How likely is a Kamala Harris presidency? Just asking questions. Join Zach Weissmueller, Reason senior producer, and Liz Wolfe, Reason associate editor, at 12:30 p.m. ET for a live discussion on their show Just Asking Questions with Nate Silver, statistician and author of the new book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything . Silver founded the renowned polling aggregator and politics website FiveThirtyEight and now runs his own Substack, Silver Bulletin . They'll discuss Vice President Kamal...
Aug 08, 2024•1 hr 8 min
Is the future of the GOP more libertarian, nationalist, or, somehow, both? Joining us today is Vivek Ramaswamy , entrepreneur, author, and former presidential candidate. He's been making a hard pitch for what he's called a " libertarian-nationalist alliance " for the past several months. He was at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention where he tried to convince libertarians to vote Republican. Reason 's Zach Weissmueller also saw Ramaswamy at the Republican National Convention, where he was t...
Aug 01, 2024•33 min
The past month has been one of the most tumultuous in modern American political history: a devastating face-plant in a televised presidential debate, an attempted assassination of an ex-president favored in the polls to win reelection, a COVID-19 infection of the sitting president and his subsequent exit from the race, and an endorsement and loads of money pouring into the campaign of a previously unpopular vice president. What was going on behind the scenes that led us to this moment? This week...
Jul 25, 2024•1 hr 18 min
Where does former President Donald Trump want to take this country? As the Republican Party coronates Trump as its presidential nominee at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, there will be a lot of talk about Trump's vice presidential pick, his dominance in the polls, and the decline of President Joe Biden. But what about policy? What is the Trump agenda? Trump's opponents implore us to fear Project 2025 , a Heritage Foundation proposal that they characterize as a vengeful, authorit...
Jul 18, 2024•1 hr 6 min
What if President Joe Biden drops out? Just asking questions. Biden is facing increasing pressure from his own side to drop out of the 2024 race, which nearly every poll taken since his disaster debate performance last week shows him losing. The latest RealClearPolitics average has him down by about 3.5 percentage points nationally. Several Democratic congress members have called for him to step aside. So have Democratic megadonors . Much of the national press, once dismissive of those pointing ...
Jul 11, 2024•1 hr 21 min
Are the boys okay? For much of history, parents have preferred boys, perceiving them as the providers, the family legacy, the heirs to the throne. A dark consequence of China's 36-year-long one-child policy was a 120 boy to 100 girl birth ratio. But in 21st-century America, the script seems to have been flipped. The New York Times has run headlines like " Wanting Daughters, Getting Sons " and " It's a Boy, and It's Okay to be Disappointed ." Boys are falling behind in school, are more likely to ...
Jul 04, 2024•1 hr 18 min
Can a Catholic be a socialist? Can a libertarian be a Catholic? Just asking questions. Today's guest, Trent Horn , is an apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers and a defender of capitalism. He hosts The Counsel of Trent podcast and has authored several books on Catholicism, including Can a Catholic Be a Socialist? In this episode, we discuss the themes of that book, respond to some of the anti-capitalist rhetoric that has come from the Vatican over the past decade, analyze the rise of "post-...
Jun 27, 2024•1 hr 22 min
How's it going in Javier Milei's Argentina? Milei , Argentina's self-described libertarian president, notched his first legislative victory last week. Argentina's Senate passed a major omnibus bill , also known as the " Bases Law ", that's been debated since February. It would further deregulate the labor market, privatize national industries, cut taxes for foreign companies investing in Argentina, and hand emergency powers to Milei. Because Milei's party controls seven out of 72 Senate seats, t...
Jun 20, 2024•1 hr 13 min
Are embryos people? And are there downsides to designer babies? Earlier this year, Alabama's Supreme Court handed down a controversial decision declaring that frozen embryos should be treated as children, and therefore their destruction treated legally as wrongful deaths, leaving in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics with a big problem. Less than a month later, the state's Republican governor, Kay Ivey, signed into law a bill protecting access to IVF treatment in the state. As Reason reported at ...
Jun 13, 2024•1 hr 14 min
Can San Francisco be saved? San Francisco, the beautiful city on the bay, has become a national punchline. During his debate with Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom last year, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis displayed a map of citywide poop sightings , which were apparently reported to 311 more than 35,000 times in 2023, according to the San Francisco Department of Public Works. The city's population slumped starting in 2018, but has slowly crawled back. And a 2022 San Francisco Chroni...
Jun 06, 2024•1 hr 38 min
Who, exactly, is Chase Oliver? And what does he really stand for? Oliver is the Libertarian Party's 2024 presidential nominee, selected after six rounds of voting at a contentious party convention in Washington, D.C., this weekend, which featured speeches from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , Vivek Ramaswamy , and former President Donald Trump , who suggested himself as the nominee to a chorus of boos. Oliver was not the preferred candidate of the Mises Caucus , who remains in control of the Libertarian ...
May 30, 2024•58 min
How bad is climate change? People are freaked out by climate change, especially young people. Scientists for Nature conducted a survey of 10,000 16- to 25-year-olds in 2021 and found that 59 percent of them were extremely worried or very worried about climate change, and large majorities reported that climate change made them feel sad, anxious, and/or afraid. On Earth Day this year, President Joe Biden shared a picture on X (formerly Twitter) of himself standing next to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Co...
May 23, 2024•1 hr 24 min
How much do billionaires really pay in taxes? "Today, the superrich control a greater share of America's wealth than during the Gilded Age of Carnegies and Rockefellers," said Gabriel Zucman in a recent New York Times opinion piece entitled, " It's Time to Tax the Billionaires ." Zucman is an economist at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, and a frequent collaborator with superstar economist Thomas Piketty , author of the extremely influential book on wealt...
May 16, 2024•1 hr 5 min
What should colleges do about pro-Palestinian encampments? College students across America are camping out to demand their universities divest all investments with Israeli-linked companies that they claim profit from the occupation and oppression of Palestine. It's gone on for weeks, and even administrators at schools known as bastions of progressive activism are finally getting fed up. Harvard's president is threatening " involuntary leave " for protesters. Columbia announced on Monday that it ...
May 09, 2024•1 hr 34 min
Should kids medically transition between genders? The number of kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria has surged in recent years. In America , diagnoses have almost tripled from about 15,000 to more than 42,000 from 2017 to 2021. In the United Kingdom, the number of minors referred to the national Gender Identity Development Service grew from 51 in 2009 to 1,766 by 2016, leading to yearslong waitlists for care within the government-run health system. This surge caused England's National Health Se...
May 02, 2024•1 hr 28 min
Why has President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's dark side been hidden? Scholars consistently rank FDR as one of America's greatest presidents. The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey ranked him number two, below Lincoln, and respondents to the Siena College Research Institute studies have ranked him number one in six out of seven survey years. Perhaps it's understandable that the longest-serving president who saw the country through the Great Depression and a World War II victory wou...
Apr 25, 2024•1 hr 27 min
Is war with Iran coming? Last Saturday, Iran launched hundreds of armed drones and missiles to attack Israel in retaliation for an airstrike on an Iranian consulate in Syria that killed seven members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, including a general. Israel and the U.S. report that they intercepted most of the drones, and the sole known casualty was a 7-year-old girl critically injured by falling missile shrapnel. Israel has not retaliated…yet. In the wake of all that, today's guest had so...
Apr 18, 2024•1 hr 4 min
At least 40 U.S. colleges still require a COVID vaccine, according to nocollegemandates.com , an initiative that tracks and opposes the mandates. Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine and biostatistician who lost his job at Harvard for refusing the vaccine even though he'd already survived a COVID infection, says such mandates are "unscientific" and "unethical." Harvard has since dropped the mandate, but Kulldorff likely won't be getting his job there back anytime soon because the Harvard-af...
Apr 11, 2024•1 hr 7 min
"I discovered something remarkably similar to an alien co-intelligence," wrote Ethan Mollick in his new book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI , describing the "sleepless nights" he experienced upon first encountering ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022. Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of the One Useful Thing Substack, has studied, taught, and written about the effects of artificial intelligence on work and education for years. He joined...
Apr 04, 2024•1 hr 26 min
Immigration ranks as the second-most important issue among registered U.S. voters and the top issue for Republican voters, according to a Marist Poll/PBS NewsHour/NPR poll released last month. Perhaps that's because of the 3.2 million border encounters documented by Border Patrol in 2023—a new record high that's so far being outpaced this year. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who continues to erect razor wire fencing at the border despite a Supreme Court ruling prohibiting Texas from stopping federal ag...
Mar 28, 2024•2 hr 2 min
Are American cities crime-ridden hellscapes right now? Have cities rebounded from pandemic-era homicide spikes? Why do subway shootings in New York and carjackings in D.C. keep making the news? "I think a lot of this has to be disaggregated: There is a public order problem, and there is a violent crime problem, and they're not necessarily the same problem," Peter Moskos , a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and former Baltimore cop, tells Reason 's Zach Weissmuel...
Mar 21, 2024•1 hr 14 min
Writer and podcast host Coleman Hughes published a column in The Free Press in January entitled, "What Really Happened to George Floyd?" in which he analyzes a documentary called The Fall of Minneapolis , which has racked up more than 6 million views on YouTube and Rumble. The documentary makes the case that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin may have been wrongly convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020. In his column, Hughes ultimately concluded that it's time for Americans to ...
Mar 14, 2024•2 hr 2 min
In a special edition of Just Asking Questions recorded before a live audience on the Honduran island of Roatán, Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe talk with Mark Lutter, founder of the Charter Cities Institute , and Patri Friedman, founder and board member of Pronomos Capital , a venture capital firm that invests in charter cities. The conversation took place at the Alternative Visions for Governance conference sponsored by the Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason . The conference hap...
Mar 07, 2024•53 min
Bryan Johnson made his fortune when he sold his company Braintree to PayPal for $800 million, netting about $300 million for himself. He spends about $2 million a year creating a system to reverse his "biological age." He's 46 years old, chronologically, but claims he's de-aged himself following a program he's branded "the Blueprint protocol." " I wanted to pose the question in this technological age: Can an algorithm, paired with science, in fact, take better care of me than I can myself?" John...
Feb 29, 2024•1 hr 13 min
"One of the ways you understand a society is through its infrastructure," said Tucker Carlson as he stood in front of a Moscow subway station in a video he posted after his two-hour interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In contrast to America's public transit, Moscow's "is perfectly clean and orderly," explained Carlson. "How do you explain that? We're not even going to guess. That's not our job. We're only going to ask the question." On the latest episode of Just Asking Questions , j...
Feb 22, 2024•1 hr 17 min
"The greatest risk of a Republican administration is a war with Iran, and the greatest risk of a Democratic administration is a war with Russia," says Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative , a magazine for the types of conservatives who are skeptical of foreign military intervention. Mills joined Reason 's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to talk about a $95.3 billion aid package , including $60 billion for Ukraine, that passed ...
Feb 15, 2024•1 hr 13 min
"We're in dark and uncertain times, but we've made it through worse," writes Peter Meijer in a November 6 announcement that he's running for a Senate seat in Michigan soon to be vacated by Democrat Debbie Stabenow. Meijer is a former Republican representative for Michigan's third Congressional district—a position once held by Justin Amash, the Republican-turned-Libertarian congressman. Amash recently announced that he is launching an exploratory committee and may enter the Republican primary for...
Feb 08, 2024•1 hr 15 min
A recently published document reveals "smoking gun" evidence of COVID-19's lab-based origin, according to Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers and one of the earliest proponents of the lab leak hypothesis. Ebright is referring to an invoice that shows an order for a particular enzyme that he believes scientists used to stitch together the genome for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. However, Alina Chan, a microbiologist affiliated with MIT and Harvard and co-author of Viral: Th...
Feb 01, 2024•1 hr 17 min
Marcos Falcone, a political scientist, project manager at Argentina's Fundación Libertad, and podcast host, joins Reason 's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to watch and analyze Argentine President Javier Milei's speech at the World Economic Forum's annual conference in Davos, Switzerland. They also discuss the political agenda of the World Economic Forum and the anti-libertarian comments of its founder Klaus Schwab. They conclude with a conversation...
Jan 25, 2024•1 hr 32 min
Matt Welch, editor-at-large for Reason and podcaster on The Reason Roundtable and The Fifth Column with Kmele Foster and Michael Moynihan, joins Reason 's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to discuss the recent Iowa caucus results and talk about what it means for the 2024 election going forward. They also talk about where libertarians and independents are leaning in the presidential race and some of the increasingly glaring divides within libertariani...
Jan 18, 2024•1 hr 26 min
