The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie

Steven Johnson is the author of the new book Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer, which is also running as a series on PBS (watch online here). The rapid advance in vaccine technology, which is bringing an end to the COVID-19 pandemic, is best understood in the context of a series of innovations that more than doubled the life expectancy of the human race over the last 100 years. Extra Life explores how innovations in epidemiological statistics, artificial fertilizer, toilets, and sanitation systems, along with vaccines and other measures, have allowed billions of people to flourish until old age. By 2016, global life expectancy at birth had reached 72 years, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Irish journalist Andrew Doyle is the creator of the Twitter personality Titania McGrath (a parody of an ultra-woke 24-year-old militant vegan poet) and the author of the new book Free Speech and Why It Matters, a comprehensive, learned, and compelling argument in favor of unfettered debate and open expression. Nick Gillespie talks with him about why cancel culture is on the rise, how to combat it, and what Titania McGrath is up to as she approaches her quarter-life crisis.

Nick Gillespie talks with Freddie deBoer about his critiques of education, the mainstream media, and the contemporary left. They also wrangle over deBoer's call for "revolution, not evolution" and an end to capitalism, what it means to "want to live outside of exchange," and the surprising overlap between Marxists and libertarians when it comes to a range of current policy issues.

Americans have a reputation for being cockeyed optimists, but we're suckers when it comes to "declension narratives" about the fallen state of our world.

John Samples is a political scientist, vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute, and a member of Facebook's Oversight Board, which recently upheld Facebook's suspension of Donald Trump. He tells Nick Gillespie how the group came to its conclusions and why he thinks the Oversight Board is an excellent example of private-sector governance of cyberspace. He also discusses his 2019 policy analysis "Why the Government Should Not Regulate Content Moderation of Social Media."

The Columbia linguist discusses his new book Nine Nasty Words and dismisses the ideological excesses of the 'anti-racism' movement.

Goodbye Guns N' Rose: The Crime, Beauty, and Amplified Chaos of America's Most Polarizing Band, by Art Tavana, is an extended essay on the cultural legacy not just of a band but of a period that informs contemporary debates on politics and culture even as it recedes from our memory. Tavana, an LA-based former writer for Playboy and LA Weekly, talks with Nick Gillespie about the attraction of popular nihilism; Axl Rose as the dispossessed son of middle America; how the band's racist, xenophobic, and homophobic song "One in a Million" reflected national anxiety over coming political, social, and economic change; how the group's beef with Nirvana, another band that couldn't quite make it into the post-Cold War era, illustrates the limits of rock and roll; and what comes after the end of corporate mass culture.

Meet Jane Coaston, the new host of The New York Times podcast The Argument. She's a registered Libertarian who is "especially distrustful of efforts by the state to get people to do things." She explains that "at some point, a regulation or a law with the absolute best of intentions will be wielded by people who may not have the absolute best of intentions."

Coaston tells Nick Gillespie that growing up in a liberal household in a conservative part of the country made her concerned about giving authorities a lot of power. Adding to that was a sense of being isolated because of her race and sexuality. "My libertarian sensibilities really came from a sense of, I know what it is like politically to always lose and to see what the winners look like," she says.

In The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills, Jesse Singal looks at attempts to change social policy based on bad or faulty psychological research--think power posing, the self-esteem movement, and the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which supposedly reveals unconscious racism. He tells Nick Gillespie his goal is to explain why we keep falling for ideas that psychologists say will fix society so we waste less time focusing on things that don't really help anyone.

Chef Andrew Gruel just might be the patron saint of restaurateurs, small-business owners, and service workers during the pandemic. He's the founder and owner of Slapfish, a growing national fast-casual restaurant chain based in Huntington Beach, California. He's a widely recognized culinary innovator and familiar face on  the Food Network and other cooking channels. He's also an unabashed critic of arbitrary rules that put business owners like him at the beck and call of hypocritical  politicians such as Gov. Gavin Newsom. Most famously, in an absolutely inspired rant that went viral on social media last December, Gruel listed all the ways in which California's ban on outdoor dining made no scientific or economic sense before concluding, "I'm not an asshole. The governor is."

Nick Gillespie sat down to talk with Gruel about what it's been like to run a business with government at all levels arbitrarily flipping the on-off switch, why innovation is central to both capitalism and cuisine, and why he'll never open another franchise in California.