Are Penis-Shaped Skyscrapers the Future Libertarians Want?
Plus, great recent Reason Interviews with Nellie Bowles, Kat Murti, and Stephen Wolfram
I’m happy to share my appearance yesterday on Live from the Table, a podcast hosted by Noam Dworman, the owner of the
in Greenwich Village. This is the club that has played home to generations of cutting-edge comedians ranging from Dave Chappelle and Louis CK to Sarah Silverman and Amy Schumer. Beyond owning the most influential—and controversial—comedy club in the country, Noam is an outspoken defender of free speech in an industry that is always butting up against the boundaries of good taste and legal offense. I interviewed Noam for Reason recently; check out audio and video of that here.Earlier this week, he reversed the roles and interviewed me about everything from the absence of influential libertarian politicians to New York City’s insane landmarking laws to drug legalization to foreign policy. What I admire most about Noam, who is himself very libertarian and laissez faire, is that he only argues in good faith and he likes to complicate things rather than simplify them. We had a very fun and wide-ranging conversation that delightfully and almost immediately went off the rails when one of his cohosts, Dan Naturman, asks whether or not libertarians would allow buildings that look like penises (short answer: Don’t they kind of already?).
Watch the video below, or check out the audio:
I’m also very happy to bring you the latest Reason Interview release, which is a great conversation I had with
cofounder , who has published a fantastic new book about all the pandemic-and-lockdown fueled craziness of the past few years. Nellie writes like she is the daughter of Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion—sharply attuned to the absurdities and inanities of supposedly deep thinkers and a master of the telling detail and self-deflating anecdote. Her work is very funny but it’s not simply mean or nasty or dismissive. She’s written a chronicle of the recent past, whose utter bizarreness is fast receding from memory. If we want to avoid going through the same thing over and over again, it’s imperative to remember the details of the Covid and racialized panics that kicked into high gear in the spring of 2020.Watch the video below, or check out the audio version.
Other recent Reason Interviews I think you might find particularly interesting include my recent talk at the Manhattan-based Psychedelic Assembly with
, a longtime staffer at the libertarian who now heads up Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), the oldest campus-based group pushing for an end to drug prohibition. Kat, who is 35 years old and a cofounder of , exemplifies a new generation of activists organizing across ideological lines to make real change. The drug policy reform movement has been massively successful over the past few decades but, as she notes, that has led many people to assume that drug war is over. In fact, 250,000 people were arrested for simple possession of marijuana last year and the substance remains illegal at the federal level. The end of the drug war is in sight, but there is still a ton of work to be done, both in changing existing laws and making amends to people stuck in prison and limbo due to laws that never should have existed in the first place.Check out the video of our interview below and go here for audio versions.
Finally, I want to make sure you know about a bonus episode of The Reason Interview featuring Reason’s Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward in conversation with the legendary scientist Stephen Wolfram about the promises and perils of AI (he’s mostly excited by the former). He received his doctorate in theoretical physics from Caltech at 20 and then joined the faculty in 1979. He moved away from academia, focusing instead on building a series of popular, powerful, and often eponymous research tools: Mathematica, WolframAlpha, and Wolfram Language. His work on computational thinking forms the basis of intelligent assistants, such as Siri.
Here’s the audio:
And there’s a transcript that appears in the June issue of Reason, which features a ton of great material about AI (and some actually generated by AI, too). The transcript is here. Check out the AI-assisted image for the interview:
Upcoming Reason Interviews include Q&As with
, , , and of , Whole Foods cofounder and former CEO John Mackey, the new head of the Free State Project Eric Brakey, and others. Subscribe to this Substack and you’ll get notified the minute they go live.
That'a a lot of great content, Nick, and some great upcoming Interviews. I have John Mackey's new book and am looking forward to getting into it, and hearing your interview!