The good, the bad, and the ugly of a decade spent simply podcasting through the wild news.
“I’d like to pose a question,” Nick Gillespie whispered into the microphone on November 10, 2016. “Is this advantageous or detrimental for libertarians to have a President Trump?”
I wasn’t present that day, so there wasn’t anyone ready to shout “BAD!” before Gillespie could finish his line, but two other Reason colleagues were there, including a gravelly-voiced Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward who said, “On balance I’m going to call it bad, yet it’s also a complete wild card.” Consequently, we have dated this particular episode of what was then the Reason Podcast as the official kickoff of what later became known across the audio world as The Reason Roundtable.
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A decade ago can feel immediate in subject matter, yet it resides in a universe far, far away. Gillespie was still based in Ohio, for instance, while Elizabeth Nolan Brown was not. There were naïve (alas) hopes that Democrats would respond to Trump by dialing back their Obama-era reliance on expansive executive power, and there were equally illusory dreams that Senator Mike Lee (R–Utah) might anchor the Republican opposition. Ah, youth!
Also, before I forget, you should tune in to catch our 10th anniversary live show at 6:30 p.m. on October 7:
Major anniversaries tend to invite a touch more retrospective self-reference than is usual for a magazine that habitually leans toward the future, even with the current political messiness in plain sight. Yet as we mark the Roundtable’s tenth year, starting with the anniversary live show in New York City, it becomes evident that there is real value in maintaining a permanent audio (and since 2024, visual) record of what the past decade of tumultuous news felt like—at least to a small cadre of disagreeable if mostly affable libertarians. For example, the upheaval of January 6, 2021…
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…and the debate-night admission that two-thirds of Americans already understood that then-President Joe Biden was simply too advanced in years:
We have, in real time, absorbed an excess of political violence: the Charlie Kirk assassination scare, the George Floyd protests, clashes in Portland, Donald Trump being shot in the ear. We’ve stood with Americans who grow weary of technology; with politicians who restrict free speech; and with the tragedies and terrors of wars in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, and Iran; and with the two-year, “slow-the-spread” frustrations of Covid-19 policy.
You can spot many of these themes, along with a few questionable hair choices, in our special 2020 ask-us-anything Webathon episode:
That Webathon—one of the many projects from which Roundtable listeners have generously contributed—spurred us to introduce a regular Listener Question of the Week. These concise inquiries sometimes test our libertarian credibility, sometimes require us to defend libertarianism in the face of (waves hands) all this, and sometimes lead to two-minute Suderman ruminations on fanny packs:
Occasionally we can be arguably too responsive, though that’s the price of asking Katherine Mangu-Ward and Nick Gillespie to pick titles for your book-club audience of women:
Reason, your friendly neighborhood 58-year-old magazine of free minds and free markets, has always prided itself on leaping into new publishing frontiers whenever technology opens a door. We launched a website in 1994, a blog in 2002, and a video production arm as early as 2007 (thank you, Drew Carey!). We were producing Emma Camp explainers before explainers for Emma Camp became fashionable. This Bess Byers feature from last week has already surpassed 1.6 million views:
All of this serves to say that, by our standards, we probably joined the podcast wave a bit late. It’s a testament to Nick Gillespie, Jim Epstein, and, of course, the thousands of donors to the Reason Foundation, the 501(c)3 nonprofit that makes our work possible, for bringing us up to speed so rapidly. The podcast slate now includes Freed Up with Robby Soave and Christian Britschgi, The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie, and The SoHo Forum Debates, in addition to the Roundtable.
Over the years, the Roundtable has taken on various configurations. The hosting baton has been passed from Gillespie to the beloved comedian Andrew Heaton, then to Welch, then Suderman. End-of-show cultural recommendations were added sometime in 2018. There have been multiple live recordings, a Florida-specific episode featuring our Florida-based staff, and a handful of guest appearances, including Andrew Sullivan, Jonah Goldberg, Mary Katharine Ham, Ben Dreyfuss, and America’s libertarian girlfriend, Kennedy.
What hasn’t changed is that this is your weekly libertarian lens on the news— a Monday afternoon jolt that helps you feel a little saner in a world that’s gone haywire. Here’s to another decade of tangled metaphors, imperfect pronunciations, nods to Mangu-Ward’s enigmatic editorial past, endless 1970s cultural allusions, inquiries about the Strait of Hormuz, and attempts to keep cursing at bay. Perhaps one day our ritual dance to celebrate smaller government won’t arrive too soon:
