The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie

"There isn't an issue facing Black people today that doesn't find its origins in K-12 education," writes Chris Stewart, CEO of the education nonprofit brightbeam and a prolific writer and podcaster. "Without our own collective governance of our children's intellectual development, how can we win? Without Black self-determination in who teaches them, what they learn, where they learn, and how lessons are taught to them, what is the future of our freedom?"

A Christian and a libertarian, the Minnesota-based Stewart says that school lockdowns over the past year have forced parents to become more involved and attentive to their children's education and may well lead to an exodus from traditional public schools. In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Stewart also talks about why he believes that the government shouldn't be in charge of curricula and why support for school choice will continue to grow despite efforts by teachers unions and education bureaucrats to maintain a failing status quo.

"I am now entering my fifth year as a regular heroin user," says Columbia University neuroscientist Carl Hart, the author of Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear. "I am better for my drug use." The 54-year-old father and military veteran makes a powerfully documented case that responsible adults should be free to buy, sell, and use whatever substances they want to and that policy discussions about drug use have been polluted by bad information and moral posturing.

Nick Gillespie speaks with Techdirt founder Mike Masnick about what current debates over social media get drastically wrong, how free speech is both empowered and imperiled by politicians here and abroad, and why a more-decentralized internet is not just possible but preferable to what we have now.

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.