The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie

Today's guest is best known by his pro wrestling name: Kane.

But Glenn Jacobs isn't just a member of the WWE Hall of Fame. Since 2018, he's served as the mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, where he has beat down tax increases and mask and vaccine mandates while pushing school choice and private sector solutions to social problems such as addiction.

Jacobs tells Nick Gillespie how Ron Paul inspired him, why he believes President Donald Trump is disrupting the administrative state, and why live-and-let-live is the best life philosophy.

The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, and politicians who are making the 21st century more libertarian—or at least more interesting—by challenging old, worn-out ideas and orthodoxies.

How can we make The Reason Interview better? Take our listener survey for a chance to win a $300 gift card: http://reason.com/podsurvey

0:00—Intro

0:50—Paul's influence on Jacobs

3:52—The appeal of Ronald Reagan

6:26—Trump and the administrative state

9:45—Responsibilities as mayor of Knox County

11:45—Taxes and public services

18:32—Pushing back on COVID-19 mandates

25:35—LGBTQ issues

29:26—Vocational training

32:57—Libertarianism inside the GOP

34:38—Which pro wrestlers embody these politicians?

36:00—What's next for Jacobs?

The post Glenn Jacobs Body-Slams Big Government appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Today's guest is Rep. Chip Roy (R–Texas), a fiscal hawk whose commitment to balancing the budget has led President Donald Trump to call for primary challenges against him.

Nick Gillespie sits down with Roy to talk about why he ultimately voted for the president's budget-busting One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), whether the controversial redistricting plan going on in Texas is legit, the expansion of the federal government under both major parties, and where libertarians and conservatives can work together to reduce the size, scope, and spending of the state.

0:00—Intro

0:41—Why we must control government spending

4:20—The OBBBA and the national debt

6:30—Facing off with Trump

9:25—The Federal Reserve's existence and independence

11:00—Reforming the health care system

14:21—Victories from the OBBBA

19:16—The influence of Ron Paul

24:51—Immigration, labor, and assimilation

35:17—Is there a new GOP consensus on foreign policy?

41:50—Texas redistricting

44:28—Cultural identity of Texas

Upcoming events:

The Soho Forum Debate: Melanie Thompson vs. Kaytlin Bailey, September 15

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Chip Roy, thanks for talking to Reason.

Chip Roy: Happy to do it, Nick. Appreciate you guys.

You are a rare voice of fiscal shrinking in Hollywood.

Hollywood for ugly people.

In Hollywood, yeah. In Washington, D.C. That has put you in the crosshairs with [President] Donald Trump in particular. You don't want to raise the debt ceiling unless there's a reduction in spending. You pushed back against the Big Beautiful Bill, although you did cave and supported it.

We'll come back to the word cave, but OK.

Well, you voted for it.

Sure.

Talk a little bit about your general philosophy. Why is it so important that government spending be either held constant or reduced?

First of all, my view is that the power of the purse is the central power of Congress, and we've abdicated it for as long as I can remember. If you don't constrain that power of the purse, then you're funding the very bureaucracy that was predicted by the founders and has proven to be true to be at odds with our liberty. You fund the bureaucrats that are then turned on us.

Why has Congress…to say they're asleep at the switch is an understatement. What's going on? You came into office in 2019, but this has been going on for at least 20 years before.

Or more, yeah.

My observation over time is that we're actually at a moment where more members of Congress get it than I've ever seen in the past, that's the good news. But the bad news is, it's still a woefully inadequate group of people to change it.

I think, really, at the end of the day, members of Congress believe that they get more popularity in votes by spending money. I actually just disagree with that. I'm a cancer survivor. I have cancer groups who come in and they ask me for money. I say, "God bless you. I know what you're trying to do. Research is great. But do you have a pay for that?" No. Well, then I can't support it. Farm Bureau comes in. I love the farmers. I want to protect small farmers against corporate [agriculture] and all those things, and we try to do that. But they come in and they want their money on the Farm Bill. I'm like, "Well, are we fixing the food stamps?" Well, no. Well, then I can't support it. They get that. And you know what, at the end of the day, they end up appreciating it. They appreciate that you're coming in and doing that. Look, I think to answer your question, the reason it's important is to not fund the tyranny that's turned on us.

I think more people are seeing that now in ways that they didn't in the past. Whether you're the bureaucrats that have been unloaded on the people, through education and DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and all these things, or whether it's just the weaponization of the Department of Justice [DOJ] against people. Targeting of parents back when parents were trying to do things in the DOJ under [President Joe] Biden and those guys were targeting people, etc., etc. WOTUS [Waters of the United States] has turned on people and farms. Our mutual friend [Rep.] Thomas Massie [R–Ky.] talks about that a lot. I think people are just understanding, "Well, crap, you're building up and funding all this stuff." Now, we just got to get a Congress that will understand that and peel it back.

Going to the heart of the Big Beautiful Bill debate. Setting up last year, I was trying to work with the OMB [Office of Management and Budget], with [OMB Director] Russell Vought, and others inside the administration and the incoming administration, a framework to hold everything back. We were told in January, "You're not going to touch anything in Medicaid or any kind of healthcare." Well, we got a trillion dollars of Medicaid. We were told we weren't going to be able to do much on the green new scam subsidies, and all this stuff going out. We were able to get three, or four, or $500 billion worth of cutbacks to those. Did we get everything we need? No. We can debate.

There's no question that the Big Beautiful Bill is going to increase the debt. There's no realistic scenario where it doesn't, if spending doesn't ramp up, we're digging a deeper hole for ourselves.

I think that is likely the case based on the following facts. Medicare was not touched. Social Security was not touched. Interest payments are going up.

But understand that part of the agreement, and we got to deliver the agreement, was holding discretionary flat or lower. That was a part of the deal, which by the way, will pay dividends if we do it—yet to be determined.

That's a part of the "deal," which I'm going to hold to fight for. And also, remember that tax cuts, look, we can debate them. But I had libertarian friends who were like, "Hey, I love the no tax on tips." Well, OK, but what about no tax on the guys in the back of the restaurant? These are debatable policies that we all want lower taxes. You, I, every person who wants a limited government.

I want lower spending.

But you want lower spending to go along with that. What I would argue is we fought to get lower spending at levels on things that people never thought we could get.

Medicaid being huge among those. Parity on Medicaid and Medicare rates, a lot of pieces in this that people don't even understand that we were able to achieve. Is it enough? No.

No.

Is it likely going to create front-loaded deficits? Yes. I showed those curves and worked with people, and I put those charts out.

The problem is it's always going to cause short-term deficits, but then in a year…

Long-term savings.

5,000…it comes pretty close to balanced.

I put all those charts out there in good faith. Why? Nick, to push the narrative over. Then figure out what we could get.

First, I want to ask you a little bit about total spending levels, since they're bonkers.

Yeah, they're bonkers.

I'm not saying you're responsible, but since you showed up, spending has gone up a lot.

I agree.

On the debt ceiling bill, you took a lot of heat from Trump. He was calling you out by name. And then in the Big Beautiful Bill, also you got leaned on.

What is it like when you have Donald Trump, the President of the United States, a guy who, whatever else you can say about him, has the power to destroy the political careers of politicians who are very popular in their districts when he says, "What the hell are you doing? You better get on the line?"

I view it this way: I view it slightly differently because I don't actually worry about whether I'm in office or not, so I don't actually care. Come after me, it's fine.

What I do care about is what can we do in this window of time when we have some people in the administration willing, clunkily, not always what you and I and others who are fiscal stewards, Thomas Massie, what we would do.

What are you going to do when you've got that opportunity? I view it that way. "All right, Mr. President, you're saying you're going to do X, Y, Z." Well, actually he's doing X. Whatever he's doing, he's taking on this, or scaling back some of the spending at the Pentagon, or taking on some cuts and getting the $9 billion of the rescissions package. There are things that are in process. Are they peanuts and crumbs? Kind of. But are they trending in the right direction? So far. Did we get material changes on the spending? Yes. The political influence, it is what it is. Look, you sit at the table in the White House, let's say you have some rather robust conversations.

The night of the Big Beautiful Bill, I was with Thomas, I was with other mutual friends. The president's calling and we're talking. The political pressures don't matter much to me. What matters to me is how can you assemble people to build a coalition to deliver. I'm proud of what we delivered on Medicaid reforms. I'm proud of what we delivered on the subsidies, which are horrid. I'm proud of what we delivered on a bunch of other spending levels that we won't go through the details in. But is it enough? No. We're just nibbling around the edges, it's crumbs.

Yeah. In 2019, the Fed spent about $4.8 trillion.

Now we're at $7.5 or whatever.

$7.2 in 2024.

Right.

What's amazing is it went from $4.8 trillion in 2019 to $6.8 trillion in 2020, to $7.5 trillion in 2021. It's now settling in around $7.2.

To give you an example, I don't think, and correct me, you'll have to go look at my voting record, I don't think I voted for any of that. I'm pretty sure I voted against every one of those appropriations packages when they were passed. But where does that get you? We have to figure out how to turn the Titanic.

Or we have to figure out how to sink the Titanic faster and build a new boat.

I am open to those ways of thinking. I think the issue here is what do we do right now with what we have to give us a fighting chance?

Do we need to end the Fed? Yes. Do we need to totally reform our entire healthcare system, Medicaid, Medicare, all of it? Yes. Do we need to be serious about cutting back half or more of the bureaucracy? Yes.

Start with how would ending the Fed reduce the federal budget?

In terms of the budget itself, I think two things would happen. One, I think it would have a direct impact on what happens with our overspend and interest.

Because I think the backstop of the Fed…that Congress feels unfettered, they feel like they can do whatever they want.

Secondly, I think that what's happening with respect to the Fed's action, which is driving up inflation and has been, that you now have to have all of the forces at play that we see unfolding right now where Trump's rattling about the Federal Reserve Chairman.

Is that troubling though? Because we can talk about whether the Fed should exist, but the Fed should be independent, right?

I don't think the Fed should exist, so independence I think is a question constitutionally with respect to executive branch, legislative branch, judicial branch. The founders didn't create, "Oh, there's this stuff over here"—NASA or whatever. Independent agencies are a whole other thing. I just personally think we need to get back to, whether it's gold standard, or whatever we want to do. Now, we've obviously got a crypto variable to figure out and how we want to manage it. Those things are all important. But what we need is something that is tangible, that we know we can rely upon, and that you can't politicize and then just print money or borrow money recklessly.

Trump is not leaning on the Fed in order to de-politicize it. He wants to…

He just wants interest rates lowered.

Yeah, he wants more money. He wants an inflationary Fed policy, so we're kind of in trouble there.

Let me ask you about…you mentioned Medicare and Social Security.

Medicaid, yeah.

Medicare and Social Security are things that Trump has taken off the table for as long as he's president, which could be another two-and-a-half years or it could be another 10 years. You have interest on the debt, you have Medicare and Social Security. That's the biggest chunk of the federal budget. Is there a way to cut spending? How do you get to a smaller budget without addressing those?

Number one, there's a technical matter: reconciliation. We're legally prohibited from touching Social Security. You got to come up with some sort of bipartisan way to address Social Security, or you can't really get to it.

Secondly, with respect to Medicare, I fundamentally believe for Medicare and Medicaid, and frankly [Veterans Health Administration] and other pieces of the puzzle, [Children's Health Insurance Program] and these other health programs, you have to have fundamental healthcare reforms from top to bottom that starts with the individuals, doctors, and liberty. I'm not saying liberty because I'm talking to you, I'm saying that's what I mean.

Literally, my ability to go to the doctor of my choice with the money that I have, the only way to get prices down for that entire system if we don't do that. One of the first bills I introduced was the Healthcare Freedom Act, which would do that. By the way, we did force into the Big Beautiful Bill DPC, direct primary care, being able to be used within your health savings accounts.

Look, fighting the swamp, fighting the healthcare swamp, is brutal because the insurance companies, pharma, big hospitals, they're all colluding to make it to where you and I can't go to the doctors of our choice.

I'm a member of Congress and I'm on Obamacare. If my cancer comes back, which I had 13 years ago, I can't go to MD Anderson [Cancer Center], which is an hour up the road right here in Texas, where we are, because Obamacare won't let me go to MD Anderson. That's asinine. And yet, millions of Americans are on that system. We've got to blow that up to get people control.

Why didn't the Republicans, and this is before your time, when you were working with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the whole first Trump administration was like, "When we take over, we're going to repeal and replace Obamacare." Then they were like, "Yeah, we didn't really mean that."

Republicans in Congress in particular suck on this and are running afraid to touch and deal with healthcare. I will say this: To the credit of the administration, we were told that we weren't going to touch healthcare at all and we did touch Medicaid in a very big way. Those reforms and people that I trust on this issue, Brian Blase at Paragon [Health Institute] and other good, solid conservatives on healthcare, are looking at this going, "Man, we got a lot of reforms that will impact Obamacare in what we fought for in that bill."

I think that's a baseline to now give us some offense to go onto. By the way, I got a lot of assurances in the administration, I got a couple I can't talk about yet regarding Obamacare expansion and continuation of the Biden credits under COVID-19 that we'll say that we would oppose, so we can minimize the footprint. Then importantly, in the second two-year stint of the term, provided that we have the House and Senate, that we'd be able to address healthcare. Because I said, "Guys, if you don't address healthcare, then there is no legacy." Because you can't stop the bleeding on the spending if you don't deal with Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans now is a huge chunk of it.

You mentioned Social Security is obviously, to say it's going bankrupt is not quite right. 

We're going to hit a ceiling.

It's about to hit a rocky ground or something.

Yeah.

What are the ways? Is there any reason to believe anybody in Congress is doing anything about that? Or do they say, "Ah, we're just going to wait, and then we're going to say just blow out the cap on earnings that are taxed to pay for Social Security?"

I think something's going to have to be dealt with on that front. Where I've come to a conclusion, especially now having lived through this reconciliation process and fought, I can't tell you how hard to get what we got while then sucking up things I didn't like, is…I think [Sen.] Rand [Paul (R–Ky.)] has been right for a long time, and others. I've been there too, but you got to get there, about you're going to have to have across the board, this penny plan, which now probably has to be the nickel plan for all I know. I don't know where we are mathematically. You have to have something where across the board, you're shrinking everything, and then force everybody to deliver.

This is actually really important. For what everyone thinks about the Big Beautiful Bill, one of the things we did that we broke the orthodoxy in Washington, that we can just have all the tax cuts we want without spending restraint. We forced that in the budget committee. Myself, [Reps.] Ralph Norman [R–S.C.], Josh Brecheen [R–Okla.], Andrew Clyde [R–Ga.]. The four of us took down the bill in the budget committee; we killed it. That brought everybody back in. I can tell you, those were some intense meetings where we said, "Guys, we're not doing this if we don't get this level of spending restraint at least as a model to guide what we do on the floor." That was before we sent it to the Senate.

That's actually a big shift. The fights we've had to have inside the Republican Party to say, "Guys, I know we're products of the '80s, and we believe in the Laffer curve, and we believe in lower taxes, of course we do." I do. But you also have to do math. You can't just keep cutting taxes and then not do the spending side because the inflation/turning over of all our freedom to government is eating up any of the value you get.

Who are the people? You've mentioned a couple times, Thomas Massie, people like Rand Paul, people like yourself, who are very insistent even in a MAGA era of spending matters.

Where's your bench? Who are you grooming to become low-spending Republicans?

There are some guys, I just mentioned one of them, Josh Brecheen from Oklahoma. He worked for [former Sen.] Tom Coburn [R–Okla.] back in the day.

We've got others that are my Freedom Caucus allies, as you talked about, Thomas. Over in the Senate, we worked very closely with [Sen.] Ron Johnson [R–Wis.], and with [Sens.] Rick Scott [R–Fla.] and Mike Lee [R–Utah].

We were trying to hold all that together towards the end. There are others, I'm going to leave people off. But there are people who are up-and-coming who get it and who understand, "Look, we've got to do something on the spending."

I will say more than I've ever seen, there was a willingness and a belief that we must do something. But when push comes to shove, they get afraid. Like, "Oh, well, we can't touch Medicaid there" or "Oh, we can't do this policy." We were having to fight that off as it went to the Senate and came back to the House.

Are there any Democrats that are interested in right-sizing government spending? Milton Friedman used to say that the ultimate measure of the size of government is its spending, because you got to pay for it ultimately one way or the other. Is there anybody on the Democratic side that is like, "Yeah, this is a little bit out of control? We're spending 50 percent more than we were just a few years ago. What do we got for it?"

I will tell you that I privately had a number of conversations with some of my Democratic colleagues who got it and appreciated those of us who were holding over, pushing wherever we landed in the end, but holding as far as we could. Look, I was taking a lot of heat because I was putting out all the charts, and I was putting out all this stuff saying, "Guys, here's the real math." They were like, "Yeah, go." I was like, "When will you meet me here? Come work with me on the spending side." But they never will on the spending side. They only want to attack the tax side. They want to say, "No, no, no, don't do those tax cuts. Or definitely go tax more and tax the rich."

I was willing to put everything on the table. I was willing to put, as much as I don't really love it, a higher top marginal rate for the top X earners if I could get more spending restraint. If that would be a deal that we could cut, I'll listen. It's politics. But I couldn't get Democrats to agree with us on anything on the spending restraint side. We have work to do there. I hope there's a little religion that's being found by some of my Democrat colleagues on that because there used to be guys that you could go sit down, back in the years past, and do that. But I don't know, it's hard to find. I've got a lot of agreement on things like stock trading among members of Congress, other issues where I can work on a bipartisan basis, but this one's tougher.

We're talking in Lake Jackson, Texas.

Yeah.

The event that we're both here at is the 90th birthday party/barbecue of the Young Americans for Liberty and the Ron Paul Institute. We're doing it for Ron Paul. Can you talk a little bit about Ron Paul's influence? Both as a member of the Texas Congressional delegation, but Ron Paul as a figure of limited government. How has he influenced your thinking about government?

Obviously, I work closely with Rand. Rand is obviously his son, and I have good friends that I've known for 25 years who worked with Rand. I did overlap with Ron, but man, what a legacy. People go automatically to the Fed because it's the thing that he's known for. And that's important because how many times do you want to say Ron Paul was right?

But the notion of limited government is something that has been lost on an entire generation of Republicans. I think that at some point here, people are now to some degree, nostalgically looking back and saying, "Ron Paul was right." This is all coming back, and the roosters are coming home to roost. I think that his legacy is going to build and grow over time.

I think you and I were talking about it before, a slightly different tangent of the point about limited government. We're devastated with the floods in Texas and I represent Kerrville. We lost 120 people. Obviously well known, those 27 little girls from a camp. We rallied around, and people of faith, and all coming together to help. But I've been really impressed with how much has been happening through philanthropy, and local action, and state action, less federal. Yeah, FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency], there are things in place and there's a lot of those battles to still ensue. But the extent to which the focus has been rightly on the people locally taking care of people locally.

If we don't get back to that, if we don't get back to that notion of limited government, then we're lost. Ron represents a philosophical bent that I think, I'm hoping, that there's a new generation of Americans that will grasp because they'll realize the futility of pursuing this path of unfettered spending which is driving up inflation, making housing completely impossible to afford. Making healthcare completely impossible to afford, so you don't ever control your life. People ask me, "Why do you do what you do?" I'm trying to fight to defend the ability of the American to go achieve the American dream, which they can't do right now. We're killing it by government action.

How do you define the American dream there?

The ability to live free, and to be able to go out and make your life…

Do whatever you want. There's not an American dream, the American dream is to make your own life.

Yes. Importantly, and this gets into libertarian, conservatarian, whatever you want to say. Do whatever you want. Well, there's limits to doing whatever you want.

Well, obviously.

In that sphere. But there's the right to go produce, live your life, work, produce for your family, own a home, get a doctor. Right now, all of those things, if I look at my staff and they're in their 20s or 30s, can they buy a house? They don't know. Can they go get a doctor and get healthcare? Increasingly limitedly. Can they buy a car? Can they afford one? Can they send their kids to a school of their choice? Those things are at the center of existence.

I think we've got to reclaim that ground. I think we're too corporatist. We're too….Free trade, I believe in. But you've got to be smart about what we're doing here in this country, in making sure that we've got workers here who have jobs in the United States. All of these things have got to come together so that you can go, you can go put a farm together. You don't have corporatists that are buying up every farm in the state of Texas, and I'm unable to actually go have the small farm that my parents passed down to me.

It gets complicated, but what's wrong with corporate farms?

I get that.

Especially, if they can run more acreage cheaper and produce more crops on it.

I get it.

Is that a problem?

At some point here, maybe this is Jeffersonian agrarianism popping its head into my UVA [University of Virginia] background.

I'm all for the freedom to be able to move capital around and make it be efficient. We all are. If you believe in free enterprise that way. But there is still something about your home and your community. There is still something about being able to say, "This farm, I own this dirt, this farm. I'm building and growing for the people here." The over-corporatization, and frankly it's not pure free enterprise corporate. Its corporate crony subsidized corporate. Big ag where the federal government is subsidizing big ag at the expense of local farmers. The big government that's subsidizing massive hospitals at the expense of local doctor-owned facilities, or whatever. We put all these bans in place and we funnel all this money, and now it's no longer the balance of a market where a corporation, it may not be their advantage to buy up a local thing. But now, it is advantaged. I think that's where we've gone awry.

I'm not asking for restrictions, but I'm just believing that community and the American dream are tied together. You want to be able to have an investment in your local area and the free flow of capital is important. But you also have got to have the non-government interfered with free flow of capital.

Just to dial in on this a little bit more. Should those small farmers be able to hire who they want? Or should they need to go through the federal government and say, "Oh, no, this person checks out?" Not to create a straw man here. The free flow of goods is good, the free flow of capital, the free flow of people.

You were very critical of Biden's border policies, and obviously Texas has a huge border with Mexico. But beyond that, what is your view about legal immigration and about letting people who want to come here, who can get jobs and work here, the more, the merrier, or what are the restrictions on that?

On this one, this is where, in a gathering of my libertarian friends, I'm a little more on the protect our sovereignty as our country. It's important that we know who's here and why they're here.

And making sure that Americans have jobs. Again, in a perfect utopian libertarian world, where free flow of capital is unfettered by government regulation, government interference or crony capital, then things would work out I think much better with respect to that flow. But you still have to have borders. You still have to know the bad guys are coming.

Sure. Nobody's questioned that.

Well, some do. I've had some pretty good fiery responses from some of my Cato [Institute] brothers when they've been at hearings. It's fine and I get it. Should you be able to go get labor if you can't get it? Sure. But there still has to be a component that is factoring in things like anchor babies and birthright citizenship. Which again, I understand all the debates. Whether or not they're in schools, if you have public programs. Again, erase all the public programs.

I think it was Milton Friedman who said very famously in the '70s, "I'm all for open borders if you get rid of the social welfare state."

Actually, he basically just said, "I'm all for open borders."

But he had the component in there about the social welfare state.

He'd build the wall around the welfare state, not around the United States.

But the component being though with a welfare state, which we massively have, which then completely alters the culture of our country. We in Texas are the ones that are sitting here with elementary schools where we have to do English as a second language, we have to do all of the things that cost with that, the hospitals, the healthcare locally. It's a real issue. You say, "Well, but you're getting the labor locally and all the tax policy." Well, that's why we have studies.

But at the end of the day, we have a problem right now where there are American workers who are not working because we're subsidizing them not to work, while we're then complaining about needing labor. We've turned it all upside down is my main point.

Is it a question of getting rid of some of those subsidies? When you say we've subsidized people not to work, there's a lot of Social Security benefits, or unemployment benefits, or various kinds of medical conditions to keep people off.

Tons of welfare people.

Yeah, that needs to be addressed.

Yeah. We had to battle to get work requirements involved with Medicaid, for example, and work requirements on SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] and food stamps. And whether or not that applies to parents who have kids or don't have kids.

Having that battle, which was a whole part of this bill which we got, we got a lot of requirements in there. Personally, I'd rather get rid of all that stuff, and then make that be state, local, churches, charities, etc.

It has a Ron Paul sensibility. Ron himself was no fan of immigration really. He kind of, in the abstract, should be in favor of it, but then he was often critical of it in specific cases. Is there a Ron Paul flavor to the MAGA movement? Because it seemed like Ron Paul certainly, in 2008 and 2012, the rise of the Tea Party in 2010, including Rand Paul, including Thomas Massie, [former Rep.] Justin Amash [L–Mich.]. It really seemed like a libertarian version of the Republican Party. Anti-war, end the Fed, limit the government was ascendant. Then that shifted gears heavily with the rise of Donald Trump and MAGA.

Well, that's an interesting question and I haven't really thought about it. I'll give you my gut response and then I'll think about it a little bit. I think where we are right now is in a blend of different factors. Part of this, when people talk about MAGA or they talk about the Freedom Caucus. I remember meeting with conservatives in the House before the Freedom Caucus existed when I was Ted Cruz's chief of staff. It was 2013, 2014. Then the Freedom Caucus was founded. Then the president comes along, and then it's MAGA, and so forth. We've had this evolution from 2008 onward. Now we're 17 years into the post-Tea Party, where all of those factors are now I think a part of where we are. Obviously, the overriding dominant force is the president and MAGA, but all of that is a piece of the fabric.

Back to the question about Ron. I think I would argue that, for example, some of the stuff about the Fed, and I get the stuff about the Federal Reserve and the interest rates, but still there is an anti-Fed, anti-government bureaucracy.

But it's very populist. Ron Paul is a populist…

There's that element that is there in part of MAGA. I do think the part about immigration right now is just recognizing, guys, we're at a point right now where we have 51-and-a-half, depending on which reports you look at, 51-and-a-half million people who were foreign-born. People will say, "Well, who cares?" We often have that. That's the highest percentage as an overall population we've really ever had in at least the modern era, if you go back to the early 20th Century.

Yeah, the '20s. Yeah.

But allegedly, we've peaked that number.

When America became great, yeah. 

But what I'm saying is though…But we also had a culture at that time that was assimilating, and saying learn English, and join in to the American dream, and all of that. Now, we've had this counterculture to that. Saying, "No, you don't have to do that," and you have [English as a second language], and you have everything else. How does that all produce a unified nation with an overall environment for success? I think that's part of the issue we've got right now.

Just to bust your chops a little bit, one said, "Latino immigrants are learning English at the same rate that my Italian grandparents did."

There's some of that. But there's also a whole lot of…

But I'm saying don't we want people from Cuba and Venezuela, people who are escaping socialism to come here?

Sure, 100 percent.

They're better Americans than I am probably.

Well, I got in trouble because I said I would rather deport white liberal Ivy League graduates, and would like to invite more people to come in otherwise.

Look, first of all, the expense for us in the state of Texas to manage that process is very high. Second of all, I question that number. Because I see a lot firsthand anecdotally in terms of what's happening in terms of language, and talk to a lot of Hispanic Texans who are a little fed up with the, "Hey, I came here, my parents came here, and they made me learn English. They made me do this stuff." Now they're seeing a different kind of environment.

Yeah. They're not making their kids learn English?

But then there's a wave here, and then there's schools, and then we're in a new era. I'm just saying, culturally what we're seeing here is that that's an impact.

I'm not disagreeing. Particularly at the border, at the southern border, hospitals and certain other kinds of facilities are overrun. If the federal government is saying, "We're in charge of the border," then they should be kicking in more money to help stressed areas for things like that. Is it immigrants' fault that we don't have a robust conception of what it means to be American? Because when I grew up, I'm a little bit older than you, but I grew up and America was a nation of immigrants. That was our whole thing was what is great about us, we can take people from shithole countries and turn them into great Americans, like Joe DiMaggio, etc.

Trump got in trouble for saying that.

I know. I know because he meant it, whereas I'm ironic about it.

What I would tell you is, of course, we're a nation of immigrants historically speaking, but understand that we're still a nation. And that has to matter. That's where I think there's a rubber meets the road issue right now. We've had a massive escalation over the last 30, 40 years. I actually don't care where people are from. What I care about is whether they're proudly putting the American flag up instead of another nation's flag, whether they're proudly joining in with our cause.

I'd recommend that you don't ever come to New York on St. Patrick's Day.

I get that, but it's one thing when it's a reverent celebration of a moment or a day of celebration that way. It's another thing when it's an in your face political statement.

But bringing this back to the point, there are a lot of hard-working American families that are hurting right now. They need to be able to have access to jobs. They need to be able to have access to their schools, and to their hospitals, and to their police. We've had a flood that is inundated in fentanyl and all sorts of things that have been crushing a lot of our community. That pushback is real and goes back to what kicked off this thread of the conversation. I do think that we are in an environment that's blending the libertarian sensibilities, the Tea Party, the limited government view, with a "Hey," the federal government has a role here to stop the flood and deal with the fact that Texas is getting inundated, and other people around the country are getting inundated. I actually think that's good. I remember we were getting some input from some of the folks in Central America. They were like, "We're losing brain drain, we're losing a lot of our good people." I think we should be having a stronger policy working with our friends in the Western Hemisphere, building up other countries. I'd love to have the free flow of trade, people moving about being able to work. But you've got to have barriers, barriers in the sense of restrictions and processes that work. Nobody disagrees with that. But we do have to have, in my opinion, a cooling-off period here to reset and deal with a lot of the mess the Biden administration created. But at the end of the day, what you really need to do is have a smaller federal government focused on its core responsibilities. Because if it was actually just doing the basic job of defending the country and defending the borders, instead of meddling with all aspects of our lives, then I think they would do a better job of that.

Let me ask you about foreign policy because this is sometimes where, to the extent that the Republican Party has become skeptical of foreign interventions, that seems to be a direct legacy both of Bush's foreign policy….I will just be catty for a second and point out that Texas has a terrible record with presidents, from Lyndon B. Johnson to George H. W. Bush to George W. Bush.

The LBJ Ranch is in my district, by the way.

Yeah. In Gillespie County, if I'm not mistaken. Ron Paul is the Republican who said to other Republicans, "It is all right to question American foreign policy," like post-World War II really muscular foreign policy. Do you agree with that, or do you feel like it goes too far?

One of the things that's interesting about you is that you are generally principled, and you at various points have said, "We should not be intervening. We shouldn't be giving any countries a blank check, but we should be supporting countries," etc. Can you explain your foreign policy? And do you think you're reflecting a new Republican consensus that may not be a Ron Paul anti-interventionist, but is certainly not a George Bush neo-conservative?

Funny you say it that way. When I was Sen. Cruz's chief of staff, this is now over a decade ago, we talked about it in terms of a third approach, a third way of thinking about foreign policy and national security.

Let me see if I can cut to the chase this way. I grew up a child of the '80s, [Ronald] Reagan, etc. You were probably just ahead of me. I was a proud American. It was like good, beat the commies. Let's tear down the wall, all that stuff. Then fast-forward, and you have these wars that are ongoing, and I'm studying the Middle East, and then 9/11. Then you're backing the president, he's standing on the rubble. It's like, "They're all going to hear from us real soon." You're all there patriotic, wanting to say, "Yeah. What the hell? Get the bad guys." Then somewhere in that timeframe, and I'll get to the exact moment for me, but in that timeframe, I started to go, "What are we doing?" We're in endless conflict with no clear mission. Then that reset my thinking.

That was about 20 years ago now. Then fast-forward, I took a trip, a rule of law trip to Baghdad in the middle of the war. Went over there and met with people, did a whole tour. I just remember I was getting a tour from a three-star general. He's taking me up and he's showing me soccer fields they're building, and they're doing all this stuff. I'm going, "This is all well-intended, but what the hell are we doing?" It just became very clear to me that there was this whole industry built around this. That that wasn't a clear position for America to have a foreign policy position that's about our national defense and that is non-interventionist, to your point.

I had a new thinking about it. Where I am today is I just generally believe we should be highly skeptical of, I'll use endless wars as the moniker. And that our driving policy should be what do we need to do to defend our interests as a nation? If you're going to go and intervene or do something, what is the mission? When can it be done? Can it be done quickly with the least amount of cost, loss of life, etc.? Defend our position, and then get out. But we shouldn't be out and meddling in nation building, and all these things.

I think there's a trend in that direction in the right way. I think that has governed a lot of the impulses with respect to Ukraine, although we're still seeing it. I guess they're going to have this summit in Alaska here soon. We'll see if something will come of that. And seeing, hopefully, ends of conflicts in a number of different areas. But obviously, some still ongoing. I think we need to…we can't do anything about….Well, we can't own every skirmish or conflict around the world. I think when we do, I think we sometimes make them worse. Notoriously, Afghanistan, the Soviet Union, then fast-forward. All of the complexities and the tangled webs you weave.

But that all being said, where I break from some of my libertarian brothers and sisters is I do think there are things where we have very specific national security interests where we should be engaged. I think that they play long-term benefits. I do think the work with Israel, and Iron Dome, and other things, I think is beneficial for us. I get that, and there's debates with the Republican Party and among libertarians on that point.

Certainly, in Trump's first term, the Abraham Accords. Whatever else you can say about what's going on in the Middle East, that's a major change.

Sure.

You had the Arab League actually call for the end of Hamas rule in Gaza.

I still think that's the right driving direction of where I think and where I believe that the administration wants to go. But obviously, there's some different tensions going on now after the October 7 issue. I hope that'll all get drawn down and get to peace, and that they can get busy rebuilding and dealing with what they're going to do. But by and large, the United States needs to focus on its own house. We have not done that. We're $37 trillion in debt. We don't have, I think, the relationships we ought to have throughout the Western Hemisphere to try to minimize the pressure of that immigration flow. In other words, that shouldn't be a political pressure. It should only be an economic one of, "Oh, yeah, if I want a job in X or go to school." Then we have policies that manage all that. But we don't, we don't have that. We've been so far strained and so far over-extended in my view. We've spent, what, $10 trillion-plus, at least, on whatever we've done over in the Middle East in all of our engagements over the last 20-X years. At one point, I remember it was $70 trillion, and 70-something-thousand injured, and 7,000-plus dead. I remember that, but that was eight years ago. That doesn't even count the burn pits, by the way. Which I didn't vote for because it was a six or $700 billion entitlement. That's what we do though. That's a perfect example. Over-extend, endless wars, our guys and gals get hurt, then we create a massive entitlement that we can't afford. Because there's never any cost-benefit that people go, "OK, well, what are we going to do?" Well, I don't know. We had some guys over there and they're breathing bad stuff, so $600 billion. Then our kids and grandkids are paying high interest rates and inflation.

A final topic, and speaking of elections in Texas. Texas right now is doing a novel redistricting, a mid-decade redistricting. How do you feel about, not the aims of that, but the means of it? Is this legitimate or is this the worst kind of politicking?

I think, number one, I'm not gerrymandering, or gerrymandering we should say. It goes all the way back to the founding. Nothing new under the sun. California is 40 whatever to nine. New England is basically all blue, not red, but there are conservative areas there that could be a district if they weren't gerrymandered. Texas is not as gerrymandered as some of our blue brothers and sister states. Some of that in 2020 was partly a landing place that we landed. Where it's like, "Well, let's consolidate districts that are in a square or more rectangular, or more representative portion." I think they ought to stay within county lines. I think representation matters to match the culture and the community that you represent. Those are my driving principles, but politics are part of it. You can't unilaterally disarm…

Is it OK to redistrict, instead of doing it once a decade, based on the census?

There's nothing that says we can't. It's very clearly political. Not saying anything anybody doesn't know. Gerrymandering is political. I think there are seats to be gained there. In full disclosure, we were probably a little soft in how far we could have gone in 2020. I say we; we have no vote in that in Congress. It's the legislature in Texas. They're taking it up. I think in light of the very close divisions and wanting to make sure that they've got a majority in the House. And also, in light of, without reopening the immigration debate, you've got a census issue about citizens, non-citizens. The impact on…

Well, non-citizens don't vote though, but they are represented in the census. 

Represented in the census and count persons, but counting persons, then how are they represented in terms of voting purposes? That's a debate. I think that's a factor in Texas, and in California, and in New York, and everywhere else. I think when we factor all that in, I do think that there's room here for the legislature to redistrict. Again, my political bent, or my personal philosophical bent might be the better way to put it, is cleaner lines, less gerrymandered districts. But man, again, you can't unilaterally disarm, so I get the political desire of the legislature to act, but I don't get a say.

Texas, over the course of your time here…you were telling me before, you're from an old Texas family, but then you grew up in…

In Virginia, yeah.

In Virginia, but you're back. Certainly, since the turn of this century, Texas is the destination. Florida can have whatever it wants, but Texas, it's going to become the most populous state in the country probably by 2050, if not before. It is also increasingly the cultural heart of America. It has an identity in a way that California does, or maybe New York. Florida does not. Why do you think people are coming to Texas? Is it the weather? Is it the fire ants? Is it the floods? Why do people come here and why is Texas thriving?

You picked the three things not to come here.

When my great-great-great-grandparents moved out to Dripping Springs, Texas, it was 1853-ish.

Where were they coming from?

They came from Georgia. Then my Roy side of the family came via Tennessee, Arkansas, in the 1870s, I think. But in any event, they all converged in that space. Then my family has been in Texas for the last 170-something years.

The reason I bring that historic perspective up is it was tough living. It was…you had to want it. You had to want to deal with…You had hostilities with Comanches. You had tough heat without air conditioning. All the stuff, you can go down the list. It was tough, so you had tough people. I think that bred a culture that was mixed with a great historic culture that was the Tex-Mex mix. Then the Germanic mix that came in—somewhat illegally too at the time.

Texas has been under Six Flags.

Correct.

Different countries. It's one of the great mixing pits of America.

I think all of that has combined though to create a culture that is Texan and people are proud of that. They want to adopt that. People get surprised. I see people come down, they see a Hispanic guy in South Texas with a cowboy hat and a big belt buckle. They go, "What's that all about?" It's like that's because it's who we are. You go to a goat roping and you're going to have a mix of people there.

But I do think, importantly, and the thing that I worry about in preserving and protecting Texas, because I think as Texas goes, to some degree the United States goes, is preserving that culture. That culture of independence, of personal responsibility, where government isn't providing for you. I'm very worried. The Texas government is bigger than it should be. We spend more than we should. Texas isn't as free as it should. It is highly regulated. Highly regulated. Cato [Institute] has done some big studies on that that you can go look at.

I don't think we're safe enough, I don't think we're free enough. There are things that I think we need to do to improve. But the reason people come to Texas is because of what it represents, and because of the freedom to be able to engage in commerce, to be able to live your life. I think we're at a crossroads. I think in order to maintain that Texas spirit and that Texas culture, we're going to have to double-down on the things that made us great. That means, in my opinion, a hard move to freedom. A hard move to a truly limited government.

You can't go around saying that Texas is the best thing since sliced bread and the federal government's the problem when you're a state of 30-plus million people and your Austin state government is the size of France or whatever. If our state government is bureaucratic, then we're not what we ought to be. We've got work that we need to do there, but it's a great state with a great mix of people, and people who respect what it means to work hard and to make their own lives.

I think the tech boom is a little bit that, it's the modern version of that. There's a reason Elon [Musk] comes and puts Tesla there. There's a reason that we've had a huge tech community because they like that, I'll call it libertarian spirit and ability. I think from a free enterprise standpoint, Texas is pretty free. I think from a regulatory, compliance, etc., standpoint, property taxes, there are things that we need to do to improve freedom in Texas and be the beacon of hope for the next century.

All right. Chip Roy, thanks for talking to Reason.

Thanks, Nick. Appreciate you guys.

The post Chip Roy on Why He Backed Trump's Spending Bill appeared first on Reason Magazine.

In 2008, Rep. Ron Paul (R–Texas) ran for the Republican presidential nomination and did surprisingly well with a campaign focused on stopping the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, ending the Federal Reserve, and reducing the size and spending of the federal government. Two years later, the Tea Party movement burst onto the scene, bringing people like Paul's son Rand to the Senate and one of today's guests, Justin Amash, to the House of Representatives. In 2012, Ron Paul again ran for the GOP nod, finishing behind the eventual nominee Mitt Romney, and helping to usher in what The New York Times called "the libertarian moment."

What happened to the Ron Paul Revolution and Tea Party's promise to shrink government, especially once Donald Trump and the MAGA movement emerged in 2015? Did the broad-based alliance that rose to cut spending and limit power transmogrify into one that prizes wielding the state instead of restraining it?

Today's episode was recorded live on Saturday, August 9, at Ron Paul's 90th birthday BBQ in Lake Jackson, Texas. The guests are Amash and Fox News personality Kennedy. They talk with Nick Gillespie about how the MAGA movement grew out of the Ron Paul Revolution and the Tea Party and redirected the right's anti-establishment energy toward expanding government power rather than limiting it. They also discuss why Congress refuses to legislate, whether social media has expanded freedom or increased anxiety, and if Gen Z is libertarian or conformist.

0:00—Ron Paul's impact on the libertarian movement

6:33—The Tea Party wave

12:45—Did Trump end the libertarian moment?

18:41—Social media and bigger government

25:26—Optimism for young libertarians

33:42—Why has everything become political?

36:33—Will Amash run for office again?

44:38—Concerns for the next generation

Upcoming events:

The Soho Forum Debate: Melanie Thompson vs. Kaytlin Bailey, September 15

The post Did MAGA Kill the Tea Party? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

What if one of the sharpest critics of centralized power, bureaucratic surveillance, and top-down social control wasn't a libertarian economist but a French postmodernist? And what if one of the economists most vilified by the left wasn't a cold-hearted market fundamentalist but a thinker obsessed with the limits of knowledge and the dangers of planning?

Today's guest is King's College London political economist Mark Pennington, author of the new book Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge and Freedom. A self-declared postmodernist libertarian, Pennington explores the common ground between Michel Foucault and Friedrich Hayek. He talks with Nick Gillespie about how Foucault's critiques of expert rule, scientism, and the construction of subjectivity can bolster the classical liberal fight for freedom—and how Hayek's warnings about the pretense of knowledge might offer the left a way to resist domination without defaulting to centralized authority.

If you're a libertarian who thinks Foucault is just woke nonsense—or a progressive who sees Hayek as a neoliberal villain—this conversation will blow your mind in the best way possible.

0:00 – Intro

Upcoming Events:

The Soho Forum Debate: Glenn Greenwald vs. Anna Gorisch, August 12

________________________________________________________________

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Mark Pennington, thank you for talking to Reason.

Mark Pennington: Thank you. It's great to be here Nick.

So let's start, you know, before we get into a discussion of your book Foucault and Liberal Political Economy—the new book, which is absolutely fascinating, and I think anybody interested in libertarian politics or in Foucault—and I think there's you, me, and about five other people that are in that intersection, but everybody should be.

But I want to read your Twitter bio and have you explain it a little bit to me. You are a "Professor of Political Economy at King's College London." OK, I understand. Everybody gets that. And then you say: "Post-modern Austrian political economist, Foucault Fan, Hayek Fan, classical liberal individualist."

And, you know, as somebody who's—I've been working at Reason since 1993. I went to grad school for literary and cultural studies from 1988 to 1993. And when I see "Post-modern Austrian political economist, Foucault Fan, Hayek Fan, classical liberal individualist," I just see all of the people that I went to school with—my professors and students and colleagues, classmates—their heads kind of exploding. This is an interesting mix.

Let's start first with the idea of: What does it mean to be a postmodern Austrian political economist?

Well, I think it refers to the idea that people who call themselves postmodernists are skeptical of universal truth claims. They're very skeptical about the access claims, as they would say, of scientific reason.

And as Lyotard, Jean Lyotard, says, "To be postmodern is to be incredulous toward metanarratives."

Absolutely, absolutely. And I see an important thread in— not in all of Austrian economics—but especially the thread that's been influenced by Hayek, but you can also see it in people like Ludwig Lachmann, George Shackle, and Don Lavoie, as being very compatible with this kind of a view.

There's a kind of radical skepticism of scientific claims. That doesn't mean that you throw out all claims to scientific reason, but it means you have a very particular understanding of what scientific rationality might imply.

And so, I mean, in a way—or the way that I think about this, because I see myself in that postmodern Austrian school of economics—it's really kind of emphasizing the limits of our knowledge rather than the extent, especially as that applies to public policy and the way that people are overtly or covertly governed.

I think that's right. And I think what underlies that, but which often doesn't come out—even as much as I would like it to—in some of the writers that I just mentioned, is that human beings are fundamentally, if you like—if we can use the word fundamental in this context—they're creative agents.

And it's that creativity that generates instabilities in the world. And it's the fact that there are these instabilities that means that our potential to discern lawlike relationships in human societies is very limited. So I see that as ultimately being about human creativity.

And this is an area where I think there should be—although there isn't—there should be much more overlap between Austrian economic analysis and a lot of the kind of work that takes place in the arts and humanities.

So the critique of scientism.

Yeah. And this term, "scientism"—when I think of how I started to develop an interest in libertarian thought, and I'm a mere journalist and an English major, so I don't think about it as rigorously as political economists and philosophers—but I had stumbled across Hayek's 1952 book The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason, where he talks a lot about scientism.

Which he sees as the kind of mechanical application of laws and axioms in one field to others. But that whole book is a critique of Enlightenment modernity that thinks, "Well, we've kind of figured out biology and chemistry and physics, and now we can just port all of that knowledge"—where the rules are clear and we can understand action and reaction—"and just port that over to human society."

And he goes through a bunch of particularly French and other continental thinkers who literally say things like, "Now that we know how physics works, we can direct human social advancement and speed it up or slow it down."

And for him, that's the beginning—it's the French Revolution and rationalizing society—that leads to the gulag. You know, both of the kind of Nazi version, but also of the Soviet—and this mania for planning.

Where does that kind of arrogance—or where does that—maybe that's too strong a term, because most of the people involved in this are not bad people. Francis Bacon didn't want to control the world when he was articulating an Enlightenment view that we're going to map every part of the known universe and understand it, and then we can control it, right? Knowledge is power and we'll get to that in terms of Foucault.

Where does that hubris come from?

That's a difficult question. I think there'd be different elements to my answer. One part would be, actually there are bad actors who can be empowered by scientism. So people whose actual real motive is to gain power over other people will use scientific reasoning as a kind of ruse for doing that.

But I think there is also a more unintended consequence from certain forms of scientific rationality. So the way I think about it is, if you have a narrative which sets up some kind of notion of expertise, you create a set of actors who have an interest in sustaining those claims to expertise. So people's income, their status, can be dependent on that expertise.

And that can mean that you have—unintentionally, perhaps, it's not something that was intended by the people who created these narratives—but you can create a kind of logic which counts against pluralism of thought. Because if you're an expert, the last thing you want is there to be too many other sources of expertise.

Because the more sources of expertise there are, the less likely it is that people will take note or feel that they should be governed by any one expert or set of experts. So the tendency is in many scientific fields—this is true certainly in social science, but also even in natural science—is once a certain view of what the expertise says gets established, there tend to be disciplinary dynamics that start moving out other sorts of opinions.

So we have that kind of gradual crushing of pluralism, which nobody's actually intended, but has sort of arisen from internal logics within these kinds of scientific narratives and the positions they create.

Gee, if only we had a recent global phenomenon that helps illustrate what that's like. But I mean, in the public health field, and the way that COVID was discussed, right?

Where dissent was not, certainly not, patriotic or scientific. It was a sign of derangement or a moral failing. Right? Because this is part of the problem too, is that the people who have the expertise are like, "I'm not doing this because I believe in this theory particularly. I'm a scientist. These are the facts. And if you disagree with me, you're not just in error, but you are actually putting other people at risk."

And what I found actually fascinating about the COVID pandemic was it wasn't only members of the public or lay opinion who were subject to this kind of condemnation. It was scientists themselves who fell outside of the mainstream view.

People who'd been considered to be mainstream scientists suddenly found themselves demonized because they were expressing a view that, actually, just months before this thing happened, was considered to be the conventional wisdom about how you respond to a pandemic.

Well, and I guess you guys at King's College have a lot to answer for, right? 

You know, how do you feel—this is that aside—how do you feel as a classical liberal individualist working at a place called King's College? I mean, I guess it's better than Imperial College, but come on, you know.

Yeah, these are matters of degree. Matters of degree.

But to go back to your earlier statement about postmodernism—you're not saying that all knowledge is fake, or you know, it's often instrumental. And one of the reasons why we got to an age of expertise—first in the sciences maybe, and then in industrial sciences—that clearly benefited people.

I mean, being able to rationalize the production and distribution of goods on the planet, but especially starting in Europe and North America, we went from being poor to being a surplus economy, where people lived longer, got richer. I mean, medicine—scientific medicine—worked. Scientific food production worked. Certain forms of social organization that were based on kind of Enlightenment thinking really delivered the goods, literally and figuratively.

So what are the limits then? Because when you say—you invoke the term "narrative" to talk about knowledge and information or expertise—it's both kind of true, right? Because oftentimes it will do what it says it's going to do. "I have studied how these crops will respond to this type of fertilizer and this type of watering and this kind of cultivation, and boom, I've solved world hunger." I mean, like, that happened.

How do you deal with, from a postmodern point of view, the idea that sometimes this expertise—or oftentimes this expertise—is actually doing something that is observably beneficial or in line with the thinking process?

Well, I think the important thing here to recognize—and this is true not only of the postmodernists but also of people like Hayek, whom you've already mentioned—is that they are not opposed to Enlightenment thinking as such. What they're concerned about is a kind of overreach of that thinking.

And by overreach, they're concerned about notions that people can access a kind of pure notion of truth that isn't always, in some sense, entangled with attempts by people to gain influence over others, to exercise power. So you recognize that power is always involved but still believe that there are certain scientific theories that we've got reasons to actually take seriously and to believe.

But what you're going to emphasize is that because—and this is especially true, I think, in the human and social sciences, as opposed to natural science, though it's even true in some areas of natural science—because the knowledge concerned is often really quite opaque, it's often hard to detach the truth claims from the attempt by actors to gain influence over others. So separating out those elements is often very hard in what are often complex phenomena.

I think it's easier in the natural sciences, because there is a case to be made that for certain kinds of natural phenomena, they are the kind of phenomena that can be looked at almost through a laboratory-like process, where you've got a sort of stimulus-response model operating on what are elements that have no agency as such of their own. But it's very different when you're looking at human phenomena.

And this is something Hayek obviously stresses throughout. I guess it maybe is distilled in the most popular form in something like The Road to Serfdom, but his entire work—and again, you know, I think it's partly just an accident of me reading The Counter-Revolution of Science first—but like, that to me is the key to everything about him. You've got to take it easy when you start saying, "Human society follows these rules, so we need to get rid of the people who aren't following the rules."

Right? It's very clear. This is the place where Hayek, in a way that maybe more of my audience is comfortable with, intersects with Karl Popper too. The idea that we know with each increase in knowledge, we gain some knowledge, but we also understand that we understood—on some level we understand less and less of the world. So you've got to be careful when you start talking about social engineering, which itself is a fantastic concept, right? Coming out of the 19th century, really. Like, we know how to engineer locomotives, so let's engineer whole towns and whole civilizations.

Well, the Hayek–Popper conversation, I think, is an interesting one in terms of these debates. Popper considers himself to be a critical rationalist. You can understand that critical rationalism to be a form of, kind of, radical skepticism, which in many ways sounds quite similar to a lot of postmodern themes. So postmodernists, I would consider, are radical skeptics. They want everything to be on the table. They want a sort of permanent spirit of criticism.

I think there's a debate between Hayek and Popper about what that critical rationalism means in different settings. Popper is very much of the view that the critical rationalist spirit is reflected in a kind of hypothesis-testing mode, where you are looking for laws but you're never quite sure whether you have access to them. You're looking about specifying scientific tests for particular sorts of theories.

Now Hayek is sympathetic to that, but he comes back by saying, "There are certain kinds of phenomena that cannot be subject to this kind of testing, even in the natural world." And the example he gives is evolution by natural selection.

So evolution by natural selection is a kind of natural science theory, but it isn't one that can be tested in a kind of positivist, hypothesis-testing way. What it is is a narrative that explains certain things about the world. And the reason we might accept that narrative is that, given other things that we believe about the world, we might find it more convincing than, say, an intelligent design theory. But it is not one that we can test—

Which itself is a narrative as well.

Exactly, exactly. But we can't test it in a kind of laboratory-type sense in the way that maybe other aspects of natural science that we could subject to those kinds of techniques.

I will—because I feel a need to do this almost every time I bring up or hear people talk about Karl Popper, whose most famous work is The Open Society and Its Enemies—and there's a joke that his students, who he was quite a harsh taskmaster with, always referred to that as, "The Open Society by One of Its Enemies."

But now this brings us to Foucault, because Foucault, like Hayek, he acknowledges at various points the way in which scientific thinking or Enlightenment thinking and rationalism and various kinds of developments have produced material wealth and even certain forms of political freedom or liberation.

Although, exactly, "Can you be liberated in a Foucauldian world" is a different type of question. But it's very much about narrative, and it's about how we talk about things.

So how do you see Foucault and Hayek kind of intersecting in the way that you were just talking about?

Well, I think it relates to the idea that there is no God's-eye view of the world. Hayek's critique of scientism is very much based on the idea that a lot of the relevant knowledge is dispersed. It's subjective. There's no entity that can actually perceive all of the knowledge that's relevant to what he calls complex phenomena.

Now for Foucault, there is also a kind of perspectival aspect to knowledge. But he—and this is where there's a difference between the two of them—he wraps that up much more in the Nietzschean notion that each individual action in the world is kind of pursuing a sort of will to power, trying to put their perspective into the world. And then, through the interaction of multiple wills to power, you get kind of emergent systems of power or forces emerging, none of which actually represent the truth, but that in various ways can operate to constrain people.

Now, I think those two views are compatible, even though they're working from somewhat different premises. But they're united in the idea that there is no godlike spectacle.

Right. So there's really only emergent phenomena. Or in Hayek, there's an emergent phenomenon, and we kind of stumble through the world figuring things out. And then in Foucault, it's that appeal to the God's-eye view is a power move to kind of shut down dissent or to sacralize a particular system of knowledge, which equals power, ultimately.

Let me ask you this. When you talk about it in these terms, it is so obvious. And I can remember, again, as a lowly graduate student, I had read Thomas Szasz, who is the great critic of the medicalization of society, a psychiatrist who himself was a critic of psychiatry, and famously in 1961 wrote a book called The Myth of Mental Illness, which argued that people we call crazy—it's not science. It's a way of kind of marginalizing people that we find annoying or dangerous for various reasons.

As it happened, as a grad student, I had read that because Thomas Szasz—who I became friendly with a bit—he had been a Reason contributing editor since, I don't know, the early 1970s. And of course, he was merely saying something that seems obvious: that when doctors or lawmakers tell you "do this" or "don't do this," it's not always in your interest. It's in their interest. They have partial knowledge, but they want to control you.

In 1961, a guy named Michel Foucault published a book called Madness and Civilization, which I encountered when I went to grad school because Foucault is the dominant figure in social science and humanities discourse of the last half of the 20th century—and persists into this one.

And in Madness and Civilization, I was reading this, and we'd be discussing it in class, and I was like, "God, this sounds a hell of a lot like Thomas Szasz"—talking about how the way we define madness and sanity is pretty situational, and there's a lot of power that's going on behind the scenes.

My question to you is: Why don't more Hayekians understand the similarities to Foucault? And why don't more Foucauldians be like, "God, you know, this guy Hayek is"—you know—they're not the same thing. There are significant differences that we'll get to. But, "geez, these guys are walking pretty arm-in-arm."

Yeah. In a way, I don't really understand it. So all I have are kind of guesses.

I think you can't separate some of this out from the sort of cultural history of the last 50 or 60 years or so. So there's certainly a sense—I wouldn't say this is true of Hayekians as such—but certain people more broadly in the classical liberal or libertarian movement who have a resistance to certain sets of thinkers who came out of what you would call French poststructuralism or what became postmodernism.

And the reason for that seems to be that many of these people—at least at some point in their careers—were associated with Marxism. Even if they abandoned it in its pure form, they still held to what people consider to be a kind of Marxist-type view.

Or, you know, you get this term "cultural Marxism," which has become very widely used and is attributed to these people. So the sense is, even if they were saying something that might be interesting, we can't really associate with it, because these were the bad guys who were supporting communism and all sorts of terrible things.

Right. And particularly in the '68 revolutions—though oftentimes before that—but you know, there's the whiff of a very strong French cheese on this. And it's like, no, we're Americans or we're English, and we dislike that.

And I guess Hayek, in a way, feeds into that because the way he distinguishes—often, I think, in ways that are unfair—between the Continental Enlightenment and the Scottish Enlightenment or the Anglo-American Enlightenment feeds into that. So it's interesting, because in a way that also kind of—you know, Foucault anticipates that kind of critique, right? That this ends up being more an exercise in national identity than it is in intellectual seriousness.

I think that's right, and I think it's a great shame. Because I see—and maybe it's because I've just been reading this stuff for a few years and I've become overly attached to it—but I actually see Foucault in some ways as kind of, almost as a heroic figure, actually.

And the reason I say that is because when you understand the intellectual milieu that he was operating in—he was operating in a social, scientific, or academic community that was dominated by Marxism, dominated by it in France—and yet he managed to find his way to an approach, a way of thinking, that actually challenges fundamental aspects of that whole worldview.

Totally, yeah.

And by the end of his career, he's moving toward really quite, I would say, individualist or liberal-oriented themes. He obviously had to go on his own journey through that, and there's questions about where precisely he ended up, but it seems to me that he was a remarkable figure in terms of the range of thought that he engaged with.

The fact that in the late '70s he was actually engaging with people in the liberal tradition—with Hayek, with Gary Becker, some of these other people—in a way that many others in those traditions just never have. So I think he deserves an enormous amount of credit for actually doing that, and that's the reason why we should listen to some of his ideas—and why, hopefully, people who've been influenced by him might try to get into some of our ideas as well.

Yeah, it always struck me as odd when people would denounce Hayek, and postmodernism more broadly, as Marxists and hence only worthy of our contempt. And it's like, yeah, postmodernism is largely—and rightly—seen as a critique of Marxism, or of not just Marxism, but also Freudianism and Darwinism, or these metanarratives that seek to explain every aspect of human life and organization.

I mean, when I meet people who call themselves postmodern Marxists, I'm kind of like, "You've got a lot of explaining to do." But postmodernism and Marxism—broadly, I think, on the libertarian right—are typically seen as being in the same camp, and that camp should be, you know, in Guantanamo Bay, and we should never hear from those people again, right?

It's totally wrong. Because if you read—I mean, it's actually a book that's almost impossible to read—but if you ever try to read Lyotard's Libidinal Economy, that is a vicious attack on Marxism.

Yeah. Because Marxism is scientism. I mean, it is almost the purest excrescence of scientism. Of a stupid mechanical application of a couple of rules to a system, or to a series of phenomena, that refuse to follow those laws, right?

So, how did you—I want to go into some of the specific insights that you take from Foucault and kind of apply and say, "Here's why we should be thinking about this, especially if we believe in liberalism and individualism." But just briefly—how did you—I mean, you are one of, really, a handful of people. You talk about people like Deirdre McCloskey and certain other Austrian school economists—you mentioned Don Lavoie. You know, Don Lavoie, he is somebody who, I think, if he had lived longer, we would be having radically different and richer conversations about intellectual history.

But, you know, there are some people who have been doing this. How did you create this merger between Hayek and Foucault? How did you encounter both of them?

Well, I encountered Hayek first. He's certainly been the most significant influence on my whole academic or political life, really. And I was very influenced by the essays that you referred to, the essays in The Counter-Revolution of Science.

So I've been kind of immersed in Hayekian thought, but I'm also operating in fields where people were referring to Foucauldian concepts all the time. And I thought, "Well, I need to know something about this guy."

Probably about 25 years ago, actually, I started reading Foucault, and I started to see themes that: Yes, I can see how instead of him being the enemy, there are actually important parallels. There's a certain aspect of individualism in Foucault. He's concerned about systems of control, how they can threaten the individual. This aspect, which is the critique of scientism that we've referred to.

So I engaged with it about 25 years ago, but then I got taken over by various other things. I wrote another book. I became a bureaucrat in the university. I was a head of department for a number of years.

And then the pandemic hit.

And the pandemic and the role of surveillance mechanisms that were taking place throughout that period—it just reignited all of the things I'd been thinking about some 20 years before. And I thought, "This is the time where I need to really systematically go through this material and see how we can link it up."

And that's really when I started writing this book.

And that—in an American context in particular—I think if people know Foucault, or if they've read, actually read, any words by Foucault, it's probably Discipline and Power. 

Discipline and Punish.

Oh, I'm sorry. Discipline and Punish. And that opens with this great set piece of a person in the early modern era being drawn and quartered.

He talks about, "OK, this is how power used to work in the pre-modern period." And all of these terms are loosely defined, and he's putting them in quote marks or under erasure—however we want to describe it. But power operated directly on bodies. It used people as examples so that you didn't do things because you knew you were going to be punished—and brutally and publicly. The teachable moment is the public execution, or the public flogging, or the punishment like that.

And then he talks about how in the modern period, what happened was that we internalized a system of control. So that the state, or any other source of power, doesn't need to constantly be checking up on us—because we're doing it for ourselves.

And he talks about Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, a model prison in which prisoners were never sure if there was a guard in the tower watching them. So they acted as if they were always being surveilled.

Just apropos of nothing—I was actually in Philadelphia yesterday for an event —where the Eastern State Penitentiary, which is the first penitentiary that was actually built. And it worked somewhat on those models. It's fascinating.

Where does that take us? That idea that there are systems of control and that we internalize them—and that this is one of the defining attributes of modernity. 

Where is that in Hayek? Or how does Hayek talk about similar kinds of very subtle and almost occult versions of surveillance and control of the individual? How does it match up with Foucault?

Well, I actually don't think Hayek and people in the Hayekian tradition talk enough about this kind of phenomenon.

There is—I think it's in the 1952 or 1956 introduction or preface to The Road to Serfdom—where he mentions the possibility for a kind of soft despotism. A kind of almost silent system operating, where people become used to being in a very heavily regulated society. And it has a kind of silent, enervating effect on their capacities for agency.

They're so used to being enmeshed in rules and regulations, not being able to do anything without asking permission for anything, that they become sort of passive agents.

Now, I think Foucault looks at that in a much more systematic way. He looks at the multiple sources of this kind of process, the kind of techniques that can be used to generate passivity. And also looking at how—even if the techniques don't actually themselves work in the way the science says—they can still have effects on people's identity and capacity to be self-creating or self-governing agents.

So I think it is a theme in Hayek and some of the people in the Austrian tradition—the idea of a soft despotism as well as a hard despotism. But it's not one that's brought out strongly enough. And actually, that was one of the reasons I wanted to write this book.

Yeah, and I mean we can think about this in terms of—to use modern parlance—things like "wokeness." It functions as a system of control. Not in that you will be publicly shamed, but in your mind, you start wondering, "Should I even be thinking this?" Much less forget about expressing it or anything like that.

And then you were talking about COVID, where a series of rules started to just constantly multiply and creep into like, "Am I washing my hands long enough?" In the early stages of COVID, where people were like, "Sing 'Happy Birthday' while you wash your hands to make sure you get rid of the germs."

It's fascinating too, just to think about Foucault and COVID. Giorgio Agamben, who is one of the great students of Foucault and an Italian philosopher, who became a darling of the academic left—certainly in the U.S., and I'm assuming in Europe as well—when he talked about the war on terror as a kind of linguistic or discursive construction that was governing everything. A "state of exception" that allowed liberal governments to suspend all the rules that normally apply to restrain government because of this vague fear of terrorism.

Agamben was hugely popular. He was an Italian academic. When lockdown happened in Italy, which was the first and most brutal lockdown in Europe, he applied the same thing. He was like, "You know what? From a Foucauldian point of view, there is no COVID pandemic. There's this system of control."

And people on the left here were like, "He's a madman. Why did we ever listen to him at all?" But it was a completely consistent application, I think, of Foucauldian principles and analysis.

I think that's right. And he was basically a victim of disciplinary power. And as you were saying, it's interesting how you can have a Foucauldian basically canceled by other Foucauldians, which is an interesting thing.

But also, going back to what we were saying before, that whole process—it's interesting how people who were in the scientific mainstream were also "canceled" because their views didn't line up with what emerged as the dominant paradigm of how you deal with this at the time.

What fascinated me about the pandemic was actually not—I don't think you should see the pandemic in isolation from many other public health techniques or operations around other fields. If you look at all the rules that public health professionals and various government agencies put out about what you're supposed to eat, whether you should smoke or drink—all of these things are areas where people become accustomed to taking expert advice and doing as they're told.

You also have what seems to be happening more and more now—and Agamben would be interested in this—but also this is something Hayek talks about, which is the discourse of emergency. Everything becomes an emergency.

Everything's a crisis. Which then justifies all kinds of control…

We need extraordinary powers because—when we get back to normal—you'll be able to live your life as a free and autonomous individual. But right now, it's too important.

Maybe you do, but not quite.

Foucault wrote in various places a phrase that is varied, but it's always: "We are always governed too much." That is a very libertarian statement, it seems to me.

Can you talk about that, and how that kind of distills part of the—well, I hate to say "essence" of Foucault, because essences have been banished in his worldview—but how does that get to a continuing insight that Foucault and Hayek, and a kind of libertarian—not just political tradition but a cultural tradition, kind of comes to the fore?

Well, I think it's important to understand that from his point of view, you can never escape government entirely. And by government, he means any attempt to, as he would put it, "conduct your conduct"—to influence the way you behave.

So on his account, this kind of government can happen in any sphere of life. It can happen in the family, it can happen in the workplace, it can happen in the school, in hospitals, as well as the formal apparatus of the state. What he's interested in is how these different forms of power connect with each other and the effects of those sorts of connections.

Now what's interesting from my point of view—this is where I think it links with Hayek—is that various scientific narratives proliferate these kinds of connections. The aspiration of a lot of these scientific discourses is that all of society becomes subject to surveillance. The attempt is made by scientists or people in the state apparatus to connect the techniques they use to all of these decentralized sites, to almost unify them in a governing purpose.

It's not that there is—outside of that—it's not that there is a government-free arena because we're always governed in these ways. But there isn't necessarily an attempt to bring them all together, to link them, to this sort of overall surveillance apparatus. And that's where the scientific temptation comes in.

Foucault has this term that he calls "biopower," which is the attempt to subject entire societies to a kind of surveillance that is supposed to identify various disequilibria which require some form of correction. That means, in the attempt to do that, the state actually recruits multiple actors in the private society and civil society to engage in surveillance.

So, I mean, you mentioned briefly that "wokeness." DEI would be the ultimate example of this.

Where it doesn't govern directly through legislative edicts, but it facilitates all kinds of performance management systems and surveillance systems that are installed within many private or civil organizations. They operate almost like localized power.

But it's not only DEI. You can think of public health. You can think of market interventions operating on the same line—sustainability, sustainable development, environmental, social, and governance initiatives. These are all the same kind of thing. They're an attempt to…

Where they are not simply one-offs or anything like it. You mentioned the phrase "totalizing structures of power." Ecology becomes—it's never an individual choice, but it has to be done. There are certain large laws that are passed, but then at every step, the business has to follow in place. And when you're in the workplace, you have to pursue that goal.

And then at home—don't water your lawn, or water your lawn, etc. But it becomes not really totalitarian in the sense of 1984 or the worst excesses of Stalinism attempted to achieve, but totalizing in the sense that you can never escape what you are supposed to be doing.

I think that's right. Even just to give a personal example of it—and I know this has happened to people in many of the universities now—when you have a publication that comes out, like I've got this book that's just coming out, the minute it goes up on your website or the university website, it immediately gets labeled with one of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.

You're categorized according to how you're fulfilling these social objectives. Even if, as in my case, I'm actually critiquing some of these goals and objectives, you're still categorized by the system in this way.

And it's not totalitarian in a Stalinist sense, but it closes the space within which people can exercise freedom of maneuver. So in universities, if you want to write a research application and that application isn't couched in a way that addresses sustainable development or DEI, you're going to find it much more difficult to get finance than if you go along with those narratives.

From a libertarian point of view—and I realize that's already problematic; that can be interpreted in a lot of ways—but why is that not kind of just, "Well, the market"?

You know, for academic papers, the market is constantly changing, but certain norms emerge from interactions of disparate people with disparate interests. It just happens that if you're in the academic game—or the academic market—like yeah, you've got to put up with that.

It also means if you're selling something, selling a certain kind of food, you're going to start talking about certain attributes or reaching certain levels that will certify to people: "This is edible. This is good for you," etc.

This is one of the critiques of Foucault, I think, is that there's always something sinister that's going on. It's always disciplining people and punishing people rather than just, "Eh, this is how things are"?

That's a good point. We need to recognize that Foucault doesn't think that these disciplines in themselves are necessarily bad.

If you can give yourself your own discipline—to give yourself shape to life—that can be a good thing. What he's worried about is the way that these processes or disciplines can morph or multiply out in ways that become totalizing.

So, if we go back to the examples I was giving—there's nothing wrong with a particular organization introducing DEI. There's nothing wrong with a particular organization introducing some kind of environmental ethics quota. The danger is when those localized efforts are hooked up to some overall societal system which is trying to grade or rank people on a single scale, or direct them into an overarching goal or purpose.

And that is what is happening with a lot of what Foucault calls these "biopolitical narratives," where the whole of society is looked at as a manageable object. The attempt is made to penetrate these managerial techniques into all spheres and to link them to these overall purposes.

So even the market itself in this case is subject to discipline by these mechanisms. So it's not that the market, in this case, is a free sphere, it's a sphere that's already being controlled, or there's an attempt to control it, by these kinds of apparatuses.

Yeah. And in this sense—I mean, no market, no arena—all areas of human activity are contested. And to say they're rigged is wrong, but the idea is they exist in a particular time and place, and there are always constraints. So the question isn't whether that's going to happen. It's, how do we…?

I guess this is a question Hayek would say: What you do is in this is you reduce the size and scope of government, and you create an area of human flourishing. In an essay or an interview, he talked about having parts of cities or dark spaces where nobody's watching. That's really important for innovation and also personal development—just where you're not being controlled.

Foucault, at various points, he critiqued Rousseau's vision of a perfectly transparent society as unlivable. You need these dark spaces.

But in Foucault, there does not seem to be a plan for how we make the world better. Or how we say, "This is a better outcome," or "This is a better system than this," within a Foucauldian frame?

I think that's right. I can come back to answer that in a second, but if I just go back to what you said about the market before.  On the view I'm putting forward, it's not, there is if you like, and in some ways critics of libertarianism or classical liberalism are right when they say this: There's no such thing as a free market in the sense of an ungoverned market.

Markets are always governed by social norms or practices. The question libertarians would posing is: OK, we may not have any ungoverned space, but we can still look at different regimes in terms of how much space they allow people to come up with their own rules about how markets are governed.

The rules that govern markets don't have to be totalizing. They don't have to be creating them in a single way. And I think that's the critical sort of point.

And is it good to allow multiple systems and for people to be able to move in between them?

This is obviously, biographically, to a certain degree, part of Hayek's life—but certainly Foucault's—of moving among different societies or different subcultures and things like that. That's a form—freedom might not be the right word—but that's a form of agency and liberation, where you kind of get to pick what market you want to play in or what rules you want to be governed in. Which is also clearly part of liberalism, right? The idea that you can move. You have voice, exit, and loyalty, or whatever.

I think that's right. I'm very attracted to the idea within liberalism of polycentricity, the idea of pluralism in rules.

I think the way you could understand that from a Foucauldian point of view is that if you have many different decision-making centers or rule-making centers. A) you make it more difficult for there to be a process of total societal capture by any one narrative, and you also make it possible for people to see that there are other ways of doing things. They're not frozen into a single grid of understanding.

Foucault uses the term "heterotopia," which refers to some kind of experimental space beyond the status quo that gives people a clue, at least, about some different way of doing things.

So you can think—going back to your earlier example—cases of free enterprise zones as possible examples of spaces that are relatively less governed. They could indicate to people: this is what could happen if we gave up some of these more controlling and overregulated conceptions.

Right. And heterotopia—that concept is another touchpoint with standard libertarian thinking. It's very much like the utopia of utopias that Robert Nozick talks about, or John Stuart Mill talking about running infinite experiments in living.

You disperse and decentralize so that people not only are free to pursue who they think they are and build that identity in that community, but you can also learn from other people's examples—what works, what doesn't—and adapt the parts they like or dismiss the things that you don't like.

In your book, you talk about creating a postmodern liberal political economy—that's really your project here. Explain what that means. And in a way—I'm making you dance for your supper—but explain what you mean by a postmodern liberal political economy in a way that will make postmodernism attractive to conventional libertarians or American conservatives who believe in classical liberalism, and also in a way that engages people on the harder left.

It actually goes back to what you were asking me before. The difference between Foucault and Hayek—and those are the two people we've been talking a lot about in this conversation—is that Hayek has the idea of a constitution of liberty. Given the critique of scientism, given these other sorts of things, are there kinds of rules we can think of frameworks within which this "play of liberties"  can take place?

Foucault is—although, as I've said, he shares many elements of that or has his own overlaps—he doesn't want to talk about what the framework looks like. Because he thinks then that you end up with other power plays that can enrich systems in their own right.

Now, toward the end of his career, there is evidence that he started to recognize, "Well actually, there is a place for rights." But again, he was very vague about what they are.

So what I try to say in the book is, you could see postmodern liberals as trying to put forward some notion of a framework that might gel with Foucault's concerns.

You were asking me how that can appeal to conventional conservatives or libertarians—

Yeah and this is one of the reasons I asked how you came across this. Because I'm assuming, if you're an academic in an English setting, Hayek is heavily identified with Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher and postmodernism—you know, they don't seem to get along. Right?

I've yet to meet a Thatcherite—with the possible exception of Johnny Rotten—who would say, "Oh yeah, I'm postmodern." They hate it. Go from there.

Where I think they should have sympathy with someone like Foucault is: Think about what it is that entrepreneurs do in society.

Entrepreneurs are people, I think, who resist rules, resist established ways of doing things. They challenge the status quo. They revolutionize it.

So I use in the book—often I refer to Schumpeter's idea about entrepreneurs as creative destructors. They're creating new ways of understanding that often shatter the current way we understand the world to create something radically new and different. And it's regulation that closes that down. It's regulation that narrows the space within which this kind of creativity and dynamism—the kind Thatcherites claim to favor—actually takes place.

The difference between them is that maybe people like Foucault have concentrated more on the cultural area. They're concerned with destabilizing norms of gender, sexuality, mental health, these other things. Whereas the economic destabilizers—the Austrian school—we talk about the value of creative destruction in the economic sphere.

And what I'm saying in the book is, "Well, if you believe in this entrepreneurial model, you should bring it together in both of those areas. We want cultural and economic creativity going together."

We might also think about the resistance strategies that can be adopted to help people get out from these kinds of systems.

There's a bit of an irony in that many people on the right—and in some ways I would identify with aspects of that myself—who are critical of these systems of control and critical of paternalism, they still look to the idea of some savior to get them out of the mess they're in.

And I think this is what's happening in the United States, where people are looking to Donald Trump as a kind of disruptor-in-chief who's going to save them from the regulatory apparatus. When probably what you should be looking to—if you treat a liberalism—is lots more decentralized experiments from people trying to escape regulatory controls.

Sympathy for evasive entrepreneurs—people who are trying to get around the rules—that is the kind of language I think could potentially provide an overlap between these positions.

And it's ironic—on the left, you will hear people who want creative disruption in the cultural arena or in society. They want to celebrate the breakdown, or the recognition that there are many types of families in society, and there are many gender or sexual orientations.

They're all in on that. But when it comes to the economy, they're like, "No, there has to be one rule that governs everything. There's only one kind of employment contract. There's one kind of muffler that can be built," or whatever.

This is where I think your book is essential. It can really force people on the right and the left to understand that they are kind of bullshitting themselves if they don't think this stuff should be—whether you're a Foucauldian or a Hayekian—this work should be applied to all aspects of human activity.

I think the other thing is you can't actually separate neatly those spheres of entrepreneurship or creative production.

So acts that look economic—it could revolutionizing a new production technique—can have cultural effects. We might be seeing that with AI.

Well, I mean, the internet was not a political technology, but it has a massive effect on everything we're doing.

Absolutely. And likewise, if you have a society where you've lots of cultural entrepreneurship taking place—challenging gender norms or other ideas—that can also feed into economic dynamism.

These things are not neatly separable. It's part of an overall package of what I think a kind of exciting or dynamic model of a liberal society is about.

Do you have any takers for this?

I mean, the book is out, but you've been working on this. I can't speak to a British political or cultural context, but in the United States, there's a palpable sense of political and cultural exhaustion. People know—and part of what you talk about in the book has to do with what you call a "social justice dispositif"—where social groups and political identities have ossified. 

We're trapped in these dumb categories: right and left, conservative, liberal, or libertarian and progressive that clearly aren't working anymore, but we don't know how to get to the next thing.

Are you finding takers for what you just talked about? Where if we apply Foucault and Hayek to politics and culture, to technology and business. There's a very exciting and interesting world that is right there, right in front of us. Are people responding well to this?

The response so far has been positive. I can't tell what the political response is because the book's not been out long enough. It isn't even released in the U.K. for another six weeks. It's out in the U.S., back in June, but it's not been released.

But I got a couple of really generous back cover endorsements: one from a big Foucault scholar, Mitchell Dean, who gave me a really generous endorsement, and also Mark Bevir at the University of California, Berkeley.

So academically, I've had a positive response. The next stage for me is going to be trying to engage it more politically. To talk about what would be a model of political entrepreneurship that uses these ideas to engage in the practical world of politics.

That would mean creating cross-identity coalitions that can share in this kind of a way.

What would an example of that be? A hypothetical one, or one that's kind of on the launching pad?

A good example would be—well, two examples.

One could be the school choice movement. You could think of alliances that could form between, say, black conservative groupings in the United States that are sick of a model that, on the one hand, they perceive as teaching values that are alien to some of their fundamental beliefs, but also doesn't recognize the character of black history.

You could also have alliances between those kinds of groups. Another kind of group that may be unsatisfied with monolithic state curriculum, like LGBT groups for example.

Why can't you get a coalition of actors—even though they don't share fundamental moral views—to argue for school choice and a more plural educational curriculum on those grounds? There's all kinds of exciting possibilities there.

Libertarians, talk about the value of choice—why can't we have police choice?

I want to be beaten by people who share my values, right?

I wouldn't go that far. But you could say, for those communities that feel that they've been treated badly—many of them don't want to defund the police. They just want to have more control over them.

So there should be an alliance between fiscal conservatives, who are skeptical of public sector monopolies, and some of these groupings who are saying, "Why don't we get more competition into the police force. Discipline the police, rather than the police disciplining the public?"

That is wonderful. That's exciting. Before we go, let me bring up two—and this kind of twins Foucault and Hayek again—shameful episodes in their careers.

Foucault—and this is one thing conservatives will always point out—they'll point that he was gay and that he probably engaged in pederasty in North Africa, and that he died of AIDS, which, you know, we don't need to say more. Like, there's something wrong with him about that.

But the thing that comes up again and again, politically, is that he endorsed the Iranian Revolution—the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Hayek endorsed Pinochet toward the end of his life. It's peculiar within left-wing discourse but also libertarian discourse in America. People are always like, "You know, Friedman had a problematic relationship with the Pinochet regime." Actually, he really didn't. But Hayek does. Hayek wrote a series of glowing reviews of Pinochet. Even in his repression, saying a kind of libertarian version of "You've got to break a couple of eggs in order to make an omelet, and the economic growth is better— We need to think about that more than political repression."

Talk about Foucault's romance with the Iranian Revolution of the Ayatollahs. Is that a legitimate complaint against Foucault? How did he respond to it, and what happened in his life?

So it is and it isn't.

I think a lot of political thinkers, frankly you've just got to admit it, they sometimes say stupid things. And I think in Foucault's case, I'm not sure I would say it was stupid, but I think what he was doing was very naive.

It's not true to say, actually, that he endorsed the Iranian regime. He was certainly sympathetic to it in the sense that he saw what was going on under the Shah as a kind of repressive authoritarianism which was using the language of modernism as a way of disciplining its own people. He was looking for resources within some elements of Islam that might offer a way out of that.

Now, it was naive in the sense that he didn't recognize—as his own theory should have led him to—that if you try to implement ideas, they can be taken in directions that you don't want them to go. And of course, it's precisely what happened there.

It is interesting, though, that when he saw how that regime was playing out, he did condemn what was happening. Now, you can criticize him and say, "It had to get to the point where gay people were being executed before he properly came out and condemned it," and he should be criticized for that. But I see it more as a reflection of naivete rather than some kind of wickedness.

I've seen some people's writing saying, "Oh, he used to be a communist and then went over to being an 'Islamo-leftist.'"

That's really not an accurate way of understanding what he was doing.

And he distanced himself from it. He might not have written a full-throated reversal of his position, but he clearly knew the Islamic Republic was not an increase in human freedom or anything like that.

There's a famous article that Murray Rothbard wrote in Reason called "The Death of a State," where, in 1975, he lauded the North Vietnamese taking over South Vietnam, as well as Pol Pot taking over Cambodia. He said, "These are great moments from a libertarian point of view because a state has died. And we should always applaud when a state ends."

It's like—yeah, I don't know about that. Maybe take a wait-and-see approach or something.

But Foucault did that. What about Hayek? He is such a powerful apostle of reducing state control, but also other forms of control, economic control, social control, over people's lives. And then, when you look at the way that—at the behest of Margaret Thatcher, who also talked in those terms—he was a gigantic Pinochet supporter. How do you factor Hayek's late-life plumping for Pinochet in the body of his work?

I don't think you can separate it out from the dynamics of Cold War politics, how important that was, and to people like Margaret Thatcher as well.

They were operating in a period where there were people were intent on creating socialist revolutions. In the contexts where we did have experience of seeing the way these revolutions were playing out and the effects they tended to have.

They seemed to take the course which implied, "If you're the enemy of that, then I'm gonna support you." Especially so, which was as well as opposing communism—you're also saying, as in the case of Pinochet, you're going to give rein to a set of economic ideas that people like Margert Thatcher and Hayek had sympathy with.

I think you can't separate it from that, but I think it should be a cause for reflection for anyone who is sympathetic to Hayek or classical liberalism or libertarianism—about whether you should be giving advice to other countries in that situation.

When you could be legitimizing something you shouldn't.

When Donald Trump calls you up to say, "Hey, I like this idea of polycentric policing," you're going to be like, "Thanks, but no thanks. I don't want to talk directly to power."

I mean, it's the age-old dilemma for academics. How far do you stay detached—and then be accused of being in an ivory tower—or how far do you engage with the real world of politics?

I don't think anybody's really figured that out yet. But at the very least, we should be aware of these dangers. And I think in the same way Foucault was naive, Hayek was naive about how his own ideas could be used and the effects they might have.

Final question. We talked about COVID. The 21st century has kind of been a horror show in many ways—going from 9/11, to the war on terror, to a financial crisis, to COVID. All of which redound or echo a lot of the themes that we were talking about: that there is always a state of exception, there is always an emergency. That we need to preserve liberal society by suspending the rules of liberal society because we're in a state of emergency.

Do you feel—from a Foucauldian-Hayekian, postmodern liberal political economy view—do you feel like we've learned any lessons? Are we in a better place to understand how the state, or how corporations, or how other social groups try to govern us when they use the helper language of the state or invoke emergencies?

Are we smarter now than we were on September 10, 2001?

I don't think we are.

It's quite a complex question. In some ways, because of what happened in the pandemic, that has generated justifiable skepticism about some of these forms of political authority.

For example, Sweden was routinely condemned by many countries and scientific authorities. And yet they've actually ended up with a lower death rate than many countries that followed the stringent lockdowns.

That has meant that people are perhaps now going to be more skeptical of these sorts of claims.

But on the other hand, the danger with that is—we see this with Donald Trump and some of the populist right movements—a kind of populist backlash against these kinds of experts that can lead to a different form of control.

It's generating a response which isn't necessarily going to lead to more freedom. It could just lead to a different set of threats to freedom. So I'm very worried about the future in that sense. I want to be optimistic, but often when you have excess in a certain direction instead of moving to a sort of freedom enhancing course you can just get excess in a different direction and that's what worries me at the moment. I think there are signs of that happening in Europe…

Yeah, clearly. Right.

I guess this is a final question, postmodernism—again it's kind of focused on the limits of knowledge rather than the extent of knowledge. Which implies, especially when you're doing public policy or dictating how people are allowed to live, like you'd be a little bit humble. Sometimes people say, "Well postmodern is acid on all of the good things that have come out," of whether we want to call it: the Enlightenment or the Scientific Revolution or the Industrial Revolution. As good postmodernists, how do we continue to believe in knowledge and expertise that is positive, yet we know is ultimately limited and is going to be replaced maybe in our lifetime, maybe shortly after and revealed as incomplete. 

Is there a way out of that trap or is that just what postmodernism breeds?

I would like to say, I do identify as a classical liberal or libertarian, and I would say that postmodernism implies that spirit of humility.

You can connect that spirit of humility to the idea that we want interactions, as far as possible, to be based on the consent of the governed. We emphasize consensual relationships—bond-trusted relationships, pluralistic relationships—where there's contestation.

Where you don't have people claiming to have the full truth and imposing their will on others.

If we could just have conversations in that space, I think we might move to a better place. At least that would be my hope.

Well, I absolutely hope you're right, as well.

Mark Pennington, author of the new book—which is not only a masterwork of synthetic thought and original analysis, but one I really think anybody interested in libertarian ideas or who thinks they understand Foucault from a left-wing perspective should read it. The book is Foucault and Liberal Political Economy. Thanks so much for talking to Reason.

Thank you very much, Nick.

The post The Libertarian Case for Postmodernism appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Today's guest is Richard E. Farley, author of Drop Dead, a history of how the richest city in America got addicted to spending, saturated in debt, and crashed the municipal bond market—and then managed to get a federal bailout in the nick of time.

In 1975, New York City almost went bankrupt. Farley argues that the same conditions are reemerging today: runaway budgets, gimmicky accounting, overpromised entitlements, and politicians more interested in ideology than arithmetic. He wrote all this before the rise of mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who promises to blow spending through the roof, enact new taxes, and create masses of new regulations.

If you want to understand what it takes to bankrupt a city, listen up. New York might be sleepwalking into another fiscal disaster, and this time, there might not be a bailout waiting.

0:00—Intro

1:24—Mamdani's agenda and economic collapse

6:03—How New York went broke in 1975

8:21—Budget fraud and political chicanery

12:20—Out of control spending

16:20—Municipal bond market saturation

20:11—Bailout politics of Mayor Abraham Beame, Governor Hugh Carey, and President Gerald Ford

31:47—Who is Felix "the Fixer" Rohatyn?

36:37—Why the budget grew during the austerity era

38:59—How NYC returned to budget normalcy

42:53—Is New York repeating the mistakes of its past?

47:00—Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo

50:12—Why NYC won't return to the Bloomberg model

56:32—Generation gaps and voter behavior

__________________________________________________

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Richard E. Farley, thanks for talking to Reason.

Richard Farley: Thank you for having me.

You work in the world of finance and all of this—what is your best estimate of, if Mamdani wins in the fall and he gets his, you know, he runs the table, he gets to do everything he wants. What happens to the population of New York?

Well, let's talk about what happens to the fiscal situation and the taxes, because that will drive a lot of it. And also, there's one thing we need to talk about too, which is law and order.

I think that if you increase the budget by $20 to $25 billion—which I think he's clearly capable of doing—we're not even talking about the nonsense about grocery stores, although he's only saying 5 or 6 grocery stores. So that's probably a sidebar.

If you increase the budget by $20 billion—which I think he's capable of doing—that's an increase of 15 to 20 percent in a time when every projection says revenue is going to decrease. If you throw into that taxes that will drive people to New Jersey, Westchester, etc.

Or totally out of the area.

Or totally out of the area. That could create a structural deficit equal to that. That money's not coming from the federal government as long as Trump's here, and there's a Republican Congress—or even one house of Republicans.

And part of what you argue in the book is, the bigger difference too, is New York is still the fourth most populous state, but it is no longer in play.

What's amazing to be reminded of in reading Drop Dead is that New York would sometimes vote Republican, sometimes vote Democrat. It was a swing state. And now everybody knows—like, Democrats can say "fuck you," and Republicans can certainly say "fuck you"—right? Because it's not coming their way.

Correct. Now I think no one will allow New York City to devolve into chaos. There will be a bailout at some point. The issue under consideration are what would those  conditions be?

When you have to worry about winning the nomination in 1976, you have to treat New York with a little bit of kid gloves. If you don't have to worry about that—because a Democrat couldn't lose it if he tried or she tried, and a Republican couldn't win it if he or she tried—you can play politics the other way and be more draconian.

So that's something to keep an eye on.

But I think the real issue—of whether or not you lose people in New York and degrade the tax base to create a very serious fiscal crisis quickly—is if people feel unsafe in New York City.

And by that, you don't mean financially. You mean…

It's partly that, but also physically.

If I have a Marxist in Gracie Mansion—I wonder if the Marxist will live in Gracie Mansion; I don't know—and I think he is a Marxist. I mean, he says, "I want to seize the means of production." I think you trust people when they say these things.

Who also says things like "globalize the intifada" and then won't really back off of that in a way that decries violence. What will the policing policies be? He's never really backed off of "defund the police" in an aggressive way. He won't say he'll keep Keechant as police commissioner who now, I think, may be the most popular political figure in the city, if you want to call the police commissioner a political figure.

You absolutely should. And, you know, there has been—this is also something to think about nationwide—there's been a decline in violent crime year over year.

People are talking about it's going to be the biggest single thing. Clearly, policing matters. But it's not clear exactly how much. But you're basically saying if we get a guy who is a "defund the police," romancer of revolutionary violence, things are going to get hairy.

I don't know. I think there's a risk of that.

He's a bit of an empty vessel. He's 33 years old. He's a bit of a dilettante, in my judgment. He's relatively new to city politics. Never really run anything. He is very glib. He's very handsome. He's charismatic. But what does he really stand for and mean?

And when you have the executive function of overseeing the largest police force in the country—in a city where there's a thin veneer of law and order—we saw that in 2020. It doesn't take much for street gangs to go down and decide they're going to loot and make a lot of money off of a ineffective law enforcement apparatus.

The book is Drop Dead: How a Coterie of Corrupt Politicians, Bankers, Lawyers, Spinmeisters, and Mobsters Bankrupted New York, Got Bailed Out, Blamed the President, and Went Back to Business as Usual (And It Might Be Happening Again).

I have no responsibility for the subtitles.

But you know what? You've got to own it, right? I don't know that I need to read any more of the book after that. But this is about the fiscal crisis of New York City in 1975.

Correct.

Can you summarize quickly what was happening in New York that brought the biggest city in America to the brink of bankruptcy?

Yeah. I think the larger quantity of factors affected all large industrial Northern and Midwestern cities. Recession of 1973 and of 1974, rising interest rates, the cutback in aid from Washington—LBJ's poverty programs, et cetera—being scaled back by Nixon. You had a longer-term impact of the hemorrhaging of industrial jobs, really starting in the late '40s but accelerating.

The peak year for industrial jobs as a percentage of the economy was in the late '40s.

Correct. I think New York was still the leading industrial state until about '48, '49. Even though the low-skilled jobs were moving out, you had an influx of low-skilled workers from the South escaping discrimination. And from Puerto Rico, obviously, looking for a higher standard of living. You had a similar exodus of white ethnic working-class voters. So you had this shift in demographics and economic impact, which would have been a problem no matter what.

But in a lot of ways, I mean, one of the things you're arguing is that, "Yeah, that's true, and it was true everywhere in every type of city, but the real problem was what was going…"

Absolutely. You can discuss it a number of different ways, but there were two things unique to New York. One was the chicanery—the accounting shenanigans, the budgetary fraud, the illegal incurrence of debt to mask deficits. So we'll put that in one bucket.

That's, of course, the most fun to talk about. If we're not going to talk about chicanery and characters, we might as well write about librarians in the 1970s.

What was going on in New York City was also mirrored at the state level under Nelson Rockefeller

Correct. Not quite as bad, but on a larger scale.

But basically what we saw—and throughout many states, many cities—there was just a commitment to spend a lot more money than was coming in.

And to use what were previously thought to be unethical, perhaps even illegal, means of doing so. Of course. Nelson Rockefeller—famous for the moral obligation bond. Through John Mitchell…

Yeah, explain that.

Sure. Way back when—when dinosaurs roamed the earth—when a government wanted to issue debt, it issued it under the full faith and credit of the state, the city, what have you, Ok? And all jurisdictions had constitutional limits or legal limits on how much you could incur.

Beginning in the 1920s, because they didn't want to get the referendum vote—which you needed from the voters to approve that kind of debt, and voters at some point were going to say "no more"—they came up with agency debt.

Which was, the state of New York, for example, forms a subsidiary, calls it the Port Authority. And the Port Authority or the Triborough Authority issues the debt. And the debt is paid by real sources of revenue that have been deferred from the state to that entity—tunnel and bridge tolls, port fees. Those bonds were what they call "self-liquidating," which means a bond investor looks at the projections of the tolls and other revenue—stadium authorities, ticket sales—and says, "Ok, this will more than repay my debt, I'll buy the bonds."

Nelson Rockefeller, starting in the early '60s, took an idea that a lawyer named John Mitchell came up with for a federal government education program to build schools.

And this is not just any John Mitchell.

Oh no, this is the John Mitchell—Watergate fame, Martha Mitchell fame, and all kinds of fame.

John Mitchell came up with an idea that said, "Even if you want to borrow for programs that won't repay themselves—like low-income housing—you can get bond buyers to buy it as long as you convince them, with a wink and a nod, that the state will stand behind it."

Well, responsible people, like the comptroller of the state at that point, Arthur Levitt, said, "Oh, wait a minute. If the state's going to stand behind it, you have to get a referendum. There's no winking and nodding here."

But Nelson Rockefeller loved the wink and the nod. And they came up with something where they explained it to the market by saying, "The state is not legally obligated to repay your debt. But if the program doesn't generate enough revenue, it's morally obligated." And the governor agrees to submit a bill to the legislature to require the state to make good on the debt. And the market bought off on it.

Why did the market do that? Is it because they were like, "Hey, you know what? The economy is booming. There's some bust, but we're still…"

There are different theories on that. I think the biggest theory was they were convinced in 1961, I think when it first came in, that the political power of Nelson Rockefeller and his allies in the state of New York would make good on this debt.

1961 was the last year that New York was the most populous state in the country.

Correct.

Right, because by '62, I believe, California overtook it, which is a big backdrop of what's happening in New York City.

Just to back up one sec. Of course, the rating agencies are always around.

Yeah.

And the rating agencies bought off on rating these bonds and giving them a decent rating. So you've got the sort of creep where the politicians say, "Wink and a nod," the rating agencies say, "Okay, we'll take that and give it a good rating," and then the market says, "Fine." And once you have a precedent of a bond deal being priced appropriately in the marketplace, then the sky's the limit.

And starting in the late '50s, early '60s, New York City also—again, following different parts of the country—just said, "You know what? Let's spend more."

And you write in the book—and this is, you know, I guess it's not surprising, but it remains shocking—that New York City in the '70s was spending more per capita than any other city in the country.

Yes.

What was it spending it on?

We talked about two differences between New York and other cities, and of course, other cities didn't have a fiscal crisis. One was the chicanery. The other was that New York City took on more obligations and responsibilities than any other city in the country.

What are we talking about? Its own university system. Well, you had a state university system—SUNY—which is very large. You had private universities, Catholic universities. Ok. You have a hospital system. Well, that may have made sense before Medicare. But why do you need Medicaid—why do you need a hospital system when you have the federal funding of private hospitals?

They ran the courts. Until '68, they ran the subways. You may say to someone, "Well, why would a city take on this responsibility given the fiscal issues that that entails?"

Well, it's very simple. It's called patronage jobs. They want Democratic politicians in New York to be able to hand out those jobs and those contracts and those goodies—not Democratic politicians at all.

So New York had an incredibly bloated budget.

Correct.

One of the takeaways from the book is that, through the mid-'70s, basically everybody who lived in New York was getting multiple streams of revenue from the city. Either they worked for it. They might have had a no-show job. Or they were benefiting from some other kind of stream.

So there are two things to keep in mind. One is when Mayor Wagner gave the unions the right to collective bargaining, that really transformed the dynamic of the relationship between the city and the unions.

Victor Gotbaum said very bluntly in 1967, "We have the power to elect our own boss." And over the course of the Wagner administration into the Lindsay administration and into Beame, you saw increased benefits to public employee unions.

This also reflected a national trend, because it was JFK who signed off on collective bargaining for public unions.

If you count the number of votes of public employee union members and their immediate family members who are voting age, that's enough votes to win just about every Democratic primary for mayor, going back all the way to '67.

So when you have that sort of power and influence—when you realize that—then your demands become greater and greater, and the pressure to accede to those demands obviously becomes overwhelming.

So you sign off. "You" meaning, you know, Abe Beame and the City Council and everybody in a political job is like, "Okay, yeah, we're going to give more money to more voters. And then we're going to use these bullshit techniques to convince them."

Correct. And the overwhelming political imperative to not take away from the voting citizens is really—if you want to put your finger on one thing—it's that. It's easier to never give in the first place than it is to take away.

And once you have this enormous smorgasbord of government-financed programs—which helped the middle class, by the way, much more than the poor.

Yeah, no, no, on both ends, right? Like they're the ones who use the parks and use CUNY ultimately, or City College. But they're also the ones getting the jobs—

And working in the hospitals—doctors, nurses, and orderlies…

Well, this is the biggest misconception. Healthcare is a middle—

And the union worker sounds like a very well-paid middle. I come from a family of teachers—union folks.

Although not in the New York area.

No, this is up in Providence. The dynamic wasn't installed yet.

So then what happened in 1975, where it's like, suddenly, the mask is off, and it's like, we're screwed?

Simply stated, the municipal bond market stopped funding New York City municipal bonds.

Municipal bonds were a great investment when everyone is making money and has taxes to pay because they're triple tax-free. So it's a good asset class when you want to not pay a full income tax on the income.

When, after a recession, you have a lot of losses, it becomes a less attractive asset class. Now, because of the chicanery—which we can talk about in a second—New York had saturated the municipal bond market with its debt. It had, I think, over 25 percent of all municipal bonds were New York bonds.

That's amazing

Given that portfolio diversification says never have more than 10 percent of any issuer in your asset class. And it was over 30 percent of short-term debt.

Now, people would park their money in short-term municipal bonds because they were tax-free and thought to be safe. But when you have such an enormous saturation, you then have a problem—particularly in an asset class that's no longer as economically attractive.

And one of the smart things Beame had done when he was comptroller in his first stint was diversify the pension portfolios so that not all of their securities are invested in New York City securities. Something like 80 percent of New York's pension must invest in New Jersey securities. When you divest that, you also saturate the market. So you had that dynamic.

So the municipal bond market collapses for New York. Nobody wants to buy their bonds.

Right. So why was it so saturated? Well, because they were borrowing to do things they shouldn't be borrowing to do.

Now, you're not supposed to borrow to fund short-term expenses—ordinary course, annual expenses. You're only supposed to borrow long-term to finance bridges, schools, capital assets.

You point out in the book, almost on every page, that New York was just like, "We're not doing any capital improvements. We're not maintaining anything. This is all money that is going directly into somebody's—"

I think at one point at the peak, over 50 percent of all borrowings—long-term—for so-called "capital assets" were actually for ordinary expenses.

Let me give you an example. There was a fellow named James Cavanaugh, who was a wonderful rogue from Brooklyn. He never went to college. He was a genius at manipulating numbers—both in terms of showing fake layoffs and in terms of showing.

So he came up with an idea that said, "No, wait a minute. Teachers have an average career of 25 years, 30 years, whatever it is. And they do teacher training all the time, right? So isn't the useful life of that training a 30 year asset? Let's go into the bond market and borrow long-term to pay for teachers' salaries."

Anybody looking at that rationally is going to say, "That's nuts."

He would do things like, "OK, we need some short-term debt because we have a liquidity issue. Let's send our tax bills for embassies and churches and rectories and all kinds of things so that we can march it down to Salomon Brothers and other banks on Wall Street and do a bond issue backed by those real estate tax receivables," which was all nonsense.

All right, they're not going to pay.

No, but you hope to roll over into some real taxes later on to sort of refinance that. And in a low-interest environment of the '60s, you could get away with that.

But when interest rates spike, all of a sudden now the interest on what you borrowed in a phony way now becomes a real expense.

Which is happening on a macro level contemporaneously.

They would do other things like, look, 5 percent of all Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements disallowed, right? For various duplicative and not-covered. They would borrow 100 cents on the dollar in what they call RANs—Revenue Anticipation Notes.

You can borrow short-term as long as you repay it during the year, because a city's expenses are relatively even over the course of the year, its revenues are lumpy. So you can borrow against those to smooth it out. And of course, they abused that in these ways.

So the witching hour comes. 

Correct.

We're in 1975, the early part of 1975. It's clear New York is going to go bankrupt. It's going to default on its debt.

Correct. It was clear much earlier than that.

Oh, but I mean, this is when stuff gets moving, right? And like Governor Hugh Carey.

Oh, the insiders knew it.

Governor Hugh Carey is one of the heroes of the book, if there is one.

Well, it depends what you mean by "hero." The most effective players in terms of advancing their own interests would be Hugh Carey, and I think he's a hero overall.

But that's because he's Irish.

John Scanlon is a hero—but maybe not necessarily…

This is like—I feel like you're fighting the Gangs of New York-era wars or something.

Scanlon maybe was not the most honorable hero in the book. In terms of being effective, he's wildly effective. I think Arthur Levitt is one of the real heroes.

In any case, in 1975 it becomes apparent that New York is going to need a federal bailout.

Correct.

And then the question is the timing. Because essentially, if it happens before Thanksgiving of 1975, it's going to be on the federal government's terms—in Gerald Ford's terms in particular. If it happens after Thanksgiving, then Ford is running for re-election.

And it's like he's going to do whatever he needs to in order to get 41 electoral votes from New York—which does turn out to be the difference between him winning or Carter winning. And Carter won.

And actually it was New York City. Because had Ford done as well as—or even slightly worse than—Republicans typically did in New York City, he would have won New York State in the election. He did historically bad. Only Alf Landon in '36 and Goldwater in '64 did worse.

So Hugh Carey and Abe Beame. Abe Beame is kind of the first political figure I remember—as somebody born in the early '60s. A total dweeb. A non-entity. An apparatchik. He was indistinguishable from a Soviet Kremlin member, right? Who was Abe Beame?

He escaped Russian communism.

Yeah, so it's like ouch. I'm sorry for that comparison. What was Abe Beame trying to do in order to…

You've got to understand Abe Beame. His father escaped the czar. His father was a radical escaping czarist oppression, and then escaping the extreme politics of the Russian Empire and Poland in those days—escapes to London and then New York.

Abe Beame, as a young man, wandered into the Madison Democratic Club in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and decided he was going to be a Democrat. He wanted to be an American and wanted to be involved in American politics. And that was the most powerful Democratic organization—maybe in the country—for the next generation or two.

And this was at a time, too, when the Democrats had taken over most of the big cities.

The Democrats did some smart things, Ok? They decided they were not just going to be a party of the Irish. They became a party of the Irish, and then the Jewish, and then the Italians, and then Hispanics, and the Blacks.

So the Jews were moving to Brooklyn, very large numbers in the 1920s, and the Crown Heights Democratic Club needed to co-opt them. And Abe Beame came in, and they said, "Here's a guy we want."

All right, let's jump forward a couple of decades. Abe Beame is coming off—you know, he followed…

After licking envelopes for three decades, he finally gets his chance.

And John Lindsay had been the mayor right before him. And then suddenly, Abe Beame is the machine candidate, right?

Well, he was the machine candidate for comptroller in '61. Then he was the machine candidate for mayor in '65 and lost in that famous election with Lindsay and Bill Buckley.

Yeah, right.

And then in '69, he got his job back as comptroller. And then'73, he's again the nominee of the bosses of New York. Maybe the last time there were bosses of New York, was '73.

He was good as a comptroller, right? In terms of, like, he knew how to park money.

He was a capable, competent guy. But he came with that machine clubhouse politics mentality. He was perhaps a bit too tolerant of corruption. He was a very pro-union guy. He was certainly a very pro–civil rights guy. There were many things admirable about Beame.

But he's not the guy you want running a city that's about to go bankrupt.

No. He is about as establishment and measured—and not going to change things radically.

Which is what's called for, because you have massive outlays…

He was quite the guy. He wanted to prove that that clubhouse system—which got them in trouble to begin with—was actually the way to keep going into the late 20th and maybe 21st century.

Ok, so then he's working with Hugh Carey—who's also from Brooklyn, right? And is an Irish guy who was a long-term congressman.

Carey… Angling, this is very interesting, Ok? Carey's career was becalmed in the early 1970s because he was supposed to be the whip. He was supposed to get the job that went to Tip O'Neill.

But Hugh Carey could at times be aloof and moody, and he got stabbed in the back by two Irish congressmen from Brooklyn who resented him. They went to Carl Albert and to Hale Boggs and said, "If you put Hugh in there, we're going to give you a hard time."

Why didn't they like Hugh Carey? 

Hugh Carey, he had a lot of money. His brother was one of the richest guys around. And Hugh could afford to be independent, Ok? And Hugh was ambitious. He ran for mayor, and he was clearly someone who viewed Congress as a stepping stone to greater things.

And nobody likes rich, ambitious people who are successful.

He was also pretty tall too, right?

He was tall. He was handsome. Look, the guy had a very tough life. He had 14 kids. His first wife was a widow whose husband died in the South Pacific.

I think his wife might've had the tougher job if he had 14…

Correct. And then at 49 years old, with all these kids, she dies of breast cancer. His brother dies in a plane crash. Two of his kids die when he's running for mayor in a car wreck out on Shelter Island.

So here he is now with all of these kids, and has the blow of being stabbed in the back, and loses the whip seat. And he was basically thought to be done in '74 when he runs for governor. And he was not the favorite at all. Didn't get the nomination of the party.

But '74 was the best year to be an outsider. It was the Watergate year—the famous midterm election where the Democratic majorities were enormous. And Hugh, with the assistance of David Garth, a brilliant media man, ran his campaign, and his brother's millions—ran perhaps the best gubernatorial primary campaign in New York.

And he kind of anticipated a Reagan Democrat, right?

He was the last of that breed, yeah. That generation—I guess Mario Cuomo's of that ilk too—but they sort of combined progressive politics with traditional values that still captured what ultimately became the MAGA base.

Right, public imagination. Yeah. They were very patriotic. They constantly talked about America.

Moynihan, I think, is from that ilk. Tip O'Neill was from that ilk. But yeah, that's a lost breed.

So Carey and Beame…what did they do to kind of string Ford out as long as possible?

It was clear by the fall of '74 that the city was going to go broke in '75 and that a bailout was needed. And the state had its own fiscal issues—couldn't do it. Everybody knew the money was going to come from…

And the money was going to come from Washington, because New York—

Bordered on electoral vote…

So much politics…

So many people….

As we're going to come back to that.

What saved New York was 41 electoral votes.

And it was never in question. I mean, this is part of your—this book is a revisionist account of the fiscal crisis in New York.

Yeah ok.

Where everybody knew a federal bailout was coming. And you point out, the book is called Drop Dead because of the famous New York Daily News headline…

John Scanlon's finest work.

That speech, Gerald Ford said, "I'm going to bail out New York"

"But here are my conditions."

And so that gets twisted into Drop Dead, not at all. But everybody knew it was coming.

Correct.

So what did they do to string them out as well?

Well, you've got to understand the dynamic here. Ford decides he wants to run for president—even though he told Nixon he didn't. Once you're in the White House, you kind of like living there.

But he had a problem. He had Ronald Reagan, who was going to challenge him for the nomination. And Ronald Reagan had the support of the conservative base of the Republican Party. Ford chose Nelson Rockefeller to be his vice president. So if you're trying to fend off a challenge from the right, as a Republican running for president, and your running mate at the time is the most liberal Republican in the country…

And the guy who got booted—who lost the nomination, '64, to Goldwater—because Rockefeller is the liberal Republican, right? The country club Republican.

And now you are going to have to bail out New York City.

Where Nelson Rockefeller was governor of New York, etc. 

So Ford's saying, "Oh great." And remember, Ford's secretary of the Treasury was Bill Simon, who ran the municipal bond desk at Salomon Brothers. So he was very well informed of what this was all going to be about.

So Ford said, "OK, I've got to walk a very thin line here. If I'm perceived to be too generous to New York, Reagan is going to use that against me and maybe beat me." And remember, that nomination fight went all the way to the convention floor. It's the last convention that ever mattered, friend.

Right, yeah.

On the other hand, if he was too hard on New York, the Republican delegates from New York might bolt.

And the first event of the 1976 presidential season was the Republican Convention, which back then chose about a third of the delegates—on January 6, 1976. See, the Republicans were making this transition from the old system—where most delegates were chosen—the overwhelming majority by conventions—to the open primary system. So they still held back a few.

And if those Republicans on January 6th were upset with Ford because he raked the city over the coals, they could have withheld their approval—which would have been big news. The vice president is on the ticket. He's a New Yorker. He's the titular head of the party. The party revolts.

Next, you have Iowa. Next, you have New Hampshire. That could have been it for Ford.

So Ford had to hold on to that, which he ultimately did. But that required him to also not be draconian in how he dealt with New York. So he thought he was walking that line very well.

And he knew that if he didn't get it over with—if people went into the Thanksgiving/Christmas holidays in New York thinking the city was going to be in default—the resentment against Ford would have been overwhelming.

So Tip O'Neill came up with a strategy. He figured this out and said, "Ford's going to want this over by Thanksgiving." That was Tip's conclusion right away.

So he basically said to Carey, "If you can hold—if you can find the money to keep the city running through Thanksgiving, Ford will cave." Which is, of course, exactly what happened.

So talk about the myths that have arisen about who saved New York. 

It's a very long list.

Well, let's start with the one named Felix.

Yes.

Ok. Who is Felix Rohatyn?

Felix Rohatyn was perhaps the greatest investment banker—maybe of all time—to give him his due. An incredibly capable guy. Energetic. A Rolodex better than anyone you could imagine.

He was a frustrated politician. He wanted to be secretary of the Treasury or head of the Federal Reserve. He ultimately had to settle for ambassador to France—not so bad.

It was kind of an insult. 

But he had those ambitions.

He was doing very well for a while. He was in front of Congress in the antitrust hearings of Manny Celler in the late '60s. He was chosen by the New York Stock Exchange to go out and get their bailout in 1970.

And then he stubbed his toe. There was the IT&T scandal, where there were alleged…

Explain what IT&T was.

Yeah. There was a [Department of Justice] investigation of antitrust violations and other violations. And Felix went down to Washington to try to— Harold Geneen was his biggest client—IT&T. He went down there smoothed it over, and there were later allegations that there were briberies.

Nothing tied Felix to any of this, but the taint of being associated with that…

And IT&T was one of these kind of shadowy mega-conglomerations—reaches all over the world.

Right. All the conspiracy theories…

Involved in the Chilean overthrow of Allende, etc.

So Felix was tainted in the mid-'70s. They called him "Felix the Fixer," which is not quite the chairman of the Federal Reserve moniker.

So he wanted to undo that. And when he saw what was coming down the pike in New York in '75, he said to himself, "If I can be useful in this, and this works out reasonably well for New York, I could rehabilitate my reputation."

Of course, he did it brilliantly. He volunteered a lot of time—was very effective. So I don't want to diminish his public service, all right? But the idea that his brainchild, the Municipal Assistance Corporation, saved New York, is just factually unsupportable

Which is the thesis of the documentary that's out now, Drop Dead City, co-directed by his son, which is…

I'd be loyal to my father too. I'd put the best spin on. But the fact of the matter was the Municipal Assistance Corporation was formed over the Memorial Day weekend to bridge the gap so that that oversaturation could get soaked up and the city could access the municipal bond market again in September.

It was supposed to sell $3 billion of bonds to tide the city over. And then in the interim, they would fix the budget, get rid of the corruption in the budgeting process, and the market would accept New York securities again.

Of course, it took four or five years for the city to access the bond market. And it's interesting—the MAC only sold a billion of bonds. They were going to do three offerings. Only one was sold. The other two floundered.

Nobody would buy them.

Because the market saw through it: this isn't like some separate credit. It's the same New York City credit and a moral obligation of the state of New York. Which the state reneged on its moral obligations when the UDC went under earlier in the year.

It's easier to say this with hindsight—but if Nelson Rockefeller is invoking "moral obligation," you should run as far as possible, right? You know, from whatever he's talking about.

There are some things about Rocky I admire. He was a great politician.

Yeah, loved art.

Loved art. Was quite a character in his own right. But the Municipal Assistance Corporation, while a useful vehicle after the bailout was obtained and the city was stabilized, had virtually nothing to do with stabilizing the debt.

Why do you think so many people are invested in the idea that what happened was—and I think Richard Brody, in The New Yorker, reviewing Drop Dead City, talked about how, whatever else you can say about it, this documentary is a paean to liberal governance. Like, when governments really did the things they needed to do for their citizens. And it's a shame—something, something happened, and like…

Oh, because they can't help themselves. The sort of elitist, left-leaning—I don't want to get overly political here—but they love that notion because they themselves are elites. They all went to the fancy boarding schools. They go to the same book parties. They want nothing more than one of their own to be a hero in—effectively—a government overreach, I would say.

The idea of a government that does everything for everybody is good. And then the people who make that…

And if our people are the heroes, that's ideal.

One of the things that is amazing in the book you talk about is that from 1975 to 1978, the budget of New York City grew by 20 percent. So this is in the most austere of austerity periods ever. Talk a little bit about the ways in which people—like, jobs were not actually cut, budgets were not actually cut. 

How does this happen?

It's very simple. Let's take the most extreme example. When Beame announced his layoffs in '75, when you actually parsed through it, very few people actually lost paychecks.

They would claim internships—unpaid internships. "We laid people off. We got rid of those." A program where a position is not filled yet, "We just don't fill them." More layoffs. "We move job classifications from a city-funded program to a federal program." Job loss. Well, no the cash outlays have not changed at all.

So that was one trick they used early on.

Then what you saw was, after '75 and going further, the union contracts continued to effectively get even better. Now, they did lose some headcount—but most of the headcount losses were the low-paid, entry-level folks. So the people who run the unions obviously take care of themselves.

And you point out that that means, disproportionately, it was minorities and women…

Minorities and women suffered the most.

Yeah, the most recently hired are the first…

And it was the established white males who ended up getting larger pay increases. You also had cuts in services to the most needy. So where there was real austerity, it was in chest X-ray programs, for example, which were done away with. 

And like hospitals in the Bronx.

Correct. Special education programs. People who don't have lobbyists, people who don't have unions representing them—those programs got decimated.

Now, one of the things that's fascinating, though, is that later in the '70s, the guy who succeeds Abe Beame is Ed Koch.

Right.

Fights off Mario Cuomo in a very tight run

Famous '77 race.

But I believe it was by 1978 that the city had balanced the budget?

A little later than that. But what happened was…

What did they do to actually get back to some kind of budget normalcy?

Well, the '75 bailout was to fix the short-term debt. Everybody knew there was going to need to be another one. In '78, the federal government came in again. But this time, there was no conflict. Carter, with the Democratic Congress, were all in favor of it. They had a signing ceremony on the steps of City Hall.

But there was still a structural deficit and still financing issues. The city still could not borrow in a normal way. It accessed the market again by '79, but not in a robust way.

I mean, not being able to sell your debt should be a budget disciplinary action, right? It's like if I'm a person and nobody will give me credit…

"I will bail you out."

So what happened was a transformation of the American economy by way of the financial services industry. The share of the economy which was financial services basically went up by 50 percent over the course of a decade and a half. And all, not all of it, but the vast majority of that wealth and tax revenue flowed into New York City.

So the hero is Michael Milken.

Who's working out of Southern California in the morning and—

Victory City. Correct.

It's fascinating because people still remember him. They know he's the junk bond king who went to federal prison and had to pay off everything. But you say he's the hero of New York's robust recovery?

I said he's the felon who represents the ascendancy of New York, when Tony Scotto, the union leader, the felon who represents its demise. And there's some truth to that.

I think the resurgence of that industry—and the resurgence of Wall Street—beginning in 1980, really, and continuing until, you know, knock on wood, now, is really what saved New York City.

It is amazing when you look back at New York. In 1975—was that the actual year of the "Fear City" pamphlets? The police were…

Which, again, you've got to understand what was going on.

Abe Beame was negotiating with Warren Anderson, the Republican Senate leader, to get more money for the city. And there were seven Republican state senators in New York City who were at risk of bolting, Ok? So Warren Anderson had to placate them.

Those Republican districts were pretty much white, pretty much middle class, very much focused on law and order. So the unions knew that if they could scare the bejesus out of those seven districts—by saying the city's going to devolve into chaos and mayhem in the streets—that Warren Anderson would cave and give the city more money.

So Beame was aware of—and probably complicit in—the "Fear City" campaign.

And this is a pamphlet that the police produced. 

Handed out at the airports and in Midtown hotels, saying, "Be careful, tourists. In New York City, you'll get mugged and raped and beaten up."

Yeah, later becomes an Iggy Pop album.

Correct. And that was one of the tactics used by the city insiders to put pressure on the state to get more money. And it worked.

You go from that to, you know, 10 years later—certainly by 1987, which I think is the year The Bonfire of the Vanities comes out—and Tom Wolfe is talking about the "masters of the universe" and New York's economy, which, compared to now, is nothing. But it was, it was unbelievable.

We thought people who made $100 million a year were wealth beyond your imagination.

A thousand dollars.

One hundred million. When Michael Milken made $500 million in one year, people thought this was the most outrageous thing. Now, if you run a major private equity fund, that's a normal year's paycheck.

Let's update this now, because of the lengthy subtitle of your book—which actually takes six or seven pages to read—but it is, you know, "How New York Went Back to Business as Usual and It Might Be Happening Again."

If you look at recent appraisals of the New York City budget—both by people within the government and watchdog organizations—they all say the same thing: that since 2023, Fiscal 2023, the city has been spending more than it's taking in on an annual basis.

Some of that there's been a surplus because during COVID a lot of money from the feds, etc., came to the cities and states. If you look down the road, in the city's 5 year plan forecasts deficits of $11 billion in 2027, $13 billion in 2028, $13 billion again in 2029…

I haven't seen a comprehensive analysis yet of what the big bad bill—the big beautiful bill…

You're right—BBB.

I call it BBB because that's what the city's credit rating is going to be once people go–

Is that going to take money away from the city?

Yeah, the city and the state. And it's unclear how much.

So are we back to where we were in—maybe not 1975—but 1971, '72?

Well, let's talk about the two things that caused New York to have a fiscal crisis when other large cities didn't.

One was the chicanery—we don't know what's going on there. You only learn about that after the fact.

Two is the city taking on more responsibilities and obligations than other cities do.

Well, we have a Democratic nominee right now who says he wants to increase universal childcare through 6 years old. Well, that's going to cost you $10 billion. You want to give away free bus service? That's going to add a billion dollars.

You want to add 4 percent to the business corporate income tax. What's that going to do in terms of businesses leaving?

You want to have a surplus of 2 percent income tax surcharge on millionaires. Who in New York City, a millionaire is doing quite fine, but you're not exactly a master of the universe anymore.

Or let's be more clear about it. A million dollars is a lot of money—you're doing well in New York or anywhere else. The difference really is that the financial industry is not anchored here in the way that it used to be.

That's a wild card.

Remember, what happened in '75 was the culmination of well-paying industrial jobs leaving. And they left because they could. There were lower taxes and lower wage rates.

We thought for a very long time you had to be in New York City. And for years you did—back when there was no interstate branch banking.

If I may—I remember my parents talking about… they had been living in New York for decades. My father was born in Hell's Kitchen in the '20s. But when California— I remember them saying when California surpassed New York as the most populous state, everybody in New York was like, "Oh, don't worry about it. Everybody wants to be in New York City. It will come back."

And then flash forward 10 years later, you know, politicians had been saying the same thing—and it was, "No. It's never coming back."

Remember, before trading became effective electronic, you traded stocks on the New York Stock Exchange. To be a member, you had to have an office in Lower Manhattan.

Before unfettered interstate branch commercial banking, you had to have deposits in New York State. The big banks had to be here. That's all gone now. You can literally pull the plug on Friday—and people have—and replug in in Palm Beach or Austin, Texas, on Monday. Seamlessly.

And, you know, in the '70s and '80s, certainly, you could also defect. You could still work in New York, but you'd move to Connecticut or New Jersey, which were tax havens by comparison. No longer true.

Or maybe with Mr. Mamdani in there, it may be.

Well, yeah, but it won't be because they're reducing their taxes. It's just lower than—

They'll be lower than if they lived in New York City.

We can talk about Mamdani as a threat. Isn't it worth also talking about, I mean, the people he's running against? And at this point, it looks like Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams—the incumbent mayor.

And Curtis Sliwa.

Yeah. But I mean, is he a factor?

What, you know, what went wrong that gave Mamdani, you know, a clear path to the Democratic Party nomination?

Yeah. I think that Andrew Cuomo was perceived by the Democratic primary voter to be less energizing, inspirational—what have you—than Mr. Mamdani.

He also ran a very safe and conservative campaign, almost akin to a "Rose Garden" campaign that took very few chances and tried to win by getting the endorsement of as many community leaders and business leaders and running an air campaign and hoping for a low-turnout primary.

And out of nowhere comes Mr. Mamdani, who then links arms with Brad Lander, and he peaks at just the right time and gets the 500,000 votes that are necessary to win the Democratic primary.

Are people wrong? And I realize, you know, we're talking about a Democratic primary, so it's a subset of Democratic voters in New York, which is a subset of voters in—

Really though, you got 1.1 million votes in this primary. The last two generals were around that same amount.

Andrew Cuomo, you know, left office in disgrace. He presided terribly over New York State. He was terrible on COVID-19 policy and lied about it. He's not good on that. He came in, it sounded like he was going to undo his father's terrible legacy of just blowing out the budget in New York and raising taxes. He didn't do any of that.

Correct.

So, I mean, the voters are right to repudiate somebody like Andrew Cuomo. What about Eric Adams? Is Eric Adams, then, like, the last least-bad alternative, or…?

I think so. I've made it clear that I'm going to support Eric Adams. I think Eric Adams has turned the corner in a lot of ways.

What does that mean?

Well, I think he went in—

He's demanding first-class upgrades on Turkish Airlines, as opposed to just a couple hours in the lounge.

He was guilty of excessive loyalty to longtime personal friends and put them in positions of power—particularly in law enforcement, where he started his career in politics.

And that came back to bite him very quickly. And I think by putting Randy Mastro in as first deputy mayor and Ms. Tisch in as police commissioner, I think he has shown that he has learned those lessons.

And I mean, if this had happened a year earlier, and he had had 2 years of Mastro and Tisch, I think he would be a much more formidable candidate.

Why does New York City so regularly generate mediocre citywide politicians? You know, if you take out Bloomberg—who, as a good libertarian, I was bothered by many of his nanny state stuff—but like everybody I talked to in New York, of all different levels—everybody is libertarian here. Everybody is tolerant and pluralistic, and everybody just wants the garbage collected, crime kept low, and business able to function.

Why aren't there Bloombergs falling off of trees? As opposed to—it's more likely that you get an Eric Adams, Bill de Blasio, a late-stage Rudy Giuliani?

Because I think most people don't want to spend their entire lives in municipal government, particularly elective office. And in order to get your hands on the apparatus to get elected—unless you are a Bloomberg and you can write a check for $50 million—it's very hard to parachute in and do that.

So the things that motivate those people—and I agree, that's most New Yorkers—I mean, this is why it's been so economically successful for 400 years. Because it attracts people with that entrepreneurial instinct who want to be left alone. They don't care about your race, creed, religion, etc.—"What can you do for me?"—in a very good way.

Those people are not attracted to serving in the City Council, by and large.

Because that's how you really have to do time and move up.

Correct.

And then if you do that, though, you're beholden to all the people who helped you along the way.

In order to make the several billion that Mike Bloomberg had when he ran for mayor, you've got to do something else. And making that transition is sometimes difficult because of the resentments and other things that come into play.

Are there large cities that you think are governed well, that New York should look to as alternatives?

No. Let's rattle off the list. Would you say L.A., Chicago, Boston?

Maybe Houston? Houston's growing.

I don't know as much about Houston as…

I mean, the cities in Texas are all growing, but this is where you never know how much of what's happening is because of local politics or state politics, or national politics, or global politics.

Remember that we had to suffer through 40 years in order to get Giuliani, and then 50 years to get Bloomberg.

Are we entering a large cycle, perhaps? Not to sound like Oswald Spengler, but New York has these boom periods that last 50 or 75 years, and then they start to—I mean, New York under Wagner… you can see it in relief. Looking backward like, "Yeah ok, this ship was clearly headed for the iceberg. The coordinates were locked in decades before it happened."

You could say going back to O'Dwyer. O'Dwyer's second term was maybe the start of the decline.

So is that just… this is just a process of collapse and renewal?

I don't go for these sort of cycles of history. I think it's too simplistic.

Well, can I ask—are you a registered Republican?

No, I'm a registered Democrat.

Registered Democrat. Ok. But what can the Republican Party do? Either at increasingly at the state level or also at the city level?

I think there's a major opportunity for the Republican Party in New York. There's been historically high migration of Black and Hispanic—particularly male—voters to the national Republican Party. Trump, like it or not, did—

He gained with basically every demographic, but larger amounts with men.

And if you look at recent immigrants and Hispanics and others—and middle-class Blacks—these are people who are in favor of smaller government, lower taxes, entrepreneurial, traditional values. Which I know is not necessarily a libertarian thing, but it certainly is more aligned with the Republican platform these days than the Democratic.

These are not "woke" constituencies. I find it encouraging in this most recent Democratic primary that the nonwhite candidate won the white vote, and the white candidate won Black voters.

So what's going on with that? Because Mamdani did very well among higher-income people.

And higher-educated white people.

Is that just white guilt?

No.

What is it, then?

I think it's an ideological shift. We talk about affordability, Ok? And housing is where it's most focused on.

They say, "Gee, I'm 28 years old. I can't afford a house. But my grandparents could." I think back to my parents. And they rented a house for two years. These were teachers. These were not impoverished people. And they saved every penny. There was no vacation, there were no new clothes, there was no… nothing fancy. They didn't have an air conditioner. And they saved their money, they got a down payment, and owning the home was their priority—because that was the marker of being successful in America.

"I'm not a renter. I'm an owner. I'm going to do whatever it takes." It turned out to be foolish economically, but my father repaid his mortgage in 5 years.

Yeah.

In '64, just in time for the LBJ interest rates to start going up. If he'd taken the mortgage payments and invested in Treasuries, he would've been better off.

But that was the mentality. That was the priority.

You can't say, "Ok, I buy the latest iPhone immediately. I have the fancy clothes and the vacations and the Instagram and this and that and the other. But how come I don't have the money to buy a house? And I don't want a house in Nutley, New Jersey. I want a nice house in Park Slope."

Is it ideological or generational?

I think it's both. Look, my mind wasn't poisoned by this Marcusean higher education. It was there, but they were the crazies in the humanities department. Everybody ignored them.

And you're 59?

Yeah.

So, is part of it that the people who are under 40 or under 45 have grown up in an incredibly rich country—which we don't acknowledge, generally speaking? So if you're second, third, fourth generation going to college—even if you have student debt—you're living in a different world than people who remember moving every six months because the rent can't be paid, and so you moved farther out into Brooklyn or Queens and so forth?

I think the bemoaning of affordability relative to the standard of living is quite shocking.

Are there any Republicans though, and we'll end on this, you talked about older candidates talking about New York as this great American experiment.

This might have died with David Dinkins, talking about the glorious mosaic as opposed to the melting pot in the '80s, but the idea that New York is a place you come where you'll be accepted. You might not be liked, but you'll be tolerated. And you can make it. You can find people who will help you, and you'll create your own world.

Who on the Republican side of things—certainly nationally, but also locally—is acting that way? Because that seems to me something that's an opportunity, right? 

I think someone like Marco Rubio could make that argument. And I think does, from time to time.

Noticeably less so than when he emerged in the beginning of the teens.

With Trump…

And Trump is busy sending people escaping socialism in Venezuela back to Venezuela with a vacation…

I think it's a bad look. Look, I'm sympathetic to having borders and getting rid of people who are lawbreakers…

Absolutely.

The visual workers—

But I'm saying, in New York…

He's deporting future Republicans, by the way. These people—a lot of them—are going to be hardworking…

Oh, wait until they see how poorly run the prisons in Venezuela are. They're going to be lifelong Republicans.

But in New York City, is there a constituency for that, "What is great about New York? Everybody is kind of weird and different"? 

I think they're out there. I think if you get a Dominican billionaire—and I'm sure there are some, and there will be more—who wants to do what Bloomberg did: "I love the city. I want to make a huge difference. I can. I have credibility with immigrant groups."

I think that immigrant story is as vibrant as it's ever been. And I don't think we necessarily know who that is now. But I think there is clearly a market demand for that.

Ok, we're going to leave it there. The book is Drop Dead. The author is Richard Farley. The subtitle—I'm not going to repeat it, because it's too long.

You don't have enough time.

But this is fascinating because it is about a particular epic moment in urban history that's within memory—but totally it's forgotten—and might be happening again.

So thank you, Richard, for writing this.

Well, I hadn't lived a wholesome enough life to deserve Mamdani to come out right when the book was launching last month. But here we are.

Thank you. 

The post Could New York Go Bankrupt Again? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Today's guest is David Lowery, the legendary frontman of the bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, digital copyright crusader, and longtime Reason reader.

He dives deep into his sprawling, deeply personal new record Fathers, Sons and Brothers and the postwar California dream, talks about how the music industry broke, and suggests ways to maybe, just maybe, fix it.

He's sued Spotify and other streaming services, teaches business at the University of Georgia, and he's dropped what might be the best one-liner about selling out since The Who.

If you care about music, creative freedom, and getting paid for your work, this one is for you.

0:00—Intro

0:52—Lowery's Reason connection

2:34—Fathers, Sons and Brothers

15:25—Lowery's musical inspirations

19:25—Camper Van Beethoven

28:31—What it was like being indie in the '80s

35:48—Cracker and alternative rock

42:26—What does it mean to "sell out"?

48:56—Streaming music and artist compensation

58:01—Lowery's class-action lawsuits

1:01:07—Royalty rates and copyright protections

1:07:30—Has the DTC model improved the music business?

1:15:50—Optimism for the future of music

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: So, David Lowery, it is a pleasure to be talking to you. Thanks for talking to Reason.

David Lowery: Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here.

And you have told me in a different conversation, when you were a wee student at UC Santa Cruz, you had a roommate or a dorm mate who was a Reason reader. Can you remind me about that?

Yeah, well, there was a couple of connections to that. But yeah, I had a—he wasn't really a roommate, but he lived in the same building—was a guy that we just called Scott the Anarchist. And that was sort of where my introduction to the magazine came from. And then I later, when I was in college, I worked at a farm, which is detailed on this solo album. And the owner was just a full-blown anarcho-capitalist, I would say.

Did that mean you had to pay to leave the job every day or something like that? That could be a brutal regime.

Right. That's my description of him. We got along actually pretty well. But considering Santa Cruz was so lefty, my calculation is that I probably found the two libertarian anarchists in the whole county, right? And they sort of were influential to me in a lot of ways.

Well, it's always good, when you're in any kind of monoculture, to hang out with the people who are not quite fitting in.

Absolutely, absolutely.

We're going to talk about your experiences with Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker and the music industry more broadly, especially issues about IP as music shifted from kind of record stores and analog needles dragging through vinyl to streaming. All kinds of the interesting IP battles and the way that record labels went from being villainous for one reason and then for other reasons. We'll talk about that in a bit.

But first, I want to talk about the new record Father's Sons and Brothers, which is a musical memoir, a musical autobiography that you've released on vinyl as well as online. And you're writing a Substack where you explain the background of each song. Can you explain what you're trying to do with Father's Sons and Brothers and why now?

Right. So, I started this shortly before COVID. I sort of felt like there were some people in my life that deserved their own song or a little explanation or something like that. So, that's sort of a memoir-ish type thing. At the same time, I'd had several people urging me, like, "Now's the time of your life when you do the autobiography." But there's definitely a formula to doing these sort of rock autobiographies, and I didn't have a lot of the elements there, in my opinion.

I didn't struggle. The first album Camper Van Beethoven puts out is played on the BBC. So, there's a lot of tension that isn't there.

There's no airplane crash that wipes out half the band or anything.

That's right. I didn't have the parents that shipped me off to some sort of indoctrination camp because I became a punk rocker or something like that. None of those things happened to me. Everybody was supportive. I got lucky all the time. So, the shape of the written autobiography, to me, wasn't there.

Also, too, you write all the time, that's a very different skill than writing music. I only have to worry about five minutes. I just felt like this was going to be a whole new skill I was going to have to learn, to write an autobiography. So I thought, "Well,why don't I just do it with— I'm already checking some boxes, writing about some people that I need to write about. I'll just start recording CDs" essentially, and "I'll be done when I'm done. I'm recording these songs"

So, that's how it started.

Then, the other element of it, though, was interesting to me, because for me, it's easier for me to write music than it is to write lyrics. I know it may not sound like that, but it's hard to find things to sing about. I keep a little notepad file in my phone where I write down titles or an idea or something, just because I need those.

And this was easy because I'd be like, "Ok, talk about my sister now. I want to talk about my grandfather on my mom's side when I talk about this." It was a good plot device for me to do this. And then it matched the COVID shutdown where the music business sort of went away.

About a year into this, we had the COVID shutdown, and then it's like, "Okay, well, this is really personal." It's just me sitting with my little tiny digital eight-track recorder.

The opening song recollects your first memory or something close to it. But you write—you're in Georgia now, you've spent time in Virginia—but fundamentally, the musical space that you seem to occupy generally, but especially on this record, to me anyways, is California.

Can you talk a little bit about California? Like you mentioned in a song, a super bloom of a certain kind of flower or weed in the Coachella Valley. Talk a bit about that. What does California mean? Because California, in rock music, California is the backdrop for a lot of stuff. It seems like things very quickly left Philadelphia and New York—and being up on the rooftop in New York or being real hot in the city or something like that—to this California, which can mean a lot of different things. But what does California mean to you, and what does that super bloom represent to you?

Yeah. So, the super bloom was doing two things. The super bloom is the late-winter, early-spring burst of wildflowers that you will get in the desert if the conditions are right. Not every year. Sometimes it skips 10 years. And it's this explosion of life.

So in one way, I'm talking about the explosion of life in that it's my age—I'm like 14 years old, boys are growing, you're sort of getting elements of being an adult, and stuff like that. It was also California at that time, which had gone through kind of a super bloom. Everybody that was around me where we lived in California—my father was in the Air Force, he got stationed in California. Was in an area called the Inland Empire, which is right next to a separate area called the Coachella Valley. It had exploded with people, mostly immigrants from other parts of the United States, specifically a lot of people from the South, from Texas, from Oklahoma.

You had this wild blossoming not just of life but of the economy and culture and things like that. Most people tend to focus on San Francisco and Hollywood, at that time, or coastal LA, but the same thing happened inland in the deserts.

My grandparents came out there, and cousins came out there basically to work in the agricultural industry, and then shifted to servicing the rich people on the golf courses and the Hollywood celebrities in Palm Springs and stuff like that. It was just a really fascinating time—a good time to be alive in California. I have a more positive spin on it than, say, Joan Didion.

The dreamers of the dream and…

I have a more positive take on it than she does.

Yeah, talk about that. Because the Grapes of Wrath, of course, ends with the Okies leaving the Dust Bowl. Then you kind of skip ahead and get to Joan Didion or, before her, James Cain and hard boiled that—or Nathaniel West. California, particularly Southern California, is kind of the asshole of the country, and all of the bad people get shaken down into there. And it's a hard, grubby, déclassé life of endless yearning and dissatisfaction. You have a different view of that.

Well, yeah, my family came out of such poverty in Arkansas and personal tragedy as well too, which I go into on the record. My grandfather didn't read or write. He signed his name with an X. He basically took care—he was like horses, farming, agriculture. Figured out how to service people's pools—a little side business for him.

Swimming for a cement pond. Right.

Yeah. The cement pond. And for them, this was a wonderful life. They made decent money. They bought a house again. Eventually their children and the grandchildren heard about the wonderful life in California, and they all followed them out there. At first, they really were literally in the fields picking fruit. Picking dates was a big thing to do.

Amazing. 

It's dangerous work. And then, eventually, I don't think nobody ever got rich—although my uncle was the marshal of Riverside County at one point.

And you had a couple of cousins who got—

Who were on the other side of the law.

Yeah, that's right. You know, the album, though, is not some kind of super feel-good album. There's a lot of darkness and tragedy, but also hope in it. It reminded me a lot of another California transplant—who it didn't end up as well—Gram Parsons. But there's a touch in this album of what he used to call "cosmic American music," which is very rooted in Americana tradition, particularly blues and R&B and country, and what used to be called "hillbilly music". It's both uplifting and sad at the same time.

Does that resonate with you? It seems to me there's a whole vein—Brian Wilson died recently—and the Beach Boys, on the one hand, they're the happiest band on earth: they're upbeat, they all look good, have white teeth, blue eyes, and blonde hair. And yet there's something unbelievably sad and depressing about their music, I find. The Byrds are like this too. I don't think this album is not depressing, but it has that mix—it's upbeat, it's yearning, it's positive, but it's also deeply kind of riven with sadness and tragedy.

Yeah, so the song that probably does that the most is "Piney Woods," which discusses this area of Arkansas, Louisiana, and East Texas. I have a song that's kind of a study of the area. But specifically, if you listen to the melody of that song, it is almost totally major-key, almost straight-up melody. It's a very positive melody, but the subject matter of it—it got better and better the more I dealt with the details of the song, which is the suicide of my dad's brother.

That was the contrast that really made that song work. It's almost so folky, it harkens back more to the Celtic roots of the American forms. It's almost there. It's so folky. That's part of it. A lot of my perspective is an Inland California perspective, which is much more—Bakersfield, obviously—but it's much more infused with the Southern and the country rock music, whereas the Beach Boys have less of that in what they do. So that's a bit of it as well.

Who do you count as your musical icons? Because it was also interesting listening to this record—Neil Young during COVID, who, Canadian by birth, Californian by choice, I suppose—he released a bunch of performances as well as songs during COVID that were somehow set in a psychic California. That can be both upbeat and downbeat at the same time.

And I was thinking, you're like occupying the Riverside County—or, the Inland Empire version of Neil Young's Northern California. Who are your musical heroes that guide you?

Well I think I'm probably pretty influenced, honestly, by the classic rock artists and stuff like that. But if you want to talk specifically about this sort of little niche I've moved into, I would say the biggest influence probably was Kaleidoscope. With the American, with David Lindley…

One song of theirs I know well, I believe, is "The Sky Children."

I don't know if I know that. There are two Kaleidoscopes. There's a British Kaleidoscope, and there's a Southern California…

Oh, okay, so this may be the other one. But talk about Southern California Kaleidoscope.

So California Kaleidoscope—they were also from the Inland Empire. It was David Lindley, who's a fiddler, guitarist—he played with everybody from Jackson Browne, did television themes, all kinds of stuff. But this was his '60s psychedelic folk band. They all played different instruments. They all play fiddle at some point on the record. I remember I started Camper Van Beethoven, and I gave a tape to Ray Farrell from SST, and he goes, "Oh, so you guys loved Kaleidoscope growing up?" And I was like, "Who?" "From your neighborhood, how do you not know them?" Right?

So in a way, that's the big Camper Van Beethoven influence.

And then from there, I suppose, I had to retroactively discover stuff. I had to discover Bruce Springsteen in the mid-2000s. Things like that would happen to me just because, I don't know, I had some impression of what he was about, and it was wrong.

So in a way, there's some of Bruce Springsteen's "Ghost of Tom Joad" in this album. In fact, to the point where I accidentally took a chord progression. But the progressions aren't copyrightable.

Well, give it time.

Give it time, yeah. So it's kind of all over the place. But for this record, I'd point to those two—literally Kaleidoscope and… I know Bruce Springsteen is sort of playing characters, and then telling their stories. In this, I'm not playing a character, but sort of his randomness where he'll talk about really specific things—like a woman's shoe, he ties her shoe, as he fits her for a shoe. Really small details that makes the song come to life. So I've got to say, there's some of that in there as well too. I could go on and on listing…

Let's talk about Camper Van Beethoven, because they were a band—I wrote for the American version of Smash Hits, which was, if you ever wanted to confess to a murder, that was the magazine to do it in because nobody read it. But I remember coming across Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. I reviewed it. I gave it a thumbs-up—or we might have used two fingers up or three fingers up because we were cheeky and different.

But Camper Van Beethoven was one of the archetypal indie rock bands of the '80s, when that mattered. And there's an irony that is infused in that music that is—you know, I don't know how to describe it. Can you talk about where that came from?

And one of the songs on Father, Sons, and Brothers, you reference "Take the Skinheads Bowling," which became this mass hit. That was life-changing for you because that made the band popular in a way that meant you were going forward in the music industry. Can you talk about where the ironic sensibility of Camper Van Beethoven came from, and then how "Take the Skinheads Bowling" being popular changed the direction of your life?

Yeah, so Camper Van Beethoven was a reaction to the seriousness of hardcore punk rock—which hadn't started that way, by the way. Hardcore West Coast punk rock and post-punk British stuff—everything was heavy. And there's a little bit of the punk rock spirit that always forces you to talk about whatever the status quo is.

In our case, our status quo had become punk rock and the post-punk rock scene that we all grew up in. I remember our demo tape at some point got reviewed by the punk fanzine Maximum Rocknroll—

Oh wow, yeah.

—where they just said, "Hey, these guys don't sound punk, but they're absolutely the spirit of punk," in a way. So that encouraged us.

It was us being ironic or tongue-in-cheek while still trying to be serious—maybe the way that Kurt Vonnegut writes. There's some humor, or non-seriousness, in his serious writing. That's also a very postmodern sort of thing. We're of second order. There's a second-order meaning in the songs.

We really don't want to play lacrosse in the song "Club Med Sucks". It's tongue-in-cheek is what we're saying. That just worked for us immediately, and we felt like, "well, we could be a serious band." The Beatles did that sometimes. Kinks did that a lot. So it just didn't frighten us away.

Why do you think punk got so serious? Because when it started—and it's useless to get into strict definitions of punk, etc. It started as a burst of energy and a reaction to prog rock or over-serious mega productions done by hippies, let's say. And it was fun and exciting. And it was short. Then it itself became really serious, especially the Southern California punk scene. It seemed to, you know—like with Ronnie Reagan and everything was serious and political. Why did that happen?

I'm not really sure. But I mean, there is a tendency, when you belong to a group, to want to dress the same or with a similar sensibility, and that gets more and more refined. There's a Substack and long-running blog called Punk Turns 30—which I think now it's probably Punk Turns 45 now. I believe it's Teresa Karyotis and Pleasant Gehman who still run that blog.

They have a lot of photos—Tracy was a blogger and she photo-documented it. And there's a point where like the '78—the way people looked in '78 in the LA punk rock scene, what they were wearing—it was a wide platter of styles. It narrows down over the next few years. I assume something like that also happens with music. It sort of the building of a community out of something anarchic causes that.

And that's what Camper is reacting to. It's like, "Okay, let's do that. Let's wear the hippie clothes. I'm going to wear a poncho—punk rock." That's us trying to take it apart again.

So "Take the Skinheads Bowling." Talk a little bit about how you came to write that song and then how it was successful.

Yeah, so it's kind of the same—it's part of that impulse. So that's when a lot of us— say '83 or something like that— are noticing that some part of punk rock had become very dogmatic. You kind of got the skinheads, and they'd got their look. Not all of them were—there was just a kind of moral panic about nazi skinheads. I never saw any, but they were sort of seen as a bad part of the movement.

So this is us kind of mocking them at first, in a song, in a single line, that doesn't really mean anything. And because it didn't mean anything, it became a little project of mine to take this song idea we had come up with and just make it so that it didn't make any sense, didn't say anything, and didn't mean anything—in reaction to everything that came before us.

So I'm like really carefully with each line going,"Okay, I'm going to say something now, and it seems like I'm going somewhere. Now I'll say something else and it doesn't lead you anywhere." It was just completely an absurdist impulse or something like that.

But that song being so much that way and being so different, and also just having a catchy hook on the chorus. When we mailed it out, and this is us really mailing it out to BBC DJs, I think it just stood out. I think it just really stood out. They looked at it and they saw that title on the record they were like, "Well, what is this?" Then they put it on the turntable and like, "Oh, this is catchy. We can play this."

There's nothing else on that record that is as catchy and also as a fun chorus. So, my take on all of this is: the fact that, that went on the record—and it's kind of buried on the record; it's like track seven or something like that—the fact that that song took off really changed our trajectory.

I could have easily seen us— we were a very hyperactive, creative group of people, not always on the same page together—but the fact that we kind of had this single, we had to go around and play that song, as well as our other songs, focused our mind. I think in a lot of ways, without that song, we wouldn't have gone on to do— we might've made a couple of records and then wandered off and done other things. That song really made it so I was, me at least, I was at least on a professional musician-songwriter path. From on the first record I think, "My life is different." And that's kind of what I talk about in that song.

You were saying earlier that you don't have the ingredients of the classic kind of Behind the Music documentary biography. But on Fathers, Sons and Brothers, you do have a song about the end of Camper Van Beethoven, which takes place on ferries and going to Sweden and whatnot. So, there's a little bit of that.

What was it like to be an indie darling in the '80s, though, as that concept was— When you go back and look to the '60s, nobody wanted to be a boutique indie artist in the '60s. They wanted to be on Top of the Pops, or the Top 40. Even through the '70s, when you think of somebody like Bruce Springsteen, he doesn't matter if he's not on CBS Records or something, or he matters less.

In the '80s, with the rise of what was called college rock—and we'll get to the high point of alt music in a bit—being an indie artist where you could be quirky and inventive and offbeat and get compensated for it, that seemed like you were living the life, right? I mean, what did it feel like to be like that? And what kind of pressures go into maintaining that, as opposed to doing the same thing over and over again?

Yeah, so you actually hit on something. There is an economic component to this '80s indie rock, '90s indie rock thing. The reason that folks in the '60s and '70s—you may have been underground, but you were trying to rise to the top of the charts was because that was where the money was. You needed money to keep the whole thing going. Even if you're driven by an intense artistic vision, you do need that.

In the '80s, the independent music systems kind of blossomed and came of age. Indie music was called "indie" at first because of how you organized your band business. You went through independent distributors, your records were sold at independent record stores, and you were probably only on college radio or non-commercial radio.

Suddenly, you could make a decent living. Maybe you weren't rich, but you could be a middle-class artist off of the system—and we were. We bought a car. I didn't buy a house—it was Santa Cruz, California—but that was one element of it.

But it also began to have a lot of rules that went along with it. I didn't feel like it had those rules at first. But eventually, sort of, rules developed. I remember there was a backlash to the fact that Camper Van Beethoven covered Status Quo's "Pictures of Matchstick Men" and kind of had a hit with it. A lot of critics grumbled at us on that album because, "Hey, you're doing a cover song that's not even your own song."

So there were odd pressures like that. I remember a couple years later, Cracker's first album, an ad agency came to us and they wanted our song for a beer commercial. It was Coors, actually, I think. Which, at that time, seemed to be a real no-no. But it was so much money, we were like, "Take it. Take it."

There were literally op-eds in the music trades about whether we should have taken that commercial.

And both because it was a commercial to begin with, and then because it was Coors, which was associated with—Coors went from being cool when Paul Newman drank it in the '60s and '70s, before it was available nationally, to being a dangerously right-wing beer because the Coors family somehow were funding the Contras against the Sandinistas or something.

Well, it was something like that. And so, we kind of stepped in it. But we were like, it was so much money. You get record advances, but you have to spend the record advances on the record. Sometimes some of that money goes to touring, too. You might get additional advances for touring.

The pressures of being an indie artist—it's not that you're totally free of pressures. It's a different set, right?

It was a different set of pressures. And then I think the music sort of became stylized. At first, what was "indie" was all over the map because it literally was, it was just describing a separate economic system for distributing and selling records. That was based on punk rock methods.

It wasn't punk rock anymore.

That's much more do-it-yourself, you record the records, you produce the records or, go to the record pressing plant, get it out, and then literally are mailing it out to smaller record stores and things like that. 

Or using an independent distributor to do that. We used Rough Trade, which was a vertical stores, a distributor, and a label as well. Eventually, we sort of had a deal with them exclusively for a while.

And then did Camper Van Beethoven sign with Virgin?

We signed with Virgin, which at first was the largest independent in the world.

It has an interesting history. Richard Branson's an interesting, charismatic figure in the music business—before he was known for his other ventures.

A guy who became a major record label owner by doing Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, right?

Yeah, the soundtrack to The Exorcist and selling it out of the trunk of his car. Us signing with him—even though he was basically considered part of the major label world when we signed—was to us like, "Well, here's the bridge." This guy is the bridge between worlds. And literally, I talk about it in one song on Fathers, Sons and Brothers.

I remember at some point trying to give a theory of our album, our upcoming album, Camper Van Beethoven's Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, to one of the executives there, who was the president at the time—Jeff Ayeroff—who immediately was just like, kind of didn't have time for me but didn't want to be mean. It was just like, "Look, look, don't worry about it. Just write songs. You'll write a hit."

That's the old-school music business, right? Throw 10 records against the wall, see what sticks. "Just give us a bunch of songs. Don't stop writing. Don't stop recording. Give us a bunch of songs. We'll worry about everything else." That was a great time to transition into the major labels because there was still that approach to creativity. Not everybody, but there were still a lot of people like that in the business.

And then as Camper Van Beethoven ends at the end of the '80s and you transition to Cracker—can we talk a bit about, by that point, alt music or alternative music became to the fore. And it seemed as if not just in the music industry but more broadly that things like rock music were fading in their cultural hold, and stuff was opening up.

The labels—this happened to the movie studios certainly at the end of the '60s, and it continues to happen with publishing houses, etc.—where they realize they no longer understand their business, or they don't understand their audiences. And they either get rigid and say, "No, we're not doing anything different," or they go all in on trying all different types of things.

But it seems like when you look at the early '90s music scene, so much is going on. And you came into it with Cracker in a really good position, right? Because you kind of got to punch your own ticket economically within the mainstream, which was desperately trying to appeal to something known as an "alternative nation." Can you talk a little bit about what that was like?

Yeah. So Camper Van Beethoven had gotten onto MTV in regular rotation—not just on the special shows, although the special shows were hugely important. 120 Minutes was landmark. That introduced the underground to middle America.

We were on—not really heavily—but we were in regular rotation on MTV. There were also about 30 commercial stations, maybe 50 around the country, that were playing modern rock. I don't even know if it was called alternative rock yet, but they were commercial radio stations. And we were one of their bands.

When Camper Van Beethoven breaks up and I then I create this band, Cracker, with my friends, we put out a record. We sort of get the seat that Camper Van Beethoven had been holding, in a way. Even though we're different, we do kind of, you know—and what had happened was that those 30 to 50 stations with Camper Van Beethoven had now expanded to this panel of 200 or 300 stations, because rock radio—AOR rock radio—was dying, and they were looking for something else.

There was also probably the deregulation of the radio business, where you suddenly had chains of radio stations

Part of it was, we made good songs. We made good records. Plenty of people make good songs and good records and get popular. We were kind of in the right place at the right time. We were in this modern rock radio format. We were a core band. And it explodes nationally. That's really when we're in a pop star part of the music business, although we were alternative rock stars.

But then the center can't hold, right? The early '90s—it's fascinating looking back on it, and it was kind of evident—you have bands like you, Nirvana and the grunge sound coming up big. You have Guns N' Roses, which is obviously about to destroy itself.

There had been a kind of resurrection of straight-on American rock and roll, or whatever they were claiming to do. And then you had all this other stuff—in terms of rap and hip-hop really coming into its own. How did you navigate that, musically?

When you're playing in something like that do you become more experimental, or do you become more focused on what you are doing alone?

There's always the impulse to make sure—coming from management, from labels, and just you as an artist—you're like, "I've got to be aware of what other people are doing, what the audience wants," to a certain extent, while not pandering to it. And that's always a tricky line to walk.

So you hear on Cracker's 1996 The Golden Age, in a way, that's sort of the most alternative rock album that we make. But it's almost a year or two behind, by the time it comes out,  it's almost a year or two behind what alternative rock had become. Alternative rock had become much harder. It was leaning toward metal, it was leaning toward metal rap.

The first two Cracker records are very Americana, roots-oriented, but they had songs that fit on alternative rock radio. Golden Age tries to lean into the alternative rock stuff a little bit. But we do clever things—like we hire Beck's dad, David Campbell, an amazing string arranger, to arrange a lot of this stuff. So it's cool and weird and angular strings on it and all kinds of stuff.

By the time we get to the fourth album, Gentleman's Blues, we're like, "Ok, alternative rock radio is going off someplace else. That's not the style of music we write. It's not our strength." And we just completely make, essentially, roots rock record.

Kind of coming into its own as well—or finding an audience.

Yes, jam bands were sort of reinvigorating that space or something like that. So in one way, yes, we did follow the trends a little bit. I mean, because we're like, "Hey, man, we're good musicians. We're good writers. We can write anything." We're not selling our soul by doing this. But we are following the trends a little bit—but it's really only for one record. And then we're like, "Ok, that didn't work."

These are kinds of conversations seem to have died, and I think that's generally a good thing—the idea that if you're an artist and you sell out…

I mean, The Who obviously have an album called The Who Sell Out from the '60s. And I guess The Byrds—"So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star"—talking about selling out to the company or whatever. We can go on and on. In the late '80s and certainly in the '90s, that seemed to be front of mind for many people. The main thing is man: "Don't sell out."

Did you guys worry about that—that you might be selling out? Or were you kind of like, "What the fuck does that even mean?"

Yeah, with Cracker especially, there's a little bit of, "We're just going to be iconoclasts." If selling out is uncool, we're going to do it. Or we're going to claim to do it—whether we are or not. You're kind of trolling people in a way. We didn't have that word then, but there was a little of that in our persona.

It even says in "Get Off This," the second, on the second album—I can't remember lyrics unless I sing them—but we talk about: "Is it true that you have sold your soul?" "I don't know, man. Lend me a quarter, I'll call my accountant," right?

I don't know if anybody can even tell what we're saying in that song. But we're playing with that. We're reacting against that.

Plus, a lot of the bands that were underground at one point and were deemed the coolest of the cool—like the Soundgarden and Nirvana and Pearl Jam—were selling tens of millions of records.

That's right.

So by that point, we're like, "I don't know what 'selling out' means." Exactly what you're saying. And that's kind of what kills it. By '94, you're like, "I don't know what selling out is."

Right. I mean, being true to your school—if you're not selling any records, that might mean that you're just not making good music, which is not necessarily true.

Right. Not necessarily true. You might be ahead of the curve.

Yeah. I mean, you can be Alex Chilton, but nobody wants to be Alex Chilton when he's 40 or 45 years old.

That's exactly right

And he fucked up his second bite at the apple, I guess. To talk about trolling: What went into the making of Tusk—your cover of what is one of the most controversial and kind of bizarre Fleetwood Mac records?

Yeah. So Camper Van Beethoven covers the album Tusk. It was partly because we had decided to get back together, but we thought it would actually be funny if we didn't really tell anybody.

I don't know why—this is just the high concepts that amuses us. So we released, first, this thing called Camper Van Beethoven Is Dead, Long Live Camper Van Beethoven, basically telling people that we got back together in the song titles—but nobody getting it.

There were some outtakes, there were some leftovers from the early career that we put on this album, but a lot of stuff was new that we created. We released a fake-out oddities album as our first record back together. Even though there are clues all the way through it—including a thing in Morse code which explains what we're doing on the record—nobody got it.

So they were like, "Ok, that was fun. That kind of worked." People were like, "Oh, there's a bunch of Camper oddities that were never released." We're like, "Ok, that's fun. So what should we do?"

"Oh, I know what we should do—we should release a cover of an entire album." I don't know who came up with the idea—it might've been Jonathan—but someone came up with it and said, "We should release a cover of an entire album, cover the entire album, and say that we recorded it back in the '80s and we discovered the tapes."

What would that album be? And of course, everybody goes, Tusk. Because we were obsessed with Tusk by Fleetwood Mac.

So in some ways, what we're doing with that album is also trying to rehabilitate that album, because—even though it's spotty, and there's some bad stuff on it that really doesn't quite work on that Fleetwood Mac album. There's a lot of great stuff on that album. And it's just really an unusual work of art.

Oh, and I mean, they owned the industry at that point. They could do whatever they wanted. And on some level, it is a monument to self-indulgence, and on another level, it's kind of rock. But why not do whatever the fuck you want when you're coasting off of Rumours, right?

So what we did was we re-recorded that album but had this fake press release that said we recorded it in 1986 in California, staying at a friend's parents' cabin. We got snowed in, so we decided to cover Tusk on a four-track.

So we tried to record it on a four-track. We were recording on professional equipment, but we tried to keep it to four tracks. We couldn't. The law of tracks just comes in, filling them all up. But we did use a drum machine from that year to sort of give it the feel of that year.

So we released this fake thing from our—this thing that wasn't really from our catalog—and put this album out. And it got everybody talking about that album. We did it in like three days, like we said, and got everybody talking about that album which was kind of the point of that album. We thought this was a great record, and it deserved its due so here's another look at that record. Maybe people will come to love the Tusk album, which I think we were part of. Yeah, we were imitating that album in the eyes of a lot of people.

Let's jump ahead to some of your criticisms and actual legal actions against streaming services and whatnot. Because you—and at various points, everybody in the bands you've been associated with—are incredibly tech-savvy. People have worked at places like Pandora and are computer programmers.

Your music is heavily, heavily indebted to technology and a knowledge and love of forward avant technology. You've been critical—particularly about 10 or 15 years ago—you were very critical of the way that streaming services did not compensate content creators. You pointed out in several interviews, I think, that for a million streams or plus of "Low," one of Cracker's best-known songs— it talks about a junkie cosmonaut in one line. And it is of the great rock lyrics that has stuck in my head forever, I'll probably say it on my deathbed. But for a million streams of that on Pandora, you would get paid as the writer and as a performer on it, something like $17.

So I think in that article I detailed that it's actually about $140 that goes towards the label, the publisher, the performers, and the songwriter. But my actual share of that, as being a band on a label, was $17. And I'm the major writer on that. I have the most writing on it. But I do explain that.

That is specifically with Pandora, which at that time was non-interactive streaming. So the royalties were very, very low on that. They're a bit higher when you get to interactive streaming.

This is one of the reasons it's great to talk about this on this podcast is that a lot of people don't realize this, but at least the songwriting part of the music business is highly regulated. For instance, in the digital realm, songwriters don't really set the price for their songs, nor do they negotiate with anybody.

There are these compulsory licenses. And the formula for paying those artists is set by an administrative law board in the Library of Congress called the Copyright Royalty Board. What happened was— always good intentions—in the '90s, the federal government saw the digital age coming and said, "What should we do about music and copyright with these new digital services that are coming? We'll make some compulsory licenses."

There's different ones depending on how it's being used, but I don't want to go on that. But effectively, those rates and the formulas determining the rates for songwriters, eliminated any sort of market for songs in the digital realm and also set the rates too low.

When you say they set the rates too low, what do you mean by that?

If I write a song 100 percent, and I own all the publishing on it—I don't sell any of it off to anybody—on a streaming service, on the best-paying streaming services, I might get a little under a tenth of a penny for each stream.

So take a five-minute song and you say, "Well, how long does this have to play for me to make a dollar? For me to make $12?" You end up with these enormously large—somebody's paying five bucks for three weeks of solid music or something. Maybe even three months, I can't remember what it was.

There's no free market, so it is hard to say what the value is. I guess that's a subjective opinion, but it doesn't seem right.

And the rates are certainly lower than they were for radio play.

Yes, but that's also—

But that's also complicated, yeah.

That's complicated in the sense that each stream is listened to by hundreds, maybe thousands of people, if you're lucky, on the radio. But you also have this real advertising business that has real money. Paying for radio ads is where the dollars were. Advertising supported streaming services, that's also a weird business, there's not very much money in that. I'm sure Reason needs subscribers, not just advertisers, because digital advertising rates are so low.

So, it's a subjective opinion that it's too low. But there's a lot of circumstantial evidence—when you look at other things and how things behaved in non-digital markets—that it is a lot lower.

That's one problem.

The other problem was just sheerly that when the streaming services launched, the way the law was written, they had to go through a process to actually get the federal licenses. And a lot of them just didn't do that. What ended up happening was, they didn't really know who to pay.

So there was a whole class of independent artists that were never licensed and never got any royalties—no matter how low. The class actions were aimed at that—not the low rates—but just the fact that these services were not paying a large class of songwriters.

That involved platforms like Spotify, probably most notably. I've seen different class action suits that you were involved in or really helped lead, calling for $40 million or $20 million or being settled. And that was for nonpayment of royalties.

And Spotify or the platform would say, "Well, we're happy to pay these very low royalty rates, but we have no idea who they are or where we wouldd send the payment to, so we're not going to do it." 

How were those cases settled?

They were settled because we had them—hands down.

I'm going to say something that's going to surprise a lot of people here: it's not necessarily Spotify's fault. In the case of Spotify and a couple of these other services because they hired a third party.

But they were liable.

We started out intending to sue the third party. But we got to the lawyers and the lawyers were like, "Yeah, but they're not really liable. It's the services that are liable."

Yeah, it's a little crazy. You're like, "Hey, I'm an artist. I enter this digital age and there's this one dominant player—Spotify. And I'm going to launch a class action against them." That could be career suicide—or maybe not. I don't really know.

But all the services did effectively the same thing—to some extent or another. They were not paying a lot of the independent writers.

I think after everything was all said and done it was like $100 million that Spotify paid out. The other services were much lower amounts because they didn't have the market share.

But it did drive the Music Modernization Act, which gave us a better system for licensing, collecting, and distributing those royalties. So now we're back to the first problem—it's that the rates are too low—but at least we've got the money coming in.

So what it did, it drove a reform of the Copyright Act.

Before we talk about the royalty rates or modernizing those or changing those—out of, say, the $100 million, you always hear about class action lawsuits where they get settled and there's a big amount, but the actual claimants end up with pennies. Is that what happened here?

And I'm thinking back to the tax—which I have not bought a blank cassette or videotape in years—but they all have taxes on them, which are for a pool of money that's supposed to go to uncompensated creators.

Well, nobody signs up for that. So it's weird, though, if you did sign up for that, in the day when people were recording on blank cassettes, if you did sign up for those royalties, it ended up being fairly substantial because nobody was signing up for it. Mostly the labels were signing up for it, but on the performer side, nobody was signing up for those.

Kind of the same thing happened with our— well there's multiple class actions; they get split off in different ways, so they're all different.

But with the Spotify class action, that pool of money had to go to the writers that signed up for it. So people got substantial payouts, that signed up for it. I have all these weird little NDAs associated with this settlement, so I'm never sure what I can say.

But it was substantial. People talked about it like, "Wow, I actually got real money from a class action." So that was good.

But you talk about these class actions where—this is something people don't know about me—talk about these class actions where people don't get any money. I was actually the objector to a case that went to the Supreme Court on a class action that I looked at it and was like, "Hey, I'm in this class, and they gave all the money away to—."

Google basically gave all the money away—remeber when Google drove around and swept up everybody's Wi-Fi traffic—so it's one of the class actions associated with that. The settlement judges approved was essentially giving the money to all these NGOs that Google was funding anyway, and also universities that the attorneys were alumni of the law school there.

So me and this guy Ted Frank, attorney Ted Frank came to me—he loved me coming on because I was a leader of a class action and then I came on as his objector to object to these settlements. In the end, we moved the ball a little, but didn't really win anything.

But yeah, that's a huge abuse class action lawsuit where no money goes to the class. It just goes to the attorneys.

With the royalty rates for plays on streaming services—in at least one respect—they're better than for radio, right? Because the performers on streams get some small; they are in the pool of money. But what would make you feel like you were made whole? How would rates have to change as an artist?

Because part of the argument, and I'm thinking back to the old kind of copyright abolitionist position—which is that the idea behind copyright is to incentivize people to make music, or write books, or create stuff. And that's going to happen anyway, so maybe the royalty rates are not that important?

Yes and no. There are definitely bands that have built up economic models—you think of the Grateful Dead, you think of Phish—that are based on giving their music away largely and taking their revenue from live shows, basically. People who write songs will probably write songs.

The problem is the tail-off is when you get into more expensive things—like films—you've got to have some sort of copyright regimen to make films. But also with songwriters and performers, I feel like I made my best work once I got into my 30s, or maybe even now. I think at some point, you stop producing as many songs if you have to have another job.

So the effect in music is more felt out in album four, five, six, seven—which a lot of artists they never get there with copyright or not. But over and over, the classic great artists, they really hit their stride during those albums. I think that's where you'd see the effect on music, which can be made fairly cheaply—I'll give you that. I think it more that way.

But I also don't like the fact that it empowers freeloaders and platforms that seem to always end up being noncompetitive if you don't have copyright. Effectively, copyright is like the eminent domain cases where the government takes your right and gives it to a private entity. That's the way compulsory licenses work in the digital realm. That has a lot of unintended consequences that are not good.

Ok, so the rates, what would be the rates?

The first thing I would do is just remove the compulsion. Remove the compulsory licenses. Maybe move to something like, I don't want to get technical, there's something called extended collective licensing, where the first thing you would do is you would move to letting people have an opt out. Those who are happy with the system would stay in the system. Those who weren't would remove themselves from the system and be faced with the prospect of having to license their stuff outside of that system.

I guess what I'm getting at is, I don't know if there's a single price for every single song. What we have right now is that we have a price for every single song. I think all songs have different prices. I think they decay over time, I think the value of a song can decay over time. Some songs start out at a low value and become very valuable.I think you want to insert a lot more economic choice into the system. And I'm not an expert. There was a librarian of Congress who wrote about a system—Beth Peters, I believe it was her—who wrote about an extended collective licensing systems. Which would transition us back to more economic choice on these things. I would sunset the compulsory licenses, because that's the problem: I can't point to a market price for a song in streaming.

Right. And that's fascinating to think about happening at a time—this is slightly different, but related—as albums became disintermediated, through the rise of Apple Music and even Napster.

Why should all songs cost 99 cents or whatever?

I will confess to being a very active Napster user. It actually got me back into music because I used it as a sampling service, then I would go out and buy high-quality things. But when Napster became legal, and I was about to buy a song for a dollar, I thought, "Well, I don't want to buy 'Norwegian Wood' by the Beatles. Because it's like a minute and 58 seconds long." Then I was like, "Maybe I'll do 'Miracles' by Jefferson Starship—it's five and a half minutes long." I ended up buying "Dream Weaver" because it was even longer.

And I said, "What the fuck is going on here?" But the point is taken that different songs should have different prices. We're willing to pay different prices for them.

You're old enough to remember the record clubs, right? I mean, that was built on the notion that this album is 18 months old. It's got a much lower price now. And so what we're doing is we're bundling it all together with a bunch of stuff.

Part of what's interesting— in your written work, and I suspect in the business classes that you teach at Georgia—you talk about this. One of the things that the rise of digital everything gave us was this dream of disintermediation. Where, finally, buyer and seller—you cut out the middleman and you can market directly to your customers. Your customers can find you because they don't have to go through these gatekeepers of various values.

And we can set aside, for a moment, that intermediaries are essential to capitalism and good functioning markets. And they tell you what's out there.They do quality control, all sorts of positive things.

But for the purposes of this conversation, disintermediation did not seem to deliver the promises to artists, to musical artists, that we were kind of hoping for. In a way it's true, it's easier now than ever, if you have 5,000 true fans, you can make a living off of that. If you're a writer and you're on Substack you can go directly to people and that's good.

But in a 2012 address that was titled Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss, the thing that is still around is that somehow it's either Spotify, or it's Columbia Records or something—these big giant entities that end up collecting all the money.

I remember in the Senate hearings on Napster, listening to Roger McGuinn—the leader of the Byrds who had a good solo career, he was well known, he was in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame—testifying that he had never received a royalty. On any of the records he was ever involved in because somehow they never paid back the advance.

It's like, "Wow." The commercial music industry has in some significant way been exploitative of artists, of the content creators, for its entire history. And it just seems to be able to continue to do that in new ways. Do you feel, is it that bad? Or is the scene better now—for people like you and people without your reputation and your track record?

Well, I wouldn't trade it for the old business, the business now for the old business. Who's going to put out an autobiographical record for a 64-year-old guy? Which label would have done that in the '70s? They would have to be somebody who would just want to take a chance on me.Creatively, there's a lot more control that's enabled by all these digital platforms. But it's definitely hard to get your money away from the free riders out there—which we've always had a problem with—or the platforms or the intermediaries.

I, fortunately, came up in the business in the late '80s and the '90s when there was a lot of money beginning to  slosh around the business. It was really competitive for the labels to sign artists. It was a very competitive marketplace. We got pretty good contracts in that era.

By the '90s, we definitely got pretty good contracts because the artists seemed to have a lot of power in the business and there was a lot of money splashing around. But Roger McGuinn grew up in a different time where you have very low royalty rates.

The way the recoupment was counted was often— the way that calculation was made, you basically never saw any money. But the difference is at least you got advances in the old days, so you weren't financing the creation of the records out of your pockets, which is essentially what we do today if you do get advances they're much, much smaller. A lot of times for indie artists what you're doing is you're making the recording and then you're basically providing the music to the platforms— it's like, "We'll just pay you every time we use it."

The economic problem is the capital accumulation to make a record is pushed back onto the artist. And you're sort of financing these platforms. And that just seems like a problem to me. But there's all kinds of other ways of dealing with it, which everybody's gone back to selling physical products.

I remember the first time I downloaded Napster, I saw something downloaded on Napster, it was in my studio—in the control room computer. Somebody needed to hear a song and one of the interns is like, "Here, I put Napster on there, let me go get it for you." And I looked at that and I was like, "Wow."

And I was looking to see what songs were on there and I just go, "Ok, so we're gonna have a system where albums are either going to be $100 or free." Is this going to be up to the fan, some deluxe edition? And that's kind of what we have with vinyl. My CX set listing at about 80 bucks—or it's free, practically free on a streaming service.

Has it pushed back? I heard Rick Rubin interviewed Todd Rundgren sometime recently. And Rundgren, who is also somebody who's very tech-savvy and actually was on an early verge—like a precedent of Patreon in the late '90s—but talked about how what we're going back to is an older model for music, where it's really about performing. And that's where the money is going to be, because that's the thing that you can actually monetize.

Do you feel like something like that is true? And is it good or bad, or is it just different?

It's just different. And it might actually favor the top tier of artists more than the bottom tier.

You know, touring is a very low-margin business. In fact, you know, most of the time artists would kind of lose a little money on tour, and then you come home, and the record sales would sort of be your payment—your shots, or your royalties, or whatever—would be kind of your payment, or the record company would pay you to go on tour.

So it's a low-margin business. We're just on the other side of the line where we can make money on touring and kind of figure it out with Cracker. I don't think Camper Van Beethoven is. I think they're on the other side of the line.

So in a weird way, like, if I was just in Cracker, I would look at this and have a much more positive account in the world.

Also, we have hits that are recurrent. I mean, we have songs that are cataloged with Cracker—they're played 30 to 45 million times a year or something like that. That's a significant amount of revenue. And that, to me, I'm like, that's probably extra money that we wouldn't have normally got under the old system.

Whereas with Camper Van Beethoven—relied on album sales—there's a bifurcated system. It works for some business models and not for others.

Live music is low-margin. I think if you're a big enough star—or even if you can just do the soft tickets in the festivals, which is mostly what Cracker does—you make money off of it. But I don't think you do for Camper Van Beethoven.

So that's why you see people putting their music for sale on Bandcamp and not on the streaming service—where you have to buy it upfront. You pay for all your streams essentially and stuff like that. Where you sell CDs, or you sell vinyl albums.

It was only recently jazz labels went to streaming, because they were still… physical sales, holding onto the old system.

It's a mixed path.

To perhaps drive to a finish here, you're teaching at the University of Georgia. You teach courses about the business of music and things like that.

Are your students optimistic about the future? Is there still a music industry—or is even that just using the wrong terminology? How will people make money off music in the future, and are people optimistic about that?

Well, you definitely still can make money on the live side. My wife is an executive and promotes concerts and stuff like that. This year's not so great, but the last few years have been pretty good.

You can make money off of live music—you always can make money off live music. The jury's a little more out on recorded music—how that plays out, and the models that work.

Young people are naturally optimistic. They think they're going to crack the nut, so I don't have to. I just need to give them the tools, and they'll go out there and try to crack the nut, you know what I mean, like try to figure out how to do this.

And I feel like I have a lot of ex-students who are figuring it out. They may not be making the kind of living I did in the '90s—or even in the late '80s—but they're getting there. There's some sort of career there.

Many of my students are actually trying to be on the business side. And they're doing pretty well. They're almost always go out and work for management or get a job with a label. Whether they stick or not, they're going out and getting jobs. Most of them, if they do well in our classes, they mostly go out there and pursue a dream in the music business.

Now, they may only stay there for seven years and then say, "You know what, I did it. I'm going to go do something else." So I know I didn't quite answer the question there.

No, no, no—that answers it for me. I guess as a final question—and you kind of alluded to this earlier in our conversation—when you said you realized you were influenced by Bruce Springsteen years many after the fact and things like that…

One of the things that really comes through very strongly on Fathers, Sons and Brothers—and it's there in all the work you've been part of—is a really intense sense of tradition or genealogy.

And it's not in a hidebound, "We've got to play music exactly like they played in Mississippi, in 1952, on a porch" but being informed by that.

Could you talk a bit about how that seems to be, simultaneously, one of the things that is afforded by contemporary digital culture—is that you can find and consume any music that's ever been recorded. You can watch almost any movie that's been recorded. You can read any book. You know, there's so much more information.

And yet, it seems like people are less inclined to kind of figure out where they come from or how they fit into a particular tradition. And that seems to be important, because a lot of people are like, "I don't know who I am. I don't know where I'm going." And it's kind of like the tools are all here in front of you.

Could you talk a little bit about how you have done that? Because to me, that is written into the title of your album, but also kind of the body of your work.

It seems worth driving home.

Yeah, well, I got to do this experiment live with my career.

We did Camper Van Beethoven, where we would say, "Ok, let's play something that's like music from the Balkans played in a surf chorus." And we'd just go everywhere and do whatever—with the notion that we're not really going to get it right, and that's what's cool about it.

That's what we think is cool about listening to bands from the '60s who tried to do sitar music or something like that. They get it wrong. Right?

Eventually, with Camper Van Beethoven, we sort of discovered that, "Well, when we're playing stuff that sits more in the musical culture we've been immersed in—if we just sit back into that a little more—it seems to be more powerful."

By the time we get to Cracker, I'm leaning into that completely. I'm still going to do a little of this and that—there's a little postmodernism in there.

I'm trying to make a Chesterton's fence joke, but I can't quite figure out how to make it. It's not like we're sitting there trying to play traditional blues or traditional country or Appalachian folk music with Cracker. But we are sitting back more into the traditions we were raised in—where we just sort of intuitively know what we're supposed to play.

I think we're going to leave it there. David Lowery, thank you so much for talking to Reason. It's been a real treat for me.

Thank you, thanks for having me on.

The post Streaming Music Isn't a Free Market. It's a Regulated Monopoly. appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Today's guest is University of Texas historian John Lisle, author of the chilling and brilliantly researched Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA.

Despite official attempts to destroy records of the CIA's LSD-fueled search for mind control in the 1950s and '60s, the truth has been dribbling out, especially in recent books and documentaries such as Steven Kinzer's Poisoner in Chief and Errol Morris' Wormwood.

Lisle's work draws on previously unknown depositions and documents to deliver the most definitive—and disturbing—account yet. He discusses the twisted logic of Cold War secrecy, the bizarre figures behind and victims of America's darkest experiments, and what MKUltra reveals about the dangers of unchecked power in a democracy.

And this might be the most important thing: He and Nick Gillespie talk about why conspiracy theories thrive in the absence of transparency—and how to preserve skepticism without surrendering to paranoia.

0:00—Intro

1:32—What is MKUltra?

3:42—Brainwashing origins in the Korean War

6:50—Who is Sidney Gottlieb?

10:43—The CIA's startup culture

20:37—Who is Ewen Cameron?

24:32—Jolly West and implanting memories

28:24—MKUltra gets shut down

31:08—How MKUltra documents came to light

39:38—Main lessons from MKUltra

46:57—Politicization of intelligence agencies

51:03—Conspiracy thinking and the legacy of MKUltra

58:31—COVID-19 and the collapse of righteous authority

The Soho Forum Debate: Jacob Hacker vs. David Goldhill, July 16

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: John Lisle, thanks for talking to Reason.

John Lisle: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

All right, the book is Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra. I suspect that our more conspiracy-minded and history-minded listeners and watchers know what MKUltra is, but summarize what MKUltra was.

Yes, thanks for having me again. MKUltra was this program by the CIA, starting in the 1950s. And the goal of MKUltra was to determine whether methods of mind control are possible. The CIA wanted to know, for instance, whether you could create a truth drug—could you give someone you're interrogating a drug that can make them spill the truth, make them tell the truth no matter what? Could you slip something in someone's drink and make them behave in a certain way—either make them seem erratic or potentially control their behaviors and beliefs?

That's kind of the overarching goal of MKUltra. They did that through various means. Some of the reasons why the people who were in charge of it were interested in this kind of thing—someone like Sidney Gottlieb, who led MKUltra, this chemist in the CIA—he was worried about the potential for communist countries possessing these kinds of methods.

For instance, Ivan Pavlov, the famous Russian physiologist, he had done behavioral conditioning in the 1890s—ringing a bell and getting a dog to salivate. Well, if you could do that to dogs that far back, surely the Russians since then have been improving upon their methods. So, if they're doing it, we need to know how to do it ourselves and we know how to defend against it.

It's kind of an amazing thing, as we get more distance on the Cold War, the idea that we have to be more like the Russians or the Soviets than they were in order to defeat them—in order to be supremely American. We're doing everything they're doing, but better. It's peculiar.

The concept of brainwashing, which is kind of rattling around in the back of MKUltra and other CIA fever dreams—and, you know, some of them are legitimate. I mean, it's clear there were conflicts between the Soviet Union and the United States and other free countries of Europe. But the concept of brainwashing came out of the Korean War. Could you talk a little bit about that? Because that's also—I mean, it's the first Cold War conflict, or a proxy war. But what was going on in Korea, and how did that really inflame the desire to be able to force somebody to tell the truth, or to control and manipulate them?

Yeah, you're exactly right about the importance of this Korean War, too, because during it, there were several American pilots who were captured in Korea, and while they were POWs, they started confessing to very strange crimes.

For instance, many of them started saying that they were engaging in biological warfare against the Korean people—for the Americans, while they were flying over, they were dropping anthrax bombs or germ bombs or bubonic plague germs or something like that. We now know, from some Russian archives actually, that some North Korean officials had flown to China and had gotten cultures of bubonic plague to infect their own prisoners to make it seem as if the Americans were doing this.

But still, the question remains within the CIA: why are these American POWs confessing to these crimes of biological warfare? One potential explanation they come up with is maybe they're being manipulated in a certain way to do this. Maybe they've been brainwashed or mind-controlled through drugs or through hypnotism. Again, maybe the communists possess some kind of mind control technique that's causing these POWs to do this.

Now, it turns out afterward, when many of these POWs returned to the United States, they're, of course, interviewed and asked about what happened. One of the people who interviews them, in fact, is Jolly West, who plays a prominent role in the MKUltra program. And he comes to the conclusion—again, this is ironic because he's later going to be working on MKUltra—but he comes to the conclusion that it wasn't these esoteric mind control methods that the communists were using to manipulate people. Instead, it's the typical methods of coercion that people have been using for centuries. It's sleep deprivation and fatigue and food deprivation, and having an actual…

I mean actual, right? Physical beatings and more—

Exactly, yeah. So he comes to that conclusion. And you kind of mentioned the irony of this earlier, about how the Americans are recapitulating a lot of what the communists are doing or trying to catch up to what they're doing. Again, it's ironic because they weren't doing these mind control methods in the sense that the CIA thought they were. And yet, even when the CIA figures that out—they have multiple people write reports on this—what's actually causing these POWs to confess to these crimes? It's not the mind control methods. Yet the CIA still wants to develop those methods, because, "well, it was a potential if they could've done that, therefore, if the potential exists that it could have happened, we want to know whether we can do it now."

So let's talk—we'll get to Jolly West, who's one of the most ironically named people in history. I mean, he's just not a jolly man at all. Really a deeply fucked up person who, unfortunately, was able to do a lot of bad things to a lot of people and really not pay a price for it.

But Sidney Gottlieb, who, as you mentioned, is a chemist who became the head of MKUltra—who was he, and why did he ultimately fixate on drugs and things like LSD in particular?

Yeah, LSD is going to be the big one they start using within MKUltra. Sidney Gottlieb is a chemist from New York. He went to school at Caltech. He got his Ph.D. in bioorganic chemistry there, and that was right around World War II in the 1940s.

He desperately wanted to join the war—he wanted to join the Army—but he was denied because he had a limp. He suffered from a limp; he had clubbed feet, he was born with. He also talked with a stutter—not that that mattered for joining the Army—but he talked with a stutter, he walked with a limp, so he was denied entry into the Army.

After that, he kind of felt this debt that he owed to his country. His parents were immigrants from Hungary. This country had given them a good life and allowed them to raise him here. And so he felt that he wanted to pay back his country in some way. He thought it would be through service in the Army during World War II. When that didn't pan out, he got a series of jobs as a chemist at different companies and universities, but eventually he decided to apply for a job at the CIA—to serve that debt that he felt he owed to some government organization.

And it just so happened that the CIA was looking for brilliant scientists like himself to fill certain roles, because World War II had just shown how integral science was to national security. So we better have some scientists on our staff. He wound up there.

And it's interesting, though—for a mind control guy, he's not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. He's an agricultural chemist, right?

He is a chemist. You're right. You mentioned LSD earlier. One of the main reasons why the CIA becomes interested in this drug is—well, one is just happenstance. LSD is first developed by Albert Hofmann in Switzerland in 1938, I believe.

'38, and then he accidentally ingested it 5 years later.

Yes, exactly. So it's kind of a new drug. And when the CIA gets hold of it, it is an extremely potent drug too. It's a powerful hallucinogen. Just a tiny amount can have such profound effects. So they're immediately interested in this drug, because it obviously has profound effects on human psychology.

And if that's the case, then it makes itself very useful, potentially, in covert operations, because such a small amount can be slipped into someone's drink or put into a cigar or something. It could make someone potentially behave in a certain way. If that's the case, then it might have a lot of potential use.

And it was starting to be used by therapists and whatnot. I mean, Sandoz Laboratories, where Hofmann worked, didn't quite know what to do with it. So they actually were sending it out to researchers and saying, "Hey, here's a compound that has these qualities, which are pretty off the charts. Do you have a use for it?"

You know, it's funny—LSD is a new drug in the early '50s and the mid-'50s. MKUltra officially starts in 1955 or— 

'53.

And so the CIA is also a very new organization. Your previous book was about the OSS, the wartime CIA that gave rise to what we now know and all love and patriotically support to the max as today's CIA.

Did the CIA know what it was doing, just broadly, in terms of countering… I mean, the main thing was, "we've got to keep the Soviets at bay." Because at that point, China was kind of in the orbit or under the umbrella of the Soviet Union. The big break between the Soviets and the Chinese communists hadn't yet happened.

Talk about—it's weird to think of the CIA as kind of like a startup, but they had so many different things going on, many of which, when you look back now, you're like, what were people thinking? But how important to the development of MKUltra—and one thing that you stress throughout the book, which I find fascinating—is that one of the lessons or questions that needs to be studied is: Why didn't anybody say, "What? Why are you doing this? This is insane."

How did that young startup culture kind of affect how the CIA was doing? 

A lot, I think, because a lot of the freewheeling attitude of the OSS—this wartime intelligence organization, kind of the precursor to the CIA—a lot of those same people would end up in the CIA, and that same kind of mentality carried over. So I think that's part of the reason why you have that freewheeling mentality in the CIA. It's because, well, during wartime, that's what the OSS was doing, and it's the same people within the CIA.

And these were twilight—I mean, again, this is outside the purview of this conversation, but World War II was a twilight struggle between forces of fascist authoritarianism—from imperial Japan and Nazi Germany—and so anything went in order to preserve whatever we called freedom. And that mentality was just ported over in the CIA from World War II, right?

It was, exactly. Instead of the Germans and the Japanese, now it's the Soviets who potentially might be the existential risk. And so, well, if we were resorting to those kinds of methods during World War II—in my first book, The Dirty Tricks Department—I talk about how there are truth drug experiments, there are all kinds of wacky experiments about bat bombs and painting foxes with glowing radioactive paint and all kinds of things these scientists were doing.

So if we had to do anything we could to potentially stop this existential threat during World War II, well, of course we have to do that to the Soviets as well, because this might be even more of an existential threat in a certain sense—because they actually have nuclear weapons now. The Germans didn't have that, but the Soviets actually do. So yes, that mentality got carried over. So that's one of the reasons why it is fairly freewheeling.

And the last point you made in your original question is a very important one. Raising the questions of: Why was nobody stopping this? One of the things that also makes this a very freewheeling CIA in the 1950s is that there's such heavy compartmentalization that hardly anyone knows what anyone else is doing. When we think of MKUltra, we think, "oh, the CIA—this huge organization—is masterminding this. There must be hundreds of employees who are working on this and performing these experiments." That's not actually how it was.

Within the CIA, there might have been a couple handfuls of people who knew about MKUltra. Within these hundreds and thousands of employees, there might be a dozen who know that this is going on. And so with that compartmentalization, without people being able to peer into what their peers at the CIA are doing, there's no one to really stop or ask questions. "Hey, why are we performing these experiments? Why are we funding these researchers at universities to dose kids with—you know—university students with LSD, or prisoners, or so on?"

There are several reasons that make that happen, and the compartmentalization is definitely one.

And then, on a larger scale, the original CIA director, he understood that the way he was going to operate is that he would tell the president what was going on if he was asked.

As one of Allen Dulles' codes, you know.

Yeah. When you look at the history of the FBI, there's something parallel going on. It starts a few decades earlier—officially as the FBI in the '20s or whatever—but J. Edgar Hoover understood that it was in national security interests not to really offer any information to the president. And it was kind of chilling, actually, to read in the book the way that that gets described here—especially because Eisenhower, who's the president during this, he knows how to fight and win world wars. And I guess he didn't want to know too much either, right? Like, everybody wanted plausible—

That's a good point, because it's in the president's personal interest to preserve his or her's plausible deniability. For instance, I talk about assassination attempts in this book, and Sidney Gottlieb is intimately involved in those.

And that was MKChaos—or what was the code name for the assassination stuff?

I don't know if there was a code name within the CIA for that, but there was a kind of group within the CIA called the Health Alteration Committee—you know, kind of a flippant name. That's what they were in charge of.

During one meeting, Eisenhower kind of tells his CIA counterparts, "I'm interested in having Patrice Lumumba kind of knocked off. What can you do about that?" And of course, whenever they refer to this in writing afterward, they never say Eisenhower. They say, "We've been told this." But it's preserving the plausible deniability, which leads to this vicious cycle of abuse that happens because nobody's going to be held accountable if there's no paper trail to name anybody associated with what's going on.

Gottlieb, the head of MKUltra, was the subject of a biography a couple years ago called Poisoner in Chief, which is a fascinating read. And one of the things that's fantastic about your book is that it covers similar territory, but it also looks at it in a different way—in a definite frame that adds a huge amount to it.

What more can you tell us about Gottlieb when he was running the show at the CIA? How quickly did he understand that there really are no such things as mind control drugs?

I think it took him a while to understand that. But one of the things I think that makes my book unique and exciting, too, is I found dozens of depositions that happened as part of a lawsuit in the 1980s. It never went to trial—it was settled out of court—so these depositions sat in the Library of Congress for many decades.

I found them, and it's verbatim transcript of not only the perpetrators of MKUltra, like Sidney Gottlieb, Robert Lashbrook, and even Richard Helms—the director of the CIA—he is deposed. But also the victims of MKUltra. These depositions—it's thousands of pages of them being asked questions by these lawyers: What did you do? Why did you do it? How did you feel about it?

So I feel like my book allows the reader to get into the head, in a certain sense, of these people. And that's what makes it especially exciting.

It is terrifying to read—and also exciting. I was thinking, as you describe these documents and then start quoting from them, I mean, as a historian, that must have been like discovering the—I don't know—the Grand Canyon or something. It's like, holy cow, is this real?

I was very excited, yes.

So with Gottlieb—he's a true believer. He is a patriot and all of that kind of stuff, and he wants to help the U.S. and the free world defeat the communists. When did he start to realize that this whole project was just kind of wrong.

Yeah, it depends on which kinds of subprojects. MKUltra was composed of 149 subprojects, and most of those were where Gottlieb and MKUltra would fund independent researchers who were at universities or hospitals or prisons to either continue doing the research they're doing or alter it in a certain way.

So not all the experiments that are part of MKUltra were done by the CIA. This is funding many people to do this. I would say by the late '50s, it was fairly obvious to Gottlieb that drugs might not be the way to do this.

He says in his depositions, "we kind of understood with something like LSD, you could make someone lose their mind, you could make them appear crazy, but you couldn't control them like a marionette. You couldn't make them do what you wanted them to do." In other words, you couldn't create a Manchurian Candidate or something like that.

However, after the drugs, he turned to psychiatric techniques. Well, if you can't do this through drugs, maybe we should fund other subprojects that don't use drugs but instead focus on sensory deprivation, or electric shock therapy, or what was called psychic driving—like repeated messages playing through headphones, thousands and thousands of times for hours on end, for days on end.

The idea was that maybe we can break down a person's psyche and then kind of build them back in our own image. If we induce enough stress in them, then maybe they will forget their previous behaviors, and we can control them with new behaviors by implanting those in them. That was kind of the idea.

There are several subprojects that are funded—most notably Ewen Cameron—that focus on psychiatry. Of course, after several years, Gottlieb also comes to realize that you can't really create someone in your own image in that way.

People aren't behaviorists. It's not that all of your behaviors come from nurture. Some of it is nature, and you can't reduce someone to a blank slate and build them back up. So he becomes disillusioned with MKUltra, as he talks about in his depositions. And he seems kind of remorseful for it by the 1980s, when these lawsuits happened.

I think there's always a lot of remorse when you're being deposed in a civil trial—even though by that point he had absolute immunity and whatnot. And it is fascinating to think about the figures of the counterculture like Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg and whatnot, who had great fun at various points later in their careers thanking the CIA for bringing boatloads of LSD into American laboratories—where it escaped the laboratory.

And so, on a very large societal level, we saw the failure of MKUltra to make people act a certain way ultimately gave rise to a kind of hippie counterculture that completely changed and got out of control from what the original intentions were.

You mentioned Ewen Cameron. He might be a good person to talk a little bit about—specific programs and experiments that were being funded by the CIA through MKUltra and just how batshit crazy they are. Could you talk a little bit about him?

Yes. Ewen Cameron was this Scottish psychiatrist, and he was a giant in the field. At one point, he had become the head of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association.

He had been in Nuremberg at the end of World War II because he was one of the psychiatrists who was evaluating these Nazi prisoners to determine whether they were fit to stand trial. This is where we get the Nuremberg Code—one of the first points of which reads, "you need to have the informed consent of the subjects who you're experimenting on."

It's very ironic. He would go on to do many of these experiments funded by MKUltra that were patently unethical—not getting consent from these patients, not even telling them that he's doing experiments. They just thought these were tried-and-true treatments and he was helping them.

He's this notable person—well, if you commit yourself to his institution, the Allan Memorial Institute, you just assume that he has your best interest in mind, when really he's trying to experiment to find a cure for all mental illness, and he's performing all these wacky things that CIA becomes interested in this because they think that through some of the methods he's doing—like electric shocks, like sensory deprivation—you might be able to induce amnesia. And the CIA is very interested in making someone forget certain things. So let's fund him and see if that's possible.

One of the stories in the book that comes from a deposition is of Mary Morrow, who had been a neurologist working under Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute. So she had been on one side of it.

And this is in Montreal, right?

This is in Montreal, yes. She had been on one side of it, working under him as a resident in training to eventually become a doctor. And she had kind of a mental breakdown herself. She developed severe anorexia. She also failed some of her neurological exams and so she didn't get her degree.

She went into this deep spiral of depression and wound up in a hospital. Ewen Cameron comes to visit her and asks her, would you like to come back to the Allan—but not as a resident, as a patient? And she reluctantly agrees. She goes, and now she's on the other side of it.

Her perspective in the depositions is very interesting and unique because she talks about how, before she was a patient, when she was there, she thought that what they were doing was in a sense ok—because there were some consent forms that Cameron would use. But by the time that she had gotten there as a patient, he had stopped using the consent forms.

So she was subjected to this electroshock therapy, as they called it, and it reduced her to a level at which she couldn't put on her makeup. She couldn't put on her clothes. Her sister eventually had to come in there and bust her out, basically.

There are stories in Cameron's own writing, in his own notes, where he says, "We reduced this one woman, this nursing student who was 18 years old—we reduced her to basically a vegetable. She couldn't talk. She couldn't use the bathroom. She would pee her own bed."

So, all kinds of effects on these people for the long term.

Yeah, and the Canadian government paid money out, right, to several of his patients.

They did, yes. So in the 1980s, there were some lawsuits filed against the CIA—really, the Orlikow lawsuit. Velma Orlikow was one of the patients.

And in order to stave off lawsuits against the Canadian government, who had also given some money to Ewen Cameron, the Canadian government paid out some ex gratia payments to several of these patients—several thousand of dollars each.

And then in the lawsuits with the CIA, I think there were about eight or nine plaintiffs in this lawsuit. They settled for a total of $750,000 to be split among them. But, of course, you take out lawyers' fees on top of that, and they don't wind up with much.

And the lack of accountability of the people who were kind of working the levers—or turning up the knobs on the ECT treatments and stuff.

Maybe talk a little bit about Jolly West, because he is like—if it was a Robert Ludlum book or something, he would be a bad character. He would be an unconvincing character, because it's just too much. But who was Jolly West, and how did he end up becoming a kind of key part of what was going on through MKUltra?

Yes, he's in charge of one of the subprojects. He's mostly focused on drugs—and hypnotism to a degree—trying to determine whether it's possible to implant memories into someone. Can you induce false memories?

But he comes into my story because he's working at Lackland Air Force Base, and he has a correspondence with Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb is using a pseudonym—Sherman Grifford—but we know it's Sidney Gottlieb.

They have a correspondence where West talks about some of the experiments he's hoping to try out on some of these airmen. So I start the chapter on Jolly West talking about this tragic story of this young girl—a 3-year-old girl—who's murdered and sexually abused by this airman named Jimmy Shaver.

Jolly West is in charge of interrogating Shaver, and he uses some of these techniques on him while he does. He gives him some drugs, and he hypnotizes him. I have the transcript of the interrogation, which I lay out in a lot of detail in the book. That's where he comes into my story, Jolly West.

Like Ewen Cameron, Jolly West—and it seems like a lot of these people who were funded through MKUltra—they have almost a messiah complex: I'm destined to win the Nobel Prize. I'm destined to cure schizophrenia and all mental illnesses. I just have to figure out how that is.

So I think he had that kind of complex himself, and he was always looking for some sensational case to attach himself to so that it would get him more publicity. But that's Jolly West in the story.

Most famously, probably, if someone's heard of Jolly West in connection to MKUltra, it might be related to Jack Ruby, you know. But also, Jolly West is the guy who killed an elephant with LSD. So if someone has heard of him, it might be for that—he dosed an elephant.

Yeah, could you very quickly recount that?

Yes. He wanted to determine whether it was possible to create this musth state in elephants. This is a period of heightened sexual aggression that elephants go through periodically—bull elephants. So he thought, maybe with LSD, we can inject this elephant and artificially induce it. And maybe we can learn something about how we can artificially induce moods in humans through this somehow—I don't know. But that was his idea.

So he takes a large dose of LSD—even when accounting for body mass, because an elephant is so much larger—but even accounting for that, it's unreasonably large.

He doses this elephant with LSD. Pretty soon, it starts stumbling. It falls onto its mate—Judy is her name. The elephant's name is Tusko in this.

He falls onto his side. He goes into an epileptic seizure. He defecates himself and then dies.

And in the report that Jolly West writes on this, he kind of ends it on a very bland but somewhat humorous note, basically saying, "It seems like the elephant is highly susceptible to LSD." I guess so. You just killed it.

When you read these stories, and the book reads like a novel that's just incredible and a real page-turner. But when you think of the way people talk about LSD and how crazy hippies were—and, you know, Haight-Ashbury in the late '60s or Diane Linkletter, who of course did not have LSD or any drugs in her system when she committed suicide thinking she could fly like Superman—all of these strange, far-out stories of hippiedom.

And then when you start looking at people in suits and ties 10, 20 years before, doing stuff that is insane. It really is powerful to recover how weird all of this stuff was.

One of the other things that's interesting about MKUltra is that it did get shut down. It's not like, ok, it came to light—and we'll talk about how and why we know anything about it in a minute—but the CIA did shut it down.

They were like, "Ok, this isn't working." And now, we're talking in an era of DOGE and whatnot, and I don't know if this is a success story—that there was a program that the federal government was funding that didn't work, and they were like, "Ok, we're going to stop doing it," instead of tripling its budget.

But why did the CIA shut it down?

Well, it was largely unsuccessful. Gottlieb goes into a lot of detail about this in his deposition, basically saying, "We didn't achieve what we thought we could."

You can't use some kind of drug to manipulate someone to do whatever you want. You can't even use it to necessarily make them tell the truth in an interrogation.

It's very ironic, because the OSS—the precursor to the CIA—they had already concluded this in the 1940s. They had already done truth drug experiments.

But you can—and we learn this, I guess, in every war—but especially in the 21st-century wars, the lesson that the intelligence services and the armed forces learn is that you can get people to say exactly what you want them to say if you beat them and torture them enough.

Yeah, it's just not necessarily—

No, it almost never is, right? Which is very complicating in all of this. So how did MKUltra get shut down?

Yeah. It was shut down. It started in 1953. It went really until the early '60s—MKUltra itself. And then, into the late '60s, it kind of morphed into a different cryptonym that was named MKSearch.

This continued several subprojects of MKUltra, but it kind of fizzled out in the late 1960s. By that time, Sidney Gottlieb, himself, wasn't really involved in it too much anymore. In fact, he was going to retire in 1973 anyway.

So MKUltra had been largely unsuccessful. And there were several occurrences that made even the inspector generals of the CIA reconsider what's going on here.

In 1963, one of the inspector generals—John Ehrman—he writes a report. And in his words, he says that MKUltra is "illegal and unethical." Those are his words in 1963. And yet it continued for several years—at least MKSearch—after that.

So several instances like that slowly put the brakes on MKUltra. And then, especially, Sidney Gottlieb retires in 1973, as does the head of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, who was one of the big champions of MKUltra throughout its time.

And Richard Helms is a villain, right? In this book as well, and I think, in American and World history, for the most part.

He doesn't come off well.

Can you discuss how—I mean, I don't quite know how to bridge into this topic—but Helms, among many things, is famous for somehow destroying more documents than he created. And MKUltra is put into a virtually complete burn bag. When Helms is leaving, he's like, "we're getting rid of all of these records."

How do we know about MKUltra? How did it come to light?

Yeah, I'm really glad you asked that, because this is one thing that a lot of people know about MKUltra—that, "oh, the records were destroyed when Gottlieb and Helms retired from the CIA in 1973." They threw the records into the incinerator—at least the records they knew about.

And so it does raise this important question: Well, how do we know anything? Maybe MKUltra was controlling sex slaves, or maybe it was doing this or that. You can kind of invent any conspiracy, because after all, they destroyed the records. We don't know, do we?

And they all become believable once you know, among other things, that in an MKUltra-related experiment, Whitey Bulger, as a young gangster, was dosed with LSD every day straight for like a month—without being told—and then released without ever having been told what had happened to him.

So MKUltra is—the bits we know about it really make you conjecture wildly about it.

That's exactly right. And I mean, here's another subproject that's just as wild—that leads people to think, "well, of course they must have been doing something even crazier. Because how could they have even conceived of this in the 1950s and '60s?"

One subproject was to implant electrodes into the brains of animals—like dogs, rats, cats—and to try to remotely control their movements via electric signals. So if they would move in the desired direction, you would stimulate a pleasure center of the brain and reinforce that movement.

And this actually worked. You could actually get these animals to move in desired directions.

So, these kinds of crazy subprojects—yeah, it does lead one to think, how off the walls is that compared to something else? Surely something else.

Here's how we actually know about MKUltra:

For one, Gottlieb and Helms didn't destroy all the files. We have thousands and thousands of files that didn't get destroyed—that they didn't know about—it was in a budget and fiscal section of the CIA's archives center. That they didn't think to check to throw away.

So we have a lot of the financial records of all these subprojects. In fact, we have the internal descriptions of 146 out of the 149 subprojects. So we have the descriptions of what they are, as well as a lot of details about what they are too, just within those files.

In addition to that, there were multiple congressional investigations into what was going on within the CIA and other intelligence organizations in the 1970s. So we have testimony from people who were involved—people who were subpoenaed and required to testify before these committees and hearings.

We also have multiple people who were involved—especially victims—who would write memoirs about this.

We had multiple lawsuits, such as the Orlikow lawsuit, that furnished us with all these depositions that I found—thousands of pages. There are other government reports, there are institutional records that got released after these institutions found out they had been funded by MKUltra.

So we have a lot of documentation on this. And I'm really glad you raised that point, because some people get the impression, well, we can't know anything, so it could be anything. But that's not quite the case. We actually know a lot about MKUltra—even though we can never know everything about MKUltra.

You know, the '70s are a fascinating decade for many, many reasons—the least of which is the fact that I grew up in the '70s, so I'm very fascinated by it.

I was too young to understand what the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee were doing, and they were two of the principal institutions through which the American public learned that the government was acting in just incredible ways to contravene all kinds of constitutional limits on what the FBI, the CIA, the NSA could do.

Could you talk a bit about how was this type of material received at the time? Because this is also when the American economy is kind of in the crapper. The Cold War seems like, if it's doing anything, it's leaning toward the Soviets. I mean, this is a period of palpable sense of decline or stagnation in America.

How was this stuff received when congressional members—and, you know, Frank Church, ok, he's a lefty populist from Idaho, whatever—but then, you know, Nelson Rockefeller is not some kind of crazy hippie or anything.

How was this stuff received at the time?

In many ways, it contributes to the kind of anti-government sentiment that had been building up for years before then. You had the Watergate scandal. You had the Vietnam War.

Now, you have multiple revelations coming out of the intelligence community—from these commissions—about how, not only did they drug unwitting people as part of MKUltra, slip LSD into their wine or whatever, but also they were spying on anti-war protesters and tapping phones and doing all kinds of stuff.

So, it's continuing to add to this distrust of government that had already been building already before that.

The Rockefeller Commission is started—really, ironically—because Gerald Ford, the president, wanted to prevent certain information from getting out. He didn't want people to know about what was called the Family Jewels. This was a series of documents within the CIA—

Could you recount the story? I mean, this is like—it's the perfect Gerald Ford story. Because people think, oh, he was clumsy, he tripped a lot. Mentally, the story of how he basically made public the existence of these Family Jewels—the CIA's secret histor. 

Could you recount that briefly?

Definitely. So, the head of the CIA at the time, Schlesinger, he wanted to compile a list of all the illegal things that CIA personnel had done in the past, so that he could prevent it from leaking out.

He wanted to have a sense of what had gone on, in case some reporter breaks some story he would know what they're talking about.

So he asked all present and former members of the CIA: "Please submit to me any programs that you were involved in that you think might have been illegal."

He compiles this 600-page document—almost 700 pages—called, internally called, the Family Jewels.

And again, this is going against the compartmentalization, because you're compiling all of this into one space.

This is shortly after he had purged many people from their posts, and so there were a lot of disgruntled CIA personnel. And it seems like one of them leaked this document—or at least portions of it—to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh at The New York Times.

Pretty soon afterward, Hersh has this document, and the front page of The New York Times says: "CIA has been spying on anti-war protesters."That's just one of the things in the Family Jewels. So now that it's kind of leaked out, Gerald Ford can't do nothing about it—because it's the biggest story in the country.

So he determines, "well, if I create some kind of commission"—this Rockefeller Commission—"then we can at least have control over what gets leaked out, or what gets out. We can say that we're investigating the intelligence community, the CIA, and we can kind of put out what we want to put out and prevent what we don't want getting out from getting out."

So he creates this commission. And while he's at a dinner with some editors from The New York Times shortly after this, they kind of ask him, "What else is in the CIA's closet that hasn't come out yet?"

And he just says, kind of off the cuff, "Well, assassinations—something like that."

And they all kind of stop what they're doing: "What? Like, has the CIA been involved in assassinations?"

And as soon as he said it, he immediately says afterward: "That's off the record. That's off the record."

So this eventually leads to CBS News correspondent Daniel Schorr, who goes to press with it. He does a story about CIA assassinations.

And after this comes out, that prompts the congressional committees—the Church Committee and the Pike Committee—to form and investigate these past abuses, and not allow the executive branch to have sole control over what gets out.

It's not a conspiracy to say that Gerald Ford, as a congressman, had been a member of the Warren Commission. He clearly thought if he created a commission that would kind of be under his auspices—Nelson Rockefeller is his vice president—he'd be able to control the narrative.

Obviously, the Warren Commission report—which, ironically, I think is accurate in large points. But that did not control the narrative about the JFK assassination. And clearly, the Rockefeller Commission did not either.

Let's linger. Again, what is also fascinating about this book—and anybody who is interested in weird Cold War history is going to love this book, anybody interested in drug culture, this is for you. I mean, there are lots of different audiences.

But what I find particularly striking about it—and particularly since you're a historian—you draw two big lessons toward the end of the book. The first is about the problems of having secret organizations within an open society or a democratic society.

Can you talk a bit about why analyzing and understanding MKUltra—what are the main lessons for contemporary America as we struggle with things like transparency? We're reading this after Snowden, after Assange. So there's kind of a forced transparency, but it does seem like any time you think about it—or wait a couple days—something new and weird that was secret comes out.

Can you talk about that?

I can, yes. One chapter in the book is called "The Vicious Cycle of Secrecy," where I try to explain what were the parameters within the CIA that would allow for something like this to happen.

It seems patently unethical that you would dose unwitting people with drugs, or perform these experiments on them without their consent. How could that have been allowed to occur? And then, what can be done to prevent that from happening in the future?

I identify three problems that I think allowed this to happen within the CIA.

One is compartmentalization, which I talked about earlier. I should mention: these things are necessary for an intelligence organization. It just is the case that they have to keep secrets. It can't be the case that we can know everything the CIA knows itself. There has to be some secrets.

But at the same time, the secrecy they're afforded can allow them to avoid accountability. Because if we don't know what they're up to, how can we ever hold them accountable for what we don't know?

So, compartmentalization is one thing within the CIA that contributed to these abusive actions.

Another one is the lack of a paper trail. The fact that these documents were destroyed—and there was no repercussions for Gottlieb destroying these documents. He destroyed them. He left. Richard Helms destroyed them. He left.

I mean, Gottlieb not only was granted legal immunity, but he got one of the CIA's highest awards for service.

He did. Yeah, he did. Some of that has to do with the fact that he also became head of what was called the Technical Services Division, which was in charge of creating gadgets and weapons and stuff like that. So he was an influential head of that.

I think they were probably rewarding him more for that than for MKUltra.

Ok, well, those also—I mean, that's like the LSD-laced scuba suits for Castro, exploding guitars. I guess he's somewhat implicated—or it was not his anthrax, was it, that ended up being used on Lumumba or anything?

That's not what killed Lumumba, but he did procure the anthrax. And he personally took it to the Congo to try to kill Lumumba with it. He gave it to an agent there who failed to sneak it into Lumumba's toothpaste. But nevertheless, he was involved in that plot.

So, those are some of the problems within the CIA. And then I try to answer the question of: Once you have secrecy in an intelligence organization like the CIA or the FBI, that inherently leads to what I call this vicious cycle.

Secrecy leads to plausible deniability—because if nobody knows what you're doing, you can always deny that you had anything to do with it. Secrecy leads to plausible deniability.

Plausible deniability leads to risky behavior. Because again, if you're not going to be held accountable for something—because nobody knows that you did it—what's to stop you from doing something riskier than you otherwise would, if you could be held accountable?

Risky behavior, in many cases, leads to embarrassment. This gets exposed on the front page of The New York Times. A scoop gets leaked to a reporter. Someone finds out about this.

It's almost inevitable that a huge program like this—someone is going to leak it. Someone is going to find out, when there are many victims like this.

And then embarrassment leads to secrecy: "Oh, we got out that time, we better make sure we really tamp down and prevent people from doing this."

And now you're starting the vicious cycle over again: secrecy, plausible deniability, embarrassment, secrecy…

How do you intercede? How do you intervene to break that cycle?

I think one of the main ways is to have external oversight instead of internal oversight.

One of the points I make in the book is that the CIA inspector general—there were multiple inspector generals who wrote reports about MKUltra where they said this is illegal and unethical and it continued. Nothing happened to it.

So there was an impotent internal inspector general. Instead, you have to have some kind of external oversight.

I think James Madison was right when he said, basically, you need checks and balances. We have to have different branches checking each other.

Throughout the Cold War, for the most part, the oversight prerogative of Congress was largely impotent itself. They didn't really oversee the intelligence community.

Occasionally, they would meet with officials from the CIA and get updates, but it was mostly wining and dining sessions. They really wouldn't know. In many cases, these congressional elected representatives, they didn't want to know what was going on in the CIA—because then that eliminates your plausible deniability.

Well, and there seemed to be—I don't want to pretend it's naivete or something—but there was also, among Congress or among elites—electoral elites, cultural elites… I mean, the CIA pulled disproportionately from the campus of Yale and stuff like that.

But there was this sense that, "I can trust you," right? I mean, like, "You wouldn't be doing anything that is either truly awful or ineffective."

I think part of that rationale—that mindset—also comes from a World War II hangover.

We had this secret project—the Manhattan Project—and Congress didn't really know what was going on there. They knew that we had a budget for something, but who knows we're making an atomic bomb?

After the war, though, it's seen that Congress—many of these congressional members—say, "We were glad we didn't know that was going on. Because if we did, we probably would have shut it down. So, thank you for not informing us."

And that mindset kind of carries over. Maybe it's in the country's national security best interest for us not to know some of the things that are going on in these secret hallways—because they might be developing things that we can't allow if we know about it. But if we don't know about it, maybe it will eventually pay off, like the atomic bomb did.

Well, can we—obviously Britain had a different kind of thing, where they had a lot of trust and a lot of secrecy, and then that actually allowed for mass penetration of British intelligence services because everybody was kind of in the same club.

But in the U.S., I mean, one of the things that seems to come out after the collapse of the Soviet Union—and then again when we start looking at the various kinds of intelligence services or operations after 9/11—you start to see that the CIA, like the FBI, seems to be unbelievably incompetent.

The CIA did not know that the Soviet Union was about to collapse. When you look at the torture protocols that were both hidden and praised within U.S. war efforts in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, they did not deliver usable intelligence.

A lot of people—as George W. Bush became less and less popular during his presidency—a lot of people on the left, and even some on the right, were like: "We've got to get rid of secrecy. We've got to get rid of surveillance of Americans."

But then when Snowden revealed that all of that stuff was going on—either slightly modified or unmodified—under Obama, and Obama said, "Oh yeah, I think it would be good to have a discussion about all of this stuff," after he was elected promising the most transparent administration in American history…

It seems like we're not as interested in that. And now you have a Trump administration, which in many ways is filled—Trump ran against the deep state.

And if the CIA and the FBI are kind of part of the deep state, right? Somebody like Kash Patel, who was head of the FBI, was talking about how he was going to totally blow up the FBI because it's kind of a criminal organization.

All of this is just to say—have we learned the lesson from MKUltra? Or is that kind of a partisan coat? If you're out of power, you say, "We need more openness and more transparency." And then the minute you get into power, you're like, "No, not so much."

Yeah, I think that might be the case to a certain extent.

I think it could also be the case that when people get into power—to get elected, you say anything to get elected. But once you're elected, you can't say anything—because you actually know what's going on.

It might be the case that you get into power and you realize, well, what I was saying wasn't quite accurate. It's not like there is this nefarious deep state out to manipulate—

Well, with Trump—it's not like he didn't have access to all of the classified documents the first time around, right?

Right.

So then, when you talk about external oversight, is it Congress? Because it doesn't seem like Congress is up to that.

And if it's not Congress—or some subset of them—and maybe not all members of Congress, because this is kind of the way it works. There are people who have higher security clearance or get more information.

If it's not Congress, then who would it be?

Yeah, if it is Congress, I think in order for them to be more effective at the job of oversight, you have to almost restructure the incentives of Congress—to actually govern instead of just focus on a reelection campaign or something.

So I don't know if that would be through open primaries, or ranked-choice voting, or proportional representation, or something that might enable them to focus more on governance than just getting reelected.

But some kind of reform might help Congress to do the overseeing that they are obliged to do.

If it's not Congress, though—which I think it needs to be Congress, in addition to other things—then it has to be the press.

It has to be a free press and free speech that allows people to speak truth to power. It has to be someone like Seymour Hersh, who's able to discuss and post these illegal things that the government is doing, and inform people when he figures out that that's been happening

One might say about Sy Hersh over the years—he has alienated virtually every presidential administration. So he might be onto something there.

The other big lesson, which in a way—because I don't know what you and I can do about politics or about the CIA, et cetera—you implore people to draw a lesson about conspiracy thinking.

This is a fantastic end to the book, where you talk about how Sidney Gottlieb wanted to find ways of manipulating people's minds. He didn't do it through chemical ways, but we manipulate our own minds and fall prey to conspiracy thinking or just bad theorizing about what's going on.

Can you talk a little bit about that lesson that you want people to draw from Project Mind Control?

Thank you. Yeah, this last chapter—I especially wanted to focus on the conspiracy theories that come out of MKUltra, because there are a lot of them.

And I mentioned, the main reason why, earlier is that because a lot of the files were destroyed, we can paint MKUltra to be our wildest imagination. It could be anything. If we can say it could be this, who's to say we're wrong? We can always say, "It must have been in those files that were destroyed." So there are a lot of conspiracies that come out of this.

So, I try to identify several errors in critical thinking that some of these conspiracy theorists make, especially about MKUltra.

One is just factual errors. Some people are saying that MKUltra still continues, or whatever. If you're asserting the claim, the burden of proof is on you. You've got to give me some reason to think that's actually the case.

Other errors common to these conspiracy theories is the lack of any kind of documentary evidence for anything that they're saying.

For instance, one of the manipulations that they, themselves, use is the fact that they can never be wrong because the lack of evidence is itself evidence of a cover-up. So it becomes a non-falsifiable theory.

I talk about this in the book, particularly one conspiracy theorist named Cathy O'Brien. She has a book on MKUltra. She claims to have been an MKUltra sex slave from the time she was a young girl, bred into the program and so on.

I don't think that's true. But she says, "Why can't I provide more documentation? I could, if the CIA would release the documents—but they can't."

Well, that just makes it non-falsifiable. It can't be proven, but it also can't be disproven. So, what's the point? So I don't think that's the case.

In fact, she says she was a victim of an MKUltra subproject called Project Monarch. The first time that I found that Project Monarch, which I don't think exists, actually occurs in writing somewhere is in this journal called Phoenix, in 1993. And that journal itself claims to have been created by a nine-foot-tall alien from the Pleiades star system. So this is where some of this is coming from. Obviously, we know who actually created the journal—but he claimed he was an alien channeling these things.

So, you really got to figure out where some of this is going to be—

As we're talking—I'm not sure when this will air—but as we're talking, Elon Musk just trolled Donald Trump— now that they're on the outs with each other— saying  that Trump is in the Epstein files.

And the Epstein files—of Jeffrey Epstein—seems to be this type of thing where there is a lot of stuff that's out there. There are probably no literal "Epstein files," but when you think about it…

Do you think we're in a particularly hot moment for conspiracy thinking? Or is it really kind of a steady state throughout American history? Are we more or less prone to conspiracizing now?

I vacillate on the answer to this question.

Sometimes I do look at, especially these MKUltra conspiracies, and I think these are very absurd and it seems so prominent. Cathy O'Brien, for instance—her best friend is Roseanne Barr, who is very influential. So, ok, they have a lot of influence.

But at the same time, I think back and well, there were witch crazes that were highly influential. Conspiracy theories have been around forever.

What's new, though, especially, is social media. The fact that something can spread from anyone to anyone in the world immediately. I think that does heighten our susceptibility to these conspiracy theories and heightens the amount that they can travel and the amount of people who are affected by them.

I think that's the key difference. So I think we actually might be in a somewhat unique period, in the fact that there are more conspiracy-addled people around just by the fact that they have more access to these theories.

Do you think it's also true—particularly on social media, like through meme culture — if such a thing can be said to exist — there's a lot of ironizing of conspiracy theories?

I'm thinking of the mid-1970s novel trilogy Illuminatus! by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. One of the reasons why I think so many people today are talking about the Illuminati is because this is a parody of conspiracy thinking.

Which now sometimes is used as a joke, and other times it's a real thing. But it seems to me we ironize conspiracy theories now in a way that might be different.

Can you explain that? What do you mean, "ironize" conspiracy?

That people just say it because it's fun and interesting. They don't really believe it, that it's just weird.

Michael Shermer kind of makes this point. He has a book called Conspiracy, and he talks about, in some cases, it seems like people espouse these views not necessarily because they believe them—it's not a literal truth—but he says it's more like a "mythic truth."

This is the kind of thing my group says. Do we really believe this? I don't know. But we say this just to signal: I'm part of the in-group. If you can accept that I might believe this, then you already know a suite of all my other beliefs.

So you know I'm friendly to you, or that I believe in your beliefs too.

I think something like that might be going on. But at the same time, I do read enough of these conspiracy theories to think: a lot of them are actually serious.

No, and it seems more and more people in powerful positions are happy, ready, and willing—cultural leaders as well as political leaders, business leaders—to espouse conspiracy theories unironically.

You teach at UT Austin. Do you feel like your students are up to the challenge of being critical consumers of whether social media or older forms of media?

I've been really impressed with my students.

I have a couple small classes. I teach the history of science, so I don't teach the intelligence community anymore. My job now—I teach courses on science and religion before Newton, after Newton. I have a course on Newton. I teach a course called Great Works in Biology, Modern Science.

So it's all history of science stuff. And I'm really impressed with how good at critical thinking a lot of my students are.

There are cultural memes about how students today all they rely on is ChatGPT and they're not doing critical thinking. But I think they're way smarter than I was when I was in college—and I didn't have any of that.

So I don't know—I'm really impressed with the students.

Well, maybe they have better teachers than you had.

Maybe. Maybe. The truth may get to me—

In some of your writing, you've talked about how— I'm butchering the title here— I'm paraphrasing an article from Smithsonian Magazine about how our relationship to authority in science is complicated. That came out in 2020.

Can you talk a little bit about how do questions of legitimacy of government or authority…

You talk about it in the context of the Cold War and the CIA and MKUltra, but since COVID, we've had this collapse of righteous authority of public figures.

The Trump's White House team that he put together during COVID —he's the one who put Anthony Fauci on TV every day—that became a bitter enemy. A lot of people in public health contradicted themselves or admitted to telling "noble lies" in the interest of getting people to stay home, wear masks, or get vaccinated.

How do we deal with that very heavily dispute authority in something like science?

Yeah, the question really comes down to trust. How do we know who to trust?

This is a question that I ask my students many times on the first day of class: How do you actually know that the Earth goes around the sun?

We all think the Earth goes around the sun—I hope. How do you actually know that?

When it comes down to it, for most people it's just: "I've been told that's the case. I was told when I was in elementary school that Earth is one of the planets that goes around the sun."

Why do we actually know that, though? In these history of science classes, I try to tell how we actually know that—how we can show that's the case, at least for the most part. But it's not an easy question to answer about something so fundamental to what we believe about the universe. We go around the sun, of course. But why?

When you really drill down, it's not easy to come to a question. The true answer is trust. We trust someone who told us that's the case.

In many cases within our lives, it comes down to trust. I trust when I go to the doctor that he knows how to treat a broken bone. Instead of treating it myself, I have trust.

So then the question is: How do we know who to trust?

We have to trust someone. We can't read every single scientific study on every single thing. There's just no possible way anyone could ever do that and form their own opinions on every single thing.

At some point you have to trust someone. And so the question becomes, again, how do we know who to trust? That is going to lead us to credentials. Did they go to a school and get a degree? Now if that's the case, maybe that gives more credence in what they're saying, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're right.

So if they're not necessarily right, well, then is there a better way to determine who to trust? Maybe not a single individual, maybe the consensus of experts in a particular field. So if the consensus of people, well, that's better than one single individual because it's kind of drowned out by people who know— one expert can be a liar about something. But then, at the same time, the consensus can be wrong.

I mean, that's how scientific revolutions happen, right? The consensus is wrong, and then someone comes along with a better explanation.

Exactly.

Ideally, within science, we have an approximation of the truth that's pretty good—and maybe we get a better approximation.

So if we're in the Newtonian paradigm, and we believe in Newtonian gravity—as he set it down, that the strength of force is proportional to mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance—that's a really good approximation for what we now think is true.

So just because we might have a scientific revolution to you know general relativity, it doesn't necessarily mean Newton was wrong, it means that we have a better approximation. But Newton's was a pretty good approximation already. So yeah, that's an important point to make, maybe.

When people talk about Thomas Kuhn and paradigms and scientific revolutions, it's not necessarily the case that because we might switch from one theory to another, from Newtonian gravity to general relativity, we don't throw out Newtonian and gravity. It's a good approximation. It can do a lot of good.

Do you think, in a kind of political and cultural context, does it help? In the '70s, there was an attempt to do this in the United States with the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission to kind of come clean about things.

Does that work? Like, when experts or authorities say, "Ok, you know what we got it wrong, and we're admitting that publicly," does that help increase trust? Or does that actually accelerate the lack of confidence?

Because when you think about—I've written a lot about changes in generalized trust in America—and since the early '70s, it's just been downhill. And it doesn't matter when people come clean. It seems like, then it's like, "Aha! I knew you were lying. So I'm going to have even less trust and confidence."

I hope it helps.

I think it could depend on the context. In the sense that—at the point we're in—I feel like there's so much distrust in an agency like the CIA.

Building off the things we've talked about so far from like Watergate, Vietnam, MKUltra, spying on people—so many of those instances have built up that I feel a lot of trust in governmental organizations, especially in the intelligence community, is so shot right now.

Even if they were to say, "Look, we're coming clean here. These are the skeletons in our closet. We're sorry for what we did," I think people would have the mindset: "You're just doing that in order to cover up what you're actually doing."

There could be other instances in history where the opposite could be the case—where maybe we weren't at such a nadir of trust, that if someone comes clean for something, it seems like they're actually trying to put the right foot forward. We might give them the benefit of the doubt.

But I think it's going to be really hard for the CIA to come back from the reputational damage that a program like MKUltra has done.

One of the ironies of MKUltra—they wanted to keep it secret, of course, not let people know, because they knew there was going to be backlash.

It's not as if they didn't find anything in MKUltra. They did find some things—you could do certain things to manipulate people in a certain way. You could make them seem crazy by giving them LSD. There are interrogation techniques they developed that might actually be helpful that they're working on.

But for all the "benefits" they got from this multi-million-dollar program, it's nothing compared to the reputational damage—the backlash—that has come.

If you were to tell someone at the beginning of MKUltra, "Here's the trade-off." Even if you were able to determine mind control is possible through these drugs, I still don't know if it would have been worth it.

Because the backlash has been so long-lasting and effective, I don't know if they're ever going to regain the public's trust after something like that.

So, I don't really know if that's possible—no matter what they do at this point, which is hard to say. It might require some more extreme reform than just saying they're sorry.

I don't know what they could do. I hope they figure it out.

All right, well, that's a great note to end on.

The book is Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA.

John Lisle, thanks so much for talking to Reason.

Thanks for having me.

The post How a Government Mind Control Experiment Backfired appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Today's guest is University of Pennsylvania historian Sophia Rosenfeld, the author of The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life.

Her book explores why we've come to basically equate having more personal choices with having more freedom. She stresses it wasn't always this way—in the past, freedom was often defined as the ability to act in the way God wanted you to act, or to overcome base urges, to be more angel than beast.

Rosenfeld talks about how the Reformation, which enshrined a right to choose among faiths, and the rise of shopping, which allowed us to choose among many products, worked to change all that, even up to our current day, where rhetoric about choice still dominates many political and economic arguments.

0:00—Intro

1:15—Main arguments from The Age of Choice

4:03—Earlier conceptions of freedom

7:37—The Reformation and religious freedom

10:32—Capitalism and market freedom

15:37—Consumer choice and femininity

20:00—Choice as freedom in the 20th century

26:07—Abortion rights and the choice debate

31:26—Choices vs. mandates

36:50—Overwhelmed by choice

The Reason Roundtable Live in NYC, July 15

The Soho Forum Debate: Jacob Hacker vs. David Goldhill, July 16

Future of Freedom: If you're tired of cable news debates and Twitter shouting matches and you're looking for serious, good-faith conversations between people who actually care about liberty, then it's time to check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Each episode dives deep into a single topic—tariffs, campus speech, the Department of Government Efficiency—and brings together two guests who disagree on the best path forward. But here's the twist: This isn't a debate show. No interrupting. No dunking. If you believe the future of freedom depends on more than just winning arguments and you're ready for something deeper than the usual echo chambers, check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Real disagreement. Real ideas. Real conversations. Subscribe to Future of Freedom wherever you get your podcasts.

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This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Give me a quick précis of the book's argument.

Sophia Rosenfeld: Sure, I'm happy to do that. I think choice is one of those things we do tend to equate, as you've just suggested, sort of automatically with freedom. It's sort of the water we swim in: more choice is better, more opportunities for choice is better than less. And I'm not here to really dispute that exactly, but I'm interested in both the good and bad things it's brought us, and I'm also interested in how that happened.

Because actually, what's perhaps surprising to people is that freedom hasn't always been conceptualized as a matter of choice, and choice hasn't been conceptualized as what brings us freedom. So the story that I tell in the book is really about two things. It's about how choice came to proliferate so that we pick things in really disparate areas of life—ranging from political candidates to breakfast cereals to who we want to marry. We pick in all sorts of categories that would have seemed strange to people—still does to people in some parts of the globe today—and certainly would have to almost everyone around the globe in an earlier moment, a few hundred years ago.

So I'm interested in how that happened, and then I'm interested in how it came to be understood as freedom—why freedom became a matter of choice. Because there's nothing actually obvious about it, though to us it sometimes seems that way.

The book traces a whole series of social practices that people engaged in—things they did, essentially. How did people start picking things in stores? How did they come to think of ideas or even religious notions as something one could select from a menu of options? And it goes all the way up—it starts really in the Reformation and in the first Age of Empire—but it takes us all the way to the 20th century and the invention of whole sciences of choice to study why we're choice makers.

Let's run through all of these. Also the other thing that the book focused on in a way that is fascinating is the way that choice often became identified as feminine—a part of being female—and also often times kind of depreciating choice because it's something women would be dazzled or overwhelmed by too many choices in front of them, in consumer goods. There's a long history, certainly in European, continental, and Anglo studies, of shopkeepers are sad little men who are somehow not quite manly in the way that martial virtues are. Choice gets identified with femininity in various ways. We'll get to that.

First, let's talk about before the modern era. Before the Reformation, freedom was not about choice—or to the extent that it was, it was about being able to make the right moral choice. Partly when I was reading this book, I think it was back in the '80s, but at some point 7-Eleven stores brought in soda fountains that had both Coke and Pepsi products. They had a huge campaign: "Freedom of choice," like we celebrate choice, choice, choice. That's freedom—being able to have Mountain Dew and Coca-Cola without going to two separate stores.

But in this period when we're talking about Hercules' choice or the pre-modern definition of freedom—what was Hercules' choice, and what does that say about earlier conceptions of freedom?

Right. If you were a person living in the 17th or 18th century in Western Europe, or even in the burgeoning United States, you probably would have been familiar with this idea of Hercules' choice. It's allegorized everywhere, from poetry to opera. John Adams proposed it for the seal of the new United States. It was harmonized with Christian teachings; so they went well together.

The idea was this: Hercules was torn. He was torn between doing the right thing—virtue—or the opposite, turning toward vice. And often in a painting, you see his body kind of torqued. He can't quite decide which way. But he always, in the end, goes toward virtue—which is doing not what is hedonistic, not recognizing his hedonistic pleasures, but doing what was right morally, what was right for his family, what was right for his community. In the end, Hercules always makes the right choice. And so he became free—by himself, of his own volition— doing what was right.

And in that sense, he becomes free because he triumphs over his bodily urges or more base impulses?

He triumphs over his passions, his base impulses. He goes toward the moral, but as his own person. He isn't compelled to be moral; but realizes it's important for him to do the right thing.

So you're free to the extent that you do what God expects of you—or morality—which is identified at that point, ironically, since it's Hercules, and he's a pre-Christian myth figure. But if you're doing what a Christian God tells you to do, which is to be more of an angel and less of a beast, you have achieved freedom.

Absolutely. So this could be all these things harmonized: what God wanted you to do, what your family wanted you to do, what your community wanted you to do— lined up. And the idea is—of course, Hercules is a man; this is only allegorical—but he's picking between two women as virtue and vice.

So it's really imagined as a kind of manly freedom too.

It's a kind of vision of thinking of others before oneself—not giving into based temptation, but being free to be the upstanding person that you're supposed to be. This is a really important early modern trope, and it never entirely goes away, of course. But it's not the dominant way we think of freedom today.

Let's talk about that. Obviously, there are a lot of things that drive the shift from that kind of freedom to a freedom which is identified with increasing choice in all areas of human activity. But a big part of it—you mentioned this briefly in passing—is the Reformation, or the idea of religious freedom and being able to choose among different ways of, for the most part, it's different ways of worshiping the Christian God. How does the Reformation help start to create a shift in how we understand freedom?

Right. So one way to tell this story would be to see just simply capitalism taking over everything, and everything just becomes a marketplace. Certainly that's an important part of the story, but I don't think it's the whole story. I think the other point of origin—the less obvious one—may be the Reformation, for two reasons.

First, the Reformation sort of inadvertently ends up creating pluralism in the religious sphere, for Protestants especially. There are so many sects by the end of the 16th and 17th centuries that, in order for people to live together, they have to essentially accept—even though nobody really wanted to—the idea that Lutherans are going to need to live near Methodists, who are going to live near Calvinists, etc.

And it is worth talking about how, of course, none of them were saying, "Oh, and we should put up with Catholics."

No. Absolutely not.

Catholics were not particularly interested in putting up with—

—far from it. This is a kind of inadvertent effect of the Reformation. Everybody thought they had the right answer. But over time—I'm talking to you from Philadelphia, my current city—and if you were in Philadelphia, a place of religious toleration in the 18th century, on a Sunday morning you could have heard sermons by something like 12 or 15 different kinds of Christians. That doesn't even include Jews, or potentially Native Americans and other kinds of religious content.

I think in the colonial period, probably the only place—and I think it was more in rhetoric than in reality—but Providence, Rhode Island, coming out of Roger Williams' area, he stubbornly agreed that Jews, Catholics, and Muhammadans could live there in equal standing. But certainly not in most of the colonies.

One thing you see that's really surprising is that tourists who come to Philadelphia in the 18th century will try out different churches on a Sunday morning. They'll write things like, "Heard the African Methodists at 10—very interesting sermon. Enjoyed the Baptists even more at 11." That's odd. But it's an entertainment of sorts, and it's intellectual entertainment. Those become secular lectures and things—-

Yes. And that does mirror the kind of burgeoning rise of what we now call capitalism, where there's more of a marketplace in most goods and services. Right. Suddenly, there's a religious marketplace, which may or may not anticipate— but I guess it develops at the same time as a new economic system that increases or proliferates choice.

Talk a little about how capitalism does that. And if you could—because he's got a ridiculous name, but it's also fascinating—this is a history book, but a great character: Christopher Koch. He kind of exemplifies this, right?

I will just say this to finish on the religious topic, because I don't want to suggest that people picked religions the same way they pick toothpaste or something. I mean, obviously, there are some differences.

I think we do that now.

Maybe we do. But these are kind of parallel stories that eventually merge rather than all being the same thing. Freedom of conscience—this other great Protestant idea—is very important to the idea of selecting what one believes.

To get to the other side of this story—that's the religious strain—at the same time, something else is happening first in Europe and it spreads to the New World. Latin America as well as North America. That's the rise of stores and shopping.

Different from a marketplace. A marketplace— people have always bought things, but you went to a market mainly to provision yourself. You got what you needed, someone handed it to you, and there was a transaction.

But with the rise of auction houses first—which is where Mr. Koch comes into play—and fixed-location stores shortly after came these new practices of displaying the goods and letting people do what we now call browsing, now. The word shopping itself is a neologism. It's a new word in the 18th century. It starts to show up in a kind of fashionable term by the late 18th century, and it means something very specific that we now do all the time—you do it even when browsing on your computer, which is: looking at the options, deciding which ones match your preferences, and then engaging in a transactional sale.

Mr. Koch is this figure who starts an auction house in the early 18th-century in London, and he's kind of a wizard of marketing. It's not that auctions are brand new—they have auctions in antiquity—but he decides he can turn auctions into theater, into entertainment. Women and men are both invited to come on special hours to look at the household contents of people, then to be tempted, and come back and make selections. He sets up what I would call a visual menu.

This happens again in stores a little later, when cottons start arriving from India—patterned cottons, beautiful fabrics—they're available at a low enough price point that ordinary people, not the kind they would be buying fine silks, can walk in and say, "I do love blue better than red," or "Checks are more appealing to me than stripes." And there's no moral implication around that choice. One of the things that starts to happen is that these are largely value-neutral choices. It's not Hercules' choice—the good and the bad—it's two things, and I like one of them better than the other for reasons I can't really explain. I'm going to take the one I like.

And does this also start to degrade—in terms of the moral choice—this is part of a lot of different processes, but it starts undermining a rigid class structure or it starts to challenge sumptuary laws, to some degree, where only certain people could afford certain fabrics, and there might have been laws saying only certain types of people could wear specific types of clothing, etc. 

Suddenly, when things become more available to more people, it gets confusing, right?

Absolutely. At first, there's a kind of confusion. People start saying, "What if servants start dressing like masters? We can't tell if someone's in a floral dress, who they are." That has a lot to do with urbanization, too.

Right.

People don't know each other necessarily. That arises as well. But an interesting thing happens, if what you're suggesting is true—there's a kind of deregulation that allows anybody who meets the purchase price to buy something. But then, new forms of regulation start to emerge. I just want to emphasize: it's like taste.

Yeah. Both social customs and laws and things like that— The book is excellent in driving home the point that even when it seems as if we have unlimited choice, we're always experiencing bounded choices—by things like taste, and other kinds of social pressures, and sometimes legal ones.

Could you talk a bit about how did consumer choice get so heavily identified with women? There's a whole subgenre in English writing as well as colonial American writing—and it persists in novels—of women being particularly interested in choosing among novel goods and then somehow being seen as suspect. Women more than men. It happens to men, but usually as they approach femininity, get dazzled by too many choices. 

Why did consumer choice and the female sex get conjoined?

It's a really interesting question, isn't it? How did choice, at least initially, get so associated with women? I think it goes back to that term shopping. The first shoppers are imagined to be women—they're women with leisure time. They're middle class or higher-status women who, if you've read a Jane Austen novel you know, do things like go out, for their entertainment, in an afternoon and look at hats or ribbons in one of these new kinds of stores.

They're both extremely modern because they're doing this modern thing, but they're also chastised for it because it looks really lightweight, morally unserious—especially in light of, say, Hercules' choice. If you're thinking of that as manly choices. These are choices about things like ribbons, or people to dance with, or boyfriends - as we call them now.

For a long time they taint this kind of choice.

But an interesting thing happens in the 19th century. This kind of value-neutral choice starts to shift directions and becomes something associated also with men. Then women having more choices in this domain becomes aspirational. It's at the roots of feminism. For someone like John Stuart Mill—even the idea of the secret ballot. Surprisingly Mill, the great champion of choice, freedom, and liberal notions in the 19th century, is really afraid of voting that he thinks will look too much like shopping.

When you're isolated and you make a decision based on your personal preferences, he says the only manly kind of voting is much more like Hercules' choice.

It's public, it's about the general good, it's done in concert with others. It's only in the late 19th century that the feminized version of choice becomes universal enough that it becomes the standard for things like suffrage and human rights. Then women want it too. Women say, "We've always known how to choose things. Why can't we choose political candidates? Why can't we choose occupations?"

To start bringing it into the 20th century—when you're talking about the 19th century—how does the idea of choice as freedom start to fill in for things like abolition as well as feminist equality before the law?

Are there particular moments where people say, "I, myself, as an African chattel slave, I should have the same choice to choose among things as a white citizen or somebody in the marketplace"?  In the same way that when I go to the market to buy something I'm choosing among competing goods—are there moments where— explicitly—the idea of having more individual choices becomes linked to freedom in the modern sense?

Absolutely. You mentioned abolitionism—I think that's one of the starting points. It's developing in the 19th century, but it's not the strongest strain yet. In the 20th century, I think two things happened that are really important here.

One is the development I mentioned earlier—the sciences of choice that get us to things like psychology—-people are choosers, and economics. Again, turns towards consumption rather than production as the central thing. Homo economicus is somebody who is buying.

Oh, and for the Reason audience, at least, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises talked about praxeology and humans as the choosing animal. That's expressly what defines us as a species.

Absolutely—that's the culmination. That's a perfect example. First, there's these social sciences that reimagine humans as choosers. Ordinary people participate in this every time they do everything from respond to advertising, or surveys, or go to a psychologist's or psychiatrist's office. So that's one thing that happened.

I think around the time of the Second World War is a really critical moment when the Allied Powers, and especially the United States, start to say that what makes the U.S. and its allies different from communists or fascists is this notion of freedom as choice—both in the commercial sphere and in the political sphere.

By the time you get the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is 1948, I think it's striking. People often say it's just kind of the same as the Rights of Man of the 18th century rewritten in the 20th century. But it's not, because choice isn't there in the original ones, and the reframing in the 20th century as choice in religion, choice in education, choice in spouse, choice in the political sphere—all of these become kind of essential human rights principles.

A lot of other movements, including feminism, kind of capitalize on that and say, "what about us?" But the basic framework is, I think, set by the Second World War, and the key thing here is the way the political and the economic are fused in that model.

This is well done in the book—the discussion of this creates a massive amount of anxiety across every possible level of society. And it's interesting to think about the Declaration of Human Rights—or rather, that foregrounding of choice—but then all of the great sciences coming out of the 19th century seem to be… which are born out of a liberal society where people are free to experiment and do different things.

But if it's Marx, Darwin, and Freud, they're all kind of saying that, well, it appears that we have choice, but we don't. We're designed by economics. We're just designed by our psychology or our biology to—you know—we don't really have much choice at all.

And that gets compounded whenI think a lot about books like The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard in the '50s, where he's talking about how advertisers are working with psychologists to kind of make people in marketplaces think they're choosing. But in fact, they're going to buy the red car, they're going to buy the new refrigerator, and you have no say in it.

Can you talk a little bit about how the anxiety that is introduced by the idea that people have more choice, but then also this shadow idea that choice is always kind of fake, and we're actually—we're scamming people by telling them that they have choice?

Right. There are critiques all along, and they come from the right and the left. It's not like there's a single politics that dictates this model. On one side people are saying, "What does it mean to give people a choice if they don't have the means to exercise them?" So these people— you have choice in profession, you have choice in education, and nobody has any means to say, get the education presented. What kind of choice is that? So that's one kind of illusion.

And the other is what you're suggesting, which might be equally as important: aren't all these choices sort of inconsequential, and therefore give you the illusion of freedom when you have very little? Either because you're steered by various external factors, or because the choices don't really matter that much. You go to the supermarket, and there are 50 kinds of shampoo, and you spend 50 minutes trying to figure out which one you want—but they're probably all the same.

And we're in a bizarre moment of kind of horseshoe theory, where someone like Bernie Sanders said a few years ago that we don't need 23 flavors of deodorant or 50 types of sneakers. And then you hear someone like Tucker Carlson, now, saying the same thing—that being able to buy more cheap crap from China on Amazon is not a meaningful choice.

That's interesting. Yeah.

Yeah. Part of what we talk about when we think about choice—and the sections in the book on this are phenomenal to read—the genealogy of how abortion rights became codified as reproductive choice. Can we talk a little bit about that? Because that brings us closer to the present day. 

You write that when abortion laws were being—or the rhetorical arguments over abortion, particularly as Roe v. Wade was starting to come online and right after—that within feminist organizations, there was a discussion of, "do we talk about this in terms of choice or not?" 

Could you just kind of summarize that and explain how that fits into this larger set of issues that you're engaged in?

Yeah, absolutely. I had been thinking about the debates about choice because, as I was writing the book, we were having national conversations about abortion rights—50 years after Roe v. Wade.

What really struck me was that in the 1970s, right after Roe v. Wade was decided, the mainstream feminist organizations like NOW and Planned Parenthood were looking for a way to mainstream the decision—to make abortion less of a contentious issue. They think, "should we try equality? No, that's got issues around it. Should we try population control?" That now seems crazy to us, but that was one of the issues possible. "Healthcare?" That is what the British go with.

They decide against that.

A number of the organizations come to the conclusion that the one thing that all Americans across the political spectrum agree upon is the value of choice. As you just said, choices really run across left-right lines, pretty fully. So it's not a crazy idea to say, "What if we just say, 'look, you don't have to like abortion. You don't have to have an abortion if you don't want one. We're just increasing the menu. We're giving people one more option as a legal possibility. Everybody can select what's in their best interest.'" I think this was really a solution to a problem.

Well, it didn't work out, obviously, quite that way.

Although, it's fascinating that in the wake of Roe being overturned and decisions being put back to the states, that a number of states that were expected to reinstate 19th-century measures against abortion—I'm thinking Kansas and Ohio.

They were like, "Hey you know what, we're not going back. We're actually going to instantiate liberal, in contemporary terms, liberal abortion laws. 

It is fascinating. The attack from the left is easier to understand as the ones saying, "What's a choice if there are no doctors and I don't have money to pay for this?" That's a classic version.

But the attack from the right went back to a Hercules' choice model, and said, "the right to life is a consequential moral decision, you're just offering up consumer options."

Right. I used to see the bumper sticker quite frequently: "It's a child, not a choice."

Exactly.

It's interesting—it also kind of concedes the fact that that the choice rhetoric won and was very useful. It's been adopted to the extent that school choice is more of a right-wing phenomenon. 

It employs the same logic—that giving parents and children more choices on a menu of options—we will give you the money, the voucher, or public funding to make "meaningful" choices—because you're actually exercise your option.  

Right. In some ways, those women's organizations in the '70s were prescient. They figured choice is an easy sell for Americans. It's an easy sell in a lot of the world.

Just to simply say—people like reproductive choice on one side, school choice on the other. They're fighting about what should be chosen, but not about choice itself. And when you say that, the reaction in Kansas and other places has been really interesting because… people will argue against abortion, but they won't necessarily want to give up on the idea that the choice should be out there.

So they might say, "I don't actually believe abortion is a good thing." On the other hand: "Do I really want to tell everybody that they can't have it under any circumstances?" A lot of people have said no.

I think, in a way, choice seems like a not-very-successful way to sell the public on an idea, but it does continue to have a kind of resonance that makes it an effective political tool. And you saw during COVID-19, for instance, the great feminist expression my body, my choice being appropriated by people who were protesting masking or vaccine mandates—which was a very unexpected twist.

Well, it seems that Americans like choice rather than mandates, right? And this kind of goes across political lines. It's fascinating—this is slightly off-topic—but prior to COVID-19, Pew [Research] ran a survey in the early 2010s asking people across political lines whether they were pro- or anti-vaccine mandates, or vaccines in general.

And being anti-vaccine was more of a left-wing cause in the early 2010s. Now it has become very hard-coded right—even if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a liberal Democrat and is now in the Trump administration. It's kind of fascinating. But that idea of, "I don't want to make that choice, but I want to have the possibility of opting out"

Right. I do think that's a kind of residual instinct that people have: choice is good.

I sometimes worry, though, that there's a difference between a choice you can make based on your own preferences—that it only affects you. You know, "I choose to do this; it makes no difference to your life."

But there are other kinds of choices. Vaccination, for instance—if rates of vaccination get too low, it affects everybody's kids, right? Because that's how we…

It's fascinating. There are arguments that because the COVID-19 vaccine does not stop the spread of the disease - but it weakens it for the person who takes it- it's categorically different from, say, the measles vaccine. 

Right, but let's use measles as an example…

Well, I was going to say that somebody like RFK, who was very anti–measles vaccine, that was his first big foray into public discussion about vaccines.

He says that COVID-19 vaccine mandates are bad, but he's had to admit that measles vaccine mandates actually serve a public function. I think he was eating a little bit of crow there.

He did. Yeah.

You write toward the end of the book that choice—whether about babies, or baubles, or beliefs—should be a means, not an end unto itself. Can you explain how does that play into a larger question about: What are the limits of talking about choice as freedom? And complicating the easy equation of saying that more choice means we're more free?

Your example of measles vaccines actually would work there to that point.

I think if you want to think of sort of three shifts, there's the Hercules' choice—the right thing or the wrong thing. There's a kind of value-neutral choice emerging, which is to say, what I like better. And then there's one where the value itself becomes the choice—just having a choice, itself, is what matters.

And many times—of course, I'm not a critic, per se, of choice—I think choice is… you know, nobody wants to be coerced on most fronts. But if choice is always the highest value, we sometimes lose track of what we're choosing and why.

This would be a case, for instance, if you start saying, "my body, myself"  and you're talking about measles vaccines—because you feel the most important thing is getting to do what you want to do.

A certain kind of selfishness emerges, where you've lost track of why you're choosing what you're choosing.

And there are other examples one could point to, too where sometimes, choice can be liberating. But choice isn't always liberating. Some kinds of choices are, as you said, illusory—or they can trap you in various ways and prevent us from thinking: "What's in our common interest here? What would be the best-case scenario?"

So I'm more interested in people having a kind of self-reflexiveness about choice than I am in telling people, "These are the good choices, and these are bad ones"

You say at the end that too much of our history—you talk about behavioral economics and whatnot—seeks to explain a kind of path dependency: "OK, these choices were made at a particular time, and that's how we arrived at the current moment. And it kind of makes sense, whether it's good or bad…" 

But it would be good to get outside of that and to think in more—and I'm not accusing you of being a utopian in a dark sense—just what if we're actually starting over when talking about some set of activities or about what society might look like?

I don't like being called a bit of a utopian. Because I'm not asking people to set policy this way, as much as to rethink some of the things we take to be absolutely natural and ordinary.

I mean certainly. In a weird way, over the past 30 years—of thinking about my professional life—the idea of demystifying "nature" is— For God's sake we need to be doing that all of the time. We have been, as a society. So, that's very good.

You may be the wrong person to ask for this, but when you think about the choices that all of us are making on a given day…just because we have more things that we're doing in a given day. 

I have children who have grown up in a world where they just start making more choices. If they're turning on a TV or a phone, you go from three channels, to 30 channels, to an infinite number of effective channels on the internet and beyond.

What are the ways that we might become better—you were talking about being self-reflexive about choice—but give us a tip you can give us as we end this conversation…

So it's true—we're all a little overwhelmed with choice at the moment.

There was an interesting literature, some of it by people in things like behavioral economics and marketing saying, "Nobody really wants to go on Amazon and, you know, you need a new toaster. You really don't want to see 500 toasters. You really would probably prefer to have three different ones at three different prices and you just pick."

That literature, I know, in social psychology or behavioral psychology, is highly contested. But one thing that is true is that Amazon is now sharing influencer picks with you. So maybe you follow an influencer, and they say, "Here are five great toasters," instead of wading through an infinite number.

Wirecutter or something, right?

We look now to both algorithms and all kinds of consultants to help us with every kind of choice—if we can afford to. Everything from a personal shopper or a decorator to a financial planner, to an algorithm that says, "You liked this movie? You might like this other one of the 800 we're offering you."

We can use those. Of course, they tend to reinforce, they don't allow you to really dip into new things. They sort of reinforce what you already done but I think more important is to think about when choice is really valuable to you and when it isn't. Not all choices matter. Some matter a lot.

Think long and hard about, say, who you want to spend the rest of your life with, right? But back to those toasters—doing hours of research on 500 toasters, trying to figure out the best deal by checking every possible site and things—it's a source of frustration, anxiety…

Yeah—obsessive-compulsive is like, is a 4.2-star rating really better than a 4.4? Or whatever…

You spend half the evening looking through the options on Netflix before you can pick what your family's gonna watch because you've been…

That has just shifted the family drama from cruising Blockbuster for a movie everybody will watch. 

Now we do it in the living room.

Amazon even tries to mimic the experience because you have baskets— for instance — you put things into them, then you go to a checkout.

You sort of mimicked what those 18th-century shoppers were doing when they first learned to make choices.

It was novel then—now we just have electronic versions.

But I do think we could think more—both as a society - that's maybe my utopian part - but also on a personal level: When is choice meaningful? When is it actually preferable to say, "Eat the dinner that's being made. Don't think about, 'Does everybody at the table want something different?' or 'What would everybody prefer?'"

We don't add to our happiness—and I don't think we even really add to our freedom—in those actions.

And it might make the choices that matter easier to deal with if we didn't think we were making fifty a day.

That's great. OK, we're going to leave it there. I've been talking with Sophia Rosenfeld, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and the book is The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life. 

Sophia, thanks so much for talking to Reason.

Thank you—it's been a pleasure.

The post The Surprising Origins of Modern Freedom appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Today's guest is Elizabeth Nolan Brown, whose recent Reason cover story looks into the politics of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement spearheaded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Just a decade or so ago, it was Democrats, liberals, and progressives who were pushing healthy eating initiatives and it was common to see Republicans and conservatives like Sarah Palin brandish Big Gulps like AR-15s and Fox News anchors like Sean Hannity declare their loyalty to Kentucky Fried Chicken.

But now the Trumpian right is embracing wellness and food purity like nobody's business—and is using the state to enforce its preferences.

Nick Gillespie talks with Brown about how we got here, where it's headed—and whether you've eaten your last red M&M.

This episode was recorded live in front of an audience in New York City. Go here to get information about upcoming events, including The Reason Roundtable live in New York on July 15!

0:00—Intro

1:17—What is MAHA?

4:51—The right used to scoff at wellness

11:31—Processed foods were once desirable

13:13—Liberals were first to embrace "farm to table"

15:21—What led to the right's embrace of healthy living?

23:52—Where libertarians and MAHA align

27:43—How RFK Jr. won over the right

30:44—Research quality of dietary recommendations

35:53—Concerns about the MAHA movement

37:17—School lunches and food stamps

40:14—Tradwives

43:00—Gender roles and MAHA

The Reason Roundtable Live in NYC, July 15

The Soho Forum Debate: Jacob Hacker vs. David Goldhill, July 16

Future of Freedom: If you're tired of cable news debates and Twitter shouting matches and you're looking for serious, good-faith conversations between people who actually care about liberty, then it's time to check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Each episode dives deep into a single topic—tariffs, campus speech, the Department of Government Efficiency—and brings together two guests who disagree on the best path forward. But here's the twist: This isn't a debate show. No interrupting. No dunking. If you believe the future of freedom depends on more than just winning arguments and you're ready for something deeper than the usual echo chambers, check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Real disagreement. Real ideas. Real conversations. Subscribe to Future of Freedom wherever you get your podcasts.

______________________________________________________________________________

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Let's start by defining MAHA. How does it define itself, and what are its constituent parts?

Elizabeth Nolan Brown: I think MAHA is a state of mind because it means so many things. When I was researching this article, I just searched the MAHA hashtag on various social media to see what was defined as MAHA. I think of it as being about using tallow to cook your fries instead of seed oils. Or maybe skepticism about vaccines, on the other hand. But when you look at what people are describing as MAHA, it's everything from banning food dyes, to getting people to exercise more, to functional medicine, to regenerative farming, to testing your air in your home for mold and toxins. Any sort of wellness fad of the past 40 years is kind of being lumped in as MAHA, right now.

What is regenerative farming?

Regenerative… Don't let the future surgeon general Casey Means—or Callie Means, I forget which one is which. 

It's one of the Wonder Twins of alternative medicine.

It's farming so that the soil, so that while you're planting crops, it's done in a way that the soil gives back and will be more healthy after you've planted in it than before.

Okay, that sounds… 

Unobjectable…

I suspect people are doing that, yeah. So who gets to define MAHA? Because Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former Democratic presidential candidate—an independent presidential candidate— now secretary of Health and Human Services, is a big key figure in this. If Trump gets to say what "America First" means, does RFK Jr. get to define what MAHA is?

I think he's the one who coined the term or started popularizing the term. But it was really him capitalizing on this already existing trend within conservative circles, which was that suddenly conservatives were starting to sound like old-school hippies — or like my friends that lived in Brooklyn in 2009 about this stuff. Suddenly, they were talking about cleansing your aura and eating without additives, and just all of the stuff that you think of as not belonging to the right at all. Especially since COVID, that ramped up. RFK just sort of capitalized on that and brought it all under this MAHA umbrella.

What is the connective tissue between, "okay, we're going to eat healthy, we're not going to eat corporate cereals that have petroleum-based food dyes in them, and we're also going to be anti-vax?" Is there a controlling idea that motivates all of this?

Yeah. I think if there's a loose thread underlying all of this, it's skepticism of conventional health wisdom and health establishment authorities. So, skepticism of government health advice, skepticism of the big governing health bodies. And that's why, at its core, it's sort of refreshing from a libertarian standpoint. I'm not anti-vaccine. I am skeptical about some mainstream nutrition advice.

Like what? Can you give us an example?

Well, I guess now it's not necessarily mainstream anymore, but the whole "eat carbs to lose weight and don't eat saturated fat"—that kind of stuff.

So let's talk a little bit about—you were saying what's weird, or what's notable about this, among other things, is that you have people who identify on the right, they're conservatives, or they're MAGA Republicans, who are talking like they belong to the Park Slope Co-op in 2009, right? And you, in the story—which is just kind of a great run-through of all this in an analysis—you bring up forgotten episodes where Sarah Palin, of all people, is slurping from a Big Gulp and saying, "From my cold, dead hands. Would you ever take this"?

She literally did that. I discovered so many great old stories when I was going back through news archives. This is why it seemed so weird to me, though. This is what interested me in the first place. When I started noticing this trend—and a lot of people have written about it over the past year or so— but I remembered so vividly how pro-unhealthiness Republicans were in the late aughts and early 2010s. It was all, "Yeah, you can have my Big Gulp when you pry it from my cold, dead hands."

And that was because they were responding, partly, to a lot of things. But at that point, they were pushing back against people like Michelle Obama and trying to make school lunches healthy.

Yeah. I think some of that, yeah—and the soda taxes here in New York, bans on big sodas, and stuff. Definitely there was some of it that was pushing back on government stuff. But I also think that in the aughts, there was this sort of idea—or maybe going back even further—that healthy eating was "gay." Healthy eating made you like a sissy. It was more like liberal…

Like a soy boy—

Right, exactly. Real men and real Americans ate triple cheeseburgers and had heart attacks by the time they were 45, because that's what you did.

That's patriotism. 

Yeah. Yeah. 

I guess it was in the '80s, there was a book called Real Men Don't Eat Quiche. So this is like an older heritage. That was partly a response to the idea that anything that was European, like quiche—it's a French food so we know that they're our greatest gastronomical enemy, as well as geopolitical adversary.

But talk a bit about how did eating well become feminized in the conservative mind before we enter this new phase where they're the granola eaters?

That's an interesting question. Obviously, dieting and caring about food has long been associated with women, so I think there's some of that there too. But when I talked to Nina Teicholz—she wrote The Big Fat Surprise. And she was talking about how since the '60s and '70s and up through the '90s and even sort of today, the mainstream dietary advice was very much about cutting down on meat, cutting down on butter, and cheese, and eating more…

And fat… and protein, even, was cutting down…

Right. Cutting down on protein and eating more soy and eating vegetables and stuff like that. So I think these things that were associated with male diets, especially — even though everybody ate them — were really demonized for a long time. So the idea of eating healthy was very much like, "Well, you have to eat lettuce and you know…"

Then you're reduced to eating rabbit food. People would say, "Oh, vegetarians are weak." They're feminized in the public imagination and whatnot. Meat, and potatoes, and eggs, and dairy are somehow the real America. Conservatives glommed onto that. Did they glom onto that because it seemed like that's what liberals hated? Or is it that they're from states that are farm producers?

Probably both, I think, yeah. But definitely, a lot of it was like, "Oh, liberals are doing this, so we hate it."

Yeah. So then how can you—I mean, Sarah Palin, I haven't seen or heard from her in years it seems. Is she still on Big Gulps? Or has she become— I could see her becoming very healthy.

Yeah, well, that's what I thought. Sean Hannity was the funniest one that I read. In my article, I open with him, he had this extended rant: "I love my Big Mac. I love my Arby's," whatever. And then a couple of years after that, he went on a big diet. Now he's interviewing RFK about how fast food is poison. He's a really good avatar…

I don't know if he still does it—he used to throw a football into his audience at the end of his show. This was a staple, which seems related somehow, where conservatives would go on rants about how soccer is inherently gay, right? Even though it's the most popular sport in the world and in most countries it is associated with working-class or lower-class people. But in America, if you chose soccer over football, we need to send you to pray-away-the-gay camp or something, right?

I mean, we think now about how everything is—both the left and the right—seem to always be defining themselves in opposition to each other. But that always sort of has existed, and I think we see a lot of that too. I love that I found all these articles about when Michelle Obama was like, "Hey, maybe people should breastfeed," which now has become this huge conservative talking point—that women all need to breastfeed and not use formula. But Michelle Obama said that and they freaked out. There was this whole news cycle where they were all like, "Big Mother is out to get you and make you breastfeed." 

Wow, I totally forgot about that one. 

She wants to subsidize your breast pumps and stuff.

Yeah, and that is true, right? Breast pumps are subsidized. 

Well, they're tax-deductible. 

Yeah, right. I mean, I guess in any particular issue, these things come and go in cycles too. Where breastfeeding is perceived—and we can talk about whatever we know about the science or medicine or stuff in a second—but there are cycles where it's like, "Obviously better for the kid, and everybody should do it." Then it's, "No, actually, formula is good," and we should be embracing science and technology to reduce the biological burden on women to be mothers." Where are we in that? Is anybody saying, "Yeah, you know what, actually, formula is good?"

No. I was actually really surprised to learn that in my mom's generation, none of them got the breastfeeding talk.

I guess in postwar America, there are those moments where, if something is manufactured—if something comes out of a factory—it is inherently better. So white bread, Wonder Bread, was great. It was kind of an aspiration, as opposed to peasant bread, which was dark and grainy and imperfect. What you wanted was something…

Better living through science.

That's right. And it's like, we want food that is untouched by human hands. We want formula because that's got to be better. If it comes out of a lab, it's good. Now that's totally reversed.

Yeah. I think that's great, to a degree. I lived in Brooklyn in 2009 through '13, and this was the peak of people farming on rooftops, making their own kombucha, and drinking it out of mason jars, and butchering their own hogs in some weird butcher shops. My boyfriend was a big butcher trend person.

Was this underground as well?

Like figuratively or literally? 

Was it licensed butchering?

Yes, yes. No, all of a sudden in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, there were these "do your own butchering" classes and stuff. I'm very pro that trend—I definitely got taken in by it—but it's just really funny to me how that was very left-coded. There's no reason it was left-coded. There's nothing inherently leftist. In fact, you could say a lot of this stuff—the sort of "back-to-the-land," "back to traditional ways"—is actually sort of conservative. But because of the people who were doing it which was young, liberal-leaning people in urban areas, it became left-coded. And now you see the exact same aesthetic, except now it's all Mormons doing it, so it's very right-coded. It's tradwives. It's become…

Can we talk a little bit—assuming that Brooklyn is kind of the font of this, and that's overstating it a bit—but why did hipster lefties, or people who coded left, why did they get into smoking American Spirit cigarettes or rolling their own, and butchering their own meat? Where did that imperative come from?

I definitely had a lot of theories about this back in the day because it suddenly seemed it happened overnight. If you went to the sort of liberal-leaning health food stores, it was all tofu and lentils and all this shit. And then all of a sudden, it was grass-fed beef and lamb and all this stuff. Part of it was this whole slow food movement that was happening and Michael Pollan and all of that, of the era.

I also think the recession had a lot to do with it. 

How so?

Like the music changed—the music all became very folky—and everything became about getting away from the offices, getting away from this capitalist system, and making your own food, having local currencies. Everything was about being localized. I think it was very much a big mood in response to global events that people felt they couldn't control.

Were you in Brooklyn during the Occupy Movement?

No, I was in D.C. then. Because that was like 2007–08, right?

Yeah, and a little bit later, I guess, like 2010, maybe…

Maybe I was here for some of it.

Does the ideology of Occupy give rise to a kind of slow food movement—or vice versa? Are they all of a piece with one another?

I think it's the same impulse. This impulse to sort of be like,"we're going to unplug from this big, elitist system that we don't really trust and can't control."

"But we're going to use our MacBooks in order to figure out how to do everything."

Yeah, because that was back when tech was still supposed to be good.

Was still okay… 

Apple, and Twitter, and Facebook and all that, they were the good guys back then.

So let's talk about how did things started shifting rightward. Because you're totally right that this stuff which was considered— this was a sign that you were a leftist in good standing. Now it's like you're a MAGA/MAHA power user or something like that. What are the steps that it ends up turning right?

That's what I wanted to answer with this article. That's why I talked to a whole bunch of people to try and solicit theories about it. Because I don't know. I was just fascinated by the question of how we got here. Some of the more plausible theories that people talked about… a big one is COVID, but I think it starts before COVID. We can come back to that. 

Partly, the left started ceding—c-e-d-i-n-g—ceding this territory to nobody at the time. 

Suddenly we had the rise of the body positivity movement, and the rise of various concerns about cultural appropriation and various concerns about privilege, and these more, I guess you'd call them social justice-y—maybe now we'd call them "woke", or you whatever you want to call them. But these concerns started taking over what was appropriate in left-leaning spheres.

So is that like if you go to Whole Foods, which is already kind of corporate and capitalist, but if you go to your local co-op and they have a certain type of Latin American or South American crop, on the left you're like, "Maybe I shouldn't be eating this"? 

Right. Before, with Michael Pollan and that whole thing, it was like, "Let's all just do home cooking. Let's all cook different flavors and different whole foods" and things like that. And then suddenly it was, "Wait a second. Those chickpeas, that's from this culture. You need to credit them." Maybe if you're a white person, you can't even cook them. There was this cookbook author, Alison Roman, who got excoriated for calling something a stew when actually it was a curry, and she should have credited that.

Yeah, that's a big problem.

Yeah. And then on the privilege side, I talked to this author, Phoebe Maltz Bovy—who's one of my favorite authors—and she was reminding me, and I remember seeing this too…

She is dangerously Canadian. Right?

She's from New York. She's dangerously Canadian now. 

She's a settler colonial of Canada?

Yes, exactly. But as she was reminding me—and I remember this—you'd see it in the comments of places like Jezebel and stuff. Someone would be like, "It doesn't take that much money…" People would be like, "It's privileged to eat healthy. People can't all eat healthy." Then someone else would come in and be like, "Well, you can get a can of beans or you can get some lentils. They're really cheap, actually, and anybody can cook them." Then some other people would come in and be like, "Well, maybe someone doesn't have a stove. Maybe they don't have time to cook them. Or, maybe they don't have arms." It just devolved into this whole thing where you couldn't win this argument because it was just like…

I guess if you don't have arms, the can is going to be a problem. 

Or the can opener… 

That's funny, because Ben Franklin, in his autobiography, famously talks about being a vegetarian because it was cheaper in the day. So with Michael Pollan—and I guess really The Omnivore's Dilemma and a couple of other books—he popularized the idea of food miles, but also this extended attack on people who merely eat "food-like substances." One critique…

You don't eat anything your grandmother or great-grandmother wouldn't eat.

Yeah, and I'm sure this was in the pages of Reason as well. One thing that people targeted about that was that it was really classist, in the end. Does that play into Brooklyn's embrace of slow food or of ridiculously ornate ways of preparing very niche foods?

Yeah, I think that it's part of it. And I should say—because Phoebe, who I just said, she also said this and I totally agree—that part of the critique was totally legitimate. There was a part of the slow food movement that was classist. You can only get your ingredients from these farmers markets, and they have to be these in-season things, and you need all these specialty foods.

If it wasn't sexist, it was at least not very considerate of the idea that a lot of times this would mean like, "ok, someone is expected to cook." Sure, some of the high-profile people like Michael Pollan were, but a lot of times if you're saying "you need to cook more," it's the woman who that's going to fall to. There was not a lot of concerns about class and feminism and things like that. So I think some of the critique of it was valid. But then it pushed back too much.

But then you were saying, basically the left got—you know, in a way, you're supposed to eat healthy, but then you're not allowed to criticize people if they're out of shape.

Right. You're also not allowed to talk about wanting to eat healthy. That was a big part of it, too—with Pollan, with that whole slow food movement, with Michelle Obama and the early days of Let's Move. The whole thing was like, "We're really fat in this country. Let's be less fat." That was inherently a part of this healthy cooking thing. I mean, it was also about the pleasures of food and about other healthy…

But it's mostly like, "I don't want to have to walk down the street and see fat people and their Medicare scooters."

It was about trying to help people get fit, too. 

By shaming them…

And then, yes, it was about…

…and making them feel really bad about their guts. Right. Which is very American.

I think it was about a healthy concern with people's weight, and then that became a thing that was also sort of verboten.

So then the right—okay, so the left kind of evacuates this space a little bit or pulls back. How does the right move into it? Because that's kind of… 

I realize I have no idea what Sean Hannity's BMI is, but I always think of him as a fat shit, right? Am I alone in that? 

But he's not anymore, right?

No, he's not. It's also even people like Bill Clinton—if you remember him from his first two years of his presidency or so—he was Phil Hartman on Saturday Night Live, where he was stealing people's McDonald's while jogging. And it's like, no Bill Clinton hasn't been fat in like 30 years, almost. 

So how did the right move into the health space?

A couple of things. On one hand—and I'm sure you know this better than I — the right has always had weird strains of conspiracy theory, health skepticism, whatever. Going way back I think of the Kellogg's guy…

I don't know… Was Kellogg… was he right-wing or left-wing?

Well, I know he was very concerned about people masturbating. That's why he thought they should eat cereal?

That could have been a left-wing… I mean, that could be a progressive concern.

I mean that's true. That could've been a progressive concern. So again—with the Nazis. Take the Nazis…

Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

They were very concerned with health and bodily purity. There is a strain where, when you cross so far to the far right that people get really obsessed with naturalness. 

I remember a great story in the old magazine Lingua Franca, which was a magazine about higher education. They had a great article that was like, "Whatever else you say about the Nazis, you have to remember that they helped pioneer organic honey production." And it's like, yeah that's right up there thank you. The Holocaust, world domination, organic beekeeping. Yeah. But yeah, they were fixated….

A lot of this is about purity issues, right? How do you maintain your body against all of these outside shadowy forces? And the right, obviously, if you go back to the '60s, people who were anti-fluoridation or all sorts of things—that came from the right as well the left, probably more from the right. So do you see this as a continuation of that?

Kind of. Even before COVID too, you had the rise of all these different online subcultures. The gym bros got really into eating protein, talking about nootropics, and how to biohack themselves and all of that. And then on the female side of things, you have sort of, for lack of a better word, because I think this is overused now, but the trad wives and the back to the land conservative moms who are now concerned about you know like phthalates in their food and…

And that fits in with globalization or the corporatization of the food chain. Talk a little bit about how libertarians fit into this looming or this large floating set of concerns. People would talk a lot about how, "Oh, corn syrup is terrible. High-fructose corn syrup is terrible, and the only reason we have it is because we have a ban on Cuban sugar," and, "We have a corn lobby that makes us put corn in our gas tanks through ethanol—and in all of our food." That's kind of a libertarian… that's very vibrant in libertarian stuff. Is that part of this? That we have lost control over what goes into our bodies?

I mean, definitely. You have a lot of libertarians who got into the paleo diet and things like that. Who got into CrossFit a lot. I think a lot of these attract libertarians because of concerns that the powers that be are wrong about diets…

Right—and just being contrarian. So CrossFit, instead doing long repetition of specific discrete exercise, you do all these things in motion, short bursts of energy. It's contrary to what we're usually told.

For years the government was recommending like 12 teaspoons of sugar a day or something in the food pyramid. Recommending all these carbs, saying you shouldn't eat fat and you shouldn't do all of this stuff. And then it turns out that was all wrong. I cannot make sense of seed oils, guys. If somebody has the answer to seed oils if they're good or bad, please tell me, because I've read so much about seed oil.

They are the one thing, if we got rid of, we would not have a deficit. If we get rid of seed oils everything would be fine. 

Everybody be healthy. 

I think so, and then the federal budget would balance.

The reason we have seed oils in so many things is because the government suddenly was like: You shouldn't use lard. You shouldn't use butter. You shouldn't use tallow. You shouldn't use all these traditional fats to cook things. Then we got trans fats. Everybody started using trans fats instead. Then it turned out we had to ban all of those—well, that backfired. And then we went to vegetable oil. A lot of the stuff that we have now that people are now worried about is a direct response to the government—either indirectly or directly—saying you can't use these other substances.

So somebody like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talks a lot. And he's a fascinating figure because he's a former heroin addict, he—by his own account—pumps himself full of testosterone. But he also eats a particular diet, he goes falconing, and he's always doing push-ups. I mean, he's a strange figure to be a health guru. He was also on the left—as an environmentalist lawyer and an anti-vaccine advocate going back to the beginning of this century, at the very latest. How did he capture so much mindshare on the conservative right?

COVID. Which is like the missing piece of all this.

Right, right. So all of this stuff is kind of floating around, and then COVID really helps focus on coming out of that. I think I read this in Reason, but in the early 2010s or so, Pew Research asked people of different political persuasions, "are you generally pro- or against vaccines?" 

And it was more common for people who defined themselves as liberal or on the left to be anti-vaccine. Conservatives were pro. 

That has clearly flipped because of COVID. 

Yeah. They asked if they had trust in medical institutions. It was more common on the left to say no. Now, it's way more common on the right. I think people on the right got very radicalized by COVID and distrustful of the government advice around masks or vaccines. Some of the stuff they got radicalized about was valid; some, not. But anyways they got radicalized on that…

I talked to Alex Clark, who's this sort of conservative influencer, podcaster, young woman and she was saying, they already distrusted the government about a lot of things, but they were really trusting of food and pharma. And then this made them be like, "Well, wait a second, why are we trusting them about this?" On the one hand that radicalized a lot of conservatives against institutions like food and pharma that they traditionally trusted. Then on the other hand, you had a lot of leftists who were like, "I support all of these institutions." 

I talked to a woman who was a yoga teacher and she was saying how so many people she knew in the gym and yoga space, anyone who made their living doing things involving bodies—there were the shutdowns and they felt like that was unfair. They felt like defining them as not essential was unfair. They felt like there was just like all of this stuff around COVID that radicalized them and they started sort of protesting against it. And then that put them in touch either in person, at protests, or online with right wingers and people kept being like, "Well, if you don't buy everything that the government is doing about COVID, that means you're a right-winger." And a certain amount of them were just like, "Okay, well then fine, I guess I'm a right winger now." 

It sort of led to this space where people left and right who were maybe both dissatisfied with their party's establishment found each other over these health concerns. 

How do you parse the latter? In the article, you talk about this a bit, but is there a way to know with, say claims about particular foods, whether it's good or bad, or a diet is good or a bad, or a medicine is good or bad? Do we have good information or is it really still kind of up for grabs? If you only eat, you know, Atkins bars, which I did for a number of years, yeah, and will continue to, I'm sure. But you know, is that bad for you? Stuff that is made in a lab, that is supposed to help you lose weight or you know keep your blood levels where they should be? 

Do we know definitively that that's really bad for you, or nutrition seems to be one of these sciences that is constantly rediscovering things from 50 years ago. As no, this time it's real, etc. Do we have more knowledge that's actually reliable now? 

I think part of the problem is like what you said, people want to have really easy dichotomies: processed food is bad, whole foods are good. But it depends on the processed food, right?

If we're talking processed foods like potato chips and Twinkies and all the things we have on the one side of the table out there like yeah, probably eating that diet is bad. But there are many foods that are technically processed foods that are made in ways with whole foods ingredients that are maybe made in such a way that they're not actually bad for you. So you can't just say like…

I feel like that's part of the problem now. RFK, and various people in the Trump administration, and various people on the right, they were all like, "We want freedom to follow our own medical advice, not listen to experts, do our own thing, take our health into our own hands." Great. But now they're like, "Wait a second, we've got power now. So we could actually force everybody to do it, because we know what's best."

Right. And it would be criminal not to.

Right. "We have to. We know the way now. Now that we have enlightened nutrition, it's so much better than it is." And it's like, no. Because we still don't know. We might have some better answers, but there's still so much we don't know. People who think that we're like…

"We've finally cleared the thicket of ignorance and we're civilized now. We won't revisit any of this because we now have the truth." What are some of the political agenda items of the MAHA movement? Regardless of whether they're correct or not. I suppose we can and should debate each individual thing, but what are some of the political agenda items that they have that worry you?

 That worry me?

Or concern you.

I guess just any of the things that they're mandating. It's sort of hard to know because with the food additives thing, RFK was like, " Well, I came to an understanding with the food companies that they're going to phase out all these food dyes." Does that mean they're willingly doing it—this is a free market thing—or does it mean he basically pressured them? Like, "Nice company you have; it'd be a shame if I have to do some regulations on you."

It'd be interesting—I don't know the answer to this—but how many of you remember SnackWells? There was a period where your grocer aisle had a massive SnackWells item. Or Healthy Choice was another one that made terrible ice cream that you could eat by the quart. It didn't taste well, but it had no fat or flavor in it or something.

Were they jawboned into that? Or were they trying to build a market niche. Or were they responding to a market niche? In the same way now, is RFK, or is the government, forcing manufacturers to change what they do? Or are companies suddenly realizing there's a market just for this type of product? Like grass-fed beef, I don't think people probably wouldn't have been willing to pay for that in the '70s or most of the '80s.

I don't know. I think some states are starting to do more direct bans on different things.

West Virginia banned certain yellow and red food dyes. It just seems weird that that bubbles to the top of West Virginia's dietary concerns. I'm not saying anything—it's just that West Virginia is an incredibly poor state and an unhealthy state. It doesn't seem like that's going to move the needle.

I don't think anybody needs to eat Yellow Dye No. 17, or whatever it is, but I worry…

But they should be able to.

Well, yeah. And I also worry that—yes, they should be able to. From a… Yes, of course, Nick. Of course, I think they should…

They should be able to color their heroin that they sell in vending machines in private charter schools.

Yeah. They should be able to pay for their sex work in Red Dye No. 6.

I just swear, though, that with these things, we're going to have a trans fat situation too. Where everybody's going to be like, "Ok, we're all going to"—either because it's mandated or because we've been pressured into it—"we're going to all get rid of these substances, do these new things," and then we find out the new things are just as unhealthy, or actually worse for you, than before.

Does the MAHA movement concern you in terms of coercion? Are there big-ticket items—because obviously, from an economic or from a free-market point of view, we shouldn't have the embargo on Cuban sugar, right? But is MAHA going to start dictating food policy in a way that's worse or more coercive than whatever's in place now?

I think it's looking like that. And I think that's a shame, because I think that the promise of MAHA—what they were saying that they wanted to do—was just make it so people didn't have to do certain things. They talked about ending farm subsidies and getting rid of these obstacles to healthy eating that were created by the government. But now it seems like they're starting to be like, "Well, actually, since we have this power, why don't we use it?"

I want to bring it back to school lunches. How many of you ever ate a prepared lunch at school? How many of you enjoyed it? Ok, there were hands up, and there were very few hands after. Is there any way—to turn to maybe a brief conversation of state capacity libertarianism or something—is there any way that schools can be forced to, if they're going to offer lunch, offer food that is both edible and nutritious?

This is why I have mixed feelings about some of the things MAHA politicians or whatever have done. Often, do involve government things. They're like, "We're going to mess with what people can get on food stamps. We're going to change the makeup of school lunches." It's like, "Well, those are government programs. And if we are going to have those government programs, should we?" And I think there's arguments for and against the idea that like, if we are going to have them, well we should try to make them as healthy as possible. And then there's also the argument that, at least with the food stamps, that that's just paternalistic and it's actually just better to let people get what they want.

Yeah, what do you think? This is something where people on the left and right constantly are saying, "Well, soda is a definite no on food stamps and certain types of things." Do you feel that that's just being paternalistic?

What do you think?

Well, I was…

I don't have a good answer. I kind of agree with the idea and I know I'm not supposed to…

No, I don't know. I mean, in a way, having food stamps is paternalistic. Already.

Right, in general. So if we're going to do it, well, why not put some…

Yeah. "You're poor, we're going to give you money, but you can only use it on food." As opposed to—I'm much more in favor of unrestricted cash grants to low-income people, if that's what we're going to do to help them.

By extension, I know at various points in public housing projects there were attempts— this was going back I think under Obama—where smoking has been banned in most public housing projects that get federal money. But then it was like even on the grounds you couldn't smoke. And it just seems like,why are you punishing people? They can't even go outside. They've got to go outside and walk around the block in order to smoke or something. All of this stuff seems bad. 

The school lunch thing does seem clearer to me. The school lunch thing seems like we're doing these lunches, why not have them have some sort of minimum? But it is hard, because during Obama, they were like, "Ok, we're going to make school lunch, just healthier." So they have to do skim milk instead of like 2% or whole milk. And like, that's actually way less healthy. At least, a lot of people say it is, because they just added the nutrients back in. It doesn't have the fat. It's actually not as good for you, so it is kind of like, "Well, then who's the one saying what is healthy?"

Well, somebody gets to say, and they get to dictate it. You want to decentralize that or make it as individual a choice as possible. So I guess what we're saying is we need to get rid of compulsory education. That's the problem area.

Yeah, that's the only solution, obviously.

And maybe bring back work farms and child labor laws, right?

Talk a little bit about tradwives, because that's an interesting phenomenon and it's a big part of this. It seems to be a place that conservative women—whether or not they are actually stay-at-home wives—not necessarily mothers. 

How do they fit into this? Do they also embody the contradictions of the MAHA movement?

The tradwife phenomenon fascinates me because I feel like I see so many parallels with the liberals in Brooklyn that I was talking about, or the hipsters in Brooklyn— whatever you want to call them—during the recession. Because it was very much a response to that, it was this huge global thing's happening that we can't control, let's all just fantasize about if we're all prairie people and we're making all of our own living by our hands, and everything.

The tradwife thing or the online influencers that are very much like these women who are like, "I'm gonna milk my own cow and then drink the milk straight from its utter, because raw milk is best for you and I'm going to do my own sourdough from scratch." There's this one woman who makes her own Pop-Tarts from scratch—she does the butter and everything herself. That's the fantasy, it very much became popular during COVID. And I think the same thing is very much with during the recession. People felt like their lives were out of their control. There was some sort of elite controlling things. They didn't know if they could trust them or not. 

There was this very much fantasy about sort of, "What can we do? Well, we can control our bodies. We can control what we put in our bodies, we control what we put on our table." Whereas it was one crowd that captured that 10 years ago, during the pandemic it was this sort of online conservative influencer crowd that sort of managed to tap into that yearning that people had. And that's why I think they became so popular, not just with conservative women, but with all sorts of people that are apolitical or that were just across the spectrum. 

Do you think MAHA is activating large numbers of people into politics in a way that otherwise wouldn't have cared?

I think, yeah, I think a little bit. I did talk to some people when I was in this article that were just like, "I don't think that these issues should be politicized. I don't think about caring about, like food dyes or caring about getting certain toxins out of food or whatever, or getting them out of your toiletries and all that." I don't think it should be a political issue but it's become so politicized that suddenly they don't necessarily consider themselves right wingers, but they were like, "Now I'm getting slotted in with conservatives." And also if I want to vote for someone who's gonna do something about these issues, it's becoming totally polarized. The left is out there just like defending seed oils left and right, which again, I don't know about seed oils. I feel like it's weird that suddenly there's been all these like articles in like sort of left leaning publications that are like, "Actually seed oils are great." And it's just like, it's almost like the opposite of when Sarah Palin was doing the Big Gulps. Now suddenly they're like, "I'm going to bathe in seed oils and feed my infants them."

We've talked a little bit about tradwives and a kind of female version of this. There is the male version and it can be like gym bros or people who are pumping up. But also people like RFK Jr. have talked about how environmental chemicals are, "making the frogs gay." It's like straight out of Alex Jones and things like that. 

And that was a big thing about seed oil and eating soy products that it actually feminizes men on the molecular level. 

Is MAHA, on some profound level, is it partly a response to the fact that our traditional gender roles are kind of— there's a lot of free floating anxiety about them. Because, clearly, whatever we grew up with doesn't really make sense anymore, but what the new normal is hasn't quite emerged yet. 

Yeah. I mean, sometimes I think that everything that's happening right now is a response to anxiety about gender roles. At least it seems like that if you're on Twitter. 

I guess as a final question—and then we're going to have some Q&A—you have two young children. How do you feed them that is distinct from the way that your mother, or father, or grandmother fed the older generations or yourself?

Oh my God, my mom is horrified by the way I feed my children. Because I grew up on a diet of Twinkies, and Ho-Hos, Gushers, and Pop-Tarts, and canned vegetables, and McDonald's. 

And my son does not know—like when she says "McDonald's," he's like, "The farmer? Like Old McDonald?" He's never had it. She just thinks it's the worst—that I haven't given my three-and-a-half-year-old McDonald's yet in life.

Do you worry?

So it's a really weird food fight we have in my family. It legit upsets my mother.

Have you caught her trying to take them through the McDonald's drive-thru?

She hasn't done that, but she's sneaking in Goldfish crackers and stuff.

Isn't that fascinating? Food as a weapon of…

Yeah, I mean, she's pretty good about it. She actually is really respectful. But she just complains to me about it. Like, "I can't believe…"

Do you worry at all that your kids are going to become the sugar-free kids who go over to the one house in the neighborhood where…

Well, that was my neighbor across the street. Her mom—who I was like, "She's so weird. She does yoga, and she eats tofu and brown rice". And now I'm like, "Ok, I'm her mom now." But this was the '90s. She'd come over to our house and she would just binge on all the junk food that we had all the time.

So that is my lesson. I'm not super strict with my kids. Obviously, just because I've never taken them to McDonald's— they have some junk food. I'm trying to do it in moderation. It's hard. It's really hard to know where to draw lines, but I'm trying to—because I know that it can backfire like that.

It's very complicated that way. We're going to leave it there. 

I want to thank Elizabeth Nolan Brown for talking to The Reason Interview.

The post From Big Gulps to Raw Milk: The Rise of MAHA appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Today's guest is Susannah Cahalan, whose new book is The Acid Queen, a biography of Rosemary Woodruff Leary—muse, fugitive, and heavily indicted co-conspirator in Timothy Leary's psychedelic revolution.

She talks with Reason's Nick Gillespie about hippie communes, outlaw drug smuggling, the war on drugs—and how the '60s counterculture, in its best moments, ran experiments in radical individualism, using personal freedoms to build voluntary communities rooted in altered consciousness and aesthetic liberation. The Acid Queen helps explain how the personal became the political, why libertarians should care about the messy legacy of the counterculture, and what comes next in drug policy, especially regarding psychedelics.

This conversation was recorded at a live event in New York City. Go here to find out about upcoming events. Go here to sign up for Reason's NYC events newsletter.

0:00—Introduction

1:15—Who is Rosemary Woodruff Leary?

7:02—How did Rosemary meet Timothy Leary?

9:57—Why America was ready to experiment with psychedelics

15:12—Rosemary's connection to John Lennon and Yoko Ono

16:11—How Rosemary and Timothy Leary became outlaws

21:07—The jailbreak of Timothy Leary

28:45—The political speech of Timothy Leary

31:45—Why Rosemary and Timothy split up

35:31—The final years of Rosemary

40:08—The reconciliation of Rosemary and Timothy

42:54—The common thread between Cahalan's books

46:18—Labeling in mental health

48:34—Cahalan's experience with psychedelics

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This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: This is The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. Thanks, everybody. We're at the Psychedelic Assembly, which co-sponsors this event. Susannah Cahalan is the author, most recently, of The Acid Queen: The Psychedelics, Life, and Countercultural Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary. Susannah Cahalan, thanks for talking to Reason at the Psychedelic Assembly.

Susannah Cahalan: It's such a pleasure to be here—and especially at a place that Rosemary would have loved so much.

Yeah, this has her vibe all over it. Why don't you, just very briefly, tell us who Rosemary Woodruff Leary is?

Sure. So, Rosemary Woodruff Leary—as much as I hate to start with Timothy Leary, we are starting with him—she was the third or fourth wife, depending on who you ask and how seriously you take divorce records from Mexico. She was a seeker. She was someone who was very much a behind-the-scenes character who was propping up Timothy Leary, working with him behind the scenes, on his speeches, sewing his clothing, really helping him create an image.

She was also very much a true believer in the role that psychedelics could play in not only expanding consciousness but actually making society better. She was called the Queen of Set and Setting.

Explain what set and setting is. Because when you're talking about Timothy Leary and set and setting, that carries a wallop. Explain that for us.

It does. One of my favorite things that Timothy Leary wrote about—this is pre-Rosemary—was the concept of set and setting. I'm going to reduce it very much down to its essence, but it's the mindset that you bring into a trip and it's the environment. Rosemary was very good at making people feel grounded and supported. She was great at beautifying spaces. She knew what colors to make the throw pillows, to position people properly to make sure they channeled and augmented their trips. That's why she earned that moniker.

Leary was born in the early '20s. She was born in 1935 in California and then ended up in New York?

She was born in St. Louis.

Oh sorry, in St. Louis. Then she is in California at some point, right?

Yes.

In any case, she shows up kind of at the end of the Beatnik scene—or the Beat scene—in New York. What was going on there? Who was she? We'll get to how she meets Leary and how they become the king and queen of Millbrook—the upstate estate where Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert - who became Ram Dass - and Ralph Metzner really created the text that started the '60s version of psychedelia. But what was she doing in New York?

She was born in 1935, as you said, from St. Louis. High school dropout, very beautiful. Was in an abusive marriage at 17, and left that, after she lost a baby, boarded a train to New York with no money in her pocket and no degree. Was recruited and spotted by Eileen Ford and began modeling.

Of Ford Models?

Of Ford Model Fame. And she then did what was like the second-sexiest occupation you could do at the time: airline stewardess, which was apparently harder to get into than Harvard. You had to be less than 120 pounds, x, y, z. So she fit the bill, and there she met her second husband, who was a jazz accordionist and a Holocaust survivor.

She knows how to pick them.

Oh yeah. He was an intense guy, I've heard. I did not meet him myself, but I interviewed several people who said he really didn't take anyone's shit, and people respected him—especially Miles Davis, who was a big fan of his.

Interestingly, I've actually listened to his work. You can find Matt Matthews on Apple Music, I think, and it's really good—shockingly good, jazz accordion. She met him and married him, and was instantly involved in the jazz scene that was going on in mid-'50s in New York City. And began rubbing shoulders with the early Beatnik scene—with Jack Kerouac and kind of rubbing shoulders with these interesting writers, artists, and scoundrels of the era. That's when she started really experimenting with drugs.

What drove her to that? Because this is a fascinating demimonde which gives rise to the East Coast version of the '60s counterculture. What was she seeking that she wasn't getting in St. Louis?

I think that's such a great question. She had always talked about herself in these mythic terms. She saw herself as someone who was going to live a great life—with a capital G, Great. She wasn't going to find that in her small town in St. Louis. And even though St. Louis is a city, she wasn't going to find that there.

She was attracted to "great men," as she liked to think of them—these genius archetypes. That's what she found in New York. Through being in this scene, being a part of the music scene — even though she wasn't a musician or necessarily an artist outright, she was able to express some of those sides of herself and express those "great" parts through the men that she picked.

Let's talk about how she meets Leary and ends up moving to Millbrook, the upstate estate where Leary and his peers kind of repaired to after getting bounced from Harvard in the mid-'60s. How did she meet him, and how did she come to live in Millbrook?

She took a little bit of LSD before she went to a gallery opening, in downtown. There she saw the man of the hour, Timothy Leary. They were fresh off The Psychedelic Experience…

The book…

…which was a seminal guide that is quoted in a famous Beatles' song "Tomorrow Never Knows." He was really pontificating and enjoying the spotlight there. They both were immediately attracted to each other. They both write independently of that immediate pull.

She was intrigued, but she was divorced, again, and dating another jazz musician—who was very abusive, but she was in love with him. So at that time she didn't decide she wanted to go with Leary. It was later, when she decided to go with friends to visit Millbrook.

Millbrook, for people who don't know, is a 2,000-acre rich estate — wealthy landowner, old-school estate—in Millbrook, in a very fancy suburb in upstate New York. This is a place that has about twelve buildings, including an indoor tennis court and a bowling alley on the grounds.

Timothy Leary was dating, briefly, the sister of two brothers who owned that estate. Through her—an amazing woman named Peggy Hitchcock—she managed to secure that house for $1 a month for Timothy Leary and his fellow ex-Harvard psychologists.

Who eventually created something called the League of Spiritual Discovery, and I mean, that is really—if there's a place where what we think about when we think of the psychedelic '60s where it comes from—it's that.

Absolutely. The experiments weren't just psychedelic in nature, but they obviously did experiment very heavily with using psychedelics—using them in high doses, using them over long periods of time, using them with a person, solo. All sorts of different psychological experiments that Timothy was bringing from his time at Harvard and, before that, working on interpersonal dynamics.

They would not only do that, but would also experiment with your food—dyeing the eggs green, just trying to get you out of the stultifying present and really become aware of your surroundings. A gong would bang. They were constantly— at that point, you had to go to your journal and present how aware you were by writing it down. It became this exercise, like a Gurdjieff kind of exercise, in awakening and being very present.

Can you set the scene a little bit for what was going on in postwar America where this type of thing was even taking place and then was about to burst out into everyday culture? Were people feeling repressed? Were they feeling stultified? Why? And then why were they ready to, "Ok, I'm going to go to this crazy place upstate and take a bunch of drugs and eat green eggs?"

You know, it's an interesting time. I think there's a lot of overlap with today. But it was coming out of 1950s America, coming out immediately after the atomic bomb. There was a lot sense of insecurity. Some people responded to that insecurity and fear by doubling down—having a lot of children, being very family-focused. And other people started questioning the nature of their reality and the role of society.

It was the same time you had the rise of vast intellectualization that was happening in America where you had cheap paperbacks, foreign translations, and art house cinema. All these things were happening at that time. And that was really the Beatnik movement. And the next kind of step was: How do we apply this not only to this little Beatnik world, but to society? Psychedelics seemed to be one of the ways people were exploring "how do we change our consciousness and, thus, the rest of the world?"

And I suspect some people in the audience get a sense of this too, when you talk about—ok, so they're tripping, and then a gong sounds, and they write in their journal, and they eat food that is dyed weird colors. There is a dimension to Millbrook where it is—it's either the greatest thing ever or it's the beginning of, you know, the People's Temple.

Like a bad movie. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

How did it go in and out of that kind of focus?

Well, it was both—like all things, like many things are. It was Nina Graboi, who was a female psychonaut of that era—a little older than the rest, kind of like a mother figure—she said that Millbrook had many faces. And I think that's very true.

I think it did change. A lot of times, women had a very different experience than men did there. In some ways, yes—this idea of expanding consciousness. I think there was authentic belief there. They were trying vegetarianism, communal child-rearing, all sorts of these different ways of building a new society, because they felt that the society as it was, was stuck, was retrograde - or whatever word you want to use. It was regressive. It was stultifying, all the words.

But I think this was an opportunity for them. So there's that side. But then the old social hierarchies were still observed in the house. There was very human-based behavior that occurred. Women were oftentimes still left— Peggy Hitchcock, actually, had a great line where she said, "At the end of the revolution, there was always the question, who's going to do the dishes?" And at the end of the day, the women were doing the dishes.

They were still kind of caught up. Rosemary described how Timothy—despite all of his talk of revolution of the mind and was going to upend society—was the kind of man who put his hand out and expected to have a martini glass put in it.

And she—part of the function that she served was to do that. 

Absolutely.

She kept the rooms clean, or helped organize that. Organized the feeding of, you know, hundreds of people sometimes.

And you know, it's funny. It's been an interesting thing, talking about Rosemary in today's culture, where there seems to be this idea that either you have to be a trad wife or you're a girl boss. And she wasn't either of those. Yes, she was stuck with a position that oftentimes she resented. But she actually did really enjoy taking care of other people. That was a genuine thing, and she was really good at it. She was genuinely really good at taking care of people and beautifying spaces too.

Yeah, and that—I mean, it's interesting. After reading this book, I caught a recent documentary about Anita Pallenberg, the model and actress who ended up married to Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones for a while. It talked about how much she added—first to Brian Jones' look, and then to the Stones more broadly.

It's kind of fascinating. We tend to overlook the accessorizing of the cultural revolution. Where did Rosemary's sense of taste come from?

Oh, that's such a great question.

Because she wasn't educated in any of that.

She wasn't educated. Her mother did sew, and I think—according to her brother, who was very wonderful in helping me put this together—I think she had a great eye. Maybe that's something she was born with. She had a pull toward things that were unusual and exciting, and her eye caught those things.

I mean, even just the men she picked, but the clothing she'd wear. There was always something beautifully done. She never indulged in the tie-dye or the cliché. She always was interesting and exciting, and if she wore it today, you would be like, "Oh, she's a very well-dressed woman." There was something kind of classic and exciting in the way she styled herself, and she extended that to Timothy as well, in the styling of his look.

You do an extended reading of a famous photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono singing in Toronto, in their bed, and Timothy Leary is there, and so is Rosemary. It is amazing when you look at all of these people—most of whom are in kind of period drag, right? They're very much of the time and the place. And then you look at Rosemary, who is kind of in the center of the photo, but looking slightly off. She looks incredibly contemporary.

You know, it's so funny that you say that. That photo—there are a few things that made me realize I really wanted to do this book, and that photo was one of them. Not just because it's John and Yoko in the famous bed, in the white, and there she is. You never noticed her before. Your eyes kind of glance past her. 

But she's looking at you, the viewer. I mean, she's looking directly at the camera. And there is this sense that she's out of time—almost like she's Photoshopped in. And of course she's not, but she gives that impression. I think maybe there's something about her style and her sensibility that was a little bit out of time.

So she also was up for just about anything, because after a short period at Millbrook—describe what happens when she and Tim Leary and Leary's kids start traveling. And, I mean, very quickly they become literal outlaws.

Oh yeah. I mean, the law was down their neck from like six months into their relationship. They got arrested at the Laredo border bringing marijuana into Mexico right at the beginning of their relationship—not wise. Not wise.

That is so strange.

I love the list—I had a list of what they confiscated—and they were obsessed with the brown flour, like the, you know, the brown bread flour. "Who has this wheat flour? What sort of thing is this?" So, it wasn't a good idea to bring the little amount of marijuana that they did.

That was the first time. Unfortunately, the marijuana was found in Timothy Leary's daughter Susan's underwear—she was hiding it. And that did not look good for anyone involved. So that was first, and that was, I think, five or six months into their relationship. So from the beginning, the law was after them.

Then there was raid after raid of Millbrook, led at one point by G. Gordon Liddy, who was one of the plumbers of Nixon's Watergate.

And would eventually do a college tour with Leary in the '80s.

Yes! It's wild. That stuff is wild. But that was always part of their relationship. I think the first five months were this— she really sees — as many first five months as any relationship. But especially for her, was idyllic, because they didn't have the threat of incarceration constantly chasing them.

There was another arrest in California. Millbrook was a failed experiment, ultimately. And the very wealthy brothers who owned it didn't want the issues related to dealing with the kind of vagrants who were coming on the property. 

What went into the failure of the Millbrook experiment? Part of it was that they were constantly being surveilled by police, but that's not the whole story. Why did it not work?

So much pettiness. Lots of infighting. There was an ashram on the grounds. There was the League for Spiritual Discovery, which was Leary's religion that he incorporated. And there were just competing personalities, egos—lots of inflated egos—which can be a byproduct of excessive use of psychedelics.

And people take psychedelics to dissolve their ego, but somehow it's more like one of those sponges that grows when watered, right?

Exactly. And it can go in any direction—amplification of various things can happen with psychedelics. And in the case of a lot of these dudes who were hanging around Millbrook, there was a lot of amplification of ego.

There was a lot of fighting. It was expensive—even though it was only a dollar a year, Leary still had to work on feeding everyone. I think at one point, he was paying for everyone's doctor's bills. There were a lot of STDs going around at that time, so a lot of doctor's bills. So, you know, there's just humanity in tight spaces—even though it wasn't a tight space— still you have those issues you're trying to escape.

Where do Rosemary and Timothy end up escaping to, most famously?

So they end up in California, where you would expect them to. They ended up under the auspices of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love—fascinating group, wonderful name. Rolling Stone described them as a hippie mafia. They were surfers who used hollowed-out surfboards to transport their heroin—basically—from Afghanistan, and hash from Afghanistan. All sorts of drug smuggling operations in Mexico.

And their dream ultimately was to—they were using, by their lights, they were using their drug smuggling operation to fund a plan to dose the world for free. 

Turn on the world. Put it in the water supply. That was the ultimate goal. They got pretty close. They had some pretty amazing chemists working for them, and they were able to get several million doses ready for that.

Rosemary and Timothy ended up under their care. They really were taken care of because Timothy's The Psychedelic Experience and his book How to Start a Religion were key cornerstone texts for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

The head of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love — a guy who passed away from, apparently, an overdose of psilocybin—which I think may be impossible—but that was the official coroner's report. He was a real devotee of Timothy Leary and another real believer, as well.

I mean, they did things like laundry Timothy Leary and Rosemary's silk robes. They'd take them to the dry cleaner, make sure they were properly taken care of. They put them up in beautiful homes and really took care of the couple as royalty.

But the law came for Timothy and Rosemary there as well, and they were arrested in Laguna. That was their second major drug bust.

And Leary ends up going to prison, right? And the Brotherhood of Eternal Love—and Rosemary's involved in this—decides to break him out of jail. Can you describe how that happened and what Rosemary's role was?

That's a wild story. At the time, I think it's important to say, he was running for governor against Ronald Reagan of California.

And his slogan was "Come Together," which—

Which Rosemary came up with.

Yeah, there's—

"Come together. Join the party."

And there's confusion or debate over whether or not Tim Leary was involved in the John Lennon Beatles song.

Oh, he was.

Right, but I mean, they ended up arguing.

Yes, I'm sure they did.

But it's Rosemary's slogan.

Rosemary's slogan. And John Lennon was supposed to write the campaign's song but got arrested before that was ever a thing, and he just wrote a real song.

Timothy Leary was sentenced—two different… So Laredo was this very long legal saga. It ended up going to appeal, then it was retried. He gets convicted there. He gets convicted in Laguna. In total, he's facing 30 years in prison for marijuana possession.

And of tiny amounts.

And not a lot of amounts at all—I mean, probably could fit it all in your hand. And there was LSD, but it wasn't illegal yet. And Rosemary's Ritalin as well, which was also not illegal. But he was a political enemy, and he became a kind of figure. It was interesting because before he was imprisoned, he was kind of a bit of a joke in the counterculture. He was a lot older than the youth revolt happening on the New Left, and he was seen as kind of out of touch.

Then, when he went to prison, he became a bit of a martyr, and the New Left rallied around him. And managed to work with a very famous lawyer named Michael Kennedy and with Rosemary to orchestrate an escape.

That involved Timothy preparing himself… According to Laura—and I believe this, I think it's been well documented—Timothy is a trickster, so you always have to doubt. But apparently, he had come up with a personality assessment before his foray into psychedelics, when he was at Kaiser in California.

He was a psychologist working for Kaiser Health.

Exactly. Doing a lot of work on personality and interpersonal dynamics. And he apparently came up with something called the Leary Circle, it basically shows how you will act in a relationship with another person—will you be an aggressor, will you act as a victim?

Apparently, that test was used on him in the jail, and he managed to convince the authorities that he was not a threat. They gave him a very toney, cush, low-security prison in California called CMC West. Apparently, a lot of older inmates ended up there. It allowed him the opportunity to climb—like a very long pole—and go across barbed wire. Very cinematic escape.

But Rosemary was the one who was facilitating all this. She was carrying the messages. Which was amazing—I got to see letters that had never been seen before, that were used by the FBI to decode this later. They spoke in all these different code words. I got to see those letters, which was really exciting, and see the real kind of role she played in this escape. She worked with the Weather Underground—and eventually the Black Panthers.

How did she feel about going underground? Because in a way, this is the ultimate adventure—especially if you're kind of pinning your future to a great man who, of course, is going to be attacked because mere normal people can't really appreciate him. But how did she feel about all that?

That was really a line in the sand for her. At that time, before his arrest, she was begging him to walk away from the limelight and start a family. They were trying to start a family, and she couldn't conceive. But she really wanted to— she had gotten so close to fame and seen what it was really about, and I think she found it pretty repulsive. She wanted to get away from it.

But when he was in prison, she became the face. That was when she got her moniker from Allen Ginsberg—The Acid Queen. She became the person who took every media interview. And when she decided to finally throw her hat in with the revolutionaries and do this extremely illegal act that would make sure she probably wouldn't come back to the United States, she knew she was erasing herself at that point. She knew that was going to be a line that once crossed, you couldn't uncross it.

In her diary, she writes about how she had this image of all the lives she could have had, had this not happened. Simple things—like walking to the library or she saw herself working at a bakery. All these different paths in her life that could have happened, and didn't.

She helps facilitate connections from the Brotherhood of Eternal Love to the Weather Underground. Leary gets out, and they go to Algeria, where they hang out with the Black Panther Party in exile, headed by Eldridge Cleaver. What is that like?

Unhappy cohabitation, to say the least. Leary was still very out of touch. He didn't have his hearing aids—he wore hearing aids. There was a kind of conspiratorial vibe to the Panther International headquarters because Algeria was uncomfortable with them being there. Algeria was also working on a deal with the U.S. on the sidelines. They picked Algeria because there wasn't an extradition treaty. But it was an uncomfortable place for Eldridge Cleaver.

He was obviously being—we know from the FBI work—he was being targeted. There were a lot of undercover agents and narcs.

Well, this is a weird thing about the counterculture, right? Fully half the people at any place were government agents.

I have the FBI files—the Leary FBI files—and when I say that every page is redacted, I mean every page is redacted. I remember reading that something like 40 percent of the Black Panthers were undercover agents. So, he had reason to be paranoid, let's say that. But he was very paranoid.

And I mean, Cleaver—however he ended his life—this was arguably among his very worst moments. And the Panther Party also replicated the gender dynamics in an even more extreme form than what you might have seen at Millbrook.

Absolutely. His wife, Kathleen Cleaver— Anita Hoffman, was there, she was married to Abbie Hoffman, she really was disgusted by the rampant misogyny that she witnessed. She actually escaped out of a bathroom window and returned to her husband, Abbie, who was also on the lam in Paris.

But yeah, it was not a happy place for the Learys. The Panthers did not believe in psychedelics or LSD—especially not Eldridge Cleaver. He had had bad experiences with LSD. And Leary just couldn't wrap his head around the fact that it wasn't his playground.

He and Rosemary would go off in the sand dunes and run around naked. It was a Muslim-majority country—this was not appropriate…

That had a Marxist Revolution—government…

Exactly…the French occupation— the occupation was seen as the—seen as a tool of the occupation…it was just a nightmare. So Eldridge and company actually kidnapped Rosemary and Timothy and holds them hostage for a week or so.

Did they also get them—Rosemary's life is interesting partly because she goes along and then ends up in weird situations. But at a certain point in Algeria, Leary—who had always been kind of beyond politics—he would be the last person you would expect to endorse this or that candidate, because he always said these were all just menopausal men who needed Geritol and were killing other people because…

Because you should only talk politics, unless you're on all fours.

But then he gives a very political speech, right? At the behest of the Panthers. What is that about?

Rosemary talks about this. Rosemary was actually— I think that she was radicalized before actually getting to the Panthers, when she was with the Weather Underground. She was with Bernardine Dohrn, and she really liked Bernardine Dohrn and really respected her—really respected what she was saying about women. At one point, even thought about leaving Leary to join the Weather Underground. But when she called them—

I'm not sure that would have ended well.

When she called them—she's underground at that point, while she was in Paris before they went to Algeria—they asked her, "Can you type?" That was the one question they had for her. And she thought, "That was the exact job I was escaping in St. Louis. I'm not going to do it for the Weather Underground."

So she ended up going to Algeria and reunited with Leary and the Black Panthers, which ended badly, obviously.

And then talk about how they get out of Algeria, and then they ultimately split up. Leary comes above ground, but Rosemary is underground for over two decades.

Yes. Eventually, they were able to convince Eldridge to pass along their fake passports so they could attend a lecture in Copenhagen. It ended up being kind of a front—they were going to be arrested in Copenhagen. They get word from a mutual friend that the cops were already there, so they go undercover in Switzerland, a neutral country.

There, again, they get aid from a very shady character—an arms dealer named Michel Hauchard. Hauchard really wants to get his hands on Timothy Leary's book in progress about his prison escape, and manages to orchestrate another arrest of Timothy Leary, leaving Rosemary once again in the role of the media heroine and the face of the movement. She has to raise money for Timothy, and she was just exasperated by then.

When they were with the Panthers, they were at their closest—because they only had each other. But she saw him as very pathetic, a pathetic figure. He was frightened. He was cowed by the experience. He looked old. She pitied him in a lot of ways. That was their dynamic where she always would say that was something that called to her, taking care of him.

But once in Switzerland, among the jet-setters there and the socialites, I loved her detail talking about the price of shipping priceless art overseas, and allowing their dogs to eat off their plates at the table. That was the kind of vibe she was in. And she saw, what she said was, the limits of his mind. 

At that point, she couldn't unsee it.

Once she got him released from prison again, she left him. And that became the schism between them.

Leary's next few years are well known—including him ultimately being arrested, and then cutting a deal. He argues that he did not name anybody who wasn't already known, and things like that, but…

Well, he did name Rose. I mean, he said—

So yeah, explain that. Because part of the pathos of the book is that Rosemary gets simultaneously erased from history, but also she ends up having all these legal charges against her.

She becomes the target. What happens is Timothy is arrested in Afghanistan with his new "perfect love," Joanna Leary—his words. They know that Rosemary—she would call herself "the computer," she had all the information. 

Timothy Leary was giving up the information, but Timothy Leary alone on the stand wasn't going to hold water. They needed Rosemary. And Timothy was very ready to give her up. He decoded all the letters to the FBI. He gave up all the people who were involved. He even tried to bribe her mother to get her whereabouts so he could cut a better deal for himself.

Rosemary refused to cooperate. She went further underground—first going deeper into Europe, in Sicily, and then ending up in South and Central America, where she lived for about three years.

Throughout this whole time, she refused. There were opportunities for her to come forward, but she was scared—really of jail and prison. She had done some jail time earlier when she, again, was not speaking against Timothy. She was in contempt of court, back at Millbrook when they were investigating the house. She didn't want to do that.

But she also had a great sense of integrity and pride in her own sense of morality and justice—that I think was lacking in Leary.

Explain how she eventually comes back above ground. And how does she spend her life? I mean, she died in 2002 at the age of 66. Leary had died a few years before that, and they had reconciled. We'll get to that in a second. But how does she come back above ground? These stories are all played out now, but there was a moment—starting in the '70s through the '80s and '90s—where '60s radicals would float back to the surface.

Yes, and she watched it. I have all the clippings of the people she was watching. It always interested me—why she stayed so long.

She ends up—it's an apocryphal story—but she claims that she water-skied back into the country in 1976 on a drug-smuggling boat. I don't think that was true, but you know what? More power to her. I love her.

She ended up coming back via Florida and ended up going all the way up to Cape Cod, where she lived for 23 years running a bed and breakfast—or a kind of hotel—at the edge of the world in Provincetown, Cape Cod. There is where she lived under an assumed name. Very few people knew her story. She lived a very simple, quiet life until she got word of Timothy Leary's daughter's suicide.

That opened up all the spigots that she had closed about all the emotion she felt for Timothy. At that point, she made contact with him again. She was very fearful of making contact with him. She was scared of him—scared of what he could do to her reputation, what he could do to her legally. And I think she was also tired and kind of resentful of the mythology that she had helped create.

So legally, she came back and she didn't serve any time, right?

She paid $1,080—which 108 is a very important number, and she felt vindicated by that.

She was able to convince the judge that she was A) not a threat, and B) that she was overtaken by this guru, Timothy Leary. He bought it. And she hated saying that.

Her close friend David Phillips, who was with her during that time, said, "I think there was a little grain of truth about that" And she wouldn't admit that it was true.

It's kind of fascinating—the number of people who, you know, she was on the FBI's Most Wanted list for years—and then when they resurface, it's like, "all right, you can just go back into the general population."

Even people like Bernardine Dohrn, who I find despicable and risible from a political point of view—in the end, she really didn't have to pay anything. You come back. Abbie Hoffman…

Even Eldridge Cleaver, he was arrested for murder.

Right. Yeah. It's interesting that there's—particularly around the '60s—and with Leary especially, the whole War on Drugs. Nixon zeroed in on him as the most dangerous man in America. And then it's kind of like, ok, it sounds—

And then he's, you know, your friendly satirist on the night shows. But kind of—I mean, his power was…

It was interesting. He had this vision—the first time he did acid—people who know who Michael Hollingshead is… The first time he did acid was with that kind of British trickster. He had a vision of himself as a clown. And that's kind of where he ended up, at least in the '80s.

It became that terrible image for him. And he was really affected by it. He became that. And he became that in the culture too. And it was in the '90s—I think that changed a bit. The internet—

Right. Well, he was simpatico with the kind of burgeoning internet world and techno-optimism. He started talking about how personal computers and the internet were the new acid.

Yes, exactly. And for all the things—people do like to speak ill of Timothy Leary, and it's easy to do that once you know some parts of his biography—but he was very prescient. He saw a lot of things coming that we take for granted. He would say things like, "Oh, I'm going to get my brain uploaded to the internet." And people laughed. Or, "There are going to be whole departments at major universities dedicated to the study of psychedelics." And it was like—he saw a lot of the future, which you can't discount.

How did she reconcile with him? Because Timothy Leary treated a lot of people badly—particularly women who he married. And she, arguably, worse than any of them. How did she reconcile with him?

I think, well, A) she said, "I was mated to him." And that, to her, as much as they were in many ways not well-suited to each other, temperamentally, she felt that he was her soulmate. I think it was kind of that simple.

But I also think that when she saw the loss of his daughter, she took some of the blame on herself. I think she had a sense of what that loss meant to him. And I think maybe—there is a heart-opening that can happen with long-term psychedelic use and I think she was representative of that.

One great thing about the book is, if you've read a lot about the '60s counterculture, including the way it moves into the '70s, it's just a different perspective. It's by a major participant whose eyes we haven't seen through before.

From a contemporary point of view, it is hard to get past the sexism, which is everywhere, all the time. How do you tease—what is the message that you might bring to a contemporary boy or girl reading this? How do you factor that in? Because she, in the end, was giving—after Leary died, she had annual parties where she would give away parts of his ashes with glitter in it, so that when you threw it up in the air—

Yeah, it's true. I saw something—

She remained committed to the bit, even though she was part of a system that treated her so poorly.

I think she believed in him. And I think, in many ways, she believed in some of his mission—not the vast, evangelical promotion of psychedelics that he was championing, but she did believe in that.

The thing I hope people take away from it is that she was complicated. She doesn't fit into these ideas of what a woman should be or how she should use her power. No, she was more like all of us—who are complicated. We sometimes pick people who aren't great for us. Or we love people who are damaged and damaging. And that doesn't make her any less worthy of a biography. I think it makes her really exciting. As a biographer, that's very exciting to me.

Well, I mean, it is—again, it's a dimension that I just have not encountered in this way before. I think it's a huge contribution to discussions of the psychedelic movement but also, more broadly, the counterculture.

Let's talk about how it connects with your other work. Your first book, which was a cultural phenomenon, was Brain on Fire, which is about how you contracted a form of encephalitis. You were days away from being locked up in a mental institution for the rest of your life when a doctor realized what you had—and that it could be treated not through psychiatry but through medical interventions.

Your other book—and this is the first one of yours I read—was The Great Pretender from 2019, which is about David Rosenhan, who was at Swarthmore at the time—an academic psychologist who, in 1973, published a paper called "On Being Sane in Insane Places," which was a stunning takedown of mental institutions in America. And you reveal it to be an utter fraud.

What is the continuity between those two books and this one?

In some ways, I think of it as they are very closely aligned in my mind. Just in terms of very concretely—I talk about psychedelics in all three of the books. Obviously, the most in The Acid Queen. In the first book, in Brain on Fire, I talk about ketamine. The same receptor of the brain that was affected by my immune system, targeting my brain, is also the target of ketamine.

And in my second book, I talked about Humphry Osmond and the use of LSD. He actually insisted that his architect take LSD to try to understand what it's like to go mad. So that was when it was a psychotomimetic, understanding madness.

I'm interested in altered states. I think consciousness, I think the way our brain/mind shapes reality is fascinating to me. Obviously, psychedelics has a lot to do with that. But we were kind of talking before— I think there is something to the idea of institutions and how that shapes the role of labeling, and the real-world implications of those roles of institutions in everyday person's reality, if that makes sense.

Just to linger on that a bit, particularly thinking about The Great Pretender and David Rosenhan, who is one of the great critics of mental institutions and labeling—basically, what he was arguing in this paper, where he had pseudo-patients show up at mental institutions describing vague symptoms, was that because of the context, they would be labeled mad.

Is he wrong? Even though he totally faked his data.

Here's the deal with that—which I think also connects to Rosemary and the idea of being complicated. This story is obviously more nuanced, which I'm fascinated by.

He was right about so many things in that paper. And it wasn't fully fabricated. He had his own experience. There was one pseudo— they were called pseudo-patient, people who went undercover — who I was able to find. With some issues. Totally flawed study, but one that also had a lot of truth to it.

So it's hard to wrap your head around the idea that something that could be made up…

So this is like when people say, "Well, O.J. was guilty, but the LAPD framed him." 

Right.

It's one of these weird scenarios…

That can both be true at the same time.

In terms of the labeling question—we now live in a golden age of labeling, both by institutions and psychologists and medical experts, and ourselves. I don't know how many times I've talked to people who are like, "I'm on the autism spectrum—I self-diagnosed."

How should we orient ourselves toward labeling? Should we be more free with them? Should we be more careful? Should we be more suspect with them?

I mean, personally, I'm someone who's very circumspect about labeling—especially if it's an institution doing that labeling. Because as we know from the history of science and medicine, things shift all the time in terms of how labels are viewed, how they're given services, how they're treated.

So I'm always a little bit hesitant. However, a label saved my life. I got the right diagnosis at the right time, and without that, I wouldn't be here today. 

So again, it's nuanced. It's complicated. There can be great work there and very bad work there too.

It seems to me—and I'm teasing out a libertarian message in your work—that labels that are totalizing, or institutions that are totalizing, are problematic.

Because all our knowledge is provisional and contingent, and it's going to change—both with new information and with perspective and experience.

Right. Like the DSM is a working document. It was meant to be something that was supposed to change over time, but it's been—as they say—reified. It's been made concrete in a way that it wasn't meant to. And that can happen with labels as well.

Right, and that's a particular—I guess both in Brain on Fire and The Great Pretender—that's part of the negative outcome. You talk about how therapists in particular now just kind of do checklists rather than have a basic conversation with people. You miss a lot of information, even as that other approach might allow things to scale.

Seeing the humanity in another person—even if there is a hierarchy in terms of being a clinician and being the patient. And I think—to bring it back to Rosemary—but there is a hierarchical imbalance between the person who is guiding and the guided. And that's something I'm very interested in as well.

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