The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie

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Marjorie Taylor Greene: 'You're Not Being Represented!' Jun 29, 2026

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Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.) joins Free Media's Robby Soave to discuss the resurgence of democratic socialism, her friendship with Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), and where the Trump administration went wrong. Greene also argues that too many politicians simply refuse to listen to their constituents and would rather die in office than give up power. And Soave introduces her to a favorite Reason term: "total boomer luxury communism." 0:00–The resurgence of democratic socialism2:17–President Donald Trump's promise of "no new wars"6:03–The economic impact of tariffs and deportations8:32–Thomas Massie and libertarian views11:53–The political establishment and two-party system17:26–J.D. Vance and the future of the Republican party21:41–Does Marjorie Taylor Greene miss Congress?23:17–Generational wealth and entitlement programs24:51–Why octogenarians refuse to leave Congress Producers: Paul Alexander & Natalie Dowzicky Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser Transcript This is an AI-generated transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy. Robby Soave: Welcome to Free Media. I'm Robby Soave, and today I am joined by former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. It's lovely to see you. Thank you for being here. Marjorie Taylor Greene: Yeah, thank you for having me. Well, I want to start with some news from last week. The democratic socialists are doing really well in New York City, winning some primaries there. This is coming at a time when I think the rank and file in both parties are so frustrated with the establishment, whether it's the Democratic establishment on that side or the Trump administration on the Republican side. You've been a vocal critic of Trump, and we'll get to that. But first I wanted to ask you, what do you make of this rising tide of far-left policies on the socialist side? I'm not surprised by it at all. As a matter of fact, I had been saying for several years that this was coming, that that was the direction of more younger-generation Democrat voters. And so it doesn't surprise me at all, but I also see the same thing on the right. There's a sort of like a new direction happening, and it's happened in the past year, where many people, many Republican voters who voted for Trump, voted for Republicans, considered themselves MAGA or were MAHA, or just actually voted in that election for the first time, have been so disappointed that they're fractured off as well. And it's a lot of the younger-generation people on the right who are just fed up. So I think it's on both sides that you're seeing many people are fed up with the establishment of both parties, Republicans and Democrats. And the establishment, honestly, after serving in Congress, they're very much the same. There is a center of Republicans and Democrats in Congress and in the Senate that will pretty much vote yes together on a lot of the key funding bills and will never change, no matter how they campaign. They just stick together and keep the machine moving forward. And so it doesn't surprise me that you're seeing that on the left and the right. Part of the key pitch I think that Trump made to young voters, new voters, people he reached through podcasts in the 2024 election, was the no-new-wars guarantee. Last year, this year, doesn't seem like we've been a no-new-wars administration. What do you think happened? Was that a lie? Did he change his mind? Has he been convinced by people who don't agree with that aspect of MAGA? What is going on? That's a deep question, not easily answered. So that was one of the things that I loved early on about Donald Trump. Back in 2016, when he came out on the debate stage and he was willing to talk about how Iraq was a major mistake and criticize people in Washington for supporting that war. And that was always one of the things that I personally loved about Donald Trump, is he seemed to be and constantly spoke out against no more foreign wars, not supporting foreign wars, regime change. And that's exactly what so many of us are sick and tired of. Now, what changed? We saw a radical change after he became president. I spoke out. I think I was the only Republican, probably me and Thomas Massie. I'm sure we were the only two. And last year, in June 2025, when he first bombed Iran, I spoke out against it. I'm sure Thomas Massie did, Charlie Kirk did, Tucker Carlson did, but we were a very small percentage that were willing to criticize the president. That's one of the worst things you can do in MAGA is dare criticize the president. So what do I think changed? I think President Trump has been under massive pressure since he has become president, and that's come through Israel, that's come through major donors of his, that comes from people like Mark Levin, Lindsey Graham, you name it. The whole entire pro-Israel or Zionist caucus has pushed for that, and it's always a push in Washington. See, that's another thing people need to understand: No matter who the person is that becomes president, they are going to be lobbied with massive pressure to engage in war or to support another country in war. And the reason why is it is one of the biggest businesses in America. People talk about the military-industrial complex. That is a real thing. And so these are many companies all over our country that are funded annually from Washington, and they rely on defense contracts in order to continue to build weapons, to make the latest, greatest weapons that they can't wait to sell to the Pentagon, can't wait to show lawmakers and show off and say, "Hey, here's what we need for our military." They make it very patriotic to support. And there's even a massive pressure campaign, and I've first-hand witnessed this as a member of Congress, as they come to you and they say, "Hey, if you don't vote and support the [National Defense Authorization Act], there's a couple of defense contractors, companies, very important companies in your district. And without these contracts, without this funding, there's going to be thousands of people that are your constituents, they'll lose their jobs." And so they even pressure you in that way and imply that you'll probably lose your election if people are losing their jobs because you're not voting for this funding. I remember you giving interviews to Tim Dillon and some other people, saying that you are actually listening to people. You were listening to the people in your district saying, "Hey, I'm a small-business owner. These tariffs are really hurting me. Hey, I want to do something about illegal immigration, but if we're rounding up every single person, including people who are working and not committing other crimes, it impacts my business in a negative way." Do your former colleagues listen to the people in their district on some of these pretty basic economic issues, where what the administration was doing was just destroying their bottom line? So what I was saying, and I still say it, is this is what my actual constituents are saying. Here's their real words. These are the real concerns of Americans. But most members of Congress, they live in the silo of the two-party system, whether it's Republican or Democrat, and they will not openly and publicly step outside those boundaries. So whether they listen to them or not, you are not going to see—and I'm sure it's something you can observe—you're not going to see Republicans and Democrats hardly ever step outside their party. Because if they step out and they actually start telling the truth, like, "Hey, Americans really don't support whatever it may be," they're going to get it when they go back to Washington. You'll hear it. So I used to get it all the time from our leaders, whether it was the speaker, the majority leader, whether it was different leaders in our conference. If I was taking a certain position that was not the GOP position, I got a backlash for those things. And that affects people's fundraising. But I didn't ever have to rely on the party fundraising. Over 95 percent of my donations were small-dollar donors. So I never felt threatened in that way. It wasn't the cocktail party fundraisers in Washington that funded my campaign. So I was just willing to be outspoken and honest about this is what's hurting people. Can you speak a little bit about your ideological evolution? You came to Washington as a fervent backer of MAGA, of Trump, a supporter of MAHA, and you have ended your time in Washington very ideologically and personally close with Thomas Massie, who got taken out, targeted by Trump for many of the same reasons you became at odds with the administration. Thomas Massie is someone who has thought of himself as a libertarian or friendly to libertarianism, which is the ideology of Reason. Have you developed more interest in the project of— I'm not trying to say you were against freedom to begin with. I know that was important, a view of yours as well. But have you felt more kinship with Massie and with the ideology and the movement he's involved in? That's actually a misconception. Literally my entire time in Congress, I was aligned with Thomas Massie and our voting records are very similar. As a matter of fact, he was one of my best allies and best friends the entire time I served there. And we worked together on many issues, and that was before Trump was elected in 2024. So I stood, sort of, in both camps, I would say. And I never was a big Republican Party person. As a matter of fact, I never was elected before I won in 2020 for Congress, and I never even went to my county GOP meetings. Like I didn't know anybody. I didn't know them. I was actually angry at Republicans when I ran for Congress, and I attacked them constantly. And I didn't align with Democrats at all, so I attacked them as well. And I would say, if I describe myself best, I was very naive to the entire political process, because I had no experience in it. But I was angry, just completely angry at the government, just totally outraged by the government. So when I became a member of Congress—so imagine yourself becoming a member of Congress—and I actually went in there, I spent five years of my life the most pissed off I could ever be because I hated all of it. I hated every bit of it. And I would say I was very much fooled, like many. I was also a rallygoer, like a Trump rally–goer. So I believed his speeches. I believed his words when he talked about no more foreign wars and draining the swamp and "lock her up" and we're going to hold them accountable. He said, "I am your retribution." You know, I believed all of that because I believed in crashing the system. And so I thought that Trump would be the vehicle to do it, and boy, was I wrong. And so I spent five years in Washington trying every way possible to find success in stopping everything that I felt was ruining America. But it's virtually unstoppable. The two-party system is so brutal, right? Yeah. Because you're frustrated and I'm frustrated that the administration, the Trump administration, is not prioritizing some of the things they ran on, is not trying to make it easier to start a business or build a house or prosper in America, is very focused on foreign conflicts. But what you know that if you withdraw support for that party and it helps the other party, they're going down a socialist direction. Or even someone like Gavin Newsom and his backers, who want to massively confiscate the wealth of our most productive tech entrepreneurs, the people who are trying to make my life easier, who are trying to grow the economy in that way, and they're going to embrace ideas that are totally shutting all of that down. So it's like you just have bad choices no matter what you do. That's right. It's government overreach on both sides and in all different directions. And so there are no choices anymore. I call it the political-industrial complex. The Republican and Democrat two-party system is the political-industrial complex. And right now, as it stands, you can't beat it. I tried. I literally tried to beat it. I got in it and thought, "Hey, hold them accountable." I wanted to hold Republicans accountable for what they promised on the campaign trail, and I wanted to defeat Democrats on the threats that I thought they were threatening against us as well. But no, as it stands right now, it is such a strong system. Well, no, let me take it back. It's beatable. It just requires the American people fully getting engaged. And the American people just aren't fully engaged. And it's a system that is not working for so many people in America, so many young people. I know you've spoken many times about the difficulties of young people trying to obtain health care or afford a house, and I don't think big government is the solution to any of those problems, because the more money the government puts into fixing those problems, the more expensive those things seem to get, the more out of reach they seem to get. But does the left have an easier or more appealing answer when the right doesn't seem to have any answer, or doesn't articulate how they're going to clear the red tape, allow market solutions to fix those problems? You don't hear enough of that, do you? No, and the Republican Party doesn't really mean it. They might try to talk that way, and they do now. They have reduced some regulations. I mean, there are really some great things that they have done that I appreciate. I certainly love the border security. I think that's been a success from the Trump administration. However, no, no. What the Democrats do is they offer solutions, and they're good at making their solutions sound fantastic. But when you analyze their solution and you look at the outcome, you can quickly realize, no, they may have a solution, but it's going to make things worse. I mean, Obamacare was the perfect example of that. They sold it, and it sounded really, really great, but the outcome has been many insurance companies pulled out of the health insurance market. Then the competition decreased massively every year. Premiums increased, and health care costs went up, and the government funding of it helped it. So it propped it up, and then their solution is more government health care, and we can't afford that. Social Security is about to be completely insolvent in 2032. And so all of us that have been paying, you've been paying Social Security your entire life. If you're a business owner, you're paying 12.2 percent. If you have an employer, you are paying 6.1 percent. Well, very soon, in just a matter of years, most Americans are going to find out that you really have been paying a tax the entire time, and it's very unlikely you'll ever see a Social Security check paying you back any of the so-called benefits that you paid in. So much of this turns out to be a scam. While at the same time, both parties have plunged us all into nearly $40 trillion in debt. So no one's really bringing real solutions in. And my frustration remains that, at large, the American people, and I'm not talking about you, but at large, the American population just is completely not engaged. They're just not. You want to know why? They're not suffering yet. A population of people have to truly suffer before they're willing to engage. And right now, even though inflation has made the cost of living extremely difficult, even though health care and health insurance is absolutely absurdly…

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The Right Way To Fight a Trade War Jun 26, 2026

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This week, guest host Eric Boehm is joined by Financial Times columnist and economist Soumaya Keynes to discuss her new book, How to Win a Trade War.

They examine Donald Trump's tariff policies, whether trade wars can ever be won, and why Keynes believes that simply saying no one wins a trade war is no longer enough. She explains how China's economic model challenged the old rules-based trading system and why many policymakers now see Beijing as a unique economic rival.

They also discuss the collapse of the World Trade Organization's dispute-settlement system, the growing role of national security in trade policy, and the difficulties of coordinating with allies in an increasingly fragmented global economy. Finally, Keynes explains why trade wars require restraint, how economic conflicts can spiral into broader geopolitical tensions, and what a future trading system might look like.

0:00—Can trade wars be won?

5:03—Differences in the second Trump administration

8:15—The analogy of pirates for global trade

16:44—The collapse of the rules-based trading system

20:13—How China changed the global economy

24:36—Trade policy and national security

31:52—The future of the global trading system

39:38—How should the next president handle trade?

40:46—Soumaya Keynes musical performance

Producer: Paul Alexander

Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser

The post The Right Way To Fight a Trade War appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Is AI Really Taking All the Jobs? Anthropic Co-Founder Reveals the Data. Jun 24, 2026

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Today's guest is Jack Clark. He's the co-founder of Anthropic—the artificial intelligence company behind Claude—and the head of its newly launched Anthropic Institute, a forum designed to think through the philosophical, political, and practical challenges that AI poses to society. Nick Gillespie talks with Clark, a former tech journalist at Bloomberg and The Register, about his company's ongoing regulatory battles with the Trump administration; whether Anthropic should have held back Mythos, its superpowerful version, from general release; and what might happen if and when AI becomes fully capable of "recursive self-improvement," or the ability to build itself without human input. They also talk about libertarian and market-based regulatory systems for the internet and tech sector and whether those would yield better outcomes than the ones we've seen so far from the European Union and other conventional governing bodies. 0:00—The promise of artificial intelligence 3:50—Overcoming AI hallucinations and sycophancy 5:08—Military applications of AI 9:38—Anthropic's red lines on mass surveillance and fully automated weapons 14:23—Lessons from the 1990s 16:12—Oversight and regulation of AI technology 23:07—Navigating politics through policy ambiguity 33:31—How does U.S. governance affect global AI policy? 36:42—What is recursive self-improvement? 43:35—How does Clark's literature and journalism background inform his views on AI? 45:43—The liberating aspects of technology 51:15—The effects of AI on employment Producer: Paul Alexander Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser Transcript This is an AI-generated transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy. Nick Gillespie: This is The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. My guest today is Jack Clark. He's the co-founder of Anthropic, and he's one of the most influential figures in AI policy. We are going to talk about the government clampdown on Anthropic in particular and various things going on with that. We're gonna talk about the power of AI, the perils, the pitfalls, pretty much the whole ball of wax. So, Jack Clark, thanks for talking to Reason. Jack Clark: Thanks for having me. So let's start in a broader sense. Talk about what you see as the main kind of promise of AI. Because we're right now, we are definitely in a kind of technological dark cloud moment, where people are freaking out over AI. And you guys at Anthropic are freaking out on a certain level that we'll talk about. But just broadly, in a general way, what is the biggest, like, what's the biggest selling point of AI? I'd split it into three different layers: There's stuff for the individual, stuff for what you might think of as the economy, and stuff for science. So, for the individual today, we have a universal teacher, which is something that people fantasized about building for decades and decades, and it just exists. You can go and spend $0 a month to talk to an expert teacher. And if you spend $20 a month, you can talk to, like, a really good teacher. This is incredible. So that's for the individual. For the economy - the economy - especially in the Western world, it is defined by back-office work and bureaucracy, or what David Graeber called, "Bullshit jobs". We now have a system that can deal with, navigate the bureaucracy and back-office stuff, do it better, in some cases get rid of it, and allow people to get back to the parts of the jobs which either use their skills or have more meaning. Put a specific example on that. Yeah, I'll give you an example. We worked closely with the makers of Ozempic to help them do work on the backend for how they processed and formatted results in their clinical trials. And we took it down from something on the order of two months of work to a week of work. I don't think anyone misses that. No one there is crying at their desk because they can't do that. Yeah, I was the best back-office paper shuffler. Yeah, damn it, that was me. That's what I did. So that and examples like that are found everywhere. There's someone I work with at Anthropic who got so annoyed at processing a certain type of invoice that they just fully automated that. They're not sad about it. Everyone's happy that that's automated. And then for science, we now have systems that, if you read the literature, are co-creating science at the frontier of biology, mathematics, physics, medicine. You are seeing the world's expert scientists co-author papers with Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT. This is a new era for scientific discovery. Not Grok, right? Nobody serious uses Grok. I may have seen it somewhere, but there are other names that come to mind as well. Right. And this is also, you know, one of the examples that gets talked a lot about, which seems amazing, is that when you think of something like X-rays for tumors that might be cancerous or whatever, suddenly the entire world becomes a database, and you have computers training and looking at all of this and just coming up with better diagnostics and prognoses and things like that. Much better diagnostics, much better prognoses. Also, on an individual level, we've now, you know, replaced WebMD, which always tells you you've got cancer and are going to die, with AI systems, which often tell you something a lot more reasonable, factually accurate, and also say, "Probably call the advice nurse and tell them these things." What do you do? I'm forgetting the name of the disease that somebody made up that has gone through, like it's in every AI model now, Baxillism or something. But I mean, I guess just quickly before we move on to kind of more policy issues, how does the AI work to filter out kind of bullshit or mass delusion? Because this is always the problem. Right? So there's a couple of things here. Years ago, AI systems used to hallucinate. They used to make stuff up a lot. And it's basically because we train AI systems to be like a contestant on Jeopardy!. They want to hit the buzzer. The moment you say something, they want to answer. It took a lot of work to say to them, "It's totally reasonable to hit the buzzer and say, 'I don't know,' or to not answer at all." It was kind of contra how we train them. So that took some time. The more pernicious problem, which is still with us, is this issue of sycophancy, which is when AI systems are overly complimentary. When they walk in and they say, "It's amazing to be here on the world's greatest libertarian podcast. What a fantastic conversation we're having." Deeply unhelpful, completely opposite to what useful people in your life do to you. And we have to sort of train that out of the systems, where you want to make them have the form of, like a friend, something that will actually push back on you a little. Now, this introduces many, many, like, rich and interesting questions about what's appropriate or inappropriate there. But we sort of know it when we see it. We know it when we experience obsequiousness or sycophancy in our own life. Talk a little bit about military applications of AI technology. Historically, certainly going back to people like Galileo and whatnot, technology, technological innovation, and defense, broadly kind of loosely defined, it's always been a big part. This was part of your early contentious intersection with the Trump administration. How is AI going to change kind of military and defense applications? Well, there's one way where it's exactly like how it changes everything else. And there's another way that is unique to this, this kind of genre of work. So, often a joke about military organizations is they are logistics companies that have a sharp bit at the very end, right? The logistics stuff is the same back-office stuff I've talked about for everything else. AI can just be wildly helpful there and help automate and improve decision-making and back-office schlep, of which the military and other organizations famously do tons of. I mean, this is Catch-22. The military is the bureaucratic system that exists to kind of punish or torment the people who it supposedly is serving. My brother was in the British Army as well, so it sounds familiar. At the same time, AI can introduce new capabilities at the frontier. You know, the advancement of science creates new things that can be used by the military. An example outside of AI is hypersonic missiles. So we invented missiles. Now we've invented a much faster missile using advances in materials science, which is much harder to shoot down. Also, there's the example of things like drones and other stuff. I think that we can just generally expect AI to create new capabilities at the frontier of the military. And those capabilities, like previous technological creations ranging from nuclear weapons to hypersonics to cluster munitions to biological weapons, are going to be subjects of deep debate among militaries, among governments, and among citizens. Is there a—I don't know—not first to market per se, and obviously AI has already kind of permeated the major powers and many minor powers, but is it going to be something like, "If we can get a nuclear bomb first, whoever we is, then we can stop the creation of further kind of technology"? Or are we going to replay the Cold War, where it's like, ok, the U.S. gets a nuclear weapon, then, you know, Russia and China and a variety of other countries do? It's most helpful to think of AI as being almost equivalent to maybe electricity or oil, in the sense that it is both the thing and the production and management system around it. And that delivers this huge range of like commercial, civil benefits, but it has profound uses in conflict as well. And it also introduces profound weaknesses in conflict. Additionally, the most kind of refined forms of AI, really, really, very smart systems, may have properties that are akin to sort of handle-with-care technologies like nuclear weapons, where you need to find a way to proliferate their beneficial aspects but find ways to control that potentially very militarily decisive aspects. And this was basically the crux of your, of Anthropic's confrontation or conflict with the Trump administration recently, right? Or can you explain that? Because this seems to be the essential backdrop to the current limitation on Anthropic's ability to kind of send its programs around to whoever it wants. We've been longtime supporters of working with the intelligence and defense communities, and Anthropic has also always sought to talk about the full range of issues that lie ahead of us with this technology. At the moment, what we're grappling with is we have a technology, these models called Fable, that is intensely useful in a bunch of commercial ways, and it has some potentially national-security- or defense-relevant properties in cyber and bio. We've worked to find ways to make it hard for those capabilities to proliferate. And we're now in sort of daily discussion—and I obviously can't get into the specifics—with the government about what a sensible policy framework is for how you can both proliferate and export these models without proliferating and exporting the thing that seems more profoundly useful for national security. If we take it back a step, I mean, it was, what, a few months ago when Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense—I keep meaning, I don't want to call it whatever he wants it to be, the secretary of war, secretary of defense—but he was saying that Anthropic wouldn't allow for the way he wanted, or the Trump administration wanted, to deploy certain types of AI. And you guys, in the public narrative, were insisting, "No, certain kinds of kill decisions cannot be relegated to AI." That contradicts your corporate philosophy. And the Trump administration threw a shit fit about that, right? We outlined two red lines. One is about the potential use of AI for domestic mass surveillance on Americans. And another is the use of AI for fully automated weapons. The reason we outlined this is not because we think that we are the ones that can define what's appropriate there. That's absurd. But because it's clearly an area where there needs to be a wider societal debate, there needs to be some notion of what we think is right as a set of individuals, citizens of this country. And we remain standing and ready to work with the U.S. government in all ways that can be helpful, while also we believe that that discussion about those red lines is something that is beneficial to have. Where does that argument stand right now? Because the government wanted to put you guys on a list of, you know, bad corporate citizens, right? Is there any discussion still going on related to defense policies? We're in regular discussion with the U.S. government, and it's important to note that we, you know, we are constantly finding ways to support the government and work with them. And I think that the broader thing that's useful to focus on here is that these models from us are not special. There are other models from other providers that are going to exhibit the same qualities. And our role, now that we've sort of outlined our views, we believe, is for there to be a broader discussion and debate had in the public sphere about this and what is appropriate and what makes sense. Right. I mean, it's hard kind of sitting, reading the news. And it's like, ok, so you guys get into a fight with the Defense Department over the parameters of a contract that you guys had signed. And, you know, the secretary of defense and the president say, "No, you have to give us this. You know, we don't care about whatever contract there was." And then you release Mythos 5, right, which is—or you're bringing that to market—very powerful. And you say, "Hey, we're gonna pull that back, and we're going to release a slightly slimmed-down version for general release, Fable." And then the government says, "Yeah, you know what? You can't release that outside of the country," which is effectively saying that you really can't release it. How is that not just obviously payback from an administration that acts kind of like a criminal gang, where, you know, you pissed in the wrong—you know, you pissed in the punch bowl, and now this is what you get? I can't talk too much about the specifics here. It's obviously a live discussion that we're having. But I would say this is a new technology. It has new capabilities. I actually think that these capabilities are deeply surprising, and they would be surprising to any administration. And here's my view of where I have huge empathy for people who work in the administration is: If you've spent years with a national security community that is developing and fielding capabilities around, say, cyber, these capabilities come from a whole bunch of contractors you work with; they come from the system you understand. And then here are these companies that are building something called AI. AI is a civilian technology. And one day, the AI systems that have been sold as a civilian technology, are used by civilians, and are, like, wildly successful within the American economy, start popping out things that your colleagues in the intelligence agency say, "Hang on, these things look like the things that we work on over here." How do you deal with that? I actually think this is, like, a really challenging question. And what we're doing right now is the messy way of dealing with it, which is you're saying, basically, "This is a lot. We need to figure out how to slow this dow…

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What 1976 Got Right About America Jun 17, 2026

Show notes

Today's guest is Matt Welch, editor at large at Reason and co-host of The Fifth Column podcast.

Welch joins Nick Gillespie for a look back at the summer of 1976 and what it can tell us about America nearly 50 years later. They discuss the surprising reality of the bicentennial, why many observers expected it to be a failure, and how local celebrations ultimately made it a success.

They also examine the cultural impact of Roots, the enduring appeal of The Bad News Bears, and what both works revealed about race, identity, family, and American life in the 1970s. Along the way, they revisit the 1976 Montreal Olympics, the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the uniquely messy spirit of the era.

Finally, Welch and Gillespie discuss what the bicentennial got right about patriotism, why America works best as a creedal nation, and whether the country's strength lies in its ability to embrace multiple stories rather than a single national narrative.

0:00—The realities of the bicentennial

11:25—America 250

19:15—The Bad News Bears

35:28—The cultural impact of Roots

53:10—The 1976 Montreal Olympics

57:53—Bruce Jenner

1:03:42—Does America need a single narrative?

The post What 1976 Got Right About America appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Why So Many People Feel Lost Jun 10, 2026

Show notes

Human beings are "creatures of matter who long to matter," says novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, whose new book is The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. She talks with Nick Gillespie about how all humans struggle to figure out how to lead lives that justify our existence, both in the eyes of others and ourselves, and she describes remarkable cases of people who rescued children discarded during China's one-child policy era, atheists who led leper colonies so the afflicted could die with dignity, and former neo-Nazis who seek to reform racist skinheads.

A MacArthur "genius" award winner who has taught at Harvard University, New York University, and Rutgers University, among other places, Goldstein has published highly acclaimed novels such as The Mind-Body Problem and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, and nonfiction works including Plato at the Googleplex and Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.

The Mattering Instinct investigates what happens when inherited authorities—church, state, family, tribe—lose their power to dictate meaning and individuals must fend for themselves, typically employing strategies she calls transcendence, competition, social belonging, and heroic striving. She invokes Friedrich Hayek's "knowledge problem" to illuminate the dispersed and dynamic qualities of how we all create "mattering projects"—lives worth living—in a world that offers us more and more choice across virtually all areas of activity. Drawing deeply on the philosophical roots of individualism and liberalism, Goldstein offers a moral psychology of freedom, a way to think about individual dignity, pluralism, and self-authorship without devolving into either nihilism or top-down moralism.

0:00—What is the mattering instinct?

4:30—Age, class, and the crisis of meaning

8:46—How do history and technology affect mattering?

10:59—Secularism and mattering

15:00—The four archetypes

27:14—Pursuit of flourishing

32:43—Psychology of freedom

35:43—Frank Meeink

42:50—Lou Xiaoying

51:29—Existential angst

The post Why So Many People Feel Lost appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Was Lincoln More Radical Than We Remember? Jun 03, 2026

Show notes

At the start of his presidency in 1861, Abraham Lincoln supported a constitutional amendment that would have kept the federal government from banning slavery in states where it already existed. In just a few short years, he helped secure passage of the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery throughout the United States and all its territories.

Today's guest is Senior Editor Damon Root, whose new book Emancipation War delves into one of the most fascinating chapters of American history. Root and host Nick Gillespie also discuss the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, Root's previous book on Frederick Douglass, and how the Supreme Court is likely to rule in Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case that will be decided in the next few weeks.

Root writes a twice-weekly newsletter for Reason on legal issues, called Injustice System. Sign up for it here.

Previous appearances:
"Damon Root: Why Frederick Douglass Loved the Constitution (and You Should Too)," December 8, 2020
"Willett, Bolick, Sykes: Three Great Picks to Replace Anthony Kennedy," June 27, 2018
"The Libertarianism of Frederick Douglass," February 8, 2018
"Obamacare at the Supreme Court: Damon Root on King v. Burwell," March 3, 2015
"Battle for the Supreme Court: Judicial Activism vs. Restraint," November 5, 2014
"3 Supreme Court Decisions to Watch," January 24, 2012

0:00–Lincoln wanted to preserve slavery in 1861
8:38–The Northwest Ordinance and precedents for banning slavery
11:27–Frederick Douglas and slavery in the U.S. Constitution
14:07–Salmon Chase
18:40–Lincoln's generals who emancipated slaves
23:37–How Lincoln evolved on slavery
29:47–The Civil Rights Act of 1866
37:13–The 13th Amendment, citizenship, and national identity
39:30–Reconstruction
45:00–The Supreme Court
49:57–Birthright citizenship

The post Was Lincoln More Radical Than We Remember? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

How Moral Panic Creates Black Markets May 27, 2026

Show notes

Today's guest is Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin E. Roth, the author of Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work.

He talks with Nick Gillespie about why some voluntary transactions provoke moral outrage even when no one is being directly harmed. Roth explains why black markets often emerge when governments try to ban activities with persistent demand, why both markets and prohibitions require social support to function, and how unintended consequences can make moralistic policies backfire. They discuss the war on drugs, prostitution, surrogacy, same-sex marriage, price gouging, and why Iran remains the only country in the world with a legal market for kidney donors.

They also explore Roth's work designing kidney exchange networks and school choice systems, how digital technology and private transactions make certain bans harder to enforce, and why harm reduction may work better than prohibition in areas ranging from drug policy to sex work.

0:00—Repugnant transactions and organ sales

9:30—Blood plasma, coercion, and class bias

16:46—School choice reform

22:59—Same-sex marriage, abortion, and contraception

29:59—The war on drugs and moral economics

38:55—Roth's theoretical origin story

43:45—Uber, AI, and technological efficiencies

51:26—Price gouging and consumer resentment

54:27—Pornography, prostitution, and privacy

1:05:21—Has America become more economically moral?

1:12:15—Biden's economic agenda and Trump's tariffs

1:17:04—Winning a Nobel Prize

Producer: Paul Alexander

Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser

The post How Moral Panic Creates Black Markets appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Why Populism Leads to Decline May 20, 2026

Show notes

Today's guest is Johan Norberg, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of Peak Human: What We Can Learn From the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages.

He talks with Nick Gillespie about the historical patterns behind flourishing civilizations, from the Roman Republic to modern America. Norberg argues that societies thrive when they remain open to trade, immigration, experimentation, and new ideas, but begin to decay when fear and nostalgia push them toward protectionism, centralization, and tribal politics.

They also discuss the resurgence of populism in the United States and Europe, why tariffs and anti-globalization politics keep returning throughout history, and whether America is becoming more risk-averse and nativist. Norberg explains why he believes optimism and innovation can still win, explores the promise of artificial intelligence, and reflects on whether China is entering a new golden age or repeating the mistakes that led past civilizations into decline.

0:00—Why open societies thrive

3:07—The Roman Republic

10:05—America as a creedal nation

11:57—The rise of nativism

16:15—The dangers of nostalgia

20:31—What sparks renaissance?

26:40—Are older societies more risk averse?

28:33—Populism and Viktor Orbán's defeat

32:04—Left-wing populism

34:10—Javier Milei

35:42—Tariffs and free trade

40:28—Is China in a golden age?

The post Why Populism Leads to Decline appeared first on Reason Magazine.

The Global War on Free Speech May 15, 2026

Show notes

Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff are co-authors of The Future of Free Speech, a new book examining what they describe as a global "free speech recession."

In this episode, Mchangama and Kosseff talk with Nick Gillespie about why democracies are increasingly embracing speech restrictions once associated with authoritarian regimes, how fears about misinformation and child safety are reshaping internet policy, and why both the political left and right have grown more skeptical of free expression. They discuss the rise of government pressure on social media companies, the future of anonymous speech and Section 230 protections, and why they believe counter-speech, transparency, and decentralized online platforms offer a better alternative to censorship.

This interview was taped in front of a live audience at an event in New York City.

0:00—What is the free speech recession?

7:36—Speech after the collapse of communism

15:06—How important is technology for escaping censorship?

22:38—EU hate speech laws

27:55—Sullivan v. Times decision

30:19—Afroman's legal victory

34:53—Is there a crackdown on political speech in America?

39:22—Jawboning

42:44—Social media censorship

51:40—Solutions to reverse the free speech recession

The post The Global War on Free Speech appeared first on Reason Magazine.

John Fetterman: 'I'm a Very Pro-Capitalist Democrat' May 13, 2026

Show notes

Today's guest is Sen. John Fetterman (D–Pa.), who just a decade ago looked like the future of Bernie Sanders–style populism, a tattooed Colossus clad in downscale hoodies and gym shorts who championed higher minimum wages, pot legalization, criminal justice reform, and more spending on social welfare programs. After 13 years as mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, one of the poorest towns in the state during his tenure, and a term as lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, he beat physician Mehmet Oz for an open Senate seat in 2022. But since coming to Washington, Fetterman has blazed a path in the Senate as unique and oversized as his frame, routinely criticizing members of his own party for "catering to the fringe and agitated parts of our base" and accusing them of antisemitism and suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. He tells Nick Gillespie that the avowedly socialist politics of progressive Democrats like Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner (an actual "communist," declares Fetterman), Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani are alienating men and moderates and spell long-term doom for his party and the country. Fetterman denounces both former President Joe Biden's failure to control the Southern border and President Donald Trump's antipathy toward legal immigration, says that entitlement reform is overdue and the national debt "is a ticking time bomb," and praises capitalism as the one system that has consistently improved living standards. He defends expansive military action against Iran and in defense of Ukraine, praises Israel for being the one functioning democracy in the Middle East, and calls for legalizing marijuana and psychedelics. 0:00—Are Democrats catering to the fringe? 4:32—Why did Fetterman support Sanders in 2016? 7:53—Immigration policy 16:15—Would Fetterman support a path to citizenship? 17:22—Drug legalization 20:12—Where has Trump failed? 21:57—Israel and Iran 26:04—Does Fetterman trust the Trump administration on Iran? 30:10—Democratic support for Israel 32:19—The limits of military intervention 38:36—The national debt 41:20—Entitlement reform 43:25—Braddock, Pennsylvania 45:50—Fetterman is a proud capitalist Producer: Paul Alexander Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser Transcript This is an AI-generated transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy. Nick Gillespie: All right. OK. This is The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. And my guest today is John Fetterman, the outspoken Democratic senator from Pennsylvania. Senator, good to talk with you. John Fetterman: Yeah, well, thank you for the invitation to have a conversation. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, I love to have conversations with people all across the whole thing. And so, yes, it's a real pleasure. OK. Well, we met 15 years ago on the set of Bill Maher's Real Time when you were merely the mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Let me play a quick clip from that episode. Bill Maher Clip [00:00:48 - 00:01:03] Well, we continue to be style icons in our respective worlds. Beyond that, let's talk a little bit about what has changed in your politics. You recently wrote in The Washington Post that you're not going to be changing parties. People have said that, "Oh, you know, is he going to become a Republican or an independent?" But in the Washington Post piece, you did have critical words for your own party. You recently told Fox News, of all places, that the Democrats, "are an orgy of socialism." In your own piece, you wrote that, "the Democrats seem to be catering to the fringe and agitated parts of our base." What's going on with the Democratic Party that's upsetting you so much? Well, let me just step back. I mean, I assume that you had the clip that, you know, all those years ago back on Real Time. Yeah. Yeah. I know that we had that, but I mean, is it fair to say that we reconnected online and then—like friends, and just, you know, it just moved on. So, I mean, most people weren't aware of that, the dust-up way back then. And ironically, just a couple of days ago, I was on the Real Time show. So a lot has changed since when you and I first encountered each other, and I was very eager, happy to have this conversation. So, you know, where we are right now, so if you could just, what's that question again? I really want to make sure. You've told Fox News recently that the Democrats "are in an orgy of socialism." You wrote in The Washington Post that your party is "catering to its fringe and agitated parts of its base." What, you know, can you explain that a little bit more, and what do you think is driving that? I mean, I think the extremism is driving it, without a doubt. I mean, look at the primaries all across in the Senate and in the House and look at the kinds of people that have already been elected. Like, for example, the mayor in Seattle, she's an absolute socialist, if not more. And now people, "Hey, I'm leaving," and she's like, "Bye." And just describe that kind of a thing. And then, of course, New York, that's its own situation too. And I thought DeSantis had a great line saying, you know, "Mamdani is my favorite real estate agent now." And it's driving people away. People can move and they can just vote, you know, with their feet. And that explains why Florida continues to flourish. But a lot of these states like New York and other blue states. We've read that $2 trillion have migrated out of these states too. So I don't think those are the kind of people that are the problem now. And if you make billionaires…you know, the Democratic Party is the problem, except they love the billionaires that fund those kinds of causes and those kind of organizations that are actually driving apart a lot of the protesting. And that's where that energy is as well. So look at some of the views now that people are espousing. So it's moving more and more in socialism and communism. I mean, in Maine, for example, Graham Platner, avowed communist. He described himself as a communist. Antifa, that's not a slur for me. That's not GOP kinds of hit. That's his own words, how he described that. Can I ask you, what about your own personal evolution then? Because in 2016, you endorsed Bernie Sanders in the primaries for the Democratic Party. He's an avowed democratic socialist or a socialist at various points, he's called himself. You know, what is it that rubbed you the wrong way about socialists or communists? Well, I mean, in 2016, it was much more about the minimum wage and some other very basic kinds of things. And now that's just turned into much more standing with Cuba, standing with Venezuela, standing with the Iranian regime, and turn that into much more— becoming more increasingly anti-American, for me. So my views really haven't changed that much. Things that I supported, I was very supportive about gay rights, you know, thing. Back in 2013, even before you and I, well, it would have been a couple years later. Yeah, you know, I was officializing a gay marriage when that was illegal. And I was happy to get arrested on that. So my views really haven't changed. What's really changed is the party. And in 2024, I was campaigning for Kamala Harris there as a Democrat, very clear we were going to lose and a lot of the excesses that we've had in 2020 came back to revisit, and that really, I think, cost us that election in 2024. I'm sorry, Nick, let me say. The excess of the party back then summoned the second term of the Trump administration. Yeah. You've said that the Democratic Party has become anti-man or anti-men. Yeah. What forms does that take? And again, I mean, you can say, "OK, well, extremists in the party are driving it," but what is the motivating factor? Like, you know, what is going on that people are lurching, Democrats are lurching very far to the left in terms of economic policy, but also identity politics? Well, if you make someone feel uncomfortable or unwelcome, they will leave. And they've done that. Back in 2016, I've witnessed that. I lived directly across the street from a steel mill in the union hall. And I was doing an event for Secretary Clinton at that time. And I was asking the union president, "Well, where's your people on that?" And he's like, "At least half, half if not more, are in Trump." And there was just coincidentally a guy in a big truck drove by and he honked, "Ha ha ha, go Trump, go Trump." And he had truck nuts on the trailer and had a Trump sticker. And I'm like, you know, clearly that's what's already well underway. And now I think we effectively can count that a lot of those traditional union members have already left the Democratic Party. And that's where we are. And it's been a serious realignment of parts of our base. And I think that's driving some of the more extreme things of our party now too. On a rhetorical basis, you said that Trump is plain-spoken. And that's a charitable way of saying it. When he announced to run for president, he said, "I'm not politically correct." And then he launched into a diatribe against Mexicans being rapists and drug dealers and things like that. But is part of it that Trump doesn't? I mean, it's hard to say. I was going to say that he doesn't bullshit because half of the things he says are just completely made up, but that he is blunt and says what he means. Yeah, well, uses and engage in things that I would never engage on that. Just a couple of hours before we are now have this conversation, he put an image of Democrats in sewage, you know, in the reflecting pool there, here in Washington, D.C. I don't do those kinds of things. I don't support those things. But I also think it's kind of ridiculous to heckle him over $13 million to rehab that. I mean, that's just kind of small ball, for me. But let's talk about immigration, you know, we absolutely, the Democratic Party became an open-border party. That used to be like a GOP slur. But then you realize those numbers. It really was. I mean, you had 300,000 people showing up at our border every month. That's the size of Pittsburgh, where I live in that area. So, you know, I try to describe that to my party. This is a serious problem. And people are angry and all of our blue cities have become overwhelmed. New York, Chicago, Denver, Boston, all those were overwhelmed with migrants. I was a Democrat being very, very pro-immigration, as I remain that. But we have to secure our border and now deport all the criminals. I don't— Yeah, let me ask about this because this draws a distinction not just between Trump and the Democrats but you and many Democrats. So the border is secure and actually Biden in his last year basically secured the southern border. What is the best policy toward making legal immigration easier and having a higher volume? Because Trump has cut legal immigration. He's, you know, they're the INS or, you know, the CBP and ICE are going after people that are here legally. You know, they're violent at times, but just overall in terms of numbers, in terms of H-1Bs, in terms of regular visas and green cards, in terms of students coming here to study from abroad, you know, Trump is exceptionally anti-immigrant. What is a better policy once we presume that the border is secure? Well, I mean, real chaos for me and immigration, we became that as in our party, without a doubt. Not a single Democrat could identify what's the solution. You know, well, what do you do with 300,000 people showing up at the border every month? People were living at the airport in Boston. You know, New York City spent $8, $9 billion to house and take care of those people and secure the border. And yeah, the Biden administration finally made some changes. They should have already had them in place already. Why not secure the border? Because I think they were afraid of the party and that would be anti-immigration or racist for those other kinds of things. So now we think what's appropriate, now secure the border, deport all the criminals. And I was the Democratic lead for the Laken Riley Bill. Now I agree, I agree for Renée Good or Alex Pretti, but I also agree for Laken Riley or Miles Young and other people that were victimized by people that should have never been here or already should have been deported because after they broke the law. Yeah, but that's easy, right? I mean, in a way, it's easy to say, "OK, yeah, and somebody who's here illegally and causes a violent crime, they should be deported, they should be imprisoned and or deported immediately." But what do we do about, you know, I mean you would know this in western Pennsylvania, I lived in southwestern Ohio, when people stop moving to a place or people start moving out, you need to have new people moving into places. What is a good, viable, legal immigration system that will help American communities thrive, businesses thrive, the economy thrive, as well as the culture? Well, we have the most generous and the largest immigration program of any country in the world already. And people and immigrants are coming to Pennsylvania. Look in parts of Pennsylvania, like in Redding, and the Lehigh Valley, across our state now. The immigrant community is actually driving a lot of those economies all across Pennsylvania. And also agriculture is our top industry in Pennsylvania. Targeting and going after these workers is absolutely wrong. I've spoke out against that too. You know, I don't know why, you know, why would you, you know, don't, don't, don't harass and target otherwise lawful people that are just working hard. No, I agree with that. I think we should protect our Dreamers too. My wife was a Dreamer. And again, that's the thing, you reference what's easy. It's like, no, that's common sense. It's not easy. That's common sense. We betrayed those basic kinds of standards as a party. And now the Republicans, Trump has betrayed those in the same common-sense standard, you know, and have the kind of calamity in Minneapolis, things that I'd never support those kinds of things. I became the only Democrat that I voted for Markwayne Mullin for the next secretary. You know, Noem was a disaster. I called for her to go. Absolute disaster that she is for…So I'm working with Markwayne. Markwayne promised, "I'm not gonna be the guy in the headlines." And there aren't any headlines not to. You don't have the kinds of tragedies of Minneapolis right now. Finding the right way forward, for me, that's where I think me and the vast majority of Americans will be too. Calling balls and strikes, saying, the Democrats, we absolutely became the open-border. And the Republicans, you can't turn into like a twisted theater like what happened in Minneapolis now too. And targeting, you know, migrants that are a vital part of our economy as well too. And that's finding a way forward, now that's driven by the extremes, you know, in my party and on the other side as well too. Yeah, what do you have to say to Republicans who are, including senators, people like Eric Schmitt from Missouri, who go on and on about being heritage Americans or talking about how, you know, the real Americans are the people who trace their heritage back here to, you know, sometime before the Civil War. Is that any way to build a viable nation going forward? Yeah, I mean, we all have our own different views for that. But for me, my family is a product of immigration, illegal immigration. My views on that haven…

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