The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie

Today's guest is Penny Lane, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker whose previous works include Listening to Kenny G and Hail Satan?, both of which formed the basis of previous Reason interviews linked in the show notes.

Her exceptional new film is Confessions of a Good Samaritan. It's currently streaming on Netflix and follows her experience as an "altruistic" kidney donor, or one who gives an organ away to an anonymous stranger. Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with Lane about how she came to make her decision; its effects on her body, mind, and finances; and the ethics of current policy, which prevents donors from being paid for giving away life-saving organs. "My instinct as more or less a libertarian is, yeah, pay people," Lane tells Reason. "It seems like a really obvious thing." But it's not a simple one, she explains, both because of current laws and medical history. They also talk about the state of documentary film making, if we're in a golden age for the genre, and whether audiences are becoming smarter consumers of media.

Previous appearances:

"Penny Lane: Can 75 Million Kenny G Fans Be Wrong?" December 1, 2021

"Hail Satan? A New Documentary Depicts Devil Worshipers as Unlikely Defenders of the First Amendment," April 26, 2019

00:00- Introduction

2:19- Penny Lane's altruistic kidney donation

4:21- Effective altruism's influence on Lane

6:12- Lane's obstacles before surgery

7:13- Recovering from surgery physically & psychologically

11:25- Parable of the Good Samaritan

15:43- Kidney donation policy

19:34- How financial incentives would change the equation

21:03- History of kidney transplants

24:17- Could man-made organ transplants be common soon?

28:49- 'Disgust' around selling organs

32:23- Starring in your own documentary

38:12- Are audiences more media literate now?

40:33- Lane's history with documentary filmmaking

41:46- Lane's documentarian heroes

48:06- Lane's current projects

The post Penny Lane: Why I Gave a Kidney to a Total Stranger appeared first on Reason.com.

In late 2017, in the name of "zero tolerance," President Donald Trump introduced a policy of separating parents and children who crossed the Southern border and requested asylum in the United States. In all, an estimated 5,500 children were taken from their parents and many were held in detention facilities, some of which had been constructed by the Obama administration. Over 1,000 children are still unaccounted for by the federal government. The policy ended in 2018 after massive public outcry. The zero tolerance policy is the subject of Separated, a new documentary by Academy Award–winning filmmaker Errol Morris. It has aired on MSNBC and will be available for streaming on December 17.

Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with Morris and journalist Jacob Soboroff, whose book on the controversy inspired the film. They discuss how family separation became policy and whether it acted as a deterrent, America's long and ambivalent relationship with legal and illegal immigration, and what Trump's second term will mean for immigration policy.

0:00- Introduction

2:15- Trump's 'zero-tolerance' immigration policy

5:33- Jacob Soboroff's book

9:33- Who was really behind the child separation policy?

13:09- State-created orphans and the asylum process

15:04- Immigration policies through U.S. history

18:31- American attitudes towards immigration v implemented policies

21:21- Ad: ZBiotics

23:07- Anti-immigration rhetoric escalated during the 2024 election

29:15- 'Border Czar' Tom Homan

32:15- Stephen Miller, Elaine Duke & Kirsten Nielsen

37:35- Nielsen's replacement, Kristi Noem

39:42- The Dunning-Kruger administration?

40:57- Expertise vs. disruption

44:43- How to change attitudes toward immigration

Previous appearances:

Today's sponsor:

The post Errol Morris and Jacob Soboroff: Trump's Immigration Policies Are Indefensible appeared first on Reason.com.

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Today's guest is Brendan O'Neill, chief political writer for Spiked and the author of the bracing new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation.

O'Neill and Reason's Nick Gillespie talk about the response in the United Kingdom and the United States to Hamas' attacks last year, Israel's ongoing military actions, and what's likely to come next in a postwoke world. "On October 7," says O'Neill, "the progressive left went from 'believe women' to 'believe fascists.' They took Hamas at its word over the testimonies of raped women."

They also discuss whether O'Neill's politics have changed over the years. At the start of his career a quarter-century ago, he was an unapologetic man of the left—a self-declared Trotskyist, in fact. But these days he seems to make more common cause with conservatives and libertarians. "My rallying cry remains the same," O'Neill insists. "Increase the power of man over nature and decrease the power of man over man."

0:00- Introduction

1:16- O'Neill's new book: "After The Pogrom"

5:48- Hamas is religious extremist movement

11:10- Islamism as extreme rejection of modernity

16:57- Is being anti-Zionist punk?

18:40- The 'cultural appropriation' of the Keffiyeh

21:17- Is Israel a white settler-colonialist state?

24:28- When did the left turn against Israel?

28:53- Is antisemitism connected to anti-capitalism?

32:30- The demonization of Israel

33:40- Palestine as the Omni-cause

35:34- The madness of Queers for Palestine

39:29- The catastrophe of post-Oct. 7 progressivism

43:34- Did Oct. 7 accelerate the collapse of wokeness?

46:40- How much should the west be supporting Israel's war effort?

51:28- O'Neill's political evolution

53:21- How gay liberation differed from the trans movement

58:22- Today's young activists seek institutional approval

1:00:50- How Marxism & Trotsky influenced O'Neill

1:04:14- Critics of Zionism in 1930s-40s Europe

Previous appearances:

"A Heretic's Manifesto: Spiked's leading polemicist defends J.K. Rowling, Brexit, and Enlightenment values of free speech and pluralism," June 21, 2023

"'The Real Threat to Free Speech Now Is Conformism and Cowardice': Spiked's Brendan O'Neill on free expression, environmentalism as 'an apology for poverty,' and why he is 'a Marxist libertarian,'" December 23, 2015

The post Brendan O'Neill: The West Went Insane After October 7 appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst who is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center and a columnist for The Free Press. A decade ago, in the wake of the Arab Spring and various "color" revolutions around the world, Gurri published The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, which analyzed how social media empowered ordinary people to resist control from above and anticipated the rise of Donald Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Brexit.

Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Gurri shortly after the 2024 election at The Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of intellectual conformity and groupthink. (Go here for information on Reason events.) They talked about why Gurri voted for Trump and why he's cautiously optimistic about the next four years.

0:00- Introduction

1:13- Why Gurri voted for Trump

4:46- Trump vs. Harris: Chaos vs. Control

8:40- Trump's first term 11:04- Trump's new coalition

14:33- Is authoritarianism coming to America?

19:00- Attention, Populism & Wild Hair

20:42- Colossal transformation awaits us

34:05- Creating communities of meaning in the digital age

36:22- The transformations enabled by the printing press

38:41- More chaos is coming 43:11- Lessons from Cuba

48:40- Arab Spring and the spark that overthrows a regime

50:37- Short term pessimistic, long term optimistic

Today's Sponsor:

The post Martin Gurri: Political Chaos Brings Colossal Transformation appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is Amanda Knox, an activist, writer, and host of the podcast Labyrinths. In 2007, while studying abroad in Italy, Knox was accused of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in what the lead prosecutor claimed was a bizarre sex game gone wrong. Despite mishandled DNA, a coerced confession, and a lack of credible evidence, Knox was convicted and spent nearly four years in an Italian prison before being exonerated in 2015. Her case was a media spectacle that sensationalized every aspect of her life.

Reason's Billy Binion talks with Knox about her views on true crime after her story became one of the biggest examples of the modern era. They also discuss the psychological impact of being imprisoned for something she didn't do; what Knox thinks the U.S. criminal justice system gets right and wrong; and how she reacts to people who still believe she's lying. What's more, she shares a fascinating tidbit about her relationship with the lead prosecutor on her case—something that will be featured more in her new book Free, which is available for preorder.

0:00—Introduction

The post Amanda Knox: 'I Have Felt Utterly Exploited' by True Crime appeared first on Reason.com.

In the wake of massive victories by Donald Trump and Republicans, here's a question worth asking: What does today's GOP really stand for? Longstanding support for free trade and overseas wars seems to have been replaced with tariffs and non-interventionism.

Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis are the authors of The Myth of Left and Right. They argue that the way we talk about the political spectrum misleads and confuses us because it reduces complex special-interest coalitions to one or two issues that really aren't representative of what the parties actually stand for. As a result, they say that the next four years will be as fractious within the GOP (and the Democratic Party too) as the last four.

Today's Sponsor:

The post Hyrum and Verlan Lewis: Stop Buying the 'Left v. Right' Myth appeared first on Reason.com.

Join Reason's Nick Gillespie live on election night at YouTube, X, and Reason.com, starting at 10 p.m. EST.

Will history be made? Will it end? Joining Gillespie are The Fifth Column's Kmele Foster, Bloomberg economics columnist Allison Schrager, and many more special guests, who will break down the weirdest—and possibly the most consequential—election season in any of our lifetimes.

The post Live on Election Night! The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie appeared first on Reason.com.

Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist at Stony Brook University and the author of the new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Al-Gharbi argues that academics, journalists, and other elite professionals that he calls "symbolic capitalists" are disconnected from the marginalized and disadvantaged communities they claim to speak for—and that, by using the rhetoric of class solidarity drawn from the Occupy movement (which pitted the "99 percent versus the 1 percent"), progressive symbolic capitalists actually exploit those communities to maintain a relatively lush lifestyle.

Born and raised in a mixed-race military family in Arizona, al-Gharbi spoke with Reason's Nick Gillespie about wokeness transforming the college experience, his conversion from Catholicism to atheism to Islam, why black and Latino voters appear to be embracing former President Donald Trump in record numbers, and his highly public cancellation in 2014 after he was attacked by Fox News for criticizing U.S. foreign policy.

0:00— Introduction

Today's sponsor:

The post Musa al-Gharbi: How Woke Elites Became Out of Touch appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, the co-founder of Ideas Beyond Borders (IBB), a nonprofit that translates books and articles about limited government, freedom of thought, and market economics into Arabic and other languages, and distributes them for free in the Middle East and other parts of the world. (Full disclosure: Reason's Nick Gillespie is on the board of IBB.)

Gillespie talked with Al Mutar about IBB's new book, Untold Stories of the Middle East, which celebrates entrepreneurs in Kurdistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere whom IBB has given startup grants; how the October 7 attacks on Israel and fighting in Gaza and Lebanon will affect the region for decades; and what it was like to grow up in Baghdad under Saddam Hussein, various Islamic terrorist groups, and the U.S. occupation. This conversation was taped in front of a live audience in New York.

0:00 - Introduction

1:26 - Untold Stories Of The Middle East

4:20 - Micro grants in the Middle East

6:20 - The hope of Kurdistan

9:00 - Beirut's post-explosion struggles & recovery

11:12 - Oil vs. the entrepreneurial spirit in the Middle East

14:20 - Building a vocabulary of freedom with Ideas Beyond Borders

18:20 - Censorship & internet access in the Middle East

19:39 - Hiring Middle Eastern translators

22:16 - A brief history of political upheaval in the Middle East

30:12 - The 'liberal minority' in Lebanon

33:29 - U.S. intervention in the Middle East

39:45 - Impact of October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel on peace processes in the region 44:00 - Funding schools for girls in Afghanistan

46:05 - The tragedy & hope of Afghanistan: The Graveyard of Empires

49:43 - 'Sanctions Boy': Growing up in 90s Baghdad

59:04 - 'We don't have the privilege to be depressed (about the Middle East)'

1:01:35 - Economic freedom & self-determination restore agency

Previous appearances:

Today's sponsor:

The post Faisal Saeed Al Mutar: Peace In The Middle East Through Capitalism appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is Meghan McCain, political commentator, former co-host of ABC's The View, and host of the podcast Citizen McCain.

Reason's Billy Binion talks with her about the changing GOP, bias in corporate media, the 2024 election, and what it's like to be a non-MAGA, nonpopulist member of today's Republican Party.

0:00- Introduction

Today's sponsors:

The post Meghan McCain: 'Trump Didn't Break My Brain. What's Your Excuse?' appeared first on Reason.com.