Ten Years of The Reason Roundtable

“I want to ask this,” Nick Gillespie breathed into a microphone on November 10, 2016. “Is this good or bad for libertarians, to have a President Trump?”

I wasn’t there that day, so there was no one to blurt out “BAD!” before Gillespie could finish his sentence, but two of our other Reason colleagues were, including a croaky-throated Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward (“I think on balance I’m gonna say bad, but I also think it is a total wild card”), so therefore we have carbon-dated this particular episode of what was then the Reason Podcast as the official beginning of what is now known ’round the audio world as The Reason Roundtable.

Ten years ago can feel like yesterday, subject-matter-wise, but it also belongs to a galaxy far, far away. Gillespie still lived in Ohio, for example, while Elizabeth Nolan Brown did not. There were naïve (alas!) hopes that Democrats might react to Trump by ratcheting down their Obama-era fondness for executive power, and equally delusional dreams that Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) might anchor the Republican resistance. Ah, youth!

Also, before I forget, you should tune in to watch our 10th anniversary live show at 6:30 p.m. on October 7:

Major anniversaries prompt a bit more backward-looking self-reference than is customary for a magazine that is always tilting cheerfully toward the future, bum politicians of the present notwithstanding. But as we celebrate the Roundtable‘s decennial, beginning with an anniversary live show on October 7 in New York City, it becomes plain that there is value in having a permanent audio (and since 2024, visual) record of what the last decade of upsetting news felt like, at least to a handful of disagreeable if mostly pleasant libertarians. For instance, the shock of January 6, 2021…

…and the debate-night revelation of what two-thirds of Americans already knew, which was that then-President Joe Biden was too damned old:

We have, in real time, processed too much political violence: the Charlie Kirk assassination, the George Floyd riots, mayhem in Portland, Donald Trump getting shot in the ear. We’ve been there for Americans souring on technology; for politicians cracking down on free speech; for the horrors and tragedies of war in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, and Iran; and for the two-years-to-slow-the-spread infuriations of all policies related to Covid-19.

You can see many of these themes, plus some questionable tonsorial decisions, on display in our special 2020 ask-us-anything Webathon episode:

That Webathon, one of the many that Roundtable listeners in particular have been generous about contributing to, spurred us into incorporating a regular Listener Question of the Week. These terse queries sometimes challenge our libertarian bona fides, sometimes ask us to defend libertarianism in the face of (waves hands) all this, and sometimes generate two-minute Suderman soliloquys on fanny packs:

Sometimes we can be arguably too responsive, though that’s what you get for asking Katherine Mangu-Ward and Nick Gillespie to recommend titles for your lady book club:

Reason, as your friendly neighborhood 58-year-old magazine of free minds and free markets, has always prided itself on hurtling into new categories of publishing whenever technology cracks open a door. We launched a website in 1994, a blog in 2002, and a video production division as early as 2007 (thanks, Drew Carey!). We were doing Emma Camp explainer videos before Emma Camp explainer videos were cool. This Bess Byers vertical from just last week has already surpassed 1.6 million views:

All of which is to say that by our standards, we thought we were getting into podcasts kinda 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 getting us up to speed so quickly. The podcast division now cranks out Freed Up with Robby Soave and Christian Britschgi, The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie, and The SoHo Forum Debates, in addition to the Roundtable.

There have been various Roundtable permutations over the years. Hosting has hot-potatoed from Gillespie to beloved funnyman Andrew Heaton to Welch to Suderman. End-of-show cultural recommendations were added some time in 2018. There have been several live shows, a special Florida episode starring our staff Floridians, and a sprinkling of outside guest stars, including Andrew Sullivan, Jonah Goldberg, Mary Katharine Ham, Ben Dreyfuss, and America’s libertarian girlfriend, Kennedy.

What has remained constant is that this is your weekly libertarian take on the news, a Monday afternoon jolt that helps you feel at least slightly more sane in a world gone bonkers. Here’s to 10 more years of mixed metaphors, botched pronunciations, references to Mangu-Ward’s dark editorial past, bottomless 1970s cultural references, queries about the Strait of Hormuz, and unsuccessful attempts to not cuss. Maybe one day our dance to celebrate cutting government won’t prove premature: