Interview with Nick Gillespie
Nick Gillespie is an editor-at-large at Reason and host of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. He holds a Ph.D. in American literature from University at Buffalo. He lives in New York City.
The Egghead Answer
Contents
Max Raskin: I wanted to start with your setup because you have to do this a lot. What microphone do you use?
NG: I use a Shure SM7B.
MR: And what camera? Because the picture is really good.
NG: The camera is a Sony ZV-E10 with a 24mm/1.8 FE lens.
MR: Are you into photography?
NG: No, not at all. I'm doing this because I record 50 or more interviews a year, and then I make about 50 videos a year as well for Reason that are direct-to-camera.
MR: If someone's never seen any of your interviews before, which one's coming to mind right now for someone who has never heard of you or libertarianism.
NG: Those are two different things – about me, I was on the Ask a Jew podcast. On the political side, I just did one with Carl Hart, the Columbia neuroscientist and psychologist who wrote a book called Drug Use for Grown-Ups. That one I think was really good.
MR: Let me ask you about drugs. Do you talk about drugs?
NG: Yeah. I'm happy to talk about drugs, both drug policy and drug use.
MR: I’m not interested in policy.
NG: Yes. And this is on the record. Everything I'm telling you is on the record.
MR: Why are you so open with everything?
NG: Because it's easier. Or do you want an egghead answer? It's that I take Enlightenment values seriously.
I have to admit, this morning I woke up feeling a little bit like Ray Liotta in the last third of Goodfellas. I got so much shit to do, and I don't have enough time. And I'm hearing helicopters out of the window…stuff like that. Leaping from church spire to church spire.
But the reason why I try to be open is I believe in transparency, and I think one of the great leaps forward in the way humans think about stuff came from the Enlightenment.
It’s the shift from arguing about stuff from authority to proof-of-work – the shift away from being told to do things because that's the way things were always done or because the Vicar of Christ on Earth said so. The shift was that you explain who you are and where you're coming from and why you think the way you do. That includes two things: It includes contextualizing yourself and giving a little bit of biography, but it also means showing your work.
That's why I'm open about most things.
MR: Are you afraid of the police?
NG: No.
MR: Are you afraid of the IRS?
NG: Yeah. Let me put it this way. I am both afraid of all of these organizations, but I refuse to live in fear. I pay my taxes – I follow the letter of the law as best as I can. With the cops, I don't think it takes any bravery on the part of an upper income 58-year-old white guy saying he believes that psychedelics are good for you. I believe that all drugs should be legalized. I've used drugs and I haven't turned into a horrible fucking person.
MR: What do you use regularly now?
NG: I take a statin. have a prescription for Adderall, which I take on occasion, which is totally legal. I use Xanax sometimes, I use Ambien sometimes. I snort ketamine. I take acid. I use psilocybin (magic mushrooms). I've done virtually every psychedelic. I've done MDMA and 2C-B and 5-MeO-DMT, a lot of substances.
One thing I don't do anymore is drink and it's not because I think alcohol is bad or should be banned or anything. It’s just I’m a terrible drinker.
Black on Black on Blonde on Blonde
MR: How do you listen to music?
NG: Increasingly, it's through Spotify, which I'm not happy with. And it's the cheap version too, with ads, which is one of the reasons I'm not happy with it.
Back in the day I was a music journalist. I wrote for a bunch of new wave punk and heavy metal magazines in the '80s. And I listened to a lot of different kinds of music. And this kills me when I think about it, but for the better part of a decade, I lugged about 5,000 records around the country because I had all this vinyl. I think I got rid of virtually all of it when I left California in 1996.
MR: Can you take a look and tell me what your top songs were for 2021?
NG: “A House Is Not a Motel” by Love, the psychedelic group that had best known for their album Forever Changes. “Heroin” by The Velvet Underground. “Unbelievable” by Blitzen Trapper, and “Benedictus” by The Electric Prunes.
MR: What was the last album you listened to start to finish?
NG: I probably re-listened to Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind.
MR: Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan?
NG: Oh, it's Bob Dylan, but I've grown to actually appreciate Leonard Cohen in a way that I never thought possible.
MR: Did you like him singing the Great American Songbook?
NG: Yeah, I do actually. And to me that makes total sense in the context of his career.
What I love about Dylan is he’s a Jew from fucking Hibbing, Minnesota who has become the American everyman – even speaking where he can speak in a black blues idiom with a revival, fire and brimstone element. Fuck Walt Whitman – Dylan is vast. He contains multitudes and he stitches together some meaning out of the disparate, rambling events of American life.
MR: Like “We Didn't Start the Fire” by Billy Joel?
NG: If I got to get stuck with somebody from Long Island, it's going to be Lou Reed. It's not going to be Billy.
Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and Hillary Clinton
MR: When did you start wearing the black t-shirt?
NG: It’s not just the t-shirt, I started wearing black in general for good. I had gone through phases of wearing a lot of black, but it was really in the late 90s. When I was about to become editor-in-chief of Reason, I wanted to simplify my life because running a magazine is incredibly complicated.
I like people like Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, and even Hillary Clinton who had work uniforms. Black has always appealed to me in a political space in particular. What expresses me? What expresses my values? And it's also standing out a little bit. In political magazines, political commentary magazines, you always see the same fucking people and whether it's a woman or a man – generally somebody in ill-fitting traditional, conventional, respectable clothing – a jacket and tie and things like that. And that isn't what I'm about. And it was a way of just simplifying my life and making a statement about what matters. And if I’m being fully honest, black also shaves pounds off you, which most of us can use. The Cure’s Robert Smith doesn’t wear black because he’s sad. It’s because he likes dessert a little too much.
I stand with the unconventional people. I stand with the people who are not going along with the crowd. They're being who they are without being a dick about it. And they're going to present themselves as the same in all situations because they're not changing their message or their world view depending on who the audience is.
MR: What do you do for exercise?
NG: When I was younger I was the captain of my high school soccer team. I graduated high school in 1981. Soccer was seen as absolute proof positive that you were both communist and gay in America. It was reviled in many ways. I never saw it that way. I always liked it. I thought it was a good game to play.
MR: Well, that's because you're a gay communist.
NG: Yeah. Obviously. I just said that, didn't I?
So what I did for exercise – I used to weightlift a lot.
MR: What position did you play in soccer?
NG: I was a center fullback – today, that would be a defender, but back when I started in the 70s, positions were called by their analogous role in American football. Many of my early coaches were converted from football.
I also played baseball a lot. I'm left-handed and I was tall. So I played a lot of first base. And I had a really good arm, so I became an outfielder.
I used to work out a lot. I used to run a lot. I ran a marathon in 1988. I used to weightlift like six times a week doing split sessions, really into it. I saw Pumping Iron, the documentary which came out in the mid '70s about Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno and Franco Columbu. I found that world really interesting because these guys were sculpting themselves in a way. And I found that very appealing. And again, that was another activity that people thought was odd.
When I started high school, coaches would tell you not to lift weights because it was “fake strength.” And because it would screw up the finesse.
MR: Where do you get your black t-shirts from?
NG: Most recently UNIQLO, and a couple places online sometimes.
MR: What shoes do you wear?
NG: I go back and forth. I have a couple pairs of boots that I like. And then I also have a pair of Hokas that are very comfortable. They look like what used to be called orthopedic shoes.
MR: They are the orthopedic shoes.
NG: But everybody is wearing them. The evolution of running shoes is a fascinating kind of thing.
Timeout of Mind
MR: What speakers do you have in your apartment to listen to music?
NG: What I've got at this point, I either listen on Skullcandy earbuds and I have just a USB speaker. I'm not a big audiophile. It's another one of those things where I can recognize exquisitely great speakers, but it's not a place where I spend a lot of my energy or time. I was living in Oxford, Ohio at the time and my neighbor built high-end stereo cabinets. And told me to bring over a CD to hear the difference. I brought over the Sex Pistols' Anarchy in the U.K., which is an album I love. It's probably one album that I play a couple times in the course of a year. I listened to it on the speakers, and it sounded like it was underwater wrapped in cellophane because the version I had hadn't been remastered for CD.
Then I listened to Time Out of Mind by Dylan, which had come out a couple years before and was optimized for audiophiles. And Dylan was whispering or croaking in my ear. It was amazing. So I get the difference, but I don't really care about it that much in my own life.
MR: When do you get nervous? When do you get anxious?
NG: Sometimes at night when I'm trying to sleep. I got a lot of shit going on.
MR: Do you get nervous before either flying or appearing on Bill Maher’s show?
NG: Yeah. I get nervous. Never to a point where I take Xanax.
I took a Xanax before I had an MRI because I was going have my head in a small, contained space.
MR: Do you pray?
NG: Occasionally. I have some people in my life that I pray for. I don't really pray to God, but I will recite things. I was raised Catholic. I went to Catholic grammar school and high school. I have five of seven Catholic sacraments, which is pretty good.
MR: Do you believe in God?
NG: Well, I define myself as an apatheist. I am apathetic about the question – like not even agnostic. The question of whether or not God exists does not interest me very much. I have a profound respect for religion and the role that it plays in many people's lives. I think religion is like a lot of technology and other types of things where it can be a force for good or evil.
MR: What about the afterlife?
NG: No, not really. Again, I'm apathetic about it. I'll figure it out when I get there. I don't believe in stories of eternal damnation.
Shorter Line, Shorter Hair
MR: Where do you get your haircut?
NG: There are two places, Ace Of Cuts is one. And I can't remember the name of the other one in the East Village. Usually it's based on who has a shorter line. They're like $25 haircuts.
MR: Do you like dessert?
NG: Sometimes. I just came off a week of traveling a lot for work and I went on a week-long bender of having dessert at almost every meal. But generally speaking, I try not to eat dessert too much.
I've bounced around from extreme diets. I did the Atkins diet in an extreme way for a number of years where I essentially had no carbs. I've eaten vegan, I've eaten macrobiotically, I've eaten vegetarian. Now I tend to be an omnivore with a heavy emphasis on fish and seafood, and I tend to eat low carb.
MR: What is the first thing you do in the morning?
NG: It depends. If I wake up before my alarm clock at 7:00 or 8:00 and I have a little bit of time before I have to get it out of bed, I'll read. I love having time before everything starts or in the middle of a busy day to be reading and really just absorbing a text – that is a real pleasure of mine.
MR: Do you floss?
NG: I don't floss. I'll start flossing about two weeks before seeing the dentist twice a year, but I'm told I have pretty good teeth, which is amazing because this is another one of those stories of just a gigantic cosmologic improvement in human flourishing that nobody fucking talks about. When I went to a dentist as a kid, all the dentists I knew had German names, and were all like Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man. They asked “Does it hurt?” but they didn't give a shit.
The Myth of Thomas Szasz
MR: What charities do you like?
NG: Well, Reason is a nonprofit.
I'm also on the board of a group called Ideas Beyond Borders, which is five years old. It was founded by a guy named Faisal Al Mutar and Melissa Chen. They translate works about pluralism tolerance, enlightenment values, civil liberties, and whatnot into Arabic, and then distribute them for free throughout the Arab speaking world, as digital books. I give money to places like the Internet Archive.
MR: I love the Internet Archive, especially because of their Grateful Dead archive.
NG: I also give to Wikipedia because I think Wikipedia is one of the great inventions.
MR: Do you give to any places like soup kitchens?
NG: Occasionally and I keep going around. I like the idea of direct aid to the poor, but I haven't found a place whose mission speaks to me so directly. I just spot give.
I'm very interested in that stuff because part of my critique of the welfare state is that I am a postmodern libertarian, and that means among other things, I take seriously critiques of medicalization and of state power by people like Thomas Szasz.
MR: Oh my God! I wrote Szasz when I was like 13 years old and I had a correspondence with him. That’s when I made up my joke about his work, “You’d have to be crazy to believe in mental illness.”
NG: He and Michel Foucault knew each other a bit. They corresponded when Foucault taught at University of Buffalo in the early 70s – it was his first American teaching gig. Szasz was up at the SUNY Medical Center in Syracuse.
One of the things they talk about is the welfare state and medicalization as a means of social control that presents itself as helping people.
MR: You go to a lot of events – what organization do you think puts on the most fun events? What do you look forward to?
NG: You're catching me just after lunchtime, so I'm starting to go into my blood sugar spiral. Nothing. I look forward to nothing. I'm going to stump for Reason. One of the things that I like about Reason events is that Reason is libertarian, but it's non apocalyptic, non-millenarian libertarian. So our events are usually fun and interesting because there's optimism.
We do a monthly series in New York called the Reason Speakeasy which you can find on Eventbrite. A couple weeks ago I interviewed my Reason colleague Brian Doherty, who just published an incredible history of underground comix – think Robert Crumb, Trina Robbins, Art Spiegelman. It’s called Dirty Pictures and it tells the story of “low” art form that, like similar things in music and literature, became more powerful as it became more individualistic.
I also like the Soho Forum debates in New York. They're monthly and I think those are great because they model civil debate while also talking about big topics.
MR: You’re a reporter – how do you keep track of your contacts and sources?
NG: I don't know. Just yesterday I was trying to disaggregate my various email accounts because I'm getting too much stuff in a personal email that demands a media professional response. So it's hard. I don't know.
I don't have pretty good memory and people complain to me when I haven't gotten back to them.
MR: Can you tell me your screen time? How much you’re on your phone each day.
NG: I am online a ton. Pretty much from the minute I wake up until I go to sleep. And so that's anywhere from 12 to 14 hours, 16 hours.
MR: Are there any apps you like that people wouldn’t have heard of?
NG: What are the apps that I like? I'm just looking. I'm on Twitter a lot. I wouldn't really call that an app.
MR: Yes, it is. What else?
NG: I like Callin. It's the new version of Clubhouse. I like fuboTV. It’s a way of getting a basic cable package over any screen that you want. Mailstrom, which promises to help you “clean up your inbox now,” is good. It has helped me to literally delete hundreds of thousands of emails, though I’m still behind on email.
Manichean Round
MR: Can we just do one-minute rapid fire good, let's call the Manichean round. Good or bad.
NG: Okay. The manic Manichean round.
MR: Max’s manic Manichean round!
NG: I'm just putting this out there and don't edit this out, but that's the wrong way of thinking about stuff. The 21st century – it's all about gradient introspection.
MR: Whatever.
NG: Like I told you, I'm not Catholic anymore.
MR: I understand, but I'm doing the interview.
Murray Rothbard.
NG: I think bad, if the choices are good and bad.
MR: It's just good and bad.
NG: But influential.
MR: Walt Whitman.
NG: I guess good.
MR: Ok we’ll do a third category – “eh.”
NG: Yeah. Okay.
MR: Brian Doherty.
NG: He's great.
MR: Ayn Rand.
NG: Eh.
MR: Ludwig von Mises.
NG: Great.
MR: Hayek.
NG: Great.
MR: Salma Hayek.
NG: Great. Actually, I'm going to take that back because the problem with Salma Hayek – and you see this in the Frida Kahlo pic – I don't think she has a good grasp of capitalism despite being married to like a billionaire. Maybe because she’s married to a billionaire.
MR: So now you say “eh,” or “bad”?
NG: I don't know…but good.
But every time I'm about to lock-in good, I think like I watched Eternals, which is a terrible movie.
MR: I'm just going with your gut the reaction.
NG: So, good.
MR: Grateful Dead.
NG: Good.
MR: Velvet Underground.
NG: Good.
MR: Nico.
NG: Good.
MR: Andy Warhol.
NG: Great.
MR: Basquiat.
NG: Good.
MR: New York City.
NG: Great.
MR: Los Angeles.
NG: Good.
MR: Mississippi.
NG: Eh.
MR: Living abroad.
NG: I think it's a great idea. But to paraphrase Saul Bellow’s line, I’m American born-and-bred.
MR: How about Saul Bellow?
NG: It's ridiculous to say it's good or bad, but I find him less and less interesting.
MR: You say “eh” on Saul Bellow
NG: Yeah. Eh.
MR: Shakespeare.
NG: Eh.
MR: Acid.
NG: Good.
MR: Laura Ingalls Wilder.
NG: Great.
MR: Carl Menger.
NG: Good.
MR: And then my final one is the planet Pluto.
NG: I wish it were still a planet. I think it deserves it. It's a scrappy little planetoid or whatever.
MR: So you say Pluto good?
NG: Yeah. I'll say Pluto good.
MR: Do you have a gun?
NG: No.
I guess I shouldn't have said that.
MR: I'll edit that out.
NG: I don't care.
MR: I'm going to edit it out. I don't want people knowing that you don't have a gun.
NG: I think people should be allowed to own and carry a gun.