"You don't get conned because you're stupid—you get conned because you're human." That's the message of this week's guest, Brian Brushwood. He's an Austin-based magician, podcaster, and professional skeptic. With shows like Scam Nation and The Modern Rogue, he's taught millions of us how to upgrade our B.S. detectors in a world where truth is more …

Are you part of the growing stoicism movement? Built on virtue, reason, and self-control, the ancient Roman philosophy is gaining popularity in a world that just seems to get crazier and crazier. Today's guest is a self-described stoic. Robert Rosenkranz is the author of The Stoic Capitalist: Advice for the Exceptionally Ambitious, which takes a de…

Today's guest is evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins, whom Reason's Nick Gillespie interviewed last fall in Milwaukee as part of his "Final Bow" tour. Gillespie and Dawkins talked about why he believes science can't thrive without freedom, why gender ideology is starting to look a lot like Soviet Lysenkoism, and why some tr…

"I feel fear… because they're somewhat vindictive people. I don't care who you are, having this set of people mad at you is not comfortable." That's today's guest, Cliff Asness, talking about President Donald Trump, his administration, and his supporters. Asness is the outspoken billionaire co-founder of AQR Capital Management. He is also a pioneer…

Today's guest is Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker and Reason's Nick Gillespie discuss recent shifts at Harvard toward greater institutional neutrality and free speech, while warning that threats to academic freedom now come from both internal ideologies and external political forces—including pressure from the federal government under Pre…

Today's guest is John Arnold—the former Enron wunderkind and billionaire philanthropist (and Reason Foundation supporter) who's determined to hack America's most expensive and least accountable public sector systems in areas such as criminal justice, education, and pensions. (Fun fact: He was once called "the most hated man in pensionland" by Gover…

Jeffrey Singer, a Cato Institute fellow and longtime surgeon, argues that government overreach in health care undermines patient autonomy, which should be the guiding principle in medical decision making. Drawing from historical examples and personal experience, he critiques licensing laws, the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) drug approval mon…

Today's guest is Harvard economist Jason Furman, who was one of former President Barack Obama's chief economic advisers and an architect of the Affordable Care Act. These days, he's in the news for his withering critique of former President Joe Biden's dismal economic record and two-fisted attacks on President Donald Trump's trade policy. We talk a…

Today's guest is Mark Clifford, former editor in chief of the South China Morning Post whose recent book, The Troublemaker, chronicles the life of Jimmy Lai, a man who escaped mainland Communist China to Hong Kong as a child and went on to become a self-made billionaire. But now at age 77, Lai is a political prisoner, currently on trial in China fo…

Satire is a powerful force for political and cultural change. But is it even possible in a world that outstrips our imagination on a daily—or even hourly—basis? Today's guests are two young novelists who are redefining satire in the 21st century. Leigh Stein is the author of Self Care, which is set at a women's wellness startup where things go very…

You've probably heard about microdosing, which involves taking a small, "sub-perceptual" dose of psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin on a regular basis to ward off depression, anxiety, and chronic pain—or to optimize focus and boost energy. Today's guests are James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber, authors of the new book Microdosing for Health, Healing, …

Today's guest is Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty, who has just published Modern Libertarianism: A Brief History of Classical Liberalism in the United States. His previous books include Radicals for Capitalism, the indispensable history of the libertarian movement, and titles covering the Ron Paul revolution, gun rights, Burning Man, and undergro…

This week's guest is Rachel Barkow, a professor of law at New York University and the author of the book Justice Abandoned: How the Supreme Court Ignored the Constitution and Enabled Mass Incarceration, which was just released this month. Barkow and Reason's Billy Binion talked about the importance of the presidential pardon power—which is a contro…

Our guest today is Alton Brown, who for years hosted Good Eats on the Food Network and brought his interest in science to the making of dinner. He's currently touring the country, and he has also just published Food for Thought, a great collection of essays about food, culture, and his life on and off the screen. In this episode, Reason's Nick Gill…

Today's guest is Columbia University linguist and New York Times columnist John McWhorter. In 2021, he published Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, which argued that politically correct "antiracism" was not only a new religion but a dangerous form of illiberalism that quashed free expression, individual liberty, and social …

Jim O'Shaughnessy is a superstar investor and venture capitalist who leads O'Shaughnessy Ventures and hosts the popular Infinite Loops podcast. He's also the coauthor of the new collection Two Thoughts, which compiles provocative quotes from figures ranging from Sam Adams and Ludwig von Mises to Frank Zappa. O'Shaughnessy chats with Reason's Nick G…

The Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991, taking down with it the threat of international communism, right? Today's guest says no, writing that, "Far from dead, Communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started." Sean McMeekin is a historian at Bard College and the author of the mesmerizing book To Overthrow the World: The Ris…

Today's guest is Nico Perrino, executive vice president at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), director of the 2020 documentary Mighty Ira, which profiles the longtime head of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the author of a forthcoming book on the triumph of civil libertarians. He's also the host of the popula…

One of the very first things that Donald Trump did after being sworn in as president was to make good on promises to reduce both legal and illegal immigration. He even issued an executive order ending birthright citizenship, a right guaranteed by the Constitution's 14th Amendment. That order has already been blocked by a federal judge, and its fate…

"Even paranoids have real enemies," said the poet Delmore Schwartz, who was both clinically paranoid and definitely on to something, according to today's guest: Michael Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine, Substack superstar, and author of many best-selling books about rationalism, the evolution of morality, and pseudoscience. He quotes Schwar…

This week's guest is Christina Dent, whose organization, End It For Good, seeks to change the approach to addiction from a criminal justice issue to a health-centered one. But Dent is not your typical anti–drug war activist. She's an evangelical Christian who believes legalizing drugs is the conservative thing to do—a position she adopted after an …

"Tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary," says Donald Trump, who made many promises throughout the 2024 presidential race to raise the cost of imports from China, Mexico, and Canada—America's three biggest trading partners. But are Trump's tariffs a good idea or a terrible one? And is the era of free trade coming to a close? That's the…

Today's guest is Sister Helen Prejean, a Catholic nun famous for her activism against the death penalty. In the early 1980s, Prejean met a prisoner on death row—Elmo Patrick Sonnier—after an activist asked her to write him a letter. She served as Sonnier's spiritual adviser and accompanied him to his death, which inspired her work against capital p…

Few figures have literally and figuratively electrified American culture the way Bob Dylan has. He released his first album in 1962, won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, and continues to perform about 100 concerts a year at the ripe age of 83. His life is chronicled in the new movie A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet. But what's the…

Today's guest is Penny Lane, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker whose previous works include Listening to Kenny G and Hail Satan?, both of which formed the basis of previous Reason interviews linked in the show notes. Her exceptional new film is Confessions of a Good Samaritan. It's currently streaming on Netflix and follows her experience as an "…

In late 2017, in the name of "zero tolerance," President Donald Trump introduced a policy of separating parents and children who crossed the Southern border and requested asylum in the United States. In all, an estimated 5,500 children were taken from their parents and many were held in detention facilities, some of which had been constructed by th…

Reason's annual Webathon is underway. Please considering donating here. Today's guest is Brendan O'Neill, chief political writer for Spiked and the author of the bracing new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation. O'Neill and Reason's Nick Gillespie talk about the response in the United Kingdom and the United State…

Today's guest is Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst who is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center and a columnist for The Free Press. A decade ago, in the wake of the Arab Spring and various "color" revolutions around the world, Gurri published The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, which analyzed how social m…

Today's guest is Amanda Knox, an activist, writer, and host of the podcast Labyrinths. In 2007, while studying abroad in Italy, Knox was accused of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in what the lead prosecutor claimed was a bizarre sex game gone wrong. Despite mishandled DNA, a coerced confession, and a lack of credible evidence, Knox was c…

In the wake of massive victories by Donald Trump and Republicans, here's a question worth asking: What does today's GOP really stand for? Longstanding support for free trade and overseas wars seems to have been replaced with tariffs and non-interventionism. Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis are the authors of The Myth of Left and Right. They argue that …

Join Reason's Nick Gillespie live on election night at YouTube, X, and Reason.com, starting at 10 p.m. EST. Will history be made? Will it end? Joining Gillespie are The Fifth Column's Kmele Foster, Bloomberg economics columnist Allison Schrager, and many more special guests, who will break down the weirdest—and possibly the most consequential—elect…

Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist at Stony Brook University and the author of the new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Al-Gharbi argues that academics, journalists, and other elite professionals that he calls "symbolic capitalists" are disconnected from the marginalized and disadvantaged communities they claim…

Today's guest is Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, the co-founder of Ideas Beyond Borders (IBB), a nonprofit that translates books and articles about limited government, freedom of thought, and market economics into Arabic and other languages, and distributes them for free in the Middle East and other parts of the world. (Full disclosure: Reason's Nick Gilles…

Today's guest is Meghan McCain, political commentator, former co-host of ABC's The View, and host of the podcast Citizen McCain. Reason's Billy Binion talks with her about the changing GOP, bias in corporate media, the 2024 election, and what it's like to be a non-MAGA, nonpopulist member of today's Republican Party. 0:00- Introduction 0:21- Ad: St…

Today's guests are Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, author of Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, and American Enterprise Institute fellow Ruy Teixeira, coauthor most recently of Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with them a…

Today's guest is Billy Binion, who joined Reason's staff in 2019 after stints at an opera company (!) and as a contractor for NATO (!!). He has written blockbuster stories about the abuse of power by cops and courts, and he just produced an incredible documentary about a citizen journalist in Laredo, Texas, who sued the city after they arrested her…

You've probably heard some variation of the notion that Millennials and Gen Z are going to be the first generations of Americans to have lower standards of living than their parents. It's too expensive to go to college, to buy a house, to have kids—you name it, goes this line of thinking. Today's guest has good news: Younger Americans are actually …

Today's guest is Kat Timpf, whose new book is I Used To Like You Until…:(How Binary Thinking Divides Us). In a totally insane election season, this just might be the most important book of the year. A sequel of sorts to 2023's You Can't Joke About That: Why Everything Is Funny, Nothing Is Sacred, and We're All in This Together, it seeks to show how…

Today's guest is Mike Pesca, who publishes The Gist podcast every weekday. The Gist, which launched in 2014, is a tight 30 minutes of news, interviews, and opinions on the biggest issues of the day. Pesca is a veteran of NPR and Slate—experiences that have made him an outspoken critic of legacy media, especially its willingness to overthrow longsta…

Today's guest is Reason's Eric Boehm, a reporter and the host of the podcast Why We Can't Have Nice Things. The first season of the podcast exposed how little-understood trade policies and regulations screwed with the pricing and availability of everything from baby formula to women's underwear to frozen chicken. The new season focuses on laws and …

Today's guest is Nick Cave, the music legend who emerged from Australia in the 1980s. Over the years, Cave has written screenplays, soundtracks, and novels, and has collaborated with a diverse range of artists, from Johnny Cash and Kylie Minogue to P.J. Harvey and Neko Case. Known for his brooding and meditative mystique, he coauthored the bestsell…

If you ever wanted to live in a world of endlessly fascinating conversations about the arts, science, and philosophy, you're going to love today's guest—Anna Gát. She's the person behind a platform* called Interintellect, which hosts hundreds of online salons a year. While some of them feature superstars like Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, rel…

Charles Gasparino is a senior correspondent for the Fox Business Network and a columnist for the New York Post. He's also the author of the new book Go Woke, Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America. Gasparino analyzes major missteps by companies such as Anheuser-Busch, Target, and Disney and explores how CEOs and top m…

Today's guest is the Libertarian Party's candidate for president Chase Oliver, who wants to phase out Social Security and Medicare for younger Americans, create a 21st century version of Ellis Island, and get the government out of bedrooms and boardrooms. A longtime antiwar activist, he also wants to bring American troops home and slash the Pentago…

Today's guest is libertarian legal giant Randy Barnett, who has just published his memoir, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist. Currently a law professor at Georgetown, Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with Barnett about his days as a prosecutor in Chicago, how he helped create the legal philosophy of originalism, what it was lik…

Ted and Courtney Balaker are the team behind the new documentary The Coddling of the American Mind. Based on the 2018 best-selling book by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, the film follows a series of students as they navigate life on today's highly charged college campuses. I spoke with Courtney and Ted, who started his video career as one of th…

This week's guest on The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie is school choice activist Corey DeAngelis, whose provocative new book is The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools. A senior fellow at the American Federation for Children and a former education policy analyst at the Reason Foundation (the nonprofit …

Today's guest is Eric Brakey, the new executive director of The Free State Project, a nonprofit that has been working since 2001 to get small-government diehards to move to New Hampshire and make the Granite State a stronghold for libertarian ideas. Prior to becoming head of the Free State Project, Brakey was a Republican state senator in Maine, wh…

This week's guest is Andy Mills, the co-creator of Reflector, a new documentary podcast. Reflector's early episodes delve into controversial treatments for alcoholism and the free speech implications of the trial of rapper Young Thug, whose lyrics are being used by prosecutors to build a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) cas…

Today's guest is Mike Rowe, the podcaster, former host of Dirty Jobs, and star of Something To Stand For, an unabashedly patriotic film in which he tells unknown stories about legendary figures in American history. Something To Stand For will be in theaters from June 27th through the 4th of July, and will be available online afterward. Reason's Nic…