research and education in universities by increasing viewpoint diversity, mutual understanding, and constructive disagreement."
"Ideological frameworks, including political orientation, powerfully inform the assumptions scholars and professors make, the questions they ask, the outcomes they value, and the way they interpret their data and their world," Heterodox's founding documents argue. "When campuses don't include ideologically diverse voices and don't engage seriously with dissenting ideas, students and scholars miss the opportunity for their thinking to be challenged." The group offers a wide-range of resources, ranging from a blog to a podcast to an online library of texts and videos, that are designed to help start and sustain wide-ranging, serious conversations among academics.
Headquartered in New York, Heterodox Academy recently sponsored a day-long "Open Mind" conference (you can watch the whole thing on the group's website) featuring scholars and journalists from all over the political spectrum.
Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Heterodox Academy's Deb Mashek about her goals for the conference and the group. A Ph.D. in social-and-health psychology who was a full professor at Harvey Mudd College in California, she became Heterodox Academy's first full-time executive director earlier this year.
Imagine it's sometime in the future, but not so far in the future that you're not still putting together flat-packed furniture.
You realize you need to drive some screws into the bookcase or whatever it is you're assembling. Instead of rummaging through your garage or basement for your goddamned electric screwdriver, you tap out "rent a drill" on your a smart phone app. A few minutes later, a package arrives at your door. It contains a drill, you drive the screws, you send the drill back. Total time: 10 minutes. Total cost $2.50.
That's a scenario from Tomorrow 3.0, a new book by Duke University economist and political scientist Michael C. Munger. Subtitled Transaction Costs and the Sharing Economy, it takes a long look at what he says is, after the Neolithic and Industrial Revolutions, the third great economic revolution in world history—a revolution that is already well under way.
I talked with Munger about the future of work in a gig economy, the possible need for a guaranteed basic income, and why laws and policies designed to preserve the labor status quo inevitably increase the pace and magnitude of disruption. Co-editor of The Independent Review, Munger also explains how he came to his libertarian beliefs and how he designed the arresting cover of his latest book.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Last week was a huge week for Supreme Court related news and on today's Reason Podcast, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Damon Root (author of 2014's highly regarded Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court), and I work through the intricacies of Janus v. AFSCME and Carpenter v. United States and assess whether the rulings are wins or losses for liberty (both are wins!). Our regular host, Matt Welch, is on assignment covering the Libertarian Party National Convention in New Orleans.
We discuss whether Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is retiring at the end of the month, was reliably libertarian during his decades on the bench (kind of) and whether his replacement will really be able to overturn Roe v. Wade, which is literally what Donald Trump promised when he was running for president. As a bonus, I put each of the panelists on the spot to say straight up whether they think abortion should be legal and under what circumstances. We also discuss the gruesome murder of five people at Annapolis's Capital Gazette and ponder if 2018 is starting to look a lot like 1968, the year of Reason's founding, when there was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air?
When it comes to sharing what we're reading, listening to, or watching, this week's recommendations are eclectic as hell and lead into a semi-tense discussion about whether aesthetics and ideology are linked. Suderman gives thumbs up to Kanye West's latest set of releases; Mangu-Ward admits she's reading Henry George's single-tax manifesto Progress and Poverty (it's for a conference, she says, when asked whether she!); Root, a teenage metalhead, cops to mourning the death of drummer Vinnie Paul by listening to Pantera's catalog; and I give a rave review to Be More Kind, the new album from libertarian post-punk Brit folkster Frank Turner, whom I properly describe as the Bizarro-world Billy Bragg (the guy has a tattoo of the Sumerian "amagi" and another commemorating the great English Leveller "Freeborn John" Lilburne!).
There's still time to register for the Reason Media Awards (tickets and more info here), which will be held this year at FreedomFest, the world's largest annual gathering of libertarians. It takes place in Las Vegas from July 10-14. (Tell them Reason sent you).
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Few TV shows—especially few political shows—can compare to Firing Line, the talk show hosted by William F. Buckley, Jr. In its original incarnation, it ran for 33 years and over 1,500 episodes and featured guests ranging from Muhammad Ali to Ronald Reagan to Jack Kerouac to Milton Friedman to Mother Teresa.
The show went off the air in 1999, but now it's back on PBS with Margaret Hoover in the host chair.
Born in 1977, Hoover is the great-granddaughter of Herbert Hoover, a former contributor to Fox News and CNN, and the author of 2011's American Individualism: How a New Generation of Conservatives Can Save the Republican Party.
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Jim Epstein.
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By announcing his retirement from the Supreme Court (effective at the end of July), Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy has poured more gas on a political season that's already in flames. Since joining the Court in the late 1980s, Kennedy has been seen as the key swing vote and, in the words of Reason Senior Editor Damon Root, "perhaps the single most influential jurist alive today," who "will surely go down in American legal history as one of the most influential justices to serve on the high court."
In today's Reason Podcast, I talk with Root, author of the 2014 book Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court, about Kennedy's crucial role in rulings on issues such as free speech, campaign finance, gay marriage, and abortion. One of the country's keenest Supreme Court watchers, Root also talks about possible replacements for Kennedy and why he'd like to see the president nominate a jurist like Don Willett, Clint Bolick, or Diane S. Sykes.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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In a highly anticipated Supreme Court ruling, Janus v. AFSCME, the nation's high court said public-sector employees can no longer be forced to pay dues to unions to cover activities in connection with compensation, workplace rules, and related issues. The plaintiff in the case, Mark Janus, is a state employee in Illinois who objected to having $50 taken out of his paycheck and given to a union, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. The ruling affects workers in the 20 states that had not yet banned the practice.
The decision is being hailed by a wide variety of pro-business groups and many libertarians as a victory for economic freedom and freedom of association. But its long-term impact is not clear.
About 35 percent of public-sector workers belong to unions, a figure that hasn't changed much in the last 25 years. "Unions are probably right to be worried about losing dues-paying members in the aftermath of the Janus ruling," writes Reason's Eric Boehm, who has covered the story closely. "An analysis by the Illinois Economic Policy Institute, a union-backed think tank, estimates that 726,000 workers nationally would stop paying dues if they had that choice. The loss of union members and their dues could be particularly challenging in blue states, according to the IEPI report. Public-sector union membership would decrease by an estimated 189,000 members in California, 136,000 members in New York, and 49,000 members in Illinois."
In the newest Reason Podcast, I talk to Boehm about the ruling and its possible implications for public-sector workers, unions, and taxpayers.
Back in February, I talked with Mark Janus about why he brought his lawsuit, what it's like to be at the center of a major Supreme Court case, and more.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Did you ever notice that elite athletes seem to be getting...older? You're not imagining things. In 2016, Peyton Manning won a Super Bowl for the Indianapolis Colts at the ripe old age of 39. A year later, Tom Brady did the same thing at the same age for the New England Patriots (boo). This year, tennis great Roger Federer became the oldest man to be ranked number one (he's 36). His female counterpart, Serena Williams, has won more Grand Slam tennis titles than anyone and was ranked number one in 2017 when she was 35. She also faced off against her 36-year-old sister Venus in that year's Australian Open final.
The new book Play On: The New Science of Elite Performance at Any Age, explores and analyzes why today's professional athletes aren't just sticking around longer but are often getting better as they get older. And it's not simply pros, says Jeff Bercovici, the San Francisco bureau chief of Inc. and a former staffer at Forbes. The rest of us are upping our games as we move into middle age and beyond, he writes, increasing our "healthspan," or years at or near the top of our physical condition even as we live longer. Rich in detail and humor (Bercovici memorably documents his ordeals at some of the nation's top conditioning clinics), Play On is ultimately a book about self-improvement and taking control not just of your life but your body and mind, too.
In a wide-ranging discussion, Bercovici talks to me about everything from blood-doping, by which athletes seek to increase their endurance, to Silicon Valley's current penchant for "blood boys" (don't ask).
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Will the Red Hen episode lead to a "Red Wedding"-style breakdown of the American political family? It's been an unavoidable conversation these last 52 hours in American politics, so it kicks off this week's editor-roundtable version of the Reason Podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch.
Aside from the legality, political efficacy, and etiquette of public-official-shaming, the editors share what they learned during the family-separation imbroglio, celebrate last week's Fourth Amendment victory at the Supreme Court, break down the advent of health association plans, and manage not to spoil the season finale of Westworld.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Should the U.S. Constitution be interpreted and applied according to the original meaning of its text?
On June 11, 2018, two leading constitutional legal scholars, Georgetown's Randy Barnett and Cornell's Michael Dorf, debated "originalism," which seeks to protect against arbitrary and personal interpretations by jurists, while making the law stable, predictable, and consistent in its application.
The debate was hosted by Reason and the Soho Forum, which runs Oxford-style debates, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains more ground is victorious. The resolution was: "The U.S. Constitution should be interpreted and applied according to the original meaning communicated to the public by the words of the text."
Dorf won the debate by changing the minds of 20 percent of the attendees.
Barnett, arguing for the affirmative, is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at the Georgetown University Law Center and the director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. His books include Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People and Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty. After taking a J.D. from Harvard Law School, he worked as a prosecutor in Chicago. Barnett is a Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute and the Goldwater Institute.
Dorf, for the negative, is the Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law at Cornell University Law School. He is the editor, author, or co-author of six books, including On Reading the Constitution, with co-author Laurence Tribe. Since 2000, Dorf has written a bi-weekly column, currently appearing on Justia's Verdict. He also posts less formal legal analysis several times per week on his blog, Dorf on Law. After taking a JD from Harvard Law School, he served as a law clerk for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then for Justice Anthony Kennedy of the Supreme Court of the United States.
The event opened with a standup routine from comedian Dave Smith.
The Soho Forum is held every month at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan's East Village. The next debate, which is sold out, features Erik Voorhees and Peter Schiff on bitcoin and crypotcurrency. On August 27, William Easterly and Joseph Stiglitz will discuss whether free markets or government action is the best way to eliminate global poverty.
Produced by Todd Krainin.
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"In those original weeks of Ferguson," says Reason Editor at Large Matt Welch while talking about the 2014 police shooting that started nationwide protests and conversations about police violence, "we started seeing the country use terms and looking at issues that [Reason had] been using and looking at for years. So things like the militarization of police, a great Radley Balko phrase, suddenly was on the tips of everyone's tongue.... [In the] last couple of years, [we're seeing it with] civil asset forfeiture, just what an awful thing that is, or the way local cities just shake down their poorest residents in the criminal justice system as a way to fund their operations." He also points to pot legalization, marriage equality, warnings about mounting national debt, and alarm over the ways campuses handle sexual abuse as cases where Reason has been way ahead of the curve.
Founded in 1968 by Lanny Friedlander (1947–2011), Reason is celebrating its 50th anniversary by hosting a series of in-depth conversations with past editors in chief about how the magazine has changed since its founding, what we've gotten right and wrong over the years, and what the future holds for believers in "free minds and free markets."
In this Reason Podcast, I talk with Matt Welch, who was editor of the print magazine from 2008 through 2016, about how he became a libertarian and learned about Reason, what it was like working at The Los Angeles Times opinion page, and whether he still believes in "The Libertarian Moment," a concept that he and I came up with in 2008.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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"Deregulate everything," reads a typical tweet from Cliff Maloney, the avuncular national president of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), a student group started by former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) on the heels of his insurgent runs for president in 2008 and 2012.
With chapters on 900 campuses, YAL is fast-growing and increasingly visible. Its mission is to identify and train political activists who can start conversations about limited government and individual freedom in new and interesting ways. (YAL's giant "free-speech beach balls," on which people can write anything they want, have caused a commotion on more than a few campuses.) Unlike many other libertarian groups, YAL also endorses candidates for office.
I caught up with Maloney at FEEcon, the annual gathering in Atlanta sponsored by the Foundation for Economic Education, to talk about the midterm elections, whether Donald Trump is good or bad for libertarians, and what to expect at YAL's national convention in July.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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