Reason Podcast

Cory Doctorow, author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Little Brother, and Makers, is a three-time Prometheus Award winner, an honor bestowed on the best works of libertarian science fiction. In his most recent book, Walkaway, the super rich engineer their own immortality, while everyone else walks away from the post-scarcity utopia to rebuild the dead cities they left behind. Reason magazine Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward spoke with Doctorow about cyber warfare, Uber-style reputation economics, and that most overused and poorly understood of sci-fi themes: dystopia. Edited by Todd Krainin.

Speaking to a gathering of leaders of Middle-Eastern countries, President Donald Trump has declared that peace is only possible if "your nations drive out terrorists and extremists." In the same speech given over the weekend, Trump also called for foreign-policy realism and told the assembled leaders that he wasn't there "to lecture" them about how the govern their citizens just so long as they suppress terrorists. Is Trump's rhetoric a shift in U.S. foreign policy or will it have no real impact on how war, diplomacy, and commerce is waged? That's one of the topics that Reason's Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, and Robby Soave discuss in the latest Reason Podcast. Also on the docket: What is behind the jihad against "cultural appropriation," the idea that artists, writers, and individuals should never be allowed to imagine themselves as members of another racial, ethnic, or gender group? Why did Notre Dame students walk out during a commencement speech by Vice President Mike Pence—and did the peaceful protest actually signal a maturity when it comes to disagreement? Will Donald Trump's 10-year budget plan, to be released this week, be anything other than a fantasy map, or will it actually deliver on his promise to, in the words of his advisor Steve Bannon, "deconstruct the administrative state"?

"We've gone to a modern [broadcast] system that has a lot of places where stuff can happen without permission," says Thomas W. Hazlett, who's the FCC's former chief economist, a professor at Clemson University, and author of the new book The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone. "And we have seen that the smartphone revolution and some other great stuff in the wireless space has really burgeoned...That comes from deregulation." So-called net neutrality rules are designed to solve a non-existent problem and threaten to restrict consumer choice, Hazlett tells Reason's Nick Gillespie. "The travesty is there's already a regulatory scheme [to address anti-competitive behavior]—it's called antitrust law." Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Justin Monticello. Music by RW Smith.

"We want to say that campus racism is wherever 'the other' is," says Lawrence Ross, author of Blackballed: The Black and White Politics of Race on America's Campuses. "But no, [racism] happens at Missouri, Yale, Berkeley, Columbia, my alma mater, UCLA...whether it's a small college, or a private college, or a state college, it happens in every place." In today's podcast, we've got the audio from a public debate between Ross and The Fifth Column's Kmele Foster over the following proposition: "America's colleges have fostered a racist environment that makes them a hostile space for African American students." Audio production by Ian Keyser.

"We're at a really interesting moment where public-private partnerships could blossom in a pretty dramatic way," says Stephen Goldsmith, former mayor of Indianapolis and professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "If we have technologies that are highly refined…we can anticipate a problem and fix it before it occurs." Goldsmith, author of 2014's The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance, was the recipient of the Reason Foundation's 2017 Savas Award for promoting public-private partnerships. (The nonprofit Reason Foundation is also the publisher of Reason.com.) As mayor of Indianapolis from 1992 to 1999, Goldsmith trimmed $100 million from the city budget mainly by requiring departments of the municipal government to compete with private companies. Edited by Alexis Garcia. Hosted by Nick Gillespie.

"The best-case scenario [in terms of the Trump-Russia investigation] is that the executive branch gets harassed by the legislative branch," says Reason Editor at Large Matt Welch. "Let's have more investigations because [members of] the executive branch have too much damn power, and they should be forced to explain themselves more fully." On today's episode of the Reason Podcast, Welch joins fellow Reason editors Nick Gillespie and Katherine Mangu-Ward to discuss Trump's decision to fire FBI Director James Comey ("is this the moment where the wheels come off 20th century political institutions?"); how Trump is reshaping the conservative movement; whether the Rock has a shot at becoming our 46th president ("the logical conclusion of the increasingly empty vessels in which we pour our hopes and dreams"); Jeff Sessions' terrifying decision to re-escalate the drug war (is the attorney general "the only person in Washington who knows what he wants?"); and the petty tyranny of the latest vaping crackdown in Austin and Laguna Beach ("getting fined for walking down a public sidewalk and breathing out").

In 1948, veteran newsman Ray Sprigle, best-known for having exposed Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black's membership in the Ku Klux Klan, published an explosive series detailing his month-long trip through the Jim Crow South. A white man, Sprigle altered his appearance and passsed as black so that he could experience firsthand a part of the country that most Americans either didn't know much or care much about. Traveling with the well-known NAACP activist John Wesley Dobbs, Sprigle (pronounced sprig-el) published 21 articles and a book that detailed the ways in which segregation was ruthlessly enforced at every level of interaction between the races. Party-line phone operators, for instance, would never address blacks as mister or missus on a call and shop owners would drape napkins or tissues over a black woman's head when she tried on a hat. Bill Steigerwald's powerful new book, 30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South, documents Sprigle's expose and does a masterful job of recreating an America in which de facto and de jure segregation was the rule not just in the former Confederacy but much of the North as well. It's a deeply disturbing and profoundly moving account that, Steigerwald tells Nick Gillespie, reminds us that "When anybody goes back in history, you learn that nothing is new, everything was worse, and what you thought was simple or true was not.... I have such a deeper appreciation for the punishment that black people received from their government for so long and the crass politics that perpetuated it."

"I've lived my life as a pro free enterprise person," explains Flying Dog Brewery CEO Jim Caruso. "Not pro business. Pro free enterprise, pro consumer choice, artisanal manufacturing." A central player in America's craft beer revolution, Caruso is dedicated to creating something special both inside and outside the bottle. Famed artist Ralph Steadman, best known for his iconic illustrations for work by Hunter S. Thompson, creates all of Flying Dog's labels. It was Steadman who spontaneously wrote on his first commissioned label "good beer, no shit." And it was this label that kicked of Flying Dog's first -- but not last -- fight with government censors. Caruso sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to talk about his run-ins with the state, why he is a libertarian, and the how his values keep him happy. "I'm a happy person. And I attribute that to living as an individual, taking self responsibility, self reliance, but connected to society. It's not a Lone Ranger sort of thing." Edited by Meredith Bragg.

"The rules and the codes [on campuses] have been rewritten behind closed doors such that almost all sex can be charged as something criminal," says feminist author and Northwestern University film professor Laura Kipnis. "It reinforces a traditional femininity that sees women as needing protection, sees women's sexuality as something that is endangering to them." Kipnis' new book is Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, which explores the insanity of sexual conduct codes and attitudes at American universities. It grew out of Kipnis' own experience of being investigated under Title IX of the Education Amendments Act at Northwestern for a 2015 essay she published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. She sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to talk about feminism, sex on campus, her personal experience with Title IX, the dismissal hearing of her former Northwestern colleague Peter Ludlow, which Kipnis has characterized as a "witch trial," and her uneasy new alliance with conservative and libertarian groups. Edited by Paul Detrick.

On the latest episode of the Reason podcast, Peter Suderman chats with fellow Reasoners Nick Gillespie and Katherine Mangu-Ward about why the Republican health care bill is tax legislation in disguise (check out Suderman's Sunday New York Times op-ed); our stupid debate over whether the law makes rape a pre-existing condition (it doesn't); the centrist Emmanuel Macron's big win in France (maybe populism isn't sweeping the globe after all?); the FCC's investigation of Steven Colbert's comic rant that Trump's mouth is only good as a "cock holster" for Vladimir Putin; and the agency's shifting stance on net neutrality (thank god we have a government bureaucracy protecting us from free YouTube).

In a new Reason Podcast, Reason's Peter Suderman tells Nick Gillespie why The American Health Care Act (AHCA) not only fails to really "repeal and replace" Obamcare but actually makes the system even worse. Indeed, the AHCA, which passed by four votes on a strictly party-line vote, locks in Obamacare's system of tax subsidies and while it ends the loathsome individual mandate, it effectively replaces it with an equally ineffective and distortive penalty for failing to maintain constant coverage. The AHCA is also a disaster in terms of process: The GOP House majority rushed it throughout with waiting for the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to score its costs and benefits. Taking a page from former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Paul Ryan rushed the bill through despite a number of members saying they had not had time to read the lengthy legislation. Suderman also explains the steps that need to be taken in order to start building a truly market-oriented health-care and medical-insurance system.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has called marijuana "only slightly less awful" than heroin. But with cannabis legal in 28 states and Washington, D.C., it's clear that federal and state drug policies are at odds. Does the Trump administration want to stop marijuana legalization? How is California dealing with the uncertainty that surrounds this legal industry? What can we expect in the next four years and beyond? On April 20, 2017, Reason hosted a panel of experts interested in the state of marijuana legalization. Hosted by Zach Weissmueller. Edited by Alex Manning.

"I think kratom is the cure for the opioid epidemic," says Chris Bell, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker behind 2008's Bigger, Stronger, Faster and 2015's Prescription Thugs. A plant native to Southeast Asia, kratom can relieve pain and provide a caffeine-like boost. Its most exciting application, however, is weaning addicts off heroin and prescription painkillers. Though the scientific literature is thin, users have been safely ingesting the plant for centuries. Despite kratom's promise, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) claims that it poses an "imminent hazard to public safety" and tried to prohibit most clinical research on it. Produced by Justin Monticello. Cameras by Paul Detrick and Alex Manning. Music by StrangeZero, Ethan Meixsell, Topher Mohr and Alex Elena, and Kevin MacLeod.

On today's episode, Peter Suderman join fellow Reason editors Katherine Mangu-Ward and Stephanie Slade to discuss the Pope's claim that libertarianism is the root of all evil; the five-month budget deal to keep the federal government running while boosting spending across the board; Filipino President (and human-rights abuser) Rodrigo Duterte's invitation to the White House; the White House Correspondents' Dinner; the latest on repealing and replacing Obamacare; the Bret-Stephens-New-York-Times-op-ed-page kerfuffle; and whether the Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale offers a glimpse at where the U.S. is headed.

In the latest Reason podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with the entrepreneurs behind the Yarlap, a device that not only promises to help the one-in-three women who experience incontinence but also reconfigures the way we think about personal health and well-being. The Yarlap, says MaryEllen Reider, can be bought without a prescription and is an example of a medical technology that's "about improving your lives and taking your health into your own hands."