Alex Winter talks with Nick Gillespie about his documentary on Frank Zappa's life and legacy. They talk about Zappa's ultra-individualism and libertarian commitment to free speech and self-expression. They also discuss the Rock Hall member's internal contradictions regarding sexual freedom, attitudes toward hippies and drugs, and other matters.

In his new memoir and practical guide, Listening To Ecstasy: The Transformative Power of MDMA, 71-year-old psychotherapist Charles Wininger comes out of the "chemical closet" to talk about how MDMA has helped to revitalize his personal and professional life, what important lessons today's "psychedelic renaissance" has learned from the 1960s counterculture, and why "serious fun" that leads to both self-actualization and the revitalization of community is within our grasp.

Why did prescription opioids bring so much misery, addiction, and death to the small towns of post-industrial America? Psychiatrist and author Sally Satel spent a year treating patients in Appalachian Ohio and tells Nick Gillespie that media and government narratives blaming OxyContin are missing a much bigger and darker picture.

In Wretched Refuse?: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions, Alex Nowrasteh and Benjamin Powell take an exhaustive look at the data and conclude that destination countries not only benefit economically from immigration but that many key markers of liberal democracy—such as support for the rule of law, belief in private property and trust in government—improve when newcomers arrive en masse.

In his new book A Glorious Liberty: Frederick Douglass and the Fight for an Antislavery Constitution, Reason Senior Editor Damon Root argues the contemporary debates over systemic racism and America's founding are replaying fights that took place in the middle of the 19th century. Far from seeing our country's Constitution as a morally ambiguous document that simply sanctioned white supremacism, Douglass extolled it as "a glorious liberty document" that justified the ending of slavery and other forms of race- and gender-based inequality. Douglass's message, says Root, is as vital to the current moment as it was in the 19th century.

Nick Gillespie spoke with Ajit Pai the day before the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this podcast, awarded Pai the Sixth Annual Savas Award for Privatization for his market-friendly policies, including facilitating the growth of 5G networks and ending FCC regulation of internet service providers commonly known as Net Neutrality. Pai discusses what sorts of reforms or revisions of Section 230 he supports, what he's most proud of accomplishing at the FCC, and whether he thinks free speech—especially online—has much of a future.

No journalist is more relentlessly iconoclastic than Glenn Greenwald, who shared a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Edward Snowden revelations. 

Nick Gillespie spoke with Greenwald via Zoom at Greenwald's house in Brazil, where he lives with his husband, two children, and numerous dogs. Among other topics, they discussed what Greenwald sees as a generational fight playing out in newsrooms, the challenge identity politics poses to free expression, and whether a coalition of libertarians and progressives can effectively push non-interventionist foreign policy, lifestyle liberation, and an end to corporate subsidies during the Biden presidency.

Billionaire Charles Koch and co-author Brian Hooks discuss their new book, Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World, leaving political partisanship behind, and learning from critics.

"From the moment we're born, we're surrounded by textiles," says Virginia Postrel, author of the new book The Fabric of Civilization. "It's not just our clothes, it's our blankets, it's our curtains. It's our bandages. It's our duct tape! There are more textiles than you can ever think about surrounding us. And we don't think about them very much."

Writer and filmmaker Shelby Steele went to Ferguson to investigate the meaning of Brown's death and the reaction that it inspired. His new documentary, a collaboration with his son Eli, is called What Killed Michael Brown?