What happens if President Donald Trump "seals the border"?

Among Trump's Day 1 executive orders is one called Securing Our Borders, which promises to build the wall, detain and deport immigrants who violate federal or state law, prosecute illegal border crossers, and obtain "complete operational control" of the border. He also declared a state of emergency and ordered the military to "seal the border" and repel an "invasion." Perhaps most controversial of all, another order claims to end birthright citizenship.

The crackdown is already in full swing, with NBC News reporting a single-day record 1,179 immigration arrests this past Sunday. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted pictures of herself overseeing a series of arrests in New York on Tuesday. 

Today's guest is going to help us understand the myths and realities of the immigration system and offer some suggestions about what pragmatic steps could be taken to reform an immigration system that people on all sides have come to believe just isn't working. 

Julia Gelatt is associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, where she studies the legalities of the immigration system, demographic trends, and the interactions between local, state, and federal immigration policy. 

Arresting some criminal aliens this morning in NYC - thank you to the brave officers involved. @DHSgov @ICEgov @SecretService @DEAHQ @USMarshalsHQ @NYPDSpecialops pic.twitter.com/uaRxFCvh5h

— Secretary Kristi Noem (@Sec_Noem) January 28, 2025

• Producer: John Osterhoudt

The post Julia Gelatt: What Happens if Trump 'Seals the Border'? appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's bonus episode of Just Asking Questions is a conversation with Libertarian Party National Chair Angela McArdle about the role the party played in securing a presidential pardon for Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the dark web marketplace Silk Road. Ulbricht, who entered prison at age 29 and walked out at age 40, had served 11 years of a double life sentence with no possibility of parole.

Ulbricht started Silk Road as an idealistic libertarian experiment, describing on his LinkedIn profile his ambition to  create "an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force." The site was only accessible through the anonymizing network known as Tor, and transactions for all sorts of illegal drugs were made in bitcoin. For all these reasons, Ulbricht became a kind of libertarian icon.

The Free Ross movement was tirelessly spearheaded by Ulbricht's mother, Lyn, and championed by the libertarian movement and its many institutions and publications, including Reason magazine, for the past decade. This decade-long effort culminated in a dramatic turn of events during the Libertarian National Convention last year, where Trump appeared and gave a speech in which he promised to free Ulbricht. 

Reason produced a 15-minute video essay describing Ulbricht's case in detail and how this deal came to be, which we'll also link in the description. During the production of that, I interviewed McArdle, who had met with Trump and told him that freeing Ulbricht was a major priority for libertarians.

For those of you who don't follow third-party political drama, McArdle has been a polarizing chair who led the so-called "takeover" of the Libertarian Party by a faction called the Mises Caucus. Her unorthodox strategy, aggressive messaging, and leadership style have generated constant controversy within the broader libertarian movement. Reason has produced several documentaries and interviews on those developments as well.

This is the full conversation that Reason conducted with McArdle before the inauguration on December 13, 2024, about what her conversation with Trump was like, how the meeting came about in the first place, and what the terms of the deal actually were. It also includes some discussion about the state of the Libertarian Party and McArdle's future within it. 

• Producer: John Osterhoudt

The post Angela McArdle: What Role Did the Libertarian Party Play in Freeing Ross Ulbricht? appeared first on Reason.com.

How will the second Donald Trump presidential term transform America? Just asking questions.

It's officially the Trump 2.0 era. One New York Times columnist called his inaugural address "American Carnage 2," while Trump promised a new American "golden age" in his speech.

So how excited, hopeful, or anxious should we be as we enter these next four years?

Journalist Mike Pesca, host of the popular daily news podcast The Gist, joined Reason Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller and Associate Editor Liz Wolfe to reflect on Trump's inaugural address. They also discussed Elon Musk's appearance at the inauguration and Trump's slate of Day 1 executive orders.

• Producer: John Osterhoudt

The post Mike Pesca: How Will Trump 2.0 Transform America? appeared first on Reason.com.

What have the wildfires done to southern California and the people who live there? And could any of this destruction have been prevented? Just asking questions.

The wildfires breaking out across Greater Los Angeles have so far killed at least 25 people and damaged or destroyed over 12,000 structures, according to the Los Angeles Times. 

Today's guest lost her home in a fire that started in the Eaton Valley of the San Gabriel Mountains. "This is what's left of my house," she wrote on X. "Every house on the block is burned to the ground."

Meghan Daum is a writer and author of five books including The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through The New Culture Wars and The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, a PEN Center USA Award winner for creative nonfiction. She also hosts the podcast The Unspeakable with Meghan Daum.

Goodbye, red tape. Through an executive order, we are making it easier for victims of the SoCal fires to quickly rebuild their homes and lives.

We're also extending key price gouging protections to help make rebuilding more affordable. pic.twitter.com/BMrVcFSlHL

— Governor Newsom (@CAgovernor) January 12, 2025

• Producer: John Osterhoudt

The post Meghan Daum: After the Fires, What's Left of L.A.? appeared first on Reason.com.

Why are we forgetting history's lessons?

We're told in school that we study history so as not to repeat its mistakes. But what if those lessons aren't sticking? Today's guest regularly invokes what he calls The Great Forgetting. The striking thing about this collective amnesia is that it doesn't apply only to distant, ancient history, but hard lessons learned only a few decades ago—lessons about inflation, price controls, and crime.

Tyler Cowen is the Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Director of the Mercatus Center, and host of the podcast Conversations with Tyler. He and his colleague Alex Tabbarok founded the popular and influential economics blog Marginal Revolution and recently launched their joint show, the Marginal Revolution Podcast, which has released a limited series on the unlearned economic and cultural lessons of the 1970s.

• Producer: John Osterhoudt

The post Tyler Cowen: Why Do We Refuse To Learn From History? appeared first on Reason.com.

Is it time for the nuclear option? Just asking questions.

A nuclear renaissance may be afoot. The partial reactor meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island plant in 1979 invigorated an anti-nuclear movement that forced the industry to a grinding halt for decades. But in 2023, the first reactor built from scratch since 1974 began operating. Big investments are being made in so-called "advanced nuclear," which promises to deliver smaller, less costly, and less risky reactors. And the AI boom has caused such an energy hunger that tech companies are talking about funding their own nuclear reactors. In fact, Microsoft wants to reopen Three Mile Island! 

We are so back, at least that's what today's guest tells us. 

Isabelle Boemeke is a nuclear influencer. What is that? Well, she'll tell us more in a minute, but what I can tell you for now is that she kissed a cask and she liked it. Boemeke is a Brazilian fashion model who developed an interest in nuclear power's potential to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

• Producer: John Osterhoudt

The post Isabelle Boemeke: Time for the Nuclear Option? appeared first on Reason.com.

How do we escape stagnation and accelerate progress? What if bubbles are actually good? Just asking questions. 

"They promised us flying cars. All we got was one hundred forty characters." Those were the words of Peter Thiel over a decade ago, lamenting technological stagnation. The character limit has since increased, but his point remains the same: Innovation in the software world of "bits" has accelerated, but progress in the material world of "atoms" has been stubbornly slow, at least in his telling.

Economist Tyler Cowen, who popularized the term "Great Stagnation," argued that we picked all the low-hanging fruit in the early-to-mid 20th century thanks to cheap cultivation of unused land, mass education of a previously uneducated population, and revolutions in transportation, energy, and synthetic materials that could since be only marginally improved at increasingly greater expense and effort. The result has been stagnant wage growth when accounting for price inflation and a failure to realize any revolutionary breakthroughs in energy, transportation, or materials science for decades.

But today's guest says there's another underlying reason for the stagnation: a self-defeating cultural and spiritual malaise and pessimism about the future. It manifests itself in the dystopian movies and shows that dominate Hollywood, as well as in the falling prevalence of words associated with progress and the future, and a rise of words associated with caution, worry, and risk found in contemporary literature. 

Byrne Hobart is the co-author of Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation, which offers a surprising way out of stagnation: embracing the dynamic and chaotic power of bubbles—investment bubbles, big social bubbles, and filter bubbles. Examples range from big, ambitious public investments like the Apollo missions and the Manhattan Project to the rise of bitcoin.

• Producer: John Osterhoudt

The post Byrne Hobart: What happened to progress? appeared first on Reason.com.

Must we accelerate AI innovation?

You've probably heard of "effective altruism," but how about "effective accelerationism," or e/acc? "You claim to be building an artificial god in the human image. We're building the conduit for the thermodynamic god that created us. We are not the same." 

Those are the words of Based Beff Jezos, a pseudonymous X account devoted to spreading the e/acc message far and wide, once described by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen as a "patron saint of techno-optimism" and by its detractors as "unhinged" and "absolutely toxic for the AI discourse." 

The man behind Based Beff Jezos was unmasked in Forbes magazine last December as Guillaume Verdon, a Google quantum computing engineer-turned-co-founder of the AI startup Extropic, which has received about $14 million in seed funding to develop a new kind of chip for running AI models. 

He joins us today to talk about effective accelerationism, the politics of AI, and what his company is doing to make sure that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) arrives quickly and remains beyond the control of a single corporation or government. 

• Producer: John Osterhoudt

The post Guillaume Verdon: Should We Have a 'Second Amendment for AI'? appeared first on Reason.com.

About 0.5 percent of U.S. adults identify as transgender, according to a 2022 UCLA study. Among 13- to 17-year-olds, the figure has grown to about 1.4 percent. That uptick in the youth might help explain why trans issues are playing a growing role in American politics. 

Registered voters told Gallup pollsters that transgender issues ranked among the least important political issues they considered when weighing their presidential vote—just below climate change. 

Yet, the Trump campaign spent $65 million running ads in swing states attacking Vice President Kamala Harris' transgender policy stances in the final stretch of the campaign, according to The New York Times. The top Harris super PAC found that one such ad shifted voters who viewed it almost three points towards Trump, resonating particularly well with demographics that swung significantly in his favor.  

In a relatively close election, is it possible that this actually was a deciding factor? And how should trans advocates and Democrats adjust their approach to this issue? 

Joining us today to talk about it are Brianna Wu and TafTaj. They are two of the co-hosts of the new show Dollcast, a show about transgender issues and politics, aiming to correct what they see as the excesses or errors in both the trans and gender-critical movements. TafTaj is a streamer and commentator. Wu is a programmer, political activist, and commentator, best known for her involvement in Gamergate. She now runs the progressive Rebellion PAC.

The post Brianna Wu and TafTaj: How Have Trans Issues Scrambled Our Politics? appeared first on Reason.com.

Was bitcoin the winner of the 2024 election? Just asking questions. 

Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to protect bitcoin and the entire crypto economy. 

Major endorsements from the industry followed, including from the Winklevoss twins, who each made a $1 million bitcoin donation to a pro-Trump PAC. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong called Trump's win the "dawn of a new crypto era." Bitcoin has hit new all-time highs, since the election.

Today's guest has been writing and speaking on these topics for a long time, and was also celebrating after the election, going so far as to call Trump's win a victory in a "spiritual war."

Nic Carter is a writer and general partner at Castle Island Ventures, which invests in crypto-financial infrastructure.

Let's start with crypto and bitcoin before we zoom all the way out to spiritual warfare. Nick begins by telling us why he's optimistic about Trump's second term in regard to making America a better place for people to buy, sell, and hold bitcoin and other crypto assets.

This conversation was recorded on Nov. 20, 2024. Between now and then, some important and relevant news has come to light, especially regarding debanking. There is a new intro to this episode detailing why this matters.

• Producer: John Osterhoudt

The post Nic Carter: Did Bitcoin Win the Election? appeared first on Reason.com.