In this episode of Big Questions with Big John, Geoffrey A. Manne joins Big John to explain why antitrust, Big Tech regulation, privacy rules, AI regulation, and intellectual property law are much harder than the political debate admits. The problem is not just whether a company is big. The harder question is whether regulators can […]

Stephanie Slade joins Big John to discuss fusionism, the future of the American right, and the growing fight over whether government should protect freedom or use state power to impose virtue. This conversation gets into the conflict between old-school limited-government conservatism and the New Right’s more muscular approach to politics. It also asks a deeper […]

In this episode of The Big Questions with Big John, Andy Smarick and Big John discuss public schools, school governance, institutional trust, democratic accountability, and why Americans no longer agree on what education is supposed to do. Andy Smarick is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a former president of the Maryland State […]

Americans say they believe in free speech. Then the speech gets ugly, offensive, dangerous, politically inconvenient, or useful to the other side. In this episode of Big Questions with Big John, Jonathan Rauch joins Big John to discuss why free speech is so difficult to defend, why universities lost sight of truth-seeking, why government censorship […]

We built the most productive civilization in human history. We’re also the most anxious, the most isolated, and the least trusting of any generation on record. Brink Lindsey spent two decades at the Cato Institute defending the system that built this world. Now he argues that the wealth machine stopped delivering what it was always […]

What if one of the most hated Supreme Court cases in American legal history was not the villain you were taught it was? David Bernstein, constitutional scholar at George Mason University’s Scalia Law School, joins Big John to challenge the accepted story of Lochner v. New York, the rise of judicial activism accusations, the administrative […]

The Libertarian Party has a strategy problem, and Jacob Hornberger says it’s destroying the movement from within. Hornberger is the founder of the Future of Freedom Foundation, a former U.S. Senate candidate, and a Libertarian presidential contender. He’s spent three decades making the uncompromising intellectual case for individual liberty — and he’s not interested in […]

Megan McArdle is a Washington Post columnist and trained economist who has spent two decades mapping the fault lines where money, policy, and institutional failure collide. With the national debt crossing $36 trillion and expert credibility at a generational low, this conversation is overdue. Chapters:00:00 The $36 Trillion Question01:15 From NYC Socialist to Libertarian Economist06:06 […]

Political philosopher Kevin Vallier, author of Trust in a Polarized Age, joins Big John to map the doom loop connecting social distrust and political polarization — and why COVID may have been the event that broke American trust for good. Chapters:[00:00] Introduction[01:27] Vallier’s Origin Story — Liberty, Conformity & Columbine[03:13] The Open Society: Can It […]

The system isn’t just broken; it was built this way. Lars Mapstead ran for president on one theme: unrig it. Lars Mapstead is a tech entrepreneur and 2024 Libertarian presidential candidate who argues that the two-party duopoly, the Federal Reserve, and the IRS were designed to protect elites — not you. In this episode of […]