Today's guest is the legendary journalist and New Yorker staffer Lawrence Wright. He is the author of Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief; The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11; and The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid.

Wright talks with Reason's Nick Gillespie about The Human Scale, his new novel set in the war-torn Middle East, and why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict keeps burning even as most of the 20th century's conflicts have cooled. They also go deep on Wright's exposés on the war on terror, satanic panics, and how our craving for belief can lead us to madness. Then they turn to Texas, Wright's home state and the place he says is the future of America. What exactly does it mean that we're all becoming more like Lone Star State?

This discussion took place at a live event in New York City.

0:00— Introduction

1:20— Texas: the future of American politics

3:17— 'The Human Scale'

5:38— Why the Israel-Palestine conflict endures

12:12— 'Thirteen Days In September' and the Camp David Accords

23:37— America as both egocentric bully and colony for the rest of the world

26:17— 'Remembering Satan' and the 'recovered memories' panic

33:29— How abortion anxiety may have fueled a moral panic

37:07— Insurance companies ended the panic by denying quack psychiatric treatments

39:15— The will to believe often overrides logic and evidence

40:55— Wright's teenage religious fervor led to interest in Scientology

42:19— How Scientology seduced Hollywood

47:26— 'Going clear' and Scientology backlash

50:03— Getting Paul Haggis on the record about Scientology

52:55— Texas in American mythology

 

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, Lawrence Wright, late of the Texas Monthly, currently with The New Yorker, and I guess you live in Austin. Do people punch you in the face when you walk down the street because you're at The New Yorker?

Lawrence Wright: Austin is not the usual Texas town. You know, it's a very, very blue city with a recent influx of California libertarian billionaires. 

Uh oh.

So, you know, it's changing a lot.

I'm two of those things. I've lived in California, and I'm a libertarian. So the third will follow. 

Just one more step.

But I was joking about Texans' attitude toward New Yorkers. I remember the old Pace Salsa ads, where they would make fun of salsa that was made in New York City. Austin—and Texas more broadly—is very cosmopolitan these days, isn't it? Or getting there. 

You know, it's the second-largest state, and by 2050, it's projected to be the size of New York and California combined. 

Wow.

So, whatever you think of American politics, it's going to be Texas politics from now on out. And I can tell you, speaking from the belly of the beast, we Texans are not ready for that.

We haven't educated our kids, we haven't got the infrastructure—there are a lot of problems we have. We don't take care of our citizens' health. But all that aside it's the hot spot on the map, and there doesn't seem to be anything that's likely to change it unless we run out of water. I think if there's one thing, one real vulnerability that Texas has, that's what it is.

We're going to come back later in our conversation to talk about Texas—not only Texas' future but Texas as the future of America. But let's start now. You have a new novel out. It's called The Human Scale. It is a police procedural that's set in the Middle East, in the occupied territories mostly, right? In Hebron. It follows Tony Malik who is half Irish and half Palestinian. And I thought, as a half Irish, half Italian, I had problems.

But he's an American FBI agent who is investigating the murder in Gaza of an Israeli police chief. Tell us, what prompted you to write this novel now—and as a novel, as opposed to nonfiction?

Well, I've written about the Middle East for much of my career. And, you know, I was always puzzled by what made this conflict so durable. I mean, I'm the same age as Israel. It's a young country. But in my lifetime, I have seen apartheid end. I've seen a black man elected president. I've seen the Soviet Union dissolve—all these things that were never going to happen until they did.

I've seen Vietnam, Iraq I, Iraq II, Afghanistan—all these are past history now. But this keeps going and going. One of the reasons I decided to do it as a novel is that, you know, you can talk to people, you can look them in the eye, but only a novel allows you to go through the eyes and see the world through your characters' own perspective. That would allow me, I thought, to try to get closer to what are the elements that make this war go on and on.

And it's not just Israel and Palestine. It's infected our own politics. We're in the streets, we're on the campuses. The whole Western world is absorbed with this argument, which has been going on for as long as I've been alive.

So what do you think? What's the root of it—or what's enough?

Well, there are several obvious ones. One is God. If you look at the Torah and the Old Testament, God promised this grant of land to Moses—twice, as a matter of fact—but they're different parcels. The first one is a little more generous. It goes from the Red Sea to the Euphrates, which would take in Jordan, the West Bank, parts of Lebanon, a little bit of Saudi Arabia.

And then the next time he gives the promise of the Promised Land, it's more like modern Israel, with the West Bank in it. And then, when Moses dies and Joshua takes over, God commands him to go into Judea and Samaria and kill every living thing. And so that's how the Holy Land was birthed, according to the Bible.

So if you're Jewish and you see this as God's promise to you, then, you know, you don't have to hear anything else. The Quran also agrees that God gave Moses this gift but that the Jews lost the birthright because they turned against God and He took it away from them. That's one of the main problems.

Another real dilemma—I was in Gaza in 2009. It was right after Operation Cast Lead, which was one of those periodic, what the Israelis call "mowing the lawn." In this case, Hamas had kidnapped this young Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit, and they were still holding him when I went to visit. He was held for five years. The Israelis never found him. They finally exchanged him for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.

And I got to wondering: In what scale do you measure the value of a human being? How does one person get to equal 1,000? This disparate valuation of people's lives is evident right before us—1,200 Israelis have been slaughtered, and yet 50,000 Palestinians have been killed so far that we know of. At what point does the scale get balanced?

There's one other thing that I was really curious about. I thought I had figured out the way to peace—many people have. It's like the illusion of water in the desert or something like that. But I read this book by David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. Ben-Gurion was Israel's founding premier, and Ben-Zvi was its second president.

They were living in Manhattan in 1906 after being kicked out of the Ottoman Empire. They wrote this book in which they described, and this is mainly Ben-Zvi, because he was kind of an amateur archaeologist. He would wander in the Arab villages and see candles in the windows on Friday night. He would see Hebrew in the cemeteries. And he formed a theory that the Palestinians are Jews—or were. They were the remnant of the Jewish population that didn't go out in the diaspora. They stayed.

Then, as centuries passed, they converted to Christianity or to Islam to avoid paying taxes. And actually, genetics have proved that theory right. The Jewish population in Gaza is very similar to the Ashkenazi, through DNA. If you extrapolate and go back in time, they were probably identical.

So I thought I would just go to Israel and tell them, "Yeah, you know, these guys are Jewish." And I expected, "Oh my gosh, we didn't know!" No. "We knew that." And that made it more complicated for me.

So I found a book that has been very—it's an arresting book for me. It's called The Need to Have Enemies and Allies by a Cypriot American psychiatrist named Vamik Volkan. He grew up in Cyprus, populated by Greeks and Turks—these historic antagonists. And they're very similar people. They dressed the same. They each had a white robe. The men who were Turkish would have a green belt and the Greeks would have a blue belt. They smoked different cigarettes. By such things, you knew who your enemy was.

In Northern Ireland, the Catholics and the Protestants would paint their doors different colors so you'd know who lived there. The Hutus and the Tutsis were so similar, they had to ask which tribe you're in before they killed each other.

He referenced [Sigmund] Freud's idea of the narcissism of minor differences—that it is people who are more similar who have the bloodiest civil wars, and so on. According to Freud, it's because, due to the similarity, you project onto your twin the parts of your own nature that you despise. So you're actually fighting, in a way, against your own nature.

It's an interesting theory. But it leaves you grasping for: How is it that Arabs and Jews can live together peacefully in Brooklyn and they can't in the Middle East? I think we have more to learn about that.

Yeah, you also wrote a book called Thirteen Days in September, which was kind of a paean to Jimmy Carter for brokering the Camp David Accords. You mentioned Jews and Arabs—or Muslims—in the Middle East. Christians have kind of vacated that space. In talking about that book, you attribute a lot of what happened at Camp David to Carter's Christianity. Could you talk about that? I mean, religion is generally seen as the stumbling block, particularly in the Middle East. Could it also be a way to resolve things?

Well, in that case, it was. They were fervent believers. But aside from their belief—Carter was a one-term Georgia governor, Anwar Sadat was an assassin, Menachem Begin was a terrorist. "Let's get together and have a peace conference. How does that sound?"

Thirteen days in Camp David with the outside world closed up. These three—the most unlikely gathering of peacemakers you can imagine—emerge with a peace treaty. They signed it in 1979. It hasn't been violated a whit in the years since. It's the first and most durable treaty signed there.

And so you can ask yourself: How did they do it? It was arduous and painful. They had political courage. But I think each of them realized they were going to pay a price for it. I'm not sure they understood how great a price.

But Carter lost reelection. He failed, for the first time as a Democratic nominee, to get the Jewish vote. The Jews turned against the man who had given Israel probably the greatest gift it had ever received.

Menachem Begin felt he was now entitled to invade Lebanon for a couple of weeks—and it lasted 18 years. At the end of his days, he was secluded and isolated. There were protesters outside his house. He refused to have them dispersed. But it was like the "Hey, hey, LBJ!" chants—they were haunting. He was a sad figure when he lived out the rest of his life.

And of course, Sadat was assassinated. They had courage—and they paid the price. But I think maybe the lesson that goes to future peacemakers is that it is a perilous enterprise.

Is some of it that they weren't religious? I mean, Carter was an evangelical—mainstream born-again theology as a cultural identity—but he was a secularist. And the other two, compared to the leadership now, it seems like religion is much more front and center in daily life. Extreme religion, in Israel and in the Palestine territories. Is part of the problem that secularism is taking a beating in the Middle East?

I don't know. Sadat called himself the First Man of Islam. He thought he was the most religious person on the planet. And Menachem Begin was the first nonsecular leader of Israel. So, the step was taken at that point.

Frankly, I don't think religion has as much to do with the conflict as commonly thought. A lot of it is politics. First of all, the Palestinians have had bad luck with democracy, to put it politely. It's interesting to look back—the last election in Palestine and Gaza was in 2006. So, it's been, what, 19 years?

And Hamas won. Why did that happen? What was interesting was that after people left the polls, there were exit polls taken. More than 80 percent of the people polled who had voted for Hamas said they wanted peace with Israel. They wanted Hamas to drop its anti-Israel rhetoric—all the things you would have wanted them to think, they were thinking.

But they voted for Hamas because the Palestinian Authority was so corrupt and tyrannical that everybody hated it so much they'd rather have Hamas. But they didn't, I think, think they'd have Hamas forever. You can see stirrings in Gaza right now—under the most dangerous imaginable circumstances—of people trying to shed Hamas from governing that territory.

Yeah. The anti-Hamas protests put to shame the kind of campus protests here. The stakes are incredibly high.

Can we shift from talking about that to an earlier book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, that you wrote, which was published in 2006? That book, I think, along with The Siege of Mecca, which came out around the same time, really explores what happened. Can you give a capsule summary? Where did the Islamism that fueled Osama bin Laden and ultimately the creation of Al Qaeda—where did that start?

My contention is that it started in the prisons in Egypt.

It's interesting—my wife Roberta and I were teaching in Egypt at that time. I was a conscientious objector during Vietnam, and that was my alternative service. We were there when [Gamal Abdel] Nasser died—that was in October of '70 [sic]—and Anwar Sadat became president. Everybody thought it was a joke. He was sort of like a Spiro Agnew figure; nobody could take him seriously.

Until he shook up the whole world by flying to Tel Aviv and speaking at the Knesset.

One of the first things Sadat did was to free the Muslim Brothers who were in prison. And they're the ones who killed him. At the time, I was really naive. There were practically no Americans or even Westerners in Egypt at the time. There were no diplomatic relations. The American University was run by a CIA agent—we found that out while we were there.

I was seen as a political dissident. I was a kid, more or less. Certainly not a sophisticated politician. I wish I could go back and relive some of that with a little more knowledge about how the world works.

During the time of the Afghan revolt against the Soviet Union, a lot of Egyptians and other Arabs went to fight. And they came home and by this time they had formed Brotherhood groups and had been radicalized. When they went into prison—the Egyptian prisons, I can't speak to what they're like now—they were just appalling.

We have film of Ayman al-Zawahiri who was the Egyptian doctor that became the right-hand man of Osama bin Laden, and he was in prison. He was talking in court—there was a big cage full of defendants—and he was talking about how the guards had put the dogs on them. What that meant was they would tie them backward on a chair and let the dogs fuck them.

That kind of humiliation stays with you. In my opinion, it was this Egyptian clique that came out of the Egyptian prisons, went to Afghanistan, and merged with bin Laden—who at the time was thinking of it as kind of an Arab foreign legion. They would go help muslims everywhere, but Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Egyptians had a different idea.

Why would, on a kind of basic level, wouldn't those people, after experiencing that, want to kill Egyptians?

Oh, they did. They killed a lot of them.  So how does it get projected outward?

It was bin Laden who made the turn. Basically, Zawahiri wanted to take over Egypt, but he thought it was too hard.

Bin Laden had this idea, that is an Islamic idea, about the near enemy and the far enemy. In order for Islam to triumph, you begin with the enemy that's close to you—the one affecting your society. Then, when you solve that problem, you spread it. Bin Laden had the insight that the far enemy is near. The Red Sea, the Mediterranean—is an American lake. So, the way to get rid of the near enemy is to scare away the far enemy.

That insight caused Al Qaeda to become an international organization.

Part of what the book raises—and it's a question that comes up from time to time in American foreign policy, especially in the wake of 9/11 and the war on terror—you know—Bin Laden said, "the reason we bombed the towers," just a few miles from here, "was because you had bases in Saudi Arabia, at our holiest sites" and things like that.

Do we take him at face value of that? Was it was somebody—speaking of Texans, was Ron Paul right—that the reason they attacked here was because we were bombing and subjugating them over there?

There's no question there was truth to that. But also, it was a great rallying cry.

It seemed easier to fight Americans than Egyptians or Saudis. If you're a Saudi, for instance, you're a member of a tribe—most of the Saudis are. Your whole family—your extended family are at risk if you are antiroyal family. It's a very difficult thing.

So, it's easier to be anti-American.

America's adventures in the world have been disastrous for us and for the rest of the world—because we don't know the rest of the world. I often think of it as being like a one-way mirror. We can't see outside it, but outside of America everybody else sees us.

Moreover, every country has a colony here. In Egypt, everybody would have an uncle in America. So there was always a point of comparison: "My uncle's life is better than my life."

In a way, America's mission in the world is to show how democracy can work and how you can have a better life. That was, it still is, a powerful thing, but it's been so polluted by our adventures that it's become discredited.

Out of the last 25 years, we've spent about 20 of them in major wars, shooting wars. We're kind of out of that for the moment. Do you feel like we've learned any meaningful lessons?

It's like we learn it on Tuesday and forget it on Friday.

Every war has its raison d'être or its reason. The most egregious example was the Second Iraq War. Hideous. I don't know how much of the story about the nuclear bombs and everything was based on fantasy, or convenient fiction, or just bad intelligence.

There was also a different Camp David meeting. The idea was they were just better targets. So we can go bomb a country that has a lot of things that would get hit, rather than opium fields. So, I don't know. 

I guess I want to point out that Texas is kind of 0 for 3 in terms of presidents who have had good foreign policies—at least going back to LBJ [Lydon B. Johnson].

But let's talk about something a little more cheerful. Let's talk about your 1994 book, Remembering Satan, which is one of the most devastating explorations of a ritual satanic child abuse panic case. Can you quickly talk about the person at the center of that? What makes it amazing is that the person at the center confessed to the crimes he was accused of.

It started with my therapist telling me that they were treating all these—mainly young—women who were recovering memories of satanic abuse. And then they said that Satanists are responsible for 50 murders a year in Austin. We never even had 50 murders in Austin! And I thought, these are bright, intelligent people. Wow.

So I got intrigued by how could they believe that?

Well, the Satanists eat their victims, right? So they don't leave a trace. You know, this elaborate infrastructure…

There was one meeting I went to. Part of the syndrome was that ladies that were treated would be diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. So I went to a meeting, the therapist and the victims were hosting the meeting. The victims that they were seeing, as patients—there were four of them—one of them claimed to have 400 personalities—which is a real management problem.

You'd need to be Andrew Huberman to really schedule that properly, right?

So I sat at the lunch break, and the woman who had organized it. I said, "I don't get it—if there are 50 murders, who's collecting the bodies?"

She said, "Postmen. The postmen are doing it. They put them in the bags…."

It was nuts. Nuts. Nuts. Nuts.

We had four hospitals in Austin. By the time I started writing this, each of them had a dissociative disorders wing to treat women—mainly—who had multiple personality disorder. And part of their disorder was supposedly brought on by the fact that they had been satanically abused.

I went to a conference of policemen in Austin. It was led by a roving cop who was making his living talking to other cops about satanic abuse. He said there were that 50,000 murders a year in America by Satanists. Again, that was more murders than we actually had.

Tina Brown was the editor of The New Yorker at the time, and I said I was interested in multiple personality disorder. I said that, "when they're in therapy, they would have these memories of being satanically ritually abused."

[Wright as Tina] "Oh. That's hot, hot, hot! I want that right away."

So I had to find an example. There were hundreds of cases in the courts already. But there was one where a guy went to prison—he was a deputy sheriff in Olympia, Washington—and he confessed. So I thought, that's the case. If there's anything to it, this guy's confessed to it so maybe that'd be a more interesting story.

I went out and met with him. He was investigated by his own police department—it was the county sheriff's office. He was an evangelical Christian, and his minister came in and told him that God would not let him have a false memory.

Then a psychiatrist was brought in too, who hypnotized him and persuaded him. He began to develop these memories. His daughters were developing memories—but they never coincided. They were always different memories. There was never a single one that sounded like the other.  

I was curious about, "Where did this start?"

I was in L.A., and there's a church—the Foursquare Gospel Church. Aimee Semple McPherson, some of you may have heard that name, famous evangelist in the early part of the 20th Century. It's still going. 

For other reasons I was there interviewing, but I said, "I know that there was a summer camp where Erica Ingram, the first to make this charge, has gone. It must of been one of your evangelists…" 

"Oh yeah, that was Paula." 

"Oh, is she here?" 

"Yeah, she's here."

So I asked her to come in and tell me about the moment in summer camp with all these young girls. 

She said:

Oh, it was a holy site. I would talk to them, and I'd say, "I feel there's someone in here who's been locked in the closet and she's hearing her father's footsteps." 

Then someone would cry, "It was me! It was me!"

Gradually, so many came forward.

They came to me and said, "there is a young woman"—who was one of the counselors—"and she's just in tears, and we can't break through."

So I went to see her. She was by herself, and she was sobbing. I put my hand on her head and anointed her. I said, "You've been abused." Then I said, "And it's by your father. And it's been happening many times."

This very religious 15-year-old girl hears from God that her father had been abusing her. So what she did with that was to go home and start trying to remember what had happened. And she came up with these accusations.

And then—the most shocking thing—is that he agreed…

I mean, he doesn't now.

Even though he's serving 18 years in prison. He did try to change his plea. I mean, you go through it—it's fascinating, the way he was interrogated. His confession came very quickly. And then he kind of started walking away from it, but he wasn't allowed to.

It's a sad story—the willingness of people to believe things that are not true.

For instance, these girls would supposably—they had been raped, they have had babies ripped out of their stomachs, they'd been nailed to the floor—all these things that they said had happened to them. Finally, a physical examination was taken. They were virgins. They had never had children.

But in the minds of the cops, this didn't stop the freight train. Paul had confessed. Something must have happened. 

What do you think was driving it? I mean, we all have moments—both on an individual level and on a societal level—where we want to believe things that clearly are not true.

What was going on in America in the '70s and '80s that these kinds of accusations—of satanic ritual child abuse? This was something right-wingers believed it and left-wingers—Tipper Gore wrote a whole book about raising PG kids in an X-rated world that had a lot to do with this. 

Is there some underlying sociological fact that helps explain it?

Abortion. I mean, the fantasies are ideal: "The baby was ripped from my body," "There was blood all over the place"—that sort of thing.

Especially with young teen girls and preteens, the sexual longing mixed with the fear and the societal condemnation that would come along with being pregnant—I think that's my Freudian analysis of it. But it was a hot subject.

In some of the cases, like the McMartin preschool case—there were a couple of big ones in the New York area—I always saw that as people were uncomfortable with kids going into daycare as women entered the work force on equal terms with men. There was a deep discomfort with that as well.

We had a case in Austin. Fran and Dan ran a nursery school. The hysteria got to the point that people began asking their own children who were maybe 3 or 4-year-olds, "Does anything happen to you in school?"

It evolved to the point that some of the children began to talk about how when their parents left them at school they would get on a plane and go to Mexico. They would kill a giraffe and bury him.

You think: Nobody can believe this. But the parents said, "Well, that may not have happened exactly like that, but something happened."

I went to see some of the trial, and there was this 3-year-old girl. When I walked into the courtroom I see her sitting on her big sister's lap. The prosecutor said, "Now sweetie, did Dan touch you? Did Dan hurt you?"

"No."

"Your Honor, can we have a recess?"

And then she's got a lollipop and it's, "Yes. Yes."

They got out of prison, eventually. Their conviction was reversed. But they must've been in for 10 years.

What lanced that kind of boil—or that mania? Because we don't hear about it anymore.

It was insurance companies refusing to pay for those kinds of treatments that made the difference. Those four dissociative disorder wings? They're all gone now. Nobody will provide coverage for therapy involving multiple personalities or satanic abuse.

Multiple personalities aren't even in the DSM manual.

I was invited to a group of psychoanalysts and psychiatrists in Austin. I'm in a band, and my guitar player is a professor of psychology, so you might enjoy this.

The guy leading it was Colin Ross, who is a Canadian psychiatrist who ran this really high-end sanitarium in Dallas. I'd gotten hold of a galley that he had written about how multiple personality disorder really exists—but it was created by the CIA in order to split personalities so they could carry secrets in one personality the others wouldn't know about.

I was dying to see what he had to say. He didn't address that, at the time.

He talked about the persecution psychiatrists were going through. So, "Any questions?"

I raised my hand, and he said, "Before I call on this man, I want you to know that he's the one whose book is being used in court suits against psychiatrists all over this country."

Boy, was that a great introduction.

And this woman in a table next to me—a German accent—said, "Yeah, people denied the Holocaust, too."

And I said, "There were bodies in the Holocaust. There's no bodies here, you know?"

Anyway, one last anecdote about that. For some reason, they always want me to come and be converted. This same woman, that told me about the mailbags—I had been invited to attend a conference of therapists. They would witness this young man who had grown up in the house of Anton LaVey—the founder of the Church of Satan and the author of The Satanic Bible.

He had a handler. He was about 22, and the handler would show him a chalice and then this sacrificial knife—and then, "Any questions?" That's my favorite time.

"I'm delighted to talk to you because I wrote an article for Rolling Stone about Anton LaVey. And I just wanted to hear some of your memories. Do you remember what color the house was?"

"White."

"No, no—it was black. Don't you remember? It was a famous…it was a black house in San Francisco. And I guess you played with his kids and so remember their names."

He said, "You got me."

And I thought, that's the end of the show. But no—they kept passing the ritual objects through the crowd. It didn't make a dent in their belief that this guy had confessed, in front of them, that he was a fraud.

Well, that kind of is a natural segue into the next book I wanted to talk about, which is 2013's Going Clear, which is about the Church of Scientology. In that, you talk about the "prison of belief."

Why did you get interested in delving into Scientology? How is it another system that people use to keep the world at bay—or to empower themselves? In a way, what are people getting out of believing they've been abused? Why do people put themselves in a place like Scientology? There must be something beneficial.

Well, I guess, personally, part of it came from the fact that I had been a very religious teenager. I wouldn't call it a cult, but there was a Christian youth group where you got promoted by being more pious.

That's a mechanism that works in a lot of these things—even political cults like Nazism. The more fervent you are, the higher you rise. And I was highly risen.

So, I look back at my career and religion has been a big part of it, and I think that was the motor for me.

With Scientology, I looked at people like Tom Cruise and John Travolta—the poster boys. Scientology is like a public relations martyrdom for them. It's not a help to their careers. People laugh at them for it. I thought, there must be something they get out of it.

There are a lot of varying things. For one, they're movie stars and get treated like Adam and Eve or something. But John Travolta—we suspect he's gay, right? In Scientology, that is a low form.

He had his first movie. It was filmed in Mexico, and it happened that one of the women —who was an actress—befriended him and treated him with some auditing, which is Scientology form of therapy. Often, one of the goals is to leave your body during these experiences, to access past lives. But he had an out-of-body experience. After that, he was hooked.

He was in a Scientology class, and the teacher said, "Johnny is up for a role in this show called Welcome Back, Kotter. We just want to make sure he gets it. NBC Studios is in that direction—focus your energy that John Travolta is going to get the role."

And he got the role. And that was evidence for him.

And Tom Cruise—like many young actors—they come to Hollywood. They may or may not have gotten out of high school. They're young. They're looking for a way to get into the business. There really is a central casting, so they go to stand in line at central casting and Scientology people would come down and hand out brochures saying, "Looking for an agent? How to get ahead. Come to the Celebrity Center on Friday night."

They're desperate for help. They see some people like Tom Cruise who claimed to have been advanced because of what they learned in Scientology. And I'm not saying they didn't learn anything. Jerry Seinfeld, for instance, took a personality course and he credits it for helping his career, although he didn't get sucked in.

Rock Hudson went to Scientology and left because they wouldn't let him out of the auditing room because he wanted to fill his parking meter. So he almost got in—

William Burroughs in London got trafficked in it. Then they wanted money, so he was like, "I'm out."

Leonard Cohen too—so many people were drawn to it. But only a few—

Is it that it gives you a kind of scientific patina on personality development and a structure?

There are a lot of different courses. But I think the glue for young people, bear in mind, when they go to Hollywood, their classmates are going to law school, getting jobs—they're advancing. And they're in Hollywood eating dog food and trying to get something going. They feel terribly inadequate about schooled they are, how educated they are. 

Scientology says: You vault over that. You can control people. You cause them to like you. You can achieve great things. You don't need college. You don't need these kinds of skills. We'll give you more than the world can offer.

One of my observations about religion is the fact that a religion might be absurd, like what we were talking about, you'd think it'd be destructive. But actually, it creates a wall around the community. All you have to do to get into this community is say you believe it, and you get into a community of likeminded people.

And this occurred to me when I started hearing—when people would tell me, "We believe this" or "We believe that" 

Finally, I heard the word we. And realized: that's the most important word in that sentence.

Your book and then the documentary that came out a year later—also called Going Clear—was part of a process of people unmasking Scientology. Scientology is always claiming to be growing, to have millions of adherents, but probably has somewhere around 50,000 at most—

There are more Rastafarians in the U.S. than Scientologists.

I guess the Scientologists have better mixers—or better free punch or something.

But what went into the debunking of Scientology? There was the South Park episode that just discussed theology, and people were like, "Oh, that's odd." Your book, your New Yorker article, started with Paul Haggis—an Oscar-winning film writer, director, and screenwriter who finally left the church. And then a couple of other actors, Leah Remini who was big. 

As with the ritual satanic child abuse, what happens? What happens where stuff runs out of steam and it kind of gets unmasked?

With Scientology, its defectors tended to be very quiet. They didn't want to take on the problems that come with leaving the church because it can be very prosecutorial. It's litigious. In prior experiences with reporters, they tried to frame them for murder or get them committed to mental institutions. It's ruthless.

There had been some exposés—like in 1992, Time magazine had a big exposé. Scientology sued Time and lost at every stage, all the way up to the Supreme Court. But it was the most expensive suit Time ever faced.

They're not going to be writing about Scientology again.

And I didn't want to do that to my magazine, but I was very interested in Scientology.

When John Travolta's son died, I thought that might be an interesting way to get into it. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said, "It's too tabloid for you." But it sounded like a good story to me.

Then Paul Haggis dropped out and I thought—he's kind of ideal. Because when people talk about Scientology, they often do so with a sneer: "I would never fall for that." Most people would say that about themselves, but here's Paul Haggis—two-time Academy Award winner, smart, very cautious intellectually.

I thought I wanted someone who would challenge readers' ideas. But he was not saying a word.

I was doing something else. And finally I got the number for his business manager. I said, "Hi, this is Lawrence Wright with The New Yorker. I would like to write an article about your client, Paul Haggis, and his adventures with the Church of Scientology."

"Are you kidding? Get the fuck off my phone." Click.

I thought, "Well, that went well."

The next day, I got Paul's email address and I wrote him: "I had a conversation with your business manager—he said 'This wasn't the right time.' But if there's ever a moment when you'd like to talk about your intellectual and spiritual development, I'd be honored."

Twenty minutes later, he wrote back: "Very honored. Let's have lunch on Tuesday."

So he was up here and I came up. He wanted a cigarette break, so we went out on the sidewalk and I said, "Well, Paul, this is going to deal mainly with your experience in Scientology."

His eyes got a little wide.

It was months later that he said he had never thought it was going to be about Scientology. He was just so flattered that The New Yorker was going to do a on profile him.

But he turned out to be a very courageous source. And underwent a lot of harassment.

And they still keep an interest up on me, but it's mostly inconsequential.

Haggis was charged with sexual assault—in 2017, I think it was. He was in a civil trial and ended up having to pay over $10 million to an accuser. Do you think that charge was engineered by Scientology?

I have no idea. It's in Italy—

The Italy one, actually, just got dismissed. 

So I don't know. I don't question what he told me. And if he was misbehaving around women that seems to be going around.

Let's return to Texas. You've written two books—In the New World, that looks at America but also your adventures in Texas. You were born in Oklahoma, but moved there when you were a kid, from 1964 to 1984. And then God Save Texas, which came out about six years ago. Let's talk about Texas. Especially since in God Save Texas, you're trying to capture a state which has a very distinct identity—but then at least four or five regions, at least.

What is so powerful about the kind of psychic territory that is Texas?

You know, when you talk about Texas, you have to think in terms of Greek and Rome in terms of mythology—the cowboy, the oilman. The cowboy thing, those great trail drives, they only lasted like 16 years. Yet you see people dressed like cowboys to this very day. Getting a pearl-snap shirt and an Open Road Stetson, and you look just like somebody who was riding the range in 1890.

It's alluring.

What people outside Texas don't understand is that it's the most urban state in the nation. Six of the top 11 cities in America in terms of population are in Texas. As I said earlier, it's going to be the size of New York and California combined by 2050.

Yet there's a ton of totally open space. Once, when I moved from Los Angeles to Huntsville, Texas—a prison town north of Houston—the midway point when I drove was El Paso, Texas. I mean, it's a big state.

It's ridiculous. People when they want to compare Texas to another country, sometimes say it's the size of Afghanistan. 

If they're kind, they can say it a little larger than France. 

But it was in its own state. And so was Vermont. You know, I mean, Hawaii was a kingdom. But these kinds of things feed a sense of culture in the state. And it's an outsider culture, which is one of the reasons I worry about it becoming so predominant, because it's not taking the leadership role. It's always taking the outsider antagonist role. And lots of stuff that starts in Texas, as we know, winds up running all across the country and determining our politics now. If you think it's bad now, just wait.

Why do you think people are going to Texas—particularly in the 21st century? It's been growing all of the 20th century, but it is really one of the major destinations. What draws people to Texas?

People like me keep writing about it.

As an answer to that question, I'm writing a musical based on a novel I wrote called Mr. Texas. My son and Marcia Ball—some of you may know her, as a great New Orleans and Austin piano player and songwriter. We're writing this musical.

Here's one of our songs. This is the Speaker of the House, on his deathbed, explaining what Texas means to him:

I've been around the world in my service days,
Been in French cafés, seen Russian plays.
I ticked everyone off my bucket list—
There can't be too much I missed.
You got your temples of Egypt, your fountains of Rome,
You could fit them all in the Astrodome.
But no matter wherever I roam,
There's only one place I'll ever call home:
Texas, you've got to love her.
If you need another chance, she'll always be there.
If it's a friend you need, there'll be someone to care.
That's why I love Texas.
Texas, my home.

As a final question before we talk to the audience a little bit. It was the shorthand of America, it was a place where people came to remake themselves and to make money, to just struggle and grow rich.

Then it became California in the early '60s when it became the most populous state. The California Dream is about becoming a star or remaking yourself or creating stuff that goes out into space. 

What is the Texas Dream? Because Texas is the most populous state, it always shapes the nation's political culture and identity of the United States. What's the essence of the Texas Dream?

It's still in formation.

If you had asked me this question 20 years ago, it was money. And money is always an issue.

I always look at Texas through the lens—my theory about culture is there are three levels, and they're so clear in Texas.

There's the primitive, Level 1. Which in Texas is barbecue, and boots, and big belt buckles—all the stuff you can buy at the airport. Chili and beans. All of that stuff is real old time Texas. And there's nothing wrong with it. But outsiders come, they go to Buc-ees—this gigantic filling station. And they can buy a suit up. And as far as anybody knows or cares, they're a Texan. There's no test you have to pass. You are immediately accepted, which is different from a lot of places I've lived.

Level 2 is when money starts to come in then you begin to look back at level one with a little bit of embarrassment. And you go out into the world and see how other people dress, how they eat. You know, you look at the architecture. You think about the big cities. You start sending your kids away to school. You learn a foreign language….This is Level 2. In a way, it's educational, but it's also a little fraudulent. It's not who you are. It's sort of who you want to be. You project yourself into that. This has always been a level of insecurity in Texas about being outside the power centers, the cultural centers.

And then there's Level 3 where—this came to me when I was in Cafe Annie in Houston, and I ordered a rabbit enchilada. 

It was great. 

And, you know, it was looking back at Level 1, but with a little crème sauce. And, it, you it was a sophisticated take on, and every Texan would recognize it, on where we came from. And, we have passed all the way through level two. And, now we're looking back and drawing strength from level three. I think that's where Texas is right now, is trying to be a player in the cultural world. It has sources of revenue that when you talk about New York being sort of the past, Houston is the future. And it's the most diverse city in America. It's got oil and it has got real estate. Except for the fact that it's on the Gulf of America. And that's where all the hurricanes come.

All the most precious resources, our refineries and everything are right there. And so it's vulnerable, but it's full of energy. And in both literal and metaphorical sense. So, you know Texas is trying to find its way into the world. This recent migration is characterized by the California billionaires deserting their state to come to Texas and pay fewer taxes. 

That's making a big change right now, especially in Austin, where Elon Musk is buying up houses for his baby mamas and—

That'll be like a new WPA [Works Progress Administration]. 

There are, I think, 15 now. Of the children, not the mamas.

Apparently, he's selling his sperm. So if any of you ladies are interested, he's got a deal for you. It comes with a Tesla.

All right, I think we're going to leave it there. Let's say thank you to Lawrence Wright.

Thanks for talking to Reason.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

 

• Video editor: Ian Keyser

The post Lawrence Wright: America's Misadventures in Wars, Cults, and Panics appeared first on Reason.com.

Did mainstream conservatives and libertarians lose a generation of young men to the post-liberal, reactionary right?

Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with C. Bradley Thompson, author of the Substack newsletter The Redneck Intellectual, and Jeremiah Johnson of the Center for New Liberalism, who wrote the article "Weak Men Create Hard Times: And Weak Men Love a Strongman."

This conversation was recorded live on Wednesday May 21.

• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post C. Bradley Thompson and Jeremiah Johnson: Rise of the 'MAGA Manosphere' appeared first on Reason.com.

"You don't get conned because you're stupid—you get conned because you're human."

That's the message of this week's guest, Brian Brushwood. He's an Austin-based magician, podcaster, and professional skeptic. With shows like Scam Nation and The Modern Rogue, he's taught millions of us how to upgrade our B.S. detectors in a world where truth is more up for grabs than ever before.

Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with him about World's Greatest Con, Brushwood's mind-blowing podcast where he reveals grifts like Disney World's authoritarian Epcot theme park, the psychic-soldier panic of the Cold War, and the myth that the French used magic tricks to subdue colonial Algeria.

Along the way, they look at how media monocultures used to gatekeep truth—and how the chaotic pluralism of the internet is both a blessing and a curse (mostly a blessing!). Brushwood is a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian who celebrates decentralization, transparency, and personal agency—even when it's messy. He discusses the influence of performers like the Amazing Randi and Penn & Teller, why teaching magic online pissed off the old guard, and why skepticism has to evolve or die in a world full of customized realities.

Upcoming Reason events:

• Reason Speakeasy: Nick Gillespie and Susannah Cahalan on The Acid Queen, June 3
• Reason Versus debate: Jacob Sullum and Billy Binion vs. Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael Mangual, June 24

1:43— Brushwood's podcast: World's Greatest Con
6:00— The con of Disney's EPCOT
13:20— The Project Alpha hoax
17:47— James Randi, Uri Geller, and Banachek
28:49— Why do we love to be conned?
31:00— Arthur Conan Doyle's rationality and mysticism
33:25— How to built a better bullshit detector
35:42— Why Brushwood feels hopeful about AI
40:55— How the internet changed magic
42:50— Psychic surgery and the placebo effect
45:21— Brushwood's origin story
46:09— Magic's gender imbalance
48:58— Skepticism and atheism

Transcript

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Brian Brushwood, thanks for talking to Reason.

Brian Brushwood: Thank you for having me, man.

You are a podcaster, a magician, a debunker of bullshit and things like that. I want to start off by talking about your series The World's Greatest Con. 

Yeah.

What's the catchphrase?

"Cons don't fool us because we're stupid. They fool us because we are human."

OK, let's talk about some of the episodes. You had a two-part episode about Epcot— one of the world's biggest cons. Tell me about that.

OK, whether it's the greatest in terms of it has the longest shadow of history, whether it's the greatest in terms of scale or stakes, the very first season was about Operation Mincemeat, which later became a Netflix movie. In that case, Ian Fleming, of all people, helped design a Trojan horse—a haversack ruse—where they took a dead body, filled it with pocket litter that told a false story.

In World War II, to kind of get the Nazis to chase the wrong story.

Yeah. Basically, Hitler defended the wrong coast. Depending on how you squint, that won the war. What I loved about that story is that, like a good magic trick—you never say. A good magician-teller once told me that the cardinal sin of all magicians is they say what you're going to do and then do it. That's bad magic. The moment you hear a magician say, "I have an ordinary deck of cards," guess what?

Right.

Instead, what you need to do is lay the elements in front of someone, let them come to the incorrect conclusion, and let them misremember things. They're left only with mystery. I perceive the job of a magician to play chess with the audience. There's two ways to be the best chess player in town. One is to read all of the book moves, study the greats, practice, practice, practice, until you're the best. The other is to form a cartel and say, "Nobody's allowed to know the rules of chess except us." And that, traditionally, is how magicians have operated.

But that's hard to do now, right? Because all secrets eventually emerge.

And Scam School, my show where I teach magic, was on the forefront, the bleeding edge. Magicians didn't know whether I was exposing or teaching magic. That ended up being its own thing.

It struck me early on, especially while doing Scam School, that the structure of a good magic trick is identical, one for one, to that of a scam or a con. You lay everything out, you let them come to a false conclusion, and then accelerate things until they're left…in the case of magic, the good version, the white-hat hacking of wetware systems—they get checkmated and they're left only with wonder. I cannot reconcile what I saw with what just happened. In the black-hat version, you're defrauded and you have no money.

Usually, when we see stories of cons, it's rare to see a morally just con man. Usually, it's someone whose past catches up with them. The idea of recasting the 20 Committee and their bold, audacious plan as a con. And who knows, for every one success, who knows how many failures there were, but it's truly wonderful. We did a season of game show cons. You've heard the legendary story—it's about to be a movie—about the guy who won Press Your Luck by figuring out the patterns.

No whammies.

Yeah, exactly. Most people don't know he was, I believe, somebody'll fact-check me, because the internet—I believe that the FBI said that he was the very first person to perpetrate an internet fraud. Him on Usenet news groups was running a lottery scam or something. Anyway, we did a whole series on game show scams. And in the third season—which I think we tricked you into listening to—it was the one on Project Alpha.

Let's get to Project Alpha in a minute. I want Epcot. 

Oh yeah.

Lay it out quickly—what is the con? Because you know, Disney World in Florida started as a giant version of Disneyland in California. It opened in the early '70s, they started building it in the mid-'60s. But then what about Epcot Center? Why is that a con?

Well, first of all, it began with the curious fact that I ran across, I found out, "Why is a privately held company in Florida legally entitled to handle enriched uranium?" And from there you work backward, and it's like well because they wanted legal status to create the city of tomorrow, and they didn't know what kind of energy they were going to run on. So they just said, "Let's say we can handle all of it." If we want a nuclear reactor, we can have a nuclear reactor.

And then you go backward from that and find that the pitch for Epcot wasn't the objectively best part of Disney World—because "drink around the world" is the best thing on the planet—but it began basically as Silo or Fallout. This totalitarian, highly structured…"All of you are going to have the same toaster, and because this month we have signed an agreement with General Electric, we're throwing out your Westinghouse toasters. Also, you're going to be things to be gawked at as people walk around."

And the wild part is, part of the reason that that existed, that hellscape of totalitarianism or the pitch for it, came from the fact that the fact that Disney wanted so much more freedom but had to deal with so many restrictions or regulations and Disneyland ended up being so compromised from what he wanted it to be.

If you go to the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco—it is very much not a Disney corporate institution. It's the family museum. Which means there's a whole wing dedicated to how much he hated unions and resented the strikes, and so on.

To pull off Epcot, they knew they needed an obscene amount of land. In order to buy that land, everything had to be secret. So there's a series of shell corporations and there are a lot of moments where it looked like the cat was about to be out of the bag.

And so Part One is: Can we get the land? Can we build it? But then we lose our protagonist. Right at the height of this.

Yeah. Because Walt Disney dies.

Exactly.

And is not frozen and living or frozen underneath Disney. 

I still have my fingers crossed. We'll see. But it ends up being—imagine Ocean's Eleven, but halfway through the movie, Danny Ocean dies. And also, the other 10 people don't really care about the heist, but they all feel a need to complete it for the shareholders.

And Walt Disney—he wanted to build a true, living, thriving community. A city of tomorrow. That's what he was selling.

Yes. That was the dream he was selling. And it ended up becoming more and more compromised. We got something, and what we got was delightful. But it is not what Disney had envisioned.

Yeah. 

Thankfully actually—because what he envisioned was objectively a hellscape. 

And that's partly because he was thinking in mid-century terms. The perfect city was perfect for him because everyone would do what he wanted, or would fill out his aesthetic landscape.

And it's funny because, when you say it out loud, the actual plan out loud, it sounds like pure fiction. I'm going to describe for you a place where the good people are on the surface, up top, where everything is green and lush and there are no filthy automobiles. Beneath them—literally beneath them—are the people who make sure the good people have everything they need. And beneath them will be all the filthy automobilists, coming and going.

So you also, I can't remember if it's that season or a different one, you also tell a story about Robert-Houdin, the great French magician, who supposedly, at the behest of the French government when they were having trouble with Algerians, which had recently become a French colony, Houdin goes to demonstrate that the French have superior magic. Can you lay out this story? First lay out the story as we know it, or as it's perceived, and then what you discovered?

Yeah, this one was a one-shot because it was always just a short story. When we started investigating it, we had hoped that there was more to the story. The story, magicians love to tell it because it glamorizes magicians—

And Robert-Houdin, in the 19th century, kind of invented modern magic. He was such a big figure that Houdini became Houdini by adding an i to Houdin.

Correct. Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin is the canonical top-hat-and-tails magician. And as Penn and Teller point out, the reason he wore that was because everyone else was dressed as wizards at the time. He wanted to be of the people. To my magician mind, he got it. The game is to play chess and cause wonder.

So, the story magicians love to tell—this is antiquated language, please forgive me, internet—is that "savages" in Algeria believed in magic. To calm them down, the French government enlisted the great Robert-Houdin, who used an electromagnetic—well, a secret method—that had something that a powerful person couldn't lift, but a child could.

I'll ruin it so you don't lose your credit—it's an electromagnet. It's a little box that, when the juice is on, nobody can lift. Otherwise, anyone can.

It's literally how security doors work at 7-Elevens now. 

You bring out a huge, brutish, strong man from Algeria, come up and he can't lift it. Then any little kid, or Houdin, can. Then the guy goes screaming offstage.

The canonical version is that he turns and says to the audience, "My magic is too weak against the French magic."

And then the "savages" fall into line and put up with 100 years of French occupation.

Right. Peace is achieved—until it isn't. But upon examining it, that story collapses. This is the beauty of having a flexible title like World's Greatest Con. What starts as a story about the French pulling a con on the Algerians becomes no it's us who had the con pulled on us. Everything traces back to a single source: an old man's autobiography with no corroborating evidence whatsoever.

How did you find that out?

By going back. There have been greater historians—which is to say historians—there have been historians who pointed out, well, here's what we know: We know he toured, we know he had a magic shop, and we know that most people know him from his autobiography.

There's a quiet period during which the dust settles, and I would imagine an old man might lengthen the shadows on a lot of those tall tales.

So let's talk about Project Alpha, which is a season-long story. What was Project Alpha?

That was a wild one. I'd be curious to hear your take on this, but I couldn't even begin to tell the story without setting the landscape. It is hard to convey to anyone under the age of 30, just how insane it was when communication was limited to the monoculture—the big three networks. When the only intel we had on what was going on behind the Iron Curtain was clearly propaganda.

Out come these tales of Soviet psychic soldiers. Again, whether it was real or not—spoiler alert: It was not—it made sense that if there was going to be an arms race, even just for P.R. reasons, America needed to be armed.

So people hear stories that somewhere in the Soviet Union they are training people who can bend spoons and needles with their minds, and it's like, "Goddamn, we've got to get to the moon first, and we've got to be able to bend spoons, better than anybody," right?

It's interesting you mention the moon, because the speculation is, if what you want is the P.R. win, why actually go to the moon? And essentially, when it came to psychic soldiers, that's exactly what the Soviets did. They were like, "Hey, does it matter? Can we just tell everyone we have magic powers?"

So that and the beginning of the series does a great job scene setting what it was like living in a world with far less knowledge and a lot less transparency on stuff. Particularly in the '70s, there was a boom in all kinds of parapsychology or paranormal stuff. You point to—major universities that were funding basically psychic labs.

Yeah. You see this anytime there's a big advancement in technology. In the 19th century, in a world where suddenly we're able to have telephone communication across the Atlantic Ocean, why not a version of that to the great unknown—the afterlife? So you see the rise of spiritualism.

In the 1970s, in a postatomic, nuclear age, why wouldn't these things work? And oftentimes, we still see this today we see statistically small samples that aren't double-blind or peer-reviewed.

For example, Chevreul's pendulum. Michel Eugène Chevreul. He had heard about dowsing. He took an empty bowl, held a pendulum over it, and it did nothing. Then he put a bowl filled with mercury under it—the pendulum started going nuts. Swapped it back to an empty bowl—and it was calm again. He said, "It's sacré de crap," because he was French.

Then he correctly thought, "What if I'm unconsciously affecting this?" He had a partition set up. And once he didn't know whether the bowl was filled or not, he figured out this was the beginning of the double-blind experiment.

When it came to early parapsychology, it's so internal, it's so personal because we've all had that experience—for those of you who remember picking up a phone expecting a dial tone and instead getting the exact party that you intended to call. That feels like magic.

Likewise, we all remember the time we had a song stuck in our head, started up the car, and it was playing that exact song. We remember the hits and forget the misses. Just like every night we dream a bunch of crazy stuff, but you remember the dream where it happens to be a premonition of 9/11, and forget the others.

Most people aren't statisticians or economists. They don't think, "I'm remembering the hits, not the misses," or about unconscious bias. So you get all these anecdotes that create a throughline, a narrative that feels right. That feeling is so powerful and personal that you seek confirmation of it.

Parapsychologists essentially would develop a framework—again, this sounds ridiculous nowadays, but you would get somebody who would claim to have ESP, they would demonstrate ESP, and you'd have very smart, learned, paper-holding, robe-wearing scientists. And if the scientist discussed with each other and they could not think of a way that it was possible, then it must be an actual ESP.

Which, of course, I'm describing also…a magic show.

And this is where we introduce James Randi into the scene. Our story takes place in the shadow of these two great colossus entities: Uri Geller and James Randi. Uri Geller claimed in every way to have what the world wanted. And when the world wants something badly enough—when there's a void—nature abhors a vacuum. Somebody, usually the con men, shows up and says, "I've got that," and collects money.

Sometimes, they're all like, "one second" and maybe they pull it off, in which case, you know, they're a legitimate businessman. But more often than not, they're con men.

In that space, I on this podcast will not make any evaluations as to whether or not the claims are true or not. But Uri Geller definitely claimed to have the goods, and he had everything the world wanted from this.

And he would go on The Tonight Show—well, we'll get to that—but he would go on TV shows and elsewhere and use his mind to bend spoons and keys and pins.

He could find water using dowsing—that was a big one. Drawing replication, the ability to see through things. James Randi was of the opinion that these were magic tricks. So he would go on shows and replicate the feats.

The story that we tell in episode one of Project Alpha is the most famous encounter, which objectively seems like it should have worked. It should have fixed things.

James Randi gets word from Johnny Carson—who is a magician—that Uri Geller is going to do psychic demonstrations on the show. As a fellow conjurer, he works with Johnny Carson and says, "Here are the test conditions. He might try this. Don't let him do this. Whatever you do, blank, blank, blank. Bring your own spoons," and so on.

What happens is the most awkward 15 minutes in the history of television. Just flop sweat and silence.

This is when The Tonight Show, you know, 50 percent of American households were watching it. Carson says, "OK, Uri Geller, bend your spoons, bend your keys." And Uri Geller is like, "Mmm…" and then realizes—

Johnny Carson straight-up no-sells him. Doesn't help. Doesn't keep the conversation afloat. Just lets him choke on live air. The story that trickles down is that Uri Geller thought, "Well, that's it. I must be through. I'm over with." He does mention like, "I don't know. You weren't feeling the vibes. I wasn't feeling the vibes."

Yeah, "This gift comes and goes," right? Like The Shining—"It was cloudy tonight, so I don't read minds."

Exactly. And nowadays, in this internet attention economy, it's more common to understand that people quickly forget what you're famous for. They just know that you're famous.

If they remembered anything about Uri Geller, there's three parts to this sentence: "Uri Geller was on The Tonight Show for some ESP thing. It went some way—either good or bad, I don't recall."

So instead, his star just went higher. You would think a very public debunking would do something—but it did not.

Then, in this emotionally charged peak Cold War era—where they want there to be psychic soldiers—you begin to get private investments in  testing for ESP. This is the story I'm really proud we were able to uncover.

There were two kids, about 18 years old at the time, who applied for ESP tests in St. Louis.

At Washington University…

At Washington University…

At a lab that was funded by one of these… 

McDonnell Douglas?

A major airline manufacturer and defense contractor was funding a major ESP lab at a very highly regarded university.

Correct. Correct.

This is already crazy.

Yes. And much like—well, I don't know how much of my own show to spoil. The reason we were attracted to this is because we had extraordinary access to the principal players.

My co-writer and co-creator, Justin Robert Young, was an intern at the James Randi Educational Foundation. He would help with those million-dollar challenge paranormal tests. I toured with a show in the spirit of James Randi, got advice on how to perform psychic surgery, which I later performed on Penn & Teller: Fool Us. I took college students on a 90-minute "best of parapsychology" experience.

We wanted to basically tell the full version of the original story we heard, which was: James Randi got two kids, taught them magic, sent them into the depths, and they fooled—made fools of—the entire industry.

Turns out, that wasn't the story at all.

Turns out, the kids have agency. They did this on their own. They looked up to James Randi and let him lead point. The stories that emerged—we quickly discovered through the interviews—this was less a story of a takedown of a monolith. And more of a story of two undercover detectives who got in too deep, and who realized, month after month, that "Oh wait, these are humans who are trying to advance science and we're actively deceiving them, even though it's for a good end"

Because of the nature of storytelling, the simpler story wins. The story that emerges on live TV—there's an astonishing moment, an astonishing moment. Where again back in the monoculture the entire world is watching as during a press conference, the students are asked, "How do you do it?" And they say, "Quite honestly, we cheat."

James Randi—shall we say—simplifies the narrative. It's a sanded-down narrative in which James Randi is at the center of it because he has the more tradable brand.

Just to say, "James Randi plus Banachek plus Mike Edwards." Even now I can barely get the whole sentence out as opposed to just saying James Randi, this iconic person. 

It's fascinating, you go through the show, these two young kids show up at this lab at Washington University, and they kind of work through how they fooled the people who run this lab. And then they also, the main guy, what was the name of the guy who ran the lab? 

I should know this. 

OK.

Since I hosted. That's the thing about podcasts is you consult your notes and let it go. Well, Peter, let me actually look it up. If we have the power of pausing time…

Peter Philips, that's what it was.

All right. So then, you know, they go through their stuff where they're, you know they're faking the people out there and then the guy who ran the lab, Peter Phillips, who's a respected scientist, he's just completely destroyed by this.  

Yeah. This is pure speculation on my part. One of the difficult things is that on the one hand it's great to bring to light the boots-on-the-ground experience of Mike and Banachek. Who were just under these brutal test conditions, where every single day, they would have to essentially invent a new magic trick on the fly.

Later, it's fascinating—Banachek became one of the greatest mentalists on the planet, specifically because he went through this two-year trial by fire of having to invent magic methods on the fly constantly.

They were constantly closing down the ability for them to cheat, and they would figure out a way to wiggle out of that. So, they were still reading signs through a wall or bending stuff.

Yeah, and there would be a few examples that we get to cover in there, some neat moments where somebody sees something over somebody's shoulder, or there'd be a gentle tee-up, or maybe one person might set up something in a tricky way so that the other one could get the payoff hours later.

Basically they're tinkering with information inefficiency. As the results were more and more amazing, the rules got more and more stringent. Mostly because—out of nowhere—they were getting letters from James Randi saying, "By the way, if they were conjurers, they might be doing this…"

So something that would work on day one they would show up and now suddenly there's a glass partition. But he would notice that there was a bit of a gap. Maybe they could blow it down and have it work. Then there's a gasket, but he realized that if he made an excuse, they'd pick it up—and maybe a bit of sand might wedge it enough.

This constant cat-and-mouse would give increasingly small, statistically insignificant results—but it was still enough that the lab kept on going, all the while setting up this big gotcha reveal.

Right. Describe that because there was a TV show where a special where Randi and the two kids are like—

Yeah, the show was called Magic or Miracle, and it's an interesting hodgepodge. You could tell it was sold as one thing and then the producer wanted to make it something else. So as a result it's a little bit meandering, but the big moment was the reveal of Project Alpha. And it was really surreal to hear the first-hand accounts of these kids showing up. They're in the spotlight. Nobody knows nothing when you're a late teenager. And so you think, "well, this must be, objectively, it's going to be the most famous thing that ever happens to me." "After this," thinks Mike Edwards, "I'll go to Hollywood. And after this, everything will be fine." And so instead, it doesn't work out that way. Instead, it comes, it goes, and the narrative gets sanded down, sanded it down. And then you hear Project Alpha, you hear James Randi and that's it. 

That's a hard thing when you think of how much they gave up. There's a bit of a moral question because what is ethically the right thing to make the biggest impact? Because in one reality, you just keep spending money and who's going to show up, charlatan after charlatan after charlatan, all that money that could have been used to actually do real science to cure cancer and so on. But, on the other hand, the factual collateral damage to the reputation…of the lab to the entire industry, like who knows what advancements might have happened. That's less the realm we cover because, you know, we had access to the principles. 

Like you were talking about the Houdin story or, you know, listening to your show it's like being in, you know, the David Mamet movie, House of Games, or The Sting where you think of this one con. That's the con. And then you realize that there's a reversal, which really keeps you guessing. 

Yeah. There usually is.

So, I guess two things. One, why do we love to be conned? And then have it revealed to us? 

I don't know if you've read Will Storr's book, The Status Game, but he starts with an extraordinary statement: "Humans are status-seeking engines." And it's like when you think of humans as, I don't know, I sometimes think of a soup of folded proteins and you shake it up and the two folded proteins…

You are having much deeper thoughts than I am…folded proteins…in a shake.

You want to remain congruent. When it comes to narratives, we're narrative-seeking engines as well. Every Campbellian story has a character saying, "Who am I?" A bunch of stuff happens. Then he finds out he's Luke Skywalker.

So I mean, long before Google we're doing autocomplete, we were making sense, "How does this end?" or "What is the story I am in?" And then we drive toward that ending.

Exactly. Humans love—as best I can tell—to be almost right. We hate it when we're totally right. We like seeing one and two, we see the line, and if it's three we don't like it. That's too predictable. That's too perfect. We also don't like it if it is oblique and wild, and it seems like it's nonsense, but when it's almost right, boy do we love that. Which is why, for example, the very first scam that we talked about is that I got suckered into buying what I thought/hoped were stolen speakers. Because what I was sold was the line that, "Oh no, these are studio monitors for a strip club and we just have a couple of extra. They're supposed to be $1,200. Look, you could see it on here."

And I was the one who saw the two and two in front of me, put it together, and thought, "Oh my God, they're stolen—but they're not going to tell me they're stolen." So I go to the ATM, gave them $350, thanked them, and thought, "I did it. I stuck it to the man while getting sweet speakers." Turns out, they're just cheap garbage speakers and I was the one who got scammed.

Likewise, when we hear stories, part of what we try to do on the show is take those "just-so" tales and figure out the legitimate top spin on it that you didn't see coming.

I'm thinking, as you're talking about people like Arthur Conan Doyle—who invents—or with Poe in mind who kind of created the first ratiocination detective who uses his mind to figure out impossible mysteries. You get Sherlock Holmes, who is the ultimate avatar of enlightenment rationality and figuring everything out.

But then Arthur Conan Doyle is a kind of sad case. He's this man of science and rationality who then is conned in a variety of things, including obviously fake pictures of fairies and things like that. Are people who pride themselves on rationality particularly susceptible to being conned?

A hundred percent. Humans are not very good at remembering…In theory, we all know that there are things that we do not know and things that we don't see and worlds that are oblique to us, you know, that we're surrounded by black boxes.

In theory everybody, our Vulcan brain says that's the case. But think of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. That's System One, System Two. Our guts are not so good at that. And sometimes it pays off. For example, in Gavin De Becker's book, The Gift of Fear, he essentially says, "Look, humans, we ain't got scales, we ain't got claws, we got teeth, we have one thing, a finely honed sense of intuition. And so when the bushes are shaking, we know we're in trouble, and that's why we won." 

Because you figure that's a lion. You get out of there on the savanna. And those of us who were like, "Oh, that looks interesting"—we're the ones who were eaten. And that's the end of the line.

Yeah, and as best I can tell, the game—and it's the same game that magicians and spectators play—but with a mark and the con man. And the mark, each gets one gift. The con man gets the gift of asymmetry of time. They get to spend months and months and months calculating this narrative and laying out all of the artifacts so that the mark will hopefully see this, see that, see that, piece it together in their mind—"Oh, these are stolen speakers"—and then fall right into the trap. The mark, however, gets a finely honed sense of intuition—that gut feeling that so often we rationalize and talk ourselves out of. Only after something disastrous has happened do we realize, "Oh wait, I should have known the entire time."

So, I love the way that you talked about the monoculture—which I would say is probably unfamiliar to people under 50 at this point—where it's hard to remember a world in which there were only a couple of sources of information. Kind of, you know, the difference between CBS, NBC, and ABC News, it's like whatever, you know? It's hard to know. But they were all kind of revered, or all kind of trusted, and there was no knowledge outside of that. In that world, it's harder to understand that you're being fed a particular version of things, right?

Now we live in a world of infinite YouTube channels and other sources of information. So, it's not a monoculture anymore. How does this change the way we process information? And how do we develop a better, you know, bullshit detector so that we're not constantly being suckered by a reality that is very appealing to us?

Yeah, so Darwin proposed a tree of life where you've got a limb for mammals, and one for fungus, and so on. And it's constantly diverging. We see that with different cultures. In the monoculture days, whether the narrative from the news was right or wrong, at least it was shared, right? But now, you can select the bubble that you want to live in. If you want to say, "Whatever The New York Times says is a lie," then you can find a clubhouse where that's the fact. If you want to say, "Both of them—all of the mainstream—is a lie," you can find a clubhouse for that. If you want to say, "That clubhouse got it wrong," you can find one for that, too.

And so what we end up with is this self-repeating, self-similar fractal. Because—and I think Will Storr has this right—we are status-seeking engines. Would you rather be king of the nonbelievers in this sub-conspiracy domain, or a peon—one of the sheeple—who actually believes 9/11?

And so what we have is that the exact same objective information can now be dissected through different lenses and reinterpreted differently. Some things we all have to agree on. But even then, we can't even agree that the world's flat at the moment—or, sorry, that the world isn't flat. Did I just bust myself? I think we know what's going on. Did I just bust myself?

But, you know, it's liberating, though, too, right? To be out of the monoculture—because the monoculture kind of sucked, right? It's, you know, because if you didn't buy into a big story—or the story that everybody agreed was reality—it was lonely, it was difficult, and it was wrong, right? In many ways.

But so now we're in this more fragmented universe. How do we navigate this and kind of assess different forms of information without either becoming very cynical, or overly skeptical, or just crazy?

So one way for me is—if you—Neal Stephenson's book The Diamond Age posits a postabundance economy, thanks to nanobots, right? Where just kind of the Victorians decide, "Screw it, we're just gonna pick mid–19th century England, and that's how we're gonna live."

Right.

We have that now with the internet—with all these different strategies. And so, if No. 1, Rule 1, is: I'm out of the business of deciding one is better or more than or less than, but I recognize that these different pockets exist—at which point, it got pretty ugly because certain words mean different things.

If you're coded Team Red or Team Blue politically, you know, there are code words to indicate things. And that's very dividing. And to be honest, I'm actually very hopeful, thanks to AI. Like, I make so many cultural meme references that are appropriate to a 50-year-old person in person in Austin, Texas—that would mean nothing to my children. And so I actually said, "Please translate the following sentences—Simpsons reference, you know, et cetera, et cetera—to my 16-year-old daughter." And then it just spat it out, and she's like, "Oh yeah, I get it. I don't know what that looks like."  

That's like a Babel fish for cultural—

Exactly. A cultural Babel fish. 

That's amazing.

And that is possible now in a way that, technologically, used to require somebody who was, you know, aged between two different demographics. So I think that—hopefully—I am hopeful that that technology, that artificial intelligence, will allow us to see the humanity in each other.

Talk about your—your kind of politics and your—I mean, maybe your epistemology. And where does that come from? You consider yourself libertarian?

Oh, very much so. 

So again, it's good, like, we want hyper-individualized everything, right? But then you need to be able to navigate your reality with other people.

I mean, there's a difference between what we want and what we know is best. What I want is to eat candy all day. What is best is for me to eat vegetables. And libertarianism is inherently ugly. It is the definition of ugly. If we all agree that it was pleasant, it's the movie Pleasantville. That's a terrible place, but everything is surface-level pleasant while secretly deeply unpleasant. Libertarianism is about taking all that ugliness and putting it on the surface.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson—the first time I read it, I was like, "Oh, this is a hellscape." And then the second time I read it, I'm like—or an anarcho-libertarian paradise, where everything from currency to the roads are up for grabs. It is objectively true that competition is the tide that lifts all the boats. It is also objectively true that I personally would prefer that I have no competition.

It is objectively true that the internet and the sharing of magic methods has elevated the whole art of magic—because we are no longer limited by access to a library, or the fact that your parents bought you a magic set, or that the local magic shop either does or does not exist in your small town. All of magic is better than ever, and you see it. It's held in higher regard than at any point in my life. Now, it was ugly to get there. Because in the 1980s—here, you remember this—in the 1980s, there was a time, and this is hard to believe, that stand-up comedy and magic were held roughly in the same regard. They were peers.

But what happened was, as comedy clubs went crazy, some people were like, "I work very hard. I can do magic." And that was a filter that kept people out. Whereas everybody—"Oh, I'm funny." And so, too many people…There was a time Austin had, I think, three, four comedy clubs, right?

And then, in the early '90s, all of that collapsed because everybody was stealing each other's material. There was no enforcement. And so comedy had to go through a metamorphosis. By the time you get to, like, Bob Odenkirk, The Ben Stiller Show, and the emergence of Mr. Show and the kind of next wave of comedy…

Meanwhile, during that same time, magicians embraced what looks to me like a cartel mindset: "There's only going to be 12 canonical illusions. We're all going to wear the same purple sequined shirts." And you saw that with the primetime World's Greatest Magic specials, where it was all the same.

And then, so, magic got their comeuppance with a rejection of that—with David Blaine. And then a rejection of David Blaine with the hyper-polish of Criss Angel. And then along comes the internet.

And I was—it's hard to be a frontiersman when nobody knows what the rules are. Is the internet TV? Are we ruining magic, or are we bringing it to the masses?

And there's still a segment of magic that perceives me teaching magic on the internet as ruining the art. And meanwhile, there's not a magician in America under 30 who hasn't seen the spiky-haired dude on YouTube teaching tricks.

You've mentioned Penn & Teller. How important are they to kind of the way that you think about magic and also the culture? Because they are—I mean, they're like the best performers ever. But they kind of say, "Okay, we're going to con you." And then they do it.

Well, and they brought that narrative layer to it—and that honesty. And to be honest, the metaphor that I think of as playing chess comes from watching them. Like, "Oh, this is great. They're calling it out. They're saying, 'We dare you.'"

Teller—when I was 19 years old, I drove out to Houston from Austin to see Penn & Teller for the first time live. And I had Teller sign a card "To my bastard son," which got a chuckle, and it started an email correspondence over the years. In one of the essays he wrote me, he said: In theater, there's a willing suspension of disbelief. If I hold up a stick and say, "This is a sword," you're like, "All right, sure—where's this headed?" And then you go along, and maybe you cry or laugh or whatever.

But in magic, it's nonconsensual. You're like, "This is a sword." You're like, "Yeah, I got—what the fuck just happened?"

That's a sword. And in that wonder—in that chess match—is the heart of magic. And nobody's better at it than Penn & Teller. And it's been fascinating to watch their rise: first as counterculture, but now—culture. They have the number one show on The CW. And so, I don't know what comes next after them. 

What was the trick you did on Fool Us?

It was psychic surgery.

Explain that.

So, as a matter of fact, it's part of why we lost Andy Kaufman as early as we did. Back in the 1970s, in the Philippines, there were healing practitioners who claimed that—you know, if you've ever seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom—you know, they claimed they could do that: reach inside you, pull out tumors. And what it was, was a little bit of sleight of hand with chicken guts. They just palmed some chicken guts and blood.

They—you know, skin is very pliable. It mushes more than you would expect, and it feels weird. And they would pull out these chicken giblets and then wipe you down, and you were fine. And the weird part is, we know that the placebo effect is so powerful. And we know it's so powerful, it works even when you know it is a placebo. You know, we know red placebos work better than blue placebos. Big placebos work better than small placebos. And in the case of acupuncture—paranormal stuff aside—we know that painful placebos work better than painless placebos. And in the case of…imagine a placebo so powerful that you get on a plane, you spend your money, you have somebody physically inflict pain on you. That is such a powerful placebo that, you know, you live your life in a way that is congruent—as though you're healed. And for some people, long enough, it worked.

But it was a fraud, ultimately—and got exposed as such by the likes of James Randi. And so, being a touring stage magician, I've always felt like, if it's important, you should never say it aloud. So what I won't do is say, "Psychic surgery is fake." But what I will do is say, "Hey, here's a card. Burn it up. Mix it with pudding. Eat it. That's a pretty vanished card, right? Now lay on the table." I'm going to psychically—you know, blood and guts—doing it for comedic effect. Really, the goal of that is to take the teeth out of the con, the fraud of psychic surgery.

A similar thing happened with the Ku Klux Klan and the radio program Superman: By revealing the inner workings—the deeply held secrets—of the Klan, they suddenly became a punching bag and a laughingstock. And so that did a lot to move the needle. And likewise, that's what I wanted to do with the trick that I did on Penn & Teller: Fool Us. 

How did you get interested in magic—and in con-man stuff?

You mentioned Penn & Teller, and we don't get to choose when and where we imprint on our artistic heroes. But for me, it was in second grade, and it was their PBS show Penn & Teller Go Public, where they did a bunch of tricks. But then they said, "If you have one of these VCRs, press record—we're going to teach you one."

And so they did a fake news report where they taught a simple card force. And in second grade, I did it for my family. And then we turned on the TV, and the news—we had Penn Jillette stop and say, "Is this your card?" And that ecstasy, that first hit—I'm still chasing that high. 

Why aren't there more women involved in magic?

The internet. Straight up.

Let me put it this way: Before the internet, the only way for the methods—when I was 19 years old, I would go to a cafeteria here in Austin, IBM Ring 60—and a curious thing would happen. We would do the minutes and the thing and the lecture, and they never wanted to hang out and session with each other.

And it was weird, because people would do the same tricks with the same lines, and everybody would laugh. And I was like…that was the same one as last month. Why are we all laughing again? And now I realize what we were doing: We were all aping the structure of our performance so we could all compare notes and borrow each other's bits, rhythms, routines, plots, and techniques.

And then all of a sudden, the internet came along, and there was a much more direct route for that information. It became an efficient market of information. You didn't have to show up. For some people, that was great, because it opened a lot of doors.

For other people, it suddenly made their previously easy job harder. And so, it's just like libertarianism—it was ugly to suddenly have anybody be able to do it. But also, it did the very healthy thing of…if there was a girl of any age in that room—she was, and in this case, it was my wife—she was selected for every single trick.

And so these archetypes become established: "Oh, are you a woman adjacent to magic? Your job is to be the assistant." And then all of a sudden, people come to magic, and nobody knows the expectations—the rules. All of a sudden, a 7-year-old girl is discovering a trick and does it for her dad. Nobody told her that that's not how it's supposed to go.

And I do believe that there's something as close as real magic that happened in that quiet revolution.

So, I mean, it's democratizing because it's no longer passed through secret handshakes or social situations. It's much more wide open. 

Yeah, and it also eliminated some truly awful, grotesque artifacts. Like, for example—similar to the highly rigid structure of, say, the Catholic Church—there were two ways to learn magic. Nowadays, we learn it on the internet.

When I was young, the only way to learn magic was for a 14-year-old boy to go in a room with a 45-year-old man who explained the importance of keeping a secret. Exactly what you would expect happened.

Sorry. Sorry. I can't speak with authority. I made it sound like a specific thing. 

You mentioned James Randi, and Randi created—you know, he is like the ultimate skeptic, kind of—and he helped introduce what we talk about as skepticism, particularly about paranormal or religious sensibility.

You know, atheists have kind of won. You—there are a lot of religious people in America, but we're a much more secular society. Why is the skeptic movement over? And if it is, is it because it's achieved its basic goals—to make us all more reflective on what we believe? Or did it die out for some other reason?

I was surprised by the overlap between the skeptic movement and the atheist movement. The first time I went to The Amazing Meeting, I was really confused. Like, I'm like, "Hey man, we're all here to debunk people who defraud the bereaved, right?" And they're like, "Yeah. And I get to shout, 'There is no God!'"

And I was like, "Why would you do that?" And it's very clearly—there's a subsection of people—I talked about this with Andrew Heaton—where there's a flavor of atheist who… they still believe in the supernatural, but they're just—they're mad at the fact that, I don't know, somebody finger-banged their girlfriend at the church camp or whatever. You know, like, whatever. That's what their real issue is. It's not about rationalism or double-blind testing or what have you.

And in the case of skepticism—I mean, who are they punching against at this point? I mean, we don't see—we don't—there is no monoculture that is pumping simplified, universal narratives at us that need to be corrected by loud, angry, shouting people. Instead—I mean, I guess Twitter was the closest to it. But that seems to have wildly fragmented it.

Yeah, I mean, it's certainly not a monoculture. It might be loud and annoying, but where's the best place to find what you're up to?

The Modern Rogue on YouTube—youtube.com/modernrogue. I'm perpetually on a quest to be the ultimate gentleman, warrior, and scoundrel.

Out of warrior, gentleman, and scoundrel, which is your preferred role?

When I was in my 30s, I was playing the scoundrel. In my 40s, I tried on the warrior. Now that I'm 50? It's gentleman all the way.

We'll leave it there. Brian Brushwood, thanks for talking to us.

Thank you.

• Video editor: Ian Keyser

The post Brian Brushwood: Why We Fall for Scams appeared first on Reason.com.

Are you part of the growing stoicism movement? Built on virtue, reason, and self-control, the ancient Roman philosophy is gaining popularity in a world that just seems to get crazier and crazier.

Today's guest is a self-described stoic. Robert Rosenkranz is the author of The Stoic Capitalist: Advice for the Exceptionally Ambitious, which takes a deep dive into how stoic principles can lead to personal, financial, and social success. Rosenkranz charts his path from a small, cramped family apartment in 1950s New York City to becoming a billionaire deal-maker and founder of Open To Debate, a nonprofit that hosts nationally broadcasted debates about the toughest issues of the day.

The Stoic Capitalist is an emotional memoir with snippets of philosophy from the likes of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. It illustrates the power of rational thinking and purposeful action in all parts of life. Reason's Nick Gillespie and Rosenkranz talk about the political journey from a New Frontier liberal to more of a libertarian-leaning Reagan Republican to a philanthropist deeply committed to promoting intense but civil debate. They also talk about how the creative destruction that undergirds capitalism displaces people not just economically but culturally—and how to make it easier for people to adapt to the unending change that is necessary for improvements in living standards.

This interview was recorded at a live event in New York City.

Upcoming Reason events:

• Rise Above: Nick Gillespie and Scott Barry Kaufman in Conversation, May 19
• Reason Speakeasy: Nick Gillespie and Susannah Cahalan on The Acid Queen, June 3
• Reason Versus debate: Jacob Sullum and Billy Binion vs. Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael Mangual, June 24

 

0:00—Introduction
1:48—Rosenkranz's new book: The Stoic Capitalist
5:00—Threats to the American experiment
8:23—Rosenkranz's upbringing and secular Jewish identity
14:22—Finding inspiration from Joseph Kennedy Sr., Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca
17:30—Rosenkranz's political evolution
24:35—What killed American optimism?
29:51—How taking huge risks reaped Rosenkranz huge rewards
32:17—Rosenkranz's business philosophy
34:51—The best argument for capitalism today
39:17—Open To Debate and stoic dialectic
43:10—Organ markets and life extension experiments
49:50—The stoic view on death

• Video Editor: Ian Keyser

The post Robert Rosenkranz: How To Use Stoicism To Build a Meaningful Life appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins, whom Reason's Nick Gillespie interviewed last fall in Milwaukee as part of his "Final Bow" tour. Gillespie and Dawkins talked about why he believes science can't thrive without freedom, why gender ideology is starting to look a lot like Soviet Lysenkoism, and why some truths—like the binary nature of biological sex—shouldn't be up for political negotiation.

Dawkins discusses his new book, The Genetic Book of the Dead, what it means to live in a "colony of cooperating viruses," and why he thinks both religious dogma and postmodern relativism are enemies of progress (as an unapologetic postmodern libertarian, Gillespie argues about that last point).

They also explore how moral progress happens, whether atheism needs a replacement as a social and intellectual movement, and how cultural Christianity still casts a long shadow in an increasingly secular world.

This is a conversation for anyone who believes that science, skepticism, and freedom belong together—and who refuses to kowtow to ideological orthodoxy, wherever it comes from.

Upcoming Reason events:

• Rise Above: Nick Gillespie and Scott Barry Kaufman in Conversation, May 19
• Reason Speakeasy: Susannah Cahalan on The Acid Queen, June 3
• Reason Versus debate: Jacob Sullum and Billy Binion vs. Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael Mangual, June 24

 

0:00—Introduction

2:06—Dawkins' new book, The Genetic Book of the Dead

6:13—Selfish and cooperative genes

16:50—Heritability, variance, and twin studies

20:50—Cultural change leads to physical change

22:37—Ancient Babylon was just yesterday

24:28—Dawkins' first memory

25:13—New Zealand's "indigenous science" initiative

34:43—"Sex is the only biological binary"

37:46—Gender, transgenderism, and intersex

47:31—The folly of gender "norms"

49:42—Liberal inquiry and the shifting moral zeitgeist

53:15—Atheism's influence on knowledge and culture

57:27—Is Dawkins really a "cultural Christian"?

1:02:00—Death and legacy

1:03:50—Q&A

• Video Editor: Cody Huff

The post Richard Dawkins: Why Atheism Is Winning appeared first on Reason.com.

"I feel fear… because they're somewhat vindictive people. I don't care who you are, having this set of people mad at you is not comfortable." That's today's guest, Cliff Asness, talking about President Donald Trump, his administration, and his supporters. Asness is the outspoken billionaire co-founder of AQR Capital Management. He is also a pioneer in quantitative finance, University of Chicago Ph.D., and self-described "part-time Republican and full-time libertarian." He talks bluntly about why Trump is spectacularly wrong on tariffs and trade, his concerns about the authoritarian tendencies of the president and his supporters, and how capitalism may actually be getting less efficient due to social media.

Asness tells Reason's Nick Gillespie how he came to his libertarian beliefs, where right-wing populism overlaps with its left-wing version, and why he thinks free minds and free markets will eventually win—but only after a long slog. This conversation was recorded live at an event in New York City.

Subscribe to the new YouTube channel for The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie!

1:17- Asness's hedge fund: AQR Capital Management

4:15- The state of capitalism

7:30- From delusion to grift

10:51- Trump, tariffs, and comparative advantage

13:48- Is the Trump administration "grifting"?

16:30- Criticizing Obama and Biden

17:42- Is Trump the naked emperor?

23:57- Markets are not perfect

30:45- Social media's effect on markets and politics

37:07- Asness' politics and background

40:40- Does the arc of history bend towards libertarianism?

42:00- Left & right economic illiteracy

44:29- Median income has increased, morale hasn't

47:01- Politics rewards resentment

Upcoming Reason events:

• The Soho Forum Debates: Dave Smith vs. Alex Nowrasteh on immigration, May 21, 2025

• Video Editor: Ian Keyser

The post Billionaire Cliff Asness: Can Technology Outrun 'Stupider and Stupider' Government? appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker and Reason's Nick Gillespie discuss recent shifts at Harvard toward greater institutional neutrality and free speech, while warning that threats to academic freedom now come from both internal ideologies and external political forces—including pressure from the federal government under President Donald Trump.

Pinker defends the role of federal science funding but cautions against political micromanagement of academia, emphasizing the need for independent scholarly governance. The conversation also touches on Pinker's admiration for Richard Dawkins, the impact of declining religiosity on moral progress, and the concept of "common knowledge" as explored in Pinker's forthcoming book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows. 

0:00— Introduction

1:27— The state of Harvard

4:42— Harvard is circumventing SCOTUS affirmative action ruling

6:02— How to foster true ideological diversity

7:25— Why does Harvard rank so highly?

10:16— Threats to academic freedom under Trump

18:58— Do universities really need federal funding?

23:14— History of government interference in higher education

27:20— Is the Trump administration uniquely anti-intellectual?

30:47— Is academia historically unpopular now?

36:55— How universities can regain trust

40:25— Richard Dawkins' influence on Pinker

49:51— Societal progress was propelled by secularism

52:50— Why are public intellectuals pushing for religious revival?

54:23— Pinker's new book: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows

 

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Upcoming Reason events:

• Reason Speakeasy: Robert Rosenkranz on The Stoic Capitalist, May 6, 2025
• The Soho Forum Debates: Dave Smith vs. Alex Nowrasteh on immigration, May 21, 2025

• Video Editor: Ian Keyser

The post Steven Pinker: Can Harvard Be Saved? appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is John Arnold—the former Enron wunderkind and billionaire philanthropist (and Reason Foundation supporter) who's determined to hack America's most expensive and least accountable public sector systems in areas such as criminal justice, education, and pensions. (Fun fact: He was once called "the most hated man in pensionland" by Governing magazine due to his reform efforts.)

Reason's Nick Gillespie and Arnold talk about why public pensions are so out of control and how to fix them; how Medicare squeezes billions of unnecessary dollars out of taxpayers; and how Enron scammed its investors not despite regulations but in full view of them. And they discuss why, despite all the country's problems, Arnold is still betting on America to get better, not worse.

0:00— Introduction
1:15— Private sector vs. government vs. philanthropy
6:05— Education reform
10:31— Pension reform
17:21— Health care reform
22:21— Criminal justice reform
25:45— Gun violence studies
28:24— Commitment to research with integrity over ideology
33:10— There's no evidence for "college for all"
36:40— Being a billionaire
37:42— Arnold's experience at Enron
42:45— Markets vs regulations
46:31— Is Arnold optimistic?
48:00— Why Arnold is still betting on America

Subscribe to the new YouTube channel for The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie!

• Video Editor: Ian Keyser

The post John Arnold: Government Can't Be Trusted To Fix Any Problems appeared first on Reason.com.

Jeffrey Singer, a Cato Institute fellow and longtime surgeon, argues that government overreach in health care undermines patient autonomy, which should be the guiding principle in medical decision making. Drawing from historical examples and personal experience, he critiques licensing laws, the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) drug approval monopoly, and Certificate of Need (CON) regulations as protectionist measures that limit competition and innovation. Singer contends that private institutions—like insurers, hospitals, and certification boards—already create strong incentives for safety and quality, making many government controls unnecessary.

Reason's Nick Gillespie and Singer also explore complex topics like end-of-life choice, trans youth health care, and antibiotic regulation, emphasizing the balance between personal freedom and legitimate public health concerns.

This interview was recorded at The Reason Speakeasy, a monthly event in New York City that doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview. Go here for more information on upcoming Reason events.

Subscribe to the new YouTube channel for The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie here.

0:00 — Introduction
0:50 — Singer's medical career
3:55 — Your Body, Your Health Care
8:40 — Government interference in your health care
14:23 — CON laws
20:00 — Licensing and credentialing rackets
29:48 — The FDA's drug approval monopoly
31:30 — The thalidomide scandal
34:11 — Off-label drug prescriptions
37:00 — FDA approval for naloxone and Plan B
40:20 — The American Medical Association's push for licensing
43:00 — RFK Jr.: reformer or madman?
45:05 — The food pyramid and other government follies
45:57 — Intersex infants and trans health care
50:09 — Right to die and patient autonomy

• Video Editor: Ian Keyser

The post Jeffrey Singer: Get Government Out of Health Care appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is Harvard economist Jason Furman, who was one of former President Barack Obama's chief economic advisers and an architect of the Affordable Care Act. These days, he's in the news for his withering critique of former President Joe Biden's dismal economic record and two-fisted attacks on President Donald Trump's trade policy. We talk about Furman's defense of global markets, Obamacare's unfulfilled promises, and why he now thinks the national debt and AI are bigger deals than he used to believe.

0:48— The failure of Bidenomics and the "neoliberal delusion"
6:00— The neoliberal coalition breakdown
9:37— Trump's post-neoliberal economics
13:08— Biden's biggest economic failures
16:25— Why "free money" is a bad thing
18:28— The Age of No Accountability
20:19— Why tariffs make no sense
23:52— How Furman "zigzagged" on debt
29:42— How to get politicians to take the debt seriously
36:32— How to fix Social Security and Medicare
39:58— Has Furman changed his mind about Keynesian economics?
43:10— Furman's background and the future of Economics
46:50— Furman's outlook on AI
50:16— The Luddite impulse towards technological advancement

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of intellectual conformity and groupthink. It doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. The next one is Tuesday, May 6, and features investor and Open To Debate founder Robert Rosenkranz, author of The Stoic Capitalist: Advice for the Exceptionally Ambitious. Go here to buy tickets and go here to http://https//opentodebate.orgsign up for Reason's NYC Events newsletter.

Photo credits: CNP/AdMedia/Newscom, Andrew Leyden/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Kevin Dietsch/UPI/Newscom

• Video Editor: Ian Keyser

The post Jason Furman: Why Everyone Is Wrong About the Economy appeared first on Reason.com.