Today's guest is libertarian legal giant Randy Barnett, who has just published his memoir, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist. Currently a law professor at Georgetown, Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with Barnett about his days as a prosecutor in Chicago, how he helped create the legal philosophy of originalism, what it was like arguing medical marijuana and Obamacare cases at the Supreme Court, and what he learned from anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard. They also discuss why he thinks the libertarian movement needs an intellectual reboot and how his working-class, Jewish upbringing in Calumet City, Illinois, remains central to his identity.

0:00— Introduction

1:05— Gonzales vs. Raich (marijuana legalization)

6:15— United States vs. Lopez (gun-free school zones)

20:11— What is Originalism?

25:40— How Barnett became an originalist

27:20— How the 9th Amendment kickstarted Barnett's Constitutional law career

32:30— Lysander Spooner, slavery & the Constitution

38:28— Ad: Bank On Yourself

40:10— Calumet City Contrarianism

47:54— Murray Rothbard

54:50— Libertinism vs. libertarianism

57:48— A libertarian lawyer who didn't inhale

58:48— NFIB vs. Sebelius (the 'Obamacare' case)

1:09:48— The Libertarian Movement's influence

1:16:55— Ideas & the Academy still matter!

Previous appearances:

• "How the Conservative Supreme Court Is Changing America," July 3, 2022
• "Randy Barnett on the Secret History of SCOTUS Confirmation Hearings," July 27, 2018
• "Everything You Need To Know About Neil Gorsuch (Including Roe v. Wade)," February 2, 2017
• "Democrats Abandoned the Rule of Law. Under President Trump, Will They Help Restore It?" November 9, 2016
• "Randy Barnett on Trump, the Supreme Court, and the Future of the Republican Party," August 15, 2016
• "Randy Barnett: How To Secure Our Liberty Through 'Our Republican Constitution,'" April 7, 2016
• "Randy Barnett: Secret NSA Snooping Is 'a Fundamental Challenge' to Democracy," August 19, 2013
• "Randy Barnett: Losing Obamacare While Preserving the Constitution," July 12, 2012

Today's sponsor:

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This week's guest on The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie is school choice activist Corey DeAngelis, whose provocative new book is The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools. A senior fellow at the American Federation for Children and a former education policy analyst at the Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes Reason magazine), Corey has been called "the most effective school choice advocate since Milton Friedman."

His new book explains why K-12 education failed so badly before and during the COVID pandemic and how to fix it once and for all by making the needs of parents and students the central concern of schooling.

Previous appearances:

• "Watch Elizabeth Warren Lie About Her Son's Private School Education," by Nick Gillespie and John Osterhoudt. January 29, 2020
• "Corey DeAngelis: COVID-19 Is Super-Spreading School Choice," by Nick Gillespie. October 7, 2020
• "Thanks to Teachers Unions, Families are Fleeing Traditional Public Schools," by Nick Gillespie and Corey DeAngelis. January 29, 2021
• "Corey DeAngelis: 2021 Was 'the Year of School Choice,' But 2022 Will Be Even Better," by Nick Gillespie. January 26, 2022
• "Corey DeAngelis: How COVID Has Changed the Face of Education Forever," by Nick Gillespie. September 26, 2022
• "Why Do Public Schools Suck and What Should We Do About Them? Live With Corey DeAngelis and Connor Boyack," by Nick Gillespie. April 19, 2023

Today's Sponsors:

• The Dispatch: Is Donald Trump really going to jail? Does Joe Biden really have what it takes for a second term? Do these questions even matter in the 2024 election? Get past the bluster and get back to the facts by joining The Dispatch.
• Students for Liberty
• New York City premiere of Reason's Backpage documentary and panel discussion, Tuesday, July 23. Was the federal prosecution of the online classified ad site Backpage.com a win for opponents of sex trafficking or a loss for First Amendment rights? View a new documentary by Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Paul Detrick, and participate in a panel with Brown and Old Pros' Kaytlin Bailey about the case moderated by Nick Gillespie. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and a light buffet. Seats are limited. Details here.

• Video Editor: Ian Keyser

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Today's guest is Eric Brakey, the new executive director of The Free State Project, a nonprofit that has been working since 2001 to get small-government diehards to move to New Hampshire and make the Granite State a stronghold for libertarian ideas. Prior to becoming head of the Free State Project, Brakey was a Republican state senator in Maine, where he authored successful legislation that expanded gun rights, legalized over-the-counter birth control, and enacted Right To Try legislation. Reason's Nick Gillespie talks to Brakey about the state of the libertarian movement, how Ron Paul and Young Americans for Liberty shaped his worldview, and how he hopes to concentrate what he calls "the libertarian diaspora" in New Hampshire.

Related:
Revolt of the Porcupines! The Free State Project wants libertarians to take over New Hampshire. Is this a revolutionary plan or a pipe dream? December 2004
Keeping New Hampshire Awesome: Q&A with the Free State Project President Carla Gericke, November 27, 2011
Is the Libertarian Migration to New Hampshire Having an Impact?
Q&A with Free State Project President Matt Philips, August 22, 2016
Meet Rachel Goldsmith, the Woman Running the Free State Project, September 18, 2018

Today's Sponsor:

• The Dispatch: Is Donald Trump really going to jail? Does Joe Biden really have what it takes for a second term? Do these questions even matter in the 2024 U.S. election? Get past the bluster and get back to the facts by joining The Dispatch.
• Bank On Yourself: Bank On Yourself is a proven retirement plan alternative that banks and Wall Street are desperately hoping you never hear about. It gives you guaranteed, predictable growth and retirement income; access to your money for any purpose with NO questions asked and NO government penalties or restrictions; and the peace of mind that comes from knowing the minimum guaranteed value of your retirement savings on the day you plan to tap into them. Go to Bank On Yourself.com/WORD and get a free report about the retirement plan alternative that lets you bypass banks and Wall Street, and take back control of your financial future.

• New York City premiere of Reason's Backpage documentary and panel discussion, Tuesday, July 23. Was the federal prosecution of the online classified ad site Backpage.com a win for opponents of sex trafficking or a loss for First Amendment rights? View a new documentary by Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Paul Detrick, and participate in a panel with Brown and Old Pro's Kaytlin Bailey about the case moderated by Nick Gillespie. The $10 tickets include beer, wine, soft drinks, and light buffet. Seats are limited. Details here.

• Video Editor: Ian Keyser

The post Eric Brakey: How Libertarians Can Attain Political Power appeared first on Reason.com.

This week's guest is Andy Mills, the co-creator of Reflector, a new documentary podcast. Reflector's early episodes delve into controversial treatments for alcoholism and the free speech implications of the trial of rapper Young Thug, whose lyrics are being used by prosecutors to build a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) case. Mills is a legend in podcasting circles. He helped create The New York Times podcast The Daily, one of the most listened-to shows on the planet, and he produced the wildly popular and controversial The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling for The Free Press. Reason's Nick Gillespie and Mills discuss why podcasting is having such a moment, his tumultuous tenure at the Times (which ended with his resignation in 2021), and whether there is a market for investigative journalism that isn't done in the service of partisan politics.

0:00—Introduction

1:03— Reflector: Andy Mills' new podcast

3:47— Reflector Episode 1: Naltrexone for alcoholism

7:00— Reflector Episode 2: Drill rap on trial

18:16— Economics of podcasting

22:22— Has the podcast era peaked?

25:28— Starting The Daily at The New York Times

29:06— Spotify's bad Meghan Markle bet

31:04— The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling

37:15— Caliphate controversy and The New York Times part 1

41:06—  Ad: Lumen

43:09— Caliphate controversy and The New York Times part 2

45:33— What does healthy media consumption look like?

47:46— Andy Mills' rural Christian upbringing

52:50— 'Wokeness' at The New York Times

1:00:24— Q&A

Today's sponsors:

• Students for Liberty
• Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. On the app, it lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs, and it gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workouts, sleep, and even stress management. All you have to do is breathe into your Lumen first thing in the morning, and you'll know what's going on with your metabolism, whether you're burning mostly fats or carbs. Then, Lumen gives you a personalized nutrition plan for that day based on your measurements. You can also breathe into it before and after workouts and meals, so you know exactly what's going on in your body in real time, and Lumen will give you tips to keep you on top of your health game. Your metabolism is your body's engine—it's how your body turns the food you eat into fuel that keeps you going. Because your metabolism is at the center of everything your body does, optimal metabolic health translates to a bunch of benefits, including easier weight management, improved energy levels, better fitness results, better sleep, etc. Lumen gives you recommendations to improve your metabolic health. It can also track your cycle as well as the onset of menopause, and adjust your recommendations to keep your metabolism healthy through hormonal shifts, so you can keep up your energy and stave off cravings. So, if you want to take the next step in improving your health, go to lumen.me/INTERVIEW to get $100 off your Lumen.
• New York City premiere of Reason's Backpage documentary and panel discussion, Tuesday, July 23. Was the federal prosecution of online classified ad site Backpage.com a win for opponents of sex trafficking or a loss for First Amendment rights? View a new documentary by Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Paul Detrick and participate in a panel with Brown and Old Pros' Kaytlin Bailey about the case moderated by Nick Gillespie. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and a light buffet. Seats are limited. Details here.

• Video Editor: Ian Keyser

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Today's guest is John Mackey, the co-founder and former CEO of Whole Foods, who just released his memoir, The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism. As befits the entrepreneur who revolutionized grocery shopping from a grim, pragmatic necessity into an exciting, multi-sensory adventure, Mackey's story is far from conventional and we talk frankly about the failures, successes, and psychedelics he encountered while reshaping how Americans think about food, fitness, and free enterprise. We also discuss Love.Life, the chain of holistic health and wellness clubs he's opening this summer.

00:00— Introduction
00:48— The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism
03:45— Capitalism disrupts the status quo
07:57— Whole Foods' bumpy start
15:02— How to foster rich environments for capitalism & innovation
19:00— Why socialism ALWAYS fails
21:05— John Mackey's upbringing
26:38— Where is the next generation heading?
29:53— The Capitalism scapegoat
32:36— Ad: BankOnYourself.com
34:27— LSD and other psychedelics
38:15— Applying "Expand into love, don't contract into fear" to business
40:41— Conscious capitalism as a management philosophy
45:45— Unionization at Whole Foods
51:11— The pros & cons of selling Whole Foods to Amazon
59:48— Mackey's new venture: Love.Life
01:05:19— John Mackey's secrets to health
01:09:38— Capitalism: an infinite game

Previous appearances:

Whole Foods' John Mackey: 'I Feel Like Socialists Are Taking Over', August 10, 2022
Can 'Conscious Capitalism' Make Business a Heroic Enterprise? John Mackey Is Betting Yes, August 14, 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
John Mackey's Conscious Capitalism, Full Interview Version, October 14, 2009

Today's Sponsor:

• Bank On Yourself: Bank On Yourself is a proven retirement plan alternative that banks and Wall Street are desperately hoping you never hear about. It gives you guaranteed, predictable growth and retirement income; access to your money for any purpose with NO questions asked and NO government penalties or restrictions; and the peace of mind that comes from knowing the minimum guaranteed value of your retirement savings on the day you plan to tap into them. Go to Bank On Yourself.com/WORD and get a free report about the retirement plan alternative that lets you bypass banks and Wall Street, and take back control of your financial future.

• Video Editor: Ian Keyser

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My guest today is economist and podcaster Glenn Loury, whose new memoir is titled Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. Born in 1948 and raised working-class in Chicago's predominantly African American South Side, Loury tells a story of self-invention, ambition, hard work, addiction, and redemption that channels Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, Richard Wright's Native Son, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, and Milton Friedman's Capitalism & Freedom. The first tenured black economist at Harvard, Loury emerged in the 1980s as a ubiquitous commenter on race and class and was offered a post in the Reagan administration. Then a series of scandals involving affairs, arrests, and addiction threatened the end of his personal and professional lives. Late Admissions is an unflinching look at Loury's failures and successes, written by one of the most popular academic presences on YouTube.

0:00— Introduction

1:34— Why write a memoir now?

4:17— What is a black conservative?

7:47— Glenn Loury's background

15:10— Addiction and self destruction

17:00— 'A hustler and a player'

21:34— Crack, Infidelity, and the remarkable Dr Linda Loury

25:44— Loury's downfall in the late 80s

28:38— Recovery, self-knowledge, and making amends

36:32— 'Rise Above It': a MLM scam with real lessons 40:40- Loury's career and legacy in Economics

45:08— College students and protests

49:00— Affirmative action and conservatives

52:30— Equality, childhood development, and cultural influences

57:21— The Black Experience and healthy cultural discourse

1:02:22— Immigrants as beacons of hope

Read more: A transcript from Nick Gillespie's conversation with Glenn Loury in the August/September 2024 issue of Reason

Previous appearance: Glenn Loury: 'We're Being Swept Along by Hysteria' About Racism in America, June 24, 2020

Today's Sponsor:

• ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Get 15 percent off by going to ZBiotics/TRI and using the code TRI at checkout.

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Stephen Wolfram is, strictly speaking, a high school and college dropout: He left both Eton and Oxford early, citing boredom. At 20, he received his doctorate in theoretical physics from Caltech and then joined the faculty in 1979. But he eventually moved away from academia, focusing instead on building a series of popular, powerful, and often eponymous research tools: Mathematica, WolframAlpha, and Wolfram Language.

He self-published a 1,200-page work called A New Kind of Science arguing that nature runs on ultrasimple computational rules. The book enjoyed surprising popular acclaim.
Wolfram's work on computational thinking forms the basis of intelligent assistants, such as Siri.

Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward interviewed Wolfram as part of the June 2024 AI special issue of Reason. He offered a candid assessment of what he hopes and fears from artificial intelligence, discussed the complicated relationship between humans and their technology, and elaborated on the ways that artificial intelligence can already overcome existing regulatory burdens.

• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post Stephen Wolfram Is Ready To Be Surprised by AI appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is comedy writer Rob Long, who served as a writer for and producer of the great sitcom Cheers for years, writes the weekly Martini Shot commentary, and cohosts the GLoP Culture podcast with Jonah Goldberg and John Podhoretz. He is a columnist for Commentary and a cofounder of Ricochet, the online community and podcast platform. At a live event in New York City, Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Long about whether Hollywood is out of ideas, what it's like being a libertarian-leaning conservative in a very progressive industry, and the role that psychedelics have played in his creative process.

Chapters:

0:00- Blockchain, Machine Learning, and Jesus

3:22- What's Scarier; God Or Guns?

8:59- Road To Damascus, Hollywood

13:45- Jesus: A Weird But Groovy Dude

17:30- A Hollywood Solution To Hell

22:50- A Psychedelic Life Lesson

29:48- Comedy As Aggression

32:09- MDMA: A Non-Specific Amplifier

34:25- O Hollywood Mega-Hit, Where Art Thou? 43:35- The Comedies That Made Rob Long

45:39- Q&A

Previous appearances:

• Rob Long: Welcome To the Age of Blunder in Public Health, Foreign Policy, and…Hollywood, August 11, 2023.
• How Rob Long Went from Cheers to National Review to LSD, December 2, 2020.
• Democratizing Gun Production, Education, and Media, December 26, 2018.

Today's sponsor:

• Nick Gillespie with Students for Sensible Drug Policy's Kat Murti, May 8. 2023. In a world where drug use and policy are rapidly changing, what role will younger people play in challenging legal and cultural prohibitions of psychoactive substances? Join us for a candid conversation with Kat Murti, the new executive director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, which for over 25 years has been the leading voice on college campuses for changing laws and attitudes about psychedelics and other drugs. She will be interviewed by Reason Editor at Large Nick Gillespie and the conversation, including audience Q&A, will be recorded for a future episode of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast. Use the discount code REASON42 at checkout for 20 percent off all tickets.

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Abigail Shrier is author of the best-selling new book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up. She argues that the mental health of Gen Z—people born between 1997 and 2012—is a mess because an infantilizing therapeutic culture pervades every aspect of their lives.

Shrier stresses that she's not against psychological counseling and help per se, but she believes too many unqualified and misguided people are causing far more problems than they solve.

Her previous book was the controversial Irreversible Damage, which looked at the rapid rise of girls identifying as transgender. We talk about the roots of today's therapeutic culture, the extent of the problems it causes, and how parents, teachers, and young people themselves might find a better way forward.

Previous appearance:

Abigail Shrier: Trans Activists, Cancel Culture, and the Future of Free Expression, July 7, 2021

Today's sponsor:

• "3 Takeaways" It's a top 2 percent global podcast, and for good reason. 3 Takeaways bring you conversations with people who are changing the world. In each episode, a newsmaker talks about lessons they've learned—whether in the halls of power, the corner office, or the research lab. Plus they share three key insights to help you understand the world in new ways. You'll hear revealing talks with people such as former Secretaries of the Treasury and Homeland Security, Nobel prize winners, former Prime Ministers, past CEOs of Google and American Express, and a former Chief of MI6 and many others. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

This interview has been condensed edited for style and clarity.

Nick Gillespie: The new book is Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up. Can you give us the elevator pitch for Bad Therapy?

Abigail Shrier: So I always start a book with a question, and my question was, why are the kids who've gotten the most mental health resources, had the most therapy, the most diagnoses, the most psych meds, the most wellness tips, the most coping tips, etc. They should be the picture of mental health. Instead, they're the picture of despair. And I wanted to know why. 

And I also wanted to know why they have no interest in growing up. Why weren't they looking to move out of their parents' house? A larger percentage of them are living at home more than ever before, even with our low unemployment. Why are they putting off getting a driver's license or claiming that driving is scary? Boys over 17 are saying this. So, those were my two questions, and I found that they were related.

Gillespie: A couple of the big points that you make, which I think are really good and interesting and important, is that all medical interventions or any kind of interaction with a doctor of any stripe, they have the potential for negatives. Explain how that kind of intersects with the topic here.

Shrier: So there's this concept called iatrogenesis, which is a Greek word meaning when the healer introduces harms. What I want people to know is that any intervention, no matter how good, if it is efficacious, if it has the power to help, also necessarily has the power to harm. If it can do anything at all, then of course it can harm. So Tylenol, which is wonderful, can damage your liver if you take too much of it. X-rays. But what people might not know is that therapy, which also has the power to help, can harm as well.

Gillespie: For the context of the book, you're talking about Gen Z, but also kids who are in school now and are dealing with a much more therapeutic culture generally than you or I grew up with. Kids are different from adults. How does that factor into your book?

Shrier: A number of ways. When an adult goes to therapy, an adult first of all makes the decision, I want to work on this or I need the support. I know myself and I need this. You have their buy-in, the therapist has their buy-in, and they show up ready to work. Number two, they've lived enough life that if the therapist is a little off track, or maybe the therapist got the wrong impression, an adult can say, "You know what? I really think I gave you the wrong impression of my mom." Or "Look, my parents were difficult in that regard, but I wouldn't call them toxic. And I don't think breaking off with them is the right move." 

It's very hard for a teenager or a child to say those things, especially if they're angry with mom. They don't know what constitutes emotional abuse, especially if an adult is leading them to think that they were emotionally abused, or that they had experienced trauma. And with a child, you don't have their buy-in. So a therapist is naturally going to want to pander to a child to get them on board. Now, if a child has a severe problem that they're coming to a therapist with, that sort of focuses the mind. You've got a kid who's anorexic or who has severe [obsessive compulsive disorder], you know what they're going to be talking about. But if you drop off a kid who's got some anxiety for general psychodynamic psychotherapy, the therapist could lead in any direction. And I think that's what we're seeing.

Gillespie: How many kids are on psychoactive drugs and in active therapy?

Shrier: We only stopped talking about ADHD not because it was being diagnosed any less—there are more diagnoses—but because so many young kids are on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) today, the antidepressant. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just cleared Lexapro, which is a very strong antidepressant, for 7-year-olds. In fact, we've been going in one direction, putting kids on more and more and more psychotropic drugs, anti-anxiety medications, and various forms of speed for ADHD. 

So in 2016, one in six kids between the ages of 2 and 8, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), already had a mental health or behavioral diagnosis. Those kids weren't on social media. They didn't have smartphones, certainly not in 2016. They don't have them today. So we know that this diagnosis has been exploding. And also mental health treatment has gone in one direction. So, nearly 40 percent of the rising generation has been to see a therapist already. And I'm not the only one to have noticed this—a team of researchers did a year ago and called this the treatment prevalence paradox. 

What they were noticing is that with treatment of illness, the more treatment there is, the more the point prevalence rate of a disorder should go down. We saw this with breast cancer treatment and other things. The incidence of death from breast cancer went down with more pervasive treatment. Here, there's been vast expansion of treatment and the rates of depression and anxiety have only gone up.

Gillespie: Supporters of that trend would say, "Well, that's because it's an epidemic. It's a pandemic of anxiety, of depression, of isolation, of whatever." But you're effectively saying that it's probably more caused by the intervention itself. Let's also talk about how the therapy culture has gone into schools. Because it used to be, certainly 30-40 years ago, teachers were not trained in therapy. They were not expected to be counselors. Most schools probably didn't even have school counselors or psychologists or anything like that on staff. But now, everywhere you look, that is considered part and parcel of K-12 teacher education, right?

Shrier: And that's why we're seeing so much increase in anxiety, depression, and the known harms of therapy, because we are treating a vast population, and mostly they are well. And here's the thing with iatrogenesis or when a healer introduces harm: If you have a problem, if you have a serious cut and you need stitches, it's worth the trip to the emergency room. But if you have a minor scratch, then you only stand to face risk, right? Because you don't stand to benefit, really. 

So all the exposure to MRSA and other bacteria at the E.R., now you're just facing risk. And that's what we're doing with this generation. We're taking healthy kids who are a little bummed out, a little anxious, and we're loading them with intervention, as you say, much of it through school, through social-emotional learning and all the therapeutic techniques now going on in school. And so all these kids face is risk. 

Gillespie: Why don't teachers push back on this ask of them, to be teaching history, or reading, or math, or whatever, and to also be scanning the classroom for problematic behavior? 

They seem to have embraced this role as being therapists or being on the lookout for stuff, which I think you both stress and document very well. Whatever else you think about therapy and counseling, these teachers just aren't equipped to do that. So it's really wrong to ask them or to expect them to be any good at it. But why aren't they saying, "If you want kids to be put in therapy, come and do it yourself."

Shrier: So teachers broke down into a number of categories. Some of them absolutely objected. They're desperate to get through their lessons. That's why they got involved, and many of them told me they can't deal with even the behavioral outbursts. The kids have become so dysregulated. They're being asked to do things that aren't their job. They want to get out of teaching. 

Then there are the teachers who don't really want to teach, or they find it really challenging, and it's much easier to play "Let's talk about your trauma" or to play a sort of amateur therapist. And of course, the third answer I have is that a lot of this is coming from school counselors who march in. And what I want people to know is that when a school counseling staff expands in your high school, it operates a lot like the [diversity, equity, and inclusion] staff of a university. It starts to take over everything. All of a sudden, the mental health staff is overseeing the entire curriculum. And that's what we're seeing.

Gillespie: One of the people that you talked to in the book is Elizabeth Loftus, who is an incredibly well-known psychologist who helped to pop the recovered memory bubble a couple of decades ago. And one of the things that she stressed was that psychologists oftentimes can introduce memories that people then take on as their own. 

Last night, I watched a documentary about Joan Baez, the folk singer in the '60s. She, late in life, became convinced that she may have been assaulted by her father and that her sister probably was. And she had multiple personality disorder. 

So let's talk about iatrogenesis. And how does the work that Elizabeth Loftus does help explain the worst case scenario of a therapist-created issue?

Shrier: Well, Elizabeth Loftus, who is widely considered one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century, really showed that our memory is like a mosaic. You can introduce things into it and it's always being updated, a little like a Wikipedia page. And other people can edit it and you can edit it. And here's the thing: It's especially true of children. 

So what she did was she helped expose the recovered memory epidemic of the '90s, in which kids were being led through questioning to remember things that didn't happen to them. Traumas, assaults, sexual molestation that never happened. The problem is, what's going on today in schools is effectively group therapy—they don't call it that—social-emotional learning where the kids sit around sharing their pain and sharing their trauma. You're very likely in that process to introduce incorrect memories or exaggerate kids' memories of a past pain.

Gillespie: There's also a valorization of having pain or of having trauma or of not feeling well. Can you talk about that? How did that happen? 

Shrier: Maybe that's the goal of therapy. It's a question and I'll tell you why. The profession makes no effort to track improvements or harms. That's a real problem. And when I say the profession makes no effort, it's not that no therapists do that. There are some very good cognitive behavioral therapists who absolutely do this, and that's wonderful. 

But in general, most psychotherapists do not track any harms they make, no effort to see, "Gosh, have your relationships gotten worse since we started? Has your anxiety gotten worse? Has your depression gotten worse?" And that's a huge problem because those are the known side effects of therapy. We know that when they've studied burn victims, breast cancer survivors, first responders to catastrophe, in many cases, the ones who went to therapy ended up with worse symptoms than those who didn't go to therapy at all.

Gillespie: What is The Body Keeps the Score and why do you spend as much time as you do in the book talking about it?

Shrier: You're talking about a book that sold over 3 million copies. This has entered the bloodstream, and it's convinced a generation that they experienced childhood trauma. Actually, he kicked off an effort to go into schools and teach teachers that they needed to be trauma-informed about their education, because every child may have been traumatized and, in fact, likely had been traumatized. 

And the problem with this is, of course, that kids and people are highly suggestible. And they came to believe it. And we've basically induced what I think is something like an emotional hypochondriasis. We've created a generation of emotional hypochondriacs who are so focused on their emotional pain, so convinced of their trauma that it's debilitating them. And that's not to say that their pain isn't real. But as I learned when I talk to experts in hypochondriasis, the hyper-focus on real pain magnifies it. And I think that's what they're doing.

Gillespie: So in a simplified way, what you're arguing, at least on this point, is that trauma has been kind of defined downward. Everyday aspects of adolescence or growing up have been redefined as traumatic.

Shrier: Absolutely. Exactly right. There was just a new study out in the last couple of months by this wonderful researcher, a psychological researcher I love, named Kathy Witham. She did a prospective study. So these are the only rigorous studies really. They actually start with the kids. And they check who has actually experienced documented abuse. Then they follow them 15 years later and see what they're like as adults. And the researchers are blinded. They don't know which group is the control group. 

And what she found was the contextualization of what happened to these kids had more to do with adult psychopathology than what actually happened. Meaning, if an adult thought that what happened to him as a kid constituted trauma, he was more likely to suffer as an adult than a child who actually had suffered but didn't think of it as trauma. And here's the thing: Many of the adults who believed they had been traumatized as kids and so were suffering as adults, when they went back and looked, there was no record of actual trauma.

Gillespie: In a way, those of us who are parents, when your kid is a toddler and they hurt themselves, sometimes they look to you for the cue of like, are you hurt or not? And depending on how you react, they react. If you show them that you think they're hurt, they start to cry. If not, they kind of shrug it off.

Shrier: That's true of all of us is the remarkable thing. It turns out, if we come to believe we were traumatized as children and that the body keeps the score—that somehow, mysteriously, we have these memories stored outside our central nervous system, which has been disproven—we're a lot more likely to manifest symptoms than if we just think, "Yeah, I went through a hard time," and are able to surround ourselves with family, with friends, if we exercise, if we are active in the world, if we contribute to others. We tend to do really well in life with those things. In fact, the story of humanity is one of profound resilience in the face of what we think of as trauma.

Gillespie: You talk about Viktor Frankl in the book. Can you explain who Viktor Frankl is and why he's important to Bad Therapy?

Shrier: Sure. Well, he was a survivor of Auschwitz. He wrote a wonderful book called Man's Search for Meaning. And he was a psychiatrist himself. And one of the things that he says in his book that I quote in mine is that, actually, there are a number of things that he felt got him through Auschwitz; one of the things was humor, which is an amazing defense. And unfortunately, it has become so politically incorrect that we are often not allowed to avail ourselves of it. But actually, it's really good for getting through hard times. 

The other thing he said was that if you want the parts of an arch to form together, you don't relieve it of weight, you put more weight on it. And what he was saying is, making demands of children, which doesn't mean being cruel but giving them chores, giving them responsibilities, making them responsible for each other, having them in the world doing things, that's better for their mental health than telling them they've probably been traumatized and might not actually recover. That's the worst thing you get.

Gillespie: Another person that you cite in the book is Christopher Lasch, who is best known for two works that came out in the late '70s and early '80s, The Culture of Narcissism and The Minimal Self. You quote him in the book about the rise of therapeutic culture, how it's kind of gone everywhere. 

In The Minimal Self, Viktor Frankl is one of his villains because he felt that Frankl and a number of other people expanded the experience of the concentration camp, which is a very unique historical experience, and also one that is unbelievably intense beyond virtually anything anybody today could be doing. And Lasch argued that that was where trauma talk started seeping out in the '50s. People started equating their everyday life in a relatively comfortable suburb with a concentration camp. The most famous case of that is Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique,  saying that being a housewife was like being in a comfortable concentration camp. 

It's a vast army of educators and people in the mental health industry that have fanned out into the schools. But what do you think about that argument that the beginning of the redefinition of trauma to everyday life might actually start with the misapplication of the experience of the death camps in World War II? 

Shrier: I agree with it completely. In America, we saw a vast expansion in the treatment of the well. All of a sudden, mental health experts were not just treating the sick. They decided to treat the well. And, so that meant mental health for everybody, first of all. And second of all, we see that people often extrapolate from people who experienced the most severe trauma. Bessel van der Kolk himself talks about combat vets and PTSD and then uses that to extrapolate to kids in elementary school who grew up in the most gentle circumstances. 

That's exactly what's gone wrong. Trauma experts often use metaphor. And so it's very hard to evaluate their claims because they slip between what seems to be a serious scientific claim into metaphor. So you can never tell. Are you saying that you literally passed down your trauma through your genetic code? Or are you just saying that you told your kids really upsetting stories and it upset them? And very often they sort of make a lot of headway by not being clear about that. 

Gillespie: When a kid has a real problem, not an everyday-life problem, they can benefit from counseling or therapy or some kind of intervention. How do we draw that distinction in a meaningful way?

Shrier: That's a great question. And I think parents know their kids best. But I think in general, a good sort of shorthand is, is this something that I could handle when I was their age? If something really didn't qualify as trauma when you were a kid, it probably isn't traumatic. It's probably something they can handle. Now, if you've tried to stabilize your kid, if you've taken the tech out of their environment or whatever else seemed to be contributing to their problem—and you can't stabilize a child who is anorexic or has obsessive-compulsive disorder and any other number of things where it's really interfering with their daily life—and their suffering, by all means, get them help. I certainly wouldn't say, don't get them help. Get them help, get even medication if they need it. But we need to change our default settings, and the default should be no intervention. The default should be: Let's see if we can give him a healthier life.

Gillespie: You talked at length about your grandmother, who was born in 1927. She actually contracted polio and spent a year in an iron lung and then ended up flourishing. Is there a problem where we valorize the unbelievable stress that people were under in an earlier age?

Shrier: Well, a few things. First of all, I think we need to get clear on what the goal is. So the goal isn't someone who doesn't go through any pain. We all have our different personalities. We all have different levels of patience with each other or forbearance. Some people are more irritable or whatever else it is, but here's the thing. Can they function? Because my grandmother formed a family. My grandmother had a stable marriage. My grandmother had certain things. My grandmother could be depended upon by her neighbors. My grandmother was a good citizen. 

These are things we're seeing the rising generation opt out of. They don't even want to leave their parents' house, and they don't want to get married, they don't want to have children. They don't want people depending on them. And so whatever else you say—you might say, "Oh, you're looking past the rose-colored glasses." I think that's a fair criticism. But the question is, were these people undertaking adult responsibilities? Because that's ultimately what we want. We want to raise kids who can say, "You can depend on me" to other people. That's what we want. 

Gillespie: Is part of this that we're misdiagnosing because of the fact that childhood is lasting longer and longer, which is annoying if you're a parent because it's like, "Hey, you're 21. Maybe you ought to think about getting your own place."  But, are we misdiagnosing the curse of wealth that we can afford to start our work lives and our adult lives later as a crisis?

Shrier: Absolutely. There's no question that wealth has played a role. When I started writing the book, I thought, gosh, these kids have gone through no World War, no Great Depression. They have everything they could want. Why are they suffering? And one of the answers is, having responsibility is really good for you. Having a job, having to show up on time, having people you see in person regularly, having neighborhood friends and cousins around, that's all really good for you. And the responsibility is really good for you too. And what I wanted parents to know was not only that that stuff was good for you, but to stop feeling guilty if they wanted to give it to their kids, that kind of responsibility.

Gillespie: It is amazing how an afterschool job, which used to be something of a rite of passage for everybody from the wealthiest to the poorest—sometimes out of privilege, sometimes out of necessity—has really disappeared at every level of income. Do we just need to put our kids back in factories or something like that?

Shrier: We need to put them back into something. People ask me, well, instead of doing social-emotional learning in schools, what would be better for the kids? They could paint the gym. They could literally do anything. They could clean the yard with rakes. They could engage in any activity. They could dance. Anything would be better than sitting around and talking about their problems. And that's the truth. Like, we all need to feel productive. We do. And part of that is having responsibility where someone cares if you show up.

Gillespie: So part of it is giving them more responsibility, but part of the solution might also be giving them more free time where they're expected to hang out with their peers and kind of figure out how to do things.

Shrier: That's right. Tech-free free time is great. Sitting around on their phones is a lot less great. And we know that there's no question, as Jonathan Haidt always talks about, that social media has played a really bad role in our mental health. The problem is, this is a problem we've known about for eight years, how bad it's been. And we've done nothing to take it out. The schools allow kids to be on their phones and on social media all day long. And why have we done [nothing to change this]? Partly because parents have gotten no support from the mental health establishment. These schools, they were happy to go in and give therapy and social-emotional techniques and mindfulness, but they were less happy to take away the kids' cellphones even during the school day.

Gillespie: Can you talk a little bit about why the therapeutic culture in your argument is more important than the social media one?

Shrier: Sure. Because if you give kids a healthy life, then no one harmful thing is going to be that damaging. So, for instance, social media is bad. There's no question, and it's harmful. My last book was about a horrible trend spread through social media. But here's the thing. It's like that old commercial when we were growing up with the Frosted Flakes. They would put a bowl of sugar cereal until there was orange juice on the side and toast on one side and eggs on another, and they would say it's part of a nutritious breakfast. And what they were saying is, well, Frosted Flakes isn't great, but look at all these other things you could be eating too. 

Gillespie: It's not so bad if you eat a balanced diet.

Shrier: Right, and that's the problem. We have social media, which is bad, and then we have all these other things, like a constant valorization of being emotionally traumatized, like regular therapy teaching you that you need to check in with an adult or a mental health expert before you take any risks whatsoever. Like your mental health diagnosis that you now believe limits you in some profound way, and you can't just get over on your own like you can with, say, shyness or sadness. Now, I have depression. Well, that suggests you need an expert. So all these things have contributed to incapacitating these young people.

Gillespie: One of the things you discuss is the current parenting generation. Talk a bit about why parents surrender authority as parents to experts.

Shrier: I think that part of it is that our parents divorced in such high numbers. We had the high watermark of divorce in America when I was young, and people were put in therapy, or they felt like they needed therapy, because they went through something hard, like their parents splitting up. And as they entered adulthood, they entered therapy. They went into therapy and they thought it was beneficial. And they thought, my parents weren't there for me in various ways. I remember the pain I went through and also my therapist really encouraged me to see my parents' failings. 

They weren't emotionally sensitive enough. And my generation and millennials went into parenting thinking we were going to be the most emotionally sensitive generation of parents. We were going to watch our kids like hawks. We were going to be there for them, and we were going to constantly ask them how they were feeling. And we thought that being gentle with our kids would produce them as gentle as possible. And we never asserted our authority. We avoided all punishment. And frankly, we've presided over something like a disaster.

Gillespie: Just to play devil's advocate, I think about that a lot. My parents were members of the Greatest Generation. And in a way, they were emotionally unavailable, partly because they were dealing with their own shit. They were the children of immigrants, and they grew up in not only stern families, but also in stern subcultures. And that clearly was not good. 

I didn't want to be like them as parents. I don't want to be my kid's friend. How do we find a happy medium, where it isn't like going home to a German family in the 1930s that people rightly thought was the incubator of fascism or something like that, with a stern father and a stern mother? How do you balance not being distant but also not being smothering with positive regard?

Shrier: I think this is such an important question because a lot of people feel like, "My parents were cold. I didn't like that. I didn't get all the hugs I wanted and the love I needed." So there's a difference between, some of this is what kids need and other is just good stuff to have. 

Being loving with your kids, as affectionate as you want to be, is great. No one says you have to be cold. And in fact, there's great research on this. In study after study—this is such a replicated study, it's a very sturdy study—authoritative, meaning the parents are in charge, but loving, raise the happiest, least anxious, least depressed, and honestly, most successful kids. And the kids end up having the best relationship with their parents. What you can't do when you're loving and affectionate with your kids is divest yourself of authority. That's what you can't do, if you want them to raise them well and then have them be adults themselves.

Gillespie: When did we, as a culture, start surrendering our authority to experts? I think America was a relatively poor country before World War II. There was a huge boom after, and a lot of people entered the middle class who really came from places of little authority. There was a cult of experts growing in the mid-20th century. Parents either read Benjamin Spock in droves and were supposedly being permissive about their kids, although his book is just filled with passive aggression. Or Bruno Bettelheim, who's another concentration camp survivor who also turned out to be, in many ways, a fraud. There was a real dichotomy between hard and soft parenting. But there was an overwhelming urge for people who were newly in the middle class, I think, to say, we really don't know what we're doing, and our parents can't help us because they grew up in Italy, and Ireland, and Poland, or under bizarre circumstances. 

Are we actually getting out of the cult of experts? 

Shrier: Well, I don't think they knew that therapists were a part of that. I don't think they knew that the mental health establishment was part of that. I think they thought, "I want to be as emotionally attuned. I want to get this right. I'm better educated than my parents. So I'm going to go to the most educated therapist I can find to help me with the exact technique I need for a child." And what they didn't ask themselves, what we didn't ask ourselves is, what are we actually looking to produce? So we thought, "Oh, I'm going to raise the most sensitive, emotionally in-tune, happy child." Well, turns out that's actually not how you do it. We obsessed over our children's happiness and spent no time at all thinking about how to make them strong. And it turns out, raising strong kids is a much better way to raise happy kids.

Gillespie: Let's talk a little bit about the treatment of your book. It's funny, it has not been reviewed as widely as I would have thought. This is not because it is a bad book or a lacking book. It's curious to me. And that is also reflected in the treatment. I looked this morning and of all books sold on Amazon, you were at No. 8. But on The New York Times bestseller list, you are nowhere to be seen. Can you talk a little bit about the treatment of the book in the legacy media? And how is that working for you?

Shrier: I think all of us who are the truth-tellers out there and went against various narratives, that's the treatment we get. So, of course, right away, The New York Times decided it wouldn't review my book and other legacy media, because that's how they treat you when you were questioning the transgender narrative or the gender ideology narrative with teenage girls early on. 

Now, of course, they write whole articles about it, as if it's obvious. Everything that I said in the book four years ago is now so obvious, The New York Times can casually write about it. But at the time, they tried to paint me as some sort of bigot or something. I write for readers, I don't write for reviewers, and I don't write for legacy media, which is what it is. 

Gillespie: Obviously, sales are brisk. You were telling me before we started recording that Amazon actually ran out of the book. Is it going through another print?

Shrier: We just got another shipment. So they should be ready to go. But, it was the No. 1 book on Amazon of all books in the world and quickly sold out. And that's because there actually is a desire to talk about what the harm therapy and over-focus on feelings might be doing. Any criticism of the ruling class tends not to go over well.

Gillespie: It seems like in a strange way, and I would argue a wonderful way, your work and certainly your first book, Irreversible Damage—which was the subject of various attempts to kind of limit its circulation through discussion or to take it off certain websites and things like that—finds its audience. So that must be heartening.

Shrier: It's absolutely heartening. Look, I have no complaints. I've been very happy that I've been able to reach so many readers. But, I think we should all be getting a little tired of being told what we're allowed to read. And unfortunately, there are always these campaigns to limit certain authors because they're so afraid that if your message gets out, people might think for themselves and agree with you. And, it's just a really ugly strain that we're seeing. Obviously, it's often enforced through the various tech fora. But I certainly hope that there's a good amount of pushback to it.

Gillespie: Nothing brings out social anxieties more than talking about children. They're a blank screen that we project all of our anxieties, all of our aspirations on. And I think the book should be read by everybody who has any interest in that. What are the next steps now?

Shrier: So this is the thing I'm most optimistic about. We can absolutely turn this around, and here's why. You don't need any money. You don't need expert help. You can do it yourself as a parent. Kids need authority. They need to know they're going to be just fine. We need to remember to tell them that minor injuries are fine. They can shake it off. It's fine and play on. We need to assume that most kids will be resilient. Most combat veterans are resilient in the face of trauma. Certainly most children are, and we need to tell them that their ancestors were resilient. 

We need to tell them about what their grandparents and great-grandparents went through. We need to reassure them that they can get through hard times too. There are so many things we can do for our kids, like giving them some amount of independence, teaching them a skill, giving them time when we're not monitoring and hovering. All these things are really good for them, surrounding them with a family who loves them. And it doesn't cost any money to do it. That's the thing.

Gillespie: On a systemic level, are there particular interventions that you would make or that you think should be done because there are, what, 15,000 school districts in the country, etc.? Are there particular interventions that can have a broader reach than being the change that you want to see in the world?

Shrier: Absolutely. You can start by shrinking all the mental health staff at schools and bringing back order to schools. Right now, all disciplinary problems are treated as a mental health problem. And the kids get talk therapy and no discipline. That makes us put kids who are good kids really in danger of violence from other kids who really should be expelled. And we're seeing that. We're seeing kids brutalized in school. Since [former President Barack] Obama issued his "Dear Colleague" letter, they're not allowed to expel a disproportionate number of minority students. So instead of doing that, they do these therapeutic interventions. They don't work. We're seeing chaos in schools. We need to bring back order and shrink the mental health staff so that they can only treat the kids who actually need it, not everyone.

Gillespie: For the Gen Z kids who are in their 20s, who were raised under this dispensation of bad therapy, what's your advice to them? 

Shrier: They're on way too many medications that they don't need, way too many therapeutic interventions. And they all believe they have a mental health diagnosis. I just want to say, some kids are a little different. They're a little weird, awkward, quirky; it doesn't mean you have a mental health problem. 

I would caution people, as serious as I think it is to put a child or an adolescent on SSRIs or a serious antidepressant, you'll also need medical oversight coming off of those things. So definitely don't try to quit cold turkey. These medications have very powerful withdrawal symptoms. And you really need to very carefully taper if you're going to try living without the snowsuit you may not need.

• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post Abigail Shrier: Stop Obsessing Over Our Children's Happiness appeared first on Reason.com.

Joe Lonsdale is a co-founder of the data analytics firm Palantir; OpenGov, which provides cloud software services for governments; and the University of Austin, which seeks to reform higher education. He's the managing partner of 8VC, a tech and life sciences venture capital fund, and is chairman of the board of the Cicero Institute, a nonprofit working to "restore liberty, accountability, and innovation in American governance."

Reason's Nick Gillespie asked Lonsdale why he relocated to Texas from California, how to curb government overreach while providing essential services, his goals for his podcast American Optimist, and his 2020 article, "Libertarianism is Dysfunctional, but Liberty is Great."

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This interview has been condensed edited for style and clarity.

Nick Gillespie: Your venture capital firm is called 8VC. What is that referring to?

Joe Lonsdale: Originally, we had a firm called Formation 8 with some Korean partners, and they took formation, I took eight. Eight's a lucky number in Asia. It's a lucky number actually in Judaism. It kind of represents beyond the seven days. So you can see infinity is tied to eight. It's a lucky number. You have to have lucky numbers. 

Gillespie: And does it tie into the history of Silicon Valley at all?

Lonsdale: It does as well. We talk about waves of innovation in Silicon Valley. And the second big wave of innovation was the semiconductor wave. That's why it's called Silicon Valley, because of the silicon wafer. One of the three Nobel Prize winners who invented the transistor, [William] Shockley, he brought eight of the most impressive people he could find to Silicon Valley. And it turned out he was a great scientist but a terrible boss. And he kept giving them lie detector tests. And finally, they left and said enough of this, we're doing our own [thing]. And they got someone else to back them called [Sherman] Fairchild. So they built Fairchild Semiconductor. And those eight people at Fairchild Semiconductor, it was [Gordon] Moore of Moore's Law, it was Eugene Kleiner of Kleiner Perkins. It was the guys who built a lot of Silicon Valley. So it really pays homage to the history of the tech sector.

Gillespie: And then Shockley, just to cap that story, ended his career by promoting scientific racism.

Lonsdale: It's not ideal, I suppose. So yeah, at least fortunately, we're on the side of the eight people who didn't work for him anyway.

Gillespie: When did you move to Texas?

Lonsdale: 2020. 

Gillespie: Good time to move. Good time to buy, I suppose. But you left California. You were raised in California. You went to school in California. You've thrived in California. You co-founded Palantir in California. Why did you move to Texas? And what does that say about governance strategies?

Lonsdale: There are a lot of things California has going for it, and we still have to go there sometimes for things we do. But California got to be really broke—and I wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal at the time [about this]—it had about a thousand people working for six companies in Austin because you couldn't really scale companies in San Francisco anymore. It became really expensive. Basically, you'd hire someone in there, you pay them $300,000, and their spouse would really resent it because their standard of living for that much money was still not very high in Silicon Valley. Your staff would have to drive over an hour to come back and forth, even if they were paid well. So really not a good place for middle-class living standards.

Gillespie: Or even upper class. If you're making $300,000, you're in the top 2 percent or 5 percent.

Lonsdale: Not a good place for upper-middle-class standard, either, I should say. There are all sorts of issues in California. It's hard to build things. If you get sued, you're probably guilty until proven innocent, so the really bad court system and just all these reasons why we didn't really want to raise our family there culturally either. I'm pretty moderate socially, but there are really crazy things going on there, and you'd best rather raise your kids somewhere sane. 

A lot of my friends actually left America. They got really negative. It's really sad. Some of them went because they made a lot of money and went to Switzerland, or Singapore, or elsewhere. And I really believe in America. I believe in our constitutional republic. I believe in the values that created this country. And so for me, choosing to go to Texas is like, let's stay here, let's fight for our country. Let's do it from somewhere sane.

Gillespie: What was most attractive about Texas? The four most populous states in the country are California, New York, Texas, and Florida. California and New York are losing people to Texas and Florida. What was it about Texas that you liked more than Florida?

Lonsdale: Yeah, we do love Florida. We love Gov. [Ron] DeSantis and the rule of law there and the great policy they do. If I was just a hedge fund investor, Palm Beach would be a great place to live. I have a lot of mentors there. Miami's a good place for that. 

Culturally, Texas is a better place to build things. There's a history of building technology companies here in Austin, Texas. There are a lot more engineers. There are a lot of great engineering schools here, a lot of great companies. If you look at who's moved here to Austin, I have a lot of my fellow entrepreneurial friends. Elon Musk is spending time in Texas, not in Florida, for the same reasons as me I think.

Gillespie: In Texas, you said it's easy to build here. Can you talk about that a little bit more? Because that is something Texas is known for. It's got a lot of wide open space. Lonsdale: Yeah, there are less stupid rules. There are less bureaucrats. Even in this house, when we were trying to do some work in the back, we called the city and they said "You're in the extrajudicial territory, call the county." And we called the county, and he said, "Are y'all dumping sewage?" And we said, "No, sir. We're trying to build this extension." They said, "What did you call me for? Do what you'd like." 

This is amazing, this place. It just lets you do what you want. Also, the governor and the people here, when you call them up with a problem as a business, they say, "How can I help you get this done? How can I help you build?" In California, famously when Elon Musk complained to them online, they said, "Fuck you," right? So, it's a very different culture of working with you to help enable you as a builder and stay out of your way vs. getting in your way.

Gillespie: Let's talk a little bit about some of your billionaire friends who left the country rather than staying here. Everybody has a right of exit, but are they doomers in a way? You are part of the effective accelerationist movement. You are very much a white-pilled optimist about the future. What's wrong with going to Singapore?

Lonsdale: Listen, I'm a realist. They're right that there's a lot we have to fix about America. My father raised me to be courageous. And your job as a leader is that you confront things that are broken and that's what you're supposed to do. That's part of me. It's part of my masculine urge, that I have to fix things. I have to stand up for what's right. And so to me, it's just not who I am, to run away. 

And I could see the argument in different contexts in history where it did make sense to run away. Like I had Jewish relatives, some of whom fortunately left Poland on time. That was correct. I don't think there are places to run away to right now [where we] could get away from the types of battles that we need to fight in the world, that we need to win in the world. It's not obvious to me that liberty, freedom, markets, innovation for health care win out if America goes the wrong way. So, we have to have that fight here because if we lose, we'll probably lose everywhere else.

Gillespie: Are you always looking toward the future?

Lonsdale: I like to think I'm an entrepreneur who sees the world for how it is. I see what's possible. I see the gaps. I see where we are now, where we could be. I think that we can see what'll happen if we don't do something, what will happen if we do something. And I've built a lot of companies because I realized this thing's broken, but here is what's possible. And I see a lot of those gaps around policy and government as well. And I'm optimistic that with the right builders, we could do it. I'm not optimistic these things will just happen. But I'm optimistic that if a bunch of us get together and we fight for it, then we can win.

Gillespie: So let's talk about artificial intelligence, and how that plays out, because this seems to be the new bugaboo right now. Everybody is freaking out about it. What are the concerns over AI right now? And why are you on the positive side of things, rather than the "we got to slow down and regulate everything to death" side?

Lonsdale: There are a couple of different buckets I put the concerns into. One of the more extreme concerns, which was expressed well by people like Tim Urban and people like Elon Musk, kind of shows this exponential takeoff of AI. Throughout American history, we've had a lot of times where there are these messianic complexes where people are convinced that the Messiah is going to come and the world is going to end. And it just seems to occur every couple of generations. And this is a kind of secular version of a messianic complex that they're arguing for.

Gillespie: But you don't know if it's Jesus or the Antichrist, right?

Lonsdale: You could argue either one, very interestingly, or analogs of either one in some interesting ways. And so people are saying, yes, this thing takes off, it starts to improve itself, and it's very impressive how well this is working. And so how are we going to have to bear a new form of God effectively that's a thousand times smarter than people and just basically runs the world? And in 10 to 30 years, [that's] pretty unlikely, but there are smart people who believe that's the case and that's a worthy conversation.

Gillespie: But you're a smart person, and you're not betting on that. You're betting on something else.

Lonsdale: If it actually turns out that it is possible to create that with this technology, I don't think we're going to stop it long-term anyway. And I don't know if there's much I could do about it. So we can have that debate. It seems pretty unlikely to me. It seems like it'll take a lot longer than people think.

Gillespie: What are the things that AI will do for people that they're not understanding?

Lonsdale: So there are two buckets. There's a messianic bucket, and that's one argument. It's a very separate argument we can discuss or not, which is this very crazy end-of-time sort of debate. And then there's the everything-else argument where they're afraid of disinformation and destroying jobs. We shouldn't conflate the two arguments, right? They're two separate arguments, like, if you're going to have a God who destroys a job, that's like a stupid thing to debate. It's going to be different anyway. 

So let's go to this bucket over here, what's actually going to happen. And as far as I could tell, this is going to be one of the best things ever for humanity. Productivity is the underlying factor for how well our civilization is doing, how well the economy is doing. And productivity can go way up over the next decade. It could basically free us from drudgery. It can make things really inexpensive for poor people and for everyone else.

Gillespie: Can you give a specific example of how you think—granted, all predictions are wrong—that AI will make life easier or better for people?

Lonsdale: So let's start with what it's already doing. So there are some that came out in the last month from companies like Klarna, which is a big payments company, and people have to call and deal with them. And they have 70 percent of the calls being handled by the AI now. And the people are happier with those calls and can call back less to bother them afterward. [It's] saving [Klarna] a lot of money on those. And there are lots of versions of this. 

Michael Dell—who's also a major presence here in Austin—was saying the other day when he was here that he thinks he's going to have 20 percent higher productivity for his company of 100,000 people. And so basically, there are all sorts of applications of that. Michael is a very serious guy. He doesn't just make wild claims. He actually sees how in the next two years he's going to have certain salespeople being helped, certain marketing documents, certain customer support processes. 

I'll give you one other one: health care billing. Sounds like a boring area. Why are we talking about it? Over $200 billion a year is spent on health care billing in the United States. It's people in office parks going back and forth with insurance companies, and there's like tens of thousands of rules, each for thousands of companies—a mess. Millions of people try to do this. And so it turns out, we already have companies that are making that a few times more productive, which is going to pull another $100 billion of waste out of the economy. So this productivity hitting in all these areas seems very likely over the next few years.

Gillespie: Let's talk about Palantir. You are one of the co-founders. And it was 2003, is that right? 

Lonsdale: I was 20-21 years old, and we started it back then.

Gillespie: How did you start it at that age?

Lonsdale: I just finished at Stanford. I was helping Peter [Thiel]. Peter Thiel was an investor with Facebook at the time, and we had a hedge fund we were running together. I was an intern at PayPal—and the Chinese and Russian mafia were stealing all of our money. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk merged two companies to become Paypal. And so we had to figure out how to stop the bad guys. 

And it turned out that with all the talent that had been brought together in Silicon Valley around that first tech bubble in 2000, we were able to figure out things like how to investigate bad guys that were way ahead of what the government was doing. This was a shocking realization, that all these young engineers were actually way ahead. In the computer science world, you hear stories about the National Security Agency in the 1970s doing things that no one even understood until 15 years later.

Well, the congressional hearings built them. But honestly they would do things and people would look at it and then academics can't explain it. And then I could have just learned why with much more advanced theories much further on. So they were way ahead of us in the government from the mid-20th century. But that was no longer the case in 2000. 

And so we started helping the FBI and Secret Service to arrest the bad guys at PayPal, and my roommate and I got really interested in this. Wow, there's all this investigative stuff we're doing, and 9/11 happened and the government was spending billions of dollars on, frankly, backward things, that we're not nearly as advanced. We said, wow, this is really dangerous. We have bad guys attacking our country. We have people violating civil liberties, not using the data right. Let's build something that could take the best and brightest in this area and extend it to help all of our allies stop the bad guys.

Gillespie: What was the genius inside of Palantir?

Lonsdale: If you want to go to the highest level, we were ranked No. 1 in Silicon Valley for the talent. So there are a lot of very hard engineering problems all combined, you have to do just all these things. David Hume was a big inspiration for us of how reason works, how the mind works, like what are the ways in which the human mind can grapple with data that's too big to be kept inside one human mind. 

You had tens of billions of dollars being spent gathering all types of data in thousands of databases. How do you as an analyst look at this and connect the dots? And so you had to basically figure out how you start with one set of objects and properties and link them in various ways to other things and say, show me everything connected to this by this type of data. Show me everyone where this person's flown with. Show me everything that's connected to this where they have similar names, maybe the same person. Show me everything they've paid for, and then show everyone they've paid and watch the cash flows. Just helping people get their minds into massive data and then monitoring it in a way that's intuitive to them, so that when some random signal intelligence six months later showed a payment between two suspicious guys, all of a sudden they can connect the dots and we can find where the bad guys are. So it's really hard to say who's allowed to see what data. 

Gillespie: From a libertarian perspective, the engineering and technological feats are fantastic. The idea of following data flows where you can find bad behavior and target that, rather than doing large sweeping nets of all sorts of people, that's great. And obviously, the successes that Palantir talks about the most is unveiling China's GhostNet program, as well as probably helping to locate Osama bin Laden. 

Lonsdale: Palantir is behind thousands of terrorists being targeted and eliminated.

Gillespie: Then what are the concerns? How do you work with a government that is known for violating civil liberties on a fairly regular basis? How do you build a system so that you're not merely the handmaiden to a surveillance state?

Lonsdale: The whole core of Palantir was basically a civil liberties engine from the start. What data are you allowed to see and in what context? And how do we bring that together in light and show you only what you're allowed to see that lets you get your job done. The problem is, a lot of these guys, maybe they think they're Jack Bauer in the show 24, someone who's in charge of catching the bad guys, and they're going to break the rules. And we don't want you to be able to break the rules if you're not supposed to break them, but we want you to get the bad guys anyway. That's the whole point of this. 

So it's actually a really hard data problem. Like what are you legally allowed to see? And what's the policy? And we don't set the policy. But we make it so it's very transparent. So if Palantir's installed a certain part of the FBI or the CIA or anywhere else, the people running that can go back and look, here are the rules, here's what was done, here's where the rules were changed, here's who changed them. 

You have basically full audit logs, full audit trails, and you're doing things within their system. And you do need to make things so you can change the rules because there is policy change that happens. But it needs to be transparent, needs to be clear who did what. So someone can't just get in and do something inappropriate.

Gillespie: Here's a strange question. What is your reaction to people like Julian Assange and WikiLeaks or Edward Snowden?

Lonsdale: There's good and bad there. So as a libertarian, as someone who thinks the government wastes tons of money on tons of incompetent things, you want whistleblowers to call out the government, you want to call out waste, you want to call out bad actors. 

Palantir, along with some really talented people, helps stop a lot of major attacks. We literally helped eliminate thousands of terrorists that were planning attacks on us that we wouldn't have otherwise found or stopped, including those famous ones as you alluded to that we don't talk about in public because we don't want crazy people coming for us. But in general, we were close to people who helped uncover tons of these different rings of people who are clearly planning violent attacks in America. Some cases stopped them only with very little time to spare. And it's very frustrating to me that because you have so much competence in stopping these things, people now assume you don't need anything at all in the intelligence community. 

So I agree, there are abusive elements of the intelligence community. I agree that a lot of times, when something's confidential, they're using that to get away with nonsense. But I disagree with the idea that there are not bad guys that we have to fight. And so for me, it's like, let's make the government competent, but let's make the system so it watches the watchers.

Gillespie: How does Palantir help keep the government accountable?

Lonsdale: Actually, to Joe Biden's credit, at the time as vice president, I think he was involved in helping bring Palantir in a long time ago and making sure that we were tracking where all this money was going, because there is just generally a lot of fraud around these issues. And so the more you track any kind of government spending well, the more you understand it in a confident level, the more you're going to find all sorts of bad actors. Unfortunately, this was not always applied to my knowledge to COVID spending. It wasn't always applied as much as I would have liked it to be.

Gillespie: How does that system work?

Lonsdale: If you go back to the complicated fraud problem at PayPal, you're basically mining through the information and you're connecting different analyses and you're finding, first of all, cases that are of known fraud, which are not that hard to find. And you're modeling those to search for things that are similar, and you're piecing through it and you're flagging a bunch of suspicious things. A person does not have time to go through millions of these things. But if you flag things that are very suspicious to them and then show all the data in an intuitive way to them, they say, "Wait, this is obviously something that's wrong."

I remember back at PayPal, there'd be payments, there'd be a bunch of emails that were clearly all set up by the same person, like "baseball2000" or "Yahoofootball2000" or whatever it was, and all the money's going to those accounts and going out of the banks right away, and it's clear it's a coordinated network or something. The computer didn't know for sure. But once you show it to a person, it becomes obvious. So you work together on these things.

Gillespie: Can you ballpark what percentage of stimulus payments were either wrong or shouldn't have been made?

Lonsdale: I don't have that information myself. Palantir is a nonpartisan company. I don't even run it anymore. I'm close to a lot of people behind it. I remember at the time, even President [Barack] Obama agreed, for example, there's lots of fraud in Medicaid. We should probably go after it. He visited us. He was going to do it. His office ended up stopping us from doing it. They didn't want that. Their office doesn't want us to, because they don't want the narrative out there admitting how bad it is, which is frustrating, because we can actually fix most of it. 

Gillespie: Is there any way to change that political calculus?

Lonsdale: You need a really strong, really competent president who's willing to do it. Policy-wise, the Trump administration was willing to, but there's a certain level of confidence that wasn't always there on the follow through. And people have pushed back, and they drop it.

Gillespie: I mean, every president's like this. I'm not going to touch your Medicare. And that might mean I'm not going to touch your Medicare even if you're getting it under the wrong circumstances.

Lonsdale: It's not even for people. I think most of the fraud goes to a lot of very sketchy doctors and health systems. Those places are very powerful special interests. And it just creates a huge headache to go after them. And you need a president who wants to focus on the issue. And listen, there are lots of things to focus on. I'm not telling you this is the most important thing. It does bother me as an American that we waste $100 billion or whatever it is on this nonsense.

Gillespie: Are you going to vote for Donald Trump or Biden?

Lonsdale: I spend most of my time in the states because that's where I can make a huge difference. I have teams in 20 states for Cicero. I respect people very much who would never vote for Trump. I respect people who think Trump's policies are much better than Biden's. And so it's not something that I tend to weigh into.

Gillespie: Do you respect people who definitely will vote for Biden?

Lonsdale: I generally think there's a lot of failed policies. I generally think that there are some people in this administration I admire, but overall, I do not admire this administration. I understand why some people morally still prefer Biden to Trump. That's not my point of view right now.

Gillespie: Is something fundamentally broken, where we are looking at a rematch of Joe Biden and Donald Trump?

Lonsdale: They do seem probably slightly too old to be the people we should be electing. I understand why people are really angry at the way Donald Trump's been treated. Jeb Bush and I wrote a piece on him in The Wall Street Journal talking about how both Elon Musk and Donald Trump had the court weaponized against them. And I see people who agree with a lot of the policies Trump did and are feeling he's treated really badly. So I know why that makes them want to fight for him. I don't think the country is broken or anything like that. I respect different views on these things.

Gillespie: It is interesting though, that Trump has run twice and has gotten less than 47 percent of the popular vote each time. And it seems like it's going to be very close now. Lonsdale: Yeah, I definitely don't think he's the Antichrist. And I definitely think there are some things I really admire that he's done and some things that I dislike as well.

Gillespie: Whatever else you can say about Trump or Biden, they plainly are the end of something. They're not the beginning of something new. Are we just going to be in a holding pattern for at least four years?

Lonsdale: I don't know if that's actually entirely true. There is a lot of new stuff coming, especially on the right. Right now we have a lot of new ideas and a lot of people around the policy organizations on the right who would be running things.

Gillespie: I hope you're right. Because the narrative, which may not be right, is that nobody wants to go into the Trump administration because it's going to be a train wreck. 

Lonsdale: I think people generally want to serve the president of the United States of America, even if they don't necessarily personally always admire him.

Gillespie: Let's talk about the Cicero Institute. What's its mission statement?

Lonsdale: So, the Cicero Institute is a nonpartisan policy think tank. We have a C3, which is the education side, and the C4, which is we're working at the state level to basically increase accountability and align incentives. 

Gillespie: It's named after Cicero. Explain why.

Lonsdale: Cicero was a Roman statesman. I really admire that a lot of the wisdom we have, the kind that reignited the Renaissance, came from writings of his that were saved. And he really stood for duty and wisdom, and for how a country is supposed to work, how a country is supposed to have its citizens who are merchants or natural aristocrats getting involved and making things competent and logical.

Gillespie: What is the Cicero Institute's approach to homelessness, and how is it different and more effective than what you encountered in California?

Lonsdale: We're looking for areas where there are giant gaps in the world between how things should work and how they work today thanks to bad policy. And the homelessness stuff is a really good example of that. The way things are done now in California are just totally insane. You have a billion dollars being given out, not based on data or metrics, but based on political favors to very powerful, very corrupt nonprofit groups whose incentives are completely misaligned. So these cities and these nonprofit groups get more money for doing the wrong things.

Gillespie: I know you're a big critic of the Housing First policy, that the first thing you do to address homelessness is somehow either build more housing or give more housing to people. Why is that wrong?

Lonsdale: Seventy-five percent of these people in cities are on drugs, and 75 percent are mentally ill. It overlaps. And if you give someone who's on drugs and mentally ill a house…. I think in San Francisco, they have more people who died in these homes than who moved on to being self-sufficient. This is a total mess. And then, by the way, who gets the homes? A lot of people who are working in the nonprofit groups get the homes, and people who are close to them, of course, and we try to make it so we had to give the homes to the people who are the most vulnerable, which sounds good on paper. It's that idea of equity. There's a vulnerability index they created, which is used by most homeless groups now in most cities. Most of the cities around the country are using the progressive groups. And the index says you get more points toward a home if you're on drugs. You get more points toward a home if you've committed a crime. It's more points for violent crime. You get more points if you're not in a drug recovery program because you need it more. You get more points where kids are truant and have been taken away from you. 

If you're on the very far left and you see everything through a lens of victimhood, you say, "Oh, these things happen to you. You should get more points." If you understand the world like a person who understands logic and reason, you realize, well, these [policies] are creating incentives, right? And so our nonprofit will follow and try to help people working with the homeless industrial complex. 

Even here in Austin, homeless people walk into this thing that's been set up by these progressive groups, and they say to them, "You sir deserve a home. Here's how you can get a tent." And he replies, "I don't really need a tent. I'm sleeping on someone's couch." She says, "I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that, because you're more likely to get a home if you're in the tent. And here's how you set it up." And then he comes back two months later and she says, "Oh, you're not quite there for a home yet. The Republicans haven't given us enough funding." And he says, "I hear I would have maybe qualified for home money if I was on drugs." And she says, "Well, that might have given you enough points, but we don't like to think of it that way." 

This is literally the conversation. A lot of people don't realize our country is more insane on these things. They assume it's something more logical than this. It's not.

Gillespie: Does the Cicero Institute have model legislation for how to deal with homelessness?

Lonsdale: It does. We have eight different points. The big ones are you want to redirect money away from Housing First toward mental health treatment and drug treatment. You want to redirect things toward temporary shelter, not toward just giving away homes. It's much more efficient and scalable. You want to realign the incentives, so cities ban street sleeping and put people into the shelters. And they don't get more money for bringing more homeless people in. You want to basically realign things where the dollars given out to the nonprofit groups are given out based on metrics and goals. So you have accountability, you audit them, you say, here's your goals, and you get the money not based on being politically connected but based on what you're hitting. 

One of the big ones we really like is what is basically called diversion courts. And so you want a court that could actually force treatment for people. So if someone in San Francisco, forgive me, has pooped on the street for like a fifth time in a row, rather than say, "Oh, we can't do anything about it, just go out there and do it a sixth time," which is disgusting and bad for everyone, you say, "I'm sorry, we're not going to put you in prison because we're not jerks, but we're going to put you here in forced treatment," which is kind of like the obvious solution.

Gillespie: Which is also kind of like prison, right? 

Lonsdale: It is. So, technically, they do deserve to go to prison for having broken the law, but that's really mean. Let's send them somewhere else instead of forced treatment, because you can't just let people keep pooping on our streets. It's like having an adult in the room. It's like these are children in charge, so you can't just let a person keep doing that.

Gillespie: Reason is a house with many mansions. So we have lots of differences of opinion. Within that, I agree, if you're constantly defecating on the street, there should be enforcements for that. But, in general, with a lot of policies like this, how do you make sure that you are not just creating another power structure that can be used arbitrarily by the state or by whoever's in power to punish people that for whatever reason you don't like?

Lonsdale: This is where a lot of our government is broken. We have to have separation of powers. You have to have checks and balances. [Distinguishing between the] Legislative, judicial, and executive branches is one of the key things we get wrong with our administrative state. But you do need rules about this. Then you do need a court system that enforces those rules. And you need a way to appeal to another thing outside of that court system if it's doing something wrong.

Gillespie: So let's jump from homeless people and possibly forced diversion to something else. I've heard Cicero is involved in creating nonprofit prisons. This is not a private prison and it's not a state-run prison, but it would get money based on getting its inmates not to come back to prison, not to be recidivists. How does that illuminate what the Cicero Institute is about?

Lonsdale: So again, we're all about incentives and accountability and really things that create effective functional cultures to get the best results. And right now, our prisons in America do not have effective functional cultures. They are mostly very negative cultures. They mostly have extremely poor results relative to what's possible. When you want to look for incompetence in the world, you look for volatility results. It turns out there are some programs in some prisons for the same sets of people that have like half or a third of the recidivism rate. And so how do we do that? 

A not-very-smart politician who wants to do the right thing will look at that program and say, "We're going to just pay money for that program. We're going to try to copy it." That's one level, but the higher level is how do we create a system which is as close as possible to the way the market works, where the things that are working get more funding and get rewarded and the things that are not working go away. Because the problem is, one system might work somewhere. It's not going to work everywhere else. So you want to make things echo as close as possible to a market. And they say this actually gets down to one of the core misconceptions about prisons, that we have these for-profit prisons, and that's what's ruining everything. It's 10 percent of the prisons. These for-profits are not very good in general, but it's not because they're for-profit. It's because their profit incentive is the wrong incentive. Imagine if we gave a bunch of best entrepreneurs the right incentive and said you can only make money in prisons by getting your recidivism rate down, by making sure people who come out, they come out employed, by making sure when they come out there are ways of measuring their success in the community. That's what we should be doing. There are 37 prisons in California. Imagine if we measured all of this really well. And every couple of years, we replace the bottom three or four and give rewards to the top three or four. Make it so they're all part of this mission. 

Gillespie: You relegate them. It's like British football. 

Lonsdale: So how do you do this? First of all, there's a policy we're trying to pass. There are a bunch of great policies, and unfortunately in Arizona recently, the private prisons—not the good private prisons—stepped in and they've killed some of them. But we're going to get it next year. We're going to keep fighting. But there are other places where we have passed policy for incentives for probation and parole. It's worked extremely well. 

Here's another thing we want to do: We want to take a for-profit prison. We want to buy it into a nonprofit. So imagine putting it in a nonprofit. We're going to run it inside of that nonprofit as if the policy was already there, as if our only goal was that people coming out have higher employment, as if we don't want people to come back, and I want to do that in order to show what's possible. Because again, it's back to that volatility concept. You could show that something could be much better than it is. You can inspire people to say, wait a second, how do we get more of this? Because this is possible and no one's doing it.

Gillespie: Do you think too many things are crimes?

Lonsdale: I'm not for locking up nonviolent drug offenders in general. I have people in my life who I've worked with, who spent a lot of time in jail for things that I think they shouldn't have done. I think our regulatory state is way too big, and it's way too easy to get someone in trouble for a lot of nonsense. We have 9 million words of regulation per state on average. It's a mess. So yeah, there are definitely way too many crimes. 

That said, you do need to put the bad guys in jail. And if you don't, you get really high crime rates. And there are people who need to be punished, who need to be deterred from doing what they're doing. There's a whole thing on the left about prison abolition, which is insane. And I think that's going to hurt our society. I think there's a thing on the right, which is probably too mean, where it's just like you lock up everyone and copy [El Salvador President Nayib] Bukele, which is probably not what we should do in the U.S., even though maybe it made sense in Central America. But I think that both the left and the right, we all can agree that we should run these prisons competently.

Gillespie: I was hoping you were going to say that the right and the left can agree that they really should be libertarian.

Lonsdale: I think that's the libertarian concept from the sense that you're taking the things that work about liberty, work about a free society, and you're applying it to create competence in something that we all can win on.

Gillespie: You are one of the co-creators of the University of Austin. What drew you to that project? You're a Stanford graduate. You have written you don't want to send your kids to an Ivy League or, I guess, Stanford. What is the market gap that you're hoping the University of Austin will fill?

Lonsdale: Well, I hope in 15 or 20 years, the Ivy League or Stanford might be better. If you haven't been in these universities the last 10 years, you've really missed the rapid decline of them on a number of vectors. You basically had these radical, far-left ideologues conquer these places. There are more administrators than kids at Yale. There are almost as many at Harvard. And they are to the left of the professors. The professors in a lot of these departments are basically really focused on these very, very extreme ideologies. 

And you can't become a professor or even a Ph.D. student anymore if you don't go along with that stuff most of the time in these places, and it's really a rot that's kind of core to what's going on in our civilization right now, which Elon Musk calls the woke mind virus. I think [Richard] Dawkins came up with that. It really is this mind virus that is spreading from there and breaking a lot of things. I think a lot of stuff in our society, when it doesn't have to fight for its living or doesn't have to be accountable, ends up just being taken over by this virus.

Gillespie: One of the arguments used to be that you could be a leftist until graduation. But now it's gotten to a point where it's broken; the universities and the people coming out of them don't quite snap back. They're stuck there.

Lonsdale: Yeah. A lot of them go into these thousands of government-funded nonprofits all over the country and just spread ridiculous, broken ideology. They've conquered a lot of the marketing departments and human resources departments. And they're spreading ideas that are frankly anti-competence ideas. And they're very broken. You see all these blue cities all around the country, the vulnerability index we talked about for homelessness, it makes no logical sense. But they've learned in college, you don't argue against things like this. It's a virtue-signaling thing. You have to go along with it. You have to nod. You have to applaud. You have to snap or whatever the hell they do these days. And you're not allowed to say this is clearly wrong. It's bad incentives. By the way, you learn that if you're a white man, you shut up and you nod and go along. The whole thing's ridiculous.

Gillespie: What's the alternative then?

Lonsdale: The alternative is not to have an insane [Critical Race Theory] Marxist running schools. Just have one of them run by moderate, sane people. It's not a conservative thing. It's not a libertarian thing. You probably still have more moderate Democrats than anything else, because it's academia. That's generally been how academia works. You have people on both sides, right? And you have a school that focuses on the pursuit of truth. You have a school that focuses on actually educating the kids and teaching you how to speak up, teaching intellectual courage, teaching them how to have debates. Basically, the idea of intellectual humility, where you might not already have the answer. I think the whole idea of the woke mind virus is that you already have the answer and your job is to shame and ignore people who don't go along with your preconceived set of solutions. 

Instead, let's actually learn and let's violate what we thought was true and learn from both sides. It's a culture of healthy intellectual discourse, which is missing unfortunately on these campuses. We've had these seminars where kids come from Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, and Yale and these places, and they're blown away being at the seminar for a week with great professors and debating ideas and seeing debates, for example, on the whole trans issue, like get a famous trans-economist and a famous feminist to debate the trans issue. Imagine that, and do so with intellectual humility and respect. And they actually ended up hugging each other afterward, despite the kind of fierce argument for a couple of hours.

People have never even seen these debates modeled in a healthy way to them their whole lives. Our society's not in a great place with the way universities work.

Gillespie: Let's talk a little bit about getting it to a better place. You have a very active Substack and a podcast that is called American Optimist. What's the controlling idea there?

Lonsdale: I've been lucky to be able to found a handful of multibillion-dollar companies. And I'm friends with a lot of people who have done the same, and I'm involved with a lot of that. I've been exposed to a lot of things that make me more optimistic because I understand what a lot of smart people are doing to change things in health care and to save lives with new breakthroughs there. And there are just lots of cool stuff going on in the world. And I want to show people, here's what's going on, here's what the common people are doing. Here's why we can be optimistic.

Gillespie: Why do you think the country really has been in a funk at least for 10 years or so? What do you think is driving that?

Lonsdale: What are the challenges? There's definitely civic breakdown. There's definitely this weird thing going on. And it's probably because of social media and because of living our lives more online, where we're like these more disembodied people who don't have some of the same, traditional, healthy ways of relating to each other, relating to our communities. The algorithms make us far more polarized. Donald Trump's ascendancy was also tied to a lot of people in the working class facing competition from around the world and overall lifted up everyone around the world but that did make things tougher for quite a while. And so you have a lot of different areas of struggle. I'm actually quite optimistic. There are good solutions to these things, and I think it's our job to work on those solutions. But that doesn't mean these aren't real, serious challenges for our society.

Gillespie: You're young and you're already doing this. This is the type of stuff that usually people in your situation, they wait 10 or 20 years, cash out, and then start telling the world how to run itself. And that has a long and generally awful lineage. People like Henry Ford did that to very strange ends. But what drives you to be doing this now while you're still growing your business empire?

Lonsdale: There are a couple of things. One is there's just a lot around us that's really broken in our society. And I worry that if you know the history of these things, when you take something that's really broken, if you don't fix it, that's when populists come in and pass crazy things. So if you don't fix health care, then health care gets socialized. If you don't fix a badly broken regulatory state, that's when they come in and just completely change all the rules and take it over and break everything. So in general, I'm worried if we just don't do anything for 10 or 20 years, things could be broken. 

America is an exceptional country, and it's very rare to get a constitution with a check on powers that enshrines liberty the way that ours did. And there are lots of things to fix now. The regulatory state has obviously grown in such a way that it's no longer really constrained by the same principles of the Constitution. So we have to go and put that back in the box and fix it. So there are big things to fix. But yeah, if we just start over from scratch, if you look at human history, like 999 times out of a thousand, we get a really bad answer. So, we don't want to burn it down. That's much worse. We have something really, really precious that we have to keep fighting for and improving. And the other thing is, I do think actually that as an entrepreneur, from what I've seen, I think your mind can work really well in your 30s, 40s, and 50s in a way where you can still learn new things in a dynamic way.

When you start to get into your later 60s and 70s and 80s, I think there's something that ossifies where it's a lot harder to create new concepts for yourself and create new expertise for yourself. I think you still can be the best in the world at what you've been doing your whole life. But to do something new, I wanted to make sure I was really learning these things in a time when I could be one of the best in the world at them.

Gillespie: Do you worry that this is also true of nations and societies, where they go through a period when they get old and senescent?

Lonsdale: That's why it's our job to come in and boldly fix them. So there are all these invisible hands of the market that get rid of old companies. And we don't have stupid companies built 100 years ago around. Imagine if your local town restaurant failed 60 years ago and it was still there. That's what the government is right now. So we basically have to go in and put these same mechanisms in, to get rid of dumb regulations, get rid of dumb parts of government. And we haven't done that very well. But the reason I'm excited about what the Cicero Institute could do is we can go into the states, we can do it in the states boldly. And then we could take those same frameworks and use them in D.C. And that's what I'm trying to do.

Gillespie: Growing up, what were the sources of the person you became intellectually and politically?

Lonsdale: So, obviously, when I was very young, Ayn Rand was an important influence in the duty of the businessman to get involved in the fight for these things. My father actually read some of these books as well. He and I don't always agree on politics, but he was into that. My younger brother was into Austrian economics. So Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard had a very strong influence on me. I'm not an anarcho-capitalist, but there's deep wisdom in a lot of the structures and frameworks he came up with that were really fascinating. And when I was at Stanford, Milton Friedman was there actually. He had been in Chicago before that, and he and I regularly got lunch and his wife Rose joined us.

Gillespie: Did he pay for it? Did you get a free lunch from Milton Friedman? 

Lonsdale: I think the Hoover [Institution] did have free lunch. I was paying tuition though, so it could have been something like that. And those were really big influences on me. If I'm honest, maybe like Isaac Asimov's Hari Seldon—I don't know if you ever read the old Foundation series, but Hari Seldon's job was to kind of figure out what was going to happen over the next thousand years and to improve society. I thought that was a really great goal. I was born with a lot of talents, and I'm lucky to be good at lots of this stuff. And so I'm like, what's a really hard intellectual thing that is really important? Well, how can we have a positive impact on the future of our civilization? And so that to me was very formative as well.

Gillespie: I'm more of a Heinleinian, if we think about it in those terms. Asimov was more of an engineer. But you stopped calling yourself a libertarian. Explain why.

Lonsdale: Yeah, I wrote that piece that liberty is great, but libertarianism is dysfunctional. And in my experience with libertarians, especially from the generation above mine, it was like you sit on the couch and you yell at the TV and tell the government to stop doing things, and you maybe put some money to try to stop the government from doing things, and then the government ends up eventually doing it anyway. It ends up being even more dysfunctional and it keeps growing and you're kind of angry. And all that's not nearly as useful as getting involved in trying to put liberty-based frameworks into the government. 

So, do I think the government should be doing most of these things? No. Should the government be really small? I agree. But there are all these insights that come from liberty and they come from how our society works. Another one: vocational education in America. Do I think the government should have a bunch of vocational programs and training programs? Probably not. I'm pretty pro-liberty, but are they going to get rid of them? No, they're not. So given they're not getting rid of them all, how about we go and we say, how do we apply liberty to these things? How do you apply to them other than deleting them? We're going to go in there and say, listen, we're only going to fund you—there are 27 technical high vocational programs in Texas—based on the salaries of the students coming out. That's a market signal that you can't game. We funded based on graduation rates. They're just going to graduate people. They're going to be funded based on the salaries coming out. Guess what happened when we did that change? The salaries doubled over a period of six years. Doubled. It's completely changed the lives of 50,000 to 100,000 people. 

So you're taking these liberty and free society frameworks and you're putting them into things and you're fixing them and making the government competent. And frankly, that's where the leverage points are these days. If you understand liberty, let's fight and use those frameworks to actually fix things.

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post Why Palantir Cofounder Joe Lonsdale Left California for Texas appeared first on Reason.com.

Nick Gillespie: Last December, you published an op-ed titled "A Five-Point Plan to Save Harvard from Itself" in The Boston Globe. You wrote that Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense, but calling for another Holocaust depends on context, and that deplorable speech should be refuted, not criminalized. But you also note that outlawing hate speech would only result in students calling anything they didn't want to hear hate speech. Can you bring us up to date on the climate at Harvard?

Steven Pinker: Harvard is a big place. There is a diversity of opinion in co-founding the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. There was a rush of faculty joining us, but still a small percentage of the faculty, many of them vocal, many of them for the first time had an opportunity to just communicate with themselves across the sprawling, multiple campuses at Harvard. Many are upset at the direction that Harvard and other elite universities have taken in restricting the range of expressible opinions to a pretty narrow slice of the spectrum, to criminalizing certain opinions, to getting into needless trouble by taking stands that really should be the prerogative of its students and faculty—there isn't any reason that a university should have a foreign policy—or in general, at the level of discourse, where just calling someone a racist is considered counter-argument or a refutation. 

So we formed this council to try to push back, to try to offer emotional support to those who are under attack because it can be devastating to be the target of a cancellation campaign. A lot of the problems that universities have faced have come from the fact that deans and provosts and presidents just want to make trouble go away, and so if someone is yelling at them and making their life miserable, they'll do whatever it takes to get them to shut up. We figure if we also yell at them, then they'll actually have to think about what's the optimal thing to do, rather than just do what makes the noise go down. 

Gillespie: Do you feel like this time it's different?

Pinker: I think so. Harvard itself is in a kind of crisis by its own standards, which is to say that donations are down.

Gillespie: It doesn't really need the money, but it wants the money.

Pinker: Yes. And applications are down. It's become a national joke. I have a collection of memes and headlines and bumper stickers, like "My son didn't get into Harvard." An editorial cartoon of a corporate guy saying, "This guy has a stellar resume, straight A's, top scores, didn't go to Harvard." The reputation, which is a huge resource that Harvard has drawn on, is threatened. And when it's threatened, a lot of Harvard's comparative advantage will also be threatened. Harvard has a lot of money, but it also can to some extent coast on its reputation.

Gillespie: And it can only go down, right?

Pinker: At least if the past few months are any indication, it is.

Gillespie: You also pointed out in that The Boston Globe piece, and elsewhere, that it wasn't just that. Does the affirmative action case that Harvard lost play into the sense that Harvard has been moving in the wrong direction for a long period of time and needs to back up and get back on the highway?

Pinker: It certainly got Harvard's attention. The fact that it does have an outsized reputation means that it has a certain cushion. Not every department has to compete to be the best in the country because students will come, graduate students will come, donors will give.

Gillespie: You're saying that psychology doesn't really have to work very hard at all.

Pinker: Psychology has gone through waves. My former colleague Steve Cosslett is here, who made it the best department in the country when he was a chair and working behind the scenes, which is one of the reasons that I decamped [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] for Harvard more than 20 years ago. The actual quality of departments can go up and down. But Harvard has a certain buffer because of its reputation, which is now being threatened. 

A lot of the things that we're proposing, like meeting the Council on Academic Freedom, would actually relieve some headaches on the administration itself, even though their prime driver is to avoid bad publicity, keep the donations going. But a lot of the trouble, especially that our former President Claudine Gay found herself in, could have been avoided if Harvard did have a more robust academic freedom policy among other things.

Gillespie: Was the plagiarism a legitimate firing offense or is that kind of a side issue?

Pinker: For me, it was a side issue, and I won't go there because that was her. Her testimony did not differ from the other two university presidents. Focusing on Claudine Gay gave us a bit of a distraction, because the problems are more, as we say, systemic. But among them are the fact that universities and their divisions feel that they have to offer moral guidance, some sort of pastoral counseling to a grateful nation, what they ought to feel in response to various tragedies and outrages. That inevitably gets them into trouble because someone will think it was too early, it was too late, it was too strong. Only one side was represented. If they just could shut up and point to a policy that said, we have to shut up, we don't comment, as the University of Chicago has done for more than 50 years, it would just get them off the hook. 

Gillespie: That's the institution of neutrality. And Chicago sticks by that pretty well. 

Pinker: Pretty well. That is, if a department or a center puts up a statement, then they're under pressure to take it down. The reason that it's relevant to academic freedom is that it's just prejudicial to the people working in the university, or in particular in the departments. If your department chair is posting some opinion on police shootings, or Palestine, or Ukraine…

Gillespie: Or Donald Trump, I'm sure that happens a lot. "We love Trump, I love Trump, my department loves Trump." 

Pinker: All the time, yes. But it is prejudicial to the faculty and the students who have to worry, "Are my professional prospects at stake if I take a position that differs from the official one on my department website?" 

Gillespie: In your world of institutional neutrality, would individual faculty be free to issue? 

Pinker: Absolutely. It's just that the institution itself should be the arena. It should be the debating club. It shouldn't actually be a debater.

Gillespie: Of the five principles you mention in your article, after institutional neutrality comes nonviolence. It seems insane that you have to say that colleges should be nonviolent places. How does that fit in?

Pinker: I think we'd be actually saving the university from themselves. But the idea that a legitimate form of expression of opinion in a university campus should be forcibly ejecting a dean from his office and occupying the building, that just shouldn't be what a university is about. I think a lot of faculty have a certain nostalgia for when they did it in the '60s to protest Vietnam. It's like, isn't it cute? The younger generation is doing the same thing, but it really isn't okay for a number of reasons. It's commitment to the wrong ideals. The ideal of a university ought to be persuasion, the careful formation of arguments, not chanting slogans over bullhorns and getting in other students' faces.

Gillespie: Nonviolence includes drowning out speakers. It's one thing to protest. It's another thing to preclude somebody from speaking. 

Pinker: Exactly. There should not be a heckler's veto. Protest obviously is protected, and protest could involve holding placards. It could include shouting out "you lie" in the middle of a lecture, but it can't involve forcing speakers off the stage, drowning them out, drawing a banner across the stage so that speakers can't see them. That is restricting other speech as an ostensible form of expression.

Gillespie: Do you feel like students and faculty at Harvard or elsewhere understand this isn't simply hypothetical? That nonviolence is actually a principle that we need to hold to?

Pinker: Some of us have had to make the case that it's not okay to invade a classroom and start chanting slogans over bullhorns. But we had to make the case and that the university should be consistent in cracking down on it, again to protect itself, such as the lawsuit filed by these students against anti-Semitism who have pointed to episodes in which Jewish students have been intimidated, blocked, and in one case, were assaulted. If the university just had a policy, that "speech is fine, it's okay, we encourage it, but physical force is not," and acted consistently, then they would be off the hook for selective enforcement. 

If they started to enforce it against the often quite disruptive Palestinian student groups, then the Palestinian student groups could file a lawsuit saying, "Well, how come they're enforcing it against us and they don't enforce it against other groups?" If it was just clear, "This is the policy, this is what we recognize as speech, this is what we recognize as force," and be consistent, it would remove a headache from them.

Gillespie: Do you think the bookstore should stop selling Harvard-branded bullhorns?

Pinker: The first of the five-point plan was just consistent commitment to academic freedom. Because another reason that Claudine Gay got into such trouble is that when she was given what admittedly was a kind of a trap that she walked into—that is, if students called for genocide against Jews, would that be prohibited by Harvard's code of conduct—she made a pretty hardcore [American Civil Liberties Union]-style free speech argument, which came across as hollow or worse, because we've had a lecturer who was driven out of Harvard for saying there are two sexes. 

There was another professor whose course was canceled because he wanted to explore how counterinsurgency techniques could be used against gang warfare. We had a professor in the School of Public Health who had cosigned an amicus brief for the Obergefell Supreme Court case against a national policy allowing gay marriage. There were calls for his tenure to be revoked, for his classes to be boycotted. He had to undergo struggle sessions and restorative justice sessions and basically grovel in front of a mob. Given Harvard's history of those cases and others, to all of a sudden say, "Well genocide, it's just a matter of I disagree with what you say, but I defend it to the death your right to say it," came off as a little bit hollow and hypocritical. 

If Harvard had had a free speech policy that was reasonably enforced before that, then at least you would have had something of a leg to stand on in standing on principle. She was technically correct in the same way that there's no law in the United States that says you can't call for a Holocaust. Hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. But when it's so selectively prosecuted, then it becomes ludicrous and literally becomes a national joke or a national disgrace.

Gillespie: It's worse still that Rep. Elise Stefanik (R–N.Y.), who lead the hearing, was herself a Harvard graduate. Although I guess it would have been worse if she was from Yale or Princeton. 

Pinker: There are some theories that there's a little bit of revenge motivation there because of an incident in which she was herself targeted at this invitation at the Kennedy School of Government. But there is a history.

Gillespie: It's wonderful when you find out that all big events in human history are really petty jealousy. Another one of your points is viewpoint diversity. What does that consist of? 

Pinker: Academia has rightly resisted external control over content, over hiring, over promotion, which is good in protecting a university against government propaganda. On the other hand, you can get self-contained circles of people kind of conferring prestige on each other. Then you can get entrenched orthodoxies, which no one can challenge because if they do, then they are downgraded in judgments of quality, which are often so subjective.

Gillespie: The American novelist John Dos Passos was considered one of the greatest writers alive by international modernists. Then he had the misfortune of going to the Spanish Civil War and deciding that the loyalists were as bad as the Francoists. Overnight, literally, he became a terrible writer. This kind of stuff happens, right?

Pinker: If you just define viewpoint by the conventional left-right political spectrum, then things look pretty grim because according to at least a survey of The [Harvard] Crimson, 3 percent of Harvard faculty identify themselves as conservative. And out of those 3 percent, a lot of them are in their 90s, so we know where that's going. But it's not just the left-right spectrum. There can be dogmas that become entrenched within academic fields. For example, in our program of women and gender studies, I don't think you could use the words chromosome, hormone, or sexual selection; that would be not an idea that is thinkable. 

Now the question is, given that universities do operate by peer review, peer evaluation, how could you open them up to the kind of viewpoint diversity that is intellectually indispensable? It's a shame that we still have to recite the arguments from John Stuart Mill about why you should listen to arguments that you disagree with, namely, maybe they're right and you're wrong. Unless you're infallible, you really should listen to other viewpoints. Maybe the truth lies somewhere in between. Maybe there's some third position you haven't thought of that would only occur to you if you hear the problems with your own position. And, even if you're right, your position is only stronger if you have to defend it against legitimate criticisms. But that case has to be made again 200 years later. 

The question is, how do you rescue programs, universities, departments, fields that become self-referential echo chambers? [Psychologist] John Haidt and [political science writer] Phil Tetlock and a number of others in an article about eight years ago called for affirmative action for conservatives. Just as an idea that, especially departments of political science—as we call it, Harvard government—maybe it's not such a terrible thing to have a couple of conservatives around. That should actually be an explicit desideratum, if not a quota. But also, there might be other mechanisms, just opening the process up. We even have at universities a mechanism that's supposed to do that. There are so-called visiting committees where departments every few years are evaluated by academics from other universities, but also donors, trustees. What they're supposed to do is advise deans on whether the department is going in the wrong direction. In practice, they don't have that much influence, and they're often quite cozy with the departments themselves. But if they were more empowered to be alert to intellectual monocultures, to dogmas that have become entrenched, if that was part of their mission, that would be another, less obtrusive way of trying to mix up the ideas.

Gillespie: I suspect there are fewer and fewer Freudians in the psychology department. That's not necessarily a problem, right? As much as independent of what we do academically, we're going to enforce a political or ideological hierarchy or monoculture that has really nothing to do with academics. Is that really the problem that we're talking about?

Pinker: As a field makes progress, certain schools of thought become of historical interest. They've kind of made their contribution. You don't have to have like one Freudian, and one [Noam] Chomsky, and one structuralist, and one functionalist, but there shouldn't be a political litmus test. In many departments there really is. Sometimes it doesn't even have to pertain to the subject matter of the field. It can just be the person's reputation politically. 

I was on a hiring committee for another department at Harvard, not psychology. There was an excellent candidate, who was by any standards, including his own, a political liberal, but he had some heterodox positions. He was opposed to affirmative action, for example. The department chair said, "We can't hire him. He's an extreme right-winger," meaning he had criticisms of affirmative action. You often think of academia as being at the Left Pole. North Pole is the spot from which all directions are south. The Left Pole is the hypothetical position from which all directions are right.

Gillespie: That's the final principle that you talked about, [diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)] disempowerment. How does that happen? Why is DEI bad? And how do you minimize it?

Pinker: I have nothing against diversity, equity, and inclusion. But as Voltaire said about the Holy Roman Empire: it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Diversity, equity, and inclusion imposes an intellectual monoculture. It favors certain groups over others. It has a long list of offenses that mean you can be excluded. But it is a strange bureaucracy. It's a culture that is kind of an independent stratum from the hierarchy of the universities themselves. The officers get hired or poached to move laterally from university to university. It's with their own culture, their own mores, their own best practices. It's just not clear who they report to, or who supervises them, or who allows them to implement policy. 

One of the things that the Council on Academic Freedom discovered is that—we had to dig to do the research that—a notorious practice of the last decade in many universities has been the so-called diversity statements, where job applicants have to submit not only a statement of their research project, their teaching philosophy, but also their commitment to diversity, which in practice means endorsing a certain canon of beliefs, that there is systemic racism, that its only remedy is racial preferences, that racism is pervasive, that it is the only cause of any disparity in racial proportions. If someone in their diversity statement says, I believe that the most defensible policy is colorblindness and that the reason for racial inequities in universities is because of our educational system in high school, their application would go into the circular file.

Gillespie: How did that come to be?

Pinker: This is a good question. That is a question we've asked ourselves. First of all, no one knew that it was a policy of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Fortunately, unlike some universities like the University of California, where they are taken seriously, they are vetted by DEI bureaucrats before they're even sent to departments, and the ones that don't endorse what we could call a woke ideology are just filtered out.

Gillespie: You mean applications go there first before they go to the department.

Pinker: Yes. Not at Harvard, but at many universities. No one knew that we had this requirement. No one knew who implemented it. The faculty never voted on it. The president never said this is our policy going forward. A dean of arts and sciences must have signed off on it, but no one can remember who or when. But we just live with it. Likewise, freshman orientation consists of indoctrination sessions. 

This is emblematic of a trend in universities, that this nomenklatura just got empowered and no one knows exactly how. What often happens is a dean gets into trouble because of some racial incident. They hire a bunch of staff, and that's their way of getting out of the trouble. Then they're there forever. And there is only one way that they've been changing and that's upward. One of the points in the five-point plan is not to necessarily abolish them—although the Florida university system has done that—but at least, just as the military is under civilian control, the DEI bureaucracy should be under the control of responsible deans. 

Gillespie: Would that mean they should be under the supervision or discretion of faculty? 

Pinker: Faculty or at least academic deans, like the dean of arts and sciences. The policy should be exposed to the light of day. The ones that are defensible should be kept and the ones that aren't should be abolished. But they shouldn't change the entire university structure by stealth, which is what has happened.

Gillespie: With the Harvard admissions policies that got into trouble with the Supreme Court, part of the problem was that they were lying about it. They were saying we weren't penalizing Asian students. If Harvard had been more open about it and said we want a different student body than the one that our current admissions process is giving, would you be okay with that?

Pinker: I think if it was transparent and defensible. It's odd how many policies at a university just got entrenched and no one ever kind of decided on them, defended them against criticism. But the so-called holistic admissions, which is a kind of mystical process where they won't say exactly how they do it because it's holistic, favors some mix of regional diversity. Class diversity is a good thing. Racial diversity was okay if it was for diversity, but not for rectifying injustices, but also activism, and arts, and athletics, and volunteer work, and cultural experiences, which also provided a fig leaf where in practice—as we now know from these documents—Harvard could make sure it didn't get too Asian. De facto, that's what happened. We know that in the elite schools, in the University of California system, they have gotten largely Asian because they're more meritocratic—doesn't seem to have done them tremendous harm. But Harvard did not want that to happen. So the Asian applicants, as with the Jewish applicants 75 years before, just happened to be lower in leadership and creativity, all these things that you can't measure. 

Gillespie: You mentioned that Florida has banned DEI statements and things like that. That can affect state-supported institutions or state-assisted colleges. From an academic freedom point of view, this can be troubling, right?

Pinker: That is another kind of menace. I do think that it's not unreasonable for the taxpayers to have some kind of input into what it is they're supporting. But what is the best institutional arrangement where there can be input, there could be safeguards against self-serving, insular communities without it being managed by political ideologues. It's a question of institutional design that I don't even know we have the optimal design for yet. So I don't think it's unreasonable. Here I differ with some of my faculty colleagues who almost define academic freedom as professorial privilege, professorial prerogatives. Professors should be able to do anything they want, and it's no one else's business. I don't think that's right. But you also don't want, as with the McCarthy era, politically motivated, ideological restrictions or loyalty tests to be imposed by the government. But the government does have a legitimate interest in making sure universities don't go off the rails.

Gillespie: Over the past dozen years or so you've emerged as a chronicler of moral and material progress, particularly in books such as The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, which came out in 2011, and Enlightenment Now in 2018. Can you summarize your case for progress? 

Pinker: The case is that if you list what you consider dimensions of human well-being, that is, we're better off if we are alive than dead, if our babies don't die, if women don't die in childbirth, if people don't live in extreme poverty, if we're safe from violent crime, if we're not at war, if our environments are clean, if people are discriminated against on the basis of their race or sex, if children aren't beaten. If you list some reasonable things that people tend to agree are good things—it's better not to have a famine, better to be well-fed—and then you look at the best quantitative estimates over time, as you plot the trends, almost all of them get better. Not all; that would be a miracle. And they don't get better everywhere all the time. The trends are not, as we say, monotonic. The bad things don't always go down, and the good things don't always go up. There are often lurches and shocks. But in pretty much all of them, the historical trend has been, things are getting better.

Gillespie: Do you have a theory of social change? Why have things gotten better?

Pinker: I think that as knowledge increases, and as the arena of debate, discussion, power, and deliberation expands, there's just certain things that have to fall by the wayside. Barbaric practices of antiquity, like a human sacrifice—you throw a virgin into a volcano to get better weather—sooner or later you discover that's the wrong theory. That actually does not, in fact, prevent crop failures. Or that certain races are fit for slavery—that's just empirically incorrect. That women are not capable of intellectual work, but are designed just for the home. 

Gillespie: Up until the late '70s, girls were not allowed to pole vault because evolution had decreed that they didn't have the upper body strength to pole vault. It seems like evolution has caught up since then.

Pinker: Right, exactly. There's just the sheer gain of knowledge. Voltaire, the way he put it, those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Because there are some things that people do want—they want to be well-fed as opposed to hungry and healthy as opposed to sick—when technology provides them with the means, not uniformly, because there is superstition, but in general, more people get vaccinated than don't—but that's not the only thing. As it's harder for small elites to wield absolute power, as you open up the discussion, then there are certain ideas that just aren't going to fly. You just can't defend apartheid without seeming ridiculous or monstrous.

When the world's nations came together in the late '40s to agree on a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the question is, is there some common denominator that all of the world's countries—in the Muslim [world], in China, and India, and the Western countries—could all agree on? Or would it kind of contract to the null set, as many people suspected? It turned out the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there's a lot of stuff in there. And most of it isn't particularly controversial, like everyone should have an education. People shouldn't be imprisoned for their political beliefs. Now, if they'd started out the drafters with something like, the first thing in the Universal Declaration is that America is a shining city upon a hill, you probably wouldn't have gotten agreement on that. Or Jesus Christ as our Savior and that is the way to redemption. Again, then the Hindus would drop out, or the Chinese. So what's left? 

What's left is the conditions of human flourishing. That is, the list of things that I mentioned. It isn't controversial to say that it's better to be healthy than sick, or better for kids not to die. That realization tends to be what survives when the more parochial ideologies become untenable the circle of discourse broadens.

Gillespie: Do you think that material progress and moral progress follow the same logic? 

Pinker: I think they are related. This is something that I've been looking at cross-national and cross-temporal comparisons and putting together the data that went into Enlightenment Now, I was surprised at how many good things come from being rich, for countries. People point to Sweden and Denmark and Norway as really nice places to live. You can invoke their egalitarian ethos but these are rich countries. If you look at the plot, almost any good thing—peace, safety and environmental quality against [gross domestic product] per capita—most of the countries fall on a line, with the exception of the Gulf oil states, which are rich but kind of wretched places.

An idea is that wealth is good just because it buys good stuff, like healthcare, like environmental protection, which is a luxury that you can afford after you have electricity and running water and roads and such. Education is expensive, good policing is expensive. Being rich buys you preconditions for a good life. So why isn't Saudi Arabia such a great place? They got no shortage of money. There is an idea that should be congenial to many people in this room, which is that when you have networks of exchange and commerce and markets, and that's the way you get rich, as opposed to digging stuff out of the ground, which can be monopolized by an elite and then fought over, but if the wealth comes from distributed networks of commerce and voluntary exchange, that kind of pushes people toward cooperation. 

It's the old enlightenment idea of doux commerce, gentle commerce, that the American founders endorsed, and Emmanuel Kant and Voltaire and others, that if you're in a trading relationship that yokes your well-being to that of other people, so you don't kill your customers, you don't kill your debtors. If it becomes cheaper to buy stuff than to steal it, then that eliminates one of the incentives for conquest and plunder. So countries that are both affluent and get their affluence from networks of exchange tend to be pleasant in other ways.

Gillespie: They tend to be more liberal in a classical sense, right?

Pinker: In the classical and in the American political sense, in that they have more munificent welfare states. As countries get richer, they get more redistributive. Maybe less congenial here. I've heard it called Wagner's Law. The countries that people on the left tend to extol because of their welfare states also have a lot of economic freedom and also are very affluent.

Gillespie: That came up when [Sen.] Bernie Sanders [D–Vt.] was pointing to places like Norway and Sweden, which actually sometimes do better on economic freedom indexes than the U.S. There's a lot of bullshit on both sides of that debate. The people who deny progress, moral or material, what's in it for them? 

Pinker: It's a question I thought about a lot. Why do progressives hate progress? I have to say that in the various political factions and bands along the spectrum, it does tend to be libertarians who are most congenial to the idea of progress. That wasn't always true, that's what I found. [Thomas] Hobbes put it well. It's a long-standing phenomenon, because I'm giving you a quote that's almost 400 years old. Let's see if I can remember it verbatim: "Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence for antiquity, for men contend with the living, not with the dead." That is, to criticize the present is a way of criticizing your rivals, your competitors. If there's something that you don't like about the status quo, you want to say how much everything sucks. You don't want to say how much better everything is than it used to be, because then you might be giving credit to the people that you're contending with. That's a big one. 

There are also cognitive biases that hide progress from us, such as the availability bias as coined by [psychologists] Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, which is that we tend to judge probability, risk, danger according to how easily anecdotes come to mind. We use our brain's search engine as a surrogate for probability. If there is a disaster, a terrorist attack, a police shooting, a famine in a part of the world, that's our answer to the question. Are things getting better or worse? Well, of course they're getting worse. I just read about the terrorist attack this morning, and that sticks in memory. Also, there's an emotional coloring to memory that even though we remember bad events in the past, we don't remember how bad they were at the time, so that the negative effect tends to wear off of memory, whereas the negative aspects of the present are still keenly felt. 

This is not a new phenomenon. I'd like to quote Franklin Pierce Adams that, "nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory." That is really true. Even in our lifetimes, even though there are people, especially younger people, who kind of moan about how this is an unprecedented hellscape, in the '70s, the world had only 33 democracies. Half of Europe was behind the Iron Curtain. Spain and Portugal were literally fascist dictatorships, not just countries that people called fascist, but they called themselves fascist. Greece was under the control of a military junta, all of Latin America. So despite the recent recession, people forget how undemocratic the world was in the lifetime of many people. 

Just quality of life. Like if you missed a movie in the local repertory theater, if you did live in a big city that had a repertory theater, you would never see film classics. You couldn't get access to musical performances. You got lost because you didn't have Google Maps. You couldn't look something up in Wikipedia. You had to go to this thing called the Britannica. All of these ways that our lives really have gotten better are very easily taken for granted. 

Gillespie: Before we go to audience questions, you are in town partly because your photography is being shown at Brooklyn Sweet Lorraine Gallery, and your exhibition is called "2 1/2 D: The Stereoscopic Photography of Steven Pinker," which sounds like a concept album from the late '60s. Can you explain what stereoscopic photography is, and your interest in photography—and you're quite accomplished at it? Does it tie into your larger intellectual interests?

Pinker: It does. It actually goes back to my Ph.D. thesis. My Ph.D. thesis advisor is actually in the room, Stephen Kosslyn. The term "Two and a Half D" was borrowed from the artificial intelligence of 40 years ago. In particular, a researcher named David Marr proposed that that is the information that the eyes give to the brain. That is, we don't literally see the world in three dimensions because we see in perspective, both when we are physically observing a scene—you stand between two railroad tracks, you kind of see them as parallel, you know that they're parallel, but you also see them converge. You see them in perspective, and as things recede in distance, you can sense they get smaller, even though they're the same size. That's not what you'd get from an actual three-dimensional model of the world, a kind of mental sandbox. But nor is the world as flat as a pancake. 

The two-and-a-half dimensions allude to the fact that the third dimension is not like the other two. It's actually computed from a number of sources of visual information. When lines converge toward the horizon, we interpret that as depth. When certain things move in the visual field faster than others, we interpret that gradient of motion as a cue to depth. But one of the most interesting is the difference in the view that the two eyeballs give you, that each eyeball is a different vantage point on the world. The views are slightly different, and the farther away something is, the closer its images are in the two eyeballs. The closer it is, the more they diverge. It's kind of a high school trigonometry problem to triangulate from the distance between the eyes, the angle and the differences in the images to how far away something is. 

The brain does that trick unconsciously, and it gives us a very vivid sense of the third dimension. Now, the photography comes from—it's almost as old as photography itself. But in the 19th century, most photography was stereophotography, which means showing two images taken from two vantage points, separated by approximately the distance of the eyes, and figuring out a technological way of getting each image to be seen only by one eye. That can be done with prisms, that can be done with mirrors, that can be done with false color. The recent technology, which is one of the inspirations for the show, when I showed it to the gallery owner, it just blew him away, a new kind of monitor that gives you a stereoscopic image without any headgear, without any glasses, without any gimmicks. It just pops out through some optical wizardry. So I have ultra close-up photos of flowers which kind of reveal their shape and color in hyper-natural detail.

Gillespie: Are you an AI optimist or pessimist, or is that just a silly question?

Pinker: In principle, I am an AI optimist. You never know how technologies will be implemented. I'm not an AI doomer. I don't think that AI will enslave us or turn us into raw materials. The scenario sometimes called the "paperclips ellipse" is the scenario in which an artificial intelligence system is given a goal of maximizing manufacturing of some commodity, like paper clips, and uses every available resource, including our own bodies, to make more and more and more paper clips. That does not keep me up at night.

There are dangers like, impersonation, counterfeit people, spread of disinformation, erosion of the chain of verification of fact. There's the hypothetical technological unemployment, although we're still waiting for that to happen. But there's tremendous promise. It's kind of a shame that the first large-scale implementation of AI was kind of a gimmick: a first-person chat bot, which may have some advantages and may have some misuses. But there is tremendous promise for AI, if it's task-oriented, like autonomous vehicles that could cut down on the million people killed every year in car crashes, or eliminating jobs that no one particularly likes that are repetitive and dangerous.

Gillespie: So DEI enforcement? 

Pinker: That could be the first to go. Actually, seriously, one of my postdocs who was on the job market, and she had to write a DEI statement, but couldn't do it in good conscience. So she had ChatGPT write it for her. It's actually pretty good. Very convincing.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Photo Credits: Nancy Kaszerman/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Nancy Kaszerman/ZUMA Press/Newscom: Rick Friedman/Polaris/Newscom

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki

The post Steven Pinker: What Went Wrong at Harvard appeared first on Reason.com.

Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with one of the great pioneers of podcasting, Dan Carlin, the host of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. Carlin has been putting his thoughts out there for all to hear since the aughts. His deeply researched and urgently delivered takes on everything from Julius Caesar's wars on the Celtic tribes of Gaul to 20th century Imperial Japan's horrific conquest of Asia are downloaded by the millions.

They discussed Carlin's upcoming live tour, how he would update his 2019 book The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments From the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses in light of COVID-19, and whether he believes we can really learn meaningful lessons from history.

Previous appearance:
"Hardcore History's Dan Carlin on Why The End Is Always Near," by Nick Gillespie

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This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Nick Gillespie: You're going on tour. What can fans of Hardcore History expect at a live show?

Dan Carlin: I always call them listeners. Fans seems a little self-aggrandizing to me. It's sort of a mini tour, testing the waters here. We'll see what people think of the final product. Rather than give some sort of a presentation that's the same everywhere, I opted to do a sort of a question-and-answer with, for lack of a better word, a moderator, on stage and then open it up to the audience for questions. I figure that does two things: One, it means that no show is like any other show, and it also assures that we're going to talk about what people want to hear as opposed to me assuming that they're going to like something I do on stage and maybe have some people walk away displeased with what they got. So I hope it works out like I'm assuming. We'll see.

Gillespie: You're going to Los Angeles, Salt Lake, Portland, and New York. So you're really hitting very different kinds of demographics, right?

Carlin: Yeah. So they asked me when we were talking about getting the tour started, they wanted to sample some places and just see what the reaction was, and they said, "Well, where do you go already?" I said, "Well, those four places are places I find myself for various reasons anyway." So they said, "Great. Those are four very different places, and we'll get a good idea of what the demand is in those four areas."

Gillespie: Hardcore History gets downloaded by the millions. Do you have a sense of where your listeners are? As we used to talk about in the rock mag business a thousand years ago when I was involved in that, the psychographic. Who are your listeners and what do you think they're getting out of the show?

Carlin: Well, forever we've been told in all the reputable advisement magazines or whatever's out there that we need to do more demographic research. But coming from my perspective that I've always had, I don't like when people do that to me, and so I don't like the idea of doing it to them. So I don't ask them questions about themselves or delve into who they are or what they make or where they live and then how old they are and what their religious beliefs are. But the podcasting tools that are out there now give us more information than they used to, and so you can say certain things, like you can say what states they're listening to you in the United States, what countries they're listening to you in and those kinds of things.

Basically, when we started, I feel like it was much more U.S.-centric, and now the international audience is growing more. Obviously, the big population centers, you have more people listening than in Wyoming, but that's not because people don't like you in Wyoming. It's just there's less people in Wyoming. So to give you a real answer though, no, I don't know a ton about the listeners and I don't want to. I feel like their privacy is valuable to them like mine is to me, and I feel like what the podcasting services give us is enough.

Gillespie: It's interesting, Brian Lamb, the true radical who invented C-SPAN and turned a surveillance camera on Congress and whatnot, he stepped down a few years ago, but he said that they never did ratings because they don't want to start playing to the audience, and that even if you aren't under pressure to do that, once you know who your audience is, you'll start playing to it. You've been doing this for well over a decade, almost 20 years now, right? Do you feel that way?

Carlin: Well, part of it is an advertising thing, right? So advertisers want to know that information. I mean, we do a tiny bit sometimes, but most of our shows don't have any ads at all because, to be honest, I don't like being a pitch man very much. I had to do it when I was in radio. You don't have a choice. But I always felt a little dirty unless I really liked the product. And then when you start doing the podcast, I had the advantage of being able to just say, well, if I don't either use it for real or if I don't like it, [then I don't have to promote it]. We did Audible, the audiobooks for a while, and I'm a big proponent of reading, so it was easy. We always read the reviews to make sure that even if you like the concept behind the business, that they're treating the customers well.

So I'm happy to do those kinds of things. But we don't do much advertising, so it's a luxury for me to be able to say, "We don't care about the demographics because we don't care and the advertisers that might care we really don't deal with very much." So that was easy. I see your point about the playing to the audience, but I have a different attitude about that. I feel like we self-select our audience. Somebody told me a long time ago that if you just do the shows that interests you, the people that don't like the things that interest you will eventually go away and the people that stay with you you can reliably assume like the same things you do, and so when you pick something you want to talk about, the audience has sort of already been self-selected. I don't know if that's true, but that's what I go with.

Gillespie: Not since you've been doing Hardcore History, but back in your radio days, what was the worst product that you pitched for that you were just throwing up a little bit in your mouth as you were announcing it?

Carlin: Oh God, that's a long time ago now. Off the top of my head, I can't remember, but it was a lot of restaurants. I wasn't a national show, so we didn't get those kind of national commercials. But it's funny though, I mean, I don't feel like they were too terrible because everybody on the station had to read the same ads. They weren't specifically buying from me, so it didn't sound like I'm endorsing it, but I always did prefer if they would just run an advertisement on the show rather than me do what's called a live read where you had to sound like you were endorsing something.

Gillespie: But that's what everybody wants, right?

Carlin: That is what everybody wants. Exactly.

Gillespie: In 2019, and you came on this podcast to talk about it, you published The End is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses. This book came out just a few months before COVID became the latest apocalyptic moment. Did you feel like you were conjuring up material for the paperback or something?

Carlin: With the podcast, obviously, we have no release dates and the reason they take so long is because I really am always trying to do a better job. But when you deal with a book contract, they want their book when they think they're going to get their book. So it turned out I felt a little rushed at the end with that book, but they pushed and pushed and pushed. And then when COVID hit three or four months after the book came out, I remember thinking to myself, "Well, shoot, had it been up to me, I would've missed that because the book would've come out two months after COVID hit and that whole chapter would've been ruined."

There were no warm fuzzy feelings about having thought about that before it happened because millions of people were being affected. To be honest, I know the standard technique is to claim credit for all these things, but I mean, really I was one of the last people on the bandwagon of saying we're vulnerable to another pandemic. I mean, there were a lot of people running around for years saying, "Warning, warning, warning." We had near misses. We had avian flu and we had things a lot worse. So it didn't take a genius to see that coming. I do think the timing was just a little weird.

Gillespie: I remember when COVID hit and the lockdown started, it seemed at first that the market for podcasts seemed to collapse a little bit because people weren't commuting to work anymore. I mean, were people more interested in what you were talking about during the pandemic or less, or did you notice any difference?

Carlin: I think it's binge watching on TV. Again, this sounds awful. We did well during the COVID thing, and we've seen a drop-off since, but I think it's because people are back at work working and things like that. I think we had a time period where people were stuck in the house with nothing to do. When we're doing audio podcasts, one of the real benefits of audio over video is that you don't have to watch something and you could be mowing the lawn or ironing a shirt or making dinner and still have the ability to multitask. So I feel like during COVID, people took the opportunity to listen to what we were doing while they were doing something else, or just we were a good time waster, right? My shows are long.

Gillespie: Is history the story of massive forces that sweep over whole periods of time, or is it about heroic individuals who actually changed the course of history?

Carlin: Well, I was reading something that historian Adrian Goldsworthy wrote recently where he was talking a little about that and he was saying that while it's kind of discredited to think about individuals having such an outsized role on history, he said, "All we have to do though is look at current events and see how much the personalities of single individuals seem to be important to how current events play out to understand that this would've been the dynamic in the past also." 

Now, I think we all understand that there's an interplay between these people and the opportunities that they have because of what's going on in the world, the times we live in and all these other things for them to do what they do. So if you get an outsized personality on the scene and they're driving a lot of events, I think it's fair to ask yourself, "Would this person have been able to do this with the conditions we were living under 30 or 40 years ago?"

So I think there's a little bit of an axis of two lines crossing. One line is the personality of the people involved, and the other axis are the events, the trends, the forces of the times we live in. When those things intersect, I think that's when you hit that sweet spot where all of a sudden you're looking at some personality and you go, "If not for that person…." I always try to imagine as a way of trying to get some perspective plugging somebody else in that role, right? If Richard Nixon wins the '60 election and he's the one handling the Cuban missile crisis, does it go the same or does it go differently? Or better yet, what if the Cuban missile crisis happens a few years earlier and you have Gen. [Dwight D.] Eisenhower in the White House?

Those are fun ways in my mind of trying to game this out to get a little bit of perspective about what's more important here, the trends in the forces or the individual involved, because if you say, "It would've turned out the same with Nixon or Eisenhower as it did with [John F.] Kennedy," then you start to think maybe it's more of a trends and forces ascendant moment. But if you say, "Hmm, I don't think it does turn out the same with those other people," well, then you can I think actively say that having Kennedy in the White House at that place in time and under those circumstances actually made history go in a different direction than it otherwise would.

Gillespie: Do you have historical figures that you consider heroes? And if so, what are your criteria? 

Carlin: Oh man, I should have a ready answer to a question like that, shouldn't I? It's funny, but off the top of my head, no one comes immediately to mind, but that's not because there aren't people that I greatly admire. I think personality-wise, I am not much of a hero worshiper. First of all, sometimes I look at people and I just wonder if I could have done what they did. So for example, you look at people like in the civil rights struggle in the 1950s and 1960s, when you look at the death threats that those people got, I always ask myself, "Would I have forged ahead knowing that people are talking about hurting my kids or firebombing my house or those kinds of things?" To me, rather than the hero side of it, which is not really part of my personality, sometimes I measure myself against these other people and just say, "Man, I might be craven or cowardly or selfish." I'm not sure I do. So I mean, there's admiration there, but not hero worship, if that makes sense.

Gillespie: Not too long ago, a guy named Daniel Akst wrote a book called War by Other Means, which was a study of conscientious objectors during World War II. I don't necessarily agree with them at all on the question of conscientious objection to World War II, but looking at those guys and what they put up with, I mean, it was like being under a mile underwater with the pressure on you to just cave. It's pretty remarkable. I think we tend to think that we're going to be the person who stands out in a crowd, but we're probably kidding ourselves.

Carlin: Well, if nothing else, it's the old line of these are the times that try men's souls. I mean, you look at these kinds of things and you just go, "Hmm, would I have been the one to shelter a Jewish person in occupied Europe?" Of course, those are the tests. You don't know until you get there. But I do feel like when I read these stories, rather than hero worship, I sometimes feel a little shamed by the whole thing and worried about how I might react in the same situation. So there's admiration, for sure.

Gillespie: You define yourself as a pessimist—and maybe that's not right, maybe you're a realist—but one of the things that your podcast shows again and again is that all societies collapse. All civilizations end at some point. I also hear you talking about how things get better or different and things like that. When you think about something like COVID happening, do you feel like we've gotten to a better place, or are you a long-term pessimist but a short-term optimist? Are you a mid-range person? How do you define yourself and how do you apply the lessons of history that you analyze and dig out in your podcasts into your life span?

Carlin: To me, that's kind of a macro-micro question because I think on a micro level, like an individual human level, there are always bad places to find yourself: bottom of the economic scale, trapped in a murderous dictatorship like North Korea. I mean, I feel like on an individual level, there's awful places to be in any period in history, and they're probably equally terrible to some degree or another. 

On a macro level, there are obviously times and places that are better than others, right? So I think that sometimes you're lucky to find yourself in a nation that's technologically sophisticated and wealthy on the macro level of things, [where there's] health care if you get hurt [and] not too many invasions during your lifetime. Things like that.

I do think not so much that it's cyclical, because I think that brings up certain theories of history that are arguable, but I do think you feel like nothing lasts forever, whether it's good times or bad times. So I think sometimes this idea that we're living in a particularly good time or a particularly bad time isn't so much pessimistic. Listen, I'm 58 years old right now, and life is good, but you can't help but notice that when you're 58, life isn't going to be good forever, right? So I don't think that's being pessimistic to just know that all good things must pass and hopefully all bad things must pass because change is inevitable. If things are good, what does change mean, right?

So I do think that maybe from the perspective where we're looking at this—20th century or 21st century American citizen, for example, in the grand historical scheme—you're living in one of the best times and best places to ever be around. So the likelihood of that getting better vs. the likelihood of that getting worse would seem to indicate that change is likely to bring a lessening of the good things just because we've had it so good so long, but it doesn't mean it has to happen. It's an odds game, right? Maybe the odds are just 70/30 against wonderful things continuing, but people have made money in Vegas with odds worse than that.

Gillespie: Yeah. I think it was in an episode or an interview that you did with Rick Rubin, the record producer, where you mentioned that your father was a Korean War vet.

Carlin: As he would say, he was in the Navy, so it doesn't quite count the same as being at the Chosin Reservoir or something like that. He was eating ice cream on an aircraft carrier.

Gillespie: Also, he grew up pretty poor, right?

Carlin: Yeah, really poor.

Gillespie: So I'm a couple years older than you and my father served in World War II, was an infantry man, and I feel in a profound way that I lucked out tremendously by escaping a lot of history. Do you think we'll go back to a world that is like the ones that our parents might have grown up in where there is grinding poverty and where war is taken for granted? I think back a lot to my parents who were both born in the '20s. They were the children of immigrants and they grew up during the Depression, then there was World War II. And then when World War II ended, they were like, "OK. Well, it's good. People aren't being killed as much anymore, but we're still going to be poor." And then something happened and they stopped being poor. Do you think we might see a reversal like that in our lifetimes?

Carlin: Well, I think that's macro-micro also. In the macro sense, look, from an international relations standpoint, you don't have to be a genius to see the situation. Let me back up and say that I always think about things in much longer time frames than most people just because that's how I try to make sense of history. It's not better, it's not worse, it's just how I do it. So I always imagine 50 or 60 or 70 years not being all that long in the grand scheme of things. If you look at it through that sort of a time frame, we've been living in the post–Second World War, dual superpower, the United States being the only country with a really functioning economy and not hurt in the Second World War among all the great powers. That's a temporary situation.

Now, if it's a 70-year temporary situation, that's a lifetime. So it seems like a long time to my mom, [who was] born in 1938. All she can really remember is that era. But we're exiting that era now and returning to what they would've probably called in the 1920s a return to normalcy in an international relations sense, not hegemony, but a multipower world. I mean, look at the number of powers you had before both World Wars. It's between four and six major powers. That's much more normal than having two hegemonic powers facing off against each other with their alliance systems.

So I think from a military macro standpoint, international relations, I think you're going to see things we haven't seen in a while and I think we already see things we haven't seen in a while, including a real change in warfare, which is going to upset things, what they call an RMA, a revolution in military affairs. People don't always notice these things so much when they're happening, but I mean, for example, look at how drones in the war between Russia and Ukraine have sunk ships. That's going to be such a huge thing.

There was a piece in The Wall Street Journal today about the mixing of drones, mass swarms of drones with future artificial intelligence capabilities, getting them to work together and what that would mean for things like big, expensive surface ships. Well, those are the kind of things that change the world. I mean, they don't seem like that big of a thing, but if all of a sudden a $13 billion aircraft carrier is a vulnerable piece of floating hardware and you can't use those anymore, and if something like the United States' power projection is based on a weapon system like that, well, then you can see how all of a sudden that makes things topsy-turvy.

The funny thing that most people don't understand necessarily is how this sort of military question actually resonates and pings off a lot of nonmilitary things that affect our lives. Now, in the micro sense of the word, when you get away from these big power changes that we were talking about, I don't know. "I don't know" is the answer. Rephrase the question for me. I'll see if I can frame it in more micro terms.

Gillespie: I guess I might want to stick with the idea of what happens when we go back to a world that has half a dozen or a dozen powers because that does seem to be where we're headed. The fact is Japan is still a major power. Russia is still a major power even if the Soviet Union doesn't exist, but then you throw in China and whatnot. But is world history ultimately military history or is it the history of trade? Is it the history of migration? Where do you see those lines intersecting?

Carlin: Well, I often talk about this when I'm talking about why people are interested in history, whether they know it or not, and that's because history is everything that's ever happened. Sometimes I'll do speaking engagements with schools, and you'll have middle school students or high school students that really don't want to hear some guy talk to them about history. What I try to teach them is that because of the way history has to be segmented into so-called important events or important dates, that's a construct of historians. What choice do they have? I mean, imagine writing the history book of everything. You can't do that, right? So the main thing that historians try to do is find out what's important. I mean, even these chapters where we decide one era has ended and another began is part of the human construct of just trying to organize everything that's ever happened.

So what I tell students is that the truth is that you don't necessarily have to understand when Columbus stumbled upon the Americas. That's an important event according to somebody else. If you're interested in motorcycles or fashion or dentistry or dogs or whatever you are interested in, there is a history of that and that's part of the past too. The actual idea is that there is no rule about what's important in the past. What's important in the past is what is important to you, and then it has a past. The most important thing in my mind, and this is what I tell the students, is context and understanding how things go from where they were to how they are.

So what I always tell these kids, I say, "If you're interested in motorcycles, find the first motorcycle ever built and find the one that just came out yesterday and then trace the development from one to the other, right? So you start to see the process of change in historical development and how things move over a course of decades or whatever, and that teaches you the idea of the history of moving events." And then ask yourself when you're looking at these different motorcycles over the different eras, why they are the way they are, right? I mean, is this the engine that they're using at the time and why did a new engine come? It teaches you the context that creates the circumstances about how these new motorcycles get developed, why they have these new features, these new parts.

So between the two of them, the context and the idea of historical change, you are getting the most important part. People are going to forget 1492, most of them, the minute the test is over and they leave the classroom, but they're not going to forget the important parts of context and the historical change process if they learn it with something that they're already interested in and that has a past that's as much a part of the grand history of things as anything else is.

Gillespie: It's interesting when you're talking, I find that completely convincing. I notice that you don't say the word "progress." Do you believe in progress or do you think that that's kind of a badly value-laden term that obfuscates as much as it clarifies?

Carlin: Maybe the latter, only because progress is an "in the eye of the beholder" thing, first of all. Second of all, I think progress assumes that it's sort of a one-way street. There's a book called Global Catastrophic Risks that I fell in love with. It's edited by a guy named Nick Bostrom who works at the the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford or whatever. Every chapter of the book is written by a different expert, and every chapter is sort of a way the world could end. It's a fascinating book, but in the introduction of the book, Bostrom writes about what he calls existential threat. I was always taught that existential threat means elimination, right? So an existential threat to humanity means humanity just goes away, disappears, the last person dies and it's over, but he has a different definition of it.

One of the definitions of existential threat [is] that everybody goes away, one, but it also includes if humanity gets knocked backward in terms of capabilities and never again reaches its former abilities. So if you imagine that we have a nuclear war and that we lose the ability to put a man on the moon and we never get that back, to him, that's an existential outcome. In your question about progress, that implies that we're never going to move backward, and I think that history has shown over and over that, well, it doesn't mean you that you will, but it means you can, right? I mean, look at the post-Roman empire when you've got crumbling aqueducts and you can't replace them. Well, that's a little like the thing we said about not being able to go back to the moon when you've already been or losing an internet and never getting one back.

To me, progress implies an ever-moving single direction toward bigger, better things and improved capabilities, and I think that that's not a given. I think it's like striking a match; it's possible that, for example, the Roman Empire or China at its height in earlier eras was striking a match and having it snuffed out before we finally got the roaring fire going for good. Maybe having a global world environment prevents a collapse of one segment of the globe. For example, had the Roman Empire been in contact with the rest of the world during that time period, maybe that would've prevented things from going backward because there's a China to relight the pilot lights, so to speak. I don't know. But to me, there's a teleological aspect to progress that I'm not sure I buy into. But look, I'm always hoping for better things, but I'm not sure it's a given that things are always going to get better. I think just maybe that's the pessimism you talked about earlier.

Gillespie: I don't believe in golden ages really, but to the extent that they are defensible, we're in a golden age of people being able to dig into the past of their own making, of creating their own usable past. The past is kind of an infinite attic or a cellar where you can rummage through and construct a lot of different stories that help you make sense of where you are and who you want to be and where you want to go both on an individual level as well as on a societal level. Do you feel like people are cognizant of that? 

Carlin: I don't know how to answer that because I don't know what people are doing. This is always a problem, it's not like this is new, but it's specifically something that I notice now and maybe it just grates on me more. I feel like we've never been more likely to judge people from the past by current modern moral sensibilities, which is always something that I feel like obscures the past rather than illuminates it. I had a professor once who was so good at trying to get us to put ourselves in the shoes of people from the past and ask the question, "When they do things that we think are despicable now, was that their goal? Were they trying to do despicable things?"

I think, going from memory here, we were talking about people who tried to convert natives to Christianity, and the current line of thinking at the time was that this was an awful thing to do. We were destroying native cultures and their belief systems and forcibly taking them away from their families and teaching them the white man's religion. We can determine now that that was a huge loss in terms of what those people could have preserved, their native culture and belief system, and passed on to their children and all these kinds of things, but was that the goal at the time, to do something negative? He said, "No." He said, "You have to look at the way those people who did the converting saw the world."

You could see it with the Spanish when they came to the New World. If you literally believe that your view of religion is correct and that there is a fiery place called Hell that you will go to if you don't believe what they tell you to believe or what they believe, and then they convert somebody to believing that, then they think they've done a good thing. Now, that doesn't mean they have done a good thing. But when we look back on the past and judge people, I hate the judging thing, but when we judge people, we do so because every generation before us has done the exact same thing. We judge people based on our own modern sensibilities whenever modern is, and I think then we infuse people in the past sometimes with sort of evil overtones that if you could bring them back in a time machine would confuse and befuddle them, not because they didn't do something that we could objectively look at today and say is bad, but because that wasn't their goal at all. They thought they were doing good.

The reason I bring this up is because it's very, very, very possible, in fact, almost inevitable, that the same thing is going to happen with us. It's down the road in the future, they're going to look back on us and absolutely demonize us for any number of things that we couldn't possibly know. I mean, airplane travel, eating meat, experimentation on animals.

Gillespie: There was a book that was very popular about antebellum America by a popular writer named Lydia Maria Child. She was writing before Nathaniel Hawthorne, really, but she writes a story that's set in colonial Salem, Massachusetts. She talks about how we now look at the Puritans as ridiculously closed-minded, horrible people, and we should understand them in context. I'm going to ruin it for people. It was published 170 years ago, so I feel like the statute of limitations has expired on spoiler alerts, but it ends with a Native American who the main character has a child with disappearing and just being literally and figuratively written out of the story.

You read the book now, and she's trying to make a point that you just made. From a modern sensibility today, you're like, "Oh my God, this is an incredibly racist book that depends on the erasure of Native Americans." So, we're always like that. I think it was in an addendum episode with The Rest Is History guys, where you were talking about Thomas Jefferson, who obviously is a morally complex and in many ways just a compromised character, but that he also gave rise to a matrix of rights that were used by people like Frederick Douglass and others to argue for their rights. So history is much more complex than we ever really want it to be at any given moment.

Carlin: I come from a family tradition. I had a grandfather that was very big on "Don't judge other people until you've walked a mile in their shoes." This was really hammered into us, and it turned out to be a really good tool when I got into history as a history major. The funny thing is you can go back to the ancient Romans. I mean, you read their "histories." Go read ancient Greeks like Plutarch. Plutarch's entire work on Lives, which is his famous book, is comparing historical figures to each other, this person against that person, this person. What he's trying to do is make moral judgments even then. This is ingrained in us somehow to want to say, "This person's bad. This person's good," but the criteria we're using is the criteria of whatever time we're doing the assessment in, and that is an inherently flawed problem because that's a moving target, right?

The moral sensibilities are always changing, which is why you can look at a lot of historical figures who's…. I mean, look at Alexander the Great. Depending on the era you're assessing that guy in, he comes off as awesome or terrible and then sometimes back again. To me, that's not a bug though, that's a feature because I think that makes history much more interesting than if we have evil figures and good figures, and those figures are permanently in stone in their positions. History is a moving target. 

This I tell people all the time too, they don't realize that history is not like math, right? It's not two plus two equals four. There's a Fox News version of history and an MSNBC version of history. Depending on which source you grab from which era, you're going to get a completely different spin on the events, how they occurred, who's responsible, and what they mean.

Gillespie: Somebody like Winston Churchill. Depending on if you're raised in America or England, you love Winston Churchill. It's not complicated. He was the man who saved the West. But if you're from the Indian subcontinent, you have a radically different view of Winston Churchill. We shouldn't pretend as if one side or the other doesn't exist. We should really sit with the complications and try and work things out rather than dismiss that, which makes us have to work to understand things better.

Carlin: Sometimes I ask myself, "What's realistic to imagine someone doing?" Now, we should point out that someone like Churchill lived long enough and was involved in politics. He didn't die until 1965. He was born in the 19th century and was active politically almost that whole time. So we're talking about a figure that spanned the British Empire at its height to the post-war British coming down from imperial heights. So this is a person that in the whole second half of his career was somewhat of a political dinosaur. So contextually speaking, he had detractors during his lifetime and political career. Before the Second World War broke out, there were a lot of people that thought he was a warmonger.

So that's a wonderful example of what we were talking about earlier, when the axis gets crossed between the individual meeting the proper time and place. And Churchill knew it. I think he said something like if he could go back in time, he would always choose May 1940. That was his moment, and he knew it. 

But to me, someone like Churchill, you have to ask yourself how much that guy could have been different given where he came from, his influences growing up. Again, to me, that's a little like what we talked about earlier, where you're judging the Spanish priest for what he's doing, trying to save people from Hell. How much did that guy have any agency in thinking any differently?

So I don't want to write off good and evil in the past because I think that if you take this too far the wrong way, it makes you not able to judge [Adolf] Hitler or not able to judge [Joseph] Stalin. So we have to be careful, but at the same time, I do try to sit there and go, "OK, these people are all products of their time and political and social environment and the civilization they came from, and we have to take that into account too." 

Gillespie: How do you decide what you're going to get into, or do your topics find you? I mentioned "Supernova in the East," which is a real achievement. I mean, just of you being able to sustain that level of intensity and engagement with the topic. The "Celtic Holocaust" series is amazing too, but do you go looking for just these horrifying episodes in the past, or do they find you?

Carlin: Well, first of all, you're really kind. I appreciate that. I'm not always as easy on myself as you are on me, right? Well, thankfully, the "it's not me" thing though is part of the motivation. I mean, a lot of these stories, that's what makes me think of them as interesting, right? Oh my God, can you imagine being here and these people in this time period? I mentioned self-selection of the topics earlier. If I'm interested in it, that right there is requirement No.1, because we don't have scripts for these shows. So I don't read them and then think, "I'll write a script for this and then I'll record it." I just go in and record it. So it's based on inspiration. So if I'm not into the topic, it just doesn't work. You would hear it in my voice, right?

It's also why I can't talk about certain things. I'll get requests from people like, "Can you please talk about 17th century India?" I'll have to say no. I said, "Because I don't know anything about 17th century India, and I couldn't learn enough about it in the short span of…." It's funny, the listeners think it's forever between shows, but if you're trying to educate yourself from ground zero, it's a short amount of time. So all of these topics we choose, the No.1 requirement is that I have to be interested in them. No. 2 requirement is I have to have some foundation of knowledge that we can then build upon. So all these topics that we do shows on, I knew something about before we did them.

And then a lot of what I'm learning is what I've gotten wrong by reading histories from a long time ago, because a lot of these stories, there's a lot of new histories that I haven't read since the last time I was heavily into the topic, and that turns the tables on a lot of the old ideas about what really happened and who was responsible. Sometimes secrets come out that were not available. There's a lot of stuff in the Second World War we know now that even when I was a kid growing up we didn't know. Enigma machines, for example. Stuff like that. So I have to know something about it. I have to be interested in it.

As far as what I'm interested in, well, a lot of these stories you may have noticed have what we call here when I'm doing them spines, philosophical spines. The ancient historian Thucydides said once that history is philosophy taught by example. That's another one of those things that gets a lot of flack today, because in some senses it's wrong, but in some senses it's not. In the sense that it's not wrong, we try to find some deeper philosophical question that the story highlights.

So we did one called the "Destroyer of Worlds," which was about the early years of trying to live with nuclear weapons. The spine in that one is, can human beings learn to live with the power of their ever-evolving weapons system? So even if you manage to live with what we have today and design systems and safeguards and everything, what happens when you invent the next most powerful weapons system after that? So that's an idea, a philosophical question that runs through the entire show.

Most of the shows we do, not all of them, I don't want to ever have a formula or slip into a rut or have a format, so sometimes we switch it up just to be different and get out of the sameness of it all, but most of the shows have a philosophical throughput idea that we're trying to explore. A lot of times that's the first thing that makes me go, "Aha. Well, this would be a good thing to talk about because exploring that philosophical throughput idea would be interesting." Those are the many things that have to cross together to make me go, "Ah, that would be a fun show."

And then the last thing is more of a practical thing. I will look at the shows that we've recently done, and I try to look at the archives the same way I look at history, trying to imagine it 10 or 15 or 20 years from now and ask, "Do we have a nice mix?" Because we usually keep about 10 shows free, and then we move them to the paid archive after four or five years. I try to make sure we have enough diversity, subject matter diversity in the 10 or so free shows so that if you didn't like "Supernova in the East," which was about the Second World War in the Pacific and Asian theater, and we have six maybe shows on that, do I have a couple shows then from widely differing periods? So you could go, "Oh, I'm really not interested in that. Oh, but I like the idea of the Romans and the Celtic people, so I'll listen to that show." So there are some attempts to try to switch it up a little bit in terms of historical periods or throughput ideas or that kind of thing.

Gillespie: What would you say is the happiest show that you've done?

Carlin: Oh, that's a trick question, isn't it? I did one once called "The Organization of Peace" that was about the League of Nations. The whole League of Nations thing is this almost rainbows and unicorns attempt to try to imagine a better world through a shared understanding that we had just been through the worst war in the history of the world and we never want to go through that again. There were so many fun aspects of it, like the idea…. It was a minor idea. It was never this major League of Nations proposal, but the idea of Esperanto and the idea that we have to have human beings communicate better if we want to avoid the kinds of things that happened before. So we all need to speak the same language, right? So there's a lot of hopeful stuff in that show because the League of Nations itself was almost a naive attempt to hope for a better world and try to figure out what the heck would be involved in working toward it. So that might be the most hopeful one.

Gillespie: What's the function of history for you?

Carlin: I truthfully look at it more like the past is there to teach us what can happen, right? So it's a little showing you the Black Swan phenomenon in terms of examples. So when you say something like, "Well, how could this go sideways on us?" You have examples you can point to in terms of the worst case scenario. I mean, what the past doesn't teach are the kinds of lessons that most people want it to teach. So for example, you'll often hear someone say something like, "Well, we know appeasement doesn't work because look what happened with Hitler in the 1930s." But that's not what history teaches you because you're not taking into account the variables, right? First of all, Hitler's a person. All dictators are not exactly the same, and all circumstances aren't exactly the same. So you can't turn around and say, "Well, we learned from Munich that you can't appease dictators, therefore we shouldn't appease Saddam Hussein because he's going to act exactly like Hitler acted. We know that because Hitler acted that way." It doesn't work like that.

Now, what it can show you is what a worst case scenario might look like if things go sideways like they did in the late 1930s. What history really teaches you is how contextually things get involved. When we see, for example, rights being taken away from people in a society, like political parties being banned or safeguards that keep people from being able to be thrown into prison without any sort of due process, I think history teaches you what's going to follow next in most of those cases. Usually, it's benign, but that doesn't teach you anything specifically. It teaches you generalities, but I do think it's useful in that sense.

Now, the [George] Santayana quote about if you did not learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it, I think, one, it doesn't work that way because we take the wrong lessons. You can't use dictators because of Munich. I also think that people use history to have it prove what they want it to prove, you have these ideas that you could go back and construct it in ways, or you can choose historical approaches in ways that lets you say two plus two equals five, if you want it to. There's an old line that even the devil can quote scripture for his purpose, and history is far more subject to that than biblical narratives are, right? So that's why I think you have to be careful about this idea about history teaching X, Y, or Z and become suspicious of the teacher that teaches you that.

There are things to learn, but they're much more amorphous and much less specific. So that's what I would say. And then the idea that it could hurt you to learn from the past, well, it can, depending on what they're trying to teach you. Especially give it a sideways glance and ask what the person trying to teach you about the past is trying to get you to understand. But for broader generalizations that we talked about earlier, about how I talked to kids about context and how things evolve, I think those are really valuable lessons, but they're not very useful necessarily in applying specifically to individual cases. 

• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post <em>Hardcore History</em>'s Dan Carlin: 'History Is Not Like Math' appeared first on Reason.com.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Reason: Having been in the libertarian movement for nearly half a century, how do you assess the current state of libertarian ideas and the broader libertarian movement?

Boaz: I think there are a lot more libertarian ideas. When I was in college and thought of myself as a libertarian—but also thought of libertarians as part of the conservative movement—who did we have as intellectuals? [Friedrich] Hayek and [Milton] Friedman and [Ludwig von] Mises.

It was kind of a good set of years there, because Hayek won the Nobel Prize in '74—which was stunning to us, because even as naive college students we knew nobody like that had won a Nobel Prize before. Then in 1975, [Robert] Nozick won the National Book Award, which really helped to put libertarianism on the map of political philosophers. Then in 1976, Friedman won the Nobel Prize. I was out of college then, but that period really boosted libertarian academic credentials.

These days, just like everybody says, we have nobody like [Ronald] Reagan and [Margaret] Thatcher. But in the time of Reagan and Thatcher, they said, "Where are the people like [Winston] Churchill and [Franklin] Roosevelt?" I look back and say, "Wow, weren't those great? And who is that today?" But at least one answer is there's a lot more libertarian intellectuals today. Maybe nobody is a Hayek these days, but there's definitely a lot more libertarianism in the academy, more libertarian intellectuals, more people reading those people. Some of them even get published by major publishers. There's more of that, and I think that means there's more people who think of themselves as libertarians.

What's the essence of libertarianism for you?

To me, the essence of libertarianism is the nonaggression principle. You have no right to initiate force against people who have not initiated force against you. From that comes freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of property and markets, ideally within an ethos of cosmopolitanism and pluralism and tolerance. At that point, we're kind of talking about liberalism, and these days I'm worried not just about libertarianism, but about liberalism.

Cosmopolitanism, tolerance, pluralism—where do those come from and why should those be interconnected? If we compare the nonaggression principle to the core of a nuclear reactor, why should the surrounding framework be akin to cosmopolitanism?

I think libertarianism is set within classical liberalism, and I think of libertarianism as the intellectual core of liberalism, the intellectual vanguard. I often say I'd like to be part of a libertarian intellectual vanguard leading a broader liberal movement. And for my whole career, we haven't had that. We've had liberals divided into people who emphasize free markets and people who emphasize civil liberties and tolerance and equality under the law for all. Libertarians have not had a great record on equality under the law for all, although I think it's clearly inherent in what we believe. But you didn't see many libertarians involved in the Civil Rights Movement, critical of Jim Crow, and they should have been, and they should have been out there.

The Cato Institute, where you've spent most of your career, was founded in 1977 in San Francisco. How did it come into being?

Ed Crane was in Washington running the MacBride for President campaign in 1976, and he observed that [the American Enterprise Institute] and Brookings had a significant influence on limited budgets. And he said, "There ought to be a libertarian think tank, one representing the values of the American Revolution." So he talked to Charles Koch, who had money to help. And Charles said, "OK, I'll put some money up if you'll run it." And he said, "Well, you don't want me to run it because it needs to be in Washington, and I'm going back to San Francisco." And, as he used to tell it, "Charles was smarter than I was, and he knew if I started this, I would in a few years realize it should be in Washington."

The idea was to set up a think tank that was neither liberal nor conservative, and that would put libertarian ideas on the policy map, as well as just the pure theory map.

What were the big issues in the 1970s that you guys were obsessed with?

The big influences in the early '70s were Vietnam, Watergate, and stagflation. I used that trio often to explain why there was an efflorescence of libertarians in the 1970s. The government had just accomplished Vietnam, Watergate, and stagflation, which gave people a very different view of a government that they perceived as having solved the Depression and won World War II. It was a different generation that was coming up.

What were the main issues? The answer is they're kind of the same issues over and over. History is not a bunch of new things. It's one damn thing, over and over. For Cato, the original agenda was, "Well, we're going to take on Social Security, the linchpin of the welfare state. We're going to take on school choice, which underlies so many problems. And we're going to take on the foreign interventionist state." Early on, we were writing about all of those things. Our first real book was about an alternative to Social Security, how to get out of it. At least one of our first papers was on Social Security, but we had a very early pro-immigration paper. We had a very early paper on conscription, which was a live issue at that time.

Is Social Security unstoppable at this point? 

That seems to be the observation all over the world. We've made a lot of progress on free trade. We've made a lot of progress on human rights, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights. We've made some progress on some microregulation issues. We're making some now on housing. We repealed a lot of the New Deal regulations in the 1978 to '81 era. When people say we're on the road to serfdom, I tell them about all these things. We ended conscription, we ended the [Civil Aeronautics Board], we ended the [Interstate Commerce Commission]. We created a structure that continuously brought tariffs down. All those things were progress. There was significant progress, and people still say, "Yes, but what about all this government spending and everything?" I think the answer there is once you create a program that people think they're getting benefits from, it's very hard to take those benefits away.

We can argue that Social Security is not, on net, benefiting people, but there's a huge constituency of people who paid money in and they don't want it taken away from them. That's true for every program. It's true for the farm program. That's one of the reasons that we always say it is so important to stop a new entitlement in the beginning. Because Medicare was expected to cost a billion dollars a year, 10 years after it was founded. That was crazy. It was much more than that. You've got to stop it.

In the '80s, what was your attitude towards Ronald Reagan? A lot of libertarians, or people leaning libertarian, would say he was really good. Is that right or is that wrong? 

My own trajectory with Reagan was in the '70s. I was in [Young Americans for Freedom] and I went to the 1976 convention on behalf of Reagan, not as a delegate, but just there to cheer him on and everything. I liked Reagan, and I was actually a delegate to the state convention or maybe the county convention for Reagan.

Then in 1978, I got hired to work on the Clark for Governor campaign, and that shifted my allegiance. Ed Clark for governor, California 1978—the first big Libertarian Party campaign that actually had some money and a professional staff of me and one other guy [laughs].

While Reagan was president, I was a libertarian, and we were pretty much critical of everything he did. Well, not everything, but many things he did. As time went on, and we saw other presidents, I think we got nostalgic for the Reagan-Thatcher era—two people who, even if they didn't always live up to it, did enunciate a lot of libertarian rhetoric. I think Thatcher in England revived British entrepreneurship and appreciation for enterprise. Reagan did some of that too. I think to a great extent, Reagan's speeches about freedom revived the American spirit, maybe as much as his tax cuts did.

How disastrous was the George W. Bush administration for America and for libertarian advances?

That was pretty bad. And we were sort of optimistic when he came in! We didn't like Republicans. They did a lot of bad things. But Bush had told Ed Crane that Cato's Social Security plan was on the right track, and he wanted to do something like that. Early in his administration, he appointed a commission, which we were sort of opposed to because a commission is usually the way to put an idea to bed. But it turned out he appointed a commission of Republicans and Democrats that was stacked in favor of some kind of privatization. So that was good.

But then 9/11 happened, and Bush got distracted from everything else. Then he gets reelected, and he says, "I'm going to use my political capital on reforming Social Security." It turns out, somehow he got reelected but everybody hated him. We did a poll at the time, and we said, "Would you support an idea that would allow you to put your own money into retirement and then not take Social Security at the end?" And 60 percent said, "Yeah, that sounds good." When we said, "President Bush has a plan," it got 40 percent approval. So that kind of killed it.

How bad was the war on terror and the USA PATRIOT Act, for libertarian ideas?

It was definitely bad that we got the PATRIOT Act, but also, just the general [feeling that] we have to respond with war. We even have to invade Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. And the PATRIOT Act and the surveillance state that was created—very bad for the country, bad for libertarians too, although it gave us a lot of targets to complain about. But we didn't get very far in aiming at those targets.

Was Barack Obama particularly bad? While there were overblown accusations, such as him attempting "to destroy America as we know it," is there validity to the idea that he was putting us on a particularly terrible path?
Yes. For one thing, like I said, every time you create a new entitlement, you'll never get rid of it. He was trying to create those, and he had some success. We had stopped HillaryCare. We were not able to stop Obamacare. That's what we said at the time: You'll never get rid of it. We kept trying, but we didn't. So yes, he did put us on that bad trajectory, a bigger government than we'd had before. Although every president was giving us a bigger government than we had had before.

How did Donald Trump scramble the libertarian movement? There are people who claim that "Trump is the most libertarian president ever." What do you think people mean when they say something like that?

Yes, there were. I had lots of fights. I blocked more people that year on Facebook than ever before. I had a lot of fights with old friends who said, "He's the most libertarian president." I mean, when he was running…he said he would cut taxes. Any Republican that year would've been campaigning on tax cuts. He said he would cut regulation. He did campaign against immigration and against trade. I never did understand. I guess he said, "Drill, baby, drill." So libertarians who thought of American energy independence, or at least production, liked it.

I think a lot of libertarians, certainly a lot of conservatives, liked the fact that he fights, he stands up, he calls the left a bunch of dickheads. I think in the subsequent five years, it occurred to me that the people conservatives and some libertarians are gravitating to are not necessarily the ones who are most conservative, certainly not the ones who are making the most compelling cases; they're the ones who are the most anti-left.

Sean Hannity on Fox: He's just partisan, anti-left all the time. Tucker Carlson. Charlie Kirk with Turning Point USA. Charlie Kirk had been kind of "Free market! Socialism sucks"—that was his organization. And then he just went all in for Trump. Then I saw other people going all in for Trump. The defense of Trump now, as the most libertarian president, I think would be tax cuts, and conservative Supreme Court justices who many libertarians think are better than liberal Supreme Court justices. And they'll say deregulation. There wasn't that much deregulation, but there was less regulation than in a Democratic administration.

What's the case against President Joe Biden?

The case against Biden is he is a bankrupt spender. I think Trump may have spent more in four years than Obama did. Biden then comes in and says, "I'll see you and raise you." So there's certainly that.

The best case I heard for Trump is from one of my colleagues. He was saying, "Hillary will bring 4,000 dedicated regulators to Washington. I don't know who Trump's going to appoint—Republican hacks, [former president of the Heritage Foundation] Ed Feulner's list, his cronies—but they won't be dedicated regulators." I think that's definitely happened with Biden. He campaigned as a moderate, and compared to either [Sen.] Elizabeth Warren or Trump he seemed centrist. But he has empowered an administration that wants to regulate everything.

Some of it is woke regulation: sexual harassment on campus, hate speech, all that kind of stuff. Some of it is just pure economic regulation, and you see it every day. "The Biden administration is going to require…" "The Biden administration is going to ban…" One of the problems there, of course, is abuse of presidential power. Every time I see one of those, I'm like, "Where in the Constitution does it say the president can do that?" Of course, it doesn't anywhere.

Going back to what I said in the beginning about cosmopolitanism and tolerance: Obama comes in, campaigns. He's black; he's the first president to welcome gay people into his administration, even though he's not for gay marriage until right before the 2012 election. But he looks like somebody who believes that everybody is part of America. Trump is obviously the exact opposite of that. And with Biden, it's gone way beyond that.

Now we are looking at another Trump vs. Biden. Neither of these people, neither of these parties, are in any way committed to libertarian principles. What are libertarians to do? How do we maneuver a political landscape such as this?

That's a good question these days. Some people tried in 2016 to run a presidential ticket composed of two governors, Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, both well-respected, against the two worst candidates in history, and they got three and a half percent of the vote. That didn't seem to work out very well.

Now the Libertarian Party has fallen apart, so they're not going to do that. I guess you have to pick the party you believe in. I would love to see a fiscally conservative, socially liberal centrist party. I do believe there are millions of voters who think that way, maybe a plurality of voters who think that way. But the two parties are controlled by, more or less, their extremes, and how do you break into that? My [former] colleague Andy Craig has thought a lot about election reforms. I never thought much about them. I always figured if there's enough libertarians, they'll make themselves felt within whatever political system. But maybe something like ranked choice voting, not so much that it would help libertarians, but that it might hurt extremists and get more of a consensus candidate.

And hey, when I was a young guy, I didn't ever think I'd be looking for a consensus centrist country.

Although we are more free as individuals, certainly to express ourselves and to live the way we want to, many don't really feel that way. Can you talk about a culture of libertarian freedom and cosmopolitanism, and how it aligns to our contemporary experiences?

I think that's partly because people always have this nostalgia. On Twitter, there's all these things: "Remember when a man with one income could afford this house?" Then economists come along and say, "Adjust for inflation and adjust for house size and things, this is not true." Plus you have all the knowledge in the history of the world in your pocket right now. Nobody had that. David Rockefeller didn't have it in 1990.

Part of it is just that we always look back and think, "Oh, things were better and now they're worse." But I do think a lot of people know they're freer because they're black people who are allowed to aspire to things. I'll tell you, when Karine Jean-Pierre was appointed press secretary, I wrote a blog post and said, "This is a sign of progress. A black lesbian could not have been the president's press secretary even maybe five or 10 years ago. This is a sign that we're a more open and accepting society." And I got a lot of blowback from alleged libertarians saying, "She's an affirmative action appointee. You're endorsing diversity, affirmative action." I said, "Look, I don't know if she'll be any good, but I'll tell you this: There are positions in your administration you would put diversity hires in, I don't believe you make the most visible face in your administration an affirmative action hire. It's important how she speaks on behalf of your administration. Whether she's good or not, I don't know, but I think they think she is."

We see more black people, more women being able to rise in corporations and politics. And of course, as a gay person in high school in the '60s, now living in a world where I can live with a longtime partner and my friends can get married, all of this is pretty much taken for granted, even among conservatives.

There's a huge surge in illiberalism both on the left and on the right. Where is that coming from, and where does that leave libertarianism?

That's a good question. I've been writing about this, not so much about libertarianism, but about liberalism. We live in a liberal world. Brian Doherty wrote in his history of the libertarian movement [Radicals for Capitalism], "a world that…runs on approximately libertarian principles." You look at that first and say, "What?" And then you think, "Well, yes, the United States, Europe, and more parts of the world are generally based on free markets and private property, and on free speech and freedom of religion, and expanding human rights to people to whom they were denied." All of that is basic libertarian principles.

OK, we're arguing about gay marriage, and OK, we spend too much money. There's all those things, but we do live in a liberal world. And yet we have these big sets of illiberals on both left and right, in the United States, and in other countries, in countries like Hungary and Turkey and India. We're moving away. It's not just Russia, China, Mexico.

My question is: Liberalism works so well! Have you looked around? Do you realize what your grandparents, your great-grandparents had, even your parents? My parents had a black and white TV for a long time. I have four televisions in my house of two people.

A critique of liberalism is that while it gives material resources, it lacks deeper meaning. Critics say it does not reward true believers with a unifying faith, goal, God, or mission. Is this a legitimate critique of liberalism?

To some extent, yes, it's a legitimate critique. Liberalism is a philosophy of individual autonomy. No established church, no established ideas. [Chinese Communist Party leader] Mao [Zedong] said, "Let a thousand ideas bloom," but liberalism actually did that. It's a significant critique, but it's a good thing. We should defend the liberalism that allows people to find meaning in their own lives. Preachers and teachers and authors may want to help guide people to find meaning in their own lives, but we're not all going to find the same meaning. What we want is people being able to choose their own churches, or no church, choose their own ideas and so on. We don't want the church, the king, the Vatican, the government imposing a meaning on everybody. That's what the liberal revolution was about. It was in great part a revolution against the established churches.

There's all these illiberals on the left, there's all these illiberals on the right, and yet liberalism endures. We do mostly live in a liberal country, in a liberal world. Something is attractive enough about liberalism to resist most of these assaults. I think it is that most people, at least in the United States, do want a world of private property and free markets and free speech and human rights and freedom of abortion and women's rights and to choose jobs. They resist the real impositions.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post David Boaz: Libertarianism Is the Intellectual Core of Liberalism appeared first on Reason.com.

Pano Kanelos is the president of the University of Austin, which will be admitting its first class of 100 students this fall. The college was founded in 2021 as an antidote to left-wing monoculture in academia and is committed to free speech and the pursuit of truth. Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Kanelos, a Shakespeare scholar and first-generation college kid who grew up in a Greek diner in Chicago, about how the University of Austin will be different from virtually every other college around, why the humanities have virtually disappeared from higher education, and how a chance encounter with Nobel laureate Saul Bellow changed his life. He also does a quick, improvised close reading of the poem "Ovid in the Third Reich," by Geoffrey Hill, one of his major intellectual influences.

• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post Pano Kanelos: 'Ideology Is the Death of Ideas' appeared first on Reason.com.

Did you know that a mere 44,000 votes spread across Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin kept Joe Biden and Donald Trump from an Electoral College tie in 2020? That was even tighter than in 2016, when 80,000 votes in three states gave Trump a decisive Electoral College win. 

Patrick Ruffini is a Republican pollster at Echelon Insights and author of Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP. Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with Ruffini about why the major parties continue to leak market share, why 2024 is going to be another super-close presidential race, and whether small-l libertarian voters will make the difference in November.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Nick Gillespie: What's the elevator pitch for your book, Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP?

Patrick Ruffini: I think that it's no secret to anyone that there have been quite a few changes in our politics over the last decade or so. Specifically, a lot of those involve changes in who's voting for the parties and, fundamentally, who the parties are for. What do they seem to stand for? I go back to my early days in politics, which were at the tail end of an era in which Democrats were primarily pitching themselves to voters and receiving the votes of people who were in the working class. They really seemed to hold the moral high ground when it came to issues of who's really going to care about someone like me, an average person in this country. And [Democrats] would routinely pillory Republicans as the party of the rich, as the party of the well-to-do, the disconnected elite. 

I think what we've seen is that has largely flipped. Specifically, it flipped after 2016, when Democrats really seemed to [begin to] have a lot of trouble holding on to the broad mass of working-class voters, which are today defined as voters without college degrees. Sixty-four percent of voters do not have college degrees. We obviously saw in 2016 how they lost some of those blue wall states—Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin—largely because Trump was able to appeal to this electorate in a way that no Republican had before and flipped states that no Republican had won since 1988.

Gillespie: Early on in the book, you write, "I had egg on my face in 2016." Can you talk a little bit about why you had egg on your face? Of course, it wasn't just you. It's virtually all pollsters, strategists, and activists.

Ruffini: The presumption, I think, heading into the 2016 election was that Trump was a sure loser in the election. If not in the Republican primary, then he's a sure loser in the general election. There is always a question of, "Will he succeed in this hostile takeover of the Republican Party?" Initially, I was skeptical, but not long after, it was very clear he was the odds-on favorite because he had really captured a large chunk of the electorate. Everyone else was squabbling for scraps at the table. Even if only at 35 percent, no one else was higher than 10 percent, practically speaking, at the time. But the idea was [that] maybe he can win the Republican nomination, but he's a sure loser in the general election based on just his off-color commentary, his unhinged rally speeches. Everything that was really conventional wisdom among political observers in 2016 [pointed to] a Trump victory—a victory of somebody who just flouted political norms as he did—being flat out unthinkable. 

I was part of that conventional wisdom. Hillary Clinton seemed to be doing herself no favors. I didn't completely discount that. A lesson that I learned after that is voters also don't really care about the integrity of political norms as a whole. There are some segments of voters that absolutely deeply care about them. But in terms of the center of the electorate, I don't think most voters are saying, "Oh, politics is this noble thing that Donald Trump is degrading." I think they see politics as something that's down and dirty, dishonest, corrupt in large measure. Lots of people see it that way.

Gillespie: It's an interesting kind of issue, because one of the reasons why Hillary Clinton was so vulnerable was because she was seen as almost uniquely corrupt and in bed with all sorts of bad interests.

Ruffini: The idea is that for people like me who work in politics, and particularly for a political class, that are just trying to see the people we work with as basically well-intentioned people who are trying to make a positive difference for the country—it turns out just very few people actually see it that way. And Hillary Clinton was absolutely somebody who was painted that way.

I write about the parallels between Trump and Bill Clinton. Because Bill Clinton too was kind of viewed as this unsavory, seedy type of figure during his campaigns and his presidency. He was Slick Willy. He could get away with anything. In the same way, Trump was somebody who maybe had disreputable things, both that he had said and that he had done in his past, and he always seemed to evade accountability. I think that there's something to the idea that you can succeed in this environment if people view you as sort of being authentically that rascally, scoundrel-like figure who is in some way honest with voters about what they're getting. It's when you've got people who are trying to portray themselves as Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and then don't live up to that image, that they get in trouble.

Gillespie: Trump, the billionaire who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and was a TV star, was talking about the forgotten man. He spoke for the forgotten man. Whereas Biden—who is not working class—talked about [the working class] incessantly and coming from Scranton, Pennsylvania, etc. He's dumped a ton of money into the country, but that doesn't seem to be resonating with voters, does it?

Ruffini: I think it's ultimately who does the working class identify with? Somebody who is not fundamentally a creature of Washington, D.C., and not fundamentally a creature of this dirty, unsavory political game—I think that's what they saw in Trump. They saw a certain authenticity, and they saw somebody who spoke like them, somebody who was angry at the same people that they were angry at. I think that carried the day, ultimately.

Gillespie: It's worth pointing out that he squeaked into office with a historically low popular vote. Clinton in '92 got in with a smaller amount, and about the same amount or a little bit more in '96. 

I want to zero in on what working class means. Biden carried voters who made less than $50,000. He carried households making between $50,000 to $100,000. Trump took those making over $100,000. What you say in the book is that the key divide is education, and maybe also geography, instead of economic class. It's socioeconomic status or education level. How is that functioning differently than just the amount of money that a household is bringing it? 

Ruffini: It's true that at some level, the amount of money that you have in your bank account does actually dictate a lot about the way you view the world. There may still be some truth to that. 

But the point I'm making is that, in terms of what manifests politically and what we're seeing happen politically in the country, education is by far the better variable that predicts everything that's happened, and particularly what's happened among white voters. So I put in the book the caveat that non-white voters don't necessarily act the same way in terms of there not being a class divide. There's more of a different pattern of behavior.

Gillespie: What percentage of the electorate is white? Is it still a vast majority?

Ruffini: In 2024, it's mid-70 percent.

Gillespie: So votes by white Americans are going to comprise the vast majority of ballots cast.

Ruffini: I would say whatever 70 percent is, if it's the vast majority, but it's still a pretty strong majority. But increasingly that white vote does not really behave as a unit, does not really matter in terms of anything politically. You're really talking about white voters without a college degree and white voters with a college degree, that used to be back in the '90s very similar in how they voted. You could kind of talk about there being a "white vote" in the 1990s. Today, you can't talk about it that way. The 40 percent of voters are going to be white non-college and the 30 percent of voters who are going to be white with a college degree. Those used to vote very similarly, and are [now] 40 points apart on the margin in who they're voting for.

Gillespie: Then you talk about the distinction between cosmopolitans and traditionalists. What does that mean?

Ruffini: It maps pretty cleanly onto this idea of white college, white non-college. I'm really interested in where things are moving. Because even though, as you cited some statistics, Biden is still winning some of those lower income voters, but what's happening there is that you still have quite a few low income minority voters in that pool of people. So Biden wins. But that gap between sort of the low income and high income voters, it is nowhere near where it was in 1996, 2000—it's just a completely different ballgame there. 

When I say that, it means, who is a group of voters that is uniquely motivated by these sort of more abstract ideals of protecting democratic norms? Those are the same groups of voters, who live in cities, embrace ideas about diversity, are just generally more progressive or liberal in their outlook, but are uniquely motivated by these questions of social equality. 

Then you've got a large group of voters that are not motivated by those issues. They're either motivated on the other side by a more traditional cosmopolitan view. But when it comes to some of these minority voter communities that still vote Democratic, what you find is, they are very much the conservative wing of the Democratic Party in terms of their views on social issues. They don't really place any sort of prioritization on these animating issues behind the Democratic coalition today on this Dobbs [v. Jackson Women's Health Organization] and Democracy message. Their allegiance to the Democratic Party is more historic. It was rooted in this identity of the Democratic Party as the party of the working class, of the marginalized minority communities.

Gillespie: So as the faces of the Democratic Party become more of a multiracial coalition or a rainbow coalition, they are actually losing touch with the very people they claim to be representing more directly?

Ruffini: In the revealed preferences of voters, what you actually don't find is either Hispanic or Latino voters being motivated by identity politics. In 2016, you had Trump throw every insult in the book at Mexicans, saying they're rapists, bringing crime, drugs over the border. He didn't really seem to lose a whole lot of Latino support. I mean, you would think he would. Similarly, you had Trump after the [Black Lives Matter] protests in 2020 sort of behaving badly in that context, saying that police should shoot looters and all those things. He gained support among black voters in 2020. The revealed preferences of these voters are not that they are uniquely motivated by this kind of racial identity rhetoric that is coming from the left.

Gillespie: How much of the swing from Democrats to Republicans is Trump appealing to people? How much of it is Democrats not addressing people whose votes they're taking for granted?

Ruffini: Absolutely, you can't write Donald Trump out of the story completely. You have a catalyst for the shifts we've seen. It appears that he's obviously very, very highly likely to be the Republican nominee. When you look at polling for 2024, we're seeing a further shift of African-American and Latino voters in his direction. In fact, that's most of the gains that he's been getting in the polls. To the extent that those partly materialize in 2024, what I think we're going to see is this realignment that he helped bring into being. The question is what happens if and when Donald Trump fades from the scene, and whether or not we believe we will see some sort of return to the old coalition line, to a more Romney 2012-style coalition. 

The entire history of our politics suggests that that's not going to happen. I think you'll see some mean reversion. I think if Nikki Haley were the nominee—very unlikely to happen—you'd certainly see her do better in the suburbs. You'd probably see her frankly do better overall in the election. Not quite as polarizing a figure, but I don't think you would ever see a return back. And there's a good reason for that. That's because this kind of thing is happening throughout Western democracies, where the working class sort of is aligning itself more and more with the parties of the right. The more highly educated voters are aligning themselves more and more with parties on the left. Those countries don't necessarily have a Donald Trump. But this does seem to be something that is naturally occurring—was to some extent occurring before Donald Trump. So I don't think it's exclusively on him, but he was a catalyst for accelerating.

Gillespie: Is any of this generational in nature? Overwhelmingly younger people voted for Democrats, at least in presidential elections.

Ruffini: This is a big issue. This is a big debate right now. Are you actually going to see people as they grow older becoming more conservative? That's what we've seen in generations past. But there's a lot of discussion that millennials aren't quite following that same trajectory. Partly the big generational divide that I really talk about is that we now have an electorate that is entirely passed through the education sorting machine, in terms of when they were coming up and they were young, they had the opportunity to go to college or not go to college, and that was a legitimate choice, as opposed to maybe for those in the silent generation where most people just didn't go to college. 

As a result, you've just got much more education polarization because more people have made the decision. If you have made that decision, "Yeah, I'm going to leave my hometown and kind of not pursue knowledge and, maybe move to a big city after college and really be part of this knowledge economy," that's just fundamentally a different kind of person than the person who stays closer to the people in places they knew growing up. I think that's part of the generational story. 

I also think the generational story can't be separated from the question of race, because you just have a younger generation that is much, much more diverse. The silent generation and boomers are just much more white. You actually do see that they are more liberal and traditionally have been much more liberal as a result in the younger generation. But it's really a function of race, I think that that's true. I write about the ways that's changing. 

I don't really tackle this question of generations directly because I do think it's downstream of race. I think that to the extent that younger Hispanics are not tied to the voting patterns of their parents, younger African Americans are not tied to the same voting patterns of their parents—what you're actually going to see is more of them voting Republican. You see it as a whole, diverse, younger generation that is going to be more politically balanced.

Gillespie: You point out the fact that the country is more mixed than ever. There is a huge amount of what would count by various measures as desegregation going on—younger generations, millennials, and Gen-Z are more multi-ethnic. How do you consider yourself, if let's say, you're a third-generation Puerto Rican who married an Asian woman, then you divorce them and marry a black person? What are your kids? I think we're seeing an attempt to kind of keep two or three categories intact when the social reality is just vastly outstripping that.

Ruffini: As of today, the number of voters who are genuinely more than one race—it's actually a pretty small number. But when you look at the children born in the United States, one in five children being born today are of some kind of mixed racial background, and that doesn't even count Hispanics, because we don't have a really good way of actually accounting for Hispanics because of the way the census collects data. 

I do think that this assumption we've had about non-white groups being a loyal Democratic bloc, especially within the African-American community, was predicated on the idea that this was a marginalized, discriminated-against group that needed to organize under the banner of one political party to advance their interests. What happens when that identity is no longer salient? That identity of, "I don't view myself as a victim." I don't view myself as somebody who is going to be discriminated against as a result of my skin color, and that's just fundamentally not who I am. I am many different things. I am potentially of many different races. But I also live in a suburb with people of all different sorts of racial and ethnic backgrounds. I think that's fundamentally, in one way or the other, just going to change voting patterns over time.

Gillespie: The idea that Trump actually was getting more minority votes than somebody like a Mitt Romney or a John McCain…What was the swing in black support for Trump? It's still low, even historically going back to somebody like [Dwight D.] Eisenhower. But what's the swing? What are the issues that black voters—if we can talk about a median black vote—care about?

Ruffini: There's different data sources on this. If you look at precinct data, there's something like a 5 to 6 point swing on the margin from a very low base. But that means in some cases, you had precincts where there were literally zero voters and they go to, all right, maybe Trump gets five voters or ten voters in 2016 or 2020. 

Gillespie: But he did particularly well among black men, right?

Ruffini: Yeah. In general, you've seen a little bit of recovery and some other data sources have it as much as 10 or 12 points among black voters, from 2016 to 2020, when you had a swing of about 18 points among Hispanic voters. So you're right. That was something that kind of blew my mind too early on. But when you kind of start to see that this is actually part of the same trend of white working class voters. The vast majority of Hispanic and African-American people in this country are working class in terms of not having a college degree. It's a part of the working class shift more broadly, even as college educated shifted to Democrats, the non-college educated are shifting Republican. I do think that that has been the shift. 

I think that particularly Trump—a lot of it goes back to his personal demeanor, which I think if you talk to people along the coast, people like us would say that's a liability. But it turns out that's not a liability to a lot of people in the country. In fact, it's something that attracts a lot of people to him, including some unexpected voters. So when it comes to, again, these younger minority men, who I think are a key group, kind of heading into this election cycle, who themselves speak pretty bluntly and forthrightly, this idea of somebody who does not necessarily adhere to the genteel mannerisms of political discourse is, on balance, more appealing than somebody who does.

Gillespie: If Trump's appeal to blacks is growing and that's partly powered by an appeal to non-college-educated black men who like blunt speaking, what is it with Hispanics? 

Ruffini: I think number one, it's the economy. This is an upwardly mobile, striving community. It's a community where that old historic pattern of if you have more money, if you've made it in the country, you actually are voting more Republican. It just turns out there's a pretty good upward trajectory and upward trend in Hispanic incomes over the last few generations. You actually do see a lot more loyalty to the Democratic Party in the sort of lower income first generation communities that you see moved to second and third generation communities.

Gillespie: As you point out in your book, your name ends in a vowel. It is Italian. I am Italian on my mother's side, who grew up in Waterbury, Connecticut, not far from where you grew up. Michael Barone, 25 years ago wrote The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again, and likened the Mexican-American experience to the Italian-American experience. Part of his argument was that two or three generations in, they are indistinguishable from native-born people. 

Yet we fail to grasp that because Latino or Hispanic immigrants keep coming to the country. We keep thinking everybody is here for six months or a couple of years. And we don't recognize that since Reagan's second administration, if not longer, Latinos, particularly Mexicans, have been here, and now they're in their second or third generation. So they're really as American as Italians, right? 

Ruffini: That's right. I think there's a big divide by generation in terms of partisanship. But you mentioned that the group is not a monolith. There's no shared unique experience among Latinos in America. You've got Mexican Americans, got Puerto Ricans, got Cuban Americans. All the different [groups] came from incredibly different contexts. When you look at the issue of why does Trump actually make gains after he elevates the issue of immigration? It's because Hispanics who are already in the voting public, do they see the people coming across the border today as people like them or do they see them as fundamentally different from them? I think they see them as more different than they do similar. If you're voting and if you show up in these election statistics that I talk about, you've probably been here for a while. You're a citizen of the United States. You are a legal immigrant to the United States, if you have immigrated at all to the United States. It's just a fundamentally different experience. 

In particular in the polling, in the work I've done on the southern border, it's very clear that the people down there do not see the people crossing as being one of them, especially in the current wave. What you see also increasingly is, the people here in those communities tend to be more Mexican-American. And what you see is people from Venezuela, but you're also seeing non-Latino people crossing. You're seeing people from Haiti, the Caribbean and further afield, who are part of this migrant crisis. It's just fundamentally different. A typical Latino voter is as far apart from the people crossing today than a typical white. And that's the reality.

Gillespie: Has immigration been defined by the chaos at the border or the inability to control the border?

Ruffini: There is no question that this situation on the southern border has overshadowed and dominated the whole question of immigration, such that when you even bring up the question of immigration in this survey, people see it as an issue that is a liability for the Biden administration. People want to go back to something like the Trump administration policies. But you did see increasingly, post-2016, there was a backlash among Democrats to what was seen as Trump's xenophobia, intolerance of immigrants, and so they, as a result, putting on their jerseys to some extent, decided to be a party that was openly advocating for immigration, whereas you wouldn't have seen that in the Democratic Party of yesteryear, which was where labor was a big factor. Labor, in and of itself through the 1990s, was very skeptical of open immigration.

I think that the old populist Democratic Party went away. As a result, Biden had to commit to a much more open set of border policies that has invited political disaster for him.

Gillespie: At the same time, Bill Clinton in '96 spent a huge chunk of his renomination speech saying he was going to get rid of illegal immigrants. He was going to remove them from the country.

Ruffini: That is a really good point. I think there's a world of difference between Bill Clinton and what Joe Biden is going to do. You don't really see Biden touting the fact that he is now tough on the border, like he is the one who was tough and wants to get something done on the border, in such a way that it would register with voters. 

The other day on Twitter, I imagined, what would a Bill Clinton-style ad look like about the current border crisis? I know he'd be talking about the Biden border plan to crack down on illegals. If you were rerunning the Bill Clinton 1996 playbook, which, by the way, I think that would work, I think that would still work today. But you won't see him do it because the climate within his own party has just dramatically changed when it comes to anything that's adjacent to diversity or anything like that. It's just unimaginable that he would do something like that.

Gillespie: Let's talk about Asian Americans. How do they factor into the multiracial coalition that might remake the GOP? How bad is it to characterize all Asian Americans as peas in a pod? But then what is the highest-salience set of issues for them?

Ruffini: This is a very bifurcated community because about half of the Asian electorate is college-educated and votes in many ways similar to the white, college-educated electorate. You have a large number of Asians in California, which is a very blue state. They started out from a very democratic baseline. But if you look at the Asian American professionals in one of the major metro areas, they're pretty indistinguishable, actually, from a white educated professional. 

In terms of the places where you have an identifiably Asian voting bloc—places like Little Saigon in Orange County or in San Jose, California, or places in Queens, which have received a lot of attention over the last couple election cycles—those are oftentimes first generation immigrant communities where a lot of people speak the original language. These voters are very different from this professional class that you've seen a shift in? You actually start to see more of a class divide in the Asian community. 

But you look at places like in New York City—and particularly this realignment kind of gained steam in 2022—[former Rep.] Lee Zeldin [R–N.Y.] won a lot of those voters. You had three Asian American Republicans getting elected as Assembly people in Brooklyn, when no one was really expecting that. It is a very different community. You really see it particularly among Koreans, among Vietnamese, to some extent Chinese Americans. Less so among Indian Americans, I don't think you see it as much there. But there's a huge divide by education.

Gillespie: What about groups like Chinese and Japanese, who might be a very small population? Do you see the same kind of pattern where if they've been here for three generations or more they have become indistinguishable from white voters or native-born Americans?

Ruffini: It depends on the context of what are they moving to. To some extent, the Hispanic working-class voter is essentially this generation's version of the white working-class voter of yesteryear. They're moving into places like Northeast Philly, which was a traditionally more conservative place. We had a pretty conservative white electorate. But they're living a solidly middle-class existence. This is not like, "Oh, we're living in the barrio." We are living a solidly middle-class existence. There's a pathway where you can see how they're becoming more Republican. 

Look at the Asian American voter. It's a little bit more complicated because you mentioned The New Americans by Michael Barone, where he drew these parallels. The parallel he draws with Asians, is if Hispanics were the new Italians, Asians are the new Jews, in terms of they seem to be a very highly educated group, with very high levels of educational attainment, very high levels of rising up the income ladder, almost in a very steep pattern where they're leapfrogging every other group. There is a sense that that has led to a more Democratic outlook among a newer generation or people entering the professional class. You see that more and more among Asian voters. 

But to some extent, the Democratic Party has spurned the Asian American vote. The progressive movement has spurned the Asian-American voter in the push for diversity, ironically, in higher education, where it's really Asian-Americans who are the losers. If you de-emphasized merit in higher education—I'd love to see your Republicans actually do more to seize upon that issue in Asian communities.

Gillespie: We all know that the 2016 election was unbelievably close. It was as tight as it could get. But in 2020, Joe Biden won overwhelmingly in the popular vote as a percentage and in the Electoral College. But how close was that election? Was it a blowout, or was it actually pretty close to 2016 when you factor in things?

Ruffini: I'm smiling because actually the perception that it wasn't a close election, it's just completely wrong. It's actually, technically speaking, closer than 2016 when you look at the number of votes needed to have flipped in the Electoral College. People forget how close Trump came to winning the election—just a shift of 0.7 percent in the popular vote spread uniformly across the country would have won. That means he would have been the president, squeaking by with 6 million fewer popular votes than Biden. Why is that? Partly it's due to this working-class coalition. 

The working class is concentrated in states that are more just electorally significant to the outcome of the election. Part of the reason that this realignment really is the best avenue and bet for Republicans to win elections moving forward is because they're overrepresented in the electoral college. Now, we'll see if that happens again in 2024. But, it was a very, very close election, and particularly compared to the polls going into the election, which Biden I think was up by eight points in the last polling average. He only wins by four and barely squeaks by in a way that allows Trump to make an argument to his voters that it was stolen from him. 

Gillespie: Do you believe that or are you saying that Trump made that argument?

Ruffini: No, I don't believe it was stolen from him. But I do think that had we seen Biden actually win the election by as much as he should have won the election, as much as polls were saying, and was expected to win the election, then I think Trump would have just had a much harder time convincing people. 

Gillespie: Assuming the 2024 election is Trump vs. Biden and assuming each of them is brain damaged in their own unique, special ways, is it totally up for grabs?

Ruffini: I think that it would be. It's a fair assumption about any election, no matter what the polls say at this point. You start from the prior that it's a jump ball. But, it's a very different election right now. Right now, Trump is polling ahead and that's been very consistent, no matter what the economic numbers seem to do. I don't think you could ignore that. It's not a fundamentally different election from the standpoint of pre-election polling than it was in 2020. That said, I think we will likely still see a very, very close election. But, right now, Trump seems to be doing a lot better than he was at this point in 2020. 

Gillespie: The economy compared to 2020 is doing relatively well. Inflation was a big issue then. Despite Biden being terrible on the economy, things for most people are doing pretty well. Is that because voters don't really care about the actual reality?

Ruffini: I wouldn't say the results are reality and the ground doesn't matter. If the economic situation kind of quiets down, he'd rather have that than the alternative. But a perception has set in particularly as it relates to Biden's fitness and his age that is very hard to recover from, unless something dramatic happens, either in the form of a Trump conviction or in the form of Trump has his own health crisis, that does seem to be something that is weighing down Biden pretty heavily, independently of the state of the economy. But also just a pretty deep-seated perception that the grass was greener on the other side of the street. 

Even if Biden is able to somehow recover on the economy, and maybe make it a little bit more of a draw, does he still win the debate with Trump over who best is able to manage the economy? They still win that retrospective look back, I was better off. The perception that set in, that things were at least under control on the global stage when Trump was president, I seem to be making more money.

Gillespie: Towards the end of your book Party of the People, you say, "I come to tell the younger me that the libertarian dream of smaller government is debt." You also talk a fair amount when you're looking at the future of politics about a quadrant chart that Lee Trotman put together, which shows that what used to be called the libertarian quadrant—the shorthand is fiscally conservative, socially liberal—there are no voters there. How do you justify that?

Ruffini: That's something your colleague Stephanie Slade tackled very aptly in a feature piece at Reason recently. Growing up, I very much drank the Kool-Aid, supply-side economics and a lot of, not just maybe a more libertarian economics, but the whole Reagan view of, let's say, limited government. The reality is that not a lot of voters are motivated by those sorts of questions in the real world. You see both parties increasingly motivated on cultural questions and activated on cultural questions. That's particularly true of Republican voters, and particularly around the issue of immigration. We saw that very clearly with Trump in 2016. I also don't think that a whole lot of voters are motivated by a left-wing ideological critique of the Reagan era or support for social democracy. 

I think that the questions that actually motivate voters on a real level are fundamentally different from the ones that motivate activists, and the ones that motivate people like me growing up—we're very invested in these economic ideologies. Trump really kind of pulled that back and said this isn't really at a fundamental gut level what's moving people, even though they do have. I write this in the book that it's not like Republicans should just become a party that supports social programs, and that's how you win working-class voters. They do have this gut-level identification with capitalist or free enterprise, or business and hard work as a way of working your way up. But they're just not quite as invested in reading Milton Friedman as maybe that younger version of me was thinking.

Gillespie: If the Republican Party no longer seems to be courting libertarians in a way that they were at the end of the aughts to the beginning of the 2000 teens, it doesn't mean that libertarian voters have disappeared. Emily Ekins and David Boaz at the Cato Institute, using various measures that are alternative to some of the ones that you and Lee Trotman use, hypothesize that 10 percent to 20 percent of voters pretty reliably vote socially liberal and fiscally conservative. 

Where do those voters go, assuming they're not completely just making that up? In an election like the one that we're going to have now, in an election like in 2022 or 2016, where are those libertarian voters and who do you think they would be going for in something like this?

Ruffini: You're right that even if a group is smaller in the electorate, it turns out they matter quite a lot. And I think Joe Biden doesn't win in 2020 without all the third party voters from 2016 who primarily backed him. But when you talk about how we define that socially, more moderate, or liberal and fiscally conservative voter, I think we are used to viewing that libertarian vote as adjacent to the Republican vote. As something that belongs to Republicans. What we'll be actually seeing more and more is more of a crossover between libertarians and Democrats recently. Because those cultural issues seem to be the tie-breaker. They seem to matter more. 

Number one, Trump isn't fiscally conservative. He's not really standing up for that side of the argument. But you also just see social issues and cultural issues kind of matter more. I'm not talking about the hardcore Libertarian Party voter, I am talking about that sort of voter in the northeast corridor, that likes to say they're socially more moderate and fiscally conservative. What you've seen more recently, in a more recent election cycle is that those voters go more Democratic. Whereas that moderate voter again, that's the Obama-Trump voter. That's the voter in Michigan. That's the old autoworker. That's pro-life. They see a role for the government in the economy. Those voters have been moving in completely the opposite directions.

Gillespie: What are the signs to look for going into the election, and then after that will there be a long-lived realignment of the parties?

Ruffini: We don't necessarily know after 2024 if this new coalition survives. Certainly, there's a case for the shifts that we've seen, particularly as it relates to non-white voters continuing, you're seeing that in the polls right now. There's also a case to be made that this is more of a long-term process. In the book, I write about looking ahead. Let's actually conduct a thought experiment that if this actually happens, what does 2036 look like? What would the election of 2036 look like? 

Overwhelmingly, because we have a pretty good idea of what the demographics are going to be in that year. We know the country is just getting more non-white. What would the breakdown need to look like? It would need to look something like this: Republicans draw pretty even among Hispanics, they're winning about maybe 40 percent of Asian voters, and they're winning almost a quarter of the African-American vote. What's interesting is there's polls out there that show that's happening in 2024. It could be that I'm way too conservative. But I think you really have to view this over a long-term trajectory and not election to election, which is very noisy. I think that subject to all sorts of factors that are specific to the cycle. 

Right now we have this tendency to view Ronald Reagan as this golden era of Republican normalcy, as somebody who is moderate on immigration and for free trade and for internationalism and global leadership. Certainly, that's true, but I think it understates the extent to which Reagan himself was a disruptive figure in the Republican Party in the '70s and '80s, where he was fundamentally—in the same way Trump is disrupting the existing Republican order—disrupting challenger Gerald Ford from the right. As a result, the party moves, the party shifts, and it becomes a really unambiguously conservative party after Reagan. 

In some way, I think the party will become an unambiguously more populist party. Now, whether or not we have somebody who is quite as much of an avatar of that as Donald Trump in the future, I'm not sure. I think he is somewhat sui generis. I think you will, by default, have somebody more "normal" in the future, particularly someone who can get elected president. But, I think that just the baseline has shifted. It shifted with Reagan and I think it's now shifted with Trump. 

Gillespie: Where do you think the Democratic Party is shifting to? Are they undergoing a similar process, if they are now appealing to educated cosmopolitan voters? 

Ruffini: It's a coalition that is shifted in terms of the voters it's appealed to significantly. It's really openly making the case on cultural issues, openly making the case for a more open society, really talking up these sort of more abstract concepts of democracy as opposed to the kind of campaign we saw as recently as 2012 when Obama was railing against Mitt Romney as the scion of private equity. You didn't care about people like you. You just don't seem to see that kind of rhetoric anymore, even though that remains part of the party's policy commitment. I don't necessarily think they're going to go conservative on economic issues.

Gillespie: Medicare and Social Security appear to be completely inviolate at this point. It is beyond the third rail of American politics now. To even invoke it, other than to say you are going to keep it forever and maybe make it shinier, is complete political death. Is there any way that that's going to change? 

Ruffini: What's going to change, if nothing else, are the actuarial realities of these programs that are going to impose upon everybody's tidy the political notions and ideas. What you would say now is that it is absolute political death for anybody to touch that entitlement reform. Particularly when you frame the question as cuts to entitlement programs. I think you're absolutely passing that rubicon of we're no longer able to pay out benefits at the state level. It's going to fundamentally be another major disruption, akin to but somewhat I think much greater than what we saw in the last three years with 20 percent inflation. I think that that is going to be in and of itself going to upend a lot of our politics. 

But, Trump intuited, not incorrectly, that this was not a political winner for Republicans and he was actually willing to—and I think probably others had intuited that beforehand—make the argument, which have made it overall very much more difficult for any political party that is calling out for some kind of solution.

Gillespie: Are there new ways to talk about entitlement spending that casts it in a more populist sensibility, because it's clear that Social Security and Medicare both take money from relatively young people and relatively poor people and give it to relatively old and relatively rich people. Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan failed because he didn't make the commercial throwing grandma off a cliff. He should have owned that and said,
we need to do this, and she wants that for us anyway."

Ruffini: It's fundamentally different for a lot of people. You'll have Hispanic voters really voicing the sentiment around, "We don't want welfare cheats." And frankly, that's a real, palpable sentiment. They completely exclude Social Security and Medicare from that calculation.

 Whereas for a lot of people, when people take offense to the idea that these are quote-unquote entitlements—aka welfare programs—when the technical definition of an entitlement is you're entitled to it because you theoretically paid into it. Fundamentally, this is actually the political consensus in the working class, is anti-welfare and pro-Social Security. They're making the distinction based on the fact that they believe they paid into these programs, and they're just getting out what they have already paid in. Which is not reality, but that's a very strongly held belief.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Photo Credit: Wennphotostwo121965

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post Patrick Ruffini: Why Blacks and Hispanics Are Turning to Trump appeared first on Reason.com.

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

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You probably already know that the national debt is bigger than our whole economy. But relax, because things can always get worse! And they will, regardless of whether Biden or Trump gets elected in the fall. Each has a proven track record of spending like a drunken sailor and most projections show that debt will grow to between 181 percent and 340 percent of GDP over the next few decades. Reason's Nick Gillespie discussed all of this and more with Brian Riedl, a budget expert at the Manhattan Institute. Riedl explains why massive and growing debt is really bad, why reducing it is really hard but really important, and why young people should be really pissed.

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Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.

Gillespie: We know who the candidates are going to be. It's going to be Biden vs. Trump. They both have track records that you have been tracking as a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute talking about debt and deficits. You, last fall, released a big book of charts and doom and deficits. The Congressional Budget Office [CBO] is projecting $119 trillion worth of deficits over the next 30 years. And that's optimistic. 

You note that we have gone from the national debt being $3 trillion in the year 2000 to $27 trillion in the past quarter century. According to the CBO calculations, depending on what happens, debt will be between 181 percent and 340 percent of gross domestic product [GDP] in another 30 years. So we got a lot of debt floating around here. Why are debt and deficits bad?

Riedl: Modest and sustainable deficits are not bad. It's like any sort of borrowing. It's OK to go into debt for your mortgage. It's OK to borrow for school. I am not a balanced budget absolutist. 

Every year's deficit adds up to the national debt. Modest borrowing is not bad. It doesn't raise interest rates very much. It doesn't cost taxpayers much. The problem is debt gets out of control when it grows faster than the economy forever. It's just like a family. If your debt is growing faster than your income forever, it's not sustainable. And for most of the period after World War II, the debt was about 40 percent of GDP, which most economists considered sustainable. It didn't raise interest rates very high, and the interest costs as a share of federal spending were manageable. 

The problem is now we've gone from 40 percent to 100 percent, and we're going much higher. If that happens, the dangers are, in a basic macroeconomic angle, higher interest rates. Because the more savings the government borrows, the less savings are available for everyone else to borrow. And that'll bid up interest rates and reduce investment. But what becomes even a bigger issue is how Washington's even going to be able to borrow that much money. Is there enough savings for Washington to even lend? And if they are able to borrow it, are the interest costs going to be so high that we could have a situation where 50 percent or 80 percent of your federal taxes are just paying interest on the debt rather than getting anything of value?

Gillespie: What about the idea that long, persistent, and growing national debt decreases long term economic growth?

Riedl: Absolutely. Again, modest debt doesn't make much of a difference. But, if you think of it, there is a certain pool of savings in America and in the global economy. That savings usually would be borrowed for home loans, car loans, business loans, investment to grow the economy. But the more the government borrows this money, the more they soak up the savings. And instead of spending on investment, they spend it on consumption. They're going to give it to seniors to consume. 

There's going to be fewer money for home loans, car loans, student loans, and business loans. Ultimately, because investment is the lifeblood that drives the economy, when you starve the economy of investment dollars, you're going to get less business investment. It's going to create fewer jobs. There's going to be lower wages and lower growth. And you could argue we've already seen this. Japan has a debt of 200 percent of GDP. Their economy has been a basket case for 30 years.

Gillespie: Both the federal government and the Federal Reserve System are ostensibly independent. They've just said, "OK, well, we're just going to keep printing money. We're going to create money out of thin air." Is that also unsustainable?

Riedl: Yes. In fact, of the growth in debt over the past decade or so, about $4 trillion to $5 trillion of it has essentially been funded by the printing press. The Federal Reserve's holding of Treasury bills, which they essentially buy with printed money, has gone up $4 trillion to $5 trillion. The Fed is actually looking to unload that $4 trillion to $5 trillion. But if they didn't, let's say they keep printing money, you're just going to get hyperinflation. 

The [Modern Monetary Theory] MMT crowd says you can always just print more money and the debt goes away. You can't expand the money supply by tens of trillions of dollars without creating significant inflation. My worry is long term. There's going to be a lot of pressure in Congress to go that direction. [It's] what's called fiscal dominance, when interest rates are set more to keep borrowing costs low than to stabilize the economy. That's my worry.

Gillespie: What is driving the debt? What is driving persistent deficits?

Riedl: The debt up until now has been driven by all sorts of factors. When you go from $3 trillion to $27 trillion, there's going to be a lot of blame to go around. We've had Social Security and Medicare costs rise. There have been wars, tax cuts, just yearly runaway spending. The pandemic cost about $5 trillion. But moving forward from where we are now, there's one answer: Social Security and Medicare. Over the next 30 years, the Social Security and Medicare systems will run a shortfall of a $116 trillion.

Gillespie: As we mentioned, we're looking over the next 30 years at $119 trillion in total deficits. It's all Social Security and Medicare.

Riedl: The long term budget is roughly balanced if you take out Social Security and Medicare deficits. We do not really have a budget problem. We have a Social Security and Medicare problem.

Gillespie: In your book you mention that there are specific episodes where things cost a lot of money. It's fascinating. After 9/11, there wasn't the type of spike there was after the 2008 financial crisis. There was a massive blowout of debt finance spending. And then there was, of course, COVID. Broadly speaking from 1960 to 2022, spending was 20.4 percent of GDP. 

So the government is spending 20.4 percent of the equivalent to the economy; revenue average over that same time was 17.4 percent. So that explains where we're at now. But you're saying going forward, it's going to get worse. And it's almost all because of old age entitlement.

Riedl: Right. You mentioned revenue has averaged 17.4 percent of the economy since 1960. It's projected to rise above that depending on whether or not we extend the 2017 tax cuts. Revenues are going to be 18 percent or 19 percent of the economy over the next 30 years. That's above average. 

The problem is spending is going to jump all the way to 30 percent of the economy under the rosiest scenarios that the CBO can come up with. So people can have their own value judgments, like, "Well, I think revenues are lower than they should be." But if you're just looking at the moving variable driving deficits, it is 100 percent above average spending. There is no below average revenues projected for the next 30 years. We're going to have the highest sustained revenues in American history under the baseline. But it can't keep up with spending jumping 10 percent of GDP.

Gillespie: One of the things that you talk about in your book of charts—you have a piece  recently at The Dispatch that talked about this—is that this is not a Republican or Democratic issue. It is both parties. How do Democrats tend to spend money? And then how do Republicans tend to spend money?

Riedl: Democrats like to do big bursts when they get a new presidency. For instance, Barack Obama came in, spent trillions of dollars on stimulus, then did Obamacare. The next year, you get this big burst of activity. And then it was similar with Joe Biden. Biden comes in, spends $4.8 trillion in new legislation in 20 months, which is remarkable.

Gillespie: And as remarkable as that is, he came in promising $11 trillion in new spending. So he got halfway there.

Riedl: He got halfway there in 20 months. And, who knows, had the Democrats had a good election year in Congress, they could have gone further. Democrats not only do these bursts, but Democrats also are the defenders of the status quo with entitlement costs. The quiet driver of deficits is Social Security and health care costs rising 6 percent or 7 percent a year. And Democrats are the adamant party that says we can never touch that. So even if they weren't passing their bills, that Social Security and Medicare 6 percent or 7 percent a year buries us.

Gillespie: So what about Republicans? How do they jack up spending?

Riedl: Republicans talk a good game. But if you take a look at 2017 and 2018, Republicans had the trifecta. They had the House, the Senate, and the presidency. They didn't reform entitlements at all. There was a little bit of push to repeal Obamacare that failed. There was no Social Security reform, no Medicare reform, no Medicaid reform. Instead, they came in, cut taxes, and busted the discretionary spending caps with a 13 percent hike in one year. 

When Republicans get the trifecta, when Republicans control the government, the first thing they want to do is reward their constituents. They're not thinking in terms of deficit reduction. They're thinking in terms of handing out benefits to constituents, whether it's big defense hikes, big discretionary hikes, or tax cuts. You don't get the fiscal spinach from Republicans when they control everything. They consider it time to party. Republicans need to be judged by their actions, not their rhetoric. You listen to Republicans give speeches, "We're going to balance the budget. We're going to reduce wasteful spending, and we're going to cut waste, fraud, and abuse." It's all empty rhetoric. If you look at Republicans, not only is their past record terrible, but their current proposals to reduce the deficit don't even reduce the deficit. Every Republican presidential candidate has an economic plan that increases deficits, every one of them.

The House Budget Committee released a budget blueprint that was entirely gimmicks. The Freedom Caucus, for all their talk, has released no actual blueprint to how to balance the budget. In fact, Republicans take 75 percent of spending off the table. They say, "We're not going to touch Social Security, Medicare, defense, veterans, and interest." They immediately take 75 percent off the table. So it's hard to trust a party that cuts taxes, increases spending, and then moving forward takes 75 percent of the spending off the table and won't tell us where they'd cut the other 25 percent. I think you need to judge them by their actions, not their empty balance the budget rhetoric.

Gillespie: Are there Democrats who are more serious about fiscal responsibility?

Riedl: There are some. What are the modern equivalent of blue dog democrats? The blue dogs were wiped out under Obama. There is a quiet group of Democrats, about two or three dozen of them in the House, that are trying to work with Republicans kind of under the table on budget process reform, Social Security and Medicare reform. They're very quiet about it. 

In the Senate, you have [Sens.] Joe Manchin [(R–W.Va.)], Michael Bennet [(D–Colo.)], and Mark Warner [(D–Va.)]. There are some Democrats who at least talk a better game than even Republicans. But there hasn't been, of course, much action. The Democrats who are reasonable on this issue are unfortunately overshadowed by the loud progressives who cost their party any credibility when you have [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren [(D–Mass.)], [Sen. Bernie] Sanders [(I-Vt.)] and [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.)] demanding $40 trillion in spending.

Gillespie: How important is the presidency when it comes to increases or decreases in spending? 

Riedl: The president cannot cut spending himself or herself. The president does not have the full power of the purse. And that's why I think sometimes presidents get too much blame when spending rises. When they tried to cut spending, Congress wouldn't cut it. That being said, you can't cut spending without the president being involved. The president has to sign the bills. And the president also has the bully pulpit to frame the issue. If presidents would actually invest political capital in spending cuts, they can create the framework in order to help us get there. They can't do it themselves. But again, the problem is we haven't really had a serious fiscal conservative president in memory. Not only are they not a help, they're usually a barrier to spending cuts.

Gillespie: The budgeting process that comes out of Congress was reformed in the mid-'70s or early '70s. People in Congress don't follow it. Is that part of the problem?

Riedl: The 1974 Budget Act has been neutered into oblivion. One way to think about how it works is every year Congress is supposed to pass a budget. They never do.

Gillespie: And they're supposed to pass a budget before that budget year starts.

Riedl: Right, they're supposed to pass the budget in March for the following October 1. 

Gillespie: How many times does that happen?

Riedl: Rarely. And then after that, you're supposed to pass 12 appropriations bills that actually fund the programs. The first problem is the appropriations bills only fund discretionary spending, which is 30 percent of the government. The budget process takes 70 percent of spending on autopilot out of the process. We're talking Social Security, Medicare, anti-poverty programs, Medicaid, farm subsidies. They're not even part of the budget process. They're just set aside on permanent autopilot. 

Congress spends all year tearing itself apart over the remaining 30 percent that's discretionary spending. And then you have situations like now where we're almost six months into the next fiscal year, and we still don't have discretionary appropriations for this year. We're still just running last year's numbers on autopilot. So the '74 Budget Act simply doesn't work anymore. If its goal is to help Congress set priorities, make tradeoffs, and shape a holistic view of the budget, it's nonfunctional.

Gillespie: What gave rise to the '74 Budget Act? And does that have any lessons for how we might reform things today?

Riedl: The '74 Budget Act resulted primarily from Nixon trying to impound money. There was a huge constitutional crisis under Nixon, where he was trying to impound money that had been already appropriated by Congress. Impoundment means the spending has already been signed into law and the president says, as chief executive, I'm not spending the money. 

Gillespie: What was he trying to not spend money on?

Riedl: That I do not know right now. But the Supreme Court essentially shot down impoundment and said, if the law says to spend it, the president doesn't have a choice. That's why the Budget Act was called the Budget and Impoundment Act. But also what was happening back then is the budget was expanding. We were just past the Great Society. You had huge new government programs and a totally unwieldy process. It was just kind of all funded on an ad hoc basis. So the combination of the Great Society and impoundment drove the '74 Budget Act.

Gillespie: Is there anything that might spark a reform of the budgeting process?

Riedl: The challenge right now is everybody in Congress knows the process is broken. The debt limit, the government shutdowns, that often motivates members to say that this is no way to run a country. We keep having debt limit crises. We keep having government shutdown crises. The problem with budget reform that we've run into is there have been a lot of commissions in Congress and a lot of working groups and a lot of special blue ribbon lawmaker commissions. Nearly every reform they come up with dies because somebody's ox gets gored. Some committee is going to lose power, whether it's that the Appropriations Committee is going to lose to the Budget Committee or that the Budget Committee is going to have to give power to Appropriations, or the Ways and Means [Committee] is going to lose some authority over some of their entitlement programs. 

Budget process starts out idealistic and good government, and it ends up devolving into a turf war between members over who can control what, and the whole system falls apart. One way of doing it, potentially, is enact reforms that don't go into effect for five, seven, eight years so that members who are voting on it don't have to worry that they won't be the committee chairman anymore.

Gillespie: What's the role then of public opinion? In your theory of social change, does it come from people protesting bad budget processing and things like that?

Riedl: You know, I have a sign up in my office. I believe it's a quote that says, "Do not think that public opinion doesn't matter in the long run. It's the only thing that does matter." And ultimately, I have worked 20 years trying to adjust public opinion because when I worked on the Hill, I worked for six years in the Senate as chief economist of Sen. Rob Portman [(R–Ohio]). And when you're working in Congress and you talk to lawmakers, they will tell you the same thing. We know all these problems. We know it's unsustainable. But if I try to do anything about it, the voters will kill me. 

So one of the reasons I left the Senate was I'm like, "OK, if everything comes down to public opinion because lawmakers are just weather vanes, we have to fix public opinion." The challenge addressing public opinion on deficits is nobody believes it and nobody feels it. And they've been hearing concerns of deficits for a long time. But they don't feel it as much. I mean, there's been a little bit with interest rates. My fear is that we're not going to get real budget reform until the pain starts to hit us hard enough that people feel it.

Gillespie: And that will be inflation. 

Riedl: Inflation, rising interest rates, the bond market cutting us off, stock markets falling, and the danger, of course, is by the time you've gotten to that point, it's too late to fix it in any way that's not totally brutal. But I have spent 25 years trying to motivate people, even looking for a Ross Perot type or something to motivate people. 

One of the reasons it's harder to get people motivated on the deficit now than, say, in the 1990s is in the 1990s, the deficit was smaller, and you could fix it by reforming programs that didn't matter as much. Today, the deficit is $2 trillion and driven almost entirely by Social Security and Medicare. It's really hard to motivate people to address the deficit when they realize that's the ox that's going to be gored. It's going to be Social Security, Medicare, and middle-class taxes. You're not going to be able to tweak your way to this like you did in the 1990s.

Gillespie: Before we go into what is to be done—and I want to talk about some of the proposals that you've articulated over the years—let's talk a little bit about Trump and Biden. 

By the time George W. Bush left office, he ended up adding $10.3 trillion in deficits, beyond what was expected. Obama added $4.6 trillion in a 10-year budget window. Trump in four years had $3.9 trillion extra budget deficits that he added to the baseline. Biden, I guess, in his first 20 months, because it's still going on, added $5 trillion. So does that tell us anything essential about these people or the parties they represent?

Riedl: You don't just want to look at what the deficit was when they arrived and when they left because you might inherit a budget where everything is on autopilot getting better or everything's on autopilot getting worse. But you can further divide up these changes between legislation vs. the economy. And if you do that, Trump comes out a lot worse. Trump actually added $7.8 trillion in deficits, but he was able to save $3.9 trillion through faster economic growth, which cut the impact in half.

Gillespie: Obama came in with a terrible economy, and I think we would both agree that the actions that came after him slowed down the recovery. But by the time Trump came into office, things were picking up.

Riedl: Sure, exactly. Especially in those first three years, the economy overperformed. 

Gillespie: And Biden also inherited a bad economy.

Riedl: So if you go by just legislation and you further take out the economy, Bush's legislation added $7 trillion in borrowing, Obama $5 trillion in borrowing, and Trump nearly $8 trillion in just four years. So what you see is that Bush and Trump added more than Obama, and much of Obama's debt was actually extending the Bush tax cuts. But Biden really came in all guns blazing. Like I said, he added $4.8 trillion in 20 months. He added as much debt in 20 months legislatively as Obama did in eight years. And so I think things are getting worse. That's why I'm concerned about a Trump-Biden rematch, because you have two presidents with two of the worst fiscal records of the past 100 years.

Gillespie: What is the option beyond despair when we look at the 2024 election? 

Riedl: I think one hope you can have on spending in deficits is gridlock. I think if you get a full Republican government or a full Democratic government, you're going to see massive deficits. If you get gridlock, you might have some hope that even if neither side cares about the deficit, they don't want to increase the deficit the other way. Republicans don't want spending hikes. Democrats don't want tax cuts. 

But other than that, the real danger coming up after this election is we have an epic fiscal cliff coming next year. Next year, the tax cuts expire and are up for renewal. That's about $4 trillion over 10 years. The recent Obamacare expansion that Biden signed expires. The discretionary spending caps expire. The infrastructure bill expires, and we hit the debt limit. So it's going to be interesting to see whether we have a unified or divided government in a situation where we have $6 trillion or $7 trillion in renewals coming, and whether or not they're going to try to constrain or blow this out of the water.

Gillespie: Talk a bit about how gridlock has operated in the 21st century. Because Bush came in and ultimately, by 2004, he had a united government. But in 2006, he lost control of the House and the spending slowed down toward the end of his term. Obama, as we discussed, basically elected a Republican Congress. There was a massive increase and then a kind of flatlining. It didn't quite work that way with Trump, although he also managed to fracture control of Congress. But is gridlock viable and is it good? 

Riedl: Historically, gridlock is the only thing that has reduced spending and deficits. I can go a little earlier to the 1990s when President [Bill] Clinton came in and spent his first two years trying to nationalize health care. It was a disaster. Newt Gingrich comes in 1994, and all of the sudden, the entire debate is over how to balance the budget. And four years later, the budget was balanced. Clinton was dragged kicking and screaming by Republicans into this. Similarly, as you mentioned, Obama in the first two years did about $1.5 trillion in stimulus bills plus Obamacare. And it was after Republicans took the House in 2011, the next six years were six of the best years we've had. There was very little expensive legislation passing. It was Boehner and Obama at each other's throats on spending, and you had legitimate deficit reduction. 

It kind of fell apart under Trump after Trump lost in 2020 because you had the pandemic. And also, the Trump Republican Party had changed so much that they were happy to team up with Nancy Pelosi to increase spending, even outside the pandemic. Like I said, even when Republicans had unified government, that version of the Republican Party was happy to make deals with Democrats that said, if you give us a 10 percent hike in defense, we'll give you a 10 percent hike in domestic discretionary spending. So, we went off the rails there. But historically, the GOP has worked really hard to constrain Democratic presidents. That's probably been the top formula for spending restraint: a Republican Congress constraining a Democratic president.

Gillespie: Let's talk about the '90s, because we managed to have balanced budgets for three years in a row? 

Riedl: '98 through '01.

Gillespie: So, what happened there and how did that come about?

Riedl: There's a lot of mythology about the 1990s balanced budgets. There is a certain view that it was a massive amount of fiscal consolidation. The fiscal consolidation was actually pretty minor.

Gillespie: What do you mean by fiscal consolidation?

Riedl: Policies to reduce the deficit. You had President Clinton raise taxes in 1993, but it was only about half a percent of GDP out of a deficit that was about 5 percent of GDP. You had some modest spending restraint. But the real reason the budget got balanced and balanced faster than anybody predicted was, a) the end of the Cold War created a defense dividend. Defense spending absolutely plummeted from about 5 percent or 6 percent of GDP down to 3 percent of GDP. 

At the same time, you had a big revenue bubble in the late '90s when the stock market was on fire. The defense savings and that temporary revenue bubble provided about 90 percent of the deficit reduction in the late '90s. If you want to give Clinton and Gingrich credit, it was basically staying out of the way. They didn't pass big, expensive bills. They didn't do big tax cuts. They didn't do big spending hikes. They stayed out of the way and let the defense savings happen and the revenue bubble happen.

Gillespie: And Gingrich never talked about that partly because he didn't want to be seen as 

cutting defense spending.

Riedl: Right. He didn't mention that. But, you wonder then, why did the budget become unbalanced in 2001? Well, all the savings were due to a revenue bubble and defense cuts, and then you have the revenue bubble burst and then you have 9/11. The revenue bump went away at the same time the defense savings went away. You were suddenly right back to where you were 10 years earlier.

Gillespie: And then you have the added kind of secret future costs by expanding Medicare.

Riedl: And then the Bush spending spree. I think one thing that gets lost on a lot of individuals is when Bush ran on compassionate conservatism in 2000, that theme was a repudiation of Newt Gingrich. Because there was a concern that Republicans were being too aggressive cutting spending, even though they really didn't successfully cut that much.

Gillespie: Yeah, but they cut defense spending.

Riedl: Right, they didn't cut social programs at all. But there were government shutdowns. So Bush was trying to repudiate that. Bush was announcing in 2000, unlike meanspirited Newt Gingrich, I'm compassionate and I'm going to increase spending. And he did. We had no Child Left Behind, farm subsidies, a huge highway bill. Domestic discretionary spending was rising about 8 percent or 9 percent per year in addition to the defense programs. So Bush made it clear at the outset in 2000 that he was going to be a big spender. 

And then 9/11 just kind of put it on the acceleration. Even if there were some fiscal conservatives in the Bush White House, the prioritization of 9/11 defense funding meant that they didn't really didn't have much leeway to play hardball with Democratic spenders. In fact, when you talk to people from the Bush White House, they will tell you, we didn't want to increase discretionary spending as much as we did. But we needed our Homeland Security and defense funding from Democrats, and we had to give them what they wanted.

Budgeting is about tradeoffs. It kind of always reminds me of [the saying], "If we can afford to go to the moon, we can afford to do something else." No, because if you do A, you cannot afford to do B.

Gillespie: In 2021, we were spending $59,188 per household. Currently it's at about $48,000. So it's come down from the peak, but not that far.

Riedl: [It's] still much higher than before the pandemic.

Gillespie: Yeah. And then it's projected in another 10 years or so to be up to $55,000. That kind of figure, does that crystallize for people that government spending is out of control?

Riedl: It does. When I talk to audiences, they can't believe the numbers. I say the government is spending at the peak of the pandemic $59,000 per household and right now about nearly $50,000 per household. And I frame it to audiences [like this]: Imagine what you could do if you were able to keep even a fraction of that money for yourself in the first place without sending it to Washington. And that crystallizes it for people just how big it's gotten. I remember when George H.W. Bush was president, we were spending $27,000 per household. That seemed high. And that's all adjusted for inflation. 

But I think that should crystallize it for people. And it reminds me of a report and Wall Street Journal op-ed by my colleague at the Manhattan Institute, Judge Glock, who showed how much of people's taxes come back to the same household in benefits. I think he was estimating around 20 percent directly come back to the same household and much of the rest of it indirectly comes back to the same household. And it's really kind of dumb to send this money to Washington, have them cut an administrative haircut, and then send it right back to you.

Gillespie: This is current spending, the way the federal budget is split up: 34 percent currently goes to Social Security or Medicare, 19 percent goes to anti-poverty programs, 13 percent to defense, 10 percent to interest, and then there's 23 percent in another category. What are some of those?

Riedl: The other category? Basically education, infrastructure, border security, health research, housing. All that kind of stuff.

Gillespie: This is only going to get bigger, but a third of federal spending is Social Security and Medicare.

Riedl: And that's going to go way up. 

Gillespie: And interest will likely go up if interest rates continue to climb and things like that. In the early '60s, defense spending was close to half of federal spending. And it's not so much anymore because we spend less proportionately on defense, but it's also because we spend so much on everything else.

Riedl: We've gone from one-half to one-eighth of the budget on defense. 

Gillespie: What do we do in order to pay for this type of spending? Can we tax our way out of it?

Riedl: It is mathematically impossible to tax our way out of this. In order to stabilize that long term, you need non-interest savings that gradually rise to about 6 percent of GDP outside of interest. I did a report last year on taxing the rich that showed that, realistically, you can only get about 1 percent of GDP and higher revenues. If you set all upper income taxes at the highest possible rate at the revenue maximizing level, and you adjusted for the economic damage that would create, you get 1 percent to 2 percent of GDP. 

Just to put a finer point on this, if you seized every dollar of every billionaire's wealth in America, their home, their car, their stocks, their vacation houses, their yachts, their businesses, you could fund the government one time for nine months. That's it. If you assessed 100 percent tax rates over $500,000 a year, you still wouldn't balance the budget. So taxing the rich should be on the table because everything needs to be on the table, but when I hear lawmakers say all we have to do is tax the rich and it'll pay for everything, that is spectacularly, mathematically false.

Gillespie: In your book you show actually that according to data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—and the OECD are advanced economies. The United States actually has the most progressive tax code. We are taxing the rich. The rich pay a higher percentage of government revenue in the U.S. than in any other country. 

Riedl: Substantially more. And it's because we tax the rich at a similar level as other countries. In fact, our highest rates are actually higher for other countries. But we tax the nonwealthy so much less than other countries that it makes us more progressive.

Gillespie: The upper 10 percent of income earners in the U.S. pay about 90 percent of the taxes.

Riedl: The highest 20 percent of earners pay 90 percent of all income taxes. The bottom half collectively pays zero.

Gillespie: So does that mean in order to balance the budget, we have to tax the middle class or we have to tax a wider range of income earners?

Riedl: Here's the part that makes me really unpopular with all our audiences. If you try to build a stable budget for the next 30 years—and I don't mean stable, I don't mean balance the budget, I mean just one small enough deficit that the debt share of GDP stays at about 100 percent—you can't really get there on spending cuts alone. You have to cut that 5.5 percent of GDP. You can't really find 5.5 percent of GDP in reasonable cuts. You're going to have to have some revenue. And if taxing the rich is limited, there's going to be higher middle-class taxes. This is just a mathematical reality. 

As I explained in my Dispatch article, you can't stabilize the debt with revenues at 17 percent of GDP. Spending is going to 30 [percent]. You're not going to get spending all the way down that low. And you can't get there from taxing the rich. So, middle-class taxes are going to rise.

Gillespie: Yeah, so what's the median household income now? $76,000? Something like that? What will they be paying in taxes 10 years down the road vs. now?

Riedl: It remains to be seen. I can't give a number. I think people are surprised to hear, though, that the median earning family in America today pays an effective income tax rate of 2 percent. And people say I pay more than that. 

If you actually adjust for what they actually pay with the child credit, and sometimes the [Earned Income Tax Credit], the middle earning family pays an effective income tax rate of 2 percent. And then they pay an effective payroll tax of about 10 percent when you count the employer portion. So they do pay payroll, but it's going to go up from that. And the question eventually is, are we going to do most of this through payroll taxes and a value added tax, which is like a national sales tax, or through income taxes?

Gillespie: And in Europe, that is everything, right?

Riedl: We are the only country in the OECD that does not have a value added tax. I would like to keep it that way.

Gillespie: Why? What's bad about a value added tax?

Riedl: Value added taxes are actually more efficient than income taxes, if you're starting a government from scratch, because you're taxing consumption. The danger, though, is value added taxes are a cash cow. Once you start with a 1 percent rate, it's so easy to raise it to higher rates and collect a huge amount of revenue. And my concern is, I wouldn't mind replacing the income tax with a value added tax, but I don't want to get to the point where families are paying large income taxes and large value added taxes because then you're burying families. A lot of conservatives have said if we're going to switch to a consumption tax, the income tax needs to be destroyed, burned, and salted the Earth first.

Gillespie: The income tax is not that old, right? In a way, we could conceivably do that.

Riedl: It's 100 years old, the income tax. But yeah, if you're starting a government from scratch, your bets are better. 

Gillespie: Can we grow our way out of this?

Riedl: No. And this might be news to Vivek Ramaswamy, who said that he was going to balance the budget by growing the economy 6 percent per year, which was absolutely absurd. 

The first challenge is, we can't get that much additional economic growth, because when you look at the economic growth rates of the '50s, '60s, and '70s, most of that was rising population. The population is set to pretty much level off for the next 30 years. We're going to have almost zero growth of the work force population, which means all the growth is going to have to come from productivity. You're not going to get 4 percent, 5 percent, or 6 percent growth entirely from productivity. Mathematically, that doesn't work. You would need to do it like we did in the past with people. But the other side is, while economic growth does reduce the deficit, it also increases Social Security, Medicare and Interest costs. 

Your Social Security payment is tied to your lifetime wages. The faster the economy grows, the more your wages grow, the bigger benefits you get. On Medicare, higher income is associated with higher health care consumption. Also, faster economic growth typically brings higher interest rates. And when you're in debt that much, every point interest rates rise has an enormous effect on deficits. So don't get me wrong, faster economic growth is very good and it can modestly reduce the deficit. But as long as entitlement spending and interest costs rise alongside, you're not going to get a huge deficit reduction.

Gillespie: So why don't we just cut Social Security and Medicare? Social Security was a New Deal program. It was a Depression-era program. Medicare was called the last act of the New Deal by President Lyndon Johnson. Those are programs that were designed for an economy in which you were more likely to be poor if you were an old person, if you were past retirement age. You also didn't live as long. Wouldn't it make sense to say, OK, what needs to be on the table, first and foremost, is this massive growing blob of space?

Riedl: Mathematically, it's going to have to come from Social Security and Medicare. Thirty years from now, Social Security and Medicare are going to be running a deficit of 12 percent of GDP. Just these two programs are going to be running a deficit of 12 percent of GDP if you count the interest costs that they create in the budget. 

You can't raise other taxes and cut other spending enough to close 12 percent of GDP gap. The challenge, of course, is even if everything is on the table, most savings are going to have to go with the actual policy driving it. The problem is the politics. You have Republicans even tripping over themselves to say they won't touch Social Security and Medicare because the voters will kill them, because there is this perception that you're just getting back what you paid into the system, which is absurdly, patently false.

Gillespie: How is that false? Are you getting more back?

Riedl: Social Security benefits are designed to become substantially more generous each generation, even adjusted for inflation. On Medicare, it's even a bigger gap. The typical retiring couple today gets back triple what they paid into Medicare. And that's after you've adjusted in the net present value. So you can't say, "Oh, [it's because of] inflation and interest." No, even adjusted for all that, you get triple. But there is this perception that there's a savings account for me in Washington that is just going to send me back by money. 

The reality is seniors get back more than they paid in. The programs are becoming more generous every generation. And baby boomers today are the richest generation, the richest age group, in the richest country in the world in the richest time in history. As a matter of fact, retiree income over the last couple decades has grown four times faster than the income of workers paying the benefits. So, Social Security and Medicare right now largely redistribute money up the income ladder, not down. Yes, some seniors struggle and you can design reforms. And I've designed reforms that protect struggling seniors. But it's really absurd that seniors making $1 million a year after retirement are still getting generous benefits.

Gillespie: This was also an issue with COVID relief. You had families making up to $400,000 cashing checks from various benefits for COVID. We've completely lost the distinction between even just median income families, much less struggling families, and people who can afford it. 

Riedl: Right. And keep in mind, when we're talking about senior income, seniors making half a million a year or $400,000 a year after they retired, this isn't even wage income. This is interest and Social Security income. These are net worths far into the millions.

Gillespie: But, the youngest boomers are 59, I guess, right? So, they're moving into retirement and they will die. And I think about that on an almost daily basis as a boomer myself. But they're going to give a lot of that money back to people, right? They have so much, they're going to leave it to their kids. Does that affect these calculations?

Riedl: It can, over time. I mean, if you assume a certain degree of inheritance, especially simply housing values. Boomers have so much home equity, and frankly, they're hanging on to the home equity a little too much to make the housing market difficult for their kids. But eventually, when they go, those are going to be inherited by their kids. And those huge 401(k)s are going to be inherited by their kids. That should make it a little easier. I'm Gen X. That should make it easier for Gen X and millennials to get by with less. And I've been telling people for years, if you're a Gen X or a millennial and you're assuming that Social Security is going to be there forever in its current form with no savings, you're just not paying attention. You should save as if Social Security and Medicare are a bonus because the programs will exist, don't get me wrong, but I wouldn't take the little mailing you get from Social Security with your future benefits too literally.

Gillespie: How do we activate Gen X, but especially millennials and Gen Z, to get motivated about this? How do we reach them to start creating that movement for social change on this policy?

Riedl: That is the million dollar question. It's kind of remarkable that we are facing the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in world history. And while young people are often voting on the trendy issues of the day or not voting at all, seniors are going to the polls in record numbers and robbing them blind. And young people are completely oblivious to the fact that seniors are robbing you blind while you're voting on side issues. You have to get their attention. And one thing that I try to point out to younger progressives, and I haven't had a lot of luck, is whatever priorities you have in the future—not having your taxes go up, family leave, child care, health care, climate safety net—you're going to get squeezed. 

There is no way we can pay for any of the priorities you have. If we're giving $116 trillion in extra benefits to senior citizens, the math doesn't work. One thing that a lot of conservatives think about with motivating young people is climate change. Young people are so focused on climate change, even though it's something that's 30 to 40 years off—you don't feel it now, and some years it gets a little better and some years it gets worse—but young people are totally attuned to these long term climate projections and their effect. 

And conservatives are often asking, well, how do we get them to focus on long-term debt projections, which is a danger to them—I don't want to say just as much as climate. I don't want to get into that debate, but it's real. And the costs that are in the system are not theoretical projections. The seniors walk among us and they have the letters saying how much they get. If there's a way we could motivate them the same way they're motivated on climate, that would be a success. But we haven't had much luck.

Gillespie: What about younger conservatives? And to be honest, I don't care about progressives or conservatives. I care more about libertarians, and they seem to be somewhat in sync with these ideas. If you're right of center, and you're not as suspicious of capitalism, or you're not as motivated by climate change, what works to grab people?

Riedl: If I knew, I would have grabbed them by now. I think there is a certain perception, at least among right-of-center young people, that Social Security and Medicare are unsustainable. I don't think you have to really convince them of that. I think you have to get them to care about it though. And when I talk to young people on the right, to be honest, they're a little too focused on Twitter, the culture war, and Trump owning the libs that you can't really get much policy focus. They get it, but they're just not motivated on it yet. And again, if I knew a way to reach them better, I'd love to do it.

Gillespie: How do you reach your own generation of Gen X? It was very popular in the '90s, as I recall, that members of Gen X were more likely to believe in UFOs than that they were going to get collective security or Medicare. Are they still keeping the faith or are they lost in the hurly burly of everyday life?

Riedl: I think Gen X now has it in their DNA to be skeptical that Social Security and Medicare are going to be there for them. When I talk to people in my generation, they're not necessarily motivated to do anything about it, because I think when you talk to Gen Xers, there's bigger things going on in the world that are getting their attention politically. There is Trump, Biden, all the culture war stuff. That's what they're voting on. But they're aware that we're facing problems.

Gillespie: The leading edge of Gen X is really going to be in the pinch point when all of this blows up. 

Riedl: We're going to be the ones hit with the drastic changes when you have to do it. But you mentioned the '90s with Social Security. That was the time to fix it. You know, the reason to fix Social Security in the '90s was not because the program was going to go bankrupt in the '90s. It was always going to go bankrupt around 2030. 

But that was the time to phase in the reforms while people were young. And we missed the window in the '90s and early 2000s to gradually phase in reforms for boomers. And because we didn't, now we're going to have to do the more drastic reforms. And as you mentioned, when there's a ratchet of benefits, we're going to be the ones being ratcheted because we didn't do the reform 20, 30 years ago when we were warned to do it.

Gillespie: Do you think we'll be in a better place fiscally, or in terms of budget, a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now?

Riedl: We're going to be in a worse place just because I think deficits are looking to get much bigger—$2 to $3 trillion deficits. I don't see Congress going in the other direction. Things are going to get worse until either voters wake up or the financial markets cut us off. I'm really hoping it's the first option, that voters wake up, but I'm just not seeing it.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post Brian Riedl: Who Bankrupted Us More—Trump or Biden? appeared first on Reason.com.

Just 15 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. But why is it broken and how do we fix it? Those are just two of the questions that Reason's Nick Gillespie asked Justin Amash, the former five-term congressman from Michigan who is currently exploring a Senate run.

Elected as part of the Tea Party wave in 2010, Amash helped create the House Freedom Caucus but became an increasingly lonely, principled voice for limiting the size, scope, and spending of the federal government. After voting to impeach Donald Trump, he resigned from the GOP, became an independent, and then joined the Libertarian Party in 2020, making him the only Libertarian to serve in Congress.

They talked about the 2024 presidential election and the country's political and cultural polarization that seems to be growing with every passing day. And about how his parents' experiences as a Christian refugee from Palestine and an immigrant from Syria inform his views on foreign policy, entrepreneurship, and American exceptionalism.

This Q&A took place on the final day of LibertyCon, the annual event for Students for Liberty that took place recently in Washington, D.C.

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Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.

Nick Gillespie: Why is Congress broken and how do we fix that?

Justin Amash: We can take up the whole 30 minutes talking about that if we wanted to. We don't know exactly how Congress got to where it is, but today it is highly centralized, where a few people at the top control everything. And that has a lot of negative consequences for our country. Among them is that the president has an unbelievable amount of power because the president now only has to negotiate with really a few people. You have to negotiate with the speaker of the House. You have to negotiate with the Senate majority leader and maybe some of the minority leaders. But it's really a small subset of people that you have to negotiate with. And when that happens, it gives the president so much leverage. 

So when we talk about things like going to war without authorization, as long as the speaker of the House isn't going to hold the president accountable and the Senate majority leader is not going to, the president is just going to do what he wants to do. And when it comes to spending, as long as the president only has to negotiate with a couple of people, the president's going to do whatever the president wants to do. So it's super easy in the system for the president to essentially bully Congress and dictate the outcomes. 

But there's a deeper problem with all of this, which is that representative government is supposed to be a discovery process. You elect people to represent you. You send them to Washington, and then the outcomes are supposed to be discovered by these representatives through discussions and debates, and the introduction of legislation, and amendments. You're supposed to have lots of votes, where the votes freely reflect your will representing the people back home. But instead, in Congress today, a few leaders are deciding what the final product is and then they're not bringing it to the floor until they know they have the votes. So there's no actual discovery process. Nancy Pelosi used to brag about this; she wouldn't bring a bill to the floor unless she knew it was going to pass. Which is the opposite of how Congress should work.

Gillespie: What are some of the ways to decentralize power within Congress? When you were in Congress, you founded the Freedom Caucus, which was supposed to be kind of a redoubt of people who believed in limited government and libertarian and conservative principles and actually even some liberal principles, but decentralizing authority. You got kicked out of the Freedom Caucus, right?

Amash: Well, I resigned from it.

Gillespie: Well, you were asked to leave. The police sirens were coming, and it's like, "Hey, you know what? I'm going to go," right? But even places like that, that were explicitly designed to act as a countervailing force to this unified Congress, how can that happen? What can you do or what can somebody do to make that happen?

Amash: Well, it does take people with strong will. I think that when we go to vote for our elected officials, when you go to vote for a representative, when you go to vote for a senator, you have to know that that person is willing to stand up to the leadership team. And if that person's not willing to break from the leadership team on a consistent basis—and this doesn't mean they have to be mean or anything like that; it just means that they have to be independent enough where you know they're willing to break from their leadership team. If they're not willing to do that, it doesn't matter how much they agree with you on the issues, don't vote for them because that person is going to sell out. There's no chance they're going to stand up for you when it counts. I think you need to have people who have a strong will, who are going to go there and actually represent you and are willing to stand up to the leaders.

Gillespie: If you are interested in Congressman Amash's commentary on contemporary issues, go to his substack Justin Amash. The tagline is: "A former congressman spills on Congress and makes the practical case for the principles of liberty." It's a great read, particularly on issues you mentioned.

Can you tell us how you discovered libertarian ideas? You got elected in 2010, which was a wave election. It was part of the Tea Party reaction to eight years of Bush, and more problems during the financial crisis and the reaction of the government to that. Where did you first encounter the ideas of liberty, and how did that motivate you to get into Congress?

Amash: The ideas of liberty are something that have been with me since I was a child. It's hard to pinpoint exactly where they came from. I think they came from my parents' immigrant experience, coming to the United States. My dad came here as a refugee from Palestine. He was born in Palestine in 1940. And when the state of Israel was created in '48, he became a refugee. My mom is a Syrian immigrant. 

When my parents came here, they weren't wealthy. My dad was a very poor refugee. He was so poor that the Palestinians made fun of him. So that's really poor. When he came here, he didn't have much, but he felt he had an opportunity. He felt he had a chance to start a new life, a chance to make it, even though he came from a different background from a lot of people, even though his English wasn't great compared to a lot of people. So he came here and he worked hard, and he built a business. When we were young, he used to tell us that America is the greatest place on earth, where someone can come here as a refugee like he did and start a new life and have the chance to be successful. It doesn't matter what your background is. It doesn't matter what obstacles you face. You have a chance here and you don't have that chance in so many places around the world. 

I think that's where that spirit of liberty came from. It was from my dad's experience especially, my mom as well, coming here as a young immigrant. So I was always a little bit anti-authoritarian as a child. I rebelled against teachers at times. I didn't like arbitrary authority, let's put it that way. When someone would just make up a rule, like this is the rule, "I just say so." Well, tell me why. 

Gillespie: Have you rethought that as a parent?

Amash: No, I mean, I let my kids think very freely.

Gillespie: As long as they follow the rules.

Amash: I don't mind when they are a little bit rebellious. I think it doesn't hurt for kids to have some independence. I encourage them to challenge their teachers, even when they think the teacher is wrong about something. I think that it's a good thing for people to go out there and not just accept everything as it is.

Gillespie: You famously, as a congressman, explained all of your votes on Facebook, which is a rare concession by authority to say, okay, this is why I did what I did.

Amash: Yeah. Actually, a lot of the people in leadership and in Congress didn't like that I was doing that because I was giving people at home the power to challenge them. Instead of just being told this is the way it is, now I was revealing what was going on.

Gillespie: You grew up in Michigan. You went to the University of Michigan as an undergrad and for law school. Was it there that you started coming across names like Hayek, and Mises, and Friedman, Rand, and Rothbard?

Amash: Not really, no. My background is in economics, my degree is in economics. I did well in economics at Michigan, but we sure didn't study Austrian economics. We didn't study Hayek. I think he might have been mentioned in one class. Very briefly he was mentioned, like there was one day where he was mentioned. But I'd say that what happened is, as I went through my economics degree, and then I got a law degree at Michigan as well, I started to realize that I had a lot of differences from other people who were otherwise aligned with me. I was a Republican. I aligned with them on a lot of things, but there were a number of issues where we didn't align— some of the foreign policy issues, but certainly a lot of civil liberties issues. 

I started to wonder, what am I? What's going on here? I just thought of myself as a Republican, and I would read the platform and hear what they're saying. They believe in limited government, economic freedom, and individual liberty. 

But when push came to shove on a lot of issues, they didn't believe those things. They'd say they believe those things, but they didn't. I've told this story before, I just typed some of my views into a Google search, and up popped Hayek's Wikipedia page. Literally, it was like the top thing on Google. So I clicked on that, started reading about them, and I was already in my mid-20s at this time. And I was like, yes, this is what I believe.

Gillespie: It is interesting because you would have been coming of age during a time when the Republicans were ascendant. But they were the war party. And we were told after 9/11 that you should not speak freely. That was kind of a problem, right?

Amash: Yeah, sure. Throughout my life, I believed in freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression. These are critical values. Maybe they're the essence of everything that makes this country work. The idea that we come from a lot of places—there's an incredible amount of diversity in the United States. I think diversity is always treated or often treated like a bad word these days. But it's a blessing to our country that we have people who come from so many backgrounds. Actually, the principle of liberty is about utilizing that diversity.

It's in centrally planned systems where diversity is not utilized, where someone at the top dictates to everyone else and doesn't take advantage of any of the diversity. They say no, a few of us at the top, we know everything. It doesn't matter. All of your backgrounds, all of your skills, all of your talents, that doesn't matter. What matters is we've got a few people in a room somewhere, and they're going to decide everything. And they know best because they're experts.

Gillespie: You came into office in 2011, and it seemed like there was a real libertarian insurgency within the Republican Party. But more nationally in discourse, people were tired of continued centralization, and government secrecy—famously, a lot of Bush's activities and particularly war spending early on was done in supplemental and emergency preparations, not really open to full discussions.

All of the stuff coming out of the Patriot Act, somebody like Dick Cheney kind of saying we're in control. But then Obama also promised the most transparent administration ever and plainly did not deliver on that. 

That energy pushing back on centralization and government power and government secrecy that helped bring you and other people like you to Congress seems to have dissipated. Do you agree with that? And if so, what took that away?

Amash: Yeah, I agree with that. When I was running for office, both for State House in 2009 and when I got to Congress in 2011, there was a lot of energy behind a limited government, libertarian-ish republicanism. I felt like libertarianism was really rising. There was a chance for libertarian ideals to get a lot of traction. A lot of people who used to be more like Bush conservatives were coming around to the libertarian way. 

I felt really good about where things were heading. And for the first, I'd say three or four years that I was in Congress, I felt like we continued to move in the right direction. The creation of the Freedom Caucus was kind of a dream of bringing people together to challenge the leadership. They weren't all libertarians or anything like that. There are a few who are libertarian-leaning, but the idea that a group of Republican members—it wasn't determined that it was going to be only Republicans, but it ended up being Republicans—got together and said, "Hey, we're going to challenge the status quo. We're going to challenge the establishment." That was kind of a dream that had come together. 

Then when Donald Trump came on the scene, I think a lot of that just fell apart because he's such a strong personality and character, and had so much hold over a lot of the public, especially on the Republican side, that it was very hard for my colleagues to be able to challenge him. 

Gillespie: What's the essential appeal of Trump? Is it his personality? Is that that he said he could win and he ended up doing that at least once? Is it a cult of personality? What's the core of his appeal to you?

Amash: I think he is definitely a unique character. He has a certain charisma that is probably unmatched in politics. I don't think I've ever seen someone who campaigns as effectively as he does. It doesn't mean you have to agree with all of the ethics of what he does or any of that, or the substance. 

Gillespie: To keep it in Michigan, he's a rock star. He's Iggy Pop. You may not like what he's doing on the stage, but you can't take your eyes off it.

Amash: That's right. He holds court. When he's out there, people pay attention. He really understands the essence of campaigning, and how to win a campaign. He understands how to effectively go after opponents. Now, again, I'm not saying that all of these things are necessarily ethical or that other people should do the same things, but he really understands how to lead a populist movement. 

Gillespie: How important do you think in his appeal is a politics of resentment, that somehow he is going to get back what was taken from you?

Amash: The whole Make America Great Again, there's a whole idea there of "someone is destroying your life, and I'm going to get it back for you." That's a very powerful thing to a lot of people. For a lot of people out there, it is more important to get back at others than necessarily to have some kind of vision of how this is all going to work going forward. It's not appealing to me because I understand, we live in one country. We have people of all sorts of backgrounds. And if you're going to persuade people, you have to be able to live with them and work with them, regardless of your differences. It doesn't mean that you can't be upset, be angry about what some other people are doing or saying. But there has to be an effort to live together here as one country. We have too much in common in this country.

Gillespie: Michigan was a massive swing state when he won the election. You voted to impeach Donald Trump. What went into that calculation? What was the reaction like to that? That's a profile in courage.

Amash: Well, I don't think that's my most courageous vote, not even by a long shot. 

Gillespie: What was? Naming the post office after your father?

Amash: I didn't name any post offices after my father, to be clear. I think that the courageous votes are the ones where everyone is against you. And I don't mean just one party. It's one thing to vote for impeachment and half the country loves what you did and half the country doesn't like what you did. That's, in my mind, not that challenging or difficult. It's when you take a vote and you know that 99 percent of the public is going to misconstrue this, misunderstand it, be against it. The vote is going to be something like 433 to 1 in the House or something like that. Those are the tough votes. And there are plenty of those votes out there, where you're taking a principled stand and you're doing it to protect people's rights. But it's not the typical narrative. 

Gillespie: Is there an example that, in your legislative record, you would put forth for that?

Amash: One of the ones I've talked about before is, they tried to pass some anti-lynching legislation at the federal level and everyone's against lynching, obviously, but the legislation itself was bad and would actually harm a lot of people, including harming a lot of black Americans. There was this idea that this legislation was good and parroted by a lot of people in the media. They didn't read the legislation. In fact, I complained about it and it mysteriously did not pass both houses of Congress after I pointed out all the problems with it. It did pass the House of Representatives. Did not pass both Houses and get signed by the president. Mysteriously, the next Congress, they reintroduced it and rewrote it in a way that took into consideration all of my complaints, and they tried to pass it off like they were just reintroducing the same legislation. I pointed out: They actually saw that there was a problem here and then tried to pretend like, "Oh, we're just passing it again." Those kinds of votes are tough because when you take the vote, everyone thinks you're wrong. Everyone. And you have to go home and you have to explain it. Those are the ones that are tricky. 

Back to the impeachment point. Look, I'd impeach every president. Let's be clear. I'm not the kind of person who's going to introduce impeachment legislation over every little thing that a president does wrong. When you introduce legislation to impeach a president, you have to have some backing for it. It can't just be one person saying, let's impeach. 

For example, I would definitely impeach President Biden over these unconstitutional wars 100 percent. But the idea of introducing impeachment legislation suggests there's other people who will join you. Otherwise, it's just an exercise in futility. You introduce it. It doesn't go anywhere. It just sits there. If we're going to impeach people, there has to be some public backing, which is why I try to make the case all the time for these impeachable offenses, why some legislation should be brought forth. But you've got to get the public behind you on that kind of stuff. I think that every president should be impeached, every recent president at least. 

Gillespie: If Trump's populism, national conservatism, and politics of resentment are sucking up a lot of energy on the right, how do we deal with the rise of identity politics and a kind of woke progressivism on the left? Where is that coming from? And what is the best way to combat that?

Amash: I think a lot of it is just repackaged socialist ideas, collectivist ideas. The idea of equity, for example, is really like a perversion of the idea of equality. In most respects, when people say equity, they mean the opposite of equality. It means you're going to have the government or some central authority decide what the outcomes should be, how much each person should have, rather than some system of equality before the law, where the government is not some kind of arbiter of who deserves what. When you think about it, there is no way for the government to do this. There's no way for the government to properly assess all of our lives. This is in many ways the point of diversity: we're all so different. There's no way that a central authority can decide how to manage all that. 

For many of the people on the woke left who say they care about diversity, they don't care about diversity if they're talking about equity. These things are in conflict with each other. The idea that you're going to decide that someone is more deserving than another based on some superficial characteristics. As an example—I've talked about this and I've talked about this earlier in this conversation—my dad came here with nothing as a poor refugee. Yet, in a lot of cases, he might be classified as just a white American. Even though he came here as an extremely poor Palestinian refugee. The New York Times, for example, classifies me as white. They might classify someone else who's Middle Eastern as a person of color.

I think a lot of this is just, someone is making decisions at the top saying, "Well, we think this person is more like this or that, and we're going to decide they're more deserving." But they don't know our backgrounds. They don't know anything about us. They don't know who deserves this or who deserves that. No central authority could figure that out. The best thing we can do is have a system of equality before the law, where the law treats everyone the same. It doesn't give an advantage to any person over another person. It may not be fair in some sense to some people. Some people might say, "well, that's not fair." 

Some people, instead of having a dad who's a Palestinian refugee, their dad was some Silicon Valley billionaire. Some person might have a dad who was a professor. Another person might have a dad who worked at a fast-food restaurant. You don't know what the differences are. The government can't figure all of this out and say who is more deserving than someone else. So I really think that the woke left, when they pushed this idea of equity, they're really pushing against diversity. They're saying, a few people at the top are gonna decide who's valuable and who's not valuable, and they're not going to actually take into consideration any of our differences, because no central authority could take it into consideration.

Gillespie: You are a libertarian, not an anarchist. You believe there is a role for government, but it should be obviously much more limited. You are also an Orthodox Christian. Could you talk a little bit about how in a world of limited government, a libertarian world, the government wouldn't be doing everything for everybody, but placing organizations and institutions like the church or other types of intervening, countervailing, mediating institutions would help to fill the gaps that are left by the government?

Amash: The place for these organizations is to help society, not to have government deciding it. When you have some central authority deciding it, you are really limiting the opportunities for the public. You're limiting the opportunities for assisting people. You're deciding that a few people are going to make all the decisions, rather than having a lot of organizations and a lot of individuals making decisions. 

When you centralize it all, there are a lot of people who are going to be missed, a lot of people who are going to be ignored. When you let the marketplace work this out, when you let private organizations work this out, there is a lot more opportunity for people who need help to get help. I think that's really important.

Gillespie: There was a libertarian wave—I like to call it a libertarian moment—which I think we're still living in, but we don't understand, rhetoric aside. What are the best ways to get libertarian ideas and sensibilities in front of young people, to really energize Gen Z? The world is getting young again. How do we make sure that these people are hearing and understanding and maybe being persuaded by libertarian ideas?

Amash: For one thing, we have to meet them where they are. I spend a lot of time, for example, asking my kids, which social media kids use these days? They're in a lot of places that the adults aren't. We might be on Facebook—I mean, my generation, your generation. Other people are on X or Twitter. And there are other people on TikTok. 

You have to meet them where they are and if they're not on X and—it's still weird to call it X—if they're not on X and you are, well, they're not hearing your message. That's an issue. That's something we all have to work on. I'm probably reaching primarily Gen X and millennial people on X, and I'm probably not reaching Gen Z people as well. I think we need to work on getting them in those places.

Also, I think people who have libertarian instincts, people who want to present libertarianism and have an opportunity, go speak to students at schools. I used to do this as a member of Congress. I used that opportunity as much as I could. When schools would invite me, I'd say, "Yes, I'd be happy to come to the school to speak to the students" and take all their questions and be open about being a libertarian. Tell them frankly that your philosophy is libertarianism and talk to them about it. I think it's great. A lot of teachers end up surprised. I've had many teachers walk up to me and whisper to me, "I think I'm a libertarian, too," after having the conversation because they have stereotypes about what it might mean to be a libertarian and you have the opportunity to change their mind.

Gillespie: I have seen a lot of chatter. I have actually helped publish a lot of chatter that you may be running for the U.S. Senate from the mediocre state of Michigan. Do you have an announcement that you would like to make?

Amash: As a part of the national championship-winning state of Michigan this year, I am exploring a run for Senate. The [Federal Election Commission] FEC requires me to state that I am not a candidate for Senate, but I am exploring a run for Senate. 

If you're interested in checking it out, go to https://exploratory.justinamash.com/. I'm giving it serious thought. I think that there is an opportunity for libertarians this year, and there's an opportunity to win a Republican Senate seat this year. So I'm looking at the Republican primary. I think this is probably the best shot libertarians have had in a long time in the state of Michigan.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Photo Credits: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; BONNIE CASH/UPI/Newscom

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In January, the Senate Judiciary Committee dragged the heads of Meta, TikTok, and X, formally known as Twitter, to Washington to charge them with exploiting children by allegedly addicting them to social media that sexually harms them, drives them to eating disorders, and even kills them. The Spanish Inquisition vibe of the proceedings reached a crescendo when Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) demanded that Mark Zuckerberg apologize to the families of children for the "harms" supposedly caused by Facebook and pay compensation out of his personal fortune.

But is social media really that bad for kids? And is the solution being pushed by Democrats and Republicans alike—universal age verification for all users of the internet—even technically feasible without shredding the First Amendment, destroying privacy, and creating major security issues? The answer is a resounding no, according to Shoshana Weissmann, director of digital media at R Street, a free market think tank, and author of "The Fundamental Problems with Social Media Age-Verification Legislation." Reason's Nick Gillespie interviewed Weissmann in Washington, D.C., in early February.

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The post Shoshana Weissmann: Online Age Verification Rules Are Unconstitutional and Ineffective appeared first on Reason.com.

Reason's Nick Gillespie interviews Rachel Nuwer, author of I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World. The book is a history of the drug known as molly and ecstasy that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently evaluating as an aid in fighting PTSD.

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• The Reason Speakeasy.  The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. Go here for an online archive and go here to sign up for information about upcoming events.

Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.

Nick Gillespie: Why did you write I Feel Love? 

Rachel Nuwer: There are really two answers to that. The first is a sort of common good answer, which is, there wasn't a book about MDMA. It's this huge cultural phenomenon. We're probably going to see it—well, hopefully see it—approved by the [Food and Drug Administration] for PTSD treatment within the next year. Yet, there wasn't a resource that brought all the information about this complex, nuanced drug together in one place. People needed to have that touchstone. There are just so many misconceptions about MDMA that I wanted to dispel those, not just for readers but also for myself. 

The other part of that answer is a more personal one. It was the height of the pandemic. Like many people, I was kind of having a crisis. What am I doing with my life? Am I going in the right direction? And for me, that was really manifesting in worries over my career. I'd spent about a decade reporting about illegal wildlife trade, which is not a cheery topic. We're talking slaughtered rhinos and elephants. And there just weren't many hopeful stories there. And I really realized that I was looking for a change of pace, for a new intellectual and personal challenge, and MDMA turned out to be the answer. 

Gillespie: And that helps explain the subtitle of the book, right? Which is? 

Nuwer: "MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World." 

Gillespie: So this is like your pandemic baby?

Nuwer: This is exactly that. It's kept me very occupied in the pandemic. And my last book, I went to 12 countries to report it, but this one I could very easily do from the phone, right here in the good ol' U.S.A.—and a quick hop over the pond to the U.K. 

Gillespie: We talk about the psychedelic renaissance at Reason and obviously other people do, but that might be one thing the pandemic really helped because you couldn't travel out. So travel in. 

Nuwer: Exactly, yeah. And I say this in the beginning of the book, so it's not a surprise. But the idea for the book came to me while I was on MDMA, but not in a club, which is my preferred environment for this. I was just sitting on my couch at home at 7 p.m. on a Friday night. 

Gillespie: Before we get into the conversation about the history of MDMA, I'm struck by you saying, "This came to me while I was on MDMA." As a broad cultural background, how old are you? 

Nuwer: I am—let's see, what am I now? 38. Keeps changing. 

Gillespie: Have you always felt comfortable saying, "I use drugs that are technically or still openly illegal." Have you always felt comfortable doing that? Or is there a shift going on in our society? 

Nuwer: I was definitely not always the person who was like, "I use drugs. I like drugs." I was a D.A.R.E. kid from the '80s. 

I completely swallowed that message. I internalized it. If I heard of friends doing drugs, whether it was weed or ecstasy, I looked down on them. I judged them. I thought people who do drugs are looking for an escape, or they're burnouts, or they're going to frazzle their brains. Wasn't for me. That began to change in college. I had a friend who introduced me to mushrooms, but I didn't really know anything about them. It didn't have the stigma attached to it like ecstasy did. So I was like, "Sure, I'll try a new thing." I love new experiences. And that was great. I really enjoyed it, but it didn't open my eyes to MDMA at all. I still had this negative connotation. 

Gillespie: Is it because MDMA is engineered? MDMA is a pharmaceutical of some sort. It's a pill. It's not a naturally occurring thing. 

Nuwer: I think for a lot of people that is absolutely the case. For me, I had a personal negative connotation. In my freshman year of college, a friend's brother committed suicide. And this is in my small town in Mississippi, and everyone blamed his use of ecstasy. They specifically said, "Chris, he was taking all this ecstasy. It made him so depressed, and he killed himself." So instead of looking at the underlying drivers of what led him to make that decision, everyone just pointed out the drug. My D.A.R.E. kid self said, "It must be this awful ecstasy thing. I'm never going to touch that." 

Gillespie: Let's talk about the rediscovery of MDMA in the late '60s, early '70s. Lay out the history of MDMA. And for the people out there—you might know it as molly or ecstasy. But what is MDMA, and where did it come from? 

Nuwer: That's a great disclaimer for everyone out there. Molly and ecstasy are the same thing. And they refer to what is supposed to be MDMA. Whether your street–bought molly or ecstasy is MDMA is another question. But they refer to the same thing. It's just a branding tactic. So, the history part of the book, surprisingly, was one of my favorite parts to write. My mom's a historian, but I'm not a history person myself, and I just really got into it cause there were so many unexpected twists and turns. 

So, first of all, MDMA is a lot older than most people think. It was first patented, let's say, on Christmas Eve 1912 by the German pharmaceutical company Merck—a respected group. And they weren't looking for something to change people's brains. They were looking for a blood clotting agent, and MDMA was just a chemical intermediary on the steps they needed to get there.

Whether or not anyone at Merck actually tried it, we don't know. They've been really cagey about letting people into their archives. It seems like maybe they did. There are little hints here and there of chemists being like, "Hey, this is pretty interesting. Let's take a closer look." Fast forward to the 1950s. MDMA pops up in the U.S. for the first time. This is during the U.S. government's search for a chemical truth serum. So, let's figure out how we can control the minds of our enemies by conducting experiments on U.S. citizens to see how this goes. 

Gillespie: So this is part of MKUltra, and it's the epiphenomenon of that?

Nuwer: It wasn't MKUltra itself, but yeah, it was the army's version of the CIA trials. Again, we don't have the sort of smoking gun evidence that MDMA was ever given to anyone under this experiment. But there's a lot of circumstantial evidence. People who have had more time than I have to pursue the Freedom of Information Act process have gotten really close to revealing that, indeed, the U.S. Army did do this. 

A student named Nicholas Dunham—I think he's gotten his Ph.D. now, so, Dr. Nicholas Dunham—tracked down a document that pointed to Tulane University in New Orleans as having contracted with the army, and MDMA was on their list of drugs. But when Nick asked for the specific document from the U.S. government that would show whether or not it was actually given to anyone, they said, "Oh, we lost it".

So MDMA pops up again in police records of seizures in around 1970–1971, which probably just points to the fact that the Controlled Substances Act had just come out and had criminalized MDA—which is a closely related molecule—and entrepreneurial chemists were probably just looking for a way to get around the law by sticking an extra methyl group. Poof:  MDMA. So, the police even thought that they were seizing MDA. But we don't know anything about those chemists. We don't know who their customers were. We don't know who was using it for what. What we do know is that MDMA comes up again in 1975 when a Ph.D. student at Berkeley named Carl Resnikoff got with his mentor there, a guy named Alexander Shulgin. Everyone calls him Sasha, a famous psychedelic chemist. And they were working on a summer project together. 

Gillespie: And Shulgin is kind of the Thomas Edison of psychedelics. 

Nuwer: That's the correct way of putting it. Incredible chemist. Invented, like, 20 molecules. He would test them on himself and his wife if they were interesting and share them with friends. Young Carl was really enamored with Shulgin and his work, because Carl had tried LSD when he was in eighth grade. He was all about it. And Shulgin said, "OK, you need to do a summer project. What do you want to do?" And Carl was a big fan of MDA—as we were talking about earlier—and thought, "OK, methamphetamine is more euphoric than plain amphetamine. The difference is this methyl group. Why don't I just stick the same methyl group onto MDA and see what happens?" It's pretty logical and Shulgin's like, "That's a great idea. Let's do it." So they hole up in the summer of 1975 at U.C. Berkeley and synthesized MDMA together, and Shulgin took most of it home. But he gave Carl a little baggie, measured out just perfectly. I think it was like 125 mg. Two doses. And Carl and his girlfriend Judith wound up taking it on a beautiful September day on a boat ride across the San Francisco Bay to Sausalito. 

Gillespie: Sometimes MDMA is that drug you do by yourself or with a loved one or somebody you want to connect with. And when I say intimate, not necessarily sexual, but like a deep bond. And then, it becomes the ultimate rave. Well, actually, club drug first. And then rave drug. How does it start shifting out from that? 

Nuwer: Well, back up just a step before that. So Shulgin did try MDMA after Carl reported back with very positive experiences in '76, and he realized this molecule's potential for therapy. He introduced it to a therapist friend of his who became sort of this—I guess people say the Johnny Appleseed of MDMA in the therapeutic community. So, it quietly started spreading among first Bay Area therapists and then broader around the U.S. and even internationally. But people were keeping really quiet about it, because a lot of these therapists had either worked with LSD in the preceding decades or knew exactly what had happened with LSD being criminalized. So, they knew that if word got out about this new psychoactive drug, it would absolutely be criminalized, just like LSD. And they didn't want that to happen because they were seeing such powerful results. 

Gillespie: How did they use it in a therapeutic context? 

Nuwer: There are some early studies from [George Greer and his wife Requa Tolbert] out of New Mexico. And at first, it's kind of funny, they were following the LSD model, but they were kind of just experimenting themselves with what worked and what didn't work. And, in those original trials, they would actually take MDMA with their clients, but they realized, "OK, we need to not be high on MDMA because we need to focus on you and not make this about us." So that stopped. But they would—kind of like the trials today—bring people to their house, give them a low or whatever dose they thought would be appropriate, and just let them work through whatever issue they were trying to work through. 

Gillespie The idea is that it opens people up. It allows them to be in touch with their feelings and feel connected.

Nuwer: Exactly. Shulgin used the word "window." So it opens this window on yourself where you can find answers to questions you're asking your own self or partners, without fear, without anxiety, without the typical neuroses or clutter of our brain that gets in the way. 

So yeah, people used it for all kinds of things, from couples counseling to just "I'm having this trouble at work. I want to work through that" to "I want to know myself deeper" to more serious things like trauma. So that was all going on through the '70s. But, as you said earlier, MDMA did make this jump from the therapist's couch to the dance floor. And, the Greers said to me at one point of the interview that it was inevitable that this was going to happen. It's a drug that makes you feel good. People want to take drugs that make you feel good. And there was a lot of tension between the recreational and the therapeutic community, just as there was with LSD years before. 

Gillespie: We should point out that LSD, particularly during the '50s and early '60s to some degree, was being used widely by therapists, just to help treat things like alcoholism. Yesterday—while we're taping this—was Cary Grant's birthday. And Cary Grant is probably the best-known kind of celebrity who took LSD and publicly extolled its virtues, saying it made him feel alive again, etc. So MDMA is kind of an echo of that. 

Nuwer: Exactly. It was really the LSD therapists that paved the way for MDMA to then just slot right into this empty pool that had been left by LSD being criminalized. And the thing is, at this time, MDMA is completely legal. The government isn't aware of it. So the therapeutic community, many of them wanted to keep it a secret, only a thing that friends tell friends. You can't, like, just spread it around a club. But there's also a different contingent of people who wanted to just release it on the world and also make a nice profit in doing so. 

So the sort of figurehead of the recreational scene at this time was a guy named Michael Clegg. He ran a group that came to be known as the Texas Group because a lot of them were operating out of Dallas. And Michael Clegg just wanted to churn out as much MDMA as possible, as quickly as possible, making a lot of money. But he wasn't the typical drug lord that you think of, like, "I'm just going to get everyone hooked and make money." He had these ideas of himself as enlightened, wanting to serve a bigger purpose in the world and wanting to help people be saved, whatever that means to them. So that was Michael Clegg. He really spread MDMA across Texas, California, and the United States. And that is what attracted the attention of the U.S. government. 

Gillespie: Right. So then what happened? 

Nuwer: Well, the [Drug Enforcement Administration] moved to schedule MDMA. In the summer of '85—which is when I was born, coincidentally—MDMA was put on the emergency Schedule I list, and that meant that it was illegal. Well, the DEA, what they did not see coming—they thought this would just be a normal scheduling—is that there were all these therapists, professors at Harvard, who believed in MDMA and thought it was worthy of study and worthy of use. So this group of therapists, including Sasha Shulgin, put together a case to bring the DEA to court and say, "Hey, this is a drug with medical purpose, so it can't be Schedule I because Schedule I is defined as no medical purpose. It should be Schedule III. Allow us to work with it, allow us to study it, control it, but, you know, come on." And the really fascinating thing is they actually won that trial. The administrative law judge sided with them and said, "Yeah, you guys have shown that MDMA does indeed have value as a medicinal tool. It's being used by therapists. It should be Schedule III." But because of whatever bureaucracy—I don't understand the federal system—MDMA was put on Schedule I because that judge's determination was only a suggestion. So the DEA just did what they wanted to do the whole time. 

Gillespie: I am old enough to have taken MDMA before it was illegal and after. I have a strong memory of it being—in the early '80s, before it was illegal—more of a reflective, introspective drug. 

Post-prohibition, the biggest thing that was a problem about it was that it made you dangerously social, where you would go out and dance all night and kill yourself. Like you couldn't stop, you were part of a hive mind, which is just kind of bizarre. 

So, talk about MAPS—the nonprofit that's been working since the '80s to bring MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. How did they get involved and what role did they play in this world where MDMA has been banned? 

Nuwer: So I'll say that we would not be where we are today in terms of MDMA-assisted therapy being on the cusp of potential federal approval if it were not for MAPS—the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. MAPS was founded in 1986 by a guy named Rick Doblin. Rick was this kid who grew up outside Chicago, raised on stories around the family dinner table of the Holocaust. So Rick was this kid who was afraid that at any moment, all the people around him could just break out in like a maniacal genocide mode. And Rick really made it his mission in life—he's a strange kid, apparently—to find a solution for that. Just a strange guy, a very interesting and unique character. Rick wound up at New College in Florida, where he was introduced to drugs, and he thought that doing mind-melting doses of LSD was the way to enlightenment. He did not find the answers that route. But through those connections, he found his way to MDMA. And at first he thought it was like, "How profound could this drug be if you can still talk on it?" But he quickly realized for himself the utility of just being able to communicate with people in the open way we were talking about earlier, and he thought, "Huh, maybe this drug is the answer for getting people to set aside their differences and seeing that we're all just human. We all want love. We all want the same thing. We have more in common than we have different." Rick got involved in that DEA trial. He was one of the three younger people that was sort of spearheading the organizational effort: getting the money, getting a lawyer, and getting everyone to write letters. 

After the trial, everyone gave up. Most people stopped using MDMA in their practice because they didn't want to lose their license. Rick was the one person who did not give up, and everybody thought, "You're an idiot. You're wasting your time. You're wasting your money. It's just a matter of time until you too see the writing on the wall. This is not coming back." But Rick just is very hardheaded, I guess, like the most tenacious person ever. And there was something that Rick actually learned at the trial. He was talking with one of the DEA agents who was representing the government and this guy, Frank Sapienza, told Rick, "Look, kid, there might be something to this MDMA thing, but you are never going to get anywhere with it unless you go through the federal route. You need to get approval. You need to do FDA trials, clinical trials, that's the way you have got to do it." And Rick really took that to heart. So he founded MAPS to see that through. And, you know, it's taken like 38-plus years

Gillespie: Where are they now for FDA approval of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy?

Nuwer: So, clinical trials have to have three phases. Phase one is just to show like, OK, this isn't going to kill like a bunch of rats and people. Phase two is more about efficacy and safety. And then phase three is the more rigorous, like, OK, does this work and is it safe? They have just completed the end of the phase three section. And again, this has taken literally 20-plus years. Rick was doing this all on fundraising, and it costs millions literally to do clinical trials. And also just jumping through all the paperwork and permission hoops of the government. 

So the last phase three trial is done, and MAPS' Public Benefit Corporation, which has now become a pharmaceutical company, just submitted an application to the FDA at the end of December asking for a new drug approval for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. So the FDA has a certain amount of time to respond. But long story short, hopefully there'll be some sort of answer by mid-2024. That's the year we are in now. 

Gillespie: Parallel to MAPS trying to get MDMA in certain circumstances approved—what happened in the '80s and '90s and the aughts with MDMA? Timothy Leary once famously talked about how LSD escaped the CIA labs and went into the mainstream. MDMA certainly escaped any kind of lockdown on it. What was going on there?

Nuwer: A lot was going on. So in the late '80s, MDMA made its way to the U.K., which basically created raves because people wanted to keep partying after clubs closed, and hence raves. And raves in turn led to the multibillion-dollar electronic dance music industry that we have today. MDMA through that rave pathway became a global phenomenon. So like tons of people doing MDMA, mostly youngsters [at] warehouses, clubs, potentially dangerous environments. And we started to see our first MDMA deaths. Nothing like the number of alcohol deaths we see or [deaths we see from] other drugs, but a few deaths that would be overly covered in the news.

Gillespie: And this is from people taking too much and having cardiac events or dehydrating and kind of dancing themselves to death. 

Nuwer: I mean, hyperthermia was the main one. Overheating. So MDMA became this hysterical news story. "Ecstasy is killing our children." It was seen as this threat to sort of puritanical American and likewise British values. So there were tons of just really severe laws that came down banning it.

Gillespie: Joe Biden was involved in the Rave Act.

Nuwer: Oh, yeah. Trying to criminalize pacifiers and glow sticks as drug paraphernalia, for example. But what that did is it really tarnished MDMA's reputation. Almost in the same way as LSD's reputation was tarnished by being attached to the counterculture. It was like a political strategy to try to take this drug down. And, at the same time, the U.S. government especially was pumping money into studies to prove that MDMA was neurotoxic, that it impacted the brain in a detrimental way. Millions of dollars of federal funding went into labs literally trying to prove this. And in the end, they didn't approve it because MDMA really isn't neurotoxic. It, of course, can be dangerous if you take too much. But, the lasting effect of that, from the late '80s and through the '90s and even early aughts, was that MDMA's reputation was really tainted. Any public understanding or awareness of its therapeutic value was completely paved over by this negative connotation. And it's that kind of connotation that I grew up with in the '80s. 

Gillespie: It's kind of flipped, right? Because there was that story, but then people were like, you know what? I feel really good on this or I've had good experiences. When did things seem to start tipping away?

Nuwer: Yeah, I absolutely agree. Well, I can tell you my personal experience of when I flipped. So I wrote this book proposal during the pandemic, like I told you, and my agent sent it out to a bunch of editors, and we got all no's. People were saying Michael Pollan already wrote this book, because they just don't understand the difference between a mushroom and MDMA or whatever. Other people were saying this book looks too positive about ecstasy. Why isn't this about the negative effects of ecstasy? And others were saying there's just not enough there to say anything about ecstasy; this isn't a book project. Then the first MAPS phase three study came out. I wrote about it for The New York Times. Suddenly, the conversation just shifted in this really significant way. I started getting interest in the book proposal. I really think that that trial kind of legitimized MDMA and put it out there in the broader public understanding in a way that wasn't present before.

Gillespie: What are the benefits of the MAPS approach, of going through FDA approval and showing that this is a medicine?

Nuwer: I have heard people who are more part of the underground scene, and they're afraid that, oh, this is going to make MDMA less cool if it's suddenly this medicine or, oh, we're sterilizing the industry. I'm just remembering a comment from Ben Sessa, who is a psychiatrist in the U.K. and also works with MDMA and other drugs like this. He's like, "You know, I can put on my white coat and then I can go to a rave, you know, whatever. It doesn't make MDMA less cool, but this is what we have to do to legitimize it, to eventually move toward hopefully legality, not just for therapeutic uses but also for recreational uses or whatever people want to do." And that's going to make these things safer in the end, because then we're going to know where we're getting our drugs. We're going to know how to take them. We're going to have education about how to use them properly. 

Gillespie: This is almost always the case with what the government calls illicit drugs—not even illegal, they're immoral—not knowing what's in them, which is hard to do in black markets because dealers don't spend a lot of time putting labels on stuff.  What's the role of the rave culture in kind of popularizing ecstasy?

Nuwer: I think hearing your friends or people you trust say, "Hey, I tried this thing and not only was it the most fun night I've ever had, it also was a profoundly beautiful experience." That's actually how I found my way to this drug. My now husband was a '90s raver kid in Colorado going out to warehouses. And when I met him, I still had these negative connotations about ecstasy. And then hearing his stories—and he was by no means trying to push me into this, he was done with MDMA—I was finally just like, I want to try this too. It sounds really fun. And I think that we really look over or we don't give the rave scene its due credit. Millions and millions of people around the world have tried MDMA. Millions of them have had profound, beautiful, wonderful experiences on it. Yet there's very little rigorous attention paid to them by the scientific community. There's just no funding or interest to study them. Because the government is providing them most of the funding. And people aren't dying en masse like they are with meth or some other drug. So I think there's just so many interesting questions to be mined there and stories to be heard. 

Gillespie: And then you have kind of underground movements that come above ground. Burning Man is not certainly exclusively about MDMA, but that's part of the culture and the rave element of that or the Electric Daisy Carnival.

Nuwer: Definitely. I mean, I think it really serves the purpose of these gatherings in the past that we could rely on from religion or mystical gatherings or whatever that we're really missing today. And people are seeking that out. I know that's why I like to go to raves. In terms of what it's actually doing, I mean, massive dumps of serotonin. It not only blocks your receptors in your brain from taking up serotonin, which is the sort of jack-of-all-trades neurotransmitter, it does all kinds of things. But, your neurons actually dump out their stores of serotonin. Something like 80 percent of your serotonin floods your brain on a night of MDMA, or a day. Oxytocin gets triggered as well. So there's just this whole chemical formula that's going on in your brain to produce that feeling. 

Gillespie: How do you think MDMA specifically fits into the larger kind of resurgence of psychedelics?

Nuwer: Well, I do think that MDMA is paving the way through this potential FDA approval. I think all things look good for MDMA to be the first psychedelic over that finish line. So that is absolutely major. You know, returning to that stigma and that taint we talked about in the '90s and 2000s, I think that was a really big obstacle to overcome, in a way that mushrooms didn't have to overcome because they just didn't have that same negative connotation that MDMA or LSD had. I mean, you never hear anything about LSD. Hardly at all. MDMA I hear less about than I hear mushrooms. I was reading U.C. Berkeley's newsletter today, The Microdose. It's like, oh, Indiana's moving to invest dollars in psilocybin research on PTSD and this and that. But the states aren't as eager to do MDMA—I think it is the connotations, the stigma from earlier decades. And also referring back to that synthetic issue that you mentioned, for some reason people are more comfortable with a natural substance than one that was made.

Gillespie: Legalizing nature, there are a lot of movements to just save plant-based entheogens or certain types of psychedelics. Maybe it's that they're harder to regulate because they could grow anywhere. I think it's an artificial distinction between nature and artifice.

Nuwer: Yeah, I 100 percent agree with that. But, at the same time, I think MDMA is just such a useful and powerful tool for therapy just because it's such an easier medicine to work with. 

Gillespie: Why does there seem to be so much interest in this? I mean, it's definitely changing. The laws seem to be changing, and there's a cultural moment where a lot of serious people are talking about this. 

Nuwer: I think it's a complex mix. So I think people are just fed up with the war on drugs. They're beginning to realize just how idiotic it was, that there's no way to win this war, just what a waste of money and lives and environment, the list goes on. 

I think people also have come to realize that the quick chemical fix that we were hoping would come through psychiatric drugs isn't working. There are more and more people suffering from things like depression, anxiety, trauma. So we're looking for other answers. And then a little bit more cynically, I think people like the idea of this magic wand cure-all. And they're just like, "Psychedelics are going to rid me of all my problems."

Gillespie: They're going to do what Prozac failed to do.

Nuwer: Exactly. And people want to believe in these magic cures. And it's not going to be that for most people. 

Gillespie: A parallel with MAPS, they're a bit behind, but Compass Pathways, a pharmaceutical company, is pushing psilocybin trials for depression and anxiety with the FDA. Is that a good sign or a bad sign that the big pharmaceutical companies are kind of starting to circle around this?

Nuwer: I think, unfortunately, it was just inevitable. It's great that they're pushing trials through to get these medications to people. The monetization of it isn't great, but this is the system we live in. And I don't think that psychedelics were ever going to be able to reform the system.

Rick Doblin was hoping that he could get MDMA over the finish line with charity alone. And I mean, incredibly, he raised $140 million in donations. And then he even says himself that he was sort of a victim of his own success because by helping bring the psychedelic renaissance about through MAPS, suddenly we have these companies like Compass popping up that are for-profit. And then donors are like, why would I give you free money that I'm not going to see a return on when I can make an investment over here? So MAPS isn't going to make it over the finish line with MDMA as a philanthropy-funded product. They just spun out a pharmaceutical arm that is for-profit. They have a board. They have investors. They tried really hard not to. But this is just the system that we live in.

Gillespie: Do you see any big obstacles in the next couple of years to the medicalization or legalization of these substances?

Nuwer: I'm sure there's going to be some kind of bureaucratic whatever. I mean, there's a lot of positive signs from the federal government that they're into this. Biden released a memo about it. There's language in a new bill about veterans for investigating this. But the government is very, very conservative. So I can see there being all kinds of hitches that delay this, like, years.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

• Audio Production: Ian Keyser
• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki

The post Rachel Nuwer: MDMA Is On the Cusp of Legalization appeared first on Reason.com.

As Ronald Reagan's first budget director, former Michigan congressman David Stockman led the charge to cut the size, scope, and spending of the federal government in the early 1980s. He made enemies among Democrats by pushing hard for cuts to welfare programs—and he ultimately made enemies among his fellow Republicans by pushing equally hard to slash defense spending. His memoir of the era, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, is a legendary account of how libertarian principles got sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.

Stockman's new book is Trump's War on Capitalism, and it takes a blowtorch to the former president's time in office. "When it comes to what the GOP's core mission should be…standing up for the free markets, fiscal rectitude, sound money, personal liberty, and small government at home and non-intervention abroad," he writes, "Donald Trump has overwhelmingly come down on the wrong side of the issues."

At a Reason Speakeasy event in New York City, I talked with Stockman about his political journey from being a member of Students for a Democratic Society who protested the Vietnam War to being one of Reagan's main advisers to his denunciation of Donald Trump and his hope that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s candidacy helps throw the 2024 election into the House of Representatives.

Stockman also explains how Trump led the disastrous charge on COVID-19 lockdowns, got rolled by Wall Street and the Federal Reserve, and why his nativist views on immigration are inimical both to freedom and economic growth.

Today's sponsor:

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The post David Stockman: Trump's War on Capitalism and Freedom appeared first on Reason.com.

While some of us went a little nuts during the COVID-19 lockdowns, others—including many of our country's leaders and people in the media—went absolutely batshit crazy, often with disastrous results. 

Exactly why that happened is the subject of author Jon Ronson's latest season of Things Fell Apart, a podcast that explores the deep origins of today's culture wars in controversies, panics, and delusions from decades ago.

I talked with Ronson about why he believes the creation of a fake medical condition called "excited delirium" in 1988 ultimately led to the death of George Floyd in 2020, how law enforcement fixations on white supremacy warped the investigation into a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and how the director of the massively influential Plandemic documentaries was actually rewriting the script of Star Wars.

Ronson is best known as the author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, an account of a U.S. Army unit that tried to perfect paranormal powers like walking through walls, and So You've Been Publicly Shamed, which helped define cancel culture just as it was becoming widespread via social media.

We also talk about Things Fell Apart, how he survived COVID, and how critical thinking and media literacy are more important than ever in a world in which we can all produce and consume our versions of the truth.

Today's sponsor:

• Better Help. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, Better Help is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.

The post Jon Ronson: Why We Went So Crazy During COVID Lockdowns appeared first on Reason.com.

"If the problem with campus speech codes is the selectivity with which universities penalize various forms of bigotry," wrote James Kirchick recently in The New York Times, "the solution is not to expand the university's power to punish expression. It's to abolish speech codes entirely."

Kirchick was writing about widespread outrage at the deeply nuanced and deeply hypocritical defense of speech offered by the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania at a congressional hearing about antisemitic and anti-Zionist campus reactions to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel.

Although Kirchick, the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington and The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, is an ardent defender of Israel, he is also a self-described free-speech absolutist who is disgusted by calls to restrict expression, whether on or off-campus. He says that instead of clamping down on speech, we should be arguing more openly and publicly, even when it's deeply uncomfortable, as it was when he raised novelist Alice Walker's antisemitic views during a literary conference at which they were both speaking.

We talk about how identity politics has overwhelmed the left's traditional defense of free speech, why so many younger journalists seem lukewarm at best to the First Amendment, and how to muster the courage to speak up for first principles in uncomfortable and hostile situations.

Previous appearances on The Reason Interview:

How Homophobia Warped the Cold War, June 1, 2022

The Very Idea of Europe Is Finished, April 23, 2017

The post James Kirchick: 'Abolish Speech Codes Entirely' appeared first on Reason.com.

Did you know that by 2050, a quarter of the planet's population will reside in Africa? Yet despite abundant natural resources and a young and ambitious population, the continent remains the poorest of them all.

Born in Senegal and now residing in Austin, Texas, Magatte Wade is director of the Center for African Prosperity at the Atlas Network, a nonprofit that supports think tanks and activist groups in the developing world. A serial entrepreneur, she's currently the CEO (and founder) of SkinIsSkin, which sells a series of skin and lip products sourced in Africa.

Wade is also the author of the new memoir and manifesto, The Heart of a Cheetah: How We Have Been Lied To about African Poverty, and What That Means for Human Flourishing. She claims the solution to Africa's problems lies with what her mentor, the late economist George Ayittey, called "the cheetah generation," young Africans who embrace free markets, individualism, human rights, and transparency in government.

Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Wade to discuss her book, "conscious capitalism," charter cities, and how cryptocurrencies are helping people like her build the Africa—and the world—they want.

The post Magatte Wade: The Real Reasons Why Africa Is Poor and Why It Matters appeared first on Reason.com.

This week's episode of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie is hosted by Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward. She sat down with former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey.

During his two terms as governor, Ducey managed to pass a flat income tax with a rate of 2.5 percent, reform public sector pensions, universalize important school choice measures, reform occupational licensing rules, turn a budget deficit into a surplus, and substantially shrink the size of the government work force. He also built a makeshift border wall out of shipping crates, pushed back on marijuana legalization, and was accused of doing both too much and too little by his constituents during the COVID pandemic. Today, he runs Citizens for Free Enterprise.

In December, Ducey received the Reason Foundation's Savas Award for Privatization, which is given annually to someone who is advancing innovative ways to improve the provision and quality of public services by engaging the private sector. In this week's episode, he talks to Mangu-Ward about his worries for the future of the Republican Party, his commitment to fusionism, and why Arizona politicians are so weird.

Watch the full video here.

The post Former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey Loves Barry Goldwater and Milton Friedman appeared first on Reason.com.

William D. Eggers is co-author, with Donald F. Kettl, of Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries To Solve Big Problems. He's now the executive director of Deloitte's Center for Government Insights, but 30 years ago, he was the director of government reform for Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason and this podcast. In fact, I interviewed with him when I applied for my first job here. 

Eggers has since worked with dozens of governments at all levels, both in the United States and internationally, and he's written a shelf's worth of books on the proper scope and function of government. I talked with him about Bridgebuilders, what he's learned over the past three decades about making government more effective and less intrusive, and why it's long past time to move beyond what he and his co-author call "the vending machine model" of government.

The post William D. Eggers: Making Government More Effective and Less Intrusive appeared first on Reason.com.

Was Milton Friedman the most important libertarian of them all? That's part of the conversation I had with today's guest, Stanford historian Jennifer Burns, who has written a masterful and definitive new biography of the Nobel Prize–winning economist. Without reservation, I recommend you check out her new book, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. 

Friedman was arguably not just the most influential free market economist of the 20th century but the central figure in building the broad political and intellectual coalition that successfully challenged Keynesian economics and the top-down rule of experts in so many aspects of our lives. I talked with Burns about Friedman's conceptual and methodological breakthroughs in economics; his way-ahead-of-his-time collaboration with female economists such as Anna Schwartz and his wife Rose; his role in popularizing free market economics through his columns in Newsweek and the TV series Free To Choose; his controversial engagements with politicians such as Richard Nixon and Augusto Pinochet; and his role in ending the military draft and championing school choice. We also talked about Burns' previous book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, and its connections to her new work.

This episode was taped at the Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a live taping of this podcast. Go here to get information about Speakeasys and all our upcoming events.

The post Jennifer Burns: Why Milton Friedman Matters More Than Ever appeared first on Reason.com.

Quitting is massively underrated, says Annie Duke, an author, psychologist, and former professional poker player who holds a bracelet from the 2004 World Series of Poker.

Her latest book is Quit: The Power of Knowing When To Walk Away. Using examples ranging from Muhammad Ali's refusal to retire from boxing earlier in his career to the over-budget, much-delayed California high-speed rail project to catastrophic American wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, she makes the case that blind commitment to grit and stick-to-it-iveness routinely leads us down the wrong path is our careers, politics, and personal lives.

She talks about misleading mental tics like the sunk-cost fallacy, the cult of identity, and the endowment effect, and how to understand and reverse them in our personal lives, our work, and our politics. She earned her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, getting her degree in 2023 after taking a 30-year break from academia. We talk about how her experience of knowing when to quit in poker—and higher education—informed her high regard for knowing when to head for the exits.

To see a Reason interview about Duke's previous book Thinking in Bets, go here.

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.

The post Annie Duke: Quitting Is Totally Underrated appeared first on Reason.com.

Just Asking Questions is a new Reason podcast hosted by Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe. Each week they bring you long-form conversations diving deep into a single topic for an hour or more, with data, media clips, and guests who can teach, challenge, and have fun. To hear future episodes, subscribe to Just Asking Questions and watch video premieres on Reason's YouTube channel every Thursday.

In this inaugural episode of Just Asking Questions, podcaster Dave Smith joins the show to tackle a fundamental question: "What is a libertarian?"

Smith discusses what has recently transpired in the Libertarian Party; his past and present disagreements with Reason-style libertarians; whether politicians are incompetent, evil, or both; and his greatest libertarian "white pill" for the future.

The post A New <I>Reason</I> Podcast Is <I>Just Asking Questions</I> appeared first on Reason.com.

Over the past decade, no legal scholar has pushed arguments for free speech as far or as influentially as today's guest: Jeff Kosseff, a former journalist who now teaches cybersecurity law at the U.S. Naval Academy. In previous books, he defended Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet and stood up for anonymous speech in The United States of Anonymous: How the First Amendment Shaped Online Speech.

His new book is his boldest yet. It's called Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation and I liked it so much that I blurbed it, calling it "a smart, wry, deeply researched and utterly convincing defense of legal protections for 'misinformation' in an age when we are less likely to agree on basic facts than ever before."

We talk about why "misinformation"—however defined—should be legally protected, how the boundaries between private companies and government are getting blurrier and blurrier, and why so many journalists are calling for limits on the First Amendment.

Today's sponsors:

• DonorsTrust. DonorsTrust is the oldest and largest donor-advised fund made for people who live out with their charitable giving the idea of free minds and free markets. If you don't know about donor-advised funds, you should, especially here at the end of the year. A fund gives you a simple, tax-advantaged way to support the charitable causes you care about. There are lots of providers of donor-advised funds, but DonorsTrust is the one that understands you the best. DonorsTrust is a great friend of Reason and all other nonprofit groups like it. Go find out yourself at donorstrust.org/nick. Watch a short video on how it works and request information to get started.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. Go here to listen to past Speakeasy events and go here to learn about upcoming ones, including one on Tuesday, December 12 with Stanford historian Jennifer Burns, whose new book is The Last Conservative, a highly praised biography of Milton Friedman.

The post Jeff Kosseff: Why False Speech Deserves First Amendment Protections appeared first on Reason.com.

This is a bonus episode, hosted by Reason Features Editor Peter Suderman. A few weeks back, at our Washington, D.C. HQ, he moderated a discussion with former Reason Editor in Chief Virginia Postrel (Reason archive here)and American Enterprise Institute Fellow James Pethokoukis about the future—why it matters, why it's misunderstood, and how we might get a better one.

Both have written extensively on the topic. Postrel is the author of many books, including The Future and Its Enemies. Pethokoukis is the author of the just-released The Conservative Futurist—How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised. 

It's a great conversation about economics, progress, science fiction—and kitchen gadgets.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason webathon. Once a year, we ask our readers, viewers, and listeners to make tax-deductible donations to support our principled libertarian journalism. Go here to see giving levels and make a contribution.

The post Virginia Postrel & Jim Pethokoukis: How To Get a Great Future appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is Sandra Newman, my favorite novelist currently at work in America—I highly recommend her recent works The Men and The Heavens. Her new book is titled Julia and it's a retelling of George Orwell's 1984 from the point of view of Winston Smith's lover who, as you probably recall, is ironically a member of the Anti-Sex League.

I don't even know how to do this novel justice—it's a stylistic and conceptual tour de force that updates and expands Orwell's universe in deeply profound, disturbing, and highly contemporary ways. We talk about the book's origins—the Orwell estate asked Newman to write it—and why 1984 continues to resonate with readers. We discuss the role of literature in a world where television and movies command greater audience attention and past controversies involving Newman's writing.

It's a wide-ranging conversation and one of my very favorite episodes of this podcast.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason webathon. Once a year, we ask our readers, viewers, and listeners to make tax-deductible donations to support our principled libertarian journalism. Go here to see giving levels and make a contribution.

The post Sandra Newman: Reimagining <i>1984</i> from Julia's Perspective appeared first on Reason.com.

Born and raised in Texas, Jeb Bush moved to Florida in 1980. The son and brother of presidents, he was governor of the Sunshine State from 1999 to 2007, where he quickly became known as a champion of school choice and fiscal responsibility. In 2016, he made an unsuccessful run for the Republican presidential nomination and he now resides in Miami-Dade County—happily retired from political life. 

A self-proclaimed "old-school conservative with libertarian blood running through [his] veins," I talked to Bush a few weeks ago for our new special issue of Reason devoted to all things Florida (subscribe now and read the full issue online!). 

He told me that more people are moving to Florida than any other state in the country because "we don't try to micromanage people's lives" and that the government "works pretty good," especially when it comes to education, regulation, and infrastructure. We discussed what he really thinks of Gov. Ron DeSantis, former President Donald Trump, current President Joe Biden, and whether the "Florida Man" meme captures something essential about the state's residents. "It's probably not fair, but who cares?" he says. "It's funny. We should embrace it. We're striving to have a disproportionate number of candidates for the Darwin Award each year. We should be very proud of it."

And we talked about what really makes America great. "I would say the shared identity should be that it doesn't matter where you start in life," Bush told me. "It doesn't matter where you were born. What matters is that you have a chance to rise up, that your hard work will be rewarded, and that you will be part of the exceptionalism of our country where people…have a chance to succeed. That's being challenged like never before."

Today's sponsor:

• Join us on November 27 in New York City for a viewing (and afterparty) of the new Reason documentary, Bitcoin, Bathhouses, and the Future of Energy, and a panel discussion on cryptocurrency, the environment, and human rights featuring Nick Gillespie, Zach Weissmueller, Alex Gladstein, and others. Tickets and details here.  

The post Jeb Bush: What He Thinks of Trump, Biden, DeSantis, and 'Florida Man' appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

"Senator Paul, you do not know what you what you are talking about." Those were the words that Anthony Fauci spoke in July 2021 to Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) following a series of questions from Paul about the possibility that Fauci's agency had funded research in Wuhan, China, that led directly to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paul's new book, Deception: The Great COVID Cover-Up, aims to show that, in fact, he very much did know what he was talking about when it came to U.S. funding of risky gain-of-function research that involves making viruses more infectious and deadly to humans. 

Internal emails later obtained by Congress showed that in February 2020, Fauci was concerned about gain-of-function research in Wuhan, and National Institutes of Health Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak admitted in an October 2021 letter to the House of Representatives that the agency had funded work there that led to a virus becoming more deadly in mice with humanized lungs. 

I spoke with Paul about his book and his investigations into the origins of COVID-19. I  asked him to reflect on his famous exchange with Fauci and what he thinks real accountability would look like. We also talked about his proposals to end all government funding of gain-of-function research and to prohibit government officials from meeting with social media companies for the purpose of censoring legal speech.

The post Rand Paul: Pursuing Accountability on Lab Leak 'Deception' appeared first on Reason.com.

"I'm under no illusion that humanity will completely eradicate the racial tribal instinct or racism or bigotry itself. But I feel that colorblindness is the North Star that we should use when making decisions," argues Coleman Hughes during a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast in New York City.

Hughes is a writer, podcaster, and opinion columnist who specializes in issues related to race, public policy, and applied ethics. His new book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America is about returning to the ideals of the American Civil Rights movement because our departure from the "colorblind ideal has ushered in a new era of fear, paranoia, and resentment." When his recent TED talk was seen as "hurtful" by some TED conference attendees, for example, he discovered that TED actually suppressed his presentation. Hughes describes how that situation left him concerned, "that TED, like many organizations, is caught between a faction that believes in free speech and viewpoint diversity and a faction that believes if you hurt my feelings with even center left, center right or, God forbid, right-wing views, you need to be censored."

The post Coleman Hughes: The End of Race Politics? appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

When Russ Roberts, an economist and host of the podcast EconTalk, received a job offer to become president of Jerusalem's Shalem University, it seemed like "a no-brainer," he wrote in his 2022 book Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us. Giving up his ability to work from his home in America on whatever interested him intellectually as a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution? "Only a fool would take the job," he wrote. But that was only if one considered the opportunity using a purely utilitarian pro/con checklist. For Roberts, this was a "wild problem," one that required him to consider "who I am and who I want to be." And with that in mind, he said, "it was a no-brainer in the other direction." He took the job and moved to Israel in 2021.

Reason's Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller spoke with Roberts about Hamas' October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel and their aftermath. They discussed how the attacks have transformed Israeli culture and politics, what it's like to live within a 90-second missile trip from Gaza, how a free society should respond to openly anti-Jewish rallies and actions such as tearing down hostage posters, and what the relationship between the United States and Israel has been and should be.

The post Russ Roberts: Life in Israel Since October 7 appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is Colleen Eren, a sociologist at William Paterson University in my favorite state in the country, New Jersey. She's also the author of the fantastic new book Reform Nation: The First Step Act and the Movement To End Mass Incarceration.

Signed into law by Donald Trump in 2018, the FIRST STEP Act is one of the few major reforms in the past 50 years aimed at reducing federal prison time and post-incarceration stigma and recidivism. The legislation was championed by the president's son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose father had served time for tax evasion and witness tampering, and celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Alyssa Milano. It also drew major support from philanthropic foundations all over the political and ideological spectrum. It's a great case study of how political change actually gets done. 

Eren's book is a masterful account of how grassroots activism on a cause that very few people really cared about blossomed into a win for not just better treatment of people convicted of certain crimes but a better use of tax dollars. She blends original interviews with major players in the reform movement with great storytelling and a sociological framework that illuminates the complexities of all reform efforts.

This is a wide-ranging discussion that also covers my time back in the 1980s when I ghostwrote an advice column for Alyssa Milano, who really played a major role in helping the FIRST STEP Act become law, at the late and unlamented magazine Teen Machine. We talk about what it's like being a libertarian-leaning academic—which Eren is—in today's universities and the value of the oft-maligned discipline of sociology as a framework for understanding who we are as a society. And, of course, we talk about what, if anything, might come next in criminal justice reform. As its name implies, the FIRST STEP Act was supposed to be the start of something, not its final triumph.

Today's sponsors:

• BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there.
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The post Colleen Eren: Why Donald Trump Signed the FIRST STEP Act appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

"At its core, money is a ledger," writes investment analyst Lyn Alden in her new book Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better. 

And if money is a ledger, she says, the most important question to consider is, "Who controls the ledger?"

Zach Weissmueller spoke with Alden about her book, which is a true tour de force that lays out the history of money from its inception to present, takes you deep into the dueling schools of thought around money's fundamental properties, offers a macro analysis of today's global monetary and fiscal situation, and charts a path forward for transitioning the world to better, more sound money in the future. If you care about any of this—and really, who doesn't care about money?—this one is a must-read.

The post Lyn Alden: Our Money Is Broken appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is Swedish historian Johan Norberg, author of The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World, which caught the eye of Elon Musk. "This book is an excellent explanation of why capitalism is not just successful, but morally right," Musk tweeted. 

Norberg wrote the book to combat a growing belief on the right and the left that libertarian values of individual autonomy, property rights, limited government, and free enterprise are failing to raise living standards and need to be ditched in favor of more centralized power and control over virtually all aspects of our lives. A senior fellow at the CATO Institute, Norberg shows that life is actually getting better for all of us—especially the world's poor—and that economic globalization, political liberalization, and cultural freedom are the main drivers of that improvement.  

We talk about how liberals and conservatives get the past wrong, why he's not worried about China's supposedly unstoppable economic growth, and why the cases for free trade, free expression, and more immigration need to be constantly updated and renewed.

Norberg's previous appearances:

Johan Norberg: How Sweden Defied Dire COVID Predictions

America Should be More Like Sweden. But Not for the Reasons You Think

Capitalism and Neoliberalism Have Made the World Better

Johan Norberg: 10 Reasons To Look Forward To the Future

Swedish Myths and Realities

Today's sponsor:

• The Best of Reason Magazine. Every Tuesday, listen to a curated selection of some of the best writing from Reason, read aloud to you by a robot voice modeled off Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward.

The post Johan Norberg: Why We Need a <i>Capitalist Manifesto</i> appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

Javier Milei, the self-described libertarian candidate for Argentina's presidency, surprised the world with a first-place finish in the primaries this August. But in the presidential election this past weekend, he finished second behind Argentina's current economy minister, Sergio Massa, a part of the Peronist political movement that's long governed Argentina. Neither candidate passed the threshold needed to become the next president, so they will have a head-to-head rematch on November 19.

Does Milei still have a chance against an entrenched political elite that began handing out money and free bus passes in the run-up to the election? If elected, how will Milei deliver on his promise to take a chainsaw to government, abolish the central bank, and dollarize the economy? And what can American libertarians learn from the movement Milei has built in Argentina? 

Reason's Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller discussed these questions and reacted to recent interview clips of Milei with Marcos Falcone, a political scientist, project manager at Argentina's Fundación Libertad, and podcast host. 

Mentioned in this podcast:

Argentina's 2023 presidential election results

"Argentina's (Unexpected) Libertarian Moment," by Marcos Falcone

"Argentina's presidential election delivers a surprise result," writes The Economist

Support for Milei by party affiliation, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit

"A man, a plan, a chainsaw: How a power tool took center stage in Argentina's presidential race," by Daniel Politi and David Biller

"Is Javier Milei's Movement in Argentina a Cult of Personality in the Name of Liberty?" by Antonella Marty and Jose Benegas

"What's in Javier Milei's head?" by Federico Rivas Molina

The post Marcos Falcone: Can a Libertarian Still Win in Argentina? appeared first on Reason.com.

"We've taught young people that any of their missteps or any of their heterodox opinions are grounds to tear them down. That's no way to grow up."

That was journalist Rikki Schlott speaking before a sold-out crowd on Monday night at a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast in New York City. Schlott, 23, teamed up with Greg Lukianoff to co-write The Canceling of the American Mind.

Lukianoff, 49, is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and co-author with Jonathan Haidt of the bestselling The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Schlott is a fellow at FIRE, a New York Post columnist, and a cohost of the Lost Debate podcast. 

Cancel culture, they argue, constitutes a serious threat to free speech and open inquiry in academia and the workplace and is best understood as a battle for power, status, and dominance. I talked with them about the roots and extent of cancel culture, whether it's fading, and whether firing or not hiring someone who supports Hamas' killing of Israeli citizens is an act of cancel culture.

Live tapings of this podcast take place once a month in New York at the Reason Speakeasy. To find out when the next one is happening, go here. For past Speakeasy events, go here.

The post Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott: <i>The Canceling of the American Mind</i> appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time.

"Despite clear interests on almost all sides against a regional war [in the Middle East], all sides are acting in a manner that makes such a war increasingly likely," writes Trita Parsi in an October 15 article calling for the Biden administration to push for "de-escalation" between Israel and Hamas. Parsi is the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a D.C. think tank that promotes a more restrained U.S. foreign policy. He is the former head of the National Iranian American Council and the author of several books, including A Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S.

Parsi says that although the Biden administration is "well aware" of "escalation risks" that might lead to a broader regional war, talk of de-escalation remains off-limits. HuffPost reported late last week that it has obtained State Department memos instructing employees to avoid terms like "de-escalation/ceasefire," "end to violence/bloodshed," and "restoring calm" in press materials and statements.

Is de-escalation feasible after Hamas slaughtered Israeli civilians and continues to hold more than 200 hostages? How should Israel respond to the worst terrorist attack in its history? What can U.S. policymakers do to make the prospect of a bigger war less likely?

We discussed these questions and more with Parsi. We also revisited the topic of domestic reactions to the Hamas attack, namely the comments of a Cornell professor who claimed to be "exhilirated" by it.

Sources referenced in this conversation:

"Biden refuses to talk 'ceasefire' even though it could prevent a regional war," by Trita Parsi

"Stunning State Department Memo Warns Diplomats: No Gaza 'De-Escalation' Talk," by Akbar Shahid Ahmed

"Source: Iran warns Israel through UN against ground offensive in Gaza," by Barak Ravid

"Iran says 'preemptive action' by resistance front expected in coming hours," by Reuters

"Talks fail to let aid reach Gaza; Israel evacuates Lebanon border," by Nidal Al-Mughrabi, Dan Williams and Yusri Mohamed

"Biden is expected to request $100 billion for Israel, Ukraine and other crises," by Karoun Demirjian

The post Trita Parsi: Is De-escalation Feasible in the Middle East? appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest is Shane Mauss, a comedian who tours the country discussing his psychedelic experiences in fantastic, immersive shows like DMT: A Love Story and A Better Trip. If you're in the New York City area, he'll be appearing at the Psychedelic Assembly in midtown October 27-31 as a part of a Halloween-themed show called Spookadelic.

I caught up with him at the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, held in Denver this June, where he participated in a "roast" of the psychedelic scene. Go here for "The Psychedelic Renaissance Is Here," Reason's 30-minute documentary about that event and the larger psychedelic movement.

Mauss, who also hosts a science podcast called Here We Are, shared his thoughts about the mainstreaming of psychedelic drugs, the surprising pace of legalization efforts, and the role that Joe Rogan, Aaron Rodgers, and other public figures play in normalizing psychedelics and promoting cognitive liberty.

Today's sponsor:

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The post Shane Mauss: Finding the Humor in Psychedelics appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time.

Hamas stunned the world last weekend by launching a brutal terrorist attack on Israeli civilians and posting their crimes on social media. Israel's government responded with a sustained bombing campaign and a total blockade of the Gaza Strip. Why would Hamas provoke what was certain to be a devastating response from the powerful Israeli military? What is likely to happen next in an Israel-Hamas war that threatens to spill far beyond the region? And what, if anything, should be America's involvement? 

To explore these questions, Reason's Liz Wolfe and I spoke with Max Abrahms, a political science professor at Northeastern University and author of Rules for Rebels: The Science of Victory in Militant History, a lengthy study of terrorism and insurgency. 

"The first thing smart militants do is recognize that civilian attacks are a recipe for political failure," writes Abrahms. "You might say that the first rule for rebels is to not use terrorism at all."

While he's called Hamas's attack a "major strategic mistake" for the Palestinian cause, he told Reason that their objective might not be to secure autonomy for Palestine at all in the near term but rather an attempt to position "itself as a leader in the larger global Sunni terrorist movement" by provoking a violent response that will galvanize jihadists from around the world to join them. 

We analyzed the likely outcomes of Israel's response to the terrorist attack, reacted to statements from GOP politicians like Lindsey Graham who has called for America to bomb Iran if U.S. hostages are killed in Gaza, discussed the principle of US military noninterventionism as articulated by Ron Paul in clips that have circulated social media in the wake of the attack, and the, frankly, insane reactions from American leftists who celebrated Hamas' violent attack as an act of "decolonization."

The post Max Abrahms: Historic Escalation in the Israel-Hamas War appeared first on Reason.com.

Beyond obvious political polarization and the rancor that generates, Alexandra Hudson says that contemporary America—and the world—is "otherizing" people in a way that makes us all worse off by threatening our ability to peacefully coexist. In her new book The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles To Heal Society and Ourselves, Hudson draws on the writings of figures from antiquity through Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. to show how to reawaken classical liberal virtues of mutual respect and tolerance in a world seemingly hell-bent on putting politics at the center of human meaning.

We talked about the difference between civility and manners, the need for and limits of civil disobedience, Hamas terrorism and the rules of war, and whether the decline of religion, family, and traditional forms of community spell the end of self-governance. Hudson publishes a Substack called Civic Renaissance, "a newsletter and community dedicated to ennobling our public discourse with the wisdom of the past."

This episode was taped live in New York City as a Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. Go here to listen to past Speakeasy events and go here to learn about upcoming ones (including one on October 23, featuring Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott discussing their new book, The Canceling of the American Mind). This event was cosponsored by Young Voices, "a nonprofit talent agency and PR firm for a rising generation of heterodox thinkers." Go here to learn more about them.

The post Alexandra Hudson: How Civility Can Save America—and the World appeared first on Reason.com.

This is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.

On June 30, Pornhub—America's most-trafficked adult website—announced that it was blocking access in Mississippi, Virginia, and Utah. Why? Well, Pornhub was reacting to the passage of age-verification laws in those three states. Similar laws have passed in Louisiana, Texas, Montana, and Arkansas, leading Politico to declare that "A Simple Law Is Doing the Impossible. It's Making the Online Porn Industry Retreat." But the industry is fighting back and won a preliminary injunction against Texas' law.

Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe talked about these developments with Aella, a former OnlyFans star and outspoken libertarian defender of sex workers who leverages her sizable social media following to run sex polls and surveys, the results of which she analyzes and publishes on her blog Knowingless. In this conversation, they discuss Aella's sex surveys, delve into the psychological literature examining online porn consumption, unpack the privacy implications of age verification laws, and talk about a recent debate Aella attended hosted by The Free Press and FIRE about the effects of "the sexual revolution" on American society.

The post Aella: Is Porn Too Pervasive? appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is Johns Hopkins professor Yascha Mounk, the founder of the online magazine Persuasion and the author of the important new book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. 

The Identity Trap explains how identity politics and social justice discourse have come to dominate contemporary discussions of just about everything, analyzes their negative influence on society, and shows how to confront and defeat them in the name of liberal values of free expression and open inquiry.

Yascha was a prime mover behind the 2020 open letter on "justice and open debate" in Harper's magazine and is one of the most powerful defenders of free speech and the marketplace of ideas at work today.

This interview took place at the Reason Speakeasy, a live, unscripted monthly conversation held in New York City with outspoken defenders of free speech and heterodox thinking. Go here for information about upcoming events.

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.

The post Yascha Mounk: Avoiding The Identity Trap appeared first on Reason.com.

This is an audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel.

The second GOP primary debate of the season took place this Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, absent frontrunner Donald Trump. The debate revealed real divides among the candidates on issues like foreign policy, broad agreement on topics like closing the southern border, and some candidates' increased willingness to take direct shots at Trump.

To help sift through the debate, Reason's Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmuller are joined by Josh Barro, a journalist and political commentator who publishes the newsletter Very Serious and co-hosts the Serious Trouble podcast with attorney Ken White. Barro is a former Republican voter who turned Democrat after Trump's nomination in 2016. 

We discuss Ron DeSantis' proposal to send U.S. troops to Mexico to fight the drug cartels, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy's feud over TikTok, the candidates' scuffle over whether to continue sending military aid to Ukraine, and more. We wrap up with a broader conversation about the 2024 election and what the best-case scenario might look like for libertarians and political independents. 

The post Josh Barro: A Republican Presidential Debate Detached From Reality appeared first on Reason.com.

In 2001, Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg burst onto the international scene with his bestselling and controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist. The onetime member of Greenpeace said that climate change is real and that human activity is clearly contributing to it, but he said the best science didn't support the apocalyptic visions put forth by people like Earth in the Balance author and former Vice President Al Gore.

Lomborg went on to create the Copenhagen Consensus, a think tank that applies cost-benefit analysis to problems facing the global poor and works with Nobel laureates, policymakers, philanthropists, and researchers to develop pragmatic, relatively low-cost solutions to issues such as tuberculosis, malaria, lack of education, and access to food. 

His new book is called Best Things First and it presents what Lomborg says are "the 12 most efficient solutions for the world's poorest people." He argues that for about $35 billion a year—a little more than half of what the U.S. spends annually on humanitarian aid—these policies could save 4.2 million lives and generate an extra $1.1 trillion in value every year.

I caught up with Lomborg in New York City during the latest meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. We talked about Best Things First, his view of the current environmentalist movement, and why politicians and the media continue to fixate on the possibility of a future climate apocalypse rather than helping the global poor in the here and now.

The post Bjorn Lomborg: How Our Climate Fixation Hurts the World's Poor appeared first on Reason.com.