The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie

Michael Shellenberger is the author of Apocalypse Never: How Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. A Time magazine "hero of the environment" and an "expert reviewer" for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he tells Nick Gillespie that green activists are wrong about most environmental trends and how to improve the future of the planet.

Yang, the author of The Souls of Yellow Folk, discusses the impact of the coronavirus lockdown and protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd; racism against blacks, latinos, Asians, and white ethnics in American history; and how a totalizing and misguided attack on "white supremacism" came to replace a focus on ending specific racist polices and attitudes in recent years.

Brown University's Glenn Loury has emerged as one of the most vocal and outspoken critics of Black Lives Matter and other groups arguing that systemic racism is at the center of the African American experience in the United States today. Loury worries that our institutions are failing "to affirm the primacy of reason over violence in calibrating our reactions to the supposed 'oppression,'" as he wrote in response to an open letter from his school's administrators that highlighted "anger" at what they called an "ongoing epidemic of racism."

The heterodox hosts of the popular Blocked and Reported podcast talk about surviving internet outrage, the roots of speech repression, and the power of direct financial support from fans.

George Floyd's death at the hands of the Minneapolis police has sparked nationwide protests against police brutality. A new consensus is forming around the urgent need for criminal justice reform. Now, though police killings have remained level since 2014, 69 percent of Americans agree that "the killing of Floyd represents a broader problem within law enforcement."

To better understand this shift and to get a sense of what changes would be most effective, Nick Gillespie sat down with Washington Post opinion writer Radley Balko, a former Reason reporter who covers police abuse, the drug war, and criminal justice reform.

Rory Sutherland, the vice chairman of the legendary global advertising agency Ogilvy UK, may seem like an unlikely defender of capitalism, but he is one of its most persuasive and engaging.

Sutherland calls the stentorian Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises his hero and celebrates not capitalism's ruthless efficiency and capacity to outproduce a command economy but its ability to create seemingly trivial products such as Red Bull and to transform the disgusting-sounding Patagonian toothfish into the delicacy known as Chilean sea bass.

Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow says that violent protests helped Richard Nixon win the 1968 presidential election by stoking fears of social unrest in whites. How will protests over the killing of George Floyd by police influence the 2020 presidential race? And what are the best ways to get rid of bad cops? Nick Gillespie hosts.

Nick Gillespie talks with Barton Gellman, whose new book "Dark Mirror" recounts his role in bringing Edward Snowden's revelations of mass surveillance of Americans to the world in 2013. They talk about what has changed and what hasn't since, why intelligence community members fear President Donald Trump abusing the information they collect, and how Joe Biden was a major player, as vice president, in an administration that prosecuted people who talked to journalists about national security.

Nick Gillespie talks with Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation about his bid for the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination. In a wide-ranging conversation, they discuss Hornberger's support for open immigration, free trade, and drug legalization; his plan to withdraw troops from around the world and dismantle the surveillance state; and his offbeat views on World War II and the Kennedy assassination.

The new documentary Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics, features the former Police frontman, Sarah Silverman, Carrie Fisher, Anthony Bourdain, Ben Stiller, and many other creative people talking about their good, bad, and ugly experiences with drugs such as LSD, magic mushrooms, peyote, and MDMA.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Donick Cary talks about his own history with psychedelics and the need for serious, open, and well-informed conversations about substances that are routinely described as life-changing.