Today's guest is the science writer Matt Ridley , author of best-selling books such as The Red Queen , The Rational Optimist , and, with Alina Chan, Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 . At a live event filmed in New York City, Ridley tells Nick Gillespie that political and cultural elites had already turned science, our best tool for understanding and improving the world, into a centralized, hyperpoliticized priesthood even before COVID. He walks through the collapse of public trust in...
Dec 03, 2025•49 min
Today's guest is Ken Burns , the filmmaker who has massively reshaped national conversations about everything from the Civil War to baseball to jazz to immigration to national parks with epic documentary series that have aired on public television. His latest work is The American Revolution , a 12-hour series about the nation's founding that he codirected with Sarah Botstein and David P. Schmidt. As the nation prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary next year, the American Revolution foregro...
Nov 26, 2025•1 hr 3 min
Today's guest is Sen. Rand Paul , the libertarian-leaning Republican from Kentucky. He talks about why he cosponsored legislation to release all of the Jeffrey Epstein files, how President Donald Trump's tariffs and bombing of Venezuelan boats are bad policy and unconstitutional, and why fellow Republicans like Vice President J.D. Vance are Luddites and nostalgia merchants who want to regulate free markets to death. Paul, the subject of a 2014 New York Times Magazine article titled "Has the 'Lib...
Nov 20, 2025•28 min
Earlier this year, The Washington Post 's owner, Jeff Bezos, announced that the opinions section of his paper would be "writing every day in support and defense of…personal liberties and free markets." Today's guest is the person Bezos hired to execute that mission. He's Adam O'Neal , a 33-year-old Southern California native whose resume includes stints at The Economist , The Dispatch , The Wall Street Journal , Real Clear Politics , and covering the Vatican for Rome Reports . O'Neal tells Gille...
Nov 19, 2025•1 hr 3 min
Today's guest is Katie Herzog , co-host of the popular Blocked & Reported podcast and author of the paradigm-shattering new book Drink Your Way Sober . Katie writes about her and other people's experiences with The Sinclair Method —a medication-assisted approach to alcoholism where you use one drug to counter problematic use of another. Her story—and the cutting-edge research and treatment she reports on—upends just about everything we think we know about drug use, recovery, and autonomy. Sh...
Nov 12, 2025•1 hr 12 min
Nick Gillespie speaks with Dr. Wolf von Laer of Students for Liberty , and Sean Themea of Young Americans for Liberty about how campus activism may change after the murder of Charlie Kirk. They discuss how the tragedy has affected their organizations, what it means for the future of student organizing, and how libertarian ideas about free expression and individual rights fit in today's campus climates. The post Campus Activism in the Wake of Charlie Kirk's Murder appeared first on Reason.com ....
Nov 06, 2025•59 min
Today's guests are Oscar-nominated filmmaker Jon Shenk and former Navy SEAL Marcus Capone . Shenk is co-director, with Bonni Cohen , of the new Netflix documentary In Waves and War , which follows three former Navy SEALs as they use psychedelic-assisted therapy to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries related to their service. Capone is one of the three main figures in the film. He first used the ultra-powerful substances ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT in 2017 and is the ...
Nov 05, 2025•1 hr 10 min
Today's guest is Jake Tapper , the host of The Lead on CNN and author of the new book, Race Against Terror: Chasing an Al Qaeda Killer at the Dawn of the Forever War . He tells Nick Gillespie why it matters that Donald Trump is following Barack Obama's lead in trying terrorists in criminal courts rather than military tribunals, why he believes the Trump administration is unleashing an all-out offensive against journalists critical of the president, and what the legacy media got way wrong with Jo...
Oct 29, 2025•1 hr 8 min
Today's guest is Jeff Flake , former Arizona senator and U.S. ambassador to Turkey, and now head of the brand-new Institute of Politics at Arizona State University. Flake made national headlines in 2017 when he delivered a searing Senate floor speech announcing he would not seek reelection and declaring he would not be complicit in the "degradation of our politics" under Donald Trump and MAGA. A lifelong conservative, Flake built his career on defending free markets, free trade, limited governme...
Oct 22, 2025•1 hr 2 min
Today's guest is Ben Wizner , deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He says that President Donald Trump's second term has brought an all-out assault on free speech—targeting comedians , immigrants , universities , and even law firms that take the "wrong" cases. Gillespie and Wizner put Trump's actions in the context of past presidents and discuss whether the ACLU has strayed from the days of defending the free speech rights of American Nazis in Skokie, Illinois, Uni...
Oct 15, 2025•1 hr 8 min
Today's guest is Lionel Shriver , the provocative writer best known for novels like We Need to Talk About Kevin , The Mandibles , and, most recently, Mania . We talked a few days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk , an event whose lasting significance she cautioned against overinterpreting. "We want tragedies to mean something," she said. "And maybe they don't." Shriver offered cutting critiques of Gen Z socialists, Tucker Carlson, Kamala Harris, and President Donald Trump, whom she said is...
Oct 08, 2025•51 min
This week's guest host on The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie is Billy Binion , who talks with Jenin Younes , a civil liberties attorney who first gained national attention when she sued the Biden administration for pressuring social media companies to censor content it didn't like. That case, Murthy v. Missouri , ultimately reached the Supreme Court . A former New York City public defender, Younes is now national legal director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, where she ...
Oct 01, 2025•1 hr
Lasting 20 years, the war in Afghanistan was not only the longest conflict in American history—it was a near total failure . Today's guest is Dan Krauss , whose documentary Bodyguard of Lies is an unflinching look at the Afghan war and the lessons the public desperately needs to learn from it. Krauss shows how officials such as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admitted they weren't going to be honest with the American people. He reminds us that within six months of the 9/11 attacks, the ...
Sep 24, 2025•1 hr 5 min
Today's guest is Joe Dolce , whose new book is Modern Psychedelics: The Handbook for Mindful Exploration . Dolce argues that psychedelics aren't just the province of hippies or tech bros anymore. They are powerful and increasingly popular—and legal—tools for therapy, self-discovery, and play. He talks with Gillespie about everything from the misunderstood role of ketamine in Friends star Matthew Perry's death to why ibogaine may be the only substance on Earth that can stop addiction cold, to how...
Sep 17, 2025•54 min
In this episode of The Reason Interview , Nick Gillespie is joined by Senior Editor Jacob Sullum , author of the new book Beyond Control , to discuss the evolution of gun and drug laws in America. They examine how decades of prohibitionist policies have backfired, undermining liberty and justice without delivering safety. This was originally recorded live on September 4, 2025. Is mass immigration good for America? Join us for a Reason Versus live debate on October 2 in Washington, D.C. The post ...
Sep 16, 2025•56 min
In this episode of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie , editors at large Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch reflect on the shocking murder of Charlie Kirk and the broader implications it carries for American politics. They discuss how his killing fits into rising concerns about political violence and what it signals about the nation's increasingly volatile climate. This was originally recorded live on September 11, 2025. The post Charlie Kirk and America's History With Political Violence appear...
Sep 11, 2025•1 hr 9 min
Today's guest is Lenore Skenazy, a journalist and activist dubbed " the world's worst mom " for letting her nine-year-old son ride the New York subway alone back in 2008. Since then, she's become a regular contributor to Reason and the co-founder, with psychologists Peter Gray and Jonathan Haidt , of Let Grow , which pushes for laws and school programs to restore independence to kids. She talks with Nick Gillespie about why kids today are more anxious and less free than they used to be , how fea...
Sep 10, 2025•54 min
Curtis Sliwa became famous by stepping in where the government was falling short. As the New York mayoral candidate told Reason 's Jesse Walker, the Guardian Angels—the anti-crime patrols that Sliwa launched in New York City in 1979—were born because "the government completely failed us….We filled the gap." In the years since then, Sliwa has expanded the Guardian Angels to cities around the world, launched a multidecade career in talk radio, confessed that some of his organization's early crime-...
Sep 05, 2025•48 min
Today's guest is Pablos Holman , a legendary hacker and cypherpunk who holds over 100 patents and has worked with Bill Gates to cure malaria and with Jeff Bezos to get Blue Origin off the ground. Pablos also runs a venture fund called Deep Future , which is committed to "creating technology that matters." In his new book—also called Deep Future —he exhorts the reader to "boycott dystopia" and describes companies that are saving bee colonies by using mushroom spores to inoculate bees against pest...
Sep 03, 2025•51 min
Today's guest is best known by his pro wrestling name: Kane . But Glenn Jacobs isn't just a member of the WWE Hall of Fame. Since 2018, he's served as the mayor of Knox County, Tennessee , where he has beat down tax increases and mask and vaccine mandates while pushing school choice and private sector solutions to social problems such as addiction. Jacobs tells Nick Gillespie how Ron Paul inspired him, why he believes President Donald Trump is disrupting the administrative state, and why live-an...
Aug 27, 2025•37 min
Today's guest is Rep. Chip Roy (R–Texas), a fiscal hawk whose commitment to balancing the budget has led President Donald Trump to call for primary challenges against him. Nick Gillespie sits down with Roy to talk about why he ultimately voted for the president's budget-busting One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), whether the controversial redistricting plan going on in Texas is legit, the expansion of the federal government under both major parties , and where libertarians and conservatives can ...
Aug 20, 2025•49 min
In 2008, Rep. Ron Paul (R–Texas) ran for the Republican presidential nomination and did surprisingly well with a campaign focused on stopping the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, ending the Federal Reserve, and reducing the size and spending of the federal government. Two years later, the Tea Party movement burst onto the scene, bringing people like Paul's son Rand to the Senate and one of today's guests, Justin Amash, to the House of Representatives. In 2012, Ron Paul again ran for the GOP nod, fi...
Aug 13, 2025•48 min
What if one of the sharpest critics of centralized power, bureaucratic surveillance, and top-down social control wasn't a libertarian economist but a French postmodernist? And what if one of the economists most vilified by the left wasn't a cold-hearted market fundamentalist but a thinker obsessed with the limits of knowledge and the dangers of planning? Today's guest is King's College London political economist Mark Pennington , author of the new book Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Pow...
Aug 06, 2025•1 hr 14 min
Today's guest is Richard E. Farley , author of Drop Dead , a history of how the richest city in America got addicted to spending, saturated in debt, and crashed the municipal bond market—and then managed to get a federal bailout in the nick of time. In 1975, New York City almost went bankrupt . Farley argues that the same conditions are reemerging today: runaway budgets , gimmicky accounting, overpromised entitlements, and politicians more interested in ideology than arithmetic. He wrote all thi...
Jul 30, 2025•1 hr
Today's guest is David Lowery , the legendary frontman of the bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker , digital copyright crusader , and longtime Reason reader. He dives deep into his sprawling, deeply personal new record Fathers, Sons and Brothers and the postwar California dream, talks about how the music industry broke, and suggests ways to maybe, just maybe, fix it. He's sued Spotify and other streaming services, teaches business at the University of Georgia, and he's dropped what might be th...
Jul 23, 2025•1 hr 22 min
Today's guest is University of Texas historian John Lisle , author of the chilling and brilliantly researched Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA . Despite official attempts to destroy records of the CIA's LSD-fueled search for mind control in the 1950s and '60s, the truth has been dribbling out, especially in recent books and documentaries such as Steven Kinzer's Poisoner in Chief and Errol Morris' Wormwood . Lisle's work draws on previously unknown deposi...
Jul 16, 2025•1 hr 6 min
Today's guest is University of Pennsylvania historian Sophia Rosenfeld , the author of The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life . Her book explores why we've come to basically equate having more personal choices with having more freedom. She stresses it wasn't always this way—in the past, freedom was often defined as the ability to act in the way God wanted you to act, or to overcome base urges, to be more angel than beast. Rosenfeld talks about how the Reformation, which enshrined...
Jul 09, 2025•41 min
Today's guest is Elizabeth Nolan Brown, whose recent Reason cover story looks into the politics of the Make America Healthy Again ( MAHA ) movement spearheaded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Just a decade or so ago, it was Democrats, liberals, and progressives who were pushing healthy eating initiatives and it was common to see Republicans and conservatives like Sarah Palin brandish Big Gulps like AR-15s and Fox News anchors like Sean Hannity declare their loyalty t...
Jul 02, 2025•46 min
Today's guest is Susannah Cahalan , whose new book is The Acid Queen , a biography of Rosemary Woodruff Leary—muse, fugitive, and heavily indicted co-conspirator in Timothy Leary's psychedelic revolution. She talks with Reason 's Nick Gillespie about hippie communes, outlaw drug smuggling, the war on drugs—and how the '60s counterculture, in its best moments, ran experiments in radical individualism, using personal freedoms to build voluntary communities rooted in altered consciousness and aesth...
Jun 25, 2025•50 min
On June 22, the United States launched what President Donald Trump called "very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran" on the social media site Truth Social. "NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!" But did that mission make America—or the Middle East—safer? Is it really a one-and-done action or the start of greater involvement on the part of the U.S. military? What lessons has our military learned—or failed to learn—from the past 25 years of foreign policy failures? In this special live epis...
Jun 24, 2025•58 min
