The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie

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Could New York Go Bankrupt Again? Jul 30, 2025

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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 this before the rise of mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who promises to blow spending through the roof, enact new taxes, and create masses of new regulations. If you want to understand what it takes to bankrupt a city, listen up. New York might be sleepwalking into another fiscal disaster, and this time, there might not be a bailout waiting. 0:00—Intro 1:24—Mamdani's agenda and economic collapse 6:03—How New York went broke in 1975 8:21—Budget fraud and political chicanery 12:20—Out of control spending 16:20—Municipal bond market saturation 20:11—Bailout politics of Mayor Abraham Beame, Governor Hugh Carey, and President Gerald Ford 31:47—Who is Felix "the Fixer" Rohatyn? 36:37—Why the budget grew during the austerity era 38:59—How NYC returned to budget normalcy 42:53—Is New York repeating the mistakes of its past? 47:00—Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo 50:12—Why NYC won't return to the Bloomberg model 56:32—Generation gaps and voter behavior __________________________________________________ Transcript This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy. Nick Gillespie: Richard E. Farley, thanks for talking to Reason. Richard Farley: Thank you for having me. You work in the world of finance and all of this—what is your best estimate of, if Mamdani wins in the fall and he gets his, you know, he runs the table, he gets to do everything he wants. What happens to the population of New York? Well, let's talk about what happens to the fiscal situation and the taxes, because that will drive a lot of it. And also, there's one thing we need to talk about too, which is law and order. I think that if you increase the budget by $20 to $25 billion—which I think he's clearly capable of doing—we're not even talking about the nonsense about grocery stores, although he's only saying 5 or 6 grocery stores. So that's probably a sidebar. If you increase the budget by $20 billion—which I think he's capable of doing—that's an increase of 15 to 20 percent in a time when every projection says revenue is going to decrease. If you throw into that taxes that will drive people to New Jersey, Westchester, etc. Or totally out of the area. Or totally out of the area. That could create a structural deficit equal to that. That money's not coming from the federal government as long as Trump's here, and there's a Republican Congress—or even one house of Republicans. And part of what you argue in the book is, the bigger difference too, is New York is still the fourth most populous state, but it is no longer in play. What's amazing to be reminded of in reading Drop Dead is that New York would sometimes vote Republican, sometimes vote Democrat. It was a swing state. And now everybody knows—like, Democrats can say "fuck you," and Republicans can certainly say "fuck you"—right? Because it's not coming their way. Correct. Now I think no one will allow New York City to devolve into chaos. There will be a bailout at some point. The issue under consideration are what would those conditions be? When you have to worry about winning the nomination in 1976, you have to treat New York with a little bit of kid gloves. If you don't have to worry about that—because a Democrat couldn't lose it if he tried or she tried, and a Republican couldn't win it if he or she tried—you can play politics the other way and be more draconian. So that's something to keep an eye on. But I think the real issue—of whether or not you lose people in New York and degrade the tax base to create a very serious fiscal crisis quickly—is if people feel unsafe in New York City. And by that, you don't mean financially. You mean… It's partly that, but also physically. If I have a Marxist in Gracie Mansion—I wonder if the Marxist will live in Gracie Mansion; I don't know—and I think he is a Marxist. I mean, he says, "I want to seize the means of production." I think you trust people when they say these things. Who also says things like "globalize the intifada" and then won't really back off of that in a way that decries violence. What will the policing policies be? He's never really backed off of "defund the police" in an aggressive way. He won't say he'll keep Keechant as police commissioner who now, I think, may be the most popular political figure in the city, if you want to call the police commissioner a political figure. You absolutely should. And, you know, there has been—this is also something to think about nationwide—there's been a decline in violent crime year over year. People are talking about it's going to be the biggest single thing. Clearly, policing matters. But it's not clear exactly how much. But you're basically saying if we get a guy who is a "defund the police," romancer of revolutionary violence, things are going to get hairy. I don't know. I think there's a risk of that. He's a bit of an empty vessel. He's 33 years old. He's a bit of a dilettante, in my judgment. He's relatively new to city politics. Never really run anything. He is very glib. He's very handsome. He's charismatic. But what does he really stand for and mean? And when you have the executive function of overseeing the largest police force in the country—in a city where there's a thin veneer of law and order—we saw that in 2020. It doesn't take much for street gangs to go down and decide they're going to loot and make a lot of money off of a ineffective law enforcement apparatus. The book is Drop Dead: How a Coterie of Corrupt Politicians, Bankers, Lawyers, Spinmeisters, and Mobsters Bankrupted New York, Got Bailed Out, Blamed the President, and Went Back to Business as Usual (And It Might Be Happening Again). I have no responsibility for the subtitles. But you know what? You've got to own it, right? I don't know that I need to read any more of the book after that. But this is about the fiscal crisis of New York City in 1975. Correct. Can you summarize quickly what was happening in New York that brought the biggest city in America to the brink of bankruptcy? Yeah. I think the larger quantity of factors affected all large industrial Northern and Midwestern cities. Recession of 1973 and of 1974, rising interest rates, the cutback in aid from Washington—LBJ's poverty programs, et cetera—being scaled back by Nixon. You had a longer-term impact of the hemorrhaging of industrial jobs, really starting in the late '40s but accelerating. The peak year for industrial jobs as a percentage of the economy was in the late '40s. Correct. I think New York was still the leading industrial state until about '48, '49. Even though the low-skilled jobs were moving out, you had an influx of low-skilled workers from the South escaping discrimination. And from Puerto Rico, obviously, looking for a higher standard of living. You had a similar exodus of white ethnic working-class voters. So you had this shift in demographics and economic impact, which would have been a problem no matter what. But in a lot of ways, I mean, one of the things you're arguing is that, "Yeah, that's true, and it was true everywhere in every type of city, but the real problem was what was going…" Absolutely. You can discuss it a number of different ways, but there were two things unique to New York. One was the chicanery—the accounting shenanigans, the budgetary fraud, the illegal incurrence of debt to mask deficits. So we'll put that in one bucket. That's, of course, the most fun to talk about. If we're not going to talk about chicanery and characters, we might as well write about librarians in the 1970s. What was going on in New York City was also mirrored at the state level under Nelson Rockefeller Correct. Not quite as bad, but on a larger scale. But basically what we saw—and throughout many states, many cities—there was just a commitment to spend a lot more money than was coming in. And to use what were previously thought to be unethical, perhaps even illegal, means of doing so. Of course. Nelson Rockefeller—famous for the moral obligation bond. Through John Mitchell… Yeah, explain that. Sure. Way back when—when dinosaurs roamed the earth—when a government wanted to issue debt, it issued it under the full faith and credit of the state, the city, what have you, Ok? And all jurisdictions had constitutional limits or legal limits on how much you could incur. Beginning in the 1920s, because they didn't want to get the referendum vote—which you needed from the voters to approve that kind of debt, and voters at some point were going to say "no more"—they came up with agency debt. Which was, the state of New York, for example, forms a subsidiary, calls it the Port Authority. And the Port Authority or the Triborough Authority issues the debt. And the debt is paid by real sources of revenue that have been deferred from the state to that entity—tunnel and bridge tolls, port fees. Those bonds were what they call "self-liquidating," which means a bond investor looks at the projections of the tolls and other revenue—stadium authorities, ticket sales—and says, "Ok, this will more than repay my debt, I'll buy the bonds." Nelson Rockefeller, starting in the early '60s, took an idea that a lawyer named John Mitchell came up with for a federal government education program to build schools. And this is not just any John Mitchell. Oh no, this is the John Mitchell—Watergate fame, Martha Mitchell fame, and all kinds of fame. John Mitchell came up with an idea that said, "Even if you want to borrow for programs that won't repay themselves—like low-income housing—you can get bond buyers to buy it as long as you convince them, with a wink and a nod, that the state will stand behind it." Well, responsible people, like the comptroller of the state at that point, Arthur Levitt, said, "Oh, wait a minute. If the state's going to stand behind it, you have to get a referendum. There's no winking and nodding here." But Nelson Rockefeller loved the wink and the nod. And they came up with something where they explained it to the market by saying, "The state is not legally obligated to repay your debt. But if the program doesn't generate enough revenue, it's morally obligated." And the governor agrees to submit a bill to the legislature to require the state to make good on the debt. And the market bought off on it. Why did the market do that? Is it because they were like, "Hey, you know what? The economy is booming. There's some bust, but we're still…" There are different theories on that. I think the biggest theory was they were convinced in 1961, I think when it first came in, that the political power of Nelson Rockefeller and his allies in the state of New York would make good on this debt. 1961 was the last year that New York was the most populous state in the country. Correct. Right, because by '62, I believe, California overtook it, which is a big backdrop of what's happening in New York City. Just to back up one sec. Of course, the rating agencies are always around. Yeah. And the rating agencies bought off on rating these bonds and giving them a decent rating. So you've got the sort of creep where the politicians say, "Wink and a nod," the rating agencies say, "Okay, we'll take that and give it a good rating," and then the market says, "Fine." And once you have a precedent of a bond deal being priced appropriately in the marketplace, then the sky's the limit. And starting in the late '50s, early '60s, New York City also—again, following different parts of the country—just said, "You know what? Let's spend more." And you write in the book—and this is, you know, I guess it's not surprising, but it remains shocking—that New York City in the '70s was spending more per capita than any other city in the country. Yes. What was it spending it on? We talked about two differences between New York and other cities, and of course, other cities didn't have a fiscal crisis. One was the chicanery. The other was that New York City took on more obligations and responsibilities than any other city in the country. What are we talking about? Its own university system. Well, you had a state university system—SUNY—which is very large. You had private universities, Catholic universities. Ok. You have a hospital system. Well, that may have made sense before Medicare. But why do you need Medicaid—why do you need a hospital system when you have the federal funding of private hospitals? They ran the courts. Until '68, they ran the subways. You may say to someone, "Well, why would a city take on this responsibility given the fiscal issues that that entails?" Well, it's very simple. It's called patronage jobs. They want Democratic politicians in New York to be able to hand out those jobs and those contracts and those goodies—not Democratic politicians at all. So New York had an incredibly bloated budget. Correct. One of the takeaways from the book is that, through the mid-'70s, basically everybody who lived in New York was getting multiple streams of revenue from the city. Either they worked for it. They might have had a no-show job. Or they were benefiting from some other kind of stream. So there are two things to keep in mind. One is when Mayor Wagner gave the unions the right to collective bargaining, that really transformed the dynamic of the relationship between the city and the unions. Victor Gotbaum said very bluntly in 1967, "We have the power to elect our own boss." And over the course of the Wagner administration into the Lindsay administration and into Beame, you saw increased benefits to public employee unions. This also reflected a national trend, because it was JFK who signed off on collective bargaining for public unions. If you count the number of votes of public employee union members and their immediate family members who are voting age, that's enough votes to win just about every Democratic primary for mayor, going back all the way to '67. So when you have that sort of power and influence—when you realize that—then your demands become greater and greater, and the pressure to accede to those demands obviously becomes overwhelming. So you sign off. "You" meaning, you know, Abe Beame and the City Council and everybody in a political job is like, "Okay, yeah, we're going to give more money to more voters. And then we're going to use these bullshit techniques to convince them." Correct. And the overwhelming political imperative to not take away from the voting citizens is really—if you want to put your finger on one thing—it's that. It's easier to never give in the first place than it is to take away. And once you have this enormous smorgasbord of government-financed programs—which helped the middle class, by the way, much more than the poor. Yeah, no, no, on both ends, right? Like they're the ones who use the parks and use CUNY ultimately, or City College. But they're also the one…

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Streaming Music Isn't a Free Market. It's a Regulated Monopoly. Jul 23, 2025

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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 the best one-liner about selling out since The Who. If you care about music, creative freedom, and getting paid for your work, this one is for you. 0:00—Intro 0:52—Lowery's Reason connection 2:34—Fathers, Sons and Brothers 15:25—Lowery's musical inspirations 19:25—Camper Van Beethoven 28:31—What it was like being indie in the '80s 35:48—Cracker and alternative rock 42:26—What does it mean to "sell out"? 48:56—Streaming music and artist compensation 58:01—Lowery's class-action lawsuits 1:01:07—Royalty rates and copyright protections 1:07:30—Has the DTC model improved the music business? 1:15:50—Optimism for the future of music Transcript This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy. Nick Gillespie: So, David Lowery, it is a pleasure to be talking to you. Thanks for talking to Reason. David Lowery: Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. And you have told me in a different conversation, when you were a wee student at UC Santa Cruz, you had a roommate or a dorm mate who was a Reason reader. Can you remind me about that? Yeah, well, there was a couple of connections to that. But yeah, I had a—he wasn't really a roommate, but he lived in the same building—was a guy that we just called Scott the Anarchist. And that was sort of where my introduction to the magazine came from. And then I later, when I was in college, I worked at a farm, which is detailed on this solo album. And the owner was just a full-blown anarcho-capitalist, I would say. Did that mean you had to pay to leave the job every day or something like that? That could be a brutal regime. Right. That's my description of him. We got along actually pretty well. But considering Santa Cruz was so lefty, my calculation is that I probably found the two libertarian anarchists in the whole county, right? And they sort of were influential to me in a lot of ways. Well, it's always good, when you're in any kind of monoculture, to hang out with the people who are not quite fitting in. Absolutely, absolutely. We're going to talk about your experiences with Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker and the music industry more broadly, especially issues about IP as music shifted from kind of record stores and analog needles dragging through vinyl to streaming. All kinds of the interesting IP battles and the way that record labels went from being villainous for one reason and then for other reasons. We'll talk about that in a bit. But first, I want to talk about the new record Father's Sons and Brothers, which is a musical memoir, a musical autobiography that you've released on vinyl as well as online. And you're writing a Substack where you explain the background of each song. Can you explain what you're trying to do with Father's Sons and Brothers and why now? Right. So, I started this shortly before COVID. I sort of felt like there were some people in my life that deserved their own song or a little explanation or something like that. So, that's sort of a memoir-ish type thing. At the same time, I'd had several people urging me, like, "Now's the time of your life when you do the autobiography." But there's definitely a formula to doing these sort of rock autobiographies, and I didn't have a lot of the elements there, in my opinion. I didn't struggle. The first album Camper Van Beethoven puts out is played on the BBC. So, there's a lot of tension that isn't there. There's no airplane crash that wipes out half the band or anything. That's right. I didn't have the parents that shipped me off to some sort of indoctrination camp because I became a punk rocker or something like that. None of those things happened to me. Everybody was supportive. I got lucky all the time. So, the shape of the written autobiography, to me, wasn't there. Also, too, you write all the time, that's a very different skill than writing music. I only have to worry about five minutes. I just felt like this was going to be a whole new skill I was going to have to learn, to write an autobiography. So I thought, "Well,why don't I just do it with— I'm already checking some boxes, writing about some people that I need to write about. I'll just start recording CDs" essentially, and "I'll be done when I'm done. I'm recording these songs" So, that's how it started. Then, the other element of it, though, was interesting to me, because for me, it's easier for me to write music than it is to write lyrics. I know it may not sound like that, but it's hard to find things to sing about. I keep a little notepad file in my phone where I write down titles or an idea or something, just because I need those. And this was easy because I'd be like, "Ok, talk about my sister now. I want to talk about my grandfather on my mom's side when I talk about this." It was a good plot device for me to do this. And then it matched the COVID shutdown where the music business sort of went away. About a year into this, we had the COVID shutdown, and then it's like, "Okay, well, this is really personal." It's just me sitting with my little tiny digital eight-track recorder. The opening song recollects your first memory or something close to it. But you write—you're in Georgia now, you've spent time in Virginia—but fundamentally, the musical space that you seem to occupy generally, but especially on this record, to me anyways, is California. Can you talk a little bit about California? Like you mentioned in a song, a super bloom of a certain kind of flower or weed in the Coachella Valley. Talk a bit about that. What does California mean? Because California, in rock music, California is the backdrop for a lot of stuff. It seems like things very quickly left Philadelphia and New York—and being up on the rooftop in New York or being real hot in the city or something like that—to this California, which can mean a lot of different things. But what does California mean to you, and what does that super bloom represent to you? Yeah. So, the super bloom was doing two things. The super bloom is the late-winter, early-spring burst of wildflowers that you will get in the desert if the conditions are right. Not every year. Sometimes it skips 10 years. And it's this explosion of life. So in one way, I'm talking about the explosion of life in that it's my age—I'm like 14 years old, boys are growing, you're sort of getting elements of being an adult, and stuff like that. It was also California at that time, which had gone through kind of a super bloom. Everybody that was around me where we lived in California—my father was in the Air Force, he got stationed in California. Was in an area called the Inland Empire, which is right next to a separate area called the Coachella Valley. It had exploded with people, mostly immigrants from other parts of the United States, specifically a lot of people from the South, from Texas, from Oklahoma. You had this wild blossoming not just of life but of the economy and culture and things like that. Most people tend to focus on San Francisco and Hollywood, at that time, or coastal LA, but the same thing happened inland in the deserts. My grandparents came out there, and cousins came out there basically to work in the agricultural industry, and then shifted to servicing the rich people on the golf courses and the Hollywood celebrities in Palm Springs and stuff like that. It was just a really fascinating time—a good time to be alive in California. I have a more positive spin on it than, say, Joan Didion. The dreamers of the dream and… I have a more positive take on it than she does. Yeah, talk about that. Because the Grapes of Wrath, of course, ends with the Okies leaving the Dust Bowl. Then you kind of skip ahead and get to Joan Didion or, before her, James Cain and hard boiled that—or Nathaniel West. California, particularly Southern California, is kind of the asshole of the country, and all of the bad people get shaken down into there. And it's a hard, grubby, déclassé life of endless yearning and dissatisfaction. You have a different view of that. Well, yeah, my family came out of such poverty in Arkansas and personal tragedy as well too, which I go into on the record. My grandfather didn't read or write. He signed his name with an X. He basically took care—he was like horses, farming, agriculture. Figured out how to service people's pools—a little side business for him. Swimming for a cement pond. Right. Yeah. The cement pond. And for them, this was a wonderful life. They made decent money. They bought a house again. Eventually their children and the grandchildren heard about the wonderful life in California, and they all followed them out there. At first, they really were literally in the fields picking fruit. Picking dates was a big thing to do. Amazing. It's dangerous work. And then, eventually, I don't think nobody ever got rich—although my uncle was the marshal of Riverside County at one point. And you had a couple of cousins who got— Who were on the other side of the law. Yeah, that's right. You know, the album, though, is not some kind of super feel-good album. There's a lot of darkness and tragedy, but also hope in it. It reminded me a lot of another California transplant—who it didn't end up as well—Gram Parsons. But there's a touch in this album of what he used to call "cosmic American music," which is very rooted in Americana tradition, particularly blues and R&B and country, and what used to be called "hillbilly music". It's both uplifting and sad at the same time. Does that resonate with you? It seems to me there's a whole vein—Brian Wilson died recently—and the Beach Boys, on the one hand, they're the happiest band on earth: they're upbeat, they all look good, have white teeth, blue eyes, and blonde hair. And yet there's something unbelievably sad and depressing about their music, I find. The Byrds are like this too. I don't think this album is not depressing, but it has that mix—it's upbeat, it's yearning, it's positive, but it's also deeply kind of riven with sadness and tragedy. Yeah, so the song that probably does that the most is "Piney Woods," which discusses this area of Arkansas, Louisiana, and East Texas. I have a song that's kind of a study of the area. But specifically, if you listen to the melody of that song, it is almost totally major-key, almost straight-up melody. It's a very positive melody, but the subject matter of it—it got better and better the more I dealt with the details of the song, which is the suicide of my dad's brother. That was the contrast that really made that song work. It's almost so folky, it harkens back more to the Celtic roots of the American forms. It's almost there. It's so folky. That's part of it. A lot of my perspective is an Inland California perspective, which is much more—Bakersfield, obviously—but it's much more infused with the Southern and the country rock music, whereas the Beach Boys have less of that in what they do. So that's a bit of it as well. Who do you count as your musical icons? Because it was also interesting listening to this record—Neil Young during COVID, who, Canadian by birth, Californian by choice, I suppose—he released a bunch of performances as well as songs during COVID that were somehow set in a psychic California. That can be both upbeat and downbeat at the same time. And I was thinking, you're like occupying the Riverside County—or, the Inland Empire version of Neil Young's Northern California. Who are your musical heroes that guide you? Well I think I'm probably pretty influenced, honestly, by the classic rock artists and stuff like that. But if you want to talk specifically about this sort of little niche I've moved into, I would say the biggest influence probably was Kaleidoscope. With the American, with David Lindley… One song of theirs I know well, I believe, is "The Sky Children." I don't know if I know that. There are two Kaleidoscopes. There's a British Kaleidoscope, and there's a Southern California… Oh, okay, so this may be the other one. But talk about Southern California Kaleidoscope. So California Kaleidoscope—they were also from the Inland Empire. It was David Lindley, who's a fiddler, guitarist—he played with everybody from Jackson Browne, did television themes, all kinds of stuff. But this was his '60s psychedelic folk band. They all played different instruments. They all play fiddle at some point on the record. I remember I started Camper Van Beethoven, and I gave a tape to Ray Farrell from SST, and he goes, "Oh, so you guys loved Kaleidoscope growing up?" And I was like, "Who?" "From your neighborhood, how do you not know them?" Right? So in a way, that's the big Camper Van Beethoven influence. And then from there, I suppose, I had to retroactively discover stuff. I had to discover Bruce Springsteen in the mid-2000s. Things like that would happen to me just because, I don't know, I had some impression of what he was about, and it was wrong. So in a way, there's some of Bruce Springsteen's "Ghost of Tom Joad" in this album. In fact, to the point where I accidentally took a chord progression. But the progressions aren't copyrightable. Well, give it time. Give it time, yeah. So it's kind of all over the place. But for this record, I'd point to those two—literally Kaleidoscope and… I know Bruce Springsteen is sort of playing characters, and then telling their stories. In this, I'm not playing a character, but sort of his randomness where he'll talk about really specific things—like a woman's shoe, he ties her shoe, as he fits her for a shoe. Really small details that makes the song come to life. So I've got to say, there's some of that in there as well too. I could go on and on listing… Let's talk about Camper Van Beethoven, because they were a band—I wrote for the American version of Smash Hits, which was, if you ever wanted to confess to a murder, that was the magazine to do it in because nobody read it. But I remember coming across Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. I reviewed it. I gave it a thumbs-up—or we might have used two fingers up or three fingers up because we were cheeky and different. But Camper Van Beethoven was one of the archetypal indie rock bands of the '80s, when that mattered. And there's an irony that is infused in that music that is—you know, I don't know how to describe it. Can you talk about where that came from? And one of the songs on Father, Sons, and Brothers, you reference "Take the Skinheads Bowling," which became this mass hit. That was life-changing for you because that made the band popular in a way that meant you were going forward in the music industry. Can you talk about where the ironic sensibility of Camper Van Beethoven came from, and then how "Take the Skinheads Bowling" being popular changed the direction of your life? Yeah, so Camper Van Beethoven was a react…

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How a Government Mind Control Experiment Backfired Jul 16, 2025

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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 depositions and documents to deliver the most definitive—and disturbing—account yet. He discusses the twisted logic of Cold War secrecy, the bizarre figures behind and victims of America's darkest experiments, and what MKUltra reveals about the dangers of unchecked power in a democracy. And this might be the most important thing: He and Nick Gillespie talk about why conspiracy theories thrive in the absence of transparency—and how to preserve skepticism without surrendering to paranoia. 0:00—Intro 1:32—What is MKUltra? 3:42—Brainwashing origins in the Korean War 6:50—Who is Sidney Gottlieb? 10:43—The CIA's startup culture 20:37—Who is Ewen Cameron? 24:32—Jolly West and implanting memories 28:24—MKUltra gets shut down 31:08—How MKUltra documents came to light 39:38—Main lessons from MKUltra 46:57—Politicization of intelligence agencies 51:03—Conspiracy thinking and the legacy of MKUltra 58:31—COVID-19 and the collapse of righteous authority Upcoming Reason Events The Soho Forum Debate: Jacob Hacker vs. David Goldhill, July 16 Transcript This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy. Nick Gillespie: John Lisle, thanks for talking to Reason. John Lisle: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. All right, the book is Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra. I suspect that our more conspiracy-minded and history-minded listeners and watchers know what MKUltra is, but summarize what MKUltra was. Yes, thanks for having me again. MKUltra was this program by the CIA, starting in the 1950s. And the goal of MKUltra was to determine whether methods of mind control are possible. The CIA wanted to know, for instance, whether you could create a truth drug—could you give someone you're interrogating a drug that can make them spill the truth, make them tell the truth no matter what? Could you slip something in someone's drink and make them behave in a certain way—either make them seem erratic or potentially control their behaviors and beliefs? That's kind of the overarching goal of MKUltra. They did that through various means. Some of the reasons why the people who were in charge of it were interested in this kind of thing—someone like Sidney Gottlieb, who led MKUltra, this chemist in the CIA—he was worried about the potential for communist countries possessing these kinds of methods. For instance, Ivan Pavlov, the famous Russian physiologist, he had done behavioral conditioning in the 1890s—ringing a bell and getting a dog to salivate. Well, if you could do that to dogs that far back, surely the Russians since then have been improving upon their methods. So, if they're doing it, we need to know how to do it ourselves and we know how to defend against it. It's kind of an amazing thing, as we get more distance on the Cold War, the idea that we have to be more like the Russians or the Soviets than they were in order to defeat them—in order to be supremely American. We're doing everything they're doing, but better. It's peculiar. The concept of brainwashing, which is kind of rattling around in the back of MKUltra and other CIA fever dreams—and, you know, some of them are legitimate. I mean, it's clear there were conflicts between the Soviet Union and the United States and other free countries of Europe. But the concept of brainwashing came out of the Korean War. Could you talk a little bit about that? Because that's also—I mean, it's the first Cold War conflict, or a proxy war. But what was going on in Korea, and how did that really inflame the desire to be able to force somebody to tell the truth, or to control and manipulate them? Yeah, you're exactly right about the importance of this Korean War, too, because during it, there were several American pilots who were captured in Korea, and while they were POWs, they started confessing to very strange crimes. For instance, many of them started saying that they were engaging in biological warfare against the Korean people—for the Americans, while they were flying over, they were dropping anthrax bombs or germ bombs or bubonic plague germs or something like that. We now know, from some Russian archives actually, that some North Korean officials had flown to China and had gotten cultures of bubonic plague to infect their own prisoners to make it seem as if the Americans were doing this. But still, the question remains within the CIA: why are these American POWs confessing to these crimes of biological warfare? One potential explanation they come up with is maybe they're being manipulated in a certain way to do this. Maybe they've been brainwashed or mind-controlled through drugs or through hypnotism. Again, maybe the communists possess some kind of mind control technique that's causing these POWs to do this. Now, it turns out afterward, when many of these POWs returned to the United States, they're, of course, interviewed and asked about what happened. One of the people who interviews them, in fact, is Jolly West, who plays a prominent role in the MKUltra program. And he comes to the conclusion—again, this is ironic because he's later going to be working on MKUltra—but he comes to the conclusion that it wasn't these esoteric mind control methods that the communists were using to manipulate people. Instead, it's the typical methods of coercion that people have been using for centuries. It's sleep deprivation and fatigue and food deprivation, and having an actual… I mean actual, right? Physical beatings and more— Exactly, yeah. So he comes to that conclusion. And you kind of mentioned the irony of this earlier, about how the Americans are recapitulating a lot of what the communists are doing or trying to catch up to what they're doing. Again, it's ironic because they weren't doing these mind control methods in the sense that the CIA thought they were. And yet, even when the CIA figures that out—they have multiple people write reports on this—what's actually causing these POWs to confess to these crimes? It's not the mind control methods. Yet the CIA still wants to develop those methods, because, "well, it was a potential if they could've done that, therefore, if the potential exists that it could have happened, we want to know whether we can do it now." So let's talk—we'll get to Jolly West, who's one of the most ironically named people in history. I mean, he's just not a jolly man at all. Really a deeply fucked up person who, unfortunately, was able to do a lot of bad things to a lot of people and really not pay a price for it. But Sidney Gottlieb, who, as you mentioned, is a chemist who became the head of MKUltra—who was he, and why did he ultimately fixate on drugs and things like LSD in particular? Yeah, LSD is going to be the big one they start using within MKUltra. Sidney Gottlieb is a chemist from New York. He went to school at Caltech. He got his Ph.D. in bioorganic chemistry there, and that was right around World War II in the 1940s. He desperately wanted to join the war—he wanted to join the Army—but he was denied because he had a limp. He suffered from a limp; he had clubbed feet, he was born with. He also talked with a stutter—not that that mattered for joining the Army—but he talked with a stutter, he walked with a limp, so he was denied entry into the Army. After that, he kind of felt this debt that he owed to his country. His parents were immigrants from Hungary. This country had given them a good life and allowed them to raise him here. And so he felt that he wanted to pay back his country in some way. He thought it would be through service in the Army during World War II. When that didn't pan out, he got a series of jobs as a chemist at different companies and universities, but eventually he decided to apply for a job at the CIA—to serve that debt that he felt he owed to some government organization. And it just so happened that the CIA was looking for brilliant scientists like himself to fill certain roles, because World War II had just shown how integral science was to national security. So we better have some scientists on our staff. He wound up there. And it's interesting, though—for a mind control guy, he's not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. He's an agricultural chemist, right? He is a chemist. You're right. You mentioned LSD earlier. One of the main reasons why the CIA becomes interested in this drug is—well, one is just happenstance. LSD is first developed by Albert Hofmann in Switzerland in 1938, I believe. '38, and then he accidentally ingested it 5 years later. Yes, exactly. So it's kind of a new drug. And when the CIA gets hold of it, it is an extremely potent drug too. It's a powerful hallucinogen. Just a tiny amount can have such profound effects. So they're immediately interested in this drug, because it obviously has profound effects on human psychology. And if that's the case, then it makes itself very useful, potentially, in covert operations, because such a small amount can be slipped into someone's drink or put into a cigar or something. It could make someone potentially behave in a certain way. If that's the case, then it might have a lot of potential use. And it was starting to be used by therapists and whatnot. I mean, Sandoz Laboratories, where Hofmann worked, didn't quite know what to do with it. So they actually were sending it out to researchers and saying, "Hey, here's a compound that has these qualities, which are pretty off the charts. Do you have a use for it?" You know, it's funny—LSD is a new drug in the early '50s and the mid-'50s. MKUltra officially starts in 1955 or— '53. And so the CIA is also a very new organization. Your previous book was about the OSS, the wartime CIA that gave rise to what we now know and all love and patriotically support to the max as today's CIA. Did the CIA know what it was doing, just broadly, in terms of countering… I mean, the main thing was, "we've got to keep the Soviets at bay." Because at that point, China was kind of in the orbit or under the umbrella of the Soviet Union. The big break between the Soviets and the Chinese communists hadn't yet happened. Talk about—it's weird to think of the CIA as kind of like a startup, but they had so many different things going on, many of which, when you look back now, you're like, what were people thinking? But how important to the development of MKUltra—and one thing that you stress throughout the book, which I find fascinating—is that one of the lessons or questions that needs to be studied is: Why didn't anybody say, "What? Why are you doing this? This is insane." How did that young startup culture kind of affect how the CIA was doing? A lot, I think, because a lot of the freewheeling attitude of the OSS—this wartime intelligence organization, kind of the precursor to the CIA—a lot of those same people would end up in the CIA, and that same kind of mentality carried over. So I think that's part of the reason why you have that freewheeling mentality in the CIA. It's because, well, during wartime, that's what the OSS was doing, and it's the same people within the CIA. And these were twilight—I mean, again, this is outside the purview of this conversation, but World War II was a twilight struggle between forces of fascist authoritarianism—from imperial Japan and Nazi Germany—and so anything went in order to preserve whatever we called freedom. And that mentality was just ported over in the CIA from World War II, right? It was, exactly. Instead of the Germans and the Japanese, now it's the Soviets who potentially might be the existential risk. And so, well, if we were resorting to those kinds of methods during World War II—in my first book, The Dirty Tricks Department—I talk about how there are truth drug experiments, there are all kinds of wacky experiments about bat bombs and painting foxes with glowing radioactive paint and all kinds of things these scientists were doing. So if we had to do anything we could to potentially stop this existential threat during World War II, well, of course we have to do that to the Soviets as well, because this might be even more of an existential threat in a certain sense—because they actually have nuclear weapons now. The Germans didn't have that, but the Soviets actually do. So yes, that mentality got carried over. So that's one of the reasons why it is fairly freewheeling. And the last point you made in your original question is a very important one. Raising the questions of: Why was nobody stopping this? One of the things that also makes this a very freewheeling CIA in the 1950s is that there's such heavy compartmentalization that hardly anyone knows what anyone else is doing. When we think of MKUltra, we think, "oh, the CIA—this huge organization—is masterminding this. There must be hundreds of employees who are working on this and performing these experiments." That's not actually how it was. Within the CIA, there might have been a couple handfuls of people who knew about MKUltra. Within these hundreds and thousands of employees, there might be a dozen who know that this is going on. And so with that compartmentalization, without people being able to peer into what their peers at the CIA are doing, there's no one to really stop or ask questions. "Hey, why are we performing these experiments? Why are we funding these researchers at universities to dose kids with—you know—university students with LSD, or prisoners, or so on?" There are several reasons that make that happen, and the compartmentalization is definitely one. And then, on a larger scale, the original CIA director, he understood that the way he was going to operate is that he would tell the president what was going on if he was asked. As one of Allen Dulles' codes, you know. Yeah. When you look at the history of the FBI, there's something parallel going on. It starts a few decades earlier—officially as the FBI in the '20s or whatever—but J. Edgar Hoover understood that it was in national security interests not to really offer any information to the president. And it was kind of chilling, actually, to read in the book the way that that gets described here—especially because Eisenhower, who's the president during this, he knows how to fight and win world wars. And I guess he didn't want to know too much either, right? Like, everybody wanted plausible— That's a good point, because it's in the president's personal interest to preserve his or her's plausible deniability. For instance, I talk about assassination attempts in this book, and Sidney Gottlieb is intimately involved in those. And that was MKChaos—or what was the code name for the assassination stuff? I don't know if there was a code name within the CIA for that, but there was a kind of group within the CIA called the Health Alteration Committee—you know, kind of a flippant name. That's what they were in charge of. During one meeting, Eisenhower kind of tells his CIA counterparts, "I'm interested in having Patrice Lumumba kind of knocked off. What can yo…

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The Surprising Origins of Modern Freedom Jul 09, 2025

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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 a right to choose among faiths, and the rise of shopping, which allowed us to choose among many products, worked to change all that, even up to our current day, where rhetoric about choice still dominates many political and economic arguments. 0:00—Intro 1:15—Main arguments from The Age of Choice 4:03—Earlier conceptions of freedom 7:37—The Reformation and religious freedom 10:32—Capitalism and market freedom 15:37—Consumer choice and femininity 20:00—Choice as freedom in the 20th century 26:07—Abortion rights and the choice debate 31:26—Choices vs. mandates 36:50—Overwhelmed by choice Upcoming Reason Events The Reason Roundtable Live in NYC, July 15 The Soho Forum Debate: Jacob Hacker vs. David Goldhill, July 16 Today's Sponsor Future of Freedom: If you're tired of cable news debates and Twitter shouting matches and you're looking for serious, good-faith conversations between people who actually care about liberty, then it's time to check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Each episode dives deep into a single topic—tariffs, campus speech, the Department of Government Efficiency—and brings together two guests who disagree on the best path forward. But here's the twist: This isn't a debate show. No interrupting. No dunking. If you believe the future of freedom depends on more than just winning arguments and you're ready for something deeper than the usual echo chambers, check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Real disagreement. Real ideas. Real conversations. Subscribe to Future of Freedom wherever you get your podcasts. ______________________________________________________________________________ Transcript This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy. Nick Gillespie: Give me a quick précis of the book's argument. Sophia Rosenfeld: Sure, I'm happy to do that. I think choice is one of those things we do tend to equate, as you've just suggested, sort of automatically with freedom. It's sort of the water we swim in: more choice is better, more opportunities for choice is better than less. And I'm not here to really dispute that exactly, but I'm interested in both the good and bad things it's brought us, and I'm also interested in how that happened. Because actually, what's perhaps surprising to people is that freedom hasn't always been conceptualized as a matter of choice, and choice hasn't been conceptualized as what brings us freedom. So the story that I tell in the book is really about two things. It's about how choice came to proliferate so that we pick things in really disparate areas of life—ranging from political candidates to breakfast cereals to who we want to marry. We pick in all sorts of categories that would have seemed strange to people—still does to people in some parts of the globe today—and certainly would have to almost everyone around the globe in an earlier moment, a few hundred years ago. So I'm interested in how that happened, and then I'm interested in how it came to be understood as freedom—why freedom became a matter of choice. Because there's nothing actually obvious about it, though to us it sometimes seems that way. The book traces a whole series of social practices that people engaged in—things they did, essentially. How did people start picking things in stores? How did they come to think of ideas or even religious notions as something one could select from a menu of options? And it goes all the way up—it starts really in the Reformation and in the first Age of Empire—but it takes us all the way to the 20th century and the invention of whole sciences of choice to study why we're choice makers. Let's run through all of these. Also the other thing that the book focused on in a way that is fascinating is the way that choice often became identified as feminine—a part of being female—and also often times kind of depreciating choice because it's something women would be dazzled or overwhelmed by too many choices in front of them, in consumer goods. There's a long history, certainly in European, continental, and Anglo studies, of shopkeepers are sad little men who are somehow not quite manly in the way that martial virtues are. Choice gets identified with femininity in various ways. We'll get to that. First, let's talk about before the modern era. Before the Reformation, freedom was not about choice—or to the extent that it was, it was about being able to make the right moral choice. Partly when I was reading this book, I think it was back in the '80s, but at some point 7-Eleven stores brought in soda fountains that had both Coke and Pepsi products. They had a huge campaign: "Freedom of choice," like we celebrate choice, choice, choice. That's freedom—being able to have Mountain Dew and Coca-Cola without going to two separate stores. But in this period when we're talking about Hercules' choice or the pre-modern definition of freedom—what was Hercules' choice, and what does that say about earlier conceptions of freedom? Right. If you were a person living in the 17th or 18th century in Western Europe, or even in the burgeoning United States, you probably would have been familiar with this idea of Hercules' choice. It's allegorized everywhere, from poetry to opera. John Adams proposed it for the seal of the new United States. It was harmonized with Christian teachings; so they went well together. The idea was this: Hercules was torn. He was torn between doing the right thing—virtue—or the opposite, turning toward vice. And often in a painting, you see his body kind of torqued. He can't quite decide which way. But he always, in the end, goes toward virtue—which is doing not what is hedonistic, not recognizing his hedonistic pleasures, but doing what was right morally, what was right for his family, what was right for his community. In the end, Hercules always makes the right choice. And so he became free—by himself, of his own volition— doing what was right. And in that sense, he becomes free because he triumphs over his bodily urges or more base impulses? He triumphs over his passions, his base impulses. He goes toward the moral, but as his own person. He isn't compelled to be moral; but realizes it's important for him to do the right thing. So you're free to the extent that you do what God expects of you—or morality—which is identified at that point, ironically, since it's Hercules, and he's a pre-Christian myth figure. But if you're doing what a Christian God tells you to do, which is to be more of an angel and less of a beast, you have achieved freedom. Absolutely. So this could be all these things harmonized: what God wanted you to do, what your family wanted you to do, what your community wanted you to do— lined up. And the idea is—of course, Hercules is a man; this is only allegorical—but he's picking between two women as virtue and vice. So it's really imagined as a kind of manly freedom too. It's a kind of vision of thinking of others before oneself—not giving into based temptation, but being free to be the upstanding person that you're supposed to be. This is a really important early modern trope, and it never entirely goes away, of course. But it's not the dominant way we think of freedom today. Let's talk about that. Obviously, there are a lot of things that drive the shift from that kind of freedom to a freedom which is identified with increasing choice in all areas of human activity. But a big part of it—you mentioned this briefly in passing—is the Reformation, or the idea of religious freedom and being able to choose among different ways of, for the most part, it's different ways of worshiping the Christian God. How does the Reformation help start to create a shift in how we understand freedom? Right. So one way to tell this story would be to see just simply capitalism taking over everything, and everything just becomes a marketplace. Certainly that's an important part of the story, but I don't think it's the whole story. I think the other point of origin—the less obvious one—may be the Reformation, for two reasons. First, the Reformation sort of inadvertently ends up creating pluralism in the religious sphere, for Protestants especially. There are so many sects by the end of the 16th and 17th centuries that, in order for people to live together, they have to essentially accept—even though nobody really wanted to—the idea that Lutherans are going to need to live near Methodists, who are going to live near Calvinists, etc. And it is worth talking about how, of course, none of them were saying, "Oh, and we should put up with Catholics." No. Absolutely not. Catholics were not particularly interested in putting up with— —far from it. This is a kind of inadvertent effect of the Reformation. Everybody thought they had the right answer. But over time—I'm talking to you from Philadelphia, my current city—and if you were in Philadelphia, a place of religious toleration in the 18th century, on a Sunday morning you could have heard sermons by something like 12 or 15 different kinds of Christians. That doesn't even include Jews, or potentially Native Americans and other kinds of religious content. I think in the colonial period, probably the only place—and I think it was more in rhetoric than in reality—but Providence, Rhode Island, coming out of Roger Williams' area, he stubbornly agreed that Jews, Catholics, and Muhammadans could live there in equal standing. But certainly not in most of the colonies. One thing you see that's really surprising is that tourists who come to Philadelphia in the 18th century will try out different churches on a Sunday morning. They'll write things like, "Heard the African Methodists at 10—very interesting sermon. Enjoyed the Baptists even more at 11." That's odd. But it's an entertainment of sorts, and it's intellectual entertainment. Those become secular lectures and things—- Yes. And that does mirror the kind of burgeoning rise of what we now call capitalism, where there's more of a marketplace in most goods and services. Right. Suddenly, there's a religious marketplace, which may or may not anticipate— but I guess it develops at the same time as a new economic system that increases or proliferates choice. Talk a little about how capitalism does that. And if you could—because he's got a ridiculous name, but it's also fascinating—this is a history book, but a great character: Christopher Koch. He kind of exemplifies this, right? I will just say this to finish on the religious topic, because I don't want to suggest that people picked religions the same way they pick toothpaste or something. I mean, obviously, there are some differences. I think we do that now. Maybe we do. But these are kind of parallel stories that eventually merge rather than all being the same thing. Freedom of conscience—this other great Protestant idea—is very important to the idea of selecting what one believes. To get to the other side of this story—that's the religious strain—at the same time, something else is happening first in Europe and it spreads to the New World. Latin America as well as North America. That's the rise of stores and shopping. Different from a marketplace. A marketplace— people have always bought things, but you went to a market mainly to provision yourself. You got what you needed, someone handed it to you, and there was a transaction. But with the rise of auction houses first—which is where Mr. Koch comes into play—and fixed-location stores shortly after came these new practices of displaying the goods and letting people do what we now call browsing, now. The word shopping itself is a neologism. It's a new word in the 18th century. It starts to show up in a kind of fashionable term by the late 18th century, and it means something very specific that we now do all the time—you do it even when browsing on your computer, which is: looking at the options, deciding which ones match your preferences, and then engaging in a transactional sale. Mr. Koch is this figure who starts an auction house in the early 18th-century in London, and he's kind of a wizard of marketing. It's not that auctions are brand new—they have auctions in antiquity—but he decides he can turn auctions into theater, into entertainment. Women and men are both invited to come on special hours to look at the household contents of people, then to be tempted, and come back and make selections. He sets up what I would call a visual menu. This happens again in stores a little later, when cottons start arriving from India—patterned cottons, beautiful fabrics—they're available at a low enough price point that ordinary people, not the kind they would be buying fine silks, can walk in and say, "I do love blue better than red," or "Checks are more appealing to me than stripes." And there's no moral implication around that choice. One of the things that starts to happen is that these are largely value-neutral choices. It's not Hercules' choice—the good and the bad—it's two things, and I like one of them better than the other for reasons I can't really explain. I'm going to take the one I like. And does this also start to degrade—in terms of the moral choice—this is part of a lot of different processes, but it starts undermining a rigid class structure or it starts to challenge sumptuary laws, to some degree, where only certain people could afford certain fabrics, and there might have been laws saying only certain types of people could wear specific types of clothing, etc. Suddenly, when things become more available to more people, it gets confusing, right? Absolutely. At first, there's a kind of confusion. People start saying, "What if servants start dressing like masters? We can't tell if someone's in a floral dress, who they are." That has a lot to do with urbanization, too. Right. People don't know each other necessarily. That arises as well. But an interesting thing happens, if what you're suggesting is true—there's a kind of deregulation that allows anybody who meets the purchase price to buy something. But then, new forms of regulation start to emerge. I just want to emphasize: it's like taste. Yeah. Both social customs and laws and things like that— The book is excellent in driving home the point that even when it seems as if we have unlimited choice, we're always experiencing bounded choices—by things like taste, and other kinds of social pressures, and sometimes legal ones. Could you talk a bit about how did consumer choice get so heavily identified with women? There's a whole subgenre in English writing as well as colonial American writing—and it persists in novels—of women being particularly interested in choosing among novel goods and then somehow being seen as suspect. Women more than men. It happens to men, but usually as they approach femininity, get dazzled by too many choices. Why did consumer choice and the female sex get conjoined? It's a really interesting question, isn't it? How did choice, at least initially, get so associated…

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From Big Gulps to Raw Milk: The Rise of MAHA Jul 02, 2025

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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 to Kentucky Fried Chicken. But now the Trumpian right is embracing wellness and food purity like nobody's business—and is using the state to enforce its preferences. Nick Gillespie talks with Brown about how we got here, where it's headed—and whether you've eaten your last red M&M. This episode was recorded live in front of an audience in New York City. Go here to get information about upcoming events, including The Reason Roundtable live in New York on July 15! 0:00—Intro 1:17—What is MAHA? 4:51—The right used to scoff at wellness 11:31—Processed foods were once desirable 13:13—Liberals were first to embrace "farm to table" 15:21—What led to the right's embrace of healthy living? 23:52—Where libertarians and MAHA align 27:43—How RFK Jr. won over the right 30:44—Research quality of dietary recommendations 35:53—Concerns about the MAHA movement 37:17—School lunches and food stamps 40:14—Tradwives 43:00—Gender roles and MAHA Upcoming Reason Events The Reason Roundtable Live in NYC, July 15 The Soho Forum Debate: Jacob Hacker vs. David Goldhill, July 16 Today's Sponsor Future of Freedom: If you're tired of cable news debates and Twitter shouting matches and you're looking for serious, good-faith conversations between people who actually care about liberty, then it's time to check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Each episode dives deep into a single topic—tariffs, campus speech, the Department of Government Efficiency—and brings together two guests who disagree on the best path forward. But here's the twist: This isn't a debate show. No interrupting. No dunking. If you believe the future of freedom depends on more than just winning arguments and you're ready for something deeper than the usual echo chambers, check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Real disagreement. Real ideas. Real conversations. Subscribe to Future of Freedom wherever you get your podcasts. ______________________________________________________________________________ Transcript This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy. Nick Gillespie: Let's start by defining MAHA. How does it define itself, and what are its constituent parts? Elizabeth Nolan Brown: I think MAHA is a state of mind because it means so many things. When I was researching this article, I just searched the MAHA hashtag on various social media to see what was defined as MAHA. I think of it as being about using tallow to cook your fries instead of seed oils. Or maybe skepticism about vaccines, on the other hand. But when you look at what people are describing as MAHA, it's everything from banning food dyes, to getting people to exercise more, to functional medicine, to regenerative farming, to testing your air in your home for mold and toxins. Any sort of wellness fad of the past 40 years is kind of being lumped in as MAHA, right now. What is regenerative farming? Regenerative… Don't let the future surgeon general Casey Means—or Callie Means, I forget which one is which. It's one of the Wonder Twins of alternative medicine. It's farming so that the soil, so that while you're planting crops, it's done in a way that the soil gives back and will be more healthy after you've planted in it than before. Okay, that sounds… Unobjectable… I suspect people are doing that, yeah. So who gets to define MAHA? Because Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former Democratic presidential candidate—an independent presidential candidate— now secretary of Health and Human Services, is a big key figure in this. If Trump gets to say what "America First" means, does RFK Jr. get to define what MAHA is? I think he's the one who coined the term or started popularizing the term. But it was really him capitalizing on this already existing trend within conservative circles, which was that suddenly conservatives were starting to sound like old-school hippies — or like my friends that lived in Brooklyn in 2009 about this stuff. Suddenly, they were talking about cleansing your aura and eating without additives, and just all of the stuff that you think of as not belonging to the right at all. Especially since COVID, that ramped up. RFK just sort of capitalized on that and brought it all under this MAHA umbrella. What is the connective tissue between, "okay, we're going to eat healthy, we're not going to eat corporate cereals that have petroleum-based food dyes in them, and we're also going to be anti-vax?" Is there a controlling idea that motivates all of this? Yeah. I think if there's a loose thread underlying all of this, it's skepticism of conventional health wisdom and health establishment authorities. So, skepticism of government health advice, skepticism of the big governing health bodies. And that's why, at its core, it's sort of refreshing from a libertarian standpoint. I'm not anti-vaccine. I am skeptical about some mainstream nutrition advice. Like what? Can you give us an example? Well, I guess now it's not necessarily mainstream anymore, but the whole "eat carbs to lose weight and don't eat saturated fat"—that kind of stuff. So let's talk a little bit about—you were saying what's weird, or what's notable about this, among other things, is that you have people who identify on the right, they're conservatives, or they're MAGA Republicans, who are talking like they belong to the Park Slope Co-op in 2009, right? And you, in the story—which is just kind of a great run-through of all this in an analysis—you bring up forgotten episodes where Sarah Palin, of all people, is slurping from a Big Gulp and saying, "From my cold, dead hands. Would you ever take this"? She literally did that. I discovered so many great old stories when I was going back through news archives. This is why it seemed so weird to me, though. This is what interested me in the first place. When I started noticing this trend—and a lot of people have written about it over the past year or so— but I remembered so vividly how pro-unhealthiness Republicans were in the late aughts and early 2010s. It was all, "Yeah, you can have my Big Gulp when you pry it from my cold, dead hands." And that was because they were responding, partly, to a lot of things. But at that point, they were pushing back against people like Michelle Obama and trying to make school lunches healthy. Yeah. I think some of that, yeah—and the soda taxes here in New York, bans on big sodas, and stuff. Definitely there was some of it that was pushing back on government stuff. But I also think that in the aughts, there was this sort of idea—or maybe going back even further—that healthy eating was "gay." Healthy eating made you like a sissy. It was more like liberal… Like a soy boy— Right, exactly. Real men and real Americans ate triple cheeseburgers and had heart attacks by the time they were 45, because that's what you did. That's patriotism. Yeah. Yeah. I guess it was in the '80s, there was a book called Real Men Don't Eat Quiche. So this is like an older heritage. That was partly a response to the idea that anything that was European, like quiche—it's a French food so we know that they're our greatest gastronomical enemy, as well as geopolitical adversary. But talk a bit about how did eating well become feminized in the conservative mind before we enter this new phase where they're the granola eaters? That's an interesting question. Obviously, dieting and caring about food has long been associated with women, so I think there's some of that there too. But when I talked to Nina Teicholz—she wrote The Big Fat Surprise. And she was talking about how since the '60s and '70s and up through the '90s and even sort of today, the mainstream dietary advice was very much about cutting down on meat, cutting down on butter, and cheese, and eating more… And fat… and protein, even, was cutting down… Right. Cutting down on protein and eating more soy and eating vegetables and stuff like that. So I think these things that were associated with male diets, especially — even though everybody ate them — were really demonized for a long time. So the idea of eating healthy was very much like, "Well, you have to eat lettuce and you know…" Then you're reduced to eating rabbit food. People would say, "Oh, vegetarians are weak." They're feminized in the public imagination and whatnot. Meat, and potatoes, and eggs, and dairy are somehow the real America. Conservatives glommed onto that. Did they glom onto that because it seemed like that's what liberals hated? Or is it that they're from states that are farm producers? Probably both, I think, yeah. But definitely, a lot of it was like, "Oh, liberals are doing this, so we hate it." Yeah. So then how can you—I mean, Sarah Palin, I haven't seen or heard from her in years it seems. Is she still on Big Gulps? Or has she become— I could see her becoming very healthy. Yeah, well, that's what I thought. Sean Hannity was the funniest one that I read. In my article, I open with him, he had this extended rant: "I love my Big Mac. I love my Arby's," whatever. And then a couple of years after that, he went on a big diet. Now he's interviewing RFK about how fast food is poison. He's a really good avatar… I don't know if he still does it—he used to throw a football into his audience at the end of his show. This was a staple, which seems related somehow, where conservatives would go on rants about how soccer is inherently gay, right? Even though it's the most popular sport in the world and in most countries it is associated with working-class or lower-class people. But in America, if you chose soccer over football, we need to send you to pray-away-the-gay camp or something, right? I mean, we think now about how everything is—both the left and the right—seem to always be defining themselves in opposition to each other. But that always sort of has existed, and I think we see a lot of that too. I love that I found all these articles about when Michelle Obama was like, "Hey, maybe people should breastfeed," which now has become this huge conservative talking point—that women all need to breastfeed and not use formula. But Michelle Obama said that and they freaked out. There was this whole news cycle where they were all like, "Big Mother is out to get you and make you breastfeed." Wow, I totally forgot about that one. She wants to subsidize your breast pumps and stuff. Yeah, and that is true, right? Breast pumps are subsidized. Well, they're tax-deductible. Yeah, right. I mean, I guess in any particular issue, these things come and go in cycles too. Where breastfeeding is perceived—and we can talk about whatever we know about the science or medicine or stuff in a second—but there are cycles where it's like, "Obviously better for the kid, and everybody should do it." Then it's, "No, actually, formula is good," and we should be embracing science and technology to reduce the biological burden on women to be mothers." Where are we in that? Is anybody saying, "Yeah, you know what, actually, formula is good?" No. I was actually really surprised to learn that in my mom's generation, none of them got the breastfeeding talk. I guess in postwar America, there are those moments where, if something is manufactured—if something comes out of a factory—it is inherently better. So white bread, Wonder Bread, was great. It was kind of an aspiration, as opposed to peasant bread, which was dark and grainy and imperfect. What you wanted was something… Better living through science. That's right. And it's like, we want food that is untouched by human hands. We want formula because that's got to be better. If it comes out of a lab, it's good. Now that's totally reversed. Yeah. I think that's great, to a degree. I lived in Brooklyn in 2009 through '13, and this was the peak of people farming on rooftops, making their own kombucha, and drinking it out of mason jars, and butchering their own hogs in some weird butcher shops. My boyfriend was a big butcher trend person. Was this underground as well? Like figuratively or literally? Was it licensed butchering? Yes, yes. No, all of a sudden in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, there were these "do your own butchering" classes and stuff. I'm very pro that trend—I definitely got taken in by it—but it's just really funny to me how that was very left-coded. There's no reason it was left-coded. There's nothing inherently leftist. In fact, you could say a lot of this stuff—the sort of "back-to-the-land," "back to traditional ways"—is actually sort of conservative. But because of the people who were doing it which was young, liberal-leaning people in urban areas, it became left-coded. And now you see the exact same aesthetic, except now it's all Mormons doing it, so it's very right-coded. It's tradwives. It's become… Can we talk a little bit—assuming that Brooklyn is kind of the font of this, and that's overstating it a bit—but why did hipster lefties, or people who coded left, why did they get into smoking American Spirit cigarettes or rolling their own, and butchering their own meat? Where did that imperative come from? I definitely had a lot of theories about this back in the day because it suddenly seemed it happened overnight. If you went to the sort of liberal-leaning health food stores, it was all tofu and lentils and all this shit. And then all of a sudden, it was grass-fed beef and lamb and all this stuff. Part of it was this whole slow food movement that was happening and Michael Pollan and all of that, of the era. I also think the recession had a lot to do with it. How so? Like the music changed—the music all became very folky—and everything became about getting away from the offices, getting away from this capitalist system, and making your own food, having local currencies. Everything was about being localized. I think it was very much a big mood in response to global events that people felt they couldn't control. Were you in Brooklyn during the Occupy Movement? No, I was in D.C. then. Because that was like 2007–08, right? Yeah, and a little bit later, I guess, like 2010, maybe… Maybe I was here for some of it. Does the ideology of Occupy give rise to a kind of slow food movement—or vice versa? Are they all of a piece with one another? I think it's the same impulse. This impulse to sort of be like,"we're going to unplug from this big, elitist system that we don't really trust and can't control." "But we're going to use our MacBooks in order to figure out how to do everything." Yeah, because that was back when tech was still supposed to be good. Was still okay… Apple, and Twitter, and Facebook and all that, they were the good guys back then. So let's talk about how did things started shifting rightward. Because you're totally right that this stuff which was considered— this was a sign that you were a leftist in good standing. Now it's like you're a MAGA/MAHA po…

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How LSD Helped Launch a Radical Libertarian Counterculture Jun 25, 2025

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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 aesthetic liberation. The Acid Queen helps explain how the personal became the political, why libertarians should care about the messy legacy of the counterculture, and what comes next in drug policy, especially regarding psychedelics. This conversation was recorded at a live event in New York City. Go here to find out about upcoming events. Go here to sign up for Reason's NYC events newsletter. 0:00—Introduction 1:15—Who is Rosemary Woodruff Leary? 7:02—How did Rosemary meet Timothy Leary? 9:57—Why America was ready to experiment with psychedelics 15:12—Rosemary's connection to John Lennon and Yoko Ono 16:11—How Rosemary and Timothy Leary became outlaws 21:07—The jailbreak of Timothy Leary 28:45—The political speech of Timothy Leary 31:45—Why Rosemary and Timothy split up 35:31—The final years of Rosemary 40:08—The reconciliation of Rosemary and Timothy 42:54—The common thread between Cahalan's books 46:18—Labeling in mental health 48:34—Cahalan's experience with psychedelics Upcoming events: Reason Speakeasy: Nick Gillespie and Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the MAHA Movement, June 25 The Reason Roundtable Live in New York City, July 15 Today's Sponsors: Reliance College: What if one day could change how you think—how you lead—and how you shape your future? Join Reliance College for Reliance Day—Saturday, June 28 in Los Angeles! This one-day, high-impact experience is designed for students, professionals, and lifelong learners ready to level up their thinking in an AI-driven world. At Reliance Day, you'll dive into collaborative Socratic discussions and sharpen the critical thinking and leadership skills that drive success in college, business, and life. It's a full day of intellectual challenge and creative exploration—rooted in the Great Books and Montessori-inspired methods that have transformed over 400 lives. Go to RelianceCollege.org/reliancedays to register today. Future of Freedom: If you're tired of cable news debates and Twitter shouting matches and you're looking for serious, good-faith conversations between people who actually care about liberty, then it's time to check out the Future of Freedom Each episode dives deep into a single topic—tariffs, campus speech, the Department of Government Efficiency—and brings together two guests who disagree on the best path forward. But here's the twist: This isn't a debate show. No interrupting. No dunking. If you believe the future of freedom depends on more than just winning arguments and you're ready for something deeper than the usual echo chambers, check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Real disagreement. Real ideas. Real conversations. Subscribe to Future of Freedom wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy. Nick Gillespie: This is The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. Thanks, everybody. We're at the Psychedelic Assembly, which co-sponsors this event. Susannah Cahalan is the author, most recently, of The Acid Queen: The Psychedelics, Life, and Countercultural Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary. Susannah Cahalan, thanks for talking to Reason at the Psychedelic Assembly. Susannah Cahalan: It's such a pleasure to be here—and especially at a place that Rosemary would have loved so much. Yeah, this has her vibe all over it. Why don't you, just very briefly, tell us who Rosemary Woodruff Leary is? Sure. So, Rosemary Woodruff Leary—as much as I hate to start with Timothy Leary, we are starting with him—she was the third or fourth wife, depending on who you ask and how seriously you take divorce records from Mexico. She was a seeker. She was someone who was very much a behind-the-scenes character who was propping up Timothy Leary, working with him behind the scenes, on his speeches, sewing his clothing, really helping him create an image. She was also very much a true believer in the role that psychedelics could play in not only expanding consciousness but actually making society better. She was called the Queen of Set and Setting. Explain what set and setting is. Because when you're talking about Timothy Leary and set and setting, that carries a wallop. Explain that for us. It does. One of my favorite things that Timothy Leary wrote about—this is pre-Rosemary—was the concept of set and setting. I'm going to reduce it very much down to its essence, but it's the mindset that you bring into a trip and it's the environment. Rosemary was very good at making people feel grounded and supported. She was great at beautifying spaces. She knew what colors to make the throw pillows, to position people properly to make sure they channeled and augmented their trips. That's why she earned that moniker. Leary was born in the early '20s. She was born in 1935 in California and then ended up in New York? She was born in St. Louis. Oh sorry, in St. Louis. Then she is in California at some point, right? Yes. In any case, she shows up kind of at the end of the Beatnik scene—or the Beat scene—in New York. What was going on there? Who was she? We'll get to how she meets Leary and how they become the king and queen of Millbrook—the upstate estate where Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert - who became Ram Dass - and Ralph Metzner really created the text that started the '60s version of psychedelia. But what was she doing in New York? She was born in 1935, as you said, from St. Louis. High school dropout, very beautiful. Was in an abusive marriage at 17, and left that, after she lost a baby, boarded a train to New York with no money in her pocket and no degree. Was recruited and spotted by Eileen Ford and began modeling. Of Ford Models? Of Ford Model Fame. And she then did what was like the second-sexiest occupation you could do at the time: airline stewardess, which was apparently harder to get into than Harvard. You had to be less than 120 pounds, x, y, z. So she fit the bill, and there she met her second husband, who was a jazz accordionist and a Holocaust survivor. She knows how to pick them. Oh yeah. He was an intense guy, I've heard. I did not meet him myself, but I interviewed several people who said he really didn't take anyone's shit, and people respected him—especially Miles Davis, who was a big fan of his. Interestingly, I've actually listened to his work. You can find Matt Matthews on Apple Music, I think, and it's really good—shockingly good, jazz accordion. She met him and married him, and was instantly involved in the jazz scene that was going on in mid-'50s in New York City. And began rubbing shoulders with the early Beatnik scene—with Jack Kerouac and kind of rubbing shoulders with these interesting writers, artists, and scoundrels of the era. That's when she started really experimenting with drugs. What drove her to that? Because this is a fascinating demimonde which gives rise to the East Coast version of the '60s counterculture. What was she seeking that she wasn't getting in St. Louis? I think that's such a great question. She had always talked about herself in these mythic terms. She saw herself as someone who was going to live a great life—with a capital G, Great. She wasn't going to find that in her small town in St. Louis. And even though St. Louis is a city, she wasn't going to find that there. She was attracted to "great men," as she liked to think of them—these genius archetypes. That's what she found in New York. Through being in this scene, being a part of the music scene — even though she wasn't a musician or necessarily an artist outright, she was able to express some of those sides of herself and express those "great" parts through the men that she picked. Let's talk about how she meets Leary and ends up moving to Millbrook, the upstate estate where Leary and his peers kind of repaired to after getting bounced from Harvard in the mid-'60s. How did she meet him, and how did she come to live in Millbrook? She took a little bit of LSD before she went to a gallery opening, in downtown. There she saw the man of the hour, Timothy Leary. They were fresh off The Psychedelic Experience… The book… …which was a seminal guide that is quoted in a famous Beatles' song "Tomorrow Never Knows." He was really pontificating and enjoying the spotlight there. They both were immediately attracted to each other. They both write independently of that immediate pull. She was intrigued, but she was divorced, again, and dating another jazz musician—who was very abusive, but she was in love with him. So at that time she didn't decide she wanted to go with Leary. It was later, when she decided to go with friends to visit Millbrook. Millbrook, for people who don't know, is a 2,000-acre rich estate — wealthy landowner, old-school estate—in Millbrook, in a very fancy suburb in upstate New York. This is a place that has about twelve buildings, including an indoor tennis court and a bowling alley on the grounds. Timothy Leary was dating, briefly, the sister of two brothers who owned that estate. Through her—an amazing woman named Peggy Hitchcock—she managed to secure that house for $1 a month for Timothy Leary and his fellow ex-Harvard psychologists. Who eventually created something called the League of Spiritual Discovery, and I mean, that is really—if there's a place where what we think about when we think of the psychedelic '60s where it comes from—it's that. Absolutely. The experiments weren't just psychedelic in nature, but they obviously did experiment very heavily with using psychedelics—using them in high doses, using them over long periods of time, using them with a person, solo. All sorts of different psychological experiments that Timothy was bringing from his time at Harvard and, before that, working on interpersonal dynamics. They would not only do that, but would also experiment with your food—dyeing the eggs green, just trying to get you out of the stultifying present and really become aware of your surroundings. A gong would bang. They were constantly— at that point, you had to go to your journal and present how aware you were by writing it down. It became this exercise, like a Gurdjieff kind of exercise, in awakening and being very present. Can you set the scene a little bit for what was going on in postwar America where this type of thing was even taking place and then was about to burst out into everyday culture? Were people feeling repressed? Were they feeling stultified? Why? And then why were they ready to, "Ok, I'm going to go to this crazy place upstate and take a bunch of drugs and eat green eggs?" You know, it's an interesting time. I think there's a lot of overlap with today. But it was coming out of 1950s America, coming out immediately after the atomic bomb. There was a lot sense of insecurity. Some people responded to that insecurity and fear by doubling down—having a lot of children, being very family-focused. And other people started questioning the nature of their reality and the role of society. It was the same time you had the rise of vast intellectualization that was happening in America where you had cheap paperbacks, foreign translations, and art house cinema. All these things were happening at that time. And that was really the Beatnik movement. And the next kind of step was: How do we apply this not only to this little Beatnik world, but to society? Psychedelics seemed to be one of the ways people were exploring "how do we change our consciousness and, thus, the rest of the world?" And I suspect some people in the audience get a sense of this too, when you talk about—ok, so they're tripping, and then a gong sounds, and they write in their journal, and they eat food that is dyed weird colors. There is a dimension to Millbrook where it is—it's either the greatest thing ever or it's the beginning of, you know, the People's Temple. Like a bad movie. Yeah, yeah, exactly. How did it go in and out of that kind of focus? Well, it was both—like all things, like many things are. It was Nina Graboi, who was a female psychonaut of that era—a little older than the rest, kind of like a mother figure—she said that Millbrook had many faces. And I think that's very true. I think it did change. A lot of times, women had a very different experience than men did there. In some ways, yes—this idea of expanding consciousness. I think there was authentic belief there. They were trying vegetarianism, communal child-rearing, all sorts of these different ways of building a new society, because they felt that the society as it was, was stuck, was retrograde - or whatever word you want to use. It was regressive. It was stultifying, all the words. But I think this was an opportunity for them. So there's that side. But then the old social hierarchies were still observed in the house. There was very human-based behavior that occurred. Women were oftentimes still left— Peggy Hitchcock, actually, had a great line where she said, "At the end of the revolution, there was always the question, who's going to do the dishes?" And at the end of the day, the women were doing the dishes. They were still kind of caught up. Rosemary described how Timothy—despite all of his talk of revolution of the mind and was going to upend society—was the kind of man who put his hand out and expected to have a martini glass put in it. And she—part of the function that she served was to do that. Absolutely. She kept the rooms clean, or helped organize that. Organized the feeding of, you know, hundreds of people sometimes. And you know, it's funny. It's been an interesting thing, talking about Rosemary in today's culture, where there seems to be this idea that either you have to be a trad wife or you're a girl boss. And she wasn't either of those. Yes, she was stuck with a position that oftentimes she resented. But she actually did really enjoy taking care of other people. That was a genuine thing, and she was really good at it. She was genuinely really good at taking care of people and beautifying spaces too. Yeah, and that—I mean, it's interesting. After reading this book, I caught a recent documentary about Anita Pallenberg, the model and actress who ended up married to Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones for a while. It talked about how much she added—first to Brian Jones' look, and then to the Stones more broadly. It's kind of fascinating. We tend to overlook the accessorizing of the cultural revolution. Where did Rosemary's sense of taste come from? Oh, that's such a great question. Because she wasn't educated in any of that. She wasn't educated. Her mother did sew, and I think—according to her brother, who was very wonderful in helping me put this together—I think she had a great eye. Maybe that's something she was born with. She had a pull toward things that were unusual and exciting, and her eye caught those things. I mean, even just the men she picked, but the clothing she'd wear. There was always something beautifully done. She never indulged in the tie-dye or the cliché. She always was interesting and exciting, and if she wore it today, you would be like, "Oh, she's…

Full show notes at the publisher

Did Bombing Iran Make America Safer? Jun 24, 2025

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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 episode of The Reason Interview, Nick Gillespie talked with Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at The Stimson Center and the author of the forthcoming First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World, and Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, the president of Ideas Beyond Borders and a non-resident fellow at George Washington University's Program on Extremism.

The post Did Bombing Iran Make America Safer? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Scott Barry Kaufman: Incels, Narcissists, and the Victim Mindset Jun 18, 2025

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Psychologist and author Scott Barry Kaufman joins Reason's Nick Gillespie to discuss his new book Rise Above, which challenges the growing embrace of victimhood as identity. They explore how traits such as neuroticism and vulnerable narcissism are shaping modern culture, why social media rewards grievance over growth, and what it really takes to develop a more flexible, empowered sense of self. Kaufman reflects on his own journey from special education to Carnegie Mellon and beyond, explains why tough love and radical honesty are essential tools for transformation, and offers a humanistic vision of how individuals and societies can move beyond resentment and reclaim purpose. 0:00—Introduction 1:30—Limiting beliefs come from our past. 6:00—The victim mindset 10:49—What is vulnerable narcissism? 12:12—Kaufman's experience in special education 17:35—Childhood trauma from summer camp 21:49—Narcissism is a defensive posture. 26:24—Kaufman's unconventional path to Carnegie Mellon 31:09—Group victimhood and empowerment 37:40—Why coddling and tough love are both wrong 41:55—Embracing optimism in the face of darkness 48:00—Developing a flexible identity Upcoming events: Reason Versus debate: Jacob Sullum and Billy Binion vs. Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael Mangual, June 24 Reason Speakeasy: Nick Gillespie and Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the MAHA Movement, June 25 The Reason Roundtable Live in New York City, July 15 Today's sponsors: Reliance College: What if one day could change how you think—how you lead—and how you shape your future? Join Reliance College for Reliance Day—Saturday, June 28 in Los Angeles! This one-day, high-impact experience is designed for students, professionals, and lifelong learners ready to level up their thinking in an AI-driven world. At Reliance Day, you'll dive into collaborative Socratic discussions and sharpen the critical thinking and leadership skills that drive success in college, business, and life. It's a full day of intellectual challenge and creative exploration—rooted in the Great Books and Montessori-inspired methods that have transformed over 400 lives. Go to RelianceCollege.org/reliancedays to register today. Future of Freedom: If you're tired of cable news debates and Twitter shouting matches and you're looking for serious, good-faith conversations between people who actually care about liberty, then it's time to check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Each episode dives deep into a single topic—tariffs, campus speech, the Department of Government Efficiency—and brings together two guests who disagree on the best path forward. But here's the twist: This isn't a debate show. No interrupting. No dunking. If you believe the future of freedom depends on more than just winning arguments and you're ready for something deeper than the usual echo chambers, check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Real disagreement. Real ideas. Real conversations. Subscribe to Future of Freedom wherever you get your podcasts. ______________________________________________________________________________ Transcript This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy. Nick Gillespie: Kaufman has entered the building. Thanks so much. I'm Nick Gillespie, I'm an editor at Reason, and Scott graciously asked me to interview him about his new book, Rise Above: Overcome a Victim Mindset, Empower Yourself, and Realize Your Full Potential. Let's have a big hand for Scott Barry Kaufman. Scott Kaufman: Thank you. Scott, I think as we talk—and we're going to talk for about 45 minutes—and then we'll have plenty of time for audience Q&A. I'll let you know when to line up, but there's a microphone over on that side of the restaurant, and you can queue up. You'll have plenty of warning about that. But as we talk, your backstory will also come out. This will be crafted like a mystery movie. But I want to start with Rise Above. You have an epigraph at the beginning, which is from Carl Jung, and it says, "I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become." I love that quote. Yeah, talk a little bit about why that's at the start of this book. Yeah, I think that we have a lot of limiting beliefs about our potential and what we're capable of, based on the stories we tell ourselves about our past and what we've been through. And a lot of the stories that we tell ourselves about our past are limiting stories. They keep us enshrined in our past. Another quote I really like, which relates to that, is from the great existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, who said, "Sooner or later you have to give up all hope for a better past." That basically encapsulates the point of my book. Why are we drawn to—why would we believe in something that limits us rather than something that empowers us? Yeah, are any psychoanalysts—any psychoanalysts in the room? People into that? Karen Horney talked about soothing illusions. She was actually the first one to really challenge Freud. And she's like, "Freud, you're batshit crazy." Yeah, she was the first to call it out, you know, before cancel culture. She called out Freud. She says we have a lot of defense mechanisms that serve for us feel—or attempt to feel—safe and secure. It takes a lot sometimes to rip our defense mechanisms off of us, because it's a very vulnerable space to do so. To admit that, "Wow, I have really not gotten over this thing," or "Wow, I really don't think I can cope." To admit to yourself, "I don't think I can do this." It's far easier for a lot of people to never, ever face that thought and hold on to these soothing illusions. Wow. And even if the illusion keeps you in a bad place. Oh, absolutely. In fact, I would say that's our default state. I talk in this book about the theory of learned helplessness. It's a theory that Martin Seligman and his colleagues developed—they shocked dogs and then eventually started shocking humans. Another illustrious chapter in the University of Pennsylvania's history. You know, every once in a while they win the Ivy League football championship, but in between that, they're shocking. They're known for shocking. Yeah, Martin Seligman moved on to humans at some point. He got bored with dogs. But what was really interesting about this research is that after a certain number of shocks, they would open up a cage—they would keep a dog in a cage—they would open the cage and the dog could just leave whenever it wanted to. It was free. But it had been shocked so many times that it did not realize it was free. And even if it realized it was free, it didn't leave. What they found is that, 50 years later, in humans, it operates differently than with dogs. Because of our consciousness, learned helplessness is actually our default state. What we have to learn is hope. Learned hopefulness is what has to be learned. So let's talk about the victim mindset because, you know, that's what this book is about. It's overcoming a victim mindset. That's a big part of it. What goes into creating that victim mindset, and are we at a surging moment of a victim mindset? Oh, yes. Can I—on the second question, yes. A victim mindset is when you believe that—you sort of outsource all of your problems to the external world. Maybe it's an individual, or maybe you're saying a group is holding you back. You don't take responsibility for your reactions to the world. Because maybe trauma—you use the word "trauma"—and so you say that excuses you from how you show up or how you act in the world. And this is the most important part: You don't productively and constructively create a better future for yourself and come up with a plan to help you overcome the past. You stay enshrined in that past for as long as possible, without any sort of hope. Why do you believe that, or what's the evidence that we are in a big surge of a victim mindset? Where does that come from? Yeah, so Jean Twenge has done some really cool analyses in her book Generations, looking at the past three or four generations. And what you see is, there was a self-esteem movement in the '80s—anyone remember Stuart Smalley? Is that his name? Like, "I'm smart enough, doggone it, people like me," or something? Yeah, that was the Al Franken character on Saturday Night Live. I'm not going to be here at the Comedy Cellar doing a Smalley impression. But yeah, there was a self-esteem movement, which morphed into a grandiose narcissism movement. So the generation after that they thought, "Well, we're the best, we're superior, we are entitled to things because we're great." But that's not what it morphed into. That actually morphed into something very interesting, which is a vulnerable narcissism movement. So now we have a generation being raised feeling as though they're entitled to special privileges not because they're great but just because of their fragility. I hate to center everything around the baby boom because, you know, enough with the baby already—but is it? The baby boom was kind of, and I know Twenge talks about this and other people, but the baby boom was the first generation that got raised after World War II in a land of plenty where things really opened up in a profound way for all sorts of people: women being treated more equally with men, Blacks, Asians, minorities kind of being more accepted. And they revolted against their parents—their parents who had survived the Depression, won World War II, and given them all of this. And then they were like, "We're not going to be like you." But now it's the baby boomers who raised kids with this kind of false self-esteem. Is that kind of accurate? Perhaps. Perhaps. There is a genetic component here, so we can't just strictly talk about environmental impact. We also have to recognize that, for instance—I talk about the personality trait neuroticism. Neuroticism is, interestingly enough, very strongly correlated with vulnerable narcissism. A lot of people might not think of neuroticists as— Can you define neuroticism the way that you're using it? Yeah, it's a personality trait—part of the Big Five. So we have conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, openness to new experiences. And then neuroticism is a particular personality trait where if you score high in neuroticism, you tend to ruminate a lot, you tend to be very anxious, you tend to have a lot of negative emotions and a lot of negative thoughts constantly. Your brain is pumping you full of negative thoughts. Genes do play a role in that—in the development of a cognition that constantly is feeding you these kinds of thoughts and things. I think the environment then can amplify neuroticism. And interestingly enough, I think we have an environment that's not only amplifying it, but rewarding it…neuroticism. Explain that. Welcome to social media. I think that you get a lot more attention within our tribal sort of universe that we live in by complaining, by ruminating, by all these cognitive distortions that Jonathan Haidt talks about and Greg Lukianoff talks about in their book The Coddling of the American Mind. You see a lot of these cognitive distortions on the rise, which are correlated with the trait neuroticism. Explain "vulnerable narcissism" as a term. This is not the first time that you're using it, but it's a big part of this book. What is vulnerable narcissism, and where does that come from? Like everything, it's a mix of nature and nurture. But as I was saying earlier, it is a form of entitlement based on past suffering. So you feel like, "I've suffered more than everyone else." It would be, for example, you're at Starbucks and there's a huge line and you're like, "Oh wow, I really should be the first one in line. I probably suffered more than everyone else in this line." There is a scale, and one of the items on the scale—my favorite item—is: "If I was on the Titanic when it was going down, I should get the first life raft because of all I've suffered." Where did you come in on that scale? After, you know, like now? That's actually been an interesting journey for me. I think I used to be pretty high in vulnerable narcissism. When I was really young and put in special education, and everyone thought I was stupid—I'm sure you're going to ask me about that. Yeah, well, why don't we start with that? We'll unspool all of this social science on an autobiography… This side doesn't get to see me at all. Hi! Part of what you're talking about in this book is overcoming a victim mindset and empowering yourself. You have a kind of great story to tell where you—I think it's a— You think it's a great story? Yeah, I think it's an interesting story. Why don't I put it that way? It was traumatic. Well, you know, I was being nice to you because we're sitting in the same room. But it could be great—or I'm rolling my eyes. Kind of fucks me up, dude. I mean, let's put it this way. You have a wonderful academic pedigree. You have a very successful psychology podcast. You're writing books on a regular basis, so you're doing something right. But you started out—you were kind of the slow kid. How did that happen, and how did you get out of that? Yeah, for the first three or four years of my life, my head was zipped up in a cloud. I had a central auditory processing disorder, which meant it took an extra couple of seconds for me to process things in real time. And yeah, everyone definitely thought I was stupid. Like, I was bullied almost daily—and by the way, I still follow those bullies on Facebook to see what they're up to. But that's an aside. But yeah, I was bullied a lot. Are you doing better than they are? Oh, I'm doing much better than they are. And you let them know that, right? No comment. I'm on stealth mode, yeah. I'm all like, "Hey, it's Scotty. Remember me?" No, I don't want to intersect with their lives. But what the hell was I talking about? Okay—so, everyone thought I was stupid. I'll remind you, because maybe you're not fully over the special ed thing. But you were talking about special ed. I sometimes do have my special moments, it's true. And you know, I was just—no one expected anything of me. I mean, it gets you to a certain state of absurdity where you start to just feel like, "Well, then what's the point of anything?" You know? I was kept in there until ninth grade. And I remember there was this day in ninth grade where—it was humiliating—they would remove you from the mainstream classroom to take a special untimed test. And here's the thing: I've always been the kind of person who didn't want the crutches. See, what was bothering me is that they kept giving me all these crutches that I didn't even want because I felt like I was smart—but no one else thought I was. So, I was in a special room taking this untimed history test, and there was a teacher there that day who I'd never seen before. She'd saw seen me. She was covering for the regular teacher, but I was being my normal smart-ass self, and she said, "Why are you daydreaming?" And I said, "Well, it's an untimed test. I have the rest of my life to take this test, so what's the point?" And she's like, "Fair point." And then she's like, "I'd like to talk to you after class." After class, she sort of looked at me, and I was like, "What the fuck is she looking at? Is…

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Kennedy: A Gen X Rebel's Journey From MTV to Fox News Jun 11, 2025

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Today's guest is the former MTV video jockey and current Fox News personality Kennedy, who emerged in the 1990s as a leading voice of Gen X when it came to politics and culture. Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with her about how a generation raised on neglect, nuclear nightmares, and Nirvana forged an ethos of irreverence and independence that still matters today. Kennedy explains her evolution from a teen Republican who swooned over Dan Quayle to a principled libertarian, why the culture of alternative music and media once felt so alive and vital, and what it means when former pop culture rebels like Jimmy Kimmel and Howard Stern become defenders of the status quo. She also talks about free-range parenting and why more of us need to stop caring about what others think and let everyone live radically on their own terms. 0:00—Introduction 2:30—What was MTV like when Clinton was elected president? 730—How did Kennedy become a 'self-declared libertarian'? 12:20—What is the most appealing about libertarianism? 15:01—How did being 'alternative' become mainstream? 22:07—What was it like being a public virgin? 25:42—What is the Gen X ethos? 31:22—Why you can make fun of everything 36:58—How Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla went down vastly different paths 41:07—What is it like to work at Fox News? 47:25—Are conspiracy theories fun? Upcoming events: Reason Versus debate: Jacob Sullum and Billy Binion vs. Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael Mangual, June 24 Reason Speakeasy: Nick Gillespie and Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the MAHA Movement, June 25 The Reason Roundtable Live in New York City, July 15 Today's sponsor: Future of Freedom: If you're tired of cable news debates and Twitter shouting matches, and you're looking for serious, good-faith conversations between people who actually care about liberty then it's time to check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Each episode dives deep into a single topic—tariffs, campus speech, the Department of Government Efficiency—and brings together two guests who disagree on the best path forward. But here's the twist: This isn't a debate show. No interrupting. No dunking. If you believe the future of freedom depends on more than just winning arguments and you're ready for something deeper than the usual echo chambers, check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Real disagreement. Real ideas. Real conversations. Subscribe to Future of Freedom wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy. Nick Gillespie: This is The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. All right, so we know the names, right? The single-named beings that stride our planet like latter-day gods—Madonna, Prince, Sting, Björk, Liberace, and, of course, Kennedy, my guest tonight. Kennedy, thanks for talking. Kennedy: Thank you, and thank you, Nick Gillespie. I'm not sure which name I want to get—should I get rid of Nick or Gillespie or come up with something new? Evita's up for grabs. Evita Portmanteau, I think. Evita. Evita, right? Let's talk about the early days of Kennedy as a public figure. You started working at MTV around 1992. Correct. It was September of 1992, right before Bill Clinton was elected. Yeah. I want to spend a lot of time talking about Gen X. Even though I am a part of the baby boom, I've become possessed with the idea that Gen X is the best generation, and its characteristics are what we need in America today. But before we get to that, because you mentioned Bill Clinton and that was the big generational shift—he was the first baby boom president—can you paint a scene? What was it like at MTV when Bill Clinton won the presidency? It was so hopeful. People were so optimistic in New York, and, of course, MTV at the time was populated by East Coast elites, big-city liberals. A lot of people had gone to places like Yale and Dartmouth, and a lot of Emerson College graduates were at MTV, and they were ready— So, a lot of miming in the hallway. Yeah, so much mummenschanz. And they were ready for their president. The MTV News department, which was fairly new and gaining influence at that time, they were putting a lot of money and resources into MTV News and wanted to cover the political campaign in a new way for this generation—who were just interfacing with politics and news for the first time. When Bill Clinton was elected, they didn't really pay attention to the data. They just looked at everything and looked at all the coverage, the publicity that the Choose or Lose campaign got—and they were like, "Well, MTV elected Bill Clinton. And you are so welcome." They didn't talk about Ross Perot. They didn't talk about the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush era. It was just like, "no, MTV was here and ordained Bill Clinton as president." It was a massive shift. It's hard to recover that, and I think we're going through something similar now—which will probably fully come online in a couple years—where it's the first millennial president or something. But you were the resident Republican at MTV. What were you thinking? And why were you a Republican, and what did that mean to you? I was a Republican because I grew up in Oregon where everyone was liberal, and the people who were really into politics didn't seem particularly happy. There was a kid at my high school named Creighton Webb who was the president of the Teen Republicans. He invited me to go to a couple of chapter meetings, and then he invited me to meet Dan Quayle in Portland when I was a senior in high school. And you famously kind of splooged over Dan Quayle, didn't you? He was a handsome, robust young man. I'm not going to say that it was externally ejaculatory, but I will say that I felt like there was such a connection between us. I think when you feel a connection like that—and any stalker can co-sign this—it can't be one-sided. When you feel something that deeply and that intensely with another human being, obviously they feel the same thing for you. There's that famous Mookie Wilson fake quote: "Whenever I'm going through a slump, I just think about dinosaurs. And then I think, if I'm thinking about dinosaurs, then somewhere the dinosaurs are thinking about me. And if the dinosaurs believe in me, then I can believe in me. And all of a sudden I feel better." It's a totally fake quote, but it's one of my favorite things in the world. That's how I felt about Dan Quayle. So, what was—beyond being contrarian—the appeal of being a Republican? I mean, it really was, at that point in my kind of immature, developing brain, it just made people so mad. I had this one English teacher— This is a great part of Gen X. Yeah, I mean, I had this one English teacher who was such a blowhard and he was such a liberal. He talked about going to Tibet and throwing himself naked on the side of a mountain. And he failed me, and I hated him with a blinding passion. The thing he really hated about me was that I started cavorting with the Teen Republicans. They were really fun. They were rabble-rousers. I compare it to young men in high school and college today who wear MAGA hats. They don't necessarily believe in the Trump doctrine—whatever that means for them—but they just know their constipated, liberal social studies teacher in high school, nothing makes them seethe like this. And there's something really satisfying about that. I think there has to be something utilitarian about making people you don't respect that angry. I'll put that in terms of evolutionary biology where the people who did that did not get eaten by the lions or something—I don't know. But you then evolved—and you evolved upward—to a libertarian position, partly because of the people you met at MTV. Can you talk a little bit about what took you from being a kind of oppositional or contrarian Republican to a self-declared libertarian? Yeah, there was a lot of stuff that I liked about the Republican Party in 1992 and 1993 because it became the opposition party. But what I didn't like about it was I had a lot of gay friends—especially being in New York, being young, being in music—and I didn't like the way that, you know, because Jesse Helms was still alive, and one of his famous quotes was, "You become what you condone." And I'm like… Oh, wow. I don't think I'm going to become a gay man anytime soon. I mean you still got— But right now, like, I totally could. I could be like, "Tomorrow, I'm a gay man." They'd be like, "Great. We're going to throw you a parade. Congratulations." But the social conservatism was really off-putting. I liked the idea of aspirational success. I was having dinner with Kurt Loder one night, and he was like, "You're not a Republican." He was getting really frustrated. He was very angry about the Clinton White House and was disgusted by what he saw as encroaching big government. And I was like, "I hate that stuff too." But he's like, "You're a libertarian." I didn't know what that meant, but I was very intrigued by the idea because I was also very good friends with Dweezil Zappa, and we would sit and talk with his father, Frank, who at the time was being treated for metastatic prostate cancer. He would lose his battle with that the year after I met him. But listening to Frank—because we wouldn't talk; I didn't have a lot to add to the discussion—but listening to Frank… I get the impression too that Frank Zappa didn't really need people to fill the pauses. He didn't. He was a very interesting person. Loved coffee. He talked about libertarianism, and he was really interesting in the way Kurt Loder was really interesting. They both were energized and super-powered by music. Obviously, Frank Zappa was creating music in a way that no one ever had, and musicians that I love respected him so much. And Kurt Loder analyzed and understood music in the way a critically thinking journalist would. He didn't have to make music to really want to exist inside of it, take it apart, and explain it to people. So if both of those people—who were infinitely smarter and more experienced than me—had a name for the same kind of conclusion, and one of them was saying, "You're a libertarian" as well, then I wanted to investigate that. And you have mentioned that Kurt gave you an Ayn Rand book. And I still have it. I rescued it— And you became a libertarian regardless. Yeah, exactly. So I have a home in Pacific Palisades that is uninhabitable. It is filled with lead and asbestos, and the insurance company is trying to deny our claim. Everything around us burned—three houses in either direction. Everything around us burned. The back door blew open, and that means that every microwave, every piece of siding, every Tesla, everything in the neighborhood burned. The incineration and the aftermath filled our house, as it did with the people who were fortunate enough to keep their homes. Pretty much everything in the house has to be thrown away. And there were two books that I—well, there are three. A really, really old edition of Les Misérables in French, and Emmanuel was like, "Oh mon Dieu, c'est fantastique." One was, of course, I found the copy that Kurt gave me of Objectivist Epistemology. And the other was a book called You Are the Message. I had it autographed by the author in 1993 when he and I were co-panelists on one of the earliest episodes of Politically Incorrect, which at the time was on Comedy Central. The inscription on the book is, "Dear Kennedy, I think you're fantastic. Do you fool around?" Yeah and wait for the punch line, that book was written by Roger Ailes. And no, I didn't fool around. There was no fooling around. And as Mary Katharine Ham pointed out years later, he didn't really have a thing for quirky libertarian brunettes. Yeah, that's not his type. What was it about libertarianism that appealed to you then? Freedom. Like the freedom to be successful, the freedom to make academic inquiry without being married to groupthink, and the freedom to allow people to do whatever they wanted because I saw so much of that going on around me in music. As long as it didn't affect me, you know, there was a relationship between debauchery and creativity that I always found so fascinating. That intersection was so rich because it could be chaotic and destructive and deadly, or it could be mind-blowing and soul-shaking and beautiful. A lot of the social conservatives they did condemn that. They condemned music, they condemned lyrics, and they condemned partying of any kind. Even though I was really straight-edged at the time, I loved being around people who rode the razor's edge. Did the people in the music industry or in entertainment industry—they wanted creativity and the freedom to create, but their politics tended to be the most suffocating form of, "Well, I should be allowed to do what I want, but you… you have to turn your thermostat down, you have to drive this kind of car, work this kind of way"? How does that kind of cognitive dissonance maintain itself? I think it sort of dies for a little bit and hibernates, and then it comes back. It comes back as Occupy Wall Street, and now it is regenerated and reanimated as "The Squad." You see this progressivism which obviously wants to increase the size and power of the state, but at the same time there's an edict. There are these arbitrary rules that you must live by. And if you're not, you're the other. You are a bad person, and you must be conquered and crushed. You can't go on private jets. You can't build skyscrapers. You can't use gas stoves, but "I'm going to go cook a video on Instagram Live and it's gonna be on my gas stove because I'm so amazing. Let's go celebrate the global intifada." You know, the show that you… That's Chuck Schumer, by the way. I'm glad somebody knew who that was. The show that you hosted on MTV—I mean, you were on a bunch of things—but it was called Alternative Nation. One of the things that was kind of great about the '90s was that alternative music became mainstream. It was the mainstream. There was no mainstream anymore. There was a period of time where things that were labeled "alternative" were the bestselling type of music. And throughout the culture, there was a real celebration of people hiving off and experimenting and doing their own thing and moving away from the old gods and creating new gods, and then smashing those idols and moving on. What do you think went into that? And is that something we should be striving to recapture? I don't know if you can recapture it because so much of what people do now is just to be seen. So much of what was great about that scene was like dudes who now would be called "incels," locking themselves in garages and basements and just experimenting with chords, putting their sad poems and their quirky poems to music. Then getting together with a couple of friends—like, "screw it, let's go play an open mic night and see if we can get anything going at this bar." Slowly and organically building a following. Then you tour. You get a crappy van and you start driving around the country, sleeping on friends' floors. The second time around, your van's a little bit bigger. It turned out that there was such an appetite for that sort of isolated and beautiful creation that it just—in spite of itself, in spite of being repulsed by fame—absolutely exploded and became its own monster that could not be killed or tamed. This puts me in mi…

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Helen Lewis: The Dark Side of Genius Jun 04, 2025

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Today's guest is Helen Lewis, a British journalist and podcaster who is a staff writer for The Atlantic. Her new book is The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, and it explores how the definition of what it means to be a genius has changed radically over the centuries, how it became linked to all sorts of weird biological theories, and how Elon Musk has come to personify genius in our time (and whether his failure at the Department of Government Efficiency spells the end of his genius moment). Lewis and Reason's Nick Gillespie also talk about The Beatles; William Shockley, who turned to racial science after winning a Nobel Prize for helping to invent the transistor; and her notorious 2018 interview with Jordan Peterson for British GQ, which has racked up over 70 million views. 0:00— Introduction 1:36— The Genius Myth 7:20— How dead geniuses fueled national myths 11:30— Thomas Carlyle and the Great Man theory 18:18— Are inventions inevitable? 23:22— Francis Galton and eugenics 33:35— Pro-natalism and declining fertility rates 37:14— William Shockley 48:00— Shakespeare and The Beatles 57:22— Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and the gender dimensions of genius 1:03:50— Lewis' Jordan Peterson interview 1:07:18— Germaine Greer and second wave feminism 1:11:05— The gender debate in the UK vs US 1:14:14— Elon Musk's rise and fall? 1:20:57— Do geniuses have second acts? Upcoming events: Reason Versus debate: Jacob Sullum and Billy Binion vs. Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael Mangual, June 24 Reason Speakeasy: Nick Gillespie and Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the MAHA Movement, June 25 Transcript This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy. Nick Gillespie: Helen Lewis, thanks so much for talking to Reason. Helen Lewis: Thank you for having me. Let's start with the obvious question. The book is The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, which is a great subtitle. But why did you write The Genius Myth? Do you know what, it's one of those things where it's evolved over time, so I may be now lying to myself about why I wrote it. But I did have a conversation with a friend a couple of years ago about the idea that—he has always said that genius is a right-wing concept, which I thought was a really interesting idea because it's about the individual over the collective. It's about people with sublime achievement who are not part of the common throng. And I thought that was interesting. I thought, well, I hear loads and loads of left-wing people use it very casually, and I don't think they're accepting this kind of idea behind it. And then that made me think, well, hang on a minute, what other ideas are kind of being smuggled in in that little word? And that's where the book kind of came from. That's fascinating. And it puts me in mind—the book is fantastic. I mean, it is a great read. It's better than 99 percent of novels I read. And I love—it's a series of stories about kind of crazy people and the people, including all of us, who enable them. But part of what you talk about in The Genius Myth is that being a genius meant radically different things in different eras. Explain in ancient Greece—and I don't know why we care about what ancient Greece thought about anything—but the Greeks talked about having genius, or being a genius meant that you were possessed with a visiting spirit. Can you explain what that means? Yeah, you have a genius—that's the original sense of it. You're visited by this spirit, and you know, it might be the muse of poetry speaks through you, or the muse of history. And they called it furor poeticus, furor divinus—divine fury. And I think that captures something really well. I don't know if you would describe yourself as a genius, Nick, but most of us wouldn't. But you must have had moments when you've sat down— No, very few people have defined me as a genius, so thank you. But you might have had times when you sit down to write a piece or do some piece of work, and it just clicks. Something just feels really good. And I think most writers probably spend most of their life kind of chasing that dragon for the rest of the time. You go, 'when will it come back?' And that's what writing should feel like, and most of the time it's just a kind of grind. So I think they did a very good thing then in capturing something that we've all felt to some extent. There are moments that work. You talk about how, particularly in the context of things like pop music and whatnot—and this is certainly true for writers and novelists in particular—you go on a streak where you are just performing at a higher level. I want to get into an argument about the Beatles for any number of reasons. It's independent of you—I have this argument every morning. But when you look at somebody like Paul McCartney, who you talk about in an interesting way, he's got to understand that whatever he's been doing for the past 40 years is not what he did for that 5- to 10-year period. He was on. So you go from that classical understanding of genius as a visiting spirit or something is speaking through you—which now is almost always the province of serial killers, right? I guess I had the dog talk to me, and it told me to kill me. They're the last classical geniuses in this tattered world. But then in the Renaissance things shift—the Renaissance and the early modern period. How does being a genius change in that period? Maybe even a little bit later than that, because the thing about the Renaissance is always that the word comes from rinascita—rebirth. So the idea was that they were, as they saw it, bringing back the classical tradition. And it was kind of quite imitative—you were trying to learn these things about proportion and form. Well, I don't want to get sidetracked. I'm just going to say yes—they were smuggling what they wanted to do by saying, "What we're really doing is merely bringing back these eras of former greatness." There's the American Renaissance in American literature, which was created in the 1940s about the pre–Civil War period. And I believe there's a racial journal now called American Renaissance, which—they want to rebirth things. So in this early modern period redefinition of genius, what's going on? Then you get this very, very important book that I had to say I didn't really know about, which is Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists. And it is a group biography of—I have to say, all the artists that I would have known growing up because they were also Ninja Turtles, like Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, Michelangelo. But there is a sense that that was a period of a kind of burst of creativity, and he puts them together in this kind of pantheon. And it's one of the first times that you begin to see, in a really systematic way—this is what I mean by the genius myth. These are stories that we tell about people who are innovators or scientists or artists. So you have, for example, the story of Leonardo da Vinci. And the myth that's imposed on him is that he couldn't settle on anything. He had a kind of—an uber level of ADHD. He was designing the helicopter, then he wanted to learn how to paint directly onto a wall using tempura, then he was doing something else. He was kind of a scatterbrain. We have all met that person in our first semester in college as well—who's just so brilliant. Obviously Leonardo accomplished a few things, as well. It's true—not all of the people that you meet in the first semester at college go on to paint the Mona Lisa, or anything like it, sadly. But what I was getting at is that the Mona Lisa wasn't really the Mona Lisa until centuries after it. Until it got stolen. This is one of my favorite things in all of it. It's the same way that Shakespeare died a respectable playwright, but he didn't die the guy that we should enthrone forever as the crowning jewel of English literature. That really a century later. And exactly the same thing with the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa was—and I'm going to be really rude here and say—quite a sludgy gray and green painting, and not seen as the crowning achievement of the Renaissance by any means. It gets stolen in the 1920s and ends up in Italy. And it becomes—actually, as lots of these things do—about national myths, because Leonardo was Italian or proto-Italian, but he was working for most of his life in France. So it becomes a kind of 'Who owns this great genius?' and 'Therefore, who should have the Mona Lisa?' And then it becomes a kind of inter-country fight. It's also great because, in the United States in particular, Italians have always claimed Christopher Columbus. But now many of us Italian Americans are like, "Oh, maybe he was working for Spain, and maybe he is a Jew, so forget it. We don't need Columbus anymore." He's not The Sopranos… But da Vinci is one model of a Renaissance genius. Talk about Michelangelo or some of the others. The person categorizing them said, "OK, well, there are different gradations." He seemed very much like a boy with a bunch of Pokémon dolls or something where he's rank ordering them things like that. Yeah, well, he definitely had a bias. He had a pro-Florentine bias. So he's quite rude about Titian, who was born—I think— Venice or the Alps. But he kind of gets relegated to second status because he's not from the right place. But Michelangelo, he uses as a different example, which is something you find all the time in genius myths: which is someone who had to struggle. So that's turned into a story about how hard it was to paint the Sistine Chapel, and how he had to design all the stuff you'll hear if you go on the tour of the Sistine Chapel. The other thing that you will know from visiting the Sistine Chapel is that it's a lot. It's quite—it is a statement, is it not? Yeah. And I think that's kind of fascinating too—that you have to have a level of ambition. The film critic called it white elephant art. Which he didn't intend as a compliment—these films that kind of announce themselves as a masterpiece. And I think that actually is also quite pertinent to this. The fact that Ulysses by James Joyce is very hard to read—not an enjoyable novel in the conventional sense—is actually taken as being a sign of its genius. The fact that the Sistine Chapel is big…if he'd done that much individual painting and separated it out by canvases, we wouldn't find it quite so impressive as this one—you know, what's that German word? Kunstkammerwerk—you know, the kind of the whole thing is it. You have that word written on your computer, and you use it in every conversation that you ever have. That's true. I do, actually. Yeah, you've rumbled me. But you know what I mean—like that idea of the kind of… You still see it now when you have like, oh, Birdman, it's filmed like it was in a single shot, or The Revenant, oh it only filmed in natural light, or Tom Hanks really lost all the weight for Cast Away, or Charlize Theron made herself ugly for Monster. These are kind of—there's a price to greatness. I like the movies where people gain weight, because anybody can lose weight, right? If we may jump forward a little bit—and I want to skip over him a little bit, both because he deserves to be forgotten, but I want to get to a later figure in Victorian England—but Thomas Carlyle pops up a couple of times in your work. And he is kind of the modern conceptualizer, right, of Great Man Theory, which is related to genius but it's not quite the same thing. Life writing takes form, and then you get the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. And what you then get is genius really as a marketing tool. So, if you're an artist in the 14th century, what you need is a rich aristocratic patron. If you're an artist in the 18th century, 19th century—well, actually, at this point there'd be things like, you know, gallerists start arriving, things like newspapers arrive, mass media arrives, and you might therefore be able to brand, basically. But what's interesting is that most of the time, or at least at that point, it seems to be less the person selling themselves as a genius, and they have a Boswell—or they have somebody around them who is writing them up as, like, "Oh, this is the real guy," like a hype man. A Flavor Flav. Yeah, everybody needs an 18th century Flavor Flav. Yes, it's true. But then you have somebody like Thomas Carlyle, who, you know, very much of a… in the context of his time, it's not like he was a right-winger. And he hated capitalism, certainly. And he hated all of the liberal economists who actually thought that Irish people and Blacks in Jamaica were human in the same way he was. But how does he talk about Great Man Theory, and how does that kind of add to the genius lore before it gets kind of quantified and mathematized later in that century? Yeah, he has this line, which I'm going to mangle, but it's something like, "The history of the world is, at root, only the history of great men." And that was very in keeping with a certain type of patrician Victorian thinking—that you just needed these once-in-a-generation personalities. One of their references would have been someone like Napoleon Bonaparte, the great French general. And I think there's a lot to that argument—that actually, the military decisions that Napoleon made at the times that he made them changed the history of Europe. He was a consequential figure. In the same way that now The Atlantic just ran a cover story on Donald Trump that said he's the most consequential president of the 21st century. I do think it's a reasonable point to say that some people are kind of hinge points in history. I was gonna make a joke about like, what's his competition so far though? You know, it's—zombie Abe or whatever. And you thought—"No, I love Obama and I would never say anything mean about him." Well, I know. I said, unfortunately, from my stupid libertarian point of view, I see an immense continuity between George W. Bush, Obama, Trump I, [Joe] Biden, Trump II. And it's not a good continuity. But, you know, this is part of what you're talking about when you talk about The Genius Myth—you're not saying everybody is exactly the same, and it's just a social construction that Leonardo gets called a great artist, but actually anybody around him was as good. But it is this storytelling and kind of creating this sense that these people are the limit of everything that we're doing. But with Carlyle—so Carlyle—I guess in a way systematic thinking— this is what the Enlightenment was about. And to some degree, the Renaissance—it hadn't quite got there. And you certainly get there with somebody like [Karl] Marx and [Freidrich] Engels, where they kind of say, actually it's the system. It's the base—typically the economic base—that actually determines everything else. So we might forgive Carlyle this one thing of not really understanding. Oh, I totally forgive him because, you know, what's the easiest thing to do is to go, "Actually, it's both," because it obviously is both, right? Some people do make decisions, but also they are products of fundamental forces that are in society. And I guess—now let me, because I outed myself on my libertarian podcast show as a libertarian—maybe it's people like Adam Smith who started to talk about how things don't just happen. There are a lot of kind of occult forces, invisible hands and whatnot, that create order among seeming chaos. And you could extend…

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