Nick Gillespie Podcasts

In 2001, Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg burst onto the international scene with his bestselling and controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist. The onetime member of Greenpeace said that climate change is real and that human activity is clearly contributing to it, but he said the best science didn't support the apocalyptic visions …

This is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel. This week, Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe sat for an in-depth discussion with Johan Norberg about the lessons to draw from Sweden's pandemic policies The Swedish government's decision to forgo lockdowns as mos…

Over the past few episodes, I've been talking with people involved with what we at Reason are calling a psychedelic renaissance, or a rebirth of interest in substances long associated with the CIA and hippies and counterculture. Today's interest in these substances is mostly motivated by a desire to help veterans and victims of sexual violence who …

This is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel. It's back-to-school season, and for some parts of the country, that means dealing with COVID restrictions again. Americans are no longer experiencing indefinite school closures or ubiquitous masking, but intermittent sc…

In June, I traveled to Denver with Zach Weismueller to cover the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a group that has been working to gain Food and Drug Administration approval of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD since the late 1980s. We produced a 30-minute documentary a…

This is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel. Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe sat down for a live discussion about the political and social ramifications of the indictments of Donald Trump with George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin. "Trump's att…

In June, I traveled to Denver with Zach Weissmueller to cover the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, which was organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a group that has been working to gain approval of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD and related ailments since the late 1980s. We produced a 30-minute documentar…

This is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel. The topic this week was a lawsuit challenging California Community Colleges' new diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility—or DEIA—teaching standards, which allegedly "mandate viewpoint conformity" and "compel pro…

My guest today is Eli Lake, a repeat guest who for almost 30 years has been one of the country's leading national security journalists, working as a columnist for and contributor to publications such as Bloomberg Opinion, The Daily Beast, The New Republic, The New York Sun, and Commentary. His 2010 article for Reason, "The 9/14 Presidency," strongl…

Today's episode is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel. The topic this week was the rise of Javier Milei, a self-described libertarian and Austrian school economist who defied polling expectations in Argentina's recent presidential primary elections, finishing in …

Carol Roth is a self-described recovering investment banker and bestselling author whose new book is You Will Own Nothing: Your War with a New Financial World Order and How To Fight Back. "The United States has been at the center of the global financial universe for about 80 years," she tells me, but that's changing for a whole lot of reasons, most…

Today's episode is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel. Zach Weissmueller talked with Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University, and John Vecchione of the New Civil Liberties Alliance. They are among th…

My guest today is Eric Boehm, a reporter at Reason who specializes in economic and trade policy. He's also the host of a fantastic, new six-part podcast series, Why We Can't Have Nice Things. Each episode looks at different ways that import and export laws and other sorts of mostly hidden regulations radically alter what we can buy, how much things…

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 cla…

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 fre…

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 pol…

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 …

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…

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…

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. Acclai…

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…

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…

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…

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 th…

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…

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 Ukrain…

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 …

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…

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,…

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 B…

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 do…

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…

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 D…

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, o…

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…

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 …

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 T…

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…

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…

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 …

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 Under…

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 hi…

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 …

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 control…

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 …

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 Americ…

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…

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 Europ…

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 aro…

"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 i…