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," 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.

Previous appearance:

• How Rob Long Went From Cheers to National Review to LSD

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.

The post Rob Long: Welcome to the Age of Blunder in Public Health, Foreign Policy, and…Hollywood appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Tara Isabella Burton: Self-Made, From Da Vinci to the Kardashians appeared first on Reason.com.

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 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.

The post Alex Winter: Is <i>The YouTube Effect</i> Good or Bad on Balance? appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Today's sponsor:

• 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.

The post Doug Stanhope: 'Nothing Stands Above Everything Else. Everything Annoys Me Equally.' appeared first on Reason.com.

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 post Jean Twenge and Elizabeth Nolan Brown: What Do Millennials Want? appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Matt Taibbi: How the Left Lost Its Mind and Legacy Media Its Audience appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Matt Ridley: Why Did Anthony Fauci et al. Suppress the Lab Leak Theory? appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Mike Rowe: The Missing 7.2 Million Male Workers appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Alec Stapp: Give Trump Credit for Operation Warp Speed appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Previous appearances:

Jonah Goldberg on Why He Left National Review, Dislikes Sean Hannity and Seb Gorka, and Is Inching Toward Libertarianism, December 4, 2019

Is Jonah Goldberg Turning Into a Libertarian? It Sure Sounds Like It., July 5, 2017

Jonah Goldberg on The Tyranny of Cliches, Creating NRO, and the Firing of John Derbyshire, May 31, 2012

The post Jonah Goldberg: A NeverTrumper's Take on the 2024 Election appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Coleman Hughes and Walter Olson: The Supreme Court Got Its Affirmative Action and Gay Website Cases Right appeared first on Reason.com.

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."

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.

The post Bridget Phetasy: Why I Left California for Texas appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

To watch the video version, go here.

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.

The post Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: COVID, Ukraine, Bitcoin, Guns, Free Speech, and More appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Kevin Kelly: Excellent Advice for Living From the World's Leading Optimist appeared first on Reason.com.

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."

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. 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. For details, go here.

The post Brendan O'Neill: A Heretic's Manifesto appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

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. For details, go here.

The post Clark Neily: Regardless of Guilt, Trump Won't Go to Jail appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

• 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. For details, go here.

The post Peter Bagge: From Adam Smith to Punk to Grunge appeared first on Reason.com.

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. For details, go here.

The post Cody Wilson: The Future of Gun Control and U.S. Politics appeared first on Reason.com.

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. For details, go here.

The post Kat Timpf: Make America Funny Again! appeared first on Reason.com.

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. For details, go here.

The post Dave Rubin: Why Libertarians Should Vote for Ron DeSantis appeared first on Reason.com.

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."

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. For details, go here.

The post Clea Conner: America Needs More and Better Debates appeared first on Reason.com.

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. For details, go here.

The post Eli Lake: Trump, Russiagate, and the End of FBI Credibility appeared first on Reason.com.

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 Culture
• Jesse Singal: Why We Keep Falling for Psychological Quick Fixes

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.
• 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. For details, go here.

The post Jesse Singal: How To Stay Honest While Doing Journalism appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream 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.

The post Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Scott Winship: Governments Can't Increase Birthrates. They Shouldn't Even Try. appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Stefan Sagmeister: An Artist Who Believes 'Now Is Better' appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of this week's The Reason Livestream, 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.

To watch the video version, go here.

The post Jaan Tallinn and Robin Hanson: Should We Pause A.I.? appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Vernon Smith: Adam Smith's Relevance, Jimmy Carter's Deregulation, and the Fed's Biggest Mistake appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, 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.

The post Jacob Siegel: 'Disinformation' Is the Hoax of the Century appeared first on Reason.com.

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 '00s 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:

• 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 post Ben Smith: Why It Matters that <em>Gawker</em>, <em>BuzzFeed News</em>, and <em>Breitbart News</em> Failed appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Vivek Ramaswamy: Why He's Running for President—and Against 'Woke Capitalism' appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Matt Dallek: The John Birch Society's Deep Influence on Trump's GOP appeared first on Reason.com.

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 Livestream, 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.

The post Connor Boyack and Corey DeAngelis: Why K-12 Education Sucks and How To Fix It appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Daniel Akst: The World War II Pacifists Who Changed America Forever appeared first on Reason.com.

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 Livestream, 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.

Today's sponsors:

• The Reason Roundtable live in New York! For the first time, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Nick Gillespie will tape live and unfiltered in New York. Come out on Tuesday, April 25 to the historic Village Underground (130 West 3rd Street)! Tickets are $25, include entry to the after-party, and are going fast. For more details and to buy tickets, go here!
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a taping of The Reason Interview podcast. The next one is in New York City on Monday, May 1, when Nick Gillespie interviews Ben Smith, the first editor in chief of 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, HuffPost, Breitbart, and his old employer Buzzfeed. Doors open at 6 p.m. Eastern. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. It's always a great evening of camaraderie and conversation, so come on out. For more details and to buy tickets, go here.
• The Reason Livestream. Every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller host live, unscripted conversations at Reason's YouTube channel with leading policy makers, activists, writers, and thinkers about everything from attempted internet censorship to COVID policy failures to the future of the Libertarian Party to cryptocurrency crackdowns to the failure of K-12 education. Find the online archive here.

The post Ian Vásquez: COVID Accelerated the Global Decline in Human Freedom appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Today's sponsors:

• The Reason Roundtable Live in New York! For the first time, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Nick Gillespie will tape live and unfiltered in New York. Come out on Tuesday, April 25 to the historic Village Underground (130 West 3rd Street)! Tickets are $25, include entry to the after-party, and are going fast. For more details and to buy tickets, go here!
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a taping of The Reason Interview. On Monday, May 1, at Manhattan's Blue Building (222 East 46th Street), Nick Gillespie interviews Ben Smith, the first editor in chief of Buzzfeed News, former New York Times media columnist, and founder of Semafor. In Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral, Smith charts the rise and fall of Gawker, HuffPost, Breitbart, and his old employer, Buzzfeed. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For details and to buy tickets, go here.

The post Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi: Who Owns Libertarianism? appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason Roundtable live in New York! For the first time, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Nick Gillespie will tape live and unfiltered in New York. Come out on Tuesday, April 25 to the historic Village Underground (130 West 3rd Street)! Tickets are $25, include entry to the afterparty, and are going fast. For more details and to buy tickets, go here!

The post Taylor Lorenz, Peter Van Valkenburgh: Why Banning TikTok Is Stupid and Unwarranted appeared first on Reason.com.

"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.

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.
• The Reason Roundtable Live in New York! For the first time, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Nick Gillespie will tape live and unfiltered in New York. Come out on Tuesday, April 25 to the historic Village Underground (130 West Third Street)! Tickets are $25.00, include entry to the afterparty, and are going fast. For more details and to buy tickets, go here!

The post Kerry Howley: A Journey Through the Deep State appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Ethan Nadelmann: How To Legalize All Drugs! appeared first on Reason.com.

"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 whose interview begins at the 0:17:05 mark)—and five other people, including:

• Magatte Wade [0:02:55], a Senegalese entrepreneur who coordinates Atlas' work in Africa;
• Alex Gladstein [0:10:25], 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 [0:38:35], an Iranian journalist forced into exile due to his criticism of his country's theocratic leaders;
• Tony Woodlief [0:45:46], the head of State Policy Network's Center for Practical Federalism and author of I, Citizen: A Blueprint for Reclaiming American Self-Governance; and
• Tom Palmer [0:54:30], 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.

Today's sponsors:

• The Reason Roundtable Live in New York City! For the first time ever, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch will tape live and unfiltered in New York, a city that is arguably the most hostile place in the country when it comes to taxes and regulation and arguably the most welcoming when it comes to living however the hell you want—a paradox that urban anarchists and minimal-government types can both savor and argue about. Come out on Tuesday, April 25 to the historic Village Underground. Tickets are $25 and must be purchased online.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a taping of The Reason Interview podcast. The next one is in New York City on Monday, April 3, when Nick Gillespie interviews University of San Diego philosopher Matt Zwolinski and Heterodox Academy President John Tomasi about their new book, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism. Doors open at 6 p.m. Eastern. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. It's always a great evening of camaraderie and conversation, so come on out. For more details and to buy tickets, go here.

The post Deirdre McCloskey: 'What We Want Is a Nonslave Society' appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Today's sponsors:

• DonorsTrust. Want a principled and tax-friendly way to simplify your charitable giving? Open a DonorsTrust giving account. Giving accounts are simple, secure, and tax-advantaged: You deposit money with DonorsTrust, tell them where to send your gifts, and they take care of all the paperwork for you. The added bonus? When you open an account with DonorsTrust, you become part of a community of like-minded givers that honor and share your belief in free markets and limited government. Visit DonorsTrust.org/nick to get a free donor prospectus and learn more about DonorsTrust.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a taping of The Reason Interview podcast. The next one is in New York City on Monday, April 3, when Nick Gillespie interviews University of San Diego philosopher Matt Zwolinski and Heterodox Academy President John Tomasi about their new book, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism. Doors open at 6 p.m. Eastern. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. It's always a great evening of camaraderie and conversation, so come on out. For more details and to buy tickets, go here.
• The Reason Livestream. Every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller host live, unscripted conversations at Reason's YouTube channel with leading policy makers, activists, writers, and thinkers about everything from attempted internet censorship to COVID policy failures to the future of the Libertarian Party to cryptocurrency crackdowns to the failure of K-12 education. Find the online archive here.

The post Bragg Brothers: Remy Videos, Libertarian Parodies, and Their Acclaimed New Film, <i>Pinball</i> appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is William Bratton, the former police commissioner of New York City and former 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.

Today's sponsors:

• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. It doubles as a taping of The Reason Interview podcast. The next one is in New York City on Monday, April 3, when Nick Gillespie interviews University of San Diego philosopher Matt Zwolinski and Heterodox Academy President John Tomasi about their new book, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism. Doors open at 6 p.m. Eastern. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. It's always a great evening of camaraderie and conversation, so come on out. For more details and to buy tickets, go here.
• The Reason Livestream. Every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller host live, unscripted conversations at Reason's YouTube channel with leading policy makers, activists, writers, and thinkers about everything from attempted internet censorship to COVID-policy failures to the future of the Libertarian Party to cryptocurrency crackdowns to the failure of K-12 education. Find the online archive here.

The post Bill Bratton: Fighting Crime Without Shredding Civil Liberties appeared first on Reason.com.

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 Walensky, 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.

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.
• The Reason Speakeasy. This is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. The next one takes place in New York City on Monday, April 3, with Nick Gillespie interviewing University of San Diego philosopher Matt Zwolinski and Heterodox Academy President John Tomasi about their new book The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism. Doors open at 6 p.m. Eastern. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now. For an archive of past events, go here.
• The Reason Livestream. Every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller talk live and in-depth with newsmakers, rhetorical bomb-throwers, elected officials, writers, thinkers, and activists who are changing how we think and live. Tune in live at Reason's YouTube channel and ask questions, or check out the archive.

The post Dr. Vinay Prasad: You're Right Not To Trust Public Health appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason Livestream. Every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller host live, unscripted conversations at Reason's YouTube channel with leading policymakers, activists, writers, and thinkers about everything from attempted internet censorship to Covid-policy failures to the future of the Libertarian Party to cryptocurrency crackdowns to the failure of K-12 education. Online archive here.

The post Hester Peirce, Nic Carter: The Government vs. Cryptocurrencies appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Kat Rosenfield: Why It's Important for Novelists To Speak Freely appeared first on Reason.com.

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; and
• The 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?

Watch an abridged video version of this interview:

The post Dave Cicirelli: Does Selfie Culture Destroy Real Individualism? appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Today's sponsors:

• Lions of Liberty Podcast Network. Take your first step toward freedom by checking out one of the oldest libertarian/anarchist podcast networks in the world. On Mondays, John Odermatt delivers a powerful mix of inspiration, health, and faith to set your mind, body, and soul free with Finding Freedom. On Wednesdays, Brian McWilliams will make you laugh at our broken world while providing the promise of a better future with Mean Age Daydream. Friday's offerings include shows like Meme Wars, Hatewatch, and Libertarians in Living Rooms Drinking Liquor. Listen today at Lions of Liberty Network and everywhere podcasts are found. Past episodes featuring Nick Gillespie talking postmodernism and South Park and Rick and Morty are here and here.
• 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 post Marc Andreessen: What the World Needs Most Is More Elon Musks appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Today's sponsors:

• Lions of Liberty Podcast Network. Take your first step toward freedom by checking out one of the oldest libertarian/anarchist podcast networks in the world. On Mondays, John Odermatt delivers a powerful mix of inspiration, health, and faith to set your mind, body, and soul free with Finding Freedom. On Wednesdays, Brian McWilliams will make you laugh at our broken world while providing the promise of a better future with Mean Age Daydream. Friday's offerings include shows like Meme Wars, Hatewatch, and Libertarians in Living Rooms Drinking Liquor. Listen today at Lions of Liberty Network and everywhere podcasts are found. Past episodes featuring Nick Gillespie talking postmodernism and South Park and Rick and Morty are here and here.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. The next one takes place in New York City on Monday, February 6, with Nick Gillespie interviewing Reason contributor, UnHerd columnist, Feminine Chaos podcaster, and mystery writer Kat Rosenfield about celebrities caving to woke critics, cancel culture, and her new novel You Must Remember This. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now.

The post Robert Pondiscio: Why Our Kids Can't Read appeared first on Reason.com.

"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 Earle-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.

Earle-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.

Today's sponsors:

• Lions of Liberty Podcast Network. Take your first step toward freedom by checking out one of the oldest libertarian/anarchist podcast networks in the world. On Mondays, John Odermatt delivers a powerful mix of inspiration, health, and faith to set your mind, body, and soul free with Finding Freedom. On Wednesdays, Brian McWilliams will make you laugh at our broken world while providing the promise of a better future with Mean Age Daydream. Friday's offerings include shows like Meme Wars, Hatewatch, and Libertarians in Living Rooms Drinking Liquor. Listen today at Lions of Liberty Network and everywhere podcasts are found. Past episodes featuring Nick Gillespie talking postmodernism and South Park and Rick and Morty are here and here.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. The next one takes place in New York City on Monday, February 6, with Nick Gillespie interviewing Reason contributor, UnHerd columnist, Feminine Chaos podcaster, and mystery writer Kat Rosenfield about celebrities caving to woke critics, cancel culture, and her new novel You Must Remember This. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now.

The post Winsome Earle-Sears: School Choice 'Is New <i>Brown v. Board</i>' Fight appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Today's sponsors:

• Lions of Liberty Podcast Network. Take your first step toward freedom by checking out one of the oldest libertarian/anarchist podcast networks in the world. On Mondays, John Odermatt delivers a powerful mix of inspiration, health, and faith to set your mind, body, and soul free with Finding Freedom. On Wednesdays, Brian McWilliams will make you laugh at our broken world while providing the promise of a better future with Mean Age Daydream. Friday's offerings include shows like Meme Wars, Hatewatch, and Libertarians in Living Rooms Drinking Liquor. Listen today at Lions of Liberty Network and everywhere podcasts are found. Past episodes featuring Nick Gillespie talking postmodernism and South Park and Rick and Morty are here and here.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. The next one takes place in New York City on Monday, February 6, with Nick Gillespie interviewing Reason contributor, UnHerd columnist, Feminine Chaos podcaster, and mystery writer Kat Rosenfield about celebrities caving to woke critics, cancel culture, and her new novel You Must Remember This. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now.

The post Mark P. Mills: Get Ready for the Roaring 2020s! appeared first on Reason.com.

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?

At 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.

The post Andrew Tatarsky and Maia Szalavitz: How 'Harm Reduction' Is Transforming Drug Policy appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Beverly Gage: The Dark Truth About J. Edgar Hoover's FBI appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. The next one takes place in New York City on Wednesday, January 4, with Nick Gillespie interviewing psychologist Andrew Tatarsky and author Maia Szalavitz about "harm reduction" approaches to drug policy. Rather than seeking to prohibit all drug use, advocates of harm reduction call for policies that minimize negative consequences to individual users and society at large. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now.

The post Jacob Grier: Craft Cocktail Freedom and the Terrible Science Behind Vaping Bans appeared first on Reason.com.

"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.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. The next one takes place in New York City on Wednesday, January 4, with Nick Gillespie interviewing psychologist Andrew Tatarsky and author Maia Szalavitz about "harm reduction" approaches to drug policy. Rather than seeking to prohibit all drug use, advocates of harm reduction call for policies that minimize negative consequences to individual users and society at large. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now.

The post Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley: More People Means More Wealth appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Kaytlin Bailey: Time to Decriminalize—and Destigmatize!—Sex Work appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. The next one takes place in New York City on Thursday, December 1, with Nick Gillespie interviewing Kaytlin Bailey, the founder of Old Pros, a sex worker rights group, host of The Oldest Profession Podcast, 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. Doors open at 6:00 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now.

The post Robert Draper: The GOP Needs a Post-Trump Reality Check appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. The next one takes place in New York City on Thursday, December 1, with Nick Gillespie interviewing Kaytlin Bailey, the founder of Old Pros, a sex worker rights group, host of The Oldest Profession Podcast, 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. Doors open at 6:00 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now.

The post Steven Heller: Growing Up Underground appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. The next one takes place in New York City on Thursday, December 1, with Nick Gillespie interviewing Kaytlin Bailey, the founder of Old Pros, a sex worker rights group, host of The Oldest Profession Podcast, 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. Doors open at 6:00 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now.

The post Andrew Koppelman: 'Delusion and Greed' Have Destroyed Libertarianism appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Today's sponsors:

• Better Help online therapy. Are you having trouble solving problems in your life? Start talking to a licensed therapist who won't judge you but will listen and help you with your problems, whatever they are. Better Help is cheaper than most traditional forms of therapy and lets you talk with your therapist via chat, phone, or video—all within 48 hours of signing up and without the hassles of in-person appointments. Go here and get 10 percent off your first month as a listener to The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. The next one takes place in New York City on Thursday, December 1, with Nick Gillespie interviewing Kaytlin Bailey, the founder of Old Pros, a sex worker rights group, host of The Oldest Profession Podcast, 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. Doors open at 6:00 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now.

The post Maj Toure: Why Black Guns—and Libertarianism—Matter appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Andrew Doyle: How the 'New Puritans' Created a 'Frenzy of Conformity' appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Additional links to data referenced in this podcast:

Decriminalisation of Drugs What can we learn from Portugal? by Pierre Andersson

The Red State Murder Problem, by Kylie Murdock and Jim Kessler of Third Way

"Murders Are Rising. Blaming a Party Doesn't Add Up." by Jeff Asher

Pennsylvania Uniform Crime Reporting System

Philadelphia Police Department's crime maps and statistics

Fort Worth's Updated 2020 4th Quarter Crime Report

"Murder rate in Jacksonville dropped 23% in 2021 compared to 2020, according to sheriff," by Heather Crawford

"Homicides and overall violent crime are up in Philadelphia," by Isaac Avilucea

FBI historic crime statistics by city and region

The post Larry Krasner: Are Progressive Prosecutors Responsible for the Urban Crime Spike? appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

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.

0:00 Intro
01:43 Education and Men
9:00 Work and Men
18:26 Health and Men
23:12 Gains of Men
28:08 Deindustrialization
30: 30 Decline in Education Performance
40:18 Biology and Men
43:58 Decline in Work Performance
50:04 Affect on Black Men
54:52What the Left Gets Wrong
58:17 What the Right Gets Wrong
1:03:34 Solutions
1:09:26 Nursing
1:14:15 VoTech
1:17:25 Audience Q&A
1:30:30 Masculinity in Crisis

The post Richard V. Reeves: Why Are Men Failing at School, Work, and Life? appeared first on Reason.com.

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, and the future of freedom both online and offline.*

CORRECTION: The original version of this writeup mischaracterized Srinivasan's opinion on whether Peter Thiel is part of the "descending class."

• Better Help online therapy. Are you having trouble solving problems in your life? Start talking to a licensed therapist who won't judge you but will listen and help you with your problems, whatever they are. Better Help is cheaper than most traditional forms of therapy and lets you talk with your therapist via chat, phone, or video—all within 48 hours of signing up and without the hassles of in-person appointments. Go here and get 10 percent off your first month as a listener to The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.

The post Balaji Srinivasan: How To Build Your Own Country in the Cloud appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Is a War on Policing Increasing Crime? Q&A With Rafael Mangual appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post How Should Libertarians Think About Ron DeSantis? appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Today's sponsor:

• Better Help online therapy. Are you having trouble solving problems in your life? Start talking to a licensed therapist who won't judge you but will listen and help you with your problems, whatever they are. Better Help is cheaper than most traditional forms of therapy and lets you talk with your therapist via chat, phone, or video—all within 48 hours of signing up and without the hassles of in-person appointments. Go here and get 10 percent off your first month as a listener to The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.

The post Ken Burns, Lynn Novick: How Closed Borders Helped Facilitate the Holocaust appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Today's sponsor:

• Better Help online therapy. Are you having trouble solving problems in your life? Start talking to a licensed therapist who won't judge you but will listen and help you with your problems, whatever they are. Better Help is cheaper than most traditional forms of therapy and lets you talk with your therapist via chat, phone, or video—all within 48 hours of signing up and without the hassles of in-person appointments. Go here and get 10 percent off your first month as a listener to The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.

The post Phil Magness: Holding Leftists and Libertarians Accountable appeared first on Reason.com.

"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.

Previous Reason interviews with Russ Roberts:

"Why the Middle Class Is Better Off Than You Think," October 31, 2019

"Should You Be Optimistic About America's Future?" April 26, 2018

"Adam Smith's Surprising Guide to Happiness (but Not Wealth)," October 8, 2014

"Why Keynesians Always Get It Wrong (and Most Economists Too)," October 11, 2012

"The Price of Everything," October 23, 2008

"What You Need To Know About the Bailout," October 7, 2008

Today's sponsor:

• Everyday Dose is the coffee alternative I start my days with. It's made from nonpsychedelic mushrooms, collagen, and nootropics that elevate my mood, sharpen my focus, and give me an energy boost, all without the jitters and digestive issues that come with drinking traditional coffee. It tastes great too and is quick and easy to make. Try risk-free, with a 60-day, money-back guarantee by going here now.

The post Russ Roberts: Why Economists Are Irrelevant appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

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.

The post Corey DeAngelis: COVID Lockdowns Made School Choice Inevitable appeared first on Reason.com.

"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.

Previous Reason interviews with and select articles by Grant McCracken:

"Is America Too Forgiving? The Case of Lance Armstrong," February 20, 2021

"Grant McCracken: The New Honor Code vs. Radical Wokeism," February 3, 2021

"How To Have a Good Idea: A unified theory of fantasy football; Eat, Pray, Love; and Burning Man," December 2012

"How Cultural Innovation Happens: Q&A with Anthropologist Grant McCracken," June 7, 2011

"The Politics of Plenitude," August/September 1998

Today's sponsors:

• Everyday Dose is the coffee alternative I start my days with. It's made from nonpsychedelic mushrooms, collagen, and nootropics that elevate my mood, sharpen my focus, and give me an energy boost, all without the jitters and digestive issues that come with drinking traditional coffee. It tastes great too and is quick and easy to make. Try risk-free, with a 60-day, money-back guarantee by going here now.
• The Reason Rundown With Peter Suderman. Free minds. Free markets. Big stories. That's The Reason Rundown, which comes out every Friday. End the week with concise, thought-provoking stories from the journalists at Reason, the magazine of logic, not legends; coherence, not contradictions. Hosted by Features Editor Peter Suderman, in each episode he talks to a single Reason journalist about a single big story. Subscribe today.

The post Grant McCracken: The Rise of Artisanal Everything and 'Cruelty-Free Capitalism' appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Today's sponsors:

• Everyday Dose is the coffee alternative I start my days with. It's made from non-psychedelic mushrooms, collagen, and nootropics that elevate my mood, sharpen my focus, and give me an energy boost, all without the jitters and digestive issues that come with drinking traditional coffee. It tastes great, too, and is quick and easy to make. Try risk-free, with a 60-day, money-back guarantee by going here now.
• The Reason Rundown with Peter Suderman. Free minds. Free markets. Big stories. That's The Reason Rundown, which comes out every Friday. End the week with concise, thought-provoking stories from the journalists at Reason, the magazine of logic, not legends; coherence, not contradictions. Hosted by Features Editor Peter Suderman, each episode he talks to a single Reason journalist about a single big story. Subscribe today.

The post Julie Holland: 'How You Can Feel Good, With or Without Drugs' appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Video version here.

Today's sponsors:

• Everyday Dose is the coffee alternative I start my days with. It's made from non-psychedelic mushrooms, collagen, and nootropics that elevate my mood, sharpen my focus, and give me an energy boost, all without the jitters and digestive issues that come with drinking traditional coffee. It tastes great, too, and is quick and easy to make. Try risk-free, with a 60-day, money-back guarantee by going here now.
• The Reason Rundown with Peter Suderman. Free minds. Free markets. Big stories. That's The Reason Rundown, which comes out every Friday. End the week with concise, thought-provoking stories from the journalists at Reason, the magazine of logic, not legends; coherence, not contradictions. Hosted by Features Editor Peter Suderman, each episode he talks to a single Reason journalist about a single big story. Subscribe today.

The post <i>The Babylon Bee</i>'s Kyle Mann: 'I'm No More Deserving of God's Grace Than a Transgender Person Is' appeared first on Reason.com.

"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 vaginoplasty 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.

Previous Reason interviews with Michael Shermer:
"The Future of Science," by Matt Welch (December 28, 2018)
"Nick Gillespie and Skeptic Magazine's Michael Shermer on Postmodernism, Rationalism, and The Intellectual Dark Web," by Zach Weissmueller (December 21, 2018)
"Michael Shermer on Why Even Scientists, Transhumanists, and Atheists Want To Believe in Heaven," by Nick Gillespie (August 3, 2018)
"Reason and Science Make Us Moral: Michael Shermer on The Moral Arc," by Zach Weissmueller (January 20, 2015)
"Skeptic Michael Shermer on Atheism, Happiness, and the Free Market," by Reason Staff (December 7. 2010)
"Michael Shermer on the Modern History of Skepticism," by Reason Staff (August 7, 2009)
"Monkeys and Money," by Nick Gillespie (March 31, 2008)
"Michael Shermer: Evolutionary Economics and the Google Theory of Peace," by Dan Hayes (January 22, 2008)

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• The Reason Rundown With Peter Suderman. Free minds. Free markets. Big stories. That's The Reason Rundown, which comes out every Friday. End the week with concise, thought-provoking stories from the journalists at Reason, the magazine of logic, not legends; coherence, not contradictions. Hosted by Features Editor Peter Suderman, each episode he talks to a single Reason journalist about a single big story. Subscribe today.

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"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.

Previous Reason interviews with John Mackey:

"Can 'Conscious Capitalism' Make Business a Heroic Enterprise? John Mackey Is Betting Yes: Podcast," August 14, 2018

"John Mackey's Merger Made in Heaven," July 1, 2018

"'They're More Conscious and More Awake than My Generation Was,'" March 31, 2018

"Whole Foods' John Mackey on Amazon Merger: 'A Meeting of the Souls,'" March 30, 2018

"Whole Foods' John Mackey on Veganism, Gary Johnson, and How Regulation Is Stunting Innovation," August 16, 2016

"Whole Foods' John Mackey: Why Intellectuals Hate Capitalism," August 12, 2015

"John Mackey on Whole Foods, Conscious Capitalism, and Life Beyond the Profit Motive," March 21, 2013

"Whole Foods CEO John Mackey on the Moral Case for Capitalism," August 10, 2012

"Whole Foods Health Care," December 15, 2009

Today's sponsors:

• Everyday Dose is the coffee alternative that I start my days with. It's made from non-psychedelic mushrooms, collagen, and nootropics that elevate my mood, sharpen my focus, and give me an energy boost, all without the jitters, digestive issues, and focus that comes with drinking traditional coffee. It tastes great, too, and is quick and easy to make. Try risk-free, with a 60-day, money-back guarantee by going here now.
• The Reason Rundown with Peter Suderman. Free minds. Free markets. Big stories. That's The Reason Rundown, which comes out every Friday. End the week with concise, thought-provoking stories from the journalists at Reason, the magazine of logic, not legends; coherence, not contradictions. Hosted by Features Editor Peter Suderman, each episode he talks to a single Reason journalist about a single big story. Subscribe today.

The post Whole Foods' John Mackey: 'I Feel Like Socialists Are Taking Over' appeared first on Reason.com.

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. 

The post George Dawes Green: Why the Past—and Storytelling—Is Never Dead appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason Rundown with Peter Suderman. Free minds. Free markets. Big stories. That's The Reason Rundown, which comes out every Friday. End the week with concise, thought-provoking stories from the journalists at Reason, the magazine of logic, not legends; coherence, not contradictions. Hosted by Features Editor Peter Suderman, each episode he talks to a single Reason journalist about a single big story. Subscribe today.

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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.

The post John Cleese: Wokeism Is the Enemy of Comedy—and Creativity appeared first on Reason.com.

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?

Today's sponsors:

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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.

The post Glenn Greenwald: Tucker Carlson, Left-Wing Authoritarians, Identity Politics, and Free Speech appeared first on Reason.com.

"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?

Today's sponsors:

• The Reason Rundown with Peter Suderman. Free minds. Free markets. Big stories. That's The Reason Rundown, which comes out every Friday. End the week with concise, thought-provoking stories from the journalists at Reason, the magazine of logic, not legends; coherence, not contradictions. Hosted by Features Editor Peter Suderman, each episode he talks to a single Reason journalist about a single big story. Subscribe today.
• The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. Hosted by Nick Gillespie in New York City, the next one takes place on Wednesday, July 27, 2022 at The Sheen Center and features George Dawes Green, the founder of The Moth, the popular show and podcast that has redefined personal storytelling in the Internet Age. The author of three previous novels, Green's latest, The Kingdoms of Savannah, has just been published to rave reviews. Tickets are $10 and must be purchased online. Go here for details and here for previous installments of the Reason Speakeasy.

photo: Robin Rayne/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom

The post Noah Rothman: The Progressive War on Fun appeared first on Reason.com.

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. Check out past episodes by going here and look for upcoming events here.

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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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The post Randy Barnett: Abortion, Guns, and the Future of the Supreme Court appeared first on Reason.com.

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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The post Zach Weissmueller: Will the Mises Caucus Save or Kill the Libertarian Party? appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. On Monday, June 20, Nick Gillespie talks with legendary graphic designer Steven Heller and Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty about the latter's new book, Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix. The event takes place at Caveat, a bar and theater on the Lower East Side. Doors open at 6 p.m., program begins at 7 p.m. Tickets cost $10 and must be purchased ahead of time online. Details here.

The post Robert Breedlove: 'Just Follow the Energy' on Bitcoin, Not the Price appeared first on Reason.com.

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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The post Greg Lukianoff: Saving the 'Culture of Free Speech' appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post James Kirchick: How Homophobia Warped the Cold War appeared first on Reason.com.

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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The post Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, Melissa Chen: Bringing Enlightenment Values to the Middle East appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Agnieszka Pilat: 'I Didn't Realize People Still Think Socialism Is a Good Idea.' appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Should We Forgive Student Debt? appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Alex Epstein: Why the Future Needs More Fossil Fuels appeared first on Reason.com.

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 $31,000 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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Here's the video version of Reason's interview with Michael Saylor. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and receive automatic notifications when new videos go live.

The post Will Bitcoin Billionaire Investor Michael Saylor End up at McDonald's? appeared first on Reason.com.

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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The post Josh Blackman: Sam Alito, <i>Roe v. Wade</i>, and Libertarians appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Jimmy Wales: What Wikipedia Got Right About Social Media appeared first on Reason.com.

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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The post Aella: Libertarian Sex Worker Turned Data Scientist appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Jared Polis: The Most Libertarian Governor in America? appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: How To Avoid 'Absolutely Catastrophic' COVID Mistakes appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

Today's sponsors include:

• The Novus Society at Donors Trust, which is helping Americans under 40 help create a freer, better world through targeted, effective philanthropy.
• Better Help, which offers affordable, online private therapy with licensed professionals anywhere in the United States. Reason Interview listeners get 10 percent off their first month. Start talking to a therapist within 48 hours by going here.

The post Carl Hart: Legalize All Drugs Now! appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Jeff Kosseff: Why Anonymous Speech Is Good—and Constitutional appeared first on Reason.com.

"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.

Watch the video version of this interview here.

• Today's sponsor is Better Help online therapy. Are you feeling stresssed out, run down, anxious, short-tempered? Take the time to take care of yourself and start talking to a licensed therapist who won't judge you but will listen and help you with your problems, whatever they are. Better Help is cheaper than most traditional forms of therapy and lets you talk with your therapist via chat, phone, or video—all within 48 hours of signing up and without the hassles of in-person appointments. Go here and get 10 percent off your first month.
• 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.

The post Nathan Rabin: Why Gen X Is Super Media-Literate appeared first on Reason.com.

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.

The post Tom Sachs: Taking NFTs Where No Man Has Gone Before appeared first on Reason.com.

"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.

The post Mike Solana: 'Thought Crime' Is Essential to Progress appeared first on Reason.com.