Reason Podcast

John Bolton is "an unrepentant advocate of the Iraq War" says Sen. Rand Paul, who's failed to learn that when America topples governments, invariably we end up with something "worse than what we had." In our latest podcast interview, the Kentucky Republican talks about why Bolton—the rumored nominee for deputy secretary of state—is unfit for office, his thoughts on the nomination of Rex Tillerson for secretary of state ("he's not part of the furniture of Washington"), whether the U.S. should allow in more refugees (probably), the budget crisis, his recent reelection, and whether Trump has absorbed any aspects of "a libertarian foreign policy" (yes, though the talk of Bolton joining the administration gives Paul pause).

Reason's Nick Gillespie joins Flemming Rose, the publisher of the "Mohammed cartoons," at the Cato Institute to discuss threats to expression in politics, culture, and social media during a Trump administration. With a president elect who has promised to "open up" libel laws and shut down parts of the Internet, there's a lot to worry about.

"This is a market solution to one of the biggest health crises we've ever seen in the history of the world," says Aaron Biebert, director of A Billion Lives, a documentary that makes the case that regulatory agencies and non-governmental organizations are engaged in a campaign of misinformation against e-cigarettes. "It's disturbing to me that something that's working is being demonized." Interview by Zach Weissmueller. Music by Chris Zabriskie.

So President-elect Donald Trump has been named as Time's 90th "Person of the Year," besting a short list that included Hillary Clinton, Beyonce, and "the Hackers." No one can argue with Time's pick, but there's plenty to say about it. And in this new Reason podcast, Reason magazine Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason Editor at Large Matt Welch, and Nick Gillespie talk about The Donald's cabinet picks so far, his intervention to keep a Carrier plant in Indiana, and his promise to start penalizing American companies that do business in a way that he doesn't like. We also talk about how Republicans have openly become the anti-free-market party—Vice President-elect Mike Pence recently opined that "the free market has been sorting it out and America's been losing"—and whether Democrats will rediscover their free-trading past, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore pushed NAFTA across the finish line.

If you listen to Elon Musk, driverless cars are a technology that are just around the corner. But, Bob Poole, Searle Freedom Trust Transportation Fellow and Director of Transportation Policy at Reason Foundation is skeptical of Musk's timeline. "Skepticism is coming partly from researchers [...] at UC Berkeley, at Carnegie Mellon, at MIT who say this is a much harder problem than a lot of people, including Elon Musk, make it out to be." Interview by Nick Gillespie. Editing by Paul Detrick.

"What [Trump] has said about energy...is the best of any president since Reagan," says Alex Epstein, who is the president and founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, a think tank devoted to exploring how new technology can improve the planet. Trump, says Epstein, has so far been an advocate for "Americans to reach their full energy potential." Epstein is the author of the excellent 2014 book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, which, in his signature, clear-eyed style, argues that cheap and abundant hydrocarbons have made human flourishing possible. (Read Ron Bailey's 2015 review.) "Man...survives by impacting nature," he told Reason's Nick Gillespie. The environmental movement, however, "says [this] essence of human survival is bad. And that's wrong." In our latest podcast, Epstein and Gillespie discuss hydraulic fracking ("our energy prosperity has depended on the ignorance of politicians"), global warming (he prefers the phrase "climate danger"), solar and wind power ("the unreliables"), Ayn Rand's influence on his work, and what we can expect from Trump on energy.

How should libertarians—and Reason magazine, Reason.com, and Reason TV—feel about the prospects of the Trump era? And should libertarians be optimistic about how social, economic, and political freedom will fare under a president who talked about "closing that Internet up in some ways" and going after newspapers that wrote negative stories about him, invoked protectionism and and nationalism without missing a cue, and recently called for yanking the citizenship of flag burners? Reason honchos Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch debate, discuss, and decided: While folks on the broadly defined left busy themselves with scare stories about the end of the world and set about overthrowing the Electoral College and folks on the right alternate between their own style of pants-wetting and embrace of Trump's economic and demographic nationalism, our print, web, and video journalism will be looking at the actual effects of policies and always advocating for more choice and freedom in how we choose to live our lives. As important, we'll be looking at all the ways in which people are moving beyond government and creating a better, fairer, and more-prosperous 21st century without asking or waiting for anyone's permission.

"People are driven by their self-interest [which is why] they're always going to use the best tool [at their disposal]," says bitcoin entrepreneur Rodrigo Souza. "And that's why I think technology is going to drive us to a freer society." Souza has played an important role in the growing popularity of bitcoin in Latin America. In addition to being an outspoken libertarian and a popular YouTube personality, he’s the founder and CEO of BlinkTrade, which operates the largest bitcoin exchanges in Vietnam, Pakistan, Venezuela, Brazil, and the second largest in Chile. In the U.S., bitcoin is used mainly by libertarians and tech geeks, but, as Souza explains, it's catching on in Latin America solely for practical reasons. Venezuelans are using bitcoins to buy food and medicine from abroad, routing around the government capital controls that make it virtually impossible to spend government-issued bolivars outside the country. In Brazil, bitcoin users are escaping tariffs that can run as high as 60 percent. In our latest podcast, Souza and Reason's Jim Epstein discuss how bitcoin is being used in Venezuela and Brazil, Souza’s personal experience with inflation in Latin America, his libertarianism, and more.

Daniel Hannan is one of Brexit's biggest champions. A Member of the European Parliament and a leading Euroskeptic, Hannan's advocacy of withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union has earned him international attention. While critics regarded the "Vote Leave" campaign as a dangerous retreat from globalization, Hannan has made consistent, libertarian arguments for withdrawal as a path towards greater democracy and free markets. Noting the E.U.'s sluggish economic growth rates and its failure to establish free trade agreements with China and India, Hannan believes the U.K. should take charge of its own economic destiny. "I want people to be making the ethical argument for free trade as the supreme instrument of poverty alleviation, of conflict resolution and of social justice," Hannan says. He adds, "It's the multinationals that thrive on the distortions and the tariffs and the quotas, he says. "And it's the poor who will benefit most from their removal." Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alex Manning.

When Thanksgiving became a national holiday back in 1863, it was a repudiation of the French aristocracy, says food historian Rachel Laudan. Europe's haute cuisine, contemporaries believed, "ruined the individual, the household, and the nation." Thus, this "simple meal...became a national celebration embracing all citizens," Laudan wrote in a 2013 Boston Globe essay. Contemporary novelist and cookbook author Sarah Josepha Hale designed the standard Thanksgiving mean as an affirmation of our (small 'r') republican virtues. Turkey was cheap to procure, pumpkin pie was easy to make, and cranberry sauce was a simple take on the fancy toppings typical in a French court. The meaning of Thanksgiving has changed over the years—thanks in part to Julia Child's successful effort to democratize French cuisine—but even today, "nobody suggests adding truffles to your turkey," Laudan says. Nick Gillespie interviewed Laudan about the meaning of Thanksgiving and other aspects of culinary history, drawing on her fascinating, 2015 book, Cuisine & Empire.

"It doesn't matter what the origins of the Second Amendment were," says Cody Wilson, creator of the first 3D-printed gun and author of the new book, Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free. "With the internet, we can transform this thing into right to resistance on a global scale. If it's just a fact that the government serves guns now, this is just a point of political life." Reason TV visited Wilson at an Austin, Texas-based manufacturing facility of his company Defense Distributed to discuss his new memoir about the creation of first 3D-printed firearm, which he dubbed "The Liberator." Interview by Zach Weissmueller. Edited by Weissmueller. Music by Kai Engel.

"What we know [about Trump] so far is that he talked a lot about crumbling infrastructure and the need to make America's infrastructure great again," says Bob Poole, Searle Freedom Trust Fellow and the Director of Transportation Policy at the Reason Foundation. "This suggests a big new emphasis on some kind of federal transportation program." Poole sat down with Nick Gillespie to discuss the transportation policies likely to be introduced in the new Trump administration and reasons for libertarians to feel hopeful when it comes to the president-elect's infrastructure plan. "I'm encouraged by what I see," says Poole, who cites the involvement of Shirley Ybarra, a former Reason Foundation fellow and Secretary of Transportation in the state of Virginia, as a sign that Trump will look to public private partnerships as part of his transportation strategy. Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alexis Garcia. Music by Topher Mohr and Alex Elena and Jingle Punks.

"Canada, Mexico, and China are the top three customers for U.S. exports," says Dan Griswold, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. So what are the top three countries President-elect Donald Trump wants to pick a trade fight with? "Canada, Mexico, and China." Griswold, who's also the co-director of Mercatus' Program on the American Economy and Globalization, says he's "cautiously pessimistic" about what Trump will mean for U.S. trade policy. In a new Reason podcast with Nick Gillespie, he dispels some of the classic myths about free trade, such as that it's a major job killer (technological progress is the real culprit), and that trade deals such as NAFTA, CAFTA, and TPP establish systems of "managed trade" and thus should be opposed by "real" libertarians. "These trade agreements have left us freer," he says, "and I think libertarians should support that."

Trump is setting the stage "for a full scale war on immigration [that will] reprise the war on drugs,” says Shikha Dalmia, a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation and a columnist at The Week. She fears that the federal government will start "giving incentives to catch illegals” just as it does in the drug war. The mayors of so-called sanctuary cities like New York and Chicago have vowed to protect illegal immigrant residents from Trump, but with the right incentives, Dalmia say, they may “come to heel after all.” Nick Gillespie interviewed Dalmia in our latest podcast.

"[Donald Trump] has no plans to reduce the drivers of our future debt," says Mercatus Center Senor Fellow and Reason columnist Veronique de Rugy, "and these are Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid." While it's still too early to suss out the details of Trump's plan, the fact that he "has no plan to reform entitlements shows that he's not serious about the current situation." De Rugy talked with Nick Gillespie about what we can expect in terms of debt and spending in the Trump Administration.